Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.
Food, the original solar powered fuel
With the UK’s chief scientist warming of a looming food crisis, and with consumers around the world changing their eating habits in the face of increasing prices, the need to find alternatives to our current food system becomes ever more pressing. TreeHugger is a big fan of urban food production and community gardening, so it’s unsurprising that we were excited to read about ambitious efforts in the UK town of Middlesborough to turn public space into productive land:
Middlesbrough borough council turned over parkland, town-centre planters and other landholdings for fruit and vegetable growing. The eight-month project culminated in a town meal outside the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, where up to 8,000 people shared meals from the food that had been grown.
This year, Middlesbrough plans to supply seeds and containers to anyone interested, and already has 2,000 individuals and groups lined up, including 31 out of 51 schools, with 280 growing sites. “This has caught people’s imagination. But we’ve gone beyond novelty now and people want to make it a mainstream activity,” says Ian Collingwood, a regeneration consultant at the council.
While high-tech food growing solutions like vertical farming, underground agriculture, and aquaponics may have great potential in meeting the challenge of feeding the world, we suspect that projects like this one that simply reconnect people with the skills to feed themselves will be at least as important as we navigate our way out of the era of cheap food.
A new definition of Eco-Tourism
Environmentally conscious visitors to Shanghai who are looking for the luxury experience can stay carbon-free and enjoy green living on the go at URBN Hotels. Designed to attract ‘urban world travelers’, the 28-room full-service hotel fuses Western and Chinese influences and a host of green-minded practices to create an urban eco-oasis for tourist and business travelers. From the building’s design and materials to cleaning products to energy-efficiency, URBN Hotels is an eco-friendly refuge amid the bustle of Shanghai.
The building design used an existing structure and locally sourced materials such as reclaimed hardwoods and old Shanghai bricks. Passive solar shades, rain water retention basins and water-based air conditioning have been used to decrease the hotel’s environmental impact. For the health and wellbeing of each guest, 6 square meters of green is space allocated per person, low-VOC paints used and interiors are cleaned with environmentally sensitive products.
What carbon emissions the hotel does produce – such as staff travel, stock deliveries and the energy consumed by each guest – will be tracked and offset by investing in clean energy development and energy efficiency projects elsewhere in China. Guests can also buy international standard carbon credits from the hotel to offset their flights.
Economic factors influenced the decision to introduce green measures, as the hotel will be cheaper to run in the long term. Over the next three years, 20 URBN hotels and resorts are set to open in Beijing, Hangzhou, Dalian, and Suzhou, containing up to 70 rooms each.
States Rights
Officials of 18 states are taking the EPA back to court to try to force it to comply with a Supreme Court ruling that rebuked the Bush administration for inaction on global warming.
In a petition prepared for filing Wednesday, the plaintiffs said last April’s 5-4 ruling required the Environmental Protection Agency to decide whether to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, including carbon dioxide, from motor vehicles.
The EPA has instead done nothing, they said.
“The EPA’s failure to act in the face of these incontestable dangers is a shameful dereliction of duty,” Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said.
The petition asks the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to require the EPA to act within 60 days.
In last year’s decision, the Supreme Court ruled the EPA has the authority to regulate emissions from new cars and trucks under the Clean Air Act, and said the reasons the EPA gave for declining to do so were insufficient.
Algae Power
As gas prices continue to soar to record highs, motorists are crying out for an alternative that won’t cramp their pocketbooks.
Scientists at U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory are answering that call by working to chemically manipulate algae for production of the next generation of renewable fuels – hydrogen gas.
“We believe there is a fundamental advantage in looking at the production of hydrogen by photosynthesis as a renewable fuel,” senior chemist David Tiede said. “Right now, ethanol is being produced from corn, but generating ethanol from corn is a thermodynamically much more inefficient process.”
Some varieties of algae, a kind of unicellular plant, contain an enzyme called hydrogenase that can create small amounts of hydrogen gas. Tiede said many believe this is used by Nature as a way to get rid of excess reducing equivalents that are produced under high light conditions, but there is little benefit to the plant.
Tiede and his group are trying to find a way to take the part of the enzyme that creates the gas and introduce it into the photosynthesis process.
The result would be a large amount of hydrogen gas, possibly on par with the amount of oxygen created.
Power Cubed
Portable green power sources are steadily gaining momentum as alternative energy tech gears up to help shoulder the strain of our overloaded energy grids. This recently released generator, dubbed the PowerCube 6000, is showing plenty of potential as an all-inclusive clean energy system. Whether you’re greening your home’s energy sources, preparing for an emergency, or opening up a Black Rock smoothie stand, the PowerCube offers an enticing (if expensive) way to break free from the grid.
