EGEB: 48 ways to kill environment; Scotland wind doubles electricity needs; World’s most sustainable office building; more

Electrek Green Energy Brief: A daily technical, financial and political review/analysis of important green energy news. Featured Image Source

Just another Manic Monday as windfarms power electricity surge – WWF Scotland analysed wind power data provided by WeatherEnergy and found that wind turbines in Scotland provided 86,467MWh of electricity to the National Grid on October 2. Scotland’s total electricity consumption, including homes, business and industry, for Monday was 41,866MWh, meaning that wind power generated the equivalent of 206% of Scotland’s entire electricity needs on the day. What? When did this happen? Elon – I think its time for you to start selling electric cars with a charging infrastructure that is electronically tied to the wind production of Scotland. The rest of the manufacturing world need start placing metals production facilities in this place that will soon enough have some of the cheapest, cleanest electricity on the planet.

Fraunhofer ISE starts construction of next-gen solar cell laboratory – Fraunhofer ISE’s long-standing R&D facility was deemed to have an outdated clean room for next generation solar cell development. Posting this because this is one of the premier research groups on the planet for solar power and anything they can do to up their research contribution to the planet makes me happy to see.

Bloomberg’s New European Headquarters Rated World’s Most Sustainable Office Building – Compared to a typical office building, the new Bloomberg building’s environmental strategies deliver a 73% saving in water consumption and a 35% saving in energy consumption and associated CO₂ emissions. Innovative power, lighting, water and ventilation systems account for the majority of energy savings. You need to understand, that as our education evolves, as the old ideas die away – all new construction will be of this manner. All new structures will be needed to do this, less because of legislative requirements – but more because no one will want to pay rent in a building that costs 20-30-40% more to inhabit. Check out some of the innovations in the article.

Australia Defence looks to solar power to cut costs, lift security – I talk about the military focus on solar power for one very specific reason – they care about the hard data and nothing else. Remote military bases don’t care about climate change, they care about electricity uptime and mission readiness. Solar power provides that. Amusingly, this article multiple times references the desire of the AU military to have positive PR as a result of this – but really, they could have had positive PR a decade or two ago – they’re only making use of the PR now that the technicals are solid enough that the PR is worth it.

NREL Evaluates National Charging Infrastructure Needs for Growing Fleet of Plug-In Electric Vehicles – The results suggest that a few hundred corridor fast-charging stations could enable long-distance EV travel between U.S. cities. About 8,000 fast-charging stations would be needed to provide a minimum level of urban and rural coverage nationwide. In a PEV market with 15 million vehicles, the total number of non-residential charging outlets or “plugs” needed to meet urban and rural demand ranges from around 100,000 to more than 1.2 million. Two things that jump out to me in the total numbers – First: 15 million total PEVs? There’s going to be closer to 200-400M PEVs, so many multiply these numbers by 10-20? Second: The range of 100,000-1.2M urban/rural plugs – that’s a huge variance. The variance is mostly based upon the type of vehicle: Perhaps surprisingly, the national PEV total is not the most sensitive input parameter in this analysis; PEV electric range, commitment to maximizing PHEV eVMT, and percent of charging taking place at home have the largest effects. If we buy long range vehicles, fewer charges needed – obviously. And we need start only buying houses that have charging infrastructure already included.

Solar Decathlon Features Hurricane-proof House – “By using concrete for our entire house — the foundations, the walls, roof panels, floor panels — in a way that they all tie together so uniquely, we’re using this as a catalyst to possibly have more efficient ways to use concrete in the construction industry in the future at a smaller scale.” – Big piece of the evolution of construction code in Florida is that houses must be constructed of concrete or brick in lower levels to defend against high level winds. Pretty much any main structures built after 1992 will be able to deal with hurricane speed winds. Being a South Floridian, it is no surprise that homes like below are still standing that were built many decades before building requirements said concrete and rebar were the rule.

48 Environmental Rules that Trump wants to reverse. Why – because someone, somewhere feels their profit margins are affected by these rules. Main article from the NYTimes.

😡 Here are the 48 environmental rules the Trump administration has sought to reverse so far https://t.co/PsOdGWMOas via @nytclimate pic.twitter.com/GTWP1fQHty

— Ben Cushing (@bmcushing) October 5, 2017

This is totally a manufacturing company advertising using my twitter name – but its cool advertising of installing a ground screw. Much easier than digging holes to put metal in there, or hammering down things. Plus – the screw piece creates a greater surface area against the dirt which increases the total amount of lift needed to pull the system out of the ground. The racking system is then installed on top of the ground screws, and the solar panels connected to the racking.

https://twitter.com/china_spiral/status/916117436578930688

Header image from the ‘Hit me with your SunShot‘ photography contest. Since I’ve shown each of the winning photographs – I’ve now moved into showing off some of the images that didn’t ‘win’ – but are beautiful nonetheless. These images are located on the flickr account page of SunShot. This stunning shot of SunPower photo-voltaic panels on a majestic Dennis, MA home was taken by Todd Druskat, solar expert and drone photographer. Photo submitted by Chris Wingard.

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