It Turns out Apple isn't so Green After All...

You may remember how apple has branded itself many times in the past with its clean, green, energy efficient image of long battery lives, smart production, and environmentally-conscious computers. The new macbook pro was advertised with images of green grass, blue skies, and bright sunshine in every Apple store, and they vowed to help recycle old computers. Well... they didn't quite cover all their bases on their green front; it turns out much of this effort was simply Greenwashing.

A report issued today by Greenpeace ranks tech companies by how "green" they are, based on an index that takes into account the kind of energy they use to power their data centers, manufacturing plants, and other facilities. Most of their energy use went into the data centers used to feed though all internet traffic used by Apple and its products, such as iTunes. As it turns out, a whopping two thirds of the energy for these data centers is provided by coal, arguably the dirtiest fuel used worldwide. The cleanest marks went to Google and Yahoo, who have made huge strides in making their data centers and operations more efficient.

We need companies to be smarter about their energy use. When you upload a video to Youtube, do you wanna feel guilty for adding more carbon emissions to the environment? Apple should take Facebook's lead, and disclose the information about their data centers, and start using more renewable energy, such as Solar Power, Wind, and Geothermal, to feed their huge hunger for energy. It's the responsible and smart thing to do, for the company that paints themselves as responsible, user-friendly, and efficient.
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What the Frack?

You may have heard about it on the news recently: Fracking. The long term for it is Hydraulic Fracturing. Its a process by which millions of gallons of chemicals and water are pumped deep into gas-containing shale rock to fracture it and let the gas seep to the surface for collection. Its the biggest boon to the Natural Gas industry in decades, and is helping to drive down energy prices across the USA, which happens to be one of the largest sources of natural gas energy in the world. Heres a neat diagram showing how fracking works

On the surface, the process seems innovative and safe, but deep below the ground the chemicals, such as Methanol, are seeping into water tables and contaminating important aquifers in the northeast and Rocky Mountain west states, where the largest reserves of natural gas lie. Many gas companies claim the water stays deep underground, but natural capillary forces move the chemicals and contaminated water upward into looser surface layers where aquifers lie. Such chemicals are often highly poisonous and toxic to both the environment and to us Humans. These normally shouldn't be used in these instances, but thanks to a loophole in an energy bill passed by the Bush Administration and hurried through congress by Dick Cheney and Halliburton, these chemicals are not monitored by the E.P.A. and thus can be used without regulation, polluting the environment without any liability to the natural gas companies.

To make matters worse, since the recession hit 3 years ago, gas companies have been baiting landowners with high-paying contracts to use their land for fracking. A one-time installation of a fracking well can pay off in a short amount of time to the company while leaving the landowner with slowly degrading well water and hazardous chemicals. In the popular documentary Gasland, one homeowner in Pennsylvania is able to light his faucet tap water on fire simply due to the high concentration of gas and methanol seeping into his wellwater. Its disgusting, and people don't yet know how hazardous fracking really is. We urgently need to spread awareness of this problem and combat this situation before it gets out of hand and we're left with poisoned citizens and degraded watersheds across the U.S., simply because we wanted cheap gas.

Solar Magnets: How do they Work?

Time for a short post on a new breakthrough to brighten up your Saturday morning: Today I'm talking about magnets!

Most modern solar power systems use sunlight to trigger electrical reactions within semiconductors, also known as a photovoltaic reaction, which in turn produces electricity. These systems are often cost-heavy as many of the materials require high-precision manufacturing with semi-rare minerals such as Cadmium Telluride and Copper Indium alloys. These drive up the costs of solar panels to hundreds of dollars per square meter, or upwards of $5-10,000 for a household installation. These are prohibitive costs to investors, as a gallon of gas still costs about $3.75, and the same goes for the equivalent amount of natural gas. However, a recent breakthrough in physics is pointing researchers towards a new form of energy that can be harnessed from the sun: Magnetism.

I'm not saying we use magnets to harness the sun, and as the oft-quoted Insane Clown Posse cavalierly states in one of their songs, many people don't understand how magnets work, but all you need to know is that when sunlight hits the Earth's surface, it produces a weak magnetic field, much like the pull of a weak magnet thats meant for your kitchen refrigerator. For years, scientists have ignored the magnetic field within sunlight for it was too weak. However, recently, a team of physicists have discovered that focusing the sunlight to 10 million times its normal strength produces a massive amount of energy in the magnetic field that can be turned into electricity. It seems like a tall order, but it can be accomplished using inexpensive glass lenses and fiber optic wires that can focus light into intense beams of energy. What this means for the future is that solar power plants no longer need massive fields of blue panels, but may only need a bunch of lenses focusing light into high-capacity fiber optic cables to be harnessed as energy using magnetism. Its complicated, very scientific, but may herald an era of cheap solar power in the decades to come.

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GE is Taking the Lead in Solar

Once again, its good to see a big corporation take a stand in the world of alternative energy. I just found out today that GE, along with PrimeStar, has developed the world's most efficient thin-film photovoltaic solar panel. at almost 12% efficiency, it takes almost a 2% leap over previous thin-film arrays, and can boost energy savings by up to 20%. This is big news, considering the money going into this operation is astronomical. GE has decided to invest $600 million in a brand new solar facility that can produce enough solar panels to power 80,000 more homes every year, or roughly 400Megawatts. On top of this, they are filling orders for another 100Megawatts. This is huge news for solar power, which as I've written on my blog before is in my opinion the true green energy of the future. Below is an image of a thin-film solar array. In my opinion, they are more aesthetically pleasing and economical than standard solar arrays.

 I believe that we can invent solar panels that may one day power an entire house off a single panel and power cities off of a single square mile of panels. The power is there, its bountiful, and we almost have a solid grasp on it. One day we won't have to peer up at buzzing wiggling high tension towers stretching across the landscape, or watch worriedly as we blast apart mountains for coal and pollute the rivers and ecosystems, such as we are doing now at increasingly destructive rates. I may be a green liberal, but I still have faith in our capitalist system to switch our demands to that of green energy and sustainable infrastructure. It's up to us as consumers to move forward with the transition to renewable energy

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Data Centers: Hidden Behemoths of the Internet

When you type a search into google, it scans billions of pages, delivering your results totalling possibly in the millions, or in the dozens, in a fraction of a second. How does it do that? Data centers. Information hosted on the internet has to have a place to stay both when being used and for simple storage. The more information a website hosts and indexes, the more data is produced in these centers, and are archived in massive arrays of servers. When you host a website, often your information gets stored on a server somewhere in your webhost's data center. With the huge influx of information into the internet rising exponentially, how we are storing this data is becoming a huge problem, both online and offline. Data centers for huge websites are massive energy sinks, using up large amounts of electricity to cool the servers as they heat up from running through so much information on a second-by-second basis. It's quickly becoming one of the major sources of energy use in our country. There is a huge need for sustainability in data centers. Many web hosts these days are offering green solutions: a small surcharge to ensure that the carbon emitted into the environment for your website's information storage in their data center is offset. Its different though for huge web corporations that use up so much energy they can't just offset their carbon.

This is what a typical server array in a Data Center looks like.

Take Facebook, a website with over 500 million users, who upload millions of images a day, posting almost 20,000 comments every second. Each bit of info uploaded to facebook goes into their data center's dedicated servers, and they are running out of space. Now, facebook is planning on building a new data center, one that uses passive heating and cooling to lower energy use, as well as relying on fewer batteries for backup power in case of a blackout. Not only that, but theyre planning everything in an open environment, posting images of the blueprints, details, as well as providing information on their new data center. This will hopefully raise awareness of the hidden energy being wasted by our fiddling on the internet.

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Gas Prices are on the Rise

Heres an article for my buddies in the US. Some of you reading this may call it Petrol, but here we call it Gasoline, and in the U.S., we're starting to understand what it feels like to pay out the nose for the most precious fuel that we use every day. Recently, the price for a barrel of light sweet crude oil (The main oil used for automotive gasoline), has started to rise after spending a couple months between $80 and $100 per barrel with the price of a gallon rising to over 3.70 (close to $1 US per liter). Heres the past 3 months gasoline price chart, along with the price of a barrel of crude oil, courtesy of http://www.gasbuddy.com

Many people are up in arms over the gas prices, blaming everything from the President to greedy businessmen. However, the truth makes a lot more sense. Theres three main factors at play here

1: The Middle East: Uprisings and revolutions over the last 4 months have put pressure on many governments in northern Africa and Arabia that regulate the drilling and shipping of oil around Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as much of the oil exported to the US. This tension has caused insecurity in the prospect of receiving oil, forcing a higher demand to claim oil contracts at lower prices, which in turn drives up the price. When a commodity is threatened, it costs more to secure the shipment of it.

2: Inflation: The value of the U.S. dollar is slowly falling in global markets. Seeing as much of the oil shipped around the world is traded on the U.S. dollar, when its value falls, it costs more for each barrel of oil, pushing prices up. With wages being outpaced by inflationary growth, people aren't going to be making enough money to catch up to price increases, placing pressure on our wallets every time we pull into the gas station.

3: Supply and Demand: more and more economists are becoming smart to the idea of Peak Oil: The idea, nay the fact, that world oil production is or will be peaking soon, and that after this peak, we will no longer be producing enough oil to keep up with its rise in demand. As oil becomes more and more scarce over the coming decades, it will be valued higher and higher, until its either unaffordable, or completely gone. While this  factor is the least considered in day to day trading of oil, its certainly the most certain.

What can we do? Conserve. Drive less often when you don't need to. Walk to the store or to pick your kids up from school. If you have a car that gets less than 20mpg and is over 5 years old, consider upgrading to a newer, more fuel efficient car. The money you spend on increased efficiency can be saved over the long term when you will be thanking yourself for not having to stop so often for gas when the price reaches $4-5 per gallon. Also, try driving 55. Unless you are in a hurry to work and willing to burn the gas, you don't need to rush everywhere. Every increase of 5mph above 55 you drive can chop a mile or two per gallon off your fuel mileage. After all, the EPA mileage estimate for your car is measured at 55mph, so if you drive 65 in a car that is rated for 30mpg you can really only be getting 26mpg, and that can make quite a difference. If we work collectively to lower the demand for gasoline, we can bring the demand down in the markets and hopefully slow the rise of oil prices and not break the bank.

Destructive Palm Oil Plantations are Ruining Tropical Ecosystems

Many people are getting behind the idea of biofuels: oils and alcohols coming from plants grown in tropical and continental regions around the world. It helps stave off our addiction on limited fossil fuels that pollute more when used, and are growing more and more expensive every day. However, the way we grow biofuels is very low-tech, and often removes more resources from the earth than by simply drilling for oil or natural gas. In the tropical rainforests of southeast Asia, old-growth forests that support rare and endangered tropical species are being torn down in order to grow palm trees. While they bill it as sustainable reforestation of deforested lands, and a way for the poor to make money, these plantations do not support any of the native species that the ocne thriving rainforests once held. Heres an image of a palm oil plantation in Indonesia. You tell me that this looks like a rebuilt rainforest

Now, it is true that millions of poor people in developing countries are relying on palm oil plantations for newfound income. The World bank instituted a moratorium in 2009 on loans for new plantations, in order to look at the pros and cons, but on Friday they lifted this ban, and reinstated loans for new palm oil operations. This is cause for alarm. There are better ways of supporting the World's poor. Join investment programs in small merchants, sustainability programs promoting native exports rather than imported foreign palm trees, and smart city growth in order to build businesses and grow to become more developed countries. If these developing nations rely solely on foreign investment for a single source of income, they may end up mistreated, run by cartels, and abused in the world economy for their cheap labor.

We need to become more aware of the destruction of rainforests and look more closely at the "remedial" programs that may really be hiding the ugly truth: Palm oil plantations are doing no good to our tropical ecosystems.

What you can do to help: look for products that use palm oil. The most common are health and beauty products such as shaving gel/foam and liquid soap, as well as cooking oils. Peanut and sunflower oils are the ecological choice, they can be grown in the US locally without environmentally expensive transport costs. Do your part!

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Wind Energy may be Losing Steam

Recently, two wind farms have been halted in Wisconsin, a state that has been in the spotlight for the past couple months thanks to a raging inferno of union protests and backhanded politics. Away from the petty politics however is an issue about Wind Energy. Two farms to be built by Midwest Wind have been put on hold due to an unstable political and regulatory atmosphere. Apparently, the laws regarding placement of wind turbines near private property are seen as "too lax" by lawmakers, who claim that placing wind turbines near houses lowers property value. This flies in the face of recent findings that wind farms as a whole do not lower home values, no matter how close they are to development. Additionally, republican lawmakers are making the bunk argument that wind turbines cause unpleasant noise and are an eyesore, despite no real evidence of raised noise levels outside of the wind farm properties themselves. All of the evidence against wind farms are purely anecdotal, but the fighting about whether or not wind turbines may not even matter.

The thing is, Wind power is ephemeral. When the wind blows, power is generated. When it stops, that power goes away. Without adequate power storage, the total energy available for the electric grid drops, and if too many houses rely on wind energy, rolling blackouts can occur. Wisconsin is a continental state, far from any open ocean where the wind blows almost constantly. In the Netherlands, a never-ending wind off the north sea provides bountiful power to residents, but in the central US, its hard to find locations that can benefit from wind power. Many farms are being proposed simply as business ventures, buying into green and renewable energy sources. I think that we should give wind power a backseat though. Solar power is dramatically increasing in its technological capabilities. While wind power has been around for centuries, solar is really just starting to take off. With new polymers and materials able to collect and harness more of the Sun's energy, we can gain more power from less space, and have a reliable source of renewable, perfectly clean, and stable energy. With the promise of new technology, I believe we could accept wind power as an alternative, but only where it is highly reliable, such as coastal areas, while the big expanses of the midwest and western U.S. could  benefit from large-scale solar farms using newly developed photovoltaic materials. New inventions in solar power are raising money, and fast, and providing an open market for new innovation. Long story short: Solar Power is the Future.

Wisconsin Wind Debacle

New Solar Panels Invented

High Electricity Bill? It's Probably due to your Gadgets!

Recently, the United States Energy Information Administration conducted a survey of American homes to find out  how and where Americans use their energy, comparing energy use to data from 1978. Unsurprisingly, the amount of energy used by personal electronics (computers, phones, video games, televisions) has jumped, but what IS surprising is that space heating energy use has dropped by 39%, and that Energy consumption by electronics  DOUBLED!

Article Source: Fast Company

Now, when you read the news, you often hear about high oil prices straining home energy budgets, but the real problem we should be worrying about is how much energy is being converted into electricity for our gadgets, devices, and appliances. Many people still aren't aware that phone chargers, computers, televisions, and appliances suck up power constantly as long as they're plugged in, often drawing more power per day when idling then when being used! Luckily, there are successful awareness campaigns going on educating people on the high cost of appliances in our homes, but it doesn't seem to be sinking in. Not enough people are unplugging their devices at night, powering down their computers, or running their refrigerators at 39 degrees, instead of 33. I think we should all take an hour or two out of our hectic lives to go through our homes, surveying where electricity is being sucked up, especially when our electronics aren't being used. If you are done playing xbox, unplug the power brick, and if you're done checking our e-mail at night, shut down your computer and unplug the cord. Its that simple. Not to mention, it could help pay for higher energy prices, which are certainly in our future.

The End of Nuclear Power?

I really hope that those in charge of our energy supply make the right decision, and STAY with nuclear power. Ever since the catastrophe at the Fukishima-Dai Ichi plant in Japan, the main focus of news coverage has been how dangerous nuclear power can be. However, I think we should look at this differently. This plant has 6 very large nuclear reactors, housed in a facility that is over 40 years old, on the coast with little protection, and has withstood a THIRTY FOOT tsunami that has knocked out all 3 backup power supplies. Even through all of this, nobody has died from radiation sickness, and the highest levels of radiation measured outside the evacuated zone has been minor fractions below the federal limit for caution, let alone danger. Think about it this way: if you had a Coal Power Plant hit by such a force of water, you would wash thousands of tons of coal, tillings, and hazardous chemicals into the water supply, causing untold amounts of sickness and environmental damage. The same goes for Oil. Its almost as if we've forgotten about the Deepwater Horizon spill last year: a loose security door caused a massive explosion and the release of over a hundred million gallons of oil, covering beaches and leaving behind environmental damage that still hasn't been fully accounted for. I think we should do the right thing and choose the safer option for energy, one that emits zero greenhouse gases, provides cheap and long-lasting energy, and becomes safer every day with research.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703576204576226524171107988.html?mod=googlenews_wsj