The U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced today that up to $32 million dollars of Recovery Act funding will be used to expand the harvest of hydroelectric power. “There’s no one solution to the energy crisis, but hydro-power is clearly part of the solution and represents a major opportunity to create more clean energy jobs,” said Secretary Chu.
The tunnel is part of the Olmos-Tinajones Hydroelectric-Irrigation Project and will divert water from the Huancabamba River of Peru’s Cajamarca region to the neighboring region of Lambayeque. It will be completed by year’s end, and will irrigate approximately 150,000 hectares of land (~ 375,000 acres) and generate up to 600 MW of electricity.
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On the previous day, she helped designate a new national park and also announced that six additional protected areas will be created in Chile next year.
She’s setting an excellent example for other world leaders on the conservation front.
SmartPlanet report that British Waterways is turning UK canals into alternative energy power stations. The company’s proposal calls for 50 wind turbines and assorted small-scale hydro-power schemes to be installed in canals and locations. In addition to generating enough energy to power 45,000 homes (100 MW of capacity), the proposal will save over 100,000 tons of CO2 each year.
Below you will find summaries and links to several of the more interesting ecologically-related stories to come out of South American countries in the past month. The list is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, but hopefully you will find something that teases your interest. Enjoy.
Several weeks ago, the International Herald Tribune reported that Brazil will lend some hydroelectric power to its neighboring country of Uruguay during July and August of this year, the coldest months of South America’s winter. Uruguay, like many South American countries, is currently struggling to meet its energy needs.
Under the arrangement, Uruguay will begin to pay back the energy to Brazil once the winter demand for electrical heating ends. For the past four years, similar arrangements have been made. Brazil is currently in negotiations with Uruguay to build a coal-powered thermoelectric plant near where the countries border. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but I find this rather simple news story intriguing.
No matter what new energy proposal someone makes, it’s bound to attract an outcry of NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard). (My recent post about the U.S. generating all the energy it needed via a 100-mile-by-100-mile solar installation in the Mojave Desert, for example, evoked some protest.)
So I thought it might help to pose the future-of-our-energy question in another way: What do I WIMBY? (As in, Want In My Backyard?)
OK, here we go: Following are photos illustrating several clean and/or renewable energy options that could help us curb greenhouse gas emissions and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Which ones would you be willing to view from your backyard as a tradeoff for a cleaner, brighter future? Be honest now: I’m asking literally if you would say OK if one of these was what you saw when looking out of the window of your home.
Forget building more hydroelectric dams and tidal energy generators … Leviathan Energy has developed a turbine that can generate electricity from the water flowing through municipal water pipes and sewers. The company was among those displaying their innovations during the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco.
Image courtesty of Wikimedia Commons user JSDX
In 2007, an enjoyable summer and fall pastime for me was sitting, newspaper in hand, on the bank of New York City’s East River in Brooklyn, looking out over the water and staring awestruck at the Manhattan cityscape. Never did I imagine that spinning somewhere in the water were hydroelectric turbines generating enough tidal energy to supply nearly a third of the power needed to run a parking garage and supermarket on Roosevelt Island. I found out about this project in a February 11 Wall Street Journal article entitled Nine Cities, Nine Ideas.
Mister Bloomberg helped jumpstart this “green” project on June 11, 2007 in an effort to move forward in his goal of cutting Gotham’s green-house-gas emissions by 30%. This goal is part of a larger list of goals outlined in PLANYC 2030, a most ambitious plan to change the city’s urban environment in some big ways.
It seems that journalism has become a pretty green profession.
Whether I am blogging or working for a more traditional media outlet, I can get almost any information I need simply by using the internet. So with a paperless home office, and no travel to speak of, just about the only ecological cost of doing business is the electricity that my computer uses… my computer, and, well, all of the servers that transport the e-mail, photos, and other data that I need.
How much electricity might that require, exactly? It turns out that our worldwide increase of internet-based data transmission relies upon a growing number of data centers, or Web server farms, as they are sometimes called. A single server farm consists of an enormous warehouse holding data storage systems and tens of thousands of smaller, state-of-the-art servers which process the information for all of our online activities. In recent years the construction of new data centers has increased dramatically, driven by the fact that most software applications will soon be delivered as online service products rather than via physical means (such as CD-ROMs). An article in Fortune magazine last year described the building boom of these server farms; a good single case study is the spate of data centers that have recently located along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.
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