300 garbage collection trucks in California will soon be fueled by the same trash that they haul. Landfill gas will be purified and liquefied, producing up to 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) daily.
This facility at Waste Management’s Altamont Landfill in Livermore, California will begin operation in 2009. It comes with a price tag of $15.5 million, with grants providing $1.4 million.
Waste Management is the largest waste management company in North America and operates the largest US fleet of heavy-duty collection trucks. The company has a goal to reduce fleet emissions by 15% by 2020.
The new facility will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 30,000 tons per year, according to Linde North America. LNG is a cleaner burning transportation fuel that emits less nitrogen oxide, carbon dioxide and particulates than diesel-fueled vehicles.
Full Article: CleanTechnica
Huge props to Waste Management for coming up with an innovative idea to use waste byproducts to forgo using gas. Instead of letting all that methane gas float into the atmosphere and contribute to global warming, it will be used for a positive purpose. I know there is an old dump around here that has been converted into a golf course, but still produces methane gas from decomposition. So they tapped into it and began using it to create electricity for thousands of homes. I hope more waste management companies take these ideas into account and use them theirselves. There are really no downsides since natural gas is very clean burning and it replaces need for gas.
The world’s data centers are projected to surpass the airline industry as a greenhouse gas polluter by 2020, according to a new study by McKinsey & Co.
Over that time, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the electricity consumed by fast-expanding data centers will rise fourfold, the study estimates. The greenhouse gas impact of data centers is “not yet counted and likely to be very significant,” said William Forrest, the lead McKinsey consultant on the report.
The study, released on Wednesday at the Green Enterprise Computing Symposium in Orlando, Fla., mainly focuses on the cost- and energy-saving opportunities being squandered today in corporate and government data centers.
For example, computer servers are used at only 6 percent of their capacity on average, while data center facilities as a whole are used at 56 percent of peak performance. In other words, if data centers were hotels, they would be bankrupt and shut down instead of growing like kudzu.
Full Article: NYTimes
In my experience, server power need is grossly over estimated. Many times powerful servers are ordered up when less powerful ones or even virtual private servers (VPS) will suffice. I think to combat the problem, people are going to realize that most of the time they don’t need an entire server for their project. Virtualization would vastly help this problem as well as tapping into alternative energy sources that do not contribute to global climate change. As we become a more digital society we need to look into ways to conserve energy will meeting our increasing demands for server access.
Nanosolar just can’t stop making news! After completing it’s $100M manufacturing plant and starting up the manufacture of nearly 500 megawatts of solar generating capacity per year, NanoSolar is taking yet more investment.
EDF Energies Nouvelles, a renewable energy provider that serves up 1.4 gigawatts of power throughout Europe, has invested $50 million in NanoSolar, at least in part in order to get access to some of the panels they’re producing. Already, NanoSolar is undercutting the price per watt of every other photovoltaic provider on the planet. They’ve done this by developing a technique whereby they can basically print solar panels. It’s fast, simple, and cheap (now that they’ve got the plant up and running) and they’ve been selling everything they can produce.
EDF’s investment ensures that they’ll be able to buy some of the highly in-demand solar panels from NanoSolar in 2009.
But NanoSolar’s vision isn’t without problems. Long-term efficiency of their cells has yet to be established, and some worry that they could degrade faster than traditional panels. Additionally, these thin-film solar cells require indium, an element that has recently become scarce due to a huge increase in use for flat-panel televisions and solar panels. The near-term shortage might force Nanosolar to increase its prices.
Other companies like Miasole and HelioVolt are working on creating similar panels using the same chemistry, but only NanoSolar has begun selling them in significant quantities.
Source: EcoGeek
Very good news for solar power. I eagerly await the day when no longer powerlines run to homes and they are self sufficient.
