It had to be April 1st, didn’t it, but it was no joke. I doubt if anyone noticed, but yesterday morning while updating this site to enhance your viewing experience, some finger trouble on my part caused a WordPress widget to go berserk and bring down the hosting server. It took about a day to restore from a backup and recreate the subsequent posts. And that merry prankster post I spent hours on has passed its sell-by date, and will have to be put on ice for next year. If it’s still topical.

None of this has done anything to improve my mood. I was in a dark place for a while, and seriously considered giving up this blogging lark altogether. However, my mate Nick at Dream Hosting helped me through it and here we are again. In one of my blacker moments I considered moving to a new hosting service, preferably one that has a position on envionmental issues. A quick Google shows there’s a load of options out there. Here’s a random sample.

“Give your carbon footprint the red card!” say www.greenwebhosting.co.uk, who claim to be an affordable earth-friendly service, 100% solar powered and Fairtrade friendly.

NSDesign Web Hosting say they “recently became one of the few web service companies to become carbon neutral, by completely offsetting our carbon footprint”. NSDesign has partnered with Tree Appeal to offer a tree planting carbon offset service. The presence on the Tree Appeal home page of two photos of that ghastly, misguided old duffer ‘Professor’ David Bellamy doesn’t tempt me to pursue this option.

Eco Web Hosting “provide carbon neutral web hosting and green web hosting throughout the UK”. They offer “individuals and companies a carbon neutral web hosting service. We carefully calculate the carbon emissions of our servers, and offset them by planting trees in Ransom Wood Business Park.”

A swift glance suggests that the majority of ‘green’ web hosting services justify their claims by using carbon offsets. Outfits like Greenwebhosting that invest directly in renewables to power their data centres seem to be pretty thin on the ground. Careful research is needed to make sure you get the right service for your own personal ethical stance. Another complicating factor is price; I pay £9.99 a year for my current site, I would have to pay seven times that amount for a basic solar-powered service with Greenwebhosting, offering a fraction of the web space and bandwidth.

Decisions, decisions. Why does everything have to be so difficult?

Shares in Renewable Energy Holdings (REH.L) were up today on the news that the green technologies firm has agreed a deal to purchase the Kobylany wind farm site in Poland, which will provide 30 MW of generating capacity with an accompanying off-take infrastructure and transformer station. REH will pay €68,000 per MW of generating capacity, making a total of €2.04m. The agreement allows for an initial lease term of 25 years, with an option to extend for a further 25 years.

The annual lease payment will be €25,000 (plus VAT) with an additional annual payment of €7,000 (plus VAT) for each turbine on the site. It is expected that there will be 15 wind turbines altogether. Construction is expected to start in Spring 2008, financed by REH’s credit facility with Standard Chartered Bank. Good to see the credit squeeze doesn’t apply for renewable projects.

REH is active in wind, wave and biomass. The company owns the CETO wave energy technology, which it is developing in co-operation with Carnegie Corporation.

The Department for Communities and Local Government has indicated that the necessary legislation for a more relaxed planning regime for domestic microgeneration equipment – solar panels, heat pumps, biomass boilers and combined heat and power schemes – will be published in Spring 2008. The results of a consultation paper, on the extension of householder permitted development rights for microgeneration, were published last month.

“The Government wants to encourage the widest possible take-up of microgeneration equipment whilst ensuring the reasonable interests of neighbours, the environment and the wider community are protected.
“In the light of the responses to the consultation, the Government now intends to provide permitted development rights for the following types of microgeneration: solar panels, wind turbines, heat pumps, biomass and combined heat and power, subject to specific limits and conditions that will ensure that any adverse impact on others is not significant.
“We will be bringing forward secondary legislation to implement these changes for householder microgeneration in Spring 2008.”

84% of respondents agreed with the proposal that there should be no additional permitted development rights for hydropower
microgeneration. The government “does not intend to provide permitted development rights for this type of microgeneration”.

Permitted Development Rights for Householder Microgeneration: Government response to consultation replies

An article in last Sunday’s Observer (‘How Africa’s desert sun can bring Europe power‘) describes a £5bn plan to generate electricity in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East, and export it to Europe. More than 100 solar installations, each equipped with an array of thousands of mirrors, would generate enough power to provide Europe with a sixth of its electricity needs.

The Trans-Mediterranean Renewable Energy Cooperation (TREC) is a joint initiative of the Club of Rome, the Hamburg Climate Protection Foundation and the National Energy Research Center of Jordan, campaigning for the transmission of clean power from deserts to Europe. TREC has researched and developed the DESERTEC concept in cooperation with the German Aerospace Center. In Brussels on November 28, former Club of Rome president Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan presented a White Paper “Clean Power from Deserts – The DESERTEC Concept for Energy, Water and Climate Security” to members of the European Parliament.

The project aims to exploit cheap desert land using a technique known as ‘Concentrating Solar thermal Power’ (CSP). A CSP installation consists of an array of adjustable mirrors covering around a square kilometre. The mirrors focus the sun’s rays onto a central pillar filled with water. Temperatures inside the pillar rise to 800C, causing the water to be vapourised into superheated steam which is channelled off and used to drive turbines which in turn generate electricity. The residual heat will then be used to power desalination processes to provide fresh water.

White Paper

I found it quite amusing that the Observer can’t tell the difference between CSP and photovoltaics. Or perhaps they just couldn’t find a picture of a CSP site in their archive and thought their readers would be too dumb to notice.

Afterword: Having published this post I went off to do something else, but found myself thinking some more about the TREC scheme. It has interesting political implications if it goes ahead. It seems the next logical step in the process of incorporating North Africa and the Middle East into some kind of Greater Europe. Where will Europe’s southern boundary be redrawn, and how will it be defended? And how will issues of energy supply security be addressed?

I just don’t know.

It’s a good job someone’s looking at increasing the supply of silicon for the solar industry (“IBM Recycles Silicon”) . In his article “Profit from the End of Cheap Oil“, Ian Cooper describes how the hopes of the solar industry to provide a viable energy alternative to oil depend on a reliable and continuing supply of polysilicon. At $70 per kilogram, the price of polysilicon has doubled since 2004. Very few solar companies world-wide have the resources to meet an insatiable demand for panels, so they have started investing in polysilicon manufacturers to fund the construction of new facilities and increase output.

Without solar panels, there’s no solar power. The industry is dead in the water. All the current activity in the solar sector will grind to a halt.

Face it. Strong global demand for solar isn’t going to slow in the face of $95 oil . . . and there’s plenty to get excited about thanks to China’s insatiable demand ahead of the Summer 2008 Olympics, and the United States’ solar energy plans:

· George W. Bush has announced plans to increase federal government spending on solar energy to $150 million.

· California’s Governor Schwarzenegger has pledged a million solar rooftops by 2017.

· And New York’s Governor George Pataki has inked a bill offering a $5,000 tax credit to homeowners who install solar-power roofing.

· Add to this the Chinese parliament’s plans to convert 10% of the country’s energy consumption to renewable energy sources by 2020, including the use of solar-generated electricity and solar water heating, and you’ve got an emerging industry with only a select few players for all the wealth to flow to.

Small wonder that there’s a “feeding frenzy” going on in the solar industry. Whether this bubble will burst depends on the supply of raw materials and the future development of alternative technologies which might change the industry beyond recognition.

Recycled waste silicon from IBM’s chip manufacturing processes will soon be finding its way into solar panels.

A new process in IBM’s Vermont factory enables it to refurbish scrap semiconductor wafers to a standard where they can be reused in-house, and subsequently ‘retired’ to be sold on for use in the manufacture of photovoltaic cells.

Up to 3.3% of the 250,000 wafers used by the semiconductor industry each day are scrapped, approximately 3 million each year. Most are crushed and sent to landfills, or melted down and resold, because they contain intellectual property which makes them unsuitable for processing by third-party recycling companies.

IBM says the wafer reclamation process generates energy savings of up to 90% by reducing the demand for new wafers to meet manufacturing needs. When wafers reach end of life they are sold to the solar industry. Solar cell manufacturers could save between 30% and 90% of the energy required if they had used a new silicon material source.

Atlanta Journal-Constitution article

Process details (geeks only)

IBM press release

The Eden Project is already a world-renowned attraction and now it’s looking to add an extra edge to its success. Their latest building, the Edge, will demonstrate options for energy supply, water conservation and waste management intended to act as models of how we all might live in the next decades. From www.theedge.org :

“Its scale and ambition will make the Edge an international icon of sustainability, showing mankind is capable of amazing things. The building will be a model of cutting-edge architecture and technology, harvesting water and energy from the sun, wind, and rain to show how we all might live in the future. It will be a testament to one-planet living, built to the lowest possible carbon footprint and designed to last.

“The awe-inspiring oasis, desert, water gardens and underground chambers inside the Edge will become somewhere to inspire and explore new solutions, rethink our values and our goals, work together to create a positive future.

“The point of the Edge is that while resources may be limited, the imagination isn’t. The building will create a setting for asking questions fundamental to our future

• What makes humans content?
• How can we still find richness in our lives without rampant consumption?
• What lessons from the past can inform the future?

“We will look back to understand how people coped with change in the past. We will look at people living ‘on the edge’ today to learn from the ingenious solutions they have put into practice. We will look forward to explore how we can find the spirit, imagination and knowledge to adapt to the challenges facing us.

“The Edge won’t be a building about climate change, it will be a building because of climate change.”

Sounds wonderful, but once you’ve fought your way past all that blowsy rhetoric, what have you got? Using language reminiscent of an Olympic bid, under the flag of sustainability, the Eden Project wants to build another biome to attract more visitors and generate more revenue. Why should we care? Because Eden wants to fund this with Lottery money. The Big Lottery Fund has put up a prize of £50m to be granted to a single “inspirational” project as part of The People’s £50 Million Lottery Giveaway. The Edge is one of four shortlisted projects, along with Sustrans’ Connect2, Sherwood:The Living Legend and the Black Country Urban Park.

The winning project will be decided by public vote in December 2007. Have your say at www.thepeoples50million.org.uk.

For most of us, solar power comes from solar panels that sit on the roof and generate electricity. Overwhelmingly, the core material used to convert light into power is silicon. There are regular background rumblings about the possibility of demand exceeding the supply of pure silicon, with consequences for the take-up of solar technologies. No wonder scientists are looking for alternatives, as pointed out by Matt in his ‘Solar News‘ post.

Researchers at the New Jersey Institute of Technology have developed a carbon-based solar cell that may one day enable householders to print their own solar panels onto plastic sheets using a standard inkjet printer. Lead researcher and author Somenath Mitra said: “Developing organic solar cells from polymers is a cheap and potentially simpler alternative. We foresee a great deal of interest in our work because solar cells can be inexpensively printed or simply painted on exterior building walls and/or roof tops. Imagine some day driving in your hybrid car with a solar panel painted on the roof, which is producing electricity to drive the engine. The opportunities are endless.”

The new cells use carbon nanotubes in combination with tiny carbon buckyballs (known as fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Buckyballs trap electrons, although they can’t make electrons flow. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons. Nanotubes, behaving like copper wires, will then be able to make the electrons or current flow. “Using this unique combination in an organic solar cell recipe can enhance the efficiency of future painted-on solar cells,” said Mitra. “Someday, I hope to see this process become an inexpensive energy alternative for households around the world.”

www.njit.edu/publicinfo/press_releases/release_1040.php