Green energy increases reliance on foreign sources.

Remember how one advantage of green technology would be to make America less dependent on foreign sources of energy? Oops. A Department of Energy report released last month to little fanfare inadvertently blows this idea away.

The “Critical Materials Strategy 2010″ represents DOE’s effort to understand how green energy technologies depend on rare earths. Those are the minerals at the bottom of the periodic table whose unique properties make them indispensable in many high technologies, including wind turbines and solar panels.

As the world recently realized, more than 95% of these minerals are sourced from China. Because of the environmental problems associated with extracting them, most countries where deposits exist have discouraged mining. The two most promising non-Chinese sources are mines in Mountain Pass, California and Mount Weld, Australia, and it will take years to bring them fully online.

photo: Associated Press

Miners work at a jade mine in the Kunlun mountains in Qinghai province.

China has been taking advantage of its rare-earth monopoly. Late last month it announced a 35% cut in its export quota, and that follows a previous quota cut of 72% last year. Export taxes on some rare earths also rose on January 1, to 25% from between zero and 15% depending on the element.

The reasons for these actions aren’t fully clear. Beijing may be cracking down on illegal mining that creates pollution problems. But politics might also be at play, as with the apparent suspension of shipments to Japan following a maritime territorial dispute last year.

Hence the DOE’s concerns about rare earths and green tech. As the report notes, “[s]everal clean energy technologies—including wind turbines, electric vehicles, photovoltaic cells and fluorescent lighting—use materials at risk of supply disruptions in the short term.” Those risks include “supply-demand imbalances that could lead to increased price volatility and supply chain disruption.” Exacerbating the problem, rare earths are traded in relatively small, nontransparent transactions instead of on open exchanges, making it harder to discern supply, demand and price trends.

So much for DOE’s claim, voiced on its website, that the “growth of clean and domestic renewable energy is an important part of . . . increasing our energy security.” In reality, renewables appear to be substituting dependence on one set of foreign suppliers for dependence on another set of foreign suppliers.

Reliance on global markets for energy supplies has never been as terrible as energy independence believers argued—at least so long as the global market in question is as broad and deep as that for oil and other hydrocarbons. The U.S. also is capable of producing more of its energy if it could muster the political will to expand oil and natural gas drilling. So we suppose thanks are in order to DOE for reminding everyone that not even a windmill can free America from the need to trade with others for energy.

~ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703791904576075481474520772.html

By Marie Morelli / The Post-Standard

Green Construction at Live Work Home

Syracuse, NY — We caught up Wednesday with Bob Hotaling of Team Industries, the company that makes the structural insulated panels going up at the Live Work Home house at 317-319 Marcellus St.

The R-Control panels are a key feature that will make the house extremely energy efficient because very little heat will be able to leak out through the walls and roof.

The Marcellus Street house was one of three winners of a design competition to build sustainable and affordable homes on the city’s Near West Side. The From the Ground Up competition was sponsored by the Syracuse University School of Architecture, Home HeadQuarters and the Syracuse Center of Excellence.

Hotaling trained the construction crew whose members come from Land Shapes Construction, a Homer company, and Home HeadQuarters, which also is acting as general contractor for the project. Two apprentices from Home HeadQuarters also are on the job.

The R-Control structural insulated panels (SIPs for short) are made in Team Industries’ factory in Grand Rapids, Mich. Oriented strand board is bonded to 4 1/2 inches of expanded polystyrene insulation for an airtight seal. A mold- and termite-resistant coating is applied. That gives the SIPs their green color.

The panels get window and door openings according to the architect’s plan, and have chases drilled into them for electrical wiring. They are numbered and labeled “top” and “bottom.” Once delivered to the job site, they are installed in numerical order.

“It’s like a giant jigsaw puzzle,” said architect Pam Cambpell, of Cook + Fox Architects, who was on site Wednesday to check on the construction.

To put them up, the construction workers run beads of sealant along the edges and bottom of the panels before fitting them together tongue-and-groove style. Insulated “splines” between panels insure an airtight connection so heat can’t leak out.

“That’s the big advantage of SIPs — no thermal break,” Campbell said “The insulation is essentially continuous.”

But because the house will be so tight, care must be taken to prevent mold and to bring in fresh air, Campbell said. This house will have a heat recovery ventilator that captures heat from the warm air going out to temper the cold air coming in. The air coming in also passes through a filter.

Next up: the roof.

The wall panels are small enough that the construction crew can move them around without machinery, Hotaling said. The roof panels are another matter — they are 4 feet wide, 22 feet long and 12 inches thick.

“The thickness of the roof panels makes the house structurally stronger,” Campbell said. That’s important because the house is fairly open inside, so there aren’t a lot of interior walls to hold up the roof, she said.

The crew had most of the wall panels up by 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Hotaling said the roof will start going up later in the day. He plans to have the crew assemble sections of the roof on the ground and then use a Lull — a forklift on a boom — to hoist them onto the structure.

“We’ll be done in three days,” he said.

SIP installation began Tuesday, so assuming all goes according to plan, the house’s skeleton should be up by Thursday.

Team R-Control also is working on a considerably larger project nearby — the State University College at Oswego’s 300-bed, 12-building student housing project, Hotaling said.

Marie Morelli, mmorelli@syracuse.com, 315-470-2220.

By Marie Morelli / The Post-Standard

November 17, 2009, 6:00AM

Stephen D. Cannerelli / The Post-StandardDuncan Cooper, director of sales at Renovus Energy in Ithaca, holds a tube used to heat water. Demonstration-sized tubes are to his left, and a solar electric panel is behind him.

Syracuse, NY — More New York homeowners than ever want to put solar panels on their houses.

That should be good news for the 174 contractors registered with the state to install solar photovoltaic systems. But the demand has put such a strain on subsidies for residential solar that the state has reduced the amount offered, hoping to make a dwindling pot of money last through the end of the year.

A new round of funding for 2010 and beyond has not yet been approved, and that leaves solar power installers hanging. They can’t sign up customers until they know what the subsidy will be. And without customers, an emerging industry employing between 800 and 1,000 people statewide can’t create more “green-collar” jobs.

“We could easily hire another person if the right incentives were in place,” said Duncan Cooper, director of sales for Renovus Energy Inc. in Ithaca, an installer of renewable energy systems that employs seven. “We just don’t know where we’re going to be in the next few months.”

So what do you tell customers?

“This is the way it is now and we have no way of predicting what it’s going to be like,” said Robert Halstead, owner of Eastern Mountain Solar Corp. in Syracuse. “As you can imagine, we’re not doing a whole lot of sales between now and then.”

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By Tim Knauss / The Post-Standard

Dick Blume / The Post-StandardOnondaga County’s plan to use trees, vegetated roofs, rain gardens, permeable pavement and rain barrels – instead of three new sewage treatment plants – to reduce sewer overflows polluting tributaries of Onondaga Lake was approved Monday by U.S. District Judge Frederick Scullin. In this file photo from August 2009, the sun rises over the lake. Syracuse, NY – Onondaga County got the final go-ahead Monday to scrap plans for three new sewage plants — including one in Armory Square — and instead reduce sewer overflows with trees, vegetated roofs, rain gardens, permeable pavement and rain barrels.

U.S. District Judge Frederick Scullin on Monday signed a new consent order between U.S. District Judge Frederick Scullinthe county, the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Atlantic States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit group that sued the county in 1988 to stop its pollution of Onondaga Lake.

The new agreement replaces a court order that required the county to build a series of sewage plants along tributaries of the lake. The parties to the lawsuit — along with environmentalists and neighborhood activists who opposed building sewage plants — hailed the new consent order as a breakthrough that could change the face of Syracuse.

“Just imagine half a million more trees in our city,” said Joseph Heath, an attorney representing the Onondaga Nation, who helped hammer out the agreement.

DEC officials have said Onondaga County will likely set an example for other New York communities in how to use “green infrastructure” to handle urban runoff.

County Executive Joanie Mahoney laid the groundwork in 2008 when, just three weeks after taking office, she halted plans for a controversial $128 million sewage plant in Armory Square, where site work had already begun. Mahoney, the DEC and Atlantic States then sought permission from Scullin to hammer out a deal that would emphasize green measures.

Mahoney said she hopes the new plan will revitalize the community by cleaning its waterways in environmentally friendly ways.

“This is truly changing the prospects for Syracuse and Central New York,’’ Mahoney said. “And it’s probably going to be among the biggest accomplishments that I’ll have in this job, to get the federal court to change the direction we’re in.’’

Instead of a sewage plant along Onondaga Creek in Armory Square, the county will build a 3.7 million-gallon underground storage tank there to hold sewer overflows until they can be processed at the county’s Metro sewage treatment plant. The Armory Square tank will be installed by December 2013. Two additional storage tanks will be built along Harbor Brook, also by 2013.

Through a combination of storage tanks, new sewers and green infrastructure, the county is expected to prevent at least 95 percent of storm runoff from reaching waterways by 2018. The sewage system now captures about 85 percent each year, or 400 million gallons less.

The new court order gives the county until 2011 — roughly three extra years — to demonstrate its ability to restrict phosphorous emissions into Onondaga Lake. The order also calls for new scientific studies examining phosphorous in the lake.

Tim Knauss can be reached at tknauss@syracuse.com or 470-3023.

—

Credit Due: http://www.syracuse.com/news/index.ssf/2009/11/federal_judge_approves_letting.html

A new, government-sponsored, awards scheme is helping to showcase the UK’s innovation in science and green technology

Siemens is behind new traffic controls that use less than a quarter of the electricity of previous systems

Designing traffic lights to be more energy efficient may not seem the hardest thing to do. Change the energy-wasting incandescent bulbs for modern light sources and you’re done, right? Not quite.

“We’ve reinvented the humble traffic light,” says Matthew Vincent, deputy director of sales and marketing at Siemens Mobility Traffic Solutions. “Previously they used very energy-inefficient [50W] tungsten-halogen lights, which only have a lifespan of six months or so, which means you have lots of maintenance issues with people visiting site to replace them.” The company replaced the bulbs with a cluster of modern LEDs, redesigned the electrical control systems from scratch and lowered the operating voltage from 240V to 48V.

The result is a new set of lights that uses less than a quarter of the electricity of standard traffic lights. There are around half a million tungsten-based traffic lights in operation around the UK and, considering the CO₂ emissions saved by preventing fleets of vans driving around replacing blown tungsten lights, the cumulative benefits to the environment become apparent. Which is perhaps one of the reasons that the Siemens traffic lights won first prize this week in the energy and environment category of the inaugural iAwards.

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