Green Energy

priceofoil.org - by Andy Rowell - October 15, 2013

CLICK HERE - STUDY - Mercury Trends in Colonial Waterbird Eggs Downstream of the Oil Sands Region of Alberta, Canada

Scientists have released yet another academic study that indicates the growing ecological impact of the tar sands.

They measured the amount of mercury in birds eggs downstream from the tar sands and compared them to eggs some distance away from the polluting region.

What they found was that the eggs of certain species of predatory birds living downstream from the tar sands were found to have “statistically significant increases” of the dangerous heavy metal, mercury.

(READ COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Image: Fracking fight: In mid-August, the energy company Cuadrilla Resources suspended operations of this exploratory shale gas drilling site in southeast England after protests from residents and environmentalists.

technologyreview.com - September 10th, 2013 - Peter Fairley

Proposed U.K. government policies to encourage hydrofracking of natural gas ignited a firestorm of protest this summer, with critics complaining that they were not consulted and that rules will restrict local planners’ authority. But the country appears to have few other options. The United Kingdom is in an energy quagmire that is forcing it to turn to shale gas.

The country’s aggressive carbon emissions goals call for the U.K.’s power supply to be virtually carbon-free by 2030.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

Image: Installing solar panels in a village.

ecowatch.com - August 28th - Justin Guay

We have two broken systems—energy and finance—which conspire to support a coal fired centralized grid that never reaches the poor while driving dangerous climate change. That means 1.3 billion people around the world won’t escape the dark, and we’ll fry the climate, unless we disrupt these systems and deploy distributed clean energy. Three months ago the Sierra Club worked on a pilot project with SunFunder to promote such a potentially disruptive solution: solar crowdfunding for the world’s poor.

(VIEW COMPLETE ARTICLE)

submitted by Albert Gomez

energymanagertoday.com - August 7, 2013

With commercial building operators facing pressure to reduce energy consumption and IT-based controls and monitoring becoming widespread, a perfect storm of factors has led to new software platforms for building energy management systems (BEMS), says Navigant Research, which predicts that the BEMS market will grow from $1.8 billion to $5.6 billion by 2020.

The Navigant report, Building Energy Management Systems — IT-Based Monitoring and Control Systems for Smart Buildings: Global Market Analysis and Forecasts, says the BEMS market represents one of the fastest-growing and most promising waves of innovation ever to occur in the building industry.

It cites factors such as the increased knowledge and proliferation of digital controls within the building stock in the industry, the high priority focus on energy efficiency among corporations and governments, and the advent of cloud-based data management and Big Data as the reason behind the explosive development of the BEMS market.