Year in Review: Solar industry puts Oregon at center of escalating trade dispute with China View full sizeMotoya Nakamura/The OregonianREC Solar employees install solar panels at Gladstone High School. Plunging solar-panel prices and declining European subsidies are squeezing companies including SolarWorld, a German business that employs 1,000 in Hillsboro. Storms hit Oregon's fast-growing solar sector in 2011 as the state emerged at the center of an escalating international trade dispute rocking the renewable energy industry. State economic development officials had high hopes that solar manufacturing would succeed the semiconductor industry as a big employer, given that the two sectors use similar raw materials and worker skills. But by year's end the picture appeared decidedly cloudy. The U.S. subsidiary of SolarWorld AG, a German company employing 1,000 in Hillsboro to make solar cells and panels, filed a trade complaint Oct. 19 against China. The companies contend China aims to drive manufacturers out of business and corner the U.S. market. The U.S. -- Richard Read
NRG Installs Privately Funded Electric Car Charging Network in Oily Houston The U.S. electric car industry is getting a jolt: NRG Energy, Inc. is bringing the nation’s first privately funded electric vehicle charging network to Houston. The New Jersey-based company announced this morning the launch of eVgo, its electric car charging infrastructure and at-home chargers. Though other companies have plans for charging networks in D.C., Phoenix, and other cities, NRG’s is the first that’s entirely privately funded, according to the company. The charging network is an effort to break what NRG CEO David Crane calls the "chicken and egg cycle around electric vehicles." To let drivers stop worrying which will come first, the electric car or the electric car infrastructure, NRG is taking the first step and investing $10 million into Houston's public system. The chargers, made by energy- and defense-company Aerovironment, will also be available in home garages for monthly fees and a three-year contract.
Data to be a defining tech trend in 2012 The start of this year was marked by a tech industry obsession with where to put growing mountains of information gathered online and by sensors increasingly woven into modern lifestyles. External drives boasted seemingly unfillable capacities and companies touted services for storing bits and bytes at massive data centers in the Internet "cloud." As 2012 approaches, focus has turned to searching for trends, patterns and other useful insights about people's preferences and behaviors that might be buried in troves of data. "Big analytics toward the end of the year became the big term and into next year it will be the big term," independent Silicon Valley analyst Rob Enderle told AFP on Friday. "Analytics is really the core of what will be happening in everything from medical research to advertising." "Analyzing data can tell you want resonates and what doesn't," Enderle said. An IBM computer called "Watson" that made headlines by beating a human Jeopardy!
Top 10 Climate-Ready Cities in the U.S. Triple Pundit.com June 14th, 2011 Credit: Digon3/WikiMedia By Boyd Cohen, Ph.D., CO2 IMPACT Cities are now home to a majority of the world’s population and are on the front line in the battle against climate change. I felt that it was time to do some analysis on U.S. The Top 10 Metropolitan Climate-Ready Cities in the U.S. are: 10.) My recent rankings of low-carbon politicians was in part a tribute to the recently retired former mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley. 9.) (San Jose’s Green Vision Progress) 7.) 7.) 6.) 5.) 4.) 3.) 2.) 1.) Here are the breakdowns of the ratings on each category for the top 10 cities. In a previous post I highlighted some of the politically elected leaders, conservative and liberal, who have been taking bold measures to transition their countries and communities towards a low-carbon future. Just last week, the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) announced the launch of its CDP for Cities Program. [Source: Triple Pundit] (+4 rating) Loading ... You might also enjoy:
How to see the best meteor showers of 2012: Tools, tips and 'save the dates' (PhysOrg.com) -- Whether you're watching from a downtown area or the dark countryside, here are some tips to help you enjoy these celestial shows of shooting stars. Those streaks of light are really caused by tiny specks of comet-stuff hitting Earth's atmosphere at very high speed and disintegrating in flashes of light. First a word about the moon - it is not the meteor watcher's friend. The best thing you can do to maximize the number of meteors you'll see is to get as far away from urban light pollution as possible and find a location with a clear, unclouded view of the night sky. The meteors will always travel in a path away from the constellation for which the shower is named. Whether viewing from your front porch or a mountaintop, be sure to dress for success. Next, bring something comfortable on which to sit or lie down. Lastly, put away the telescope or binoculars. These meteor showers provide casual meteor observers with the most bang for their buck. Major Meteor Showers (2012)
Swiss chemists emulate cheese rind to create self-cleaning surface material (PhysOrg.com) -- Cheese lovers know that the milky white outer coating of Camembert cheese not only serves to offer a tart offset to the pungent inner cheese, but also protects it until ready to be eaten, much like plastic wrap does for other foods. Now, a group of Swiss researchers have taken this idea heart, and have created a sort of artificial rind. As they describe in their paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have created a bio-sandwich of sorts using a type of cheese fungus to create a material that eats organic material that comes into contact with it. The idea was to create a material that mimics what the rind does for Camembert cheese, i.e. protect it from other microorganisms, while at the same time allowing the cheese inside to mature. To construct such a material, they started with a sheet of thin plastic which they covered with Penicillium roqueforti, a fungus mixture known more familiarly as the stuff that makes blue cheese blue.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Wallace Energy Systems & Renewables Facility :: Oregon State University, College of Engineering In 2007/2008, OSU, in collaboration with Columbia Power Technologies (CPT) and the U.S. Navy, evaluated 18 different direct-drive technologies, and down-selected to five promising designs. OSU and CPT built each of those prototypes at the 200W peak level and tested them on OSU's new wave energy linear test bed.