THE ULTIMATE ICE STORM
Warmer temperatures are not the only reason Arctic sea ice is shrinking: More frequent and intense storms have hastened the breakup of the ice.
According to a study reported in this month’s Geophysical Research Letters that analyzed Arctic atmospheric and oceanic data from 1950 to 2006, cyclones and other storms have become more frequent and are occurring farther north, pushing chunks of broken sea ice a greater distance and faster around the North Pole.
“The intensity of the storms have grown stronger in the Arctic, and this trend will continue in the future,” says the lead author of the study, Sirpa Hakkinen of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Dr. Hakkinen notes that this study confirms what many climate models have predicted: that global warming will make the planet stormier.
At the same time, there is a possibility that disappearing sea ice and more turbulent waters in the Arctic could draw more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into the sea, acting as a brake on global warming.
To make things more complicated, there is also the risk that more carbon dioxide drawn into the oceans will make global waters more acidic, threatening corals and shelled animals, and the rest of the food chain.
THE LONDON ARRAY
The world’s largest proposed offshore wind farm has just received an injection of cash from one of the world’s richest oil states.
Abu Dhabi’s Masdar Initiative, a $15-billion clean-technology investment fund, has bought a 20-per-cent share in the London Array. The wind farm will cost an estimated $5-billion, cover 90 square kilometres of British coastal waters in the outer Thames Estuary with 271 turbines, supply 1,000 kilowatts of energy, power 750,000 homes and create 70,000 jobs.
The project’s future looked doubtful when Royal Dutch Shell pulled out this year, reportedly because rising construction costs had doubled the price tag. Shell’s departure left Germany utility company E.ON AG and Denmark’s Dong Energy AS splitting the bill.
“We believe that the offshore wind market will be a major force in the future,” said Sultan Al Jaber, chief executive officer of Masdar, which bought 40 per cent of E.ON’s share and has pledged to partner with the company on future renewable-energy projects.
This is just the start of many clean-tech investments for the Masdar Initiative, including shares in turbine companies, solar-panel factories and its flagship venture, Masdar City, a planned site near Abu Dhabi that will house 50,000 people in a hypermodern, solar-powered, car-free, zero-waste and zero-carbon “eco-town” in the desert. The city will also be home to a new university partnered with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is intended as a major hub for sustainable-technology research and manufacturing.
MORE BRIGHT IDEAS
Three German towns are piloting a project that keeps streets dark until travellers call into an automated system to switch lights on along their route.
Schwelentrup-Doerntrup
and Rahden have joined the Dial4Light scheme, which has saved the town of Lemgo $70,000, as well as reduced light pollution, which confuses the biological clocks of plants, animals and people.
Energy-saving lighting innovations are becoming more popular across the globe.
In San Francisco, the Civil Twilight Collective has developed an award-winning lunar-resonant streetlight, which burns dimmer when the moon is full.
Last week, electronics manufacturer Philips unveiled a new streetlight design called the Light Blossom, which uses sensors to brighten its energy-efficient LEDs when people stroll nearby. The flower-like design has solar collectors on the rotating “petals,” which automatically track the sun (like a sunflower) and flex up or down, depending on how windy the weather is.
The Light Blossom builds on a number of other off-grid streetlight designs that gather solar and/or wind energy. For example, the Canadian company Hybridyne Power Systems has seen 750 of its wind-solar lights installed worldwide, mostly in parking lots, walkways and private country clubs.
This year, several thousand solar lights built by a Dubai company were installed in Baghdad, where fuel supplies are constantly threatened.
CAPTURING NEW COLOURS
Researchers have developed a new kind of solar cell that can use all the colours of the rainbow, potentially a significant step forward in the evolution of solar technology. Until now, solar-powered systems have used only a small fraction of the spectrum.
The new photovoltaic material, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this month, is made of a hybrid plastic that would be potentially much cheaper and easier to process than traditional solar materials, which use crystalline silicon, a commodity that has skyrocketed in price from $25 to $400 a kilogram since 2005.
This is just one of a number of innovations that solar researchers have come up with in the past few years to overcome the increasing price of silicon.
Other developments include solar panels that use lenses and mirrors to concentrate sunlight on a smaller area of silicon and materials that contain no silicon whatsoever.
“Solid-state solar panels are going the way of the dodo,” says Malcolm Chisholm of Ohio State University, the leader of the study.
There are already lightweight and flexible solar materials on the market, manufactured by such American companies as Nanosolar and Konarka, which can be cheaply printed off a roll like newsprint and are easily adapted to any surface.
Other researchers are working on using other parts of the light spectrum.
The University of Toronto’s Edward Sargent, for example, is working on solar cells that use infrared light. His cells are 10,000 times more efficient than when first described three years ago.
“But photovoltaics have to reduce cost and increase performance to see a widespread impact,” Prof. Sargent says. “Much progress remains to be made.”