Energy Usage Increases Despite Efficiency Efforts

Electronic equipment, including cell phones, iPods, PCs, videogames, and plasma TVs have increased demand for residential energy use annually by 3.4 percent since 1990, according to the International Energy Agency. This trend leads the IEA to estimate that personal electrical energy usage in homes should triple by 2030 worldwide, hence more carbon emissions from coal and natural gas plants. It noted this trend is undoing efforts toward energy-efficiency.

The energy policy advisor to 28 governments (as well as tipsters for Russia, China and India), IEA recommends raising energy-efficiency standards on consumer devices. With energy improvements in home appliances, such as Energy Star refrigerators and washing machines, that usage has lowered. Findings also show that heating and air-conditioning has fallen.

One Billion PCs, Two Billion TVs, Three Billion cellphones.
But the study states that energy use has risen sharply over the past 10 years with the use of electronic gadgets. There are over two billion television sets in the world, close to one billion personal computers by the end of the year, and over half the global population subscribes to a mobile telephone service. These figures are on the rise.

The agency urged that consumers need to make smarter choices and change habits to conserve more energy. In analyzing the data, the report suggests that categories for “functions,” such as surfing the internet, need to be considered, in addition to improvements in products. The report recommended that people’s lifestyles – as well as government policies and manufacturers’ efficiency standards – require dramatic change for energy-efficiency to improve significantly to impact global warming.

Of course, there are other energy-suckers they make recommendations about, too, like oil. But these hidden power-guzzlers start at home. Alternative energy is a solution to greenhouse gas emissions, so perhaps a rise in electricity costs would make a difference.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/05/energy-usage-increasing-efficiency-efforts.php

Save Birds by Promoting Wind Energy

A new study shows that wind farms and nuclear power plants are substantially better for avian wildlife than fossil-fueled power stations. 

Birds, for instance, can directly crash into a turbine blade when they are fixated on perching or hunting and pass through its rotor plane; they can strike its support structure; they can hit part of its tower; or they can collide with its associated transmission and distribution lines.

We are told that these risks are exacerbated when turbines are placed on ridges and upwind slopes, built close to migration routes, or operated during periods of poor visibility such as fog, rain, and at night. Some species, such as bats, face additional risks from the rapid reduction in air pressure near turbine blades, which can cause internal hemorrhaging through a process known as barotraumas. Indirectly, wind farms can positively and negatively physically alter natural habitats, the quantity and quality of prey, and the availability of nesting sites.

Yet the deluge of studies making such claims, while useful and important, nonetheless suffers from three common problems. Studies rarely compare their results with studies of other wind farms to contextualize their estimates, instead relying on a narrow sample size. Most do not compare the possible avian deaths from wind electricity with other sources, and when they do, studies typically do not compare them to other energy sources. None have so far attempted to calculate the number of avian deaths per kWh from energy sources so that more meaningful comparisons might be made between different forms of electricity supply.

In an attempt to address some of these shortcomings, one new albeit preliminary study conducted by this author has compared the avian deaths per GWh from three electricity systems: wind farms, fossil-fueled power plants (coal, natural gas, and oil generators), and nuclear power plants.

Avian wildlife can perish not only by striking wind turbines in the ways described above, but by smashing into nuclear power plant cooling structures, transmission and distribution lines, and smokestacks at fossil-fuel fired power stations. Birds can starve to death in forests ravaged by acid rain, ingest hazardous and fatal doses of mercury, drink contaminated water at uranium mines and mills, or die in large numbers as climate change wreaks havoc on migration routes and degrades habitats.

For wind turbines, the risk appears to be greatest to birds striking towers or turbine blades and for bats suffering barotrauma. For fossil-fueled power stations, the most significant fatalities come from climate change, which is altering weather patterns and destroying habitats that birds depend on. For nuclear power plants, the risk is almost equally spread across hazardous pollution at uranium mine sites and collisions with draft cooling structures.

When these avian deaths are correlated with the units of electricity those power plants produce, some may find the results surprising. Based on real world operating experience of 339 wind turbines comprising six wind farms constituting 274 MW of installed capacity in the U.S., average avian mortality for wind appears to be about 0.269 fatalities per GWh.

Based on real world operating experience for two coal facilities as well as the indirect damages from mountain top removal coal mining in Appalachia, acid rain pollution on wood thrushes, mercury pollution, and anticipated impacts of climate change, average avian mortality for fossil fueled power stations appears to be about 5.18 fatalities per GWh.

http://www.scitizen.com/stories/future-energies/2009/05/Save-Birds-by-Promoting-Wind-Energy/

Ultra-Efficient Organic LEDs

White lighting: Organic light-emitting diodes like this could be the future of lighting, thanks to very high efficiencies, which outperform even fluorescent lights.  Credit: F. Erler / N. Seidler

An organic light-emitting diode (OLED) developed in Germany has the potential to produce the same quality of white light as incandescent bulbs but with power efficiencies considerably better than even fluorescent lighting.

The prototype OLED could emerge as an ultra-efficient light source for displays and general lighting, says Sebastian Reineke, who led the research at the Institute for Applied Photophysics, in Dresden, Germany. The long-term goal is to fabricate the device using conventional low-cost roll-to-roll printing.

In recent years, many countries have begun looking to switch from incandescent lighting to compact fluorescent bulbs because the latter are so much more energy efficient. There has also been a lot of interest in using light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for displays and general lighting, again because of the potential energy savings they offer.

But with both fluorescent and LED lighting, the quality of white light produced has always left something to be desired. Fluorescent lighting can make people appear unhealthy because less red light is emitted, while most white LEDs on the market today have a bluish quality, making them appear cold.

In contrast, OLEDs can be made from a wide range of materials, so achieving good-quality white light is less challenging, says Reineke. It has not been the quality of light that has let OLEDs down but rather their efficiencies. Fluorescent lighting typically operates at around 60 to 70 lumens per watt, while incandescent bulbs operate at about 10 to 17 lumens per watt. In contrast, says Reineke, the best reported power efficiency of an OLED until now was 44 lumens per watt.

In this week’s issue of the journal Nature, Reineke and his colleagues report a novel structural design for an OLED that exhibits efficiencies of 90 lumens per watt and shows potential to go up to 124 lumens per watt.

“These efficiencies are very compelling,” says Peter Kazlas, director of device development for QD Vision, a company based in Cambridge, MA, that’s developing quantum-dot-based LED lighting.

“OLEDs have the potential to grow into a really very energy-efficient light source,” adds Kristin Knappstein, business-development manager at Philips Lighting, in Aachen, Germany. Her company already has an OLED lighting product on the market called Lumiblade. “In production, we achieve levels of between 15 and 20 lumens per watt,” she says, adding that the ultimate potential is for the technology to reach efficiencies as high as 150 lumens per watt.

http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/22656/