Search Results

There are two basic approaches for using solar energy to generate electricity. The first type, solar photovoltaic (PV) energy, uses semiconductors to convert sunlight into electricity. Crystalline silicon semiconductors are the most common type in use. The second approach is called concentrating solar power (CSP), also referred to as solar thermal. Basically, CSP uses mirrors to concentrate sunlight and generate steam, which is used to power a turbine. The most common method employed commercially is the parabolic trough, where the mirrors are horizontally disposed in a parabolic shape. Solar PV is more commonly used commercially because of high capital costs for building a CSP power plant. Solar PV has experienced rapid growth over the last ten years, increasing by more than twentyfold in the United States. Growth for CSP has increased threefold over the same ten years, but no growth over the last four years. Spain and the United States lead the world in commercial CSP plants.

This chapter addresses the question of how Christian education can engage youth in environmental stewardship and the moral imperative to protect God’s earth. The stories in this chapter highlight the ministry of Christian education for youth in three contexts: camp and conference centers, Sunday school classes, and youth groups. This chapter introduces faith leaders such as Stan Hubbard, the president of Kanuga Conferences, who saw green initiatives for camps as a discernment process that led to the installation of one of the largest solar water-heating systems in the Southeast. The lessons learned in this chapter include using land owned by religious institutions to engage youth in the outdoors, ensuring that camp facilities reflect environmental stewardship, using facilities as a teaching tool, integrating creation care into Sunday school, and harnessing the power of media to promote environmentally responsible behaviors.

This chapter provides a background on solar power. The first practical use of solar power was for satellites. Solar power allowed for a longer use time than batteries alone did; and with cost of secondary importance in the early decades of the space race, scientists were able to use the still-expensive technology to launch the Vanguard I satellite in 1958. In the late 1960s, scientist Elliot Berman discovered that scrap silicon from semiconductor manufacturing could be used for solar power. This discovery was backed by Exxon, which lowered manufacturing costs, and garnered significant interest in solar energy as oil prices rose after the 1973 OPEC oil embargo sparked concerns about energy security. With the solar market growing rapidly, Shi Zhengrong founded Suntech in 2001. Within a decade of its founding, Suntech became the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic solar modules—a corporate success that seemingly underscored China’s newfound dominance of the clean-tech world.

Part II is the substantive core of the book, devoted to the three fundamental sectors of capitalism where changes are going to be needed, and where changes are already under way. Chapter Four discusses the transition from production systems based on fossil fuels to systems based on renewable energies. The generation of power through harvesting renewable energy supplies constitutes a completely different energy foundation from one based on exploiting fossil fuels drilled or mined from the earth. In place of international conflict being fuelled by geographical accidents where oil is found in some countries but not others, all countries will have the option of building the technologies and industries needed to harvest renewable power. China has emerged as world leader in this historic transition, creating markets, building industries, and investing in clean technologies. Renewables then emerge as the default option for the energy system of a global green capitalism.

The last decade has seen the rise of China as the new center of solar photovoltaic power manufacture, and the next will likely see it become a center of its deployment. The chapter explores the conditions that have enabled China’s rapid expansion into solar PV manufacture, and its broad impact on global competition. Key factors have included: export-led growth; process innovation with a focus on crystalline-silicon production; development of upstream production capabilities to facilitate vertical structures; the success of founder and public entity investment; substantial quantities of public finance acting as a form of patient capital during early stage growth and following problems associated with overcapacity. These factors are linked to global policy frameworks to show how innovation is not just a matter of world-class R&D—it is a matter of overcoming substantial uncertainties.

Chapter 7 describes the power and energy scenario of India in terms of both the primary energy resource mix and the technology-wise gross generation mix of electrical energy as in 2015–16. It also describes in details the potential of all the renewable energy resources including storage hydro. So far as the carbon-free solar and wind power potentials are concerned, the chapter explains the basis of the estimates of the new power-capacity potentials, and also provides the power factor and the cumulative capacity built till 2012 utilizing the resources. These comparative figures indicate the huge potential of new capacity creation in future for each of such technology-based power. The chapter also discusses the natural resource requirement of these new renewables-based technologies on the one hand and gives comparative estimates of environmental cost and the true total resource cost for coal thermal power on the other.

Solar thermal energy generated electricity is produced by heating water or a heat transfer fluid with concentrated solar energy to ultimately drive a Rankine cycle power plant. The analysis in this chapter builds on the previous chapter to take concentrated solar energy and heat the working fluid to the much higher temperatures required to drive a steam-based power plant. Relations are given that can be used to design the solar field, with results that compare well with actual operating power plants. The absorber assembly was considered with and without the glass envelope to demonstrate the large difference an envelope makes, which significantly reduces the heat loss from the system. The analysis was simplified to include a constant absorber pipe temperature in the solar field and is justified as a conservative estimate, which only differs from the more complete analysis by ~10%.

The green economy is booming and many cities are connecting climate action with economic development. Although cities making this link are not necessarily topping the most sustainable city charts, the strong economic link can pave the way for more aggressive climate action. This chapter begins by examining how solar and wind technology production has shifted internationally, and how China has become the dominant player in solar and a leader in wind. It then moves to three historically industrial cities that are seeking to transition to different green economy sectors: New York State is paying $750 million of the $900 million cost to build the nation’s biggest new solar production facility in Buffalo; Cleveland has continued its efforts to develop offshore wind on Lake Erie; and Los Angeles is linking electrification of its buses and development of subways to manufacturing.

The sun radiates in all directions, and only a tiny fraction of its output is intercepted by the earth, 150 million kilometers away. On average, the solar power received by the earth is 340 watts per square meter of surface or, more concisely, 340 W m⁻². This chapter discusses the following: the solar energy budget; latitudinal temperature differences and the winds; the effect of the Earth's rotation; how the winds respond; jet streams; and Rossby waves.

The final chapter illustrates how these bundled values— nonviolence, self-sufficiency or interdependence, participatory democracy, and voluntary simplicity—might be brought home to the mainstream to address broad social tensions such as rampant consumerism and environmental degradation. Cohousing communities—the closest to suburban patterns of living—offer potential to rethink existing patterns in urban and suburban areas and illustrate how shared spaces in places such as apartment buildings offer ‘unintentional sustainability’. Intentional communities and the sustainability movement continues as primarily white middle-class spaces, and urban communities, in particular, attempt to create broader coalitions through outreach and micro-industry. Despite challenges from entrenched financial interests, solar power energy, and transportation alternatives such as bike commuting and bus travel have engaged the mainstream, and communities such as cohousing groups offer solutions to problems such as aging.

With an aim for ‘zero-carbon’ output, the Masdar City project aims to create a new mode of urbanization in a region otherwise massively contributing to carbon-rich environmental disaster. Involving an investment estimated at US$16b, ambitions include breakthroughs in solar energy, pollution-free driverless vehicles, and self-sufficient cooling technologies. Numbers of goals have had to be adjusted, including abandonment of the internal transit scheme. One can interpret the project as too much tied into a scenario of technical breakthrough without attending to social, economic or political transformations that might have made innovation more viable.

This chapter discusses the rise and fall, as well as the future of the RV. In the 1960s, the RV was an object of much interest, but as the Winnebago started to be mass-produced, the allure of escape in the house-on-wheels became ambiguous. By the 1970s, the RV had become a metaphor of middle-class inelegance, and was well on its way to becoming a symbol of wastefulness. The chapter concludes that as long as humans want to travel and not sleep on the ground, the RV will continue to evolve. First, the RV power source will soon become compressed natural gas, and electric and solar power. The RV is also going to change its form. There is a lot of interest today in creating new houses that are easily moved, and a new generation of designers is now experimenting with variations on the gypsy architecture.

This chapter summarizes the history and evolution of various forms of infrastructure and the current state of their technology as a basis for exploring the anticipated effects of global warming on existing infrastructure facilities and for developing a strategy that adapts to these effects. Infrastructure encompasses all of the physical structures that support the functioning of a community or enhance the quality of life of its members. These structures are part of systems that provide the basic services of an industrial society: transportation, energy, water management, communications, and solid waste management. There are numerous other facilities that will also experience the impact of climate change, such as those for flood control, but in this chapter I consider only the major systems. For a thousand years, the world’s average temperature remained relatively constant; in fact, it was very slowly decreasing. Then, at the end of the 19th century, it began to rise dramatically. This change was concurrent with an explosive increase in the world’s population—from less than 1 bil­lion to today’s almost 7 billion. This change spurred rapid industrialization. The insatiable appetite of a growing population for goods and services required the burning of ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels to support power plants (starting with coal and then oil and gas) as well as ever more complex transportation networks (Randers 2012). Today, our planet’s atmosphere is overburdened by the increasing amounts of CO2 spewing from these plants, and nature’s equilibrium as it existed for millennia has been destroyed. The world’s oceans and plants are no longer able to absorb any more CO2. Concentrations in the atmosphere have reached 400 parts per million (ppm) and are still rising at an annual rate of 2 ppm. As a consequence, we now have a blanket of CO2 in the upper atmosphere that traps heat in the way that the roof of a glass-enclosed greenhouse does, and it raises both the planet’s air and sea temperatures. These are the essential facts of what is popularly called global warming.