The French Install Wind Turbines on the Eiffel Tower

Image: hjjanisch/Flickr

One of the world’s most iconic and well known monuments – the Eiffel Tower – just got even better: the French authorities have installed two vertical axis wind turbines to power, at least partially, the tower’s electrical requirements.

The Eiffel Tower was initially criticized by some of France’s leading artists and intellectuals for its design, but has become both a global cultural icon of France and one of the most recognizable structures in the world. Almost 7 million people visit it every year, and it received its 250 millionth visitor in 2010. But for all its artistic and touristic merit, the Eiffel tower also sucks up a lot of energy for elevators and lighting – and this is where the wind turbines step in.

Installed by New York company Urban Green Energy (UGE), the turbines are located above the second floor and are capable of capturing wind from any direction. They will produce 10,000 kWh of electricity per year – enough to power the Eiffel tower’s commercial first floor area. They also look pretty good.

“The Eiffel Tower is arguably the most renowned architectural icon in the world, and we are proud that our advanced technology was chosen as the tower commits to a more sustainable future,” CEO of UGE, Nick Blitterswyk, said in the release. “When visitors from around the world see the wind turbines, we get one step closer to a world powered by clean and reliable renewable energy.”

As part of the same renovation, authorities installed LED lighting and 10 square metres of solar panels on the roof of the first-floor visitor’s area. This solar set-up will heat nearly half of the water used by the two pavilion areas and a rainwater collection system will provide the flushing water from the toilets.

Unfortunately, all these additions won’t provide enough energy to offset the tower’s controversial nightly light show… but the message is clear: Paris is committed to reducing its energy consumption and generating as much green energy as possible – and “greening” up landmarks doesn’t reduce their value. The city aims to have a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption, and for 25 percent of energy to come from renewable sources by 2020.

The French Install Wind Turbines on the Eiffel Tower

Report: Filtration System Reduces Pollutants Inside the Bus

A recent study by researchers at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health concluded that a filtration system designed especially for use in school buses can diminish on-board pollutants by up to 88 percent.

“School buses are by far the safest way to transport children between school and home,” said Yifang Chu, senior author of the study and associate professor at UCLA’s department of Environmental Health Sciences. “Our goal is to make it also the cleanest way.”

Researchers designed a prototype high-efficiency cabin air (HECA) filtration system and installed two units in the rear of six school buses used for testing. The units drew in air through diffusers located on its sides of the bus and passed the air through the HECA filters. Researchers tested the air inside and outside the buses for emissions such as black carbon and fine as well as ultrafine particles.

The study, funded by the California Air Resources Board, tested buses without passengers both while they were parked and while they were running on major arteries and highways in the Los Angeles area.

Interestingly, researchers found that the decrease in pollutants was greater in freeway driving conditions. This was surprising due to the higher concentration of pollutants that come from the highly congested Los Angeles freeways. The study stated that the quality of the filtered air inside the bus was comparable to that of the beach in Santa Monica, California.

According to Zhu, exposure to pollutants can take a toll on children’s health.

“During school bus commuting, children can be exposed to significantly greater levels of air pollutants than a typical resident in the South Coast air basin,” she said. “Studies have shown that exposure to high levels of vehicle pollution is associated with pulmonary and cardiovascular health risks, including oxidative stress, mitochondrial damage and acute pulmonary inflammation.”

UCLA said in a statement that another study funded by CARB over a decade ago found “air quality problems” inside diesel-powered school buses. 

“That study led to efforts to retrofit school buses with exterior pollution-reducing devices. While that method is promising for minimizing emissions from buses’ tailpipes, it doesn’t always provide cleaner air inside the buses,” the statement read.

A prior study also conducted by Zhu and her team found that air purifiers designed for home use can decrease levels of pollution inside the school bus by approximately 50 percent. However, these filters are not designed for use inside moving vehicles.

A long-term follow-up study will test the HECA systems on a greater number of school buses with children on board.

Photo: UCLA

Report: Filtration System Reduces Pollutants Inside the Bus

How you can Get HEPA Air Purifiers

Are you wanting to enhance the air top quality in your house? If so, you may be aiming to get a high end home air purifier. Although you do have a variety of different choices, you will intend to analyze high end home air purifiers that use HEPA technology. After a close assessment, you will see that air cleansers that use HEPA technology come highly rated and recommended.

As you most likely already recognize, an air purifier is that a device that clears out the air. It does so by recording air fragments that might be dangerous in huge amounts or air particles that can pollute the air. As for exactly what these air purifiers gather, a lot of capture as well as accumulate pet dander, previously owned tobacco smoke, mold and mildew, mildew and mold, dust mites, as well as pollen. Although these are all things that various sorts of air cleansers should catch and collect, those that use HEPA modern technology, specifically HEPA air filters, often generate the best results. In fact, did you know that a lot of HEPA filters accumulate around approximately 90 % of air debris? This is a quite remarkable number.

Since there are a number of advantages to owning and utilizing air purifiers that rely on HEPA technology, especially for those which struggle with asthma and allergic reactions, you could want making a purchase. If you are planning to doing this locally, your ideally alternative is to shop at your neighborhood house improvement establishment. Residence enhancement shops often concentrate a lot more on quality compared to they do cost. This indicates that you are most likely to view a huge option of high end home air cleansers, consisting of those that rely upon using HEPA modern technology.

Along with looking for a high end home air purifier that depends on HEPA technology at a house enhancement establishment, you might have a number of other options. Residence décor shops, outlet store, as well as health and wellness stores are likewise understood to bring air cleansers. Their option may not be as excellent as exactly what you will certainly discover at a house improvement shop, yet many like the rates, specifically at outlet store. When making a house air cleanser buy from an outlet store, merely make sure that you are purchasing a quality, high end item.

As previously specified, you will likely locate the biggest variety of high end house air purifiers that count on the use of HEPA technology in the house renovation saves. Although this holds true, there are frequently many more air cleansers that are available for sale. For the largest option of air cleansers, you are motivated to shop online. As a matter of fact, did you understand that there are a variety of perks to doing so?

When looking to purchase a luxury house air purifier online, you have the capability to quickly and also quickly contrast prices. You likewise get to hundreds of stores, all within a few minutes well worth of time. You can check out the on the internet web sites of stores that you recognize offer on the internet shopping, however you could additionally carry out a common internet search. This might assist you discover smaller sized companies that market HEPA air purifiers online.

As you can see, you have a variety of various options when wanting to acquire a luxury home air purifier. As a pointer, there are a variety of perks to buying air cleansers that use HEPA innovation. The best perk is the much better outcomes that you are likely to see.

How you can Get HEPA Air Purifiers

East Philips residents back 'green zone'

Tired of swatting away businesses and land-use proposals they regard as noxious, some residents of the East Phillips neighborhood in Minneapolis began organizing Saturday around the idea of a “green zone” they regard as a healthier goal for their community.

About 70 people gathered at East Philips Community Center to discuss that initiative against the backdrop of a proposal by the city to buy land currently occupied by Roof Depot to move in maintenance operations for the city’s water system. They’ll meet again on March 14.

The proposal would bring 90 workers and about 75 vehicles to that site. But residents viewed it in the context of a community sensitized by repeated fights over other unwanted land uses over the past 20 years.

There was the Hennepin County proposal for a station where garbage would be shifted from garbage trucks to semitrailer trucks that was finally killed in 1991. A proposal to burn biomass for energy at the same spot was killed only when Xcel Energy Inc. broke off talks to buy its power. Residents also rallied support to make sure Xcel’s added power lines were buried underground in 2012.

The area’s City Council member is firmly opposed to shifting water maintenance to the proposed new site at 1860 E. 28th St., at the west end of the Midtown Greenway’s Sabo bridge. Alondra Cano said no last September, she told the crowd, and she said no a month ago when city staffers sought her backing for them to negotiate with the owner of the site.

“Sometimes we women of color have to say no multiple times until we’re taken seriously,” she told a crowd from a neighborhood that’s dominantly minority and in poverty.

Two youth members of an area nonprofit, Edwin Gonzalez and Carlos Parra Olivera, listed a half-dozen potential uses for the site’s large building or the greater area to help transform it to a more sustainable future. They included a green jobs re-employment center, an urban agricultural initiative, a youth-led bike shop, an aquaponics operation to raise fish and vegetables, a farm processing center and a sustainable entrepreneur incubator.

City officials said they want to move water maintenance out of the city’s East Yard site on E. Hennepin Avenue to continue a 24-year-old plan for centralizing Department of Public Works operations, and to allow a fire station to use the Hennepin site for better access to an industrial area.

But water operations would occupy only about half the site. The city’s revamped energy-efficient public works yard nearby doesn’t have room.

The city’s Climate Action Plan supports the idea of “green zones” for neighborhoods in which they’d be eligible for funds for targeted pollution abatement and on-site renewable energy.

In addition, state Rep. Karen Clark supported a 2008 law that requires an analysis of cumulative pollution impacts in the East Phillips area when businesses move in or expand.

 

Steve Brandt • 612-673-4438

East Philips residents back "green zone"

Home National Freudenberg's aftermarket arm Corteco to expand India biz with more...

Industry

by Jaishankar Jayaramiah Feb 28, 2015

Sanjeev Ahuja, MD, Corteco India: “We are looking to increase our India product portfolio to 2,000 numbers in 2016.”

Germany-based auto component supplier Freudenberg’s aftermarket arm Corteco has chalked out plans to expand its business in India.

Corteco is the global brand of Freudenberg for the independent aftermarket and it has established its 100 percent subsidiary in 2013 in India to market Freudenberg’s aftermarket products.

Speaking to Autocar Professional at ACMA Automechanika New Delhi, Sanjeev Ahuja, managing director of Corteco India, said the company has appointed 16 distributors thus far in India. The network will be expanded to 40 distributors by 2016 as to cover the length and breadth of the country.

Currently the company has been offering its products primarily for high-end brand cars from Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Skoda, Nissan and Volkswagen.

“We have more than 20,000 products in our global product portfolio but currently we are pitching only around 500 products for the Indian market,” he said.

The company’s main focus is in the areas like anti-vibration, sealing technology and cabin air filters. Currently the company’s products will suit around 20 percent of vehicles (high-end range) in India.

Going forward, he said, the company aims to increase its India product portfolio to 2,000 numbers in 2016  and 4,000-5,000 numbers in the next five years when the company starts to cater to the entry level and middle range of vehicles in the country.

This is the second time that Corteco India has participated in ACMA Automechanika New Delhi and the visitor response has been quite high, added Ahuja.

It may be noted that more than half of all new cars in India are fitted with Freudenberg original filters. In India, Corteco offers a broad range of filters that efficiently protect the air-conditioning system and the passengers from outdoor pollutants. 

Home National Freudenberg"s aftermarket arm Corteco to expand India biz with more...

In Australia, the Green Energy Fantasy Has Collapsed

If you are sailing miles from shore and come upon the rusted prows of sunken ships, you can be sure that water is not that deep and it would be a good idea to change course.

Australia is just the latest ship’s prow to warn us away from the treacherous path of green energy mandates, taxes, and subsidies. Among the others have been Germany, Spain, and Italy.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported the collapse of the wind power market in Australia. The Liberal government there is pulling the plug on state subsidies for the renewable energy industry. Without those subsidies, investor interest evaporates. So much for the claims (also here and here) that wind and solar technologies are already competitive.

In the U.S., we had a sneak preview of what happens to wind power when it goes, cold turkey, off subsidies. An expected end to the wind Production Tax Credit on Dec. 31, 2012, dried up the investment pipeline so thoroughly that even though the PTC was retroactively reinstated just weeks after its expiration, only one wind turbine was installed in the U.S. in the first six months of 2013.

Grid parity? That’s not what we saw in the U.S. in 2013, and it’s not what wind energy companies in Australia are telling us with their actions right now.

What happened in Australia to get to this point? In 2011, the Labor government of Kevin Rudd pushed through a scheme to restrict CO2 emissions. When introduced, the approach resembled a cap-and-trade program, which effectively hides costs to consumers. But over time, the program morphed into a more explicit carbon tax.

As is almost always the case, the costs of these restrictions were downplayed while the proposal was being considered. However, the laws of science and economics cannot be legislated out of existence, and the inevitable costs soon became apparent. The program led to significant increases in the price of electricity, and the voters in Australia were not pleased with having been duped.

In fact, the carbon taxes were so unpopular that the Labor party ousted Rudd from its leadership and campaigned, in part, on getting rid of its own tax. The election’s outcome, however, forced an alliance with the Green party, whose demand was to keep the tax in place.

The voters didn’t forget the hoodwinking. In a subsequent election, they put a Liberal-National Alliance coalition in power in a campaign that was dominated by promises to remove the carbon tax. This time the politicians kept their word and jettisoned the tax.

Australians, like most people throughout the world, are more concerned with increasing economic growth, jobs, and affordable energy than they are with adopting costly yet ineffective schemes meant to address a problem that is low on their priority list. Certainly, that’s how it is in the U.S.

Survey after survey shows that Americans rank climate concerns at the bottom of virtually every list, even when the lists are restricted to environmental problems. The hysterical predictions of imminent doom, unfulfilled as the various dates pass by, have created a global warming fatigue.

People once spooked by scary predictions of ever more frequent hurricanes and other extreme weather events have seen those visions fail to materialize. Small wonder they are now not so unnerved by warnings of sea levels rising by an inch or two or afternoons warming by a fraction of a degree 100 years from now. And none of the proposed “climate-saving” policies can offer any impact beyond inches and fractional degrees.

Add Australia to the list of countries that are facing reality after seeing their green energy fantasy collapse. Germany is cutting green subsidies and building new coal-fired power plants to help halt the skyrocketing cost of electricity (three times the cost in the U.S.) that threatens its industrial base. Spain and Italy have also cut back on the renewable energy policies that helped tip them into financial crisis.

Let’s hope American lawmakers can learn from the green energy mistakes of their foreign colleagues.

Originally published in The Washington Times 

In Australia, the Green Energy Fantasy Has Collapsed

REC Group and Sunrun Increase Solar Panel Supply Agreement to 100 Megawatts

REC Group and Sunrun Increase Solar Panel Supply Agreement to 100 Megawatts

Visit http://www.recgroup.com for further information

“REC is committed to consistently delivering volume quantities of its high quality panels”

Submitted on 02/26/15, 01:54 PM

OSLO, NORWAY AND SAN FRANCISCO — FEBRUARY 25, 2015 — REC Group (Oslo Stock Exchange: RECSOL), a leading global provider of solar energy solutions, and Sunrun, the largest dedicated residential solar company in the United States, today announced the expansion of their supply agreement signed in August 2014. Under the terms of the deal, Sunrun will purchase 100 megawatts (MW) of REC’s high-quality, high-performing Peak Energy solar panels, with deliveries scheduled throughout 2015.

“Our original panel supply contract with Sunrun called for a minimum of 50 MW, with an option for up to 100 MW, so this doubling of volume underscores the solid relationship between the two companies and our position in the U.S. residential market,” said Arndt E. Lutz, senior vice president of REC Group and managing director of its North American business. “Customers like Sunrun understand the value of REC’s high standards of quality, reliability and integrity inherent in our products and the way we do business.”

“REC is committed to consistently delivering volume quantities of its high quality panels,” said Paul Winnowski, chief operating officer of Sunrun. “This enables Sunrun to provide consumers with the best and most reliable solar panels on the market for their home solar system. Our decision to strengthen our partnership reflects the confidence we have and that our qualified installers have in REC’s high-performance rooftop solar products today and in the future.”

The amended Sunrun agreement is the latest in REC’s string of major panel supply agreements and installations in the U.S. market. REC has signed 703 MW of long-term supply agreements for the residential, commercial, and utility segments in the U.S. market since May 2014. The Norway-based company is expanding its production capacity to 1.3 gigawatts at its state-of-the-art, vertically integrated Singapore manufacturing facility.

About REC Group
REC is a leading global provider of solar energy solutions. With more than 15 years of experience, we offer sustainable, high-performing products, services and investments for the solar industry. Together with our partners, we create value by providing solutions that better meet the world’s growing energy needs. REC is headquartered in Norway and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange (ticker: RECSOL). Our 1,700 employees worldwide generated revenues of $647 million in 2013. For more information, visit www.recgroup.com.

About Sunrun
Sunrun pioneered solar as a service, a way for homeowners to go solar without high upfront cost, and is the largest dedicated residential solar company in the U.S. Sunrun provides end-to-end service for homeowners to choose cleaner, cheaper solar energy and fix their electric costs for 20 years. The company designs, installs, finances, insures, monitors and maintains the solar panels on a homeowner’s roof, while families pay just for the electricity at a lower rate than their current utility. Since Sunrun introduced solar service in 2007, it has become the preferred way for consumers to go solar in the nation’s top solar markets. For more information, please visit: www.sunrun.com.

REC Group and Sunrun Increase Solar Panel Supply Agreement to 100 Megawatts