9Feb

Solar tower will power Las Vegas at night

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Solar tower will power Las Vegas at night

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SolarReserve has completed the central point of a solar project that uses molten salt storage to deliver power to the grid well after the sun has gone down.

The startup company today said it has completed the 540-foot tower of the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project near Tonopah, Nev., which is expected to start delivering 110 megawatts by the end of 2013. When it comes online, it’s projected to have 10 hours of storage, the longest full-load storage capacity for a solar plant.

Adding storage turns solar into a continuous power source and allows project developers to earn more money for their electricity. As a result, solar projects that use heat to make electricity have added molten salt storage to their facilities.

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25Nov

Apple hopes to turn green with solar power data centre

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Apple hopes to turn green with solar power data centre

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Apple, ranked the least green of the big tech companies earlier this year, is moving quietly to repair its reputation by switching its vast east coast data centre from coal to solar power.

Local officials in North Carolina say the company is preparing to build a solar farm adjacent to its $1bn data centre in Maiden.

The facility could help Apple recover from a Greenpeace report earlier this year which said its cloud-computing operations – run from centres such as the one in North Carolina – were heavily reliant on dirty energy such as coal.

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21Nov

World Bank Group Co-Finances Morocco’s Ouarzazate 500 MW Solar Thermal Power Project

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World Bank Co-Finances Morocco's Ouarzazate 500 MW Concentrated Solar Thermal Power

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The World Bank approved $297 million in loans to Morocco to support construction and operation of Morocco’s 500-megawatt (MW) Ouarzazate Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant, one of several large scale solar power projects in various stages of planning or development across the solar energy rich Middle East-North Africa region.

Upon completion, the Ouarzazate parabolic trough CSP plant would be one of the largest CSP plants in the world. A group of seven international lenders has committed $1.435 billion dollars to build and develop the project. Ouarzazate is seen as a key milestone for Morocco’s national Solar Power Plan, which was launched in 2009 with the goal of deploying 2000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2020.

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19Nov

Secret to Facebook’s green data center? Water misters

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Secret to Facebook's green data center Water misters

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by Martin LaMonica

Facebook’s state-of-the-art data center houses awesome amounts of computing power, but the biggest technical challenge has been the air handlers.

The company said today that its Prineville, Ore., data center received LEED gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating varies between 1.06 and 1.1, making it a data center that consumes about half what a building simply built to code would use.

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12Nov

Solar-Powered Artwork Around the World

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Solar-Powered Artwork Around the World

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When Spanish researcher Nacho Zamora first stumbled upon an image of “Solarsail,” an energy-generating art installation in Switzerland, he knew he had found something different from the other public artworks he had been studying — and something important.

Since that discovery, Zamora has been carefully cataloging solar-powered artworks around the world and interviewing their creators for his Solar Artworks Project, an online compendium of public art that is aesthetically striking, environmentally sustainable, and raises awareness about crucial renewable technologies.

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11Nov

Artificial leaf could grow a layer of ice in desert conditions

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Artificial leaf could grow a layer of ice in desert conditions

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A Dutch artist is aiming to create an artificial leaf in the Sahara Desert that can grow a layer of ice on its underside.

‘Sunglacier’, as the project has been dubbed, will feature a 200m2 surface covered in photovoltaic solar cells, which will power cooling condensers on the underside of the elm leaf-shaped structure to soak up humidity from the desert air and turn it into ice.

Ap Verheggen, the artist behind the project, hopes it will encourage people to believe that the impossible is possible when it comes to dealing with climate change.

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11Nov

Facebook’s New Headquarters to Be Powered by Solar Energy

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Facebook’s New Headquarters to Be Powered by Solar Energy

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The world’s largest social networking site recently announced plans to utilize more renewable energy to power it’s new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.

Last year, Facebook was scrutinized by its users for using coal to supply the energy for its massive data centers. The company responded by reminding the public that power for its newest data center would come from multiple sources, including renewables, and would be one of the most energy efficient in the world.

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4Nov

IBM brings solar power to data centers

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IBM is bringing electric power–in the form of solar panels–to data centers with trouble getting power in the first place.

The company tomorrow will detail a pilot project that couples solar power with water-cooled servers that run on high-voltage direct current. The method results in about a 10 percent energy savings by reducing the losses that normally happen in converting from alternating power from the grid to the direct current servers run on, according to Kota Murali, the chief scientist of nanotechnology at IBM India who developed the pilot as a side project.

That level of energy reduction is significant for large data centers with many servers, but the implications of solar and servers are potentially profound for places that don’t have access to reliable power, Murali said.

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3Nov

Desertec: how green energy could power Europe, north Africa and the Middle East

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Desertec how green energy could power Europe, north Africa and the Middle East

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Work starts next year on a 12 square kilometre Moroccan solar farm, the first step in a grand scheme called Desertec to supply 15% of Europe’s electricity from solar in the south and wind in the north

The maps show possible infrastructure for a sustainable supply of power to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

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2Nov

Desertec (HUGE Solar & Clean Energy Project) Moving Forward

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Desertec (HUGE Solar & Clean Energy Project) Moving Forward

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If you haven’t heard of Desertec yet, it’s about time you did. Desertec is a half-a-trillion-dollar renewable energy project (yes, I said trillion) planned for Northern Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. We’ve written about it several times over the years. If built, it is projected to produce 15-20% of Europe’s electricity by 2050, as well as providing the Middle East and North African (MENA) region with a good deal of its electricity.

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