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Green Technology Week in Review
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August 24, 2013

Green Technology Week in Review

By Cheryl Kaften
TMCnet Contributor

In green technology developments, according to a report released this week, the number of emerging nations worldwide that have issued policies in support of renewable energy technologies has increased dramatically over the past decade.

Since the mid-2000s, deployment-focused policies have been enacted at a rapid pace—mushrooming from 48 countries with policies in place in mid-2005 to a total of 127 countries as of early 2013, based on the findings of the Worldwatch Institute, a globally focused environmental research organization based in Washington, DC. As more policies have been enacted, regional diversity has greatly expanded. Of countries enacting policies by mid-2005, most (58 percent) were found in Europe and Central Asia, followed by East Asia and the Pacific (21 percent) and by Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). However, by this year, the share of Europe and Central Asia had declined to slightly more than one-third of the global total.


Notably, within the past decade, Sub-Saharan Africa has expanded—from no renewable energy support to policies on the books in 25 countries, accounting for one-fifth of all nations enacting these policies worldwide. In the LAC region, there has been a significant increase of 17 countries; and one dozen nations have enacted policies for the first time in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. The majority of renewable energy support policies worldwide support electricity generation. Regulatory policies such as feed-in tariffs (FIT), net metering/billing, and renewable portfolio standards (RPS) or quotas have been developed to encourage the introduction of renewable energy technologies in the power sector.

In other cleantech news, in a move aimed at expanding its market, Soule Hydro, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Alaska Power & Telephone, has filed an application with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to construct and operate the first-ever hydroelectric transmission line to cross the international border from Southeast Alaska to British Columbia, Canada.

The new U.S.-Canada transmission line would be capable of carrying up to 77.4 megawatts (MW) of power. The Alaskan portion of the project would be an eight-mile-long, 138 kilovolt (kV) HVAC 3-phasesubmarine cable that would be laid on the floor of Portland Canal before crossing the International Boundary off the community of Hyder, Alaska; where it would extend another two miles to land at Stewart, B.C. Arrow Dock. The transmission line eventually would transition to overhead and terminate at the BC Hydro Stewart Substation approximately 2.5 miles from the cable landing. The application, filed last March 18, has been posted in the Federal Register for comments, which must be submitted on or before August 29.

Today, hydropower in Alaska provides 24 percent of statewide electrical energy, with 423 megawatts (MW) of installed power, based on data from the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Indeed, with 96 powered and non-powered dams, hydro represents 98.7 percent of renewable energy developed in the state. Nationwide, in 2012, hydropower provided the majority of the nation’s renewable electricity, with 100,000 MW of installed capacity from coast to coast. According to the National Hydropower Association, a Washington, DC-based trade group, the states that lead the nation in hydropower generation are (in order of production capacity): Washington, Oregon, New York, California, Alabama, Idaho, Tennessee, Montana, Arizona and North Carolina.

And speaking of hydropower, you’ve been urged to reduce your carbon footprint—but what about your “aquaprint,” the new term used to describe the amount of water a business or a household consumes daily? As drought conditions spread in many areas nationwide—including Dallas, where AT&T (News - Alert) is based—the telecommunications provider has joined with the New York City-based advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), to offer a suite of tools that they claim will help U.S. commercial buildings to save up to 28 billion gallons of water annually. That’s the equivalent of the amount of water that more than 765,000 Americans use at home in a given year.

Typically, 28 percent of daily water consumption in buildings with cooling towers is for air conditioning. The Building Water Efficiency toolkit has been designed to enable these structures to reduce water demand for HVAC by 14 percent to 40 percent overall. The toolkit—including a spreadsheet “Water Scorecard”—which is available free at the EDF website, has been developed based on lessons learned from pilot projects that ran across the U.S. during the summer and fall of 2012. It gives organizations simple, cost-effective resources to build their own water efficiency programs and includes both technical and management tools to design, implement and document water savings.





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