American Solar Energy Society's "Tackling Climate Change in the U.S" Report
by John Laumer, Philadelphia 
on 05. 3.07
We wish we had posted on this ASES report back in February of 2007 when it came out. Then again, the good thing about waiting until now is that all those US Congress Critters and Presidential hopefuls with newly minted green credentials might read the report and propose policies based on it. A few excerpts from the press release:- "Getting serious about energy efficiency and harnessing existing renewable-energy technologies can cut annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 60 percent to 80 percent below today's ever-rising output of the heat-trapping gas... Such reductions would lower carbon emissions enough to keep atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gas from climbing another 18 percent over the next 35 years...The report's authors found that cutting demand through energy efficiency outweighed the potential impact of renewable energy. Efficiency could account for a full 57 percent of the potential carbon-emission cuts by 2030, the report concluded... The report came from a set of nine research papers by scientists from NREL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Rocky Mountain Institute and outside consultants commissioned for the Solar 2006 conference in Denver last July. Chuck Kutscher, an NREL engineer and the conference's organizer, asked his colleagues and others to estimate the maximum practical contribution for several renewable-energy and energy-efficiency technologies by 2030 and then calculate the carbon savings. Via:: The Daily Camera.
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Surely energy efficiency savings suffer from the law of diminishing returns?
It may interest you to know that the use of photovoltaics in homes looks like it's getting ready to really skyrocket.
According to recent research, residential PV use should quintuple in just the next few years:
Home Solar Photovoltaics To Grow Five-Fold by 2011
The press release is based on a data analysis by XooxleAnswers, a research organization in Washington DC:
The Growth of Photovoltaic Solar Energy for Home Use
I thought folks here would like to see this.
David
i had a thought about clean energy. you can use a line up of magnifying lenses to heat a low melting point metal. this in turn will have a metal pipe in the molten metal of a higher mealting point with water running thru it. this will turn the water to stream. the steam will flow thru the pipe passing thru turbines at a high rate of speed replicating a hydro dam. after the water passes thru the turbines it will meet up into a cooling process only to go back to the molten metal and repeat the cycle again. i know this would work on a huge scale producing a lot of electricity. this is also a clean method as well as it can be put into various areas of the world that are not very populated with a minimum crew to maintain the system.
Posted by: james young | September 15, 2008 at 07:49 PM