Posts Tagged ‘desert’
Massive solar tower planned for Arizona desert
An ambitious solar energy project on a massive scale is about to get underway in the Arizona desert. EnviroMission is undergoing land acquisition and site-specific engineering to build its first full-scale solar tower – and when we say full-scale, we mean it! The mammoth 800-plus meter (2625 ft) tall tower will instantly become one of the world’s tallest buildings. Its 200-megawatt power generation capacity will reliably feed the grid with enough power for 150,000 US homes, and once it’s built, it can be expected to more or less sit there producing clean, renewable power with virtually no maintenance until it’s more than 80 years old…
Enviromission’s solar tower is a simple idea taken to gigantic proportions. The sun beats down on a large covered greenhouse area at the bottom, warming the air underneath it. Hot air wants to rise, so there’s a central point for it to rush towards and escape; the tower in the middle. And there’s a bunch of turbines at the base of the tower that generate electricity from that natural updraft…
Then, raise that tower up so that it’s hundreds of meters in the air – because for every hundred metres you go up from the surface, the ambient temperature drops by about 1 degree. The greater the temperature differential, the harder the tower sucks up that hot air at the bottom – and the more energy you can generate through the turbines.
The advantages of this kind of power source are clear:
Because it works on temperature differential, not absolute temperature, it works in any weather;
Because the heat of the day warms the ground up so much, it continues working at night;
Because you want large tracts of hot, dry land for best results, you can build it on more or less useless land in the desert;
It requires virtually no maintenance – apart from a bit of turbine servicing now and then, the tower “just works” once it’s going, and lasts as long as its structure stays standing;
The critter is scheduled to start producing power in 2015. If we had a public power company that made it to the 20th Century – if not the 21st – we could do something similar here in New Mexico.
From a separate temporal view, we’ve known how to evaluate the physics of propositions like this for decades. Computer modeling of the process, processes like this, isn’t new either. But, to return to my theme song about computational analysis, the amount of computing horsepower easily and cheaply available to recheck the physics, the details of design, has scaled up beyond comprehension compared to even a decade ago. And software to match sits inside off-the-shelf laptops with graphics sufficient to educate any VC worth his or her greenbacks on how well a project like this one will produce a return.
The only people who aren’t likely to get it – are the fracking politicians and bureaucrats who sit in the way of any kind of progress in this nation. And that could have changed by now, too – but, hasn’t.
Greening India’s deserts with olive groves
Rajasthan, India’s popular tourist state, is famous for its sprawling palaces, historic forts, vast tracts of desert and celebrity weddings. Olives may be added to the list. The state is trying to grow the fruit on a large scale in India for the first time, in its deserts and semi-arid areas, and there are signs of success.
Not only would olive cultivation introduce struggling farmers in the state’s ailing and neglected agricultural sector to a lucrative cash crop and boost the local economy. It would also satisfy the growing domestic demand for healthy olive oil in the country, which has one of the highest rates of heart disease in the world.
The $3m pilot project, testing olive cultivation across seven agro-climatic regions, is in its third year and on track to deliver olives this year and next. About 112,000, saplings were brought from Israel three years ago and planted across 182 hectares. “Four farms in the north of the state, in the desert areas, have shown positive signs of flowering and olives will follow shortly. A semi-commercial yield is expected this year. We are certain it will be a success,” says Surinder Singh Shekhawat, head of the project under Rajasthan Olive Cultivation Ltd, a three-way collaboration between the state government, an Israeli firm and an Indian firm.
It may come as a surprise that olives are being grown in the harsh climatic conditions of the state where temperatures swing from extreme highs to lows, especially when the olive’s native home is the mild Mediterranean. But Rajasthan’s cold spells are key to cultivation. “The olive requires a certain chilling temperature, which we have in the state. Everything else can be managed with technology,” says Shekhawat. In addition, the olive is able to withstand scorching temperatures and has a low water requirement, which is crucial in this water-scarce state…
Once the pilot is a success, cultivation will be taken to hundreds of farmers in the initial stage. The technology would be replicated locally and handed to the farmer at a subsidised rate, along with training in crucial plant management…
Bravo – and good luck. Goes to show you what can be grown if you really examine requirements vs potential. I hope our distant friends in India succeed with this project.
Swiss firm to invest 900 million euros in Tunisia forestry
Switzerland-based Global Wood Holding will invest 900 million euros to grow Eucalyptus trees in Tunisia and export the wood to Europe, creating 45,000 jobs.
The project will be sited on 160,000 hectares in the Tunisian desert some 500 km south of Tunis.
The company’s deputy chairman Aldo Bonaldi, speaking at news conference with Tunisian State Lands Minister Fouad Dagfous, said he expected to export two million tonnes of wood each year.
The project would be completed over 15 years, he said.
Eucalyptus has attracted attention from development researchers and environmentalists. It is a fast-growing wood, its oil can be used for cleaning and functions as a natural insecticide, and it is sometimes used to drain swamps and thereby reduce the risk of malaria…
Generally, anyone who wishes to impede an earth-based project providing both jobs and improvements to the environment [like reforestation] can find some tame “analyst” to back up their criticism. It’s reaching a bit to oppose eucalyptus trees used for forest industries – but, I imagine that some junk science skeptics will come up with something.
Meanwhile, the Swiss and Tunisians are going ahead with providing jobs, income and reversing desertification.
U.S. high school dropout rate improves – and still sucks!
Daylife/Getty Images used by permission
With one in four U.S. public school students dropping out of high school before graduation, America continues to face a dropout epidemic. Building a Grad Nation: Progress and Challenge in Ending the High School Dropout Epidemic…shows that we can end the dropout epidemic, even in schools from lower-income, urban and rural districts that many previously thought were hopeless…
The U.S. graduation rate increased from 72 percent in 2002 to 75 percent in 2008. The report reveals that the number of “dropout factory” high schools fell by 13 percent – from 2,007 in 2002 to 1,746 in 2008. While these schools represent a small fraction of all public high schools in America, they account for about half of all high school dropouts each year. Experts say targeting these high schools for improvement is a critical part of turning around the nation’s dropout rate.
More than half of all states – 29 in total – increased their statewide graduation rate from 2002 to 2008.
The state of Tennessee and New York City led the nation by boosting graduation rates 15 percent and 10 percent, respectively.
Most of the decline in dropout factories – 216 of the 261 – occurred in the South.
Just as Secretary of State George C. Marshall launched a plan to rebuild Europe after World War II, we must rebuild our broken school system. We are launching a “Civic Marshall Plan,” comprising policymakers, educators, business leaders, community allies, parents and students to address the dropout epidemic by focusing on the dropout factory high schools and their feeder elementary and middle schools. In tune with the call from President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan earlier this year to increase the U.S. graduation rate to 90 percent by 2020, we are working to mobilize Americans to quicken the pace. To reach these national goals, the graduation rate must rise by an average of 1.5 percentage points per year over the next decade. The Civic Marshall Plan outlines the benchmarks to ensure the attainment of those goals, and focuses on the strategic deployment of human resources to help school districts and states accelerate improvement.
Please, please read the report [.pdf]. There is little hope for improvement in any and all aspects of life in this land without leadership from an educated citizenry.
The creeps marching at the front of rightwing mobs will badmouth General Powell, whine about the cost of decent schooling – but, then, they would do so, regardless of the conclusions and methods endorsed by this work.
For a nation that once was at the forefront of freedom to learn we have come long way down towards incompetence. It’s been 45 years or more since first I bumped into the decline and included the struggle for better education into the panoply of civil rights and needs worth fighting for. Little enough has been accomplished.
Time to get off your rusty dusties, folks.
In the Arabian desert, a sustainable city is growing
Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.
Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.
Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.
Tunisian Desert Ants navigate by stereo smell
Artist’s impression of an ant’s odor map
Desert ants in Tunisia smell in stereo, sensing odours from two different directions at the same time.
By sniffing the air with each antenna, the ants form a mental ‘odour map’ of their surroundings. They then use this map to find their way home, say scientists who report the discovery in the journal Animal Behaviour.
Pigeons, rats and even people may also smell in stereo, but ants are the first animal known to use it for navigation…
Each day, individual ants will leave the nest entrance and travel up to 100m in search of food. When they find some, they return straight home, somehow finding their tiny nest entrance again within a bleak, relatively featureless desert landscape.
But Dr Markus Knaden’s team has now found that the insect does much more than that.
First, they placed four odours marked A, B, C and D around a barely visible nest entrance.
They then tested the ants by removing and placing them in a remote location, without a nest entrance but with the same four odours. The ants immediately headed to exactly where their nest should have been, confirming that they use the odours as olfactory landmarks.
When the odours were mixed up, the ants became confused and unable to navigate their way home.
“They had learned the olfactory scenery,” Dr Knaden told the BBC.
This seems so logical you have to agree with Dr. Knaden and presume other species are doing the same. He has decades of interesting experimentation ahead.
Change coming to Afghanistan Strykers paint job – Duh!
Understand that half the “Change” Obama has to bring to the government of these United States is the elimination of Cheneyesque corruption and cronyism – and reversing Bush Era stupidity.
Sure blends into the landscape doesn’t it?
More than six years after sending the first Stryker armored vehicles into desert combat, the Army has decided that it’s probably a good idea to start painting them tan so they will blend in with the environments in Afghanistan and Iraq…“Strykers will blend into surroundings better. They’re less likely to stand out like silhouettes…”
The Army and its contracting agencies have been talking about changing the color of the Strykers since 2004, according to Butts, “but nothing firm was planned out until now.”
RTFA. There is some real “insight” displayed by soldiers and officers who just discovered that standing out like a sore thumb isn’t an advantage.
Field units cannot change the color themselves. There’s a facility for that. In another country.
The production line vehicles can only be ordered in one color; so, green it is unless the Pentagon changes to desert tan – for everywhere.
