Solar Facts..be enlightened

For those who are clueless about how solar energy is harnessed to be used as electrical energy, here's a general description about the process:

The process starts from solar rays entering the solar panels then going through the inverter and circuit breaker to ultimately produce electricity. For domestic use, consumers will attach solar panels on the roofs and the process will be as what it is stated. A diagram is included to show how solar energy is used to power home appliances.

Energy Saving Tips

1)Save Gas or Petrol
-Walk or cycle to work – you’ll save money and get a good workout.
-Take public transport, which is twice as fuel efficient, per passenger kilometre, as driving the average private vehicle. Taking the bus or other public transport once a week will cut almost 15 per cent off your vehicle fuel bill.
-Driving 90 kilometre per hour on the highway uses 20 per cent less fuel than driving 110 kph.
-Join a car pool.
-Don’t warm up your car by idling (it doesn’t need it) and turn it off if you’re stopped or parked for more than 10 seconds, except in traffic.
-Get rid of your old clunker. A pre-1998 car produces 65 times more hydrocarbon emissions than a 2001 model and gets much worse fuel economy.
-Consider Alternative Fuels, such as Biodiesel.

2) Save Water
-Install low-flow showerheads (about £10) – They cut your shower water use in half.
-Replace old toilets, which can use upwards of 20 litres per flush, with models that use as little as three or six litres.
-Install low-flow aerators on your faucets. They cut the flow rate in half by mixing air with the water, with no discernable change in performance.
-Water your lawn only once a week during dry summer periods and run the sprinkler for no more than 45 minutes. Keep your grass longer to conserve water.
-Take a five-minute shower, which uses half as much hot water as a bath or a 10-minute shower.
-Minimise water used per flush in your toilet by adjusting the float and/or putting a Hippo Bag / water bottle in the tank.
-Don’t run the water continuously when washing dishes by hand, shaving, washing your face and hands or brushing your teeth. Avoid rinsing dishes with hot water before putting them in the dishwasher.

3) Cooking
-Don’t peek while using your oven; you lose about 20 per cent of the heat every time you open the door.
-Reheat small food portions with your microwave oven, which uses less than one-half the energy of a conventional oven/range.

4) Hot Water
-Install low-flow showerheads (about £10) – They cut your shower water use in half, with no change in performance, saving sweaty families more than £50 a year in hot water use.
-Wrap foam insulation around the first metre of hot water pipe above your hot water tank and put an insulating jacket around older hot water tanks.
-Set the temperature on your hot water tank to 50 degrees Celsius. Every 5.5 degrees C. reduction saves up to 13 per cent on your water heating costs.

5) Refridgeration
-Buy energy-efficient refrigerators, which use as little as 400 kilowatt hours of electricity per year, half the energy use of standard fridges from the early ‘90s and one quarter of those from the early 1980s.
-Set the temperature in your refrigerator between 1.7 and 3.3 degrees Celsius for the refrigerator compartment and –18 degrees C. for the freezer.

6) Washing Clothes
-Wash clothes in cold water whenever possible and always rinse in cold water (heating water typically accounts for up to 90 per cent of the washer’s total energy use).
-Dry clothes outside on a line or indoors on a rack, when possible. Use the moisture sensor feature on your dryer, if it has one, to prevent over drying, or select the permapress setting, which uses cold air at the end of the cycle.

7) Save Electricity
-Turn your computer off when it is not in use . When your computer is on but not in use, turn off the monitor, which uses at least half of the computer’s energy.
-Unplug DVD players, TVs, games consoles and their set-top boxes when not in use. Even when turned off, their standby power consumes a considerable amount of electricity.
-Turn the lights off when you leave a room.
Install CFL bulbs in your home

our poster..

link: http://s271.photobucket.com/albums/jj144/msyn_2008/?action=view&current=poster-edited.jpg

Carbon Tax And Its Importance

What’s A Carbon Tax?

A carbon tax is a tax on the carbon content of fuels — effectively a tax on the carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels. Thus, carbon tax is shorthand for carbon dioxide tax or CO2 tax.

Carbon atoms are present in every fossil fuel — coal, oil and gas. They are the primary source of the heat released in fuel combustion, and essentially all of them are converted to CO2 when the fuel is burned. Carbon dioxide, an otherwise non-lethal and innocuous gas, rises in the atmosphere and remains resident there, trapping heat re-radiated from Earth’s surface and causing global warming and other harmful climate change. In contrast, non-combustion energy sources — wind, sunlight, falling water, atomic fission — do not convert carbon to carbon dioxide. Accordingly, a carbon tax (or CO2 tax) is effectively a tax on the use of fossil fuels, and only fossil fuels.

The carbon content of every form of fossil fuel, from anthracite to lignite coal, from residual oil to natural gas, is precisely known. So is the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere when the fuel is burned. A carbon tax thus presents few if any problems of documentation or measurement. As discussed here, administering a carbon tax should be simple; utilizing existing tax collection mechanisms, the tax would be paid far “upstream”. Fuel suppliers and processors would pass along the cost of the tax to the extent that market conditions allow.

Per unit of energy (or Btu), natural gas emits the least CO2 of any fossil fuel when burned, and coal the most, with petroleum (oil) products such as gasoline occupying the middle range. Generally, a Btu from coal produces 30% more carbon dioxide than a Btu from oil, and 80% more than from natural gas. A carbon tax would follow these proportions, taxing coal somewhat more heavily than petroleum products, and much more than natural gas.

To the extent carbon is included in a product such as plastic, but is not burned, that carbon will not be taxed. Similarly, to the extent the carbon used to produce energy is permanently sequestered rather than released into the atmosphere, that carbon will not be taxed or a tax credit will be provided.

Very little taxation of carbon is presently in place in the world. Nevertheless, a large and growing number of economists, policy-makers and concerned citizens regard stiff carbon taxes as essential for combating the climate crisis that gravely threatens humankind and other living things.

Why A Carbon Tax?

The rationale for a carbon tax is simple: the levels of CO2 already in the Earth’s atmosphere and being added daily are destabilizing established climate patterns and threatening the ecosystems on which we and other living beings depend. Very large and rapid reductions in the United States’ and other nations’ carbon emissions are essential to reverse runaway climate change and avert resulting severe weather events, inundation of coastal areas, spread of diseases, failure of agriculture and water supply, infrastructure destruction, forced migrations, political upheavals and international conflict.

A carbon tax must be the central mechanism for reducing carbon emissions. Currently, the prices of gasoline, electricity and fuels in general include none of the costs associated with devastating climate change. This omission suppresses incentives to develop and deploy carbon-reducing measures such as energy efficiency (e.g., high-mileage cars and high-efficiency heaters and air conditioners), renewable energy (e.g., wind turbines, solar panels), low-carbon fuels (e.g., biofuels from high-cellulose plants), and conservation-based behavior such as bicycling, recycling and overall mindfulness toward energy consumption. Conversely, taxing fuels according to their carbon content will infuse these incentives at every chain of decision and action — from individuals’ choices and uses of vehicles, appliances, and housing, to businesses’ choices of new product design, capital investment and facilities location, and governments’ choices in regulatory policy, land use and taxation.

A carbon tax won’t stop global climate change by itself — other, synergistic actions are required as well. But without a carbon tax, even the most aggressive regulatory regime (e.g., high-mileage cars) and “enlightened” subsidies (e.g., tax credits for efficiency and renewables) will fall woefully short of the necessary reductions in carbon burning and emissions.

Carbon Footprint

Climate change has become one of the major challenges for mankind and the natural environment. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions released into the atmosphere in ever rapidly growing volumes are recognised to be responsible for this change. Carbon footprint quantification, analysis and reduction are key to preventing this, for example, by enhancing energy efficiency, mitigating carbon emissions by means of green energy and then compensating for remaining GHG emissions by investing in carbon offsets, with a final goal to becoming carbon neutral. During a product life cycle, energy is required to extract, transport and refine the raw materials, for manufacturing and to distribute the final product and treat the waste at the end of a its useful life.

As fossil energy carriers play the major role for energy supply, any of the above steps is associated with the generation and emission of greenhouse gases (GHG), such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, etc., contributing in turn to the global warming effect, which is measured as the product’s carbon footprint.

Life Cycle Assessment according to ISO 14044 (also covered in the BSI PAS2050) is the state-of-the art methodology to determine your product carbon footprint. Facilitating such a “cradle-to-grave” carbon footprint analysis of your product will disclose your real carbon footprint, reveal reduction potentials and discover negative trade-offs, i.e. the shifting of environmental burdens from one stage of the life cycle to another.

General Electric Company and Ecomagination

In the year 1876, Thomas Alva Edison opened a laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he could explore the possibilities of the dynamo and other electrical devices that he had seen in the Exposition. Out of that laboratory was to come perhaps the greatest invention of the age - a successful incandescent electric lamp. By 1890, Edison established the Edison General Electric Company by bringing his various businesses together. In 1892, the Edison General Electric Company merged with one of its long time competitor The Thomson-Houston Company. From then on, the organization is known till today as the General Electric Company.

The world's environmental challenges presented an opportunity for GE to do what GE does best: imagine and build innovative solutions that will benefit its customers and society. Ecomagination to GE is a vision and commitment to harness their global capabilities, technology leadership and market knowledge to take on some of the world's toughest problems as well as to accelerate company growth while doing so. GE believes that through Ecomagination an environmentally driven business strategy can benefit society as well as our bottom line.To realize this initiative, GE has established several commitments:

1. Double their investment in R&D. GE is investing in tomorrow's energy technologies, to allow it to explore continuous improvement of existing products while searching for the next big breakthrough.


2. To increase revenues from its Ecomagination product. GE's ecomagination initiative is founded on a solid business strategy: to increase revenues for GE by providing solutions for customers that help improve their operating performance and environmental impact.


3. To reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. GE has pledged to reduce its emissions and improve the energy efficiency of its operations in three ways. They will reduce absolute emissions 1% by 2012, reduce the intensity of these emissions 30% by 2008, and will improve energy efficiency 30% by the end of 2012.


4. To keep the public informed about its Ecomagination initiative. This is done through websites, Ecomagination reports and to be as transparent as possible in its Ecomagination processes. GE adopts the sustainability reporting practice.

These are few of GE's Ecomagination products:

Footprints of Computers, Electronics, Appliances, Electrical Equipment Manufacturing

The pictures below depicts the footprints of energy consumption in the computers, electronic, appliances and electrical equipment manufacturing. this will assist us in understanding the volume of energy consumed in the manufacturing plant of businesses in this sectors. the details can be read from the previous post entitled " Understanding Energy Foorprint".

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The footprints are showing the processes involved where the energy consumption is high. These processes are extracted from the previous blog entitled "Understanding Energy Footprints". I feel that this materials are helpful to Pensonic to upgrade their current production and processes to adopt energy-saving features in their products.