Deepwater’s Offshore Wind Plans Could Revolutionize Mass. Workforce and Offshore Wind Industry

http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/articles/2018/03/deepwater-s-offshore-wind-plans-could-revolutionize-mass-workforce-and-offshore-wind-industry.html

On Tuesday, March 27, Deepwater Wind announced that it plans to assemble the wind turbine foundations for its “Revolution Wind,” a 400-MW offshore wind farm, on the south coast of Massachusetts. Assembly activities will include welding, painting, commissioning and related work for the 1,500-ton steel foundations supporting the turbine tower.  
The company said that it has identified three South Coast cities — New Bedford, Fall River and Somerset — as possible locations for this major fabrication activity, which will create 300 direct jobs with an additional 600 indirect and induced jobs that will support this effort.

Renewables generated more electricity than brown coal over summer, report finds

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/mar/26/renewables-generated-more-electricity-than-brown-coal-over-summer-report-finds

Continued growth in solar pushed renewable generation in Australia to just under 10,000-gigawatt hours between December 2017 and February 2018. With the Hazelwood plant knocked out of the system last year, brown coal’s output in the same period was just over 9,100 GWh.... A further 5,000 megawatts of large-scale renewables projects were under construction in February, supporting 17,445 jobs.

One of the coal plants that will be closing is the Hazelwood coal plant, the following video is a song composed to say goodbye to the plant.

Canada: Alberta Town Repurposing Oil & Gas Wells for Geothermal Energy

https://www.desmog.ca/2018/03/20/why-small-alberta-oil-and-gas-town-pursuing-geothermal-power

A big part of why newly elected town councillor Dewly Nelson thinks the oil-friendly residents should welcome geothermal to town? It all runs on the same infrastructure and knowledge as the oil and gas industry, making it an excellent way to make use of existing oilfields and some of the workers who have been hit by low oil prices.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096014811100574X
https://www.greengeek.ca/geothermal-power-from-oil-wells/

Are Nor’easters and Bomb Cyclones the New Normal?

Are Nor’easters and Bomb Cyclones the New Normal? 

It seems to me that one of the implications of destabilizing the weather using fossil fuels is the Arctic weather is drifting around where it should not be. 

Conditions in the Arctic have gone crazy. In late February, for example, temperatures in some locations spiked more than 50 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. More than a dozen major climate records have been broken in just the past three years: high winter temperatures, low winter and summer sea ice, extensive thawing of permafrost, and so on. But unlike in Las Vegas, what happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. For almost a decade, scientists have been predicting that rapid Arctic warming may disrupt atmospheric circulation patterns, including the infamous polar vortex, that control winter weather all around the northern hemisphere, including the U.S., northern and central Europe, and northern Asia.

Jennifer Francis, an Arctic and weather specialist at Rutgers University, was one of the first scientists to connect these dots. At an American Geophysical Union conference way back in 2011, she presented a hypothesis and preliminary data analysis indicates that the warming Arctic and related climate changes could conspire to alter the jet stream and extreme weather. She explains the phenomenon nicely in an article that Scientific American released today.

Mangled Jet Stream Delivers Record-Shattering Heat, Extreme Wildfires to California

Mangled Jet Stream Delivers Record-Shattering Heat, Extreme Wildfires to California

The pattern is essentially stuck — featuring a hot, pole-reaching, wave of the Jet Stream continuously rising over the US West, Western Canada and Alaska, and diving deep into the Arctic. It is a condition climate researchers such as Dr. Jennifer Francis attribute to an ongoing erosion and degradation of Northern Hemisphere sea ice. And the predictions of Dr. Francis appear to have born out in both recent observations and cutting edge scientific research showing how sea ice loss has shoved the storm track away from California and the US Southwest (see how Climate Change Made the California Drought Worse).

Mangled Jet Stream

Half of Alberta’s boreal forest could disappear due to fires and climate change, study warns

Half of Alberta’s boreal forest could disappear due to fires and climate change, study warns

“That’s why trees are dying,” he said. “They just cannot get the moisture they need to persist.” The research, he said, tells the same story on a much broader scale. “This climate that has supported forests for millennia is basically going beyond that cusp, beyond that point where it can really support trees on the uplands any more.” The changes could have major implications for the forestry sector in Alberta, said Parisien. “If you no longer can have these productive forests on the uplands, there’s going to be a hit to this economy.”

Photovoltaic Glass

Photovoltaic Skylight
As a part of the complete revitalization of the two-million square-foot former Bell Labs facility into an iconic mixed-use metroburb located in Holmdel, N.J., Onyx Solar will be supplying Bell Works with 60,000 SqFt of amorphous Silicon photovoltaic glass, to create the largest-of-its-kind photovoltaic skylight in the USA.
Upon completion, the PV skylight will both naturally illuminate the complex while generate free, clean electricity from the sun. It will simultaneously offset approx. 60 tons of annual CO2 emissions, drastically improving the building’s energy efficiency and reducing its carbon footprint. As an example, the annual energy generated would provide enough power to drive 100 electric cars along 4,250 miles per year... utilizing state-of-the-art technology, Bell Works’ skylight will feature 24 different glass units from Onyx Solar to cover the various unique skylight schemes at the Eero Saarinen-designed architectural gem. Each will be comprised of amorphous Silicon thin film photovoltaic (a-Si PV) active glass, laminated between two sheets of tempered safety glass, allowing for 20% Visual Light Transmittance (VLT) to reduce solar heat gain while producing energy, all while preserving Bell Work’s historical design.

In another example, the system on the roof of this Apple store allows daylight to stream through the roof at the same time producing power for the building.