Posts tagged solar
Boulder: Let the sun shine on city’s energy future
Sep 10th
Boulder to reach out to solar industry, customers
The City of Boulder announced today that it will create a working group of solar industry specialists and customers – both current and future – to explore motivators and barriers to implementing more solar throughout the community. The focus of the group’s work will be on defining the next-generation of incentives as well as providing guidance about how to handle solar contracts between now and the time when the city decides whether it will create a local electric utility.
“Supporting and increasing renewable sources of energy is a core value, and we see this discussion as an important next step in our effort to create the electric utility of the future,” said Heather Bailey, executive director of Energy Strategy and Electric Utility Development.
Bailey said the city has a unique opportunity to benefit from local experts to design programs that will encourage more local energy production. Expertise from the university and federal labs, as well as the numerous companies and entrepreneurs developing leading-edge energy technologies, has already helped Boulder achieve one of the highest levels of solar per-capita in the US, with close to 14 megawatts installed in the city.
The City of Boulder has also played a significant role in supporting local energy generation, particularly solar. This has included streamlining the permitting process to offering a local solar rebate and grant program. The concept of Solar Gardens was originally conceived in Boulder, and city staff members were on the drafting team of legislation that allowed this. The solar gardens law was signed by then-Governor Bill Ritter overlooking the Flatirons from a parking lot rooftop along the Pearl Street Mall.
“We don’t want to simply continue this tradition; we want to make it even stronger by working with stakeholders to identify ways to encourage even more locally generated clean energy sources. This is fundamental to achieving our community’s goals, whether we create our own electric utility or strike a new agreement with our current provider, Xcel Energy,” Bailey said.
One of the questions the city would like to resolve is how to encourage continued participation in solar installations during the ongoing deliberation about – and possible transition to – a local electric utility. Xcel Energy recently sent the city a letter requesting that the city agree to take over contracts it has with customers if Boulder forms an electric retail utility.
The City of Boulder is committed to protecting those who have made investments in solar energy in our community from any adverse impact related to the creation of a municipal utility. The city is also interested in working with Xcel on this important issue, not only to protect those who have already made investments, but to encourage growth in this area of renewable energy.
Boulder has no way, however, of evaluating the estimates that Xcel has made about these costs.
“Before we can agree to any arrangement, we need more information from Xcel Energy,” City Attorney Tom Carr said. “The company so far has declined most of the requests for data the city has made. Without detailed information about these contracts, we have no way of verifying Xcel’s assertions and perhaps more importantly, of making sure we are doing the right thing to protect our forward-thinking customers and other ratepayers.”
The city’s Energy Future team anticipates holding the first meeting of the solar working group shortly after the Nov. 5 election. Members of the community and industry who are interested in participating are encouraged to contact Heather Bailey at 33-441-1923 or baileyh@bouldercolorado.gov.
More information about the Energy Future project is available at www.BoulderEnergyFuture.com.
–CITY–
$6 million CU-Boulder instrument to fly on Sept. 6 NASA mission to moon
Aug 29th
Aug. 29, 2013
A $6 million University of Colorado Boulder instrument designed to study the behavior of lunar dust will be riding on a NASA mission to the moon now slated for launch on Friday, Sept. 6, from the agency’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia.
The mission, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, will orbit the moon to better understand its tenuous atmosphere and whether dust particles are being lofted high off its surface. The $280 million LADEE mission, designed, developed, integrated and tested at NASA’s AMES Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will take about a month to reach the moon and another month to enter the proper elliptical orbit and to commission the instruments. A 100-day science effort will follow.
“We are ready and excited for launch,” said CU-Boulder physics Professor Mihaly Horanyi of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, principal investigator for the Lunar Dust Experiment, or LDEX. “We think our instrument can help answer some important questions related to the presence and transport of dust in the lunar atmosphere.”
One unanswered question since the days of the Apollo program is why astronauts saw a pre-sunrise glow above the lunar horizon, said Horanyi, who directs LASP’s Colorado Center for Lunar Dust and Atmospheric Studies. “The glow has been suggested to be caused by dust particles that were electrically charged by solar ultraviolet light, causing them to lift off from the moon’s surface.”
About the size of a small toaster oven, the LDEX instrument will be able to chart the existence, size and individual velocities of tiny dust particles as small as 0.6 microns in diameter. For comparison, a standard sheet of paper is about 100 microns thick. A collision between a dust particle and a hemisphere-shaped target on LDEX generates a unique electrical signal inside the instrument to allow scientists to detect individual particles, said Horanyi.
Horanyi said clouds of dust specks seemingly observed by astronauts hovering over the moon likely weren’t clouds at all. “If you watch a cement truck on the highway, it seems to be carrying a dust cloud along with it. But what is actually happening is that every speck of dirt coming off the truck is falling onto the highway,” he said.
“The specks have very short lifespans, and the cloud that appears to surround the truck is actually a continual rain of dust from the vehicle to the pavement,” he said. “Similarly, the smallest lunar dust particles could also continually lift off and fall back onto the surface.”
Knowing more about the behavior of lunar dust could be of use for future human expeditions to the moon, including potential colonization efforts. Learning more about lunar dust also might help scientists better understand dust on other moons in the solar system — like Phobos and Deimos that orbit Mars – that have been suggested by some as possible initial landing posts for crewed missions headed to the Red Planet.
LADEE also is carrying an ultraviolet and visible light spectrometer, a neutral mass spectrometer and a lunar laser communications demonstration.
Astronauts walking on the moon sank into a shallow layer of dust, thought to be a product of millions of years of meteoric and interstellar particle bombardment, he said. “The beauty of physics is that we believe the same processes occur throughout the universe,” he said. “What we see on the moon may well apply to Mercury, Phobos, Deimos or asteroids, which all have very tenuous atmospheres.”
When the LADEE spacecraft is inserted into an elliptical orbit, its closest approach will be less than 20 miles from the lunar surface. “The closer we can get to the surface the better,” he said.
“This is a very exciting mission that will answer an almost 50-year-old question in space science,” said CU-Boulder graduate student Jamey Szalay, who is writing data analysis software for the mission that will allow the team to analyze science results immediately after data is received from the spacecraft. “Given the convenient duration of the mission and promising science return, I’m very fortunate to be a part of the science team — it’s a dream project for any graduate student in space sciences to be working on.”
Horanyi also is the principal investigator on CU-Boulder’s Student Dust Counter, a simpler instrument than LDEX flying on NASA’s New Horizons mission that was launched in 2006 to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, a massive region beyond the planets containing icy objects left over from the formation of the solar system. The Student Dust Counter was designed, built, tested and operated entirely by students, primarily undergraduates, at LASP and has been collecting data for the past seven years. New Horizons is now more than 2.5 billion miles from Earth and will arrive at Pluto in two years.
CU-Boulder researcher David James, who now is working on LDEX, got his start helping to build SDC. “Although I was a student in a lab back then, it was almost like working in the private sector,” said James, who eventually received his doctorate from CU-Boulder. “We were building an instrument that was going to Pluto. It was an amazing experience with huge responsibilities, it pushed us to do our best, and it definitely shaped who I am today.”
The LDEX instrument, as well as many previous LASP instruments launched into space since the 1970s, will carry a laser engraving of the CU mascot, Ralphie the Buffalo, as well as the names of all university people who participated in the project, from students and scientists to engineers and administrative support staff. “It’s like adding a touch of history to the mission, perhaps for good luck and pride,” said Horanyi. “After all, this is the University of Colorado.”
-CU-
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CU: Set your internal clock–go camping for, a WEEK?
Aug 5th
Artificial light screws with your circadian rhythms
Spending just one week exposed only to natural light while camping in the Rocky Mountains was enough to synch the circadian clocks of eight people participating in a University of Colorado Boulder study with the timing of sunrise and sunset.
The study, published online today in the journal Current Biology, found that the synchronization happened in that short period of time for all participants, regardless of whether they were early birds or night owls during their normal lives.
“What’s remarkable is how, when we’re exposed to natural sunlight, our clocks perfectly become in synch in less than a week to the solar day,” said CU-Boulder integrative physiology Professor Kenneth Wright, who led the study.
Electrical lighting, which became widely available in the 1930s, has affected our internal circadian clocks, which tell our bodies when to prepare for sleep and when to prepare for wakefulness. The ability to flip a switch and flood a room with light allows humans to be exposed to light much later into the night than would be possible naturally.
Even when people are exposed to electrical lights during daylight hours, the intensity of indoor lighting is much less than sunlight and the color of electrical light also differs from natural light, which changes shade throughout the day.
To quantify the effects of electrical lighting, a research team led by Wright, who also is the director of CU-Boulder’s Sleep and Chronobiology Laboratory, monitored eight participants for one week as they went about their normal daily lives. The participants wore wrist monitors that recorded the intensity of light they were exposed to, the timing of that light, and their activity, which allowed the researchers to infer when they were sleeping.
At the end of the week, the researchers also recorded the timing of participants’ circadian clocks in the laboratory by measuring the presence of the hormone melatonin. The release of melatonin is one of the ways our bodies signal the onset of our biological nighttime. Melatonin levels decrease again at the start of our biological daytime.
The same metrics were recorded during and after a second week when the eight participants—six men and two women with a mean age of 30—went camping in Colorado’s Eagles Nest Wilderness. During the week, the campers were exposed only to sunlight and the glow of a campfire. Flashlights and personal electronic devices were not allowed.
On average, participants’ biological nighttimes started about two hours later when they were exposed to electrical lights than after a week of camping. During the week when participants went about their normal lives, they also woke up before their biological night had ended.
After the camping trip—when study subjects were exposed to four times the intensity of light compared with their normal lives—participants’ biological nighttimes began near sunset and ended at sunrise. They also woke up just after their biological night had ended. Becoming in synch with sunset and sunrise happened for all individuals even though the measurements from the previous week indicated that some people were prone to staying up late and others to getting up earlier.
“When people are living in the modern world—living in these constructed environments—we have the opportunity to have a lot of differences among individuals,” Wright said. “Some people are morning types and others like to stay up later. What we found is that natural light-dark cycles provide a strong signal that reduces the differences that we see among people—night owls and early birds—dramatically.”
Our genes determine our propensity to become night owls or early birds in the absence of a strong signal to nudge our internal circadian clocks to stay in synch with the solar day, Wright said.
The new study, which demonstrates just how strong of a signal exposure to natural light is, offers some possible solutions for people who are struggling with their sleep patterns. For example, people who naturally drift toward staying up late may also find that it’s more difficult to feel alert in the morning—when melatonin levels may indicate they’re still in their biological nighttimes—at work or in school.
To combat a person’s genetic drift toward later nights, exposure to more sunlight in the morning and midday could help nudge his or her internal clock earlier. Also, dimming electrical lights at night, forgoing late-night TV and cutting out screen time with laptops and other personal electronic devices also may help internal circadian clocks stay more closely attuned with the solar day, Wright said.
Other CU-Boulder co-authors of the study are doctoral students Andrew McHill and Evan Chinoy; former undergraduate students Brian Birks and Brandon Griffin, both of whom are now professional research assistants; and former postdoctoral researcher Thomas Rusterholz.
-CU-
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