Oil News:No New Drilling in East Coast Waters 7 Yr BAN

The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it would not propose any new oil drilling in waters off the East Coast of the United States for at least the next seven years.

This announcement is a complete reversal of an earlier plan revealed just weeks before the massive BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The March 2010 plan would have authorized officials to explore potential for drilling from Delaware to central Florida, plus the northern waters of Alaska, according to MPR News.

The new drilling plan for the eastern Gulf of Mexico comes just 3 months after the Obama administration put an early end to the deepwater drilling moratorium enacted after the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

"Drilling will continue in the central and western Gulf of Mexico, although under a set of new safeguards put in place after the deadly BP explosion and oil spill in April. Future gulf leases will be subject to further environmental and safety studies," reports the New York Times. 

Since the BP oil spill, residents and politicians in Gulf Coast states, as well as environmental protection organizations, have been begging the Federal Government to reconsider its plans to pursue expanded offshore drilling.

While this news reduces the danger of a repeat of the BP oil spill, which released an estimated 172 million gallons of oil into the fragile Gulf ecosystem, it doesn't necessarily signal the end of the dangerous practice.

The seven year ban does not affect oil company plans to drill in Alaska's delicate Beaufort and Chukchi seas despite the fact that there is currently no technology available to clean up a catastrophic oil spill in the icy Alaskan waters.

For now though, it's important to celebrate this victory for the environment, the Gulf, and the clean energy economy.

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Is a 35% Solar Cell Productivity Possible? YES, according to....

Scientists Generate Two Energetic Electronic States from One Photon

By NREL News Office   |   December 2, 2010

Double yield via singlet fission could mean 35% efficiency boost for solar.

 

Golden, Colorado, USA -- Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (UCB), have reported the first designed molecular system that produces two triplet states from an excited singlet state of a molecule, with essentially perfect efficiency.

The breakthrough could lead to a 35 percent increase in light-harvesting yield in cells for photovoltaics and solar fuels.

The experiments, using a process called singlet fission, demonstrated a 200 percent quantum yield for the creation of two triplets of the molecule 1,3-diphenylisobenzofuran (DPIBF) at low temperatures.

In singlet fission, a light-absorbing molecular chromophore shares its energy with a nearby non-excited neighboring molecule to yield a triplet excited state of each. If the two triplets behave independently, two electron-hole pairs can be generated for each photon absorbed in a solar cell. This process could subsequently increase by one third.the conversion efficiency of solar photons into electricity or solar fuels.

The researchers identified DPIBF as a promising candidate while searching for molecular chromophores that have the required ratio of singlet and triplet energy states.

Earlier, NREL and Los Alamos National Laboaratory had demonstrated an analgous two-electrons-from-one photon bonus using semiconductor quantum dots in a process NREL termed Multiple Exciton Generation. The latest advance is the first to demonstrate the electron multiplication phenomenon via  the singlet-fission process in molecules.

Until this most recent advance, singlet fission had been known as a somewhat obscure phenomenon occurring at low efficiency in a small number of molecular systems. In 2004, NREL and UCB revisited singlet fission as a potential way to maximize solar photon conversion efficiency. In 2006, NREL's Arthur J. Nozik and Mark C. Hanna calculated the gains in thermodynamic efficiencies that were possible with solar cells based on singlet fission. These activities led to a much more extensive search for the best candidate molecules in a collaboration between NREL and the research group at the UCB led by Josef Michl.

The research has been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.  Authors are NREL's Justin C. Johnson and Arthur J. Nozik, and UCB's Josef Michl.  For a technical summary of this article, please visit  http://www.nrel.gov/news/pdfs/technical_summary_20101202_press_release.pdf

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SPECIAL ACEEE 30TH ANNIVERSARY AWARDS CELEBRATE VISIONARIES AND LEADERS

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 9:09 AM, ACEEE News <aceeenews@aceee.org> wrote:

NEWS RELEASE   Contact: Steven Nadel, 202-507-4011 Media Contact: Glee Murray, 202-507-4010 Special ACEEE 30th Anniversary Awards Celebrate Visionaries and Leaders 14 Awards Presented to Those Who Advance Energy Efficiency   Washington, D.C. (December 8, 2010): The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) presented special 30th Anniversary awards last night to individuals and organizations who have made outstanding contributions to the field of energy efficiency. ACEEE's year-long activities celebrating its 30th anniversary as an organization culminated in a gala reception featuring remarks by Cathy Zoi, Acting Under Secretary and Assistant Secretary, Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.   ACEEE's Board of Directors chose to recognize and celebrate some of the many ideas, individuals, and organizations that have had large impacts on the success of energy efficiency over the past decades by presenting the following awards:   Arthur H. Rosenfeld and Amory Lovins have been visionaries in the field of energy efficiency. What we know as energy efficiency today is in significant part  because of their imagination, dedication, and hard work. Art Rosenfeld, one of ACEEE's founders, recently retired as head of the California Energy Commission. Amory Lovins is Chairman and Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute. Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts has championed energy efficiency throughout his Congressional career and was the original sponsor of the first federal bill law enacting federal appliance energy efficiency standards in 1987. Seattle City Light, the municipal electric utility serving the city of Seattle, Washington, has operated the nation's longest-running energy efficiency program, initiated in order to reduce the need to build power plants and buy electricity. Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP) has been a unique organization that advises utility regulators and state and federal policymakers on issues including energy efficiency and resource planning, competition, distributed generation and demand response, renewable energy, and climate change. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Electricity Market and Policy Group has been conducting research and training into energy efficiency, demand response, distributed generation, renewable energy, electricity reliability, and other topics for over a decade. Its research related to energy efficiency has included work on how to build portfolios of energy efficiency programs to achieve policy objectives, how to design and evaluate effective energy efficiency programs, and how to quantify the economic impacts and benefits of energy efficiency and demand response for customers and society. Senator Ernest "Fritz" Hollings represented South Carolina in the Senate from 1966 through 2005. Senator Hollings was the original sponsor of the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, which introduced the Corporate Average Fuel Economy requirement.   Dan Becker has been a player in every major legislative effort to improve vehicle fuel efficiency and reduce vehicular emissions throughout his career at the Sierra Club, the Center for Automotive Safety, and the Safe Climate Campaign, and as a member of President Clinton's Presidential Advisory Council on Personal Motor Vehicle Greenhouse Gas Reductions. Philips Lighting has been a leader in advancing energy-efficient lighting. In 1980 Philips introduced the first compact fluorescent light bulb (CFL) with an integrated ballast that could be screwed into a standard incandescent light socket, which helped revolutionize the lighting industry. Currently, Philips is an industry leader in developing light-emitting diode (LED) bulbs, which promise to be the next step in improved efficiency lighting technology.  3M has been a pioneer and leader in working to manage energy use as carefully as it manages other inputs. Over the past three decades, 3M's corporation-wide energy management program has initiated different energy management efforts to increase the competitiveness of its good and services. Whirlpool Appliances has been one of the leaders in improving the energy efficiency of refrigerators and other household appliances through technological advances fueled by steady research and investment. Whirlpool won the "Golden Carrot" award in the 1990s for super-efficient refrigerators and has been a long-term supporter of the federal appliance standards program.  New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) has been one of the world's leaders in innovative ideas and research and development for energy efficiency concepts and technologies. NYSERDA is a public corporation for New YorkState that conducts research and development to help the state reduce its petroleum use by helping its citizens reduce energy use, promote renewable energy use, and protect the environment. NYSERDA was the initial developer and implementer of the Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® program. Accepting the award on behalf of NYSERDA were current and past Presidents Frank Murray, Bill Valentino, Paul Tonko, and Peter Smith. The State of California has been the nation's visionary and leader in imagining and implementing policies to reduce its energy and environmental impact with the first appliance efficiency standards; vehicle fuel economy standards; and extensive, aggressive gas and electric utility efficiency programs. Through the inspired work of the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), many of the energy efficiency and sustainability policies adopted and tested in California have influenced policies and programs in other states and around the world. CPUC Commissioner Dian Grueneich accepted the award on behalf of the state. ENERGY STAR® is the single strongest energy efficiency brand in the nation. The program helps residential, industrial, and commercial users to save energy through consumer information and education, and through market-based partnerships to remove market barriers to private efficiency actions. Current and past Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ENERGY STAR executives John Hoffman, Cathy Zoi, Kathleen Hogan, and Gina McCarthy received the award on behalf of ENERGY STAR's program workers, administrators, and partners. Today ENERGY STAR works with nearly 3,000 manufacturers to label the energy use of more than 40,000 individual energy-using products, works with more than 1,500 retail partners, and has 8,500 partners building more comfortable, energy-efficient homes in every state. Throughout 2010, ACEEE organized celebratory 30th Anniversary events designed to reflect on 30 years of progress in energy efficiency, and to build a vision for the next 30 years. In addition to the gala reception and awards presentation, a two-day conference focused on energy efficiency policy and analysis----Energy Efficiency: Advancing Our Economy, Environment, and Security. ###   About ACEEE: The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy is an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing energy efficiency as a means of promoting economic prosperity, energy security, and environmental protection. For information about ACEEE and its programs, publications, and conferences, visit aceee.org.   Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr! If you no longer wish to receive electronic communications from ACEEE, please contact us at: aceeeinfo@aceee.org

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