Enel Archimede plant in Italy. Photo: Enel

This July the Italian utility Enel unveiled “Archimede”, one of the most important developments in the emerging field of concentrating solar power (CSP). The launch showcases this power plant as the first CSP  plant in the world to use molten salts for heat transfer and storage.

Archimede, a 5 MW plant located in Priolo Gargallo (Sicily). The breakthrough project was co-developed by the utility, Enel, and ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development. The name, “Archimede,” refers to the rows of huge parabolic mirrors used to capture the sun’s rays, recalling the “burning mirrors” that Archimedes is said to have used to set fire to the Roman ships besieging Syracuse during the Punic War of 212 BC.

Energy writer Carlo Ombello writes that while several CSP plants already operate (see graphic above)  in the world, mainly in the US and Spain, they use synthetic oils to capture the Sun’s energy in the form of heat, using mirrors that beam sunlight onto a pipe where pressurized oil heats up. A heat exchanger is then used to boil water and run a conventional steam turbine cycle. Older CSP plants only operate at daytime – when direct sunlight is available.

In its press release, Enel writes that the Archimede plant is “the first in the world to use molten salts as the heat transfer fluid and is also the first in the world to integrate a combined-cycle gas facility and a solar thermal power plant for electricity generation.”

Because molten salts can operate at higher temperatures than oils (up to 550°C instead of 390°C), they increase efficiency and power output of a plant. With the higher-temperature heat storage that is allowed, the plant can also extend its operating hours to a 24-hour day. From an environmental and cost perspective, this news is good. A simplified plant design that does not use avoids the need for oil-to-salts heat exchangers eliminate the safety and environmental concerns of using oils. Molten salts are inexpensive and do not catch on fire like synthetic oils currently that are used in current CSP plants. In addition, the high temperatures of molten salts enable the use of steam turbines at the standard pressure/temperature parameters as used in most common gas-cycle fossil power plants. Translated, this means that conventional power plants can be integrated replaced with this technology without expensive retrofits to the existing assets.

Carlo Rubbia -- Molten salt pioneer. Source: Enel

The concept for using molten salts dates back to 2001. The Italian nuclear physicist and Nobel Prize winner, Carlo Rubbia (left photo), ENEA’s President at the time, started research and development on molten salt technology. One problem encountered in using molten salts is that they freeze pr solidify at around 220°C.

ENEA and Archimede Solar Energy, a private company focusing on receiver pipes, have developed several patents in order to improve the pipes’ ability to absorb heat and maximize the heat transfer to the fluid carrier.

Insiders believe the result of these and several other technological improvements create a state-of-the-art CSP plant at a price 60 million Euros. While the price is high for a 5 MW power plant, energy officials believe this model is scalable for a roll-out there is overwhelming scope for a massive roll-out in sunny regions like Northern Africa, the Middle East, Australia and the United States.

TSC Global's hypar roof is located next to the light ril tracks, just south of downtown Denver

Evidence of new buildings featuring an innovative and cost-effective roof can now be seen in a growing number of African nations, including Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Sudan, as part of a Roofs for the World initiative.

This roof is called a Thin Shell Composite Hyperbolic Paraboloid, or TSC Hypar, thus the name, TSC Global, which proclaims  the building methodology using this roof has the potential for revolutionizing roofing and construction in the most impoverished and remote parts of the globe. TSC Global executive director, Brad Wells, says that compared to the corrugated steel roof structures seen everywhere in the developing world, TSC roof construction requires a minimum in cut lumber, demands no power machinery for construction, and leaves almost no carbon footprint. In addition, buildings featuring these roofs are significantly quieter in rain and windstorms, and can be earthquake resistant.

Denver-based TSC Global was created to build, promote and fully develop this construction method, with the belief that there is real potential to dramatically enhance the overall quality and affordability of structures used by millions if not billions of people worldwide. It is now focusing on a potential rebuilding program for Haiti.

Photos: Brad Wells, TSC Global

A TSC roof is constructed as follows: an acrylic cement composite is applied to an arched hyperbolic paraboloid shaped cloth that has been stretched across a four-sided pyramid framework using wood or bamboo. When the acrylic and cement composite cures, the product is a far superior roofing alternative to corrugated metal and other roofs, contends Wells.

Even with a final thickness of approximately one centimeter, a TSC Hypar roof is strong enough to hold heavy weights. Hypar structures have been built for decades but the most closely observed demo structure was built in 1996 by habitat pioneer, George Nez, who has worked on United Nations and USAID emergency relief projects. The TSC website reports Mr. Nez’s structure has endured Colorado winds, freezes and thaws of as much as three feet of. In warmer climates, these roofs should last many decades.

Importantly, a venting and circulation system has been added to the hypar roof in hot climates, allowing air and cooking exhaust to escape. The top vent and cap is an important and simple modification, says Mr. Nez. Adding a ceiling and sealing off the attic space will also enhance cooling.

A TSC roof, reinforced with embedded chicken wire mesh demonstrates resilience to failure or collapse, says the TSC website, adding that the lightweight roof can decrease chances of injury or worse in earthquake scenarios, even in the most severe earthquake. Recent work in overall building design by Colorado School of Mines structural engineering professor, Panos Kiousis, suggests that simple wall-embedded cross-braced panels secured to a ring beam, with adequate fastening of roofs to posts, should create an earthquake resistant building, still at low costs.

TSC structures can be constructed easily in the most remote settings with no transport of large building materials or equipment. Wells says his target populations include refugee and post-disaster projects, urban “shantytown” replacement, and general commercial and residential building construction. He adds that a further goal for his organization is to offer training and micro-finance networks.

Land monitoring

This June the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI), founded after the man who made the geodesic dome a household word, awarded its 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize of $110,000 to African-based Operation Hope for its promising work to transform degraded Zimbabwe grasslands and savannas into a sustainable environment.

The grand prize was well deserved. Here’s why: smart land management work like this can foster water and food security for millions of impoverished people that have suffered for years without such living basics.

Operation Hope was launched by the Africa Centre for Holistic Management in Zimbabwe (ACHM) and its sister organization, New Mexico-based Savory Institute . The approach of these organizations to land management runs contrary to accepted practice of resting land from animal grazing. Instead, Savory seeks to re-establish the balance between plant growth and the behavior of herding animals. Predicting this outcome: the return of unusable desert to grasslands, restoring biodiversity, bringing water sources back to life, combating global climate change, and increasing crop yields to ensure food security for people. The approach is currently being practiced and producing results on over 30 million acres worldwide, states ACHM.

ACHM enhances food and water security and human livelihoods through training that utilizes livestock to restore degraded watersheds and croplands to health offering training programs targeting community NGOs. ACHM’s Grazing Plan is designed to improve land health, and to ensure livestock (and wildlife) have adequate forage year round. In the growing season livestock moves are timed to ensure maximum plant growth and regrowth, and in the dry season the plan rations out the forage that was grown to ensure it lasts until the next rains. Droughts are planned for each year. In all seasons, livestock moves are planned months ahead to avoid conflict with the needs of wildlife – for food, water, or shelter.

Savory targets the “Green Revolution, based on high input, industrial agriculture (massive inputs of petro-chemicals and herbicides, monoculture cropping, and confinement animal feeding operations), stating it has increased global food production tremendously, but has tended to severely degrade its ecological and socio-cultural capital base in the process.”

The result? “Horrific soil erosion, dead zones at the mouths of rivers, severely depleted levels of biodiversity, impoverished rural communities, soil fertility loss, and oxidation of soil organic matter have been exacerbated by the Green Revolution.”

Savory offers the Brown Revolution as a solution: “based on the regeneration of covered, organically rich, biologically thriving soil, and brought to fruition via millions of human beings returning to the land and the production of food.”

Savory contends that “slight increases in soil organic matter, over these huge extensions of the earth’s land surface area, will result in the permanent, safe, and natural sequestration of many gigatons of carbon.”

For nearly three decades, BFI has served an international network of Fuller-inspired innovators through the maintenance of a comprehensive Information Clearinghouse on R.B Fuller, including a detailed inventory of the practices and principles informing Fuller’s approach to design innovation.

Taking the roofs-first approach, a kitchen is built in Rwanda. Source: George Nez

On one Denver, Colorado back lot a visitor will encounter an unorthodox-looking roof that just might help meet the housing needs of displaced people worldwide.

The roof, shaped like a hyperbolic paraboloid, was constructed on the ground and then lifted in place by African student builders who wanted to build similar structures in locales like Rwanda and Sudan.

Remarkably strong and weather resistant, this new age shelter contains few structural elements, can be constructed without electrical power, and costs very little money.

George Nez is the developer of this roof system, simply calling it a “hypar roof.” Those familiar with his work – especially those builders in Rwanda and Sudan – fondly refer to this structure as the “Nez roof.” The roof is built using latex-modified concrete that is painted over a mesh backing. A video interview with Mr. Nez can be seen here.

Nez, now in his mid-eighties, once served as planning director for the City of Denver before going to work for the United Nations & USAID to help with large-scale resettlements in Africa, Eastern Europe, and South America caused from emergencies like floods or earthquakes. It was there that he implemented the idea of building roofs-first, a practice that has became his life’s work.

A slurry of latex-modified concrete is applied to thos Romanian roof. Source: George Nez

“The principle of roofs-first is to be able to rapidly, and at the lowest cost, provide shelter so the families can move in and eventually fill in their wall. They don’t have time for a slow process of building up from foundations or traditional walls and wait until they can afford a roof? No. The roof-first process builds the roofs for them.”

The roof is built with latex modified concrete that is painted over a mesh backing. “Latex is the basic element in paint and provides a kind of resilience in concrete, which is incredible.” says Nez, adding that testing on the roofs have been tested by the National Park Service and by the Knott Laboratory in Denver and show from double the normal roof requirement up to four times with resilience to hot and cold.

Mesh on roof structure before concrete is applied. Source: George Nez

Nez holds a sample piece of the roof, approximately one centimeter in thickness. “This is all that’s needed, the thickness; that thickness is sufficient to park a truck on it.” It has a reinforcement core of fiberglass screen. That’s what was put across the open frame first then the cement was simply poured on there as thin slurry of latex modified concrete, sand, cement, and latex and water.

Nez is a graduate of M.I.T. as a master in city planning and holds a Ph.D. in Urban Services Administration from Columbia Pacific University. He also served as a professor of planning at Kansas State University.

Mathis Wackernagel, PhD - President, Global Footprint Network Source: FootprintNetwork.org

Mathis Wackernagel of Global Footprint Network, is working with global leaders to help us understand and ultimately align our activities with the basic carrying capacity of the earth.

This 14-minute speech is very much worth seeing and sharing.

Video presented by: Sustainable Life Media:

“We may finally be on the verge of a tipping point wherein mainstream attention to identifying and mitigating a company’s carbon impact will become a core strategic priority for all businesses. But what comes next? The reality is, global warming is just one of the detrimental impacts of unchecked business activity. During this time of seismic shift in awareness of the interconnectedness of things, the opportunity is to take a longer, more systemic view of the many ways our activities impact the world around us.

“By doing so, we will begin to anticipate and respond more quickly to both the needs and the enormous world of possibility in front of us to innovate for a whole, healed world. Be inspired by this thought leader who is working with leaders around the globe to help us all understand and ultimately align our activities with the basic carrying capacity of the earth. Learn more about Sustainable Business & Design at: sustainablelifemedia.com“

“Nature Communications differs in being multidisciplinary,” reports the Nature announcement. “It aims not to compete with the established Nature journals, but to publish rigorous and comprehensive papers that represent advances of significance to specialists within each field. In addition, it welcomes submissions in fields that are not represented by a dedicated Nature research journal — for example, developmental biology, plant science, microbiology, ecology and evolution, palaeontology, astronomy and high-energy physics. ”

Using nanotube wires for hybrid fuel cells has renewed promise Source: Nature Communications

One current article discusses hybrid nanotubes as a part of miniaturizing fuel cells for biological applications.

“Now Gao and coworkers show that electrodes made with porous microfibers composed of oriented carbon nanotubes are capable of delivering fast mass transport of the reagents and greatly enhanced currents,” the magazine reports.

Many readers may find much of these works from Nature to be highly academic in nature — even heady sometimes — but such information provides a solid barometer for scientific research and development trends.

Weeds rarely are welcome in the garden soil. Getting rid of them is normally an arduous procedure with more bad sides than good sides, including blisters, aching backs, and time passed, which might have been better spent elsewhere. The one good side from weeding is probably the dead-tired, ‘sweat on your brow’ reward of seeing your garden rid of the unwelcome invasion.

Ghanaian villagers strip bark from invasive weed tree so it can be used for erosion control. Photo: G. Meyers

But if you’re an itinerant farmer in Ghana, living near the Brong Ahafo gold mine of Newmont Ghana Gold Limited, one weed features another good side: it is being converted into a cash crop.

This weed, called Broussonetia papyrifera, or York, can consume arable land in a short time, growing 25-meter trees and a system of seeds and shoots that turns food-producing areas into wastelands.  Ghanaians may once have called it Devil’s Teak, now they see it as a raw material that can bring income to the villagers of Techeyre, who operate a micro business making biodegradable matting that is used for erosion control and slope stabilization at the nearby mining operation.

This micro business jute mat operation was conceived by Muhammad Bin Abubakar, an outspoken Newmont nursery manager who has left behind a large trail of good work, including growing a shaded forest where once there were only mining tailings. Bin, as he is known, says he learned of a way to use the tree when he worked at Newmont’s Indonesian operations.  According to Bin, one farmer, Amoafo Darkwah had to abandon his family’s two-acre cassava farm because of York infestation.

Project developer, Bin Abubakar, works with village members. Photo: G. Meyers

In the village of Techeyre, some 800 people, including Darkwah, join in stripping bark from these trees.  Bark stripped, the trees die within two weeks and will stop producing seeds. The dead timber can be used for minor construction needs or for cooking fuel, and much of the sawdust is used for growing at Bin’s nursery.

Then it’s time to treat the moneymaker, the bark. The fibrous material, taken from the bottom part of the tree, measures an average of one meter by five meters. This solid piece is first hammered flat so the fibrous structure can be pulled out, or woven into a continuous net material. The hammering process, where large hand-hewn mallets are used, resonates throughout the village with the sound of drums.

As Bin describes it, “ The mat is then woven into a mesh, just like chicken mesh, thus giving it the ability to trap eroded soil particles during storm periods.”

Beyond the environmental functionality of the jute mats, there is the micro business that has provided income for some 800 people where money or paying work are as scarce as the York is plentiful.

The difficulties posed by the York have been transformed into a solution, says Bin.

“So the jute mats are used for controlling erosion in our mining areas. Which now accounts for 800 people – ladies, men, and students in this area. And they are getting their livelihood from this work.”

We hope more micro businesses such as this one Bin has started begin popping up across Africa and other developing areas of the planet.

Interest in aquaponics attracts many people wordwide Source: www.aquaponics .com

We are happy hearing from senior spokespeople in the promising field of aquaponics, especially as a way to provide food in a sustainable way for poorer countries.

After a request to contribute on the subject, Rebecca Nelson, co-founder of Wisconsin-based Nelson & Pade and publisher of the Aquaponics Journal, writes to Green Streets (my emphasis):

“Nelson and Pade, Inc specializes in aquaponics, which is a sustainable, highly efficient method of agriculture.  The company is well-established in the industry and known around the world for extensive contributions to aquaponics technology.  Nelson and Pade, Inc is very fortunate that, even in this economy, interest in their products and services is growing and the business is in an expansion mode.  With clients throughout North America and around the world, the mission of Nelson and Pade, Inc is to continue to lead the aquaponics industry by providing quality systems, supplies, training and technical support.

“In aquaponics, you grow plants and fish together in one integrated, soilless system.  The fish waste provides fertilizer for the plants and the plants provide a natural filter for the water the fish live in.  Aquaponics is a sustainable ecosystem in which both plants and fish can thrive.  Aquaponics produces safe, fresh, organic fish and vegetables.   Combining aquaponics with controlled environment agriculture gives a grower the opportunity to consistently grow premium quality, all natural fish and vegetables.

“Nelson and Pade, Inc has been at the forefront of aquaponic technology for many years.  Offerings include complete aquaponic systems for all applications including commercial production, education, research, producing food in remote villages and home food production.  In addition, Nelson and Pade, Inc. has written and published books, videos and school curriculums on aquaponics for over 15 years and has been continuously publishing the Aquaponics Journal (www.aquaponicsjournal.com ) since 1997.   Individuals from throughout the United States and numerous countries have attended aquaponics training workshops offered by Nelson and Pade, Inc.

“In an effort to meet the growing demand for their products and services, Nelson and Pade, Inc., in has recently purchased  a 12 acre property in Montello, WI that has offices, warehouses and room for expansion.  System assembly, order fulfillment, training and daily operations will take place in this new facility.  A complete revision of Nelson and Pade, Inc.’s popular and informative website, www.aquaponics.com is on the works.

“Nelson and Pade, In is currently guiding the installation of two of the largest aquaponic greenhouses in the world. They are also working with several other companies that are in the design stage of large aquaponic installations.  More announcements about these projects and the growth of this innovative company will be available soon.”

Our thanks to Rebecca Nelson. We look forward to hearing more.

Auto graveyard - Nebraska farm Photo: Glenn Meyers

The following clips come from  Matt Cawood, writing on a study from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists at farmonline:

“Agricultural land could be the focus of an “economic opportunity of unparalleled scale”, according to the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, which has called for a re-write of emissions trading legislation to properly recognise “terrestrial carbon”.

“In a discussion paper released earlier this week, the Group argues that by focusing on terrestrial carbon sequestration as a solution to climate change, Australia can simultaneously address many of its most pressing environmental challenges.

“Terrestrial carbon includes carbon stored in forests, woodlands, swamps, grasslands, farmland, soils, and derivatives like biochar and biofuels.

“We’re about to create a multibillion dollar terrestrial carbon market, and that has the potential to radically change our rural landscapes,” said Wentworth Group director Peter Cosier. “We have to maximise the benefits and minimise the consequences.”

“According to the paper’s introduction, global warming science now regards it as impossible to avoid dangerous climate change solely through emissions reduction. Positive change in the carbon balance can only be achieved if parallel efforts are made to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.”

The Wentworth Group sees much potential for managing carbon. “At a global scale, a 15 per cent increase in the world’s terrestrial carbon stock would remove the equivalent of all the carbon pollution emitted from fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution,” the paper says.

“A recent CSIRO study that examined Australia’s capacity to sequester terrestrial carbon suggested that carbon-friendly grazing practices could be capable of storing 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents per year (Mt Co2-e/yr) for the next 40 years.”

To review this article and related papers, go to http://qcl.farmonline.com.au/news/state/agribusiness-and-general/general/farm-carbon-offers-unparalled-economic-opportunity/1655404.aspx