Congratulations to Barack Obama

Congratulations to Barack Obama! I don't know about any other NERN members but I stayed up until the early hours of the morning awaiting with glassy eyed fascination the result of Ohio!

This week I attended the Euro-CASE annual conference 'How can the EU meet its 2020 renewables targets?' at the Royal Academy of Engineering earlier this week (3rd November). In case you haven’t heard of it, Euro-CASE is a non-profit-making organisation of national academies from 21 European countries. I was going to summarise the key points of the meeting here, but thankfully Alok Jha of the Guardian has beaten me to it. Lord Browne made a point that stood out for me. He stated that there needs to be a level playing field for all technologies in terms of pricing in the externalities (e.g. carbon emissions), removing regulatory and planning barriers and the dismantling of fossil fuel subsidies.

UKERC has been in the news once again this week. I managed a personal first and was quoted in the Times Higher Education Supplement in an article about the European Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Joint Technology Initiative. I think that this betters my personal previous best quote on the front page of The Sun (not this one (different Jeff Hardy) but rather this one)! UKERC’s Research Director, Jim Skea, was quoted in Nature discussing the approval of the UK Climate Change Bill.

In the news this week, there was a slight theme on electronic equipment. It seems that companies are wooing consumers at technology shows with their green gadgets. Examples of green gadgets include wireless smart meters, electric scooters and bamboo laptops. All very exciting I’m sure, but one question that springs to mind is “what happens to the gadgets that you replace?” Fortunately, BusinessWeek has examined the issue in their article the dirty secret of recycling electronics. The volume of E-waste is expected to surge next year in the US and also the UK as people switch from analogue to digital TV. A portion of this electrical and electronic equipment ends up being exported (in some cases illegally) to Asia and elsewhere where the valuable parts are recycled and where the rest is dumped allowing metals and chemicals to leach into the environment. I remember back in my days as a green chemist at the University of York we were interested in whether the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment directive (WEEE) would lead to the application of green product design (where products are designed with recycling and the environment in mind). It’s probably still a little too early to be able to tell whether green product design is taking hold or not.

Solar photovoltaic records once again have been tumbling! A new breed of organic dye sensitised solar cells (so called Grätzel cells) has achieved 10% efficiency. This doesn’t sound so impressive when compared to the 40.8% record of silicon PV but bear in mind that the advantage of the organic cells is that they are significantly less expensive than there silicon cousins. Not content with one record breaking achievement the PV scientists have pushed on and broken a second record. This time a coating for a silicon PV cell has been developed that boosts the absorption of sunlight from a typical 67% to a whopping 96%. The invention also means that PV arrays can now absorb sunlight from angles meaning that there in no longer a need for any automated system that follows the sun. If you’ll excuse the pun, the future is certainly looking bright for solar power.