Resteraunt Serving Whale Closes in Santa Monica

Posted on | March 23, 2010 | Comments Off

Thanks to Sea Shepherd volunteer Zoli Teglas, and many others, including producer Charles Hambleton from the Oscar winning documentary, “The Cove,” The Hump restaurant in Santa Monica, CA is closing it’s doors. Following the undercover operation, the restaurant was caught illegally selling Sei whale meat in clear violation of U.S. Federal law.

The attention generated by volunteers protesting outside the restaurant following the investigation, which brought these illegal activities to light, greatly increased pressure on the restaurant owners. In the end, the pressure was too great.

In a statement posted on their website, The Hump explains:

“The Hump hopes that by closing its doors, it will help bring awareness to the detrimental effect that illegal whaling has on the preservation of our ocean ecosystems and species. Closing the restaurant is a self-imposed punishment on top of the fine that will be meted out by the court. The Owner of The Hump also will be taking additional action to save endangered species.”

Sea Shepherd will continue opposing restaurants serving illegal seafood, including illegal whale meat, and hopes that The Hump sets a stark example for the severity of this crime.

Trade Restrictions on Bluefin Tuna and Polar Bears

Posted on | March 16, 2010 | Comments Off

DOHA, Qatar – Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Tom Strickland today said the United States will support trade restrictions on bluefin tuna, polar bears, and imperiled corals and sharks among other proposals at the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) that begins next week.

“The United States will push hard to curtail international trade in species that are sliding towards extinction, including species such as bluefin tuna that are currently not regulated under the treaty,” said Strickland, who is heading the U.S. delegation to the treaty’s 15th Conference of the Parties. “At the same time, we will renew our commitment to help range countries scientifically manage and conserve species such as tigers and elephants already protected under the treaty.”

CITES is an international agreement initiated in 1973 and signed by more than 175 countries regulating global trade in imperiled wild animals and plants including their parts and products. A Conference of the Parties is held every 2-3 years to review, discuss, and negotiate changes in the management and control of trade in the various wildlife species covered by the agreement.

CITES is an international agreement initiated in 1973 and signed by more than 175 countries regulating global trade in imperiled wild animals and plants including their parts and products. A Conference of the Parties is held every 2-3 years to review, discuss, and negotiate changes in the management and control of trade in the various wildlife species covered by the agreement.
Member nations consider proposals to list species in one of three appendices to the Convention:

•Appendix I includes species for which it is determined that any commercial trade is detrimental to the survival of the species. Therefore, no commercial trade is allowed in Appendix-I species. Non-commercial trade in such species is allowed if it does not jeopardize the species’ survival in the wild. Permits are required for the exportation and importation of Appendix-I species.
•Appendix II includes species for which it has been determined that commercial trade may be detrimental to the survival of the species if that trade is not strictly controlled. Trade in these species is regulated through the use of export permits.
•Appendix III includes species listed by a range country that requires the assistance of other parties to ensure that exports of their native species are legal. Permits and certificates are used to control and monitor trade in Appendix-III species. Any CITES Party may place a native species in Appendix III

Strickland said the conservation of Atlantic bluefin tuna is a high priority for the United States, and the delegation will be supporting a proposal by Monaco to list the species in Appendix I. Tuna populations have declined significantly in recent years, largely due to over-harvest.

“The purpose of CITES is to put a check on international commerce when it threatens a species’ existence,” Strickland said. “The U.S. government has significant concerns about the serious compliance problems that have plagued the Eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean fishery, and the fact that the 2010 International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) quota level is not as low as needed, the United States will support the proposal to list Atlantic bluefin tuna in Appendix I at COP15. We intend to work actively with Monaco and other CITES and ICCAT parties in order to achieve positive results for bluefin tuna.”

Other U.S. positions highlighted by Strickland include:

•The United States has submitted a proposal to list polar bears in Appendix I to highlight the need to enhance protections for the species. The proposal is based on information on polar bear habitat and reflects a concern that caution is necessary to ensure commercial trade does not compound the existing threats to the species continued existence such as climate change.
•In cooperation with several other range countries, the United States also has submitted proposals to list red and pink corals and several species of sharks in Appendix II. There is concern that over-exploitation for international trade is having adverse impacts on these species. The corals are suffering from demand for use in jewelry and other products, while some of the shark species are being decimated by the international trade in shark fins.

•The United States will fully support the inclusion of timber species in CITES when international trade is a threat to their effective management and sustainable use. For CoP15, the United States has submitted a document to improve the effectiveness of CITES Appendix-III timber listings. This was endorsed by both the CITES Plants Committee (the technical committee on plant issues, including timber), and the Standing Committee (executive body that oversees implementation) of the Convention between meetings of the Conference of the Parties.

Member nations will also consider several proposals affecting African elephant populations during the meeting, including one by Tanzania and Zambia to allow a one-time sale of their ivory stockpiles and one by other African nations to place a 20-year moratorium on all ivory sales.

“The United States will be active at the meeting to ensure that any decisions on African elephants regarding changes in listings or to allow further trade in ivory do not contribute to the recent increases in poaching and illegal trade,” Strickland said.

Meanwhile, Strickland said the United States remains a strong advocate for efforts to eliminate the illegal trade in tigers and other Asian big cats. It also supports conservation efforts for the tiger in other countries, such as India, through funding and technical assistance that includes resource management, research, and education.

The United States will provide support and assistance to other range-country proposals for endemic species, including several species of iguana from Guatemala and Honduras, and proposals from Argentina for holy wood and Brazil for Brazilian rosewood.

The United States is proposing to remove CITES protections from the bobcat, a species that is listed because of its similarity of appearance to other spotted cats listed as threatened as a result of trade. The United States has been working with the European Union to resolve identification and enforcement issues. Since bobcats are not threatened or endangered, the United States is seeking to remove the species from inclusion in Appendix II of the treaty.

In order to support the U.S. delegation during the conference and bolster the flow of information from the session concerning topics of interest, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has established a new web site dedicated to the effort and reflecting the U.S.
perspective. The interactive site at www.uscites.gov features information and highlights of the meeting and the intent is to maintain it as a valuable source for current CITES information even after the conference has ended. It is not intended in any way to replace the official CITES organizational web site at www.cites.org.

Solar Installations

Posted on | March 16, 2010 | Comments Off

The photovoltaic (PV) market now has an eye-popping, interactive bevy of maps and charts that can let anyone know where PV panels are being installed, how big they are, how much they cost and how fast the industry is booming.

Interested in where PV is installed in the U.S. and how it has grown over time? Go to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Web site, openpv.nrel.gov, and find a dynamic time map showing PV installation activity in the U.S. from 1998 to 2009.

Want to know how fast the cost per watt is plunging in Wisconsin or California? Push “Explore” on the Web site to open the PV Market Mapper application and call up any state in the nation to see graphs on the number of PV installations, cost and capacity over time.

Want to know if your old friends from Kalamazoo or Kokomo ever got around to installing PV on their roof? Zero in by zip code and neighborhood and you can probably find that out too.

NREL Geographers Conceived an Open PV Community
The Open PV database is the brainchild of geographers in the Data Analysis and Visualization Group within the Strategic Energy Analysis Center at NREL.

“We’re building a community of users who are willing to share information about PV installations,” said Christopher Helm, a Geographic Information System (GIS) developer and project manager for the Open PV project. “The project is a living, breathing and dynamic database that people can use to explore the U.S. PV market in essentially real-time.”

He and Ted Quinby, GIS developer and fellow Open PV project team member, are accepting data uploads from utility companies, local and state governments and the public.

“A big focus in getting this up and running is to spur more data-sharing,” Quinby said. “We want to foster the development of a community around collecting and maintaining this data.”

So far, Open PV has catalogued more than 64,000 systems with a total capacity of about 733 megawatts.

They know there are more systems out there (there must be more than one system in Illinois, for example) but are confident the numbers will soar as the data-sharing phenomenon catches hold among installers, government officials and utility companies.

Solar Trade Groups Embracing OPEN PV
The two largest solar trade groups, the Solar Energy Industries Association and the Solar Electric Power Association, are fans of the Open PV project and are encouraging their members to use the maps and graphs as tools to grow their businesses.

Installers can use the data to examine their positions in the market and, when they share data, can benefit from the name-recognition that goes with it.

“If people want to see the three or five top installers in their neighborhood, they’ll be able to zoom in and find that out,” Quinby said. “If they want to know the installers in their region, they’ll be able to find that too.”

Users Can Explore National, Local Trends
Open PV’s Market Mapper launches the user into a kind of time-space continuum.

Users can click on their own state to see how it compares to other states or the nation as a whole in such variables as cost, number of installations and growth. They can do the same for counties or zip codes within each state.

“The idea is that you can drill down to this very specific level,” Quinby said. People will soon be able to add comments and even upload photos of their systems.

Users can click on counties or zip codes. “We can show that Louisville Colorado, has 42 installs,” Quinby said. “When we have address-level data, we map that as well.”

Using the project’s new search tool, users can ask complex questions, such as: How many systems of 10 kilowatts or more are in the state of New Jersey and where are they? They can surf through data from several states and find they have questions of their own, such as how Massachusetts enjoyed such a steep plunge in cost-per-watt, from $15 in 2002 to about $7 in 2009.

“We’ve built a database that varies in space and time, to really understand the PV market and how it fluctuates,” Helm said.

Those who want to contribute data can create an account and visit the “Share Data” page.

An installer might upload the information that he has put PV on 200 homes, or perhaps a county energy commission will report the total installations for a three-month period.

Recently, the state of Massachusetts uploaded information on 1,500 PV installations without any solicitation from NREL.

“It’s starting to snowball,” Quinby said. “We’re not having to go out and ask for data as much as we did initially. People and organizations are now coming to us with their data.”

Zeroing In on Systems, Data
California alone has more than 50,000 PV installations recorded in Open PV project, more than three-fourths of the nation’s total.

New Jersey is second with 3,192, then Massachusetts, New York, Arizona and Connecticut.

“People want to zoom in and see their own system,” Helm said. “It’s a great tool for doing that, but really it’s meant to be more of an aggregate look at data, viewing it on bigger-picture scales.”

Open PV captures steep cost decline
One of the graphs on the site uses bars to show the rather sharp decline in average cost per watt to install PV systems from 2000 to 2007.

President Obama has set a goal for solar energy to be competitive with fossil-fuel-based energy by 2015. “This tool can be a mechanism to track progress toward grid parity,” Helm said.

“Look at how much we’ve come down from in just five years,” Helm added. “We have a ways to go, but in a few more years, we’ll be there.”

The Open PV project went on line last October.

“The overall reaction has been positive,” Helm said.

“The beauty of the site is that it has positioned itself to be the primary repository of PV data such that future PV installations will be more easily tracked and recorded,” Helm said. “The PV market should be gaining steadily. We should see a lot of installs over the next several years.”

Helm and Quinby hope to create other open data bases for wind, solar, hot water and geothermal installations — across technologies as well as across space and time.

Learn more about NREL’s market analysis group and photovoltaic research.

— Bill Scanlon

Advances In Hybrid Electric

Posted on | March 15, 2010 | Comments Off

An advancement in hybrid electric vehicle technology is providing powerful benefits beyond transportation.

Researchers at DOE’s’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory have designed, fabricated and demonstrated a PHEV traction drive power electronics system that provides significant mobile power generation and vehicle-to-grid support capabilities.

“The new technology eliminates the separate charging mechanism typically used in PHEVs, reducing both cost and volume under the hood,” said Gui-Jia Su of ORNL’s Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center. “The PHEV’s traction drive system is used to charge the battery, power the vehicle and enable its mobile energy source capabilities.”

Providing more power than typical freestanding portable generators, the PHEV can be used in emergency situations such as power outages and roadside breakdowns or leisure occasions such as camping. Day-to-day, the PHEV can be used to power homes or businesses or supply power to the grid when power load is high, according to Su.

The charging system concept, which is market ready, could also be used to enhance the voltage stability of the grid by providing reactive power, Su said. The Power Electronics and Electric Machinery Research Center is DOE’s broad-based research center helping lead the nation’s advancing shift from petroleum-powered to hybrid-electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. The center’s efforts directly support DOE’s Vehicle Technologies Program and its goal to provide Americans with greater freedom of mobility and energy security while lowering costs and reducing impacts on the environment.

by Kathy Graham, DOE