Category: WORLD

The Southern California desert is now home to the world’s largest solar power plant.

According to the USA Today, U.S. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell joined state officials on Monday to open the 550-megawatt Desert Sunlight solar project in the town of Desert Center, Calif., near Joshua Tree National Park. Built by First Solar, the project generates enough electricity to power 160,000 average California homes.

Desert Sunlight received a federal loan of nearly $1.5 billion, and Jewell called its completion an example of the loan guarantee program’s tremendous importance.

“When you are stepping out with new technology, when you are trying something that has been untested before, a loan guarantee program from an organization like the Department of Energy is what provides you, as a lender, that certainty that you can step up and support the project,” Jewell told The Desert Sun.

Conservative lawmakers have derided the loan guarantee program, arguing that it’s wasted billions of taxpayer dollars. Critics have pointed to the program’s $535 million loan guarantee for Solyndra, a Fremont-based solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011.

But the Department of Energy reported last year that it expects to make a profit of $5 billion to $6 billion from the program. The department funded five traditional, large-scale solar farms, and Desert Sunlight marks the last of those projects to go online.

“They’re all rock-solid, money is good, living up to every kind of condition we put in the loan documents in terms of performance, in terms of commercial operation,” Peter Davidson, executive director of the Department of Energy’s loan programs office, said in an interview last week.

The loan guarantee program did more than fund five solar photovoltaic projects, Davidson added: It helped launch the large-scale solar industry. In 2009, there were no traditional solar farms in the United States larger than 100 megawatts. Now, 17 such projects have been financed, according to a Department of Energy report released Monday.

Solar panels “existed before as a technology, but that technology hadn’t been deployed at a large scale,” Davidson said. “Once we’ve done that, the government steps aside to let the private markets take over.”

Desert Sunlight employed an average of 440 people during more than three years of construction, and it now has about 15 full-time employees. Money provided by the project’s owners — as part of an agreement negotiated with Riverside County — is also being used to fund $400,000 in improvements to the community center in nearby Desert Center.

“The debate’s over — we’re going to be moving to more renewable energy,” Riverside County Supervisor John Benoit said.

Power from the plant will go to Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric Co.

Desert Sunlight is the world’s largest solar power plant, although only by a hair.

The Topaz solar project in San Luis Obispo County, Calif. — which, like Desert Sunlight, was built by Arizona-based First Solar — also has a capacity of 550 megawatts. But the desert has more abundant sunlight than San Luis Obispo County, so Desert Sunlight will actually generate more electricity than Topaz, said Georges Antoun, First Solar’s chief operating officer.

“It’s a beautiful sun here, year-round,” he said.

California as a whole has installed more renewable energy than any other state, noted David Hochschild, a member of the California Energy Commission.

“There were a lot of skeptics who actually didn’t believe that renewables could scale, that this cost reduction could happen, that we could introduce it to the grid,” Hochschild said. “They’ve been proven wrong.”

There’s little doubt that California will get more electricity from clean energy in the coming years. The state’s three major utilities are on track to meet or exceed a 33% renewable energy mandate by 2020, and Gov. Jerry Brown is calling for policymakers to increase that target to 50% by 2030.

It’s an open question, though, whether future solar projects will be anywhere near as big as Desert Sunlight.

Developers have been gravitating toward smaller solar farms, which are easier to build and usually have a smaller impact on species and ecosystems in California’s deserts. Desert Sunlight spans 3,800 acres near Joshua Tree National Park, and it faced vehement opposition from environmental activists during its permitting process.

If legislators adopt a 50% renewable energy mandate, it could incentivize massive projects like Desert Sunlight. But Antoun said he’d be surprised to see many more projects 550 megawatts or larger, in California or elsewhere.

“Can we create a bigger project? Of course,” he said. “But it all has to do with how much appetite (states) have for how much land to utilize, and to be committed for 20-25 years.”

Utilities faced with renewable energy mandates, Antoun said, will more likely turn to projects in the 100-megawatt range, located closer to energy consumers. Projects built near cities require far less transmission infrastructure, which is expensive to build and poses a host of environmental concerns.

Scientists discovered an animal that rely on sunshine for its nutrition. A new study published in The Biological Bulletin belive that Elysia chlorotica might be the first plant-animal hybrid ever discovered, as the emerald green slug steals its solar power by feeding on algae and storing the algae’s photosynthesis performing plastids in its large transparent digestive glands.

According to the Immortal News, the emerald green elysia acquires its solar power by feeding on algae. In the process of feeding on the submerged vegetation, the slug consumes green organelles which capture energy from the sun, combine it with carbon dioxide and water, and produce food. As the chloroplasts are stored in the slug’s digestive glands, it’s able to adopt the plant-like ability of photosynthesis.

Chloroplasts are tiny capsules inside green leaves which use sunlight to power chemical reactions plants require to survive.

Scientific American’s Ferris Jabr wrote that most slugs digest chloroplasts right away, but some species like the emerald green slugs, store the algal chloroplasts for weeks to months.

This storage turns the sea slugs brilliant shades of green. Jabr goes on to say that the chloroplasts inside an alga depend on a lot of genes in the alga’s own nuclear and the proteins for which they code.

“In order to photosynthesize, the chloroplasts inside an alga depend on many genes in the alga’s own nucleus and the proteins for which they code. Tearing chloroplasts out of algal cells and asking them to make food inside a slug’s gut is like expecting the bottom half of a blender to puree some carrots sans the blade and glass jar.”

The research team used fluorescent DNA markers to illuminate the algal genes in the genetic material of adult and larva slugs, the researchers reported in the Biological Bulletin.

Professor Sidney K. Pierce, the study’s co-author and a biologist at the University of South Florida as well as the University of Maryland, indicated that there’s no way the genes from alga should work inside of an animal cell, yet they do.

” There is no way on earth that genes from an alga should work inside an animal cell […] And yet here, they do. They allow the animal to rely on sunshine for its nutrition. So if something happens to their food source, they have a way of not starving to death until they find more algae to eat.”

If the findings in the study are confirmed, this would be the first case of gene transfer from one multicellular organism to another. The report also notes that bacteria do this all the time, however, the sea slug would be the first plant-animal hybrid ever discovered.

Functional gene transfer between multicullular species is the goal of gene therapy which aims to correct genetically-based human diseases.

According to the Daily Mail, Elysia chlorotica is found in salt marshes and shallow pools along the east of the U.S., particularly in New York, Maryland, Florida, Texas, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.

The solar-powered sea slugs can produce carbohydrates and lipids for itself for up to nine months.

A tiny spacecraft designed to be pushed through space by ultra-thin “solar sails” will be launched in May by a U.S.-based non-profit group, 10 years after its first failed attempt.

The Planetary Society announced recently that its LightSail spacecraft will blast off on a test flight aboard an Atlas V rocket. The society is a non-profit space advocacy organization co-founded by the late astronomer Carl Sagan and headed by Bill Nye, best known as the Science Guy from his popular TV show.

According to CBC News, the LightSail spacecraft, a tiny cube satellite about the size of a loaf of bread, is expected to unfurl its four solar sails in June. The triangular sails are made of Mylar, about a quarter of the thickness of a garbage bag, and have a combined area of 32 square metres — equivalent to two parking spaces.

Solar sails are designed to capture the momentum from solar energy photons using large, mirrored surfaces. The small, continuous acceleration allows a spacecraft propelled by solar sails to reach high speeds over time.

“As LightSail breezes around the Earth, its shiny sails will be visible from the ground,” the Planetary Society says on its website for the project.

According to a blog post by Jason Davis, the society’s digital editor, the spacecraft won’t fly high enough to escape Earth’s atmospheric drag and demonstrate “true” solar sailing.

But it will gather time-lapse images of the sails’ deployment and engineering data that show how they perform in microgravity.

That, in turn, will be used to prepare for a second flight in 2016, at a higher altitude of 720 kilometres that will demonstrate “true solar sailing.”

The Planetary Society is collaborating on the project with California Polytechnic State University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, which will help collect data from the spacecraft, and two private space technology companies, Stellar Exploration Inc., which built the spacecraft, and Ecliptic Enterprises Corp., which conducted flight testing.

Five years later, the first solar sails were deployed by Japan’s Venus-bound IKAROS spacecraft and NASA’s NanoSail-D satellite in low-Earth orbit.

NASA has two upcoming solar sail missions, one to the moon and the other to an asteroid, scheduled for 2018.

Microbiologists from California have discovered bacteria that survive by eating pure electrons rather than food, bringing an entirely new method of existence to awareness and raising questions about possibilities for alien life.

According to Extreme Tech, the ‘electric bacteria’ – as they have been dubbed by the team that discovered them – take energy from rocks and metal by feasting directly on their electrons. The hair-like filaments the bacteria produce carry electrons between the cells and their environment.

These bacteria yet again prove the almost miraculous tenacity of life — but, from a technology standpoint, they might also prove to be useful in enabling the creation of self-powered nanoscale devices that clean up pollution. Some of these bacteria also have the curious ability to form into ‘biocables,’ microbial nanowires that are centimeters long and conduct electricity as well as copper wires — a capability that might one day be tapped to build long, self-assembling subsurface networks for human use.

As you may recall from high school biology, almost every living organism consumes sugar to survive. When it gets right down to it, everything you eat is ultimately converted or digested into single molecules of glucose. Without going into the complexities of respiration and metabolism (ATP!), these sugars have excess electrons — and the oxygen you breathe in really wants those electrons. By ferrying electrons from sugar to oxygen, a flow of electrons — i.e. energy — is created, which is then used to carry out various vital tasks around your body (triggering electrons, beating your heart, etc.)

These special bacteria, however, don’t need no poxy sugars — instead, they cut out the middleman and feed directly on electrons. To discover these bacteria, and to cultivate them in the lab, the USC biologists quite simply scooped up some sediment from the ocean, took it back to the lab, stuck some electrodes into it, and then turned on the power. When higher voltages are pumped into the water, the bacteria “eats” electrons from the electrode; when a lower voltage is present, the bacteria “exhales” electrons onto the electrode, creating an electrical current (which could be used to power a device, if you were so inclined). The USC study very carefully controlled for other sources of nutrition — these bacteria were definitely eating electrons directly.

 All told, various researchers around the world have now discovered upwards of 10 different kinds of bacteria that feed on electricity — and, interestingly, they’re all pretty different (they’re not from the same family), and none of them are like Shewanella or Geobacter, two well-known bacteria that have interesting electrical properties. Kenneth Nealson of USC, speaking to New Scientist about his team’s discovery, said: “This is huge. What it means is that there’s a whole part of the microbial world that we don’t know about.

As for the repercussions of finding bacteria that eat and excrete electrons, the most obvious use is in the growing fields of molecular motors and nanomachines. These bacteria, at their most basic, are machines that consume raw electricity — and so, with some clever (genetic?) engineering, it stands to reason that we might one day use them to power tiny machines that can perform tasks that are currently carried out by expensive, human-operated machines (cleaning up chemical spills, for example). These bacteria might also allow us to find out exactly how much energy a living cell needs to survive; put them in a test tube, and then slowly dial back the electrode voltage until they die. A cruel experiment, but one that would yield very informative results.