Energy42
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Sustainability Student Explains How “Smart Buildings” Are Better
Building energy consumption is an important sustainability and economic issue, as buildings account for 40% of all energy consumed. In a recently published paper, M.S. in Sustainability Management student, Greg Falco, explains how Smart Buildings help address these issues, using data analytics to troubleshoot building system inefficiencies that result in unnecessary energy costs.
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What are the Keystone XL Pipeline Risks to Water Resources?
One of the issues most passionately discussed now in the media and blogosphere is the KeystoneXL Pipeline proposal, to allow Canadian oil and gas company TransCanada to build a pipeline to transfer tar sands oil from Alberta to Texas. So what are the arguments?
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Carbon Capture & Storage Project Stalls
In June, American Electric Power suspended its work on the world’s largest test of carbon capture and storage at a power plant in West Virginia, citing lack of regulatory certainty. At the successful conclusion of a two year validation phase, American Electric Power is indefinitely delaying the next step, commercial scale demonstration. The U.S. Department…
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Drilling for Carbon-Storing Rocks in Suburban New York
Under the shopping malls and highways of suburbia, there might one day be a partial fix for global warming. Since August, engineers have been drilling just west of the Tappan Zee Bridge to collect samples of rock from the Newark Basin, an ancient rock formation stretching beneath New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. As they…
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Is Biomass Really Renewable?
Ninety percent of all existing biomass power plants use wood residue and there are currently 115 power plants in development that will burn biomass to generate electricity. But just how renewable is biomass energy?
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Hydraulic Fracturing: Resources for Journalists
(Updated Feb. 12, 2019) Earth Institute scientists can offer a wide range of expertise to journalists covering natural-gas production using hydraulic fracturing (hydrofracking). This includes basics of energy exploration and extraction; rock mechanics; contaminants in underground water; manmade earthquakes; and economic/political questions surrounding the practice. Here is a brief guide. (Click on hyperlinks for individual…
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Canadian Boreal: Protecting Today’s Water for Tomorrow
Canada’s Boreal forest is far from the public eye, but it contains 25 percent of the world’s wetlands.
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The Abatement Gap
Results of a recent modeling exercise by the Columbia Climate Center in a collaborative project with Deutsche Bank Climate Change Advisors indicate that the combined impact of more than 350 energy and emissions policies in place across the world fails to reach, by 2020, an emission trajectory consistent with stabilizing atmospheric levels of CO2 at…
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Cooling the Former Frontier: Using Water to Save Energy
AC units have become more efficient over the years, but energy consumption during hot summer months can increase significantly, boosting both the amount of money spent on electricity and the volume of greenhouse gasses emitted in the energy production process.
