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If this isn’t your first time here, then you probably figured it out but…we got a new website!
I like the look of this a lot more than the old one. I really like the slidebox on the home page, too.
Give me feedback. If something is confusing or there is a broken like, fill out the contact form or leave a comment
Thanks!
Daniel
Thursday,
January 21, 2010
8:00AM-5:00PM
$295
HOK Training Center
191 Peachtree St. NE Suite 4100
Atlanta, GA 30303
The Quality Growth Institute is offering an intensive, eight-hour course – intended for those in the construction, development, design, real estate, legal, facility operation, regulatory, or other related fields or industries – to prepare attendees to register, prepare for, and pass the Green Associate exam.
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With the coming of 2010, also comes new green tax incentives. One of the biggest green tax incentives available to homeowners is Energy Star Roof. This tax credit was available last year and is being extended through 2010. It has not been said if the write-off has been increased.
Currently, if you replace your current shingle roof with an Energy Star Certified Roofing Shingle, $1500.00 of the cost can be taken off you taxes. As Atlanta’s first green contractor, GreenWave Solutions has been working with Energy Star Roof Shingles for years.
We use CertainTeed Solaris, Owens Corning Duration Premium Cool Shingles, GAF Cool Color Series, and more!
GreenWave Solutions is the first Energy Star Roofers in Atlanta.
Call 678-491-2963 for a free estimate!
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Green building is a global movement, and USGBC has a growing commitment to ensuring our message has a global reach. Our international activities at Greenbuild and our expertise in policy, in technical green building issues, and in supporting the drive for a common carbon metric position us well to play a constructive role on the world stage in advancing the contributions of the built environment toward solving climate change.
As evidence of this commitment, this week, USGBC will join other green building councils and thought leaders from around the world in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the Conference of the Parties (COP15) United Nations Climate Change Conference. World leaders continue to struggle to find consensus around defining common goals and targets to address climate change, but during these critical meetings USGBC will aggressively add its voice to others who see greenhouse gas reductions from buildings as a fundamental strategy that should be addressed as part of the outcome of this round of talks.
Greenbuild 2009 – with its 27,373 attendees from 78 countries, hundreds of participants in the WorldGBC’s International Congress, and a dozen leaders of green building councils from every region of the world participating in the Opening Keynote & Celebration – underscored our international dedication. USGBC is committed to harnessing that energy and excitement with a focus on some clear international goals that will help us elevate the conversation.
One of those priorities is a common carbon metric. A fundamental aspect of tackling our carbon reduction goals is the ability to measure our progress, and to do that we need to have a common language worldwide. In November, the world’s leading green building organizations – including USGBC – reached a ground-breaking agreement to adopt a common global metric for the measurement of the carbon footprint of buildings. This is a critical and timely step that will demonstrate the cost-effective carbon mitigation potential of buildings, which account for around 40% of the world’s energy use and 33% of global greenhouse gas emissions. You can follow the events at Copenhagen by checking back regularly at the USGBC.org COP15 news page.
Essential to supporting the green building movement internationally is building capacity on the ground in local communities worldwide, providing professionals, policy makers and others with the tools and training they need to make green building a reality. Throughout 2009, the model by which USGBC develops, delivers and supports LEED and green building knowledge underwent a major evolution that will allow us to serve global as well as domestic audiences more effectively. We are working with green building councils and partners worldwide to bring our LEED curriculum to their communities. We will have increasing capacity to train green building professionals across the globe to serve as LEED instructors. Our course review process will allow us to identify and support quality green building education developed by third-party providers, including green building councils, international and multinational companies offering training for their employees, universities and formal education institutions, and others. We will offer education development services to help third-party providers create and improve their own green building curriculum. And we are committed to providing translations of select publications and courses, beginning with Spanish during 2010. Questions may be directed to the USGBC education department.
The USGBC community helps frame the global conversation about climate change mitigation, economic revitalization, and the other environmental and social challenges we face. We see that definitively in LEED’s increasing uptake in the world marketplace. At the end of the third quarter of 2009, there were 4,599 LEED APs outside of the United States. Currently, there are 2,688 non-U.S. green building projects registered or certified under LEED in 117 countries. Clearly, on the ground here and around the world, the pace of green building and the work of green building professionals underscore the immediacy and importance of the impact of green buildings.
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Art and Sole For the Holidays Sneaker Drive
Hosted by Broccoli City, Adrene’s Boutique, T-Mobile, & 3E Youth Services
Join us for an Evening of Art, Music, Cocktails, and Holiday Giving
Please donate new or gently used Sneakers to be donated to to Boys and Girls Club
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Adrene’s Boutique
242 Peters St.
Atlanta, GA 30313
7PM-10PM
Cheap, Efficient Solar Cells You Can Print
For a while, everybody was talking about Nanosolar. They were the Tesla Motors of solar panels, in a way. But for the past year, they’ve kept quiet and this led some people to doubt that the company really would be able to deliver on what it had promised. Was it all hype? Well, Nanosolar has now broken radio silence and the news are good. They’ve simultaneously released information about three things, along with a very cool video that shows what the inside of their factories look like, including the brand new one in Germany.
Nanosolar 640MW Robotic Factory in Germany
The first piece of news from Nanosolar concerns a solar panel factory in Germany with a capacity of 640MW/year. The fully-automated facility is located in Luckenwalde near Berlin, and its inauguration was attended by Germany’s Minister of the Environment and the Governor of the State of Brandenburg, among others.
The 640 megawatts per year number if reached when the factory is operated 24/7 at the rate of 1 solar panel every 10 seconds! Nanosolar has also announced that serial production in its San Jose, California, cell production factory commenced earlier this year and that production would be ramping up to meet the $4.1 billion in contracts that they already have.
Researchers in the Materials Sciences Division (MSD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, working with crystal-growing teams at Cornell University and Japan’s Ritsumeikan University, have learned that the band gap of the semiconductor indium nitride is not 2 electron volts (2 eV) as previously thought, but instead is a much lower 0.7 eV.
The serendipitous discovery means that a single system of alloys incorporating indium, gallium, and nitrogen can convert virtually the full spectrum of sunlight — from the near infrared to the far ultraviolet — to electrical current.
“It’s as if nature designed this material on purpose to match the solar spectrum,” says MSD’s Wladek Walukiewicz, who led the collaborators in making the discovery.
What began as a basic research question points to a potential practical application of great value. For if solar cells can be made with this alloy, they promise to be rugged, relatively inexpensive — and the most efficient ever created.
Many factors limit the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. Silicon is cheap, for example, but in converting light to electricity it wastes most of the energy as heat. The most efficient semiconductors in solar cells are alloys made from elements from group III of the periodic table, like aluminum, gallium, and indium, with elements from group V, like nitrogen and arsenic.
One of the most fundamental limitations on solar cell efficiency is the band gap of the semiconductor from which the cell is made. In a photovoltaic cell, negatively doped (n-type) material, with extra electrons in its otherwise empty conduction band, makes a junction with positively doped (p-type) material, with extra holes in the band otherwise filled with valence electrons. Incoming photons of the right energy — that is, the right color of light — knock electrons loose and leave holes; both migrate in the junction’s electric field to form a current.
Photons with less energy than the band gap slip right through. For example, red light photons are not absorbed by high-band-gap semiconductors. While photons with energy higher than the band gap are absorbed — for example, blue light photons in a low-band gap semiconductor — their excess energy is wasted as heat.
The maximum efficiency a solar cell made from a single material can achieve in converting light to electrical power is about 30 percent; the best efficiency actually achieved is about 25 percent. To do better, researchers and manufacturers stack different band gap materials in multijunction cells.
Dozens of different layers could be stacked to catch photons at all energies, reaching efficiencies better than 70 percent, but too many problems intervene. When crystal lattices differ too much, for example, strain damages the crystals. The most efficient multijunction solar cell yet made — 30 percent, out of a possible 50 percent efficiency — has just two layers.
The first clue to an easier and better route came when Walukiewicz and his colleagues were studying the opposite problem — not how semiconductors absorb light to create electrical power, but how they use electricity to emit light.
“We were studying the properties of indium nitride as a component of LEDs,” says Walukiewicz. In light-emitting diodes and lasers, photons are emitted when holes recombine with electrons. Red-light LEDs have been familiar for decades, but it was only in the 1990s that a new generation of wide-band gap LEDs emerged, capable of radiating light at the blue end of the spectrum.
The new LEDs were made from indium gallium nitride. With a band gap of 3.4 eV, gallium nitride emits invisible ultraviolet light, but when some of the gallium is exchanged for indium, colors like violet, blue, and green are produced. The Berkeley Lab researchers surmised that the same alloy might emit even longer wavelengths if the proportion of indium was increased.
“But even though indium nitride’s band gap was reported to be 2 eV, nobody could get light out of it at 2 eV,” Walukiewicz says. “All our efforts failed.”
Previously the band gap had been measured on samples created by sputtering, a technique in which atoms of the components are knocked off a solid target by a beam of hot plasma. If such a sample were to be contaminated with impurities like oxygen, the band gap would be displaced.
To get the best possible samples of indium nitride, the Berkeley Lab researchers worked with a group at Cornell University headed by William Schaff, renowned for their expertise at molecular beam epitaxy (MBE), and also with a group at Ritsumeikan University headed by Yasushi Nanishi. In MBE the components are deposited as pure gases in high vacuum at moderate temperatures under clean conditions.
When the Berkeley Lab researchers studied these exquisitely pure crystals, there was still no light emission at 2 eV. “But when we looked at a lower band gap, all of a sudden there was lots of light,” Walukiewicz says.
The collaborators soon established that the alloy’s band-gap width increases smoothly and continuously as the proportions shift from indium toward gallium, until — having covered every part of the solar spectrum — it reaches the well-established value of 3.4 eV for simple gallium nitride.
At first glance, indium gallium nitride is not an obvious choice for solar cells. Its crystals are riddled with defects, hundreds of millions or even tens of billions per square centimeter. Ordinarily, defects ruin the optical properties of a semiconductor, trapping charge carriers and dissipating their energy as heat.
In studying LEDs, however, the Berkeley Lab researchers found that the way indium joins with gallium in the alloy leaves indium-rich concentrations that, remarkably, emit light efficiently. Such defect-tolerance in LEDs holds out hope for similar performance in solar cells.
To exploit the alloy’s near-perfect correspondence to the spectrum of sunlight will require a multijunction cell with layers of different composition. Walukiewicz explains that “lattice matching is normally a killer” in multijunction cells, “but not here. These materials can accommodate very large lattice mismatches without any significant effect on their optoelectronic properties.”
Two layers of indium gallium nitride, one tuned to a band gap of 1.7 eV and the other to 1.1 eV, could attain the theoretical 50 percent maximum efficiency for a two-layer multijunction cell. (Currently, no materials with these band gaps can be grown together.) Or a great many layers with only small differences in their band gaps could be stacked to approach the maximum theoretical efficiency of better than 70 percent.
It remains to be seen if a p-type version of indium gallium nitride suitable for solar cells can be made. Here too success with LEDs made of the same alloy gives hope. A number of other parameters also remain to be settled, like how far charge carriers can travel in the material before being reabsorbed.
Indium gallium nitride’s advantages are many. It has tremendous heat capacity and, like other group III nitrides, is extremely resist to radiation. These properties are ideal for the solar arrays that power communications satellites and other spacecraft. But what about cost?
“If it works, the cost should be on the same order of magnitude as traffic lights,” Walukiewicz says. “Maybe less.” Solar cells so efficient and so relatively cheap could revolutionize the use of solar power not just in space but on Earth.
The Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California.
This undoubtedly will help our Atlanta Solar systems be cheaper and more efficient than ever!
Thanks to DOW, we may finally get solar shingles that work. The current solar shingles available for residential roofing have n0t seen substantial use for 3 reasons. 1) They are too expensive and inefficient, 2) They are difficult to install and unreliable and 3) The are manufactured by small companies that have poor distribution and little post-sale support. It seems that this all may change soon as DOW Chemical unveils its solar shingles.
Dow Chemical has unveiled a residential roof shingle in the form of a solar panel designed to be integrated into asphalt-tiled roofs.
Jane Palmieri, managing director of Dow’s Solar Solutions unit, said the Powerhouse thin-film shingle slashes installation costs because it can be installed by a roofer who is already building or retrofitting a roof.
“As a roofer is nailing asphalt shingle on roof, wherever the array needs to be installed he just switches to solar shingle,” said Ms. Palmieri, who said the solar singles are similarly attached to the roof with nails.
“You don’t have to have a solar installation crew do the work or have an electrician on site,” she added. “The solar shingle can be handled like any other shingle – it can be palletized, dropped from a roof, walked on.”
An electrician is still needed to connect the completed array to an inverter and to a home’s electrical system, but unlike conventional solar panels that must be wired together, the solar shingles plug into each other to form the array.
Dow plans to begin test-marketing the solar shingle in mid-2010, initially targeting new-home construction. Ms. Palmieri said the market could be worth $5 billion by 2015 and noted that 90 percent of homes in the United States use asphalt shingles.
Dow designed the shingles, which will initially be manufactured at the company’s Midland, Mich., facility. Global Solar of Tucson, Ariz., is supplying the thin-film solar cells.
Thin-film has generally not been used for residential systems because of its relatively low efficiency – Global Solar’s cells are 10 percent efficient. That means a larger array is required generate the same of amount of electricity as conventional solar panels.
But Dave Parrillo, the senior research and development director for Dow Solar Solutions, said the solar shingles can offset between 40 percent and 80 percent of a home’s electricity consumption.
Ms. Palmieri said a solar shingle array is 10 percent to 15 percent cheaper than a standard rack-mounted solar panel system and about 40 percent less expensive than competing building-integrated photovoltaic products.
“Our objective is to prove that this can be a mainstream adopted product,” she said.
GreenWave Solutions’ Solar Energy and Roofing Division will be offering these new solar shingles as soon as they are available. Call us for information.
Its not just you, even I did not know about the ‘green’ qualities of banana fiber. In fact, I did not even know what banana fiber was! And then I found out: Banana fibers arrive from the banana plant, which grows easily as it sets out young shoots and is found in hot climates. All varieties of banana trees abound in fibers. These fibers can be obtained from the plant itself in addition to the fruit, after they are harvested. The process of extraction is cheap and simple. Since banana fiber is a natural product, it is compatible with other natural fibers. It can also be dyed easily, is very strong and versatile, and doesn’t crumple fast. The fiber can be powdered and different colors can be obtained using natural dyes. I bet you didn’t know that 
I want to inform everyone in Atlanta that GreenWave Solutions is offering a WINTER SPECIAL on all Atlanta Painting!
This includes interior painting, exterior painting, residential painting, commercial painting, and more!
The discount will be between 10% -30%!
This special will be going on between December 1st, 2009 – March 15th, 2010!
Call us today to schedule your free estimate with one of our professional estimators.
Be Green, Save Green, Go GreenWave! You won’t be sorry.
678-491-2963
We serve most of Metro Atlanta including, Alpharetta, Brookhaven, Buckhead, Chamblee, Cumming, Dunwoody, Grant Park, Inman Park, Marietta, Norcross, Roswell, Sandy Springs, and Virginia Highlands.
