Headache in the Heartland

Robert Byrnes, a 48-year-old army veteran with a broad nose and a rugged cleft chin, is the kind of man who can tell you everything that’s wrong with Nebraska’s state energy policy while sweating in the shade of a solar panel and gnawing on a cob of corn. Byrnes holds a degree in organic chemistry from the University of Massachusetts and runs an integrator business, Nebraska Renewable Energy Systems, on a 10-acre off-grid estate that he calls his »Energy Farm.« When I met him he’d just returned from Kansas where he was trying to drum up work installing photovoltaics (PV), but the trip didn’t yield much and Byrnes wondered where, and when, his next solar job would be.

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First we take Manhattan

During nine separate nights last spring, a small twin-engine Shrike Commander soared over the city that never sleeps. Equipped with a lidar system, which sent out laser pulses to track every point of space between it and the Earth some 3,500 ft below, the flight collected data to produce a glowing never-before-seen solar map of New York – making this, researchers hope, one of the most photovoltaic (PV) module-studded cities of the future.

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To Light an Island

Our canoe docks next to some thatched huts on the tiny island of Soledad Mirya and we’re greeted by a small dark Indian man wearing green corduroy slacks, a black fedora, a checkered tie and a necklace strung with shark’s teeth. His name is Roy and he is the sayla, or chief, of this Kuna community – one of 40 groups scattered out among the hundreds of low lying, sand- and coconut-strewn San Blas Islands, otherwise known as the Kuna Yala, located several miles off the Caribbean coast of Panama.

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Energy Thirst

That was the question I asked when I met in July with Panama’s somewhat combative Energy Secretary, Juan Urriola, and the one-word answer I got was this: hydropower. Panama currently produces 750 megawatts of hydroelectric energy each year, or 60 percent of the national total, he told me. Now, with $1.7 billion (1.34 billion euro) invested in 17 new hydro projects – some of which will be completed as early as next year – that means an additional 600 megawatts.

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Tapping the Sun

Nothing like putting your feet up on a hot summer day and sipping a cold one, right? Well, now the companies making the beer are taking in the rays – and the trend toward solar brewing is showing dollar results in a very unwatered-down way. Across America, from craft breweries like Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in Chico, California, to the corporate beer giant Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis, Missouri, the financial logic of making beer with solar power has become sparklingly clear. And as photovoltaic (PV) systems expand atop more and more US brewery roofs, so does the refreshing message to consumers that they can finally drink green.

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