Building Energy-efficient Homes for Low-carbon Cities in China

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Residential buildings in China use twice as much energy to heat as equally cold places in Europe or the U.S.
• A Bank-supported project has modernized heating systems and sped up energy efficiency in buildings in China’s urban areas.
• The Bank is prepared to expand efforts – to look into how to integrate energy efficiency of buildings into low-carbon cities as a whole.

Winter is approaching and it's time to turn on the heat. Shen Tianxiang, a resident of Tianjin, China, is content that he will pay less for heating than before, since he now lives in an energy-efficient home.

Heating is vital to survive winter in northern China – where temperatures can plunge to -30 degrees Celsius. But most of the heating systems there are coal-fired, centralized, inefficient and have poor emission controls. Buildings also lack proper insulation.

To make things worse, there’s little incentive for people to cut their high energy use – the bills most people pay are dictated by the size of their apartment, not by how much energy they use.

On average, residential buildings in China use twice as much energy to heat as places in Europe or the United States where the temperature can be just as cold.

A project supported by the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) is helping bring change – to modernize heating systems and speed up energy efficiency in China’s urban homes.

Saving both energy and money

Shen Tianxiang lives in Tianjin’s Huasha Classic Community, a residential complex that is part of the Heat Reform and Building Energy Efficiency Project. These buildings demonstrate energy efficiency gains and cost savings in residential space heating.

The project, launched in 2005, aims to

• Improve enforcement of energy efficiency standards for buildings , as well as design and use of insulation and other energy-saving measures;
• Implement heat metering, cost-based pricing and consumption-based billing;
• Modernize heat supply systems so that residents can control when the heat is on.

 “Since we adopted heat metering, I can save more than 2,000 yuan ($300) a year,” Shen says. “With insulated external walls, I only need to turn on one of the eight radiators around my apartment. In the past, when we didn’t have the control valve, we had to open the windows when it got too warm in the room. Now we save both energy and money.”

“In Huasha Classic community alone, last winter, about 60 percent of the residents paid lower heating fees than before the adoption of heat metering and other energy-saving measures. This shows that residents can get some real benefits from energy-efficient buildings,” says Tang Xiao, a project coordinator with the Tianjin Housing and Urban-Rural Development Commission, which manages the project implementation in Tianjin.

The project has also motivated developers by covering a portion of the incremental costs associated with their energy efficiency innovations. Wang Jian, Vice President and Chief Engineer of Tianjin Huasha Construction & Development Company, says his company has gained good experience that can be used in future work.

“Participating in this project has also strengthened our company’s brand,” he says.

The benefits go beyond energy savings, he says. “This project also inspired us to explore resource-saving measures in a broader scope. For example, we built a water recycling system in this complex.”   

Besides, the local government conducts wide-ranging public education campaigns on energy efficiency in residential buildings, which are partly supported by the project.  Brochures on heat metering are handed to each household when they move in to a newly-built apartment building.

Since we adopted heat metering, I can save more than 2,000 yuan ($300) a year 

Shen Tianxiang
A resident living in Tianjin’s Huasha Classic Community

From Tianjin to other cities

Tianjin has been a pilot in heat reform and is setting a model for other cities in China. By 2015, it plans to set up controllable heating systems and consumption-based billing in 35% of the existing buildings and 100% of new buildings.

Other cities are making similar efforts. The project also helped Urumqi, in Northwestern China’s Xinjiang Province, to develop one of the first green building developments and supported several other cities to develop consumption-based billing policies.

“China has made strong efforts in the past few years in improving energy efficiency in buildings. First, it has promoted advanced energy efficiency standards for buildings; second, it has also looked into how to enforce those standards, so that buildings that are designed are in fact built according to those standards,” says Gailius Draugelis, a senior energy specialist at the World Bank.

From residential buildings to overall low carbon cities

China’s building boom is happening not only in the North, where much attention has been paid to improve energy efficiency standards because of the region’s heavy use of energy for heating, but also in the South, where air conditioning can easily be running for six months a year and also requires smarter energy use.  

Rapid urbanization also drives construction of office buildings and other facilities, which have significant energy needs, too.

Experts say that energy-efficient buildings are one of the most cost-effective approaches to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help save resources.

“We are prepared to expand our efforts, to look not only into energy efficiency in residential buildings,” says Draugelis, “but also how we can integrate these principles into our quest for low-carbon cities in China.”

Super-Powerful X-Ray Beam Will Probe the Center of the Earth

By Rebecca Boyle

Beamline Sample This image shows the heating of a catalyst sample in an "in situ" cell at actual operating conditions. The catalyst is studied using time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy. A new beamline at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility has a resolution of a few microseconds. ESRF

It is much easier to get to Mars than to get deep inside this planet, so for all our knowledge about things like earthquakes and the magnetic field, Earth’s interior is actually very poorly understood. To study how metals interact at the prodigious pressures within, scientists squeeze small particles in the lab and heat them up — but this is an inexact science and difficult to do. A newly revamped X-ray beam facility in Europe may be able to improve matters, and shed some light on just what is going on at the center of our planet.

The European Synchrotron Radiation Facility inaugurates its new ID24 beam today, in preparation for experiments next spring. It will enable scientists to exact extreme pressures and temperatures on metals, aiming to understand how they act at Earth’s core. It will also be able to study new chemical catalysts and battery technology, among other atomic reactions.

A synchrotron is a type of particle accelerator — the Tevatron is one — that can be used for a wide range of applications. One such application involves harnessing the accelerated particles' electromagnetic radiation for scientific imaging. Synchrotron light sources use a series of magnetic fields to bend this radiation into different wavelengths of light. At ESRF, beamlines branch off from the particle acceleration ring to capture the particles’ (usually electrons) radiation. The new beamline, ID24, will enable incredibly fast X-ray absorption spectroscopy.

This works by firing an intense X-ray beam at a sample, and watching how atoms of the different elements inside the sample absorb the X-rays — it’s an active probe, monitoring its own experiments. The beamline has an array of germanium detectors that can take 1 million measurements per second, according to an ESRF news release. So scientists could take a small sample of iron, put it in the beamline, heat it to 10,000 degrees, and watch what happens. This would conceivably help scientists understand how iron behaves 1,500 miles beneath the surface of the Earth, and what are the melting points of other metals present in the mantle and core. This, in turn, could shed some light on things like Earth’s dynamo, which creates its magnetic field.

The ID24 beam is the first of eight new beamlines at ESRF, part of a $245 million (180 million Euro) upgrade.

Renewables almost a quarter of World Bank's energy lending

A wind turbine farm in Tunisia

• Renewable energy a growing share of World Bank lending


• World Bank endorses UN sustainable energy goals


• Policy incentives, financing are key to expanding access and clean energy

November 7, 2011 - The World Bank Group’s renewable energy portfolio increased from a total of $3.1 billion between fiscal years 2008-09 to $4.9 billion in 2010-11. Given the simultaneous expansion of the overall energy portfolio during the same period, the renewable energy proportion rose from 20% to 23%.

The absolute dollar figures will decline in coming years as the Bank Group’s overall portfolio contracts after the extraordinary level of fiscal crisis lending in 2009 and 2010. But even amid year-to-year fluctuations, continued adoption of pro-growth, pro-poor and climate-resilient policies by countries will likely reinforce their interest in renewable energy financing from the Bank Group.

This is aligned with growing evidence that countries investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency will emerge as winners. Their investments can help expand access to energy and, in the case of manufacturing of renewable energy technologies, also create jobs that lay the foundation for sustained prosperity.

The use of renewable energy sources like hydropower, geothermal and solar panels, as well as programs such as Lighting Africa, all promise to bring affordable electricity to light homes and businesses and charge cell phones for hundreds of millions. || S. Vijay Iyer, Director, Sustainable Energy Department, The World Bank

Expanding access—while a critical goal in those countries where it is low—is not the only force driving investments in renewable energy. Ethiopia, for example, is developing its vast hydro potential to meet booming demand from its own cities and industries, and to export hydroelectricity to neighboring Kenya.

In doing so, it aims to join middle-income countries making a strategic choice for renewable energy. A studyby the UN Environment Programme, Bloomberg and the Frankfurt School, reports that developing countries, led by China, Brazil and India, attracted financial new investment in renewable energy totaling $72 billion in 2010, outpacing developed countries in which new financial investment in renewables was just over $70 billion. Africa had the largest percentage increase in renewable energy investment among the developing regions, excluding the big three economies, reaching $3.6 billion, a 380%-increase over the $750 million invested in 2009.

“In the low-income countries, where access rates are below 30%, or even 10% in some cases, expanding access has to be our priority,” said S. Vijay Iyer, Director of the Bank’s Sustainable Energy Department. “That is reflected in our investments in electrification programs and power systems. The use of renewable energy sources like hydropower, geothermal and solar panels, as well as programs such as Lighting Africa, all promise to bring affordable electricity to light homes and businesses and charge cell phones for hundreds of millions.”

In middle-income countries, the Bank approved major projects in 2011 that meet twin goals of expanding access and reinforcing countries efforts to achieve a sustainable energy path. The Bank approved $175 million for Indonesia’s Geothermal Clean Energy Investment Project to help meet growingenergy needs in a clean and climate-friendly way. It will enable Pertamina Geothermal Energy to boost power generation capacity by up to 150 megawatts in three geothermal fields. Absent this investment, an equivalent capacity of coal-based power generation would be required.

In India, theBank approved a $648 million loan to THDC India Ltd. to support construction of the Vishnugad Pipalkoti Hydroelectric plant, expected to generate 1,665 million kilowatt-hours of electricity a year and meet peak demand from households and industries.  The 444-megawatt project will also help reduce India’s greenhouse gas emissions by 1.6 million tons each year.

The Bank is supporting another large-scale renewable energy project in Kenya. A $330-million International Development Association (IDA) credit was approved in 2010 to expand geothermal power production at the country’s Olkaria plant by 280 megawatts. It’s part of a $1.4 billion package supported by the Kenyan government and multiple partners to expand electricity access, connecting 1.5 million people and businesses to the electricity grid by 2015.

As delegations prepare for climate talks at the 17^th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Durban November 29 – December 9, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has set a high level of ambition on renewable energy. He recently called on governments, private sector and civil society to achieve to double the proportion of renewable energy in their energy mix by 2030, while also delivering universal access to energy, and improving energy efficiency.

These goals reflect the urgency of the crisis, which demands such ambition, Sri Mulyani Indrawati, World Bank Managing Director, told an energy conference in Oslo in October. “Look at the scale of energy poverty—1.4 billion people who still live in darkness after sunset, and three billion who burn wood, dung or coal to heat their homes or cook their meals,” she said. “We need ambitious goals like these...on behalf of the World Bank, I welcome and share this level of ambition.”

How to build this synergy between expanding access and increasing the proportion of renewable energy in the power mix? It depends on a mutually-reinforcing circle of policy incentives and financing to encourage new clean energy technologies and systems, along with energy efficiency measures that help make the new technologies effective and affordable.

A good example of how the Bank has worked in partnership with a country to expand accessand do it sustainably is Vietnam. In 1993, only 14% of Vietnam’s rural population had access to electricity. Today that proportion has shot up to 95%. A third of the power comes from hydro, 40% from natural gas, and just 19% from coal—a proportion in decline. Although annual carbon emissions have grown from 0.4 to 1.3 kg per capita, this is not due to household electricity, which accounts for just 20% of power usage. The World Bank supported this sustained rural electrification drive with technical assistance and zero-interest IDA credits.

More information:

• World Bank Energy website


• Energy Issue Brief

For the First Time, Lab-Grown Blood Is Pumped Into a Human's Veins

By Sean Kane

Red Blood Cell Wikimedia Commons

Artificial blood may become a common reality, thanks to the first successful transfusion of lab-grown blood into a human. Luc Douay, of Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris, extracted hematopoietic stem cells from a volunteer's bone marrow, and encouraged these cells to grow into red blood cells with a cocktail of growth factors. Douay's team labeled these cultured cells for tracing, and injected 10 billion of them (equalling 2 milliliters of blood) back into the marrow donor's body.

After five days, 94 to 100 percent of the blood cells remained circulating in the body. After 26 days, 41 to 63 percent remained, which is a normal survival rate for naturally produced blood cells. The cells functioned just like normal blood cells, effectively carrying oxygen around the body. "He showed that these cells do not have two tails or three horns and survive normally in the body," said Anna Rita Migliaccio of Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York.

This is great news for international health care. "The results show promise that an unlimited blood reserve is within reach," says Douay. The world is in dire need of a blood reserve, even with the rising donor numbers in the developed world. This need is even higher in parts of the world with high HIV infection rates, which have even lower reserves of donor-worthy blood.

Other attempts to synthesize blood have focused on creating an artificial blood substitute, rather than growing natural blood with artificial means. For example, Chris Cooper of the University of Essex in Colchester, UK, is working on a hemoglobin-based blood substitute that is less toxic than the protein in its unbound state. Artificial blood substitutes present a solution for transfusions after natural disasters and in remote areas. The artificial substitutes do not require refrigeration, unlike fresh and stem cell-grown blood.

The stem cell method has its own pros, though. "The advantage of stem cell technology is that the product will much more closely resemble a red cell transfusion, alleviating some of the safety concerns that continue around the use of the current generations of artificial products," says Cooper.

While Douay's results, published in the medical journal Blood, are a major step forward, mass-produced artificial blood is still a long way away. A patient in need of a blood transfusion would require 200 times the 10 billion cells that Douay and his colleagues used in the test. Robert Lanza, one of the first people to grow red blood cells in a lab on a large scale, suggests using embryonic stem cells, which could generate 10 times the amount grown by Douay.

[New Scientist]

Shri Saibaba

Shri Saibaba of Shirdi lived between 1838 and 1918, whose real name, birthplace and date of birth are not known. An Indian spiritual guru and a fakir that transcended the barriers of religions, Saibaba of Shirdi was regarded with great reverence by both Hindu and Muslim followers. He lived in a mosque and after death his body was cremated in a temple.

Life Of Sai babaHis philosophy ingrained 'Shraddha' meaning faith and 'Saburi' meaning compassion. According to him Shraddha and Saburi were the supreme attributes to reach the state of godliness.

It is believed that at a tender age of 16 yrs Shri Saibaba arrived at the village of Shirdi in Ahmednagar district of Maharashtra and remained their till his death. He found shelter in Khandoba temple, where a villager Mahalsapathi in the temple addressed him as Sai or Saint.

Printable Solar-Cell Material Reaches a Milestone

A performance boost for "small-molecule" solar cells could make the materials more practical.

• BY KATHERINE BOURZAC

Audio »

A new way of manufacturing printable organic solar cells could eventually lead to new kinds of low-cost, cheap, and flexible solar panels.

The work is being led by Alan Heeger and Guillermo Bazan, both professors of chemistry at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Heeger shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 for developing the kind of conductive polymers that are already used to make plastic solar cells and organic light-emitting diodes.

Polymer solar cells are inefficient compared to silicon solar cells, but they are much cheaper to make. Organic materials—whether made of polymers or so-called "small molecules," which are organic compounds with a low molecular weight—can be made into inks and printed over large areas. They're also lightweight and flexible, which makes them promising for applications like rooftop installations or solar-cell patches for charging portable electronics.

Using a new small molecule designed by Bazan, Heeger built a solar cell that converts 6.7 percent of the light energy that strikes it into electricity. Bazan expects to reach 9 percent efficiency within a year. Although efficiencies in lab tests tend to be much greater than those in a manufactured cell, this would put these materials on par with the best polymer solar cells on the market.

Until now, most efforts to improve the performance and cost of organic solar cells have focused on developing new polymer materials.

Bazan used a combination of theory and trial-and-error to develop the new small molecule material. He started by optimizing its electrical properties, so that the molecule would be able to support the high current and voltage needed to get power out of a solar cell. It's especially tricky to create a small-molecule material that makes a good film; while polymers are long and get tangled into a stable film, small molecules don't tend to make the kind of planar films needed to make a layer in a solar cell.

After a lot of tinkering on the lab bench, Bazan's group came up with a suitable small molecule and process for making a high-efficiency small-molecule solar cell. The work is described in the journal Nature Materials. Bazan expects to further improve the performance by tailoring the design of the materials.

Heeger says he had not taken small-molecule solar materials seriously in the past because the performance was dismal. "Other people have utilized small molecules, but the performance was far below that of polymers," he says.

Still, it may be hard for organic solar cells to become real contenders in the energy market, especially when silicon cells are getting cheaper. "The performance and lifetimes are not there yet," says Yang Yang, professor of materials science and engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Yang is working on polymer solar materials at his company, Solarmer, as well as small-molecule solar cells in his academic lab; his goal is 15 percent efficiency in a lab-made cell. But Yang says the Santa Barbara work is an important demonstration of the potential of small-molecule solar.

As for how these materials will fare in the market, Heeger says, "it's too soon to know," but he believes that the efficiencies have reached a respectable level and that these solar materials show promise. "Now we should take them seriously," he says.

A Super-Absorbent Solar Material

Light catcher: This scanning electron microscope image shows the super absorbent nanostructures, which measure 400 nanometers at their base.
Nature Communications

ENERGY

A Super-Absorbent Solar Material

A new material, patterned at the nanoscale, absorbs a broad spectrum of light and could make thin-film solar cells more efficient.

• BY KATHERINE BOURZAC

Audio »

A new nanostructured material that absorbs a broad spectrum of light from any angle could lead to the most efficient thin-film solar cells ever.

Researchers are applying the design to semiconductor materials to make solar cells that they hope will save money on materials costs while still offering high power-conversion efficiency. Initial tests with silicon suggest that this kind of patterning can lead to a fivefold enhancement in absorbance.

Conventional solar cells are typically a hundred micrometers or more thick. Researchers are working on ways to make thinner solar cells, on the order of hundreds of nanometers thick rather than micrometers, with the same performance, to lower manufacturing costs. However, a thinner solar cell normally absorbs less light, meaning it cannot generate as much electricity.

Some researchers are turning to exotic optical effects that emerge at the nanoscale to solve this conundrum. Harry Atwater, a professor of applied physics and materials science at Caltech and a pioneer of the field, has now come up with a way of patterning materials at the nanoscale that turns them into solar super-absorbers.

Atwater worked with Koray Aydin, now an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, to develop the super-absorber design, which takes advantage of a phenomenon called optical resonance. Just as a radio antenna will resonate with and absorb certain radio waves, nanostructured optical antennas can resonate with and absorb visible and infrared light. The length of a structure determines what wavelength of light it will resonate with. So Atwater and Aydin designed structures that effectively have many different lengths: wedge shapes with pointy tips and wide bases. The thin, nanoscale wedges strongly absorb blue light at the tip and red light at the base.

Atwater and Aydin demonstrated this broadband effect in a 260-nanometer-thick film made of a layer of silver topped with a thin layer of silicon dioxide and finished with another thin layer of silver carved with arrays of wedges that are 40 nanometers at their tips. Atwater says they chose these materials because they are particularly challenging: in their unpatterned state, they're both highly reflective; but the patterned films can absorb an average of 70 percent of the light across the entire visible spectrum. This work is described in the online journal Nature Communications.

Kylie Catchpole, a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, says the design is promising because it works over a broad band of the spectrum. These effects, Catchpole says, "are usually very sensitive to wavelength." However, she notes, the designs will have to be applied to other materials to work in solar cells.

Aydin and Atwater are now doing just that. The researchers have made a 220-nanometer-thick silicon film that absorbs the same amount of light as an unpatterned film 25 times thicker.