Solar Efficiency Record Broken

Written by Hank Green

When it comes to eeking another fraction of a percentage point of power out of a solar panel, we're pretty good at not paying attention. I mean, what's the difference between 40.7% and 40.8% anyway?

Generally these efficiency gains aren't all that important to the future of the solar economy. Yes, it's a new world record, but the photovoltaic modules that are most economical are only like 20% efficient. They're better because they're cheaper...and these record-breaking panels are NEVER cheap.

But this one is worth talking about.

Scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado eeked that extra fraction of a percent out using a few very interesting techniques. Highly efficient solar cells have to split light into segments and then capture each hunk of wavelengths separately. This lets the panel be efficient across a wide spectrum.

This new chip uses an entirely different system to split the wavelengths (gallium indium arsenide and gallium indium phosphide...if you're curious.) The result is a much thinner and lighter solar cell that could even possibly be flexible.

The chips is also optimally efficient under concentrated sunlight. Concentrated sunlight is preferable because large areas of light can be concentrated on small areas of photovoltaic material. And since the PV material (especially this ultra-efficient stuff) is extremely expensive, using less per unit of sunlight captured is way better.

In short, this isn't just another tiny bump in efficiency, it's an entirely new solar cell, and one that could be very useful not just for satellites, but also for utility scale solar. Though, to be fair, the path to the commercial market is always pretty arduous for these new solar technologies.

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Save the planet? Buy it

Parque Tantauco, which Piñera created in 2005, is on one of South America's largest islands, Chiloé, off the coast of Patagonia.

	Sebastián Piñera and construction work in Parque Tantauco

Piñera bought the land and immediately set about protecting the offshore habitat of blue whales and the inland virgin forests.

Pulling out a map of the park, Piñera explains his plan, tracing his finger over a trekking route that will be connected by rustic cabins.

'We have been buying all the land around us. We started with 110,000 acres and now we have 150,000,' he says. 'I want my children and grandchildren to remember me for making one more million? No! So I now have many projects like this.'

While yachts and jets marked the status of last century's super rich, today the stylish accessory for millionaires is their very own ecosystem.

From Patagonia to Montana, hundreds of thousands of acres are being bought by wealthy businessmen and placed in private charities, conservation trusts or handed over to governments as a gift.

Johan Eliasch, chairman of Head, the ski and sporting goods manufacturer, and the grandson of a Swedish property developer, has taken his business skills and invested them in a new industry - Amazon Forest conservation.

Eliasch, who has a personal fortune estimated at £360m, has bought 400,000 acres in the Brazilian Amazon, near the river town of Manicore.

Deforestation, argues Eliasch, causes more carbon emissions annually than transportation, yet is often overlooked.

In his parcel of land, Eliasch estimates that some 80m tons of carbon are trapped in the forest - about the same amount the entire Swedish population will produce over the next 15 years at current rates (53m tons per year).

'The key to saving the Amazon and the rest of the world's great rainforests is actually very simple: just put a fair price on the role they play in providing a quarter of the world's oxygen, a fifth of fresh water and 60 per cent of its species,' declares Eliasch.

'I truly believe that with their values as a carbon store at last being recognised, we will see mass deforestation halted in five years.'

Eliasch's interest in the Amazon came about from a concern that one of the effects of global warming was its destruction of the European ski season due to the lack of a critical component - snow.

'The Swedish winters and summers hold the most enduring memories for me. Now when I am back in Stockholm in November, it is difficult to imagine being able to ski to school. I think that is a tragedy,' he remarked.

The efforts by Eliasch to protect the rainforest have hit a nerve among some people in Brazil who are suspicious of foreigners coming in with plans to invest in the Amazon.

Eliasch, who admits that shutting down sawmills and putting hundreds of workers out of a job is controversial, insists that hacking down the rainforest is a wildly inefficient use of natural resources.

'Once timber is cut, there is little that can be done with the land that is is sustainable,' argues Eliasch. 'Timber extraction provides big profits at the expense of local communities.'

'Providing communities with unfettered access to harvest a forest that is protected in perpetuity provides better and more reliable incomes.'

Still, some people remain unconvinced, and it might be years before Eliasch is able to fully utilise his business acumen within the complex world of conservation.

'There are pitfalls everywhere,' says Evan Bowen-Jones of the conservation body Fauna & Flora International. 'In some countries it is possible to buy large chunks of lands and preserve it, and in other areas it is impossible.'

Bowen-Jones cautions that entering the world of large-scale conservation requires patience, and he strongly suggests consulting experienced individuals who have already been through the process.

Working with local groups or, better yet, being invited by local environmental groups is another key to success, he says.

'With the current pace of biodiversity loss posed by climate change, we are going to have to stretch the methods available to us and that is going to bring in the wealthy individuals,' says Bowen-Jones.

'If they [wealthy donors] bring the right attitude to the table, then there is a good chance for success.'

	Douglas Tompkins and his Parque Pumalin, in Chile

'It is pretty hard for a country to turn down a gift of 300,000 hectares [740,000 acres],' says Douglas Tompkins, 65, the American-born founder of Esprit and The North Face.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Tompkins amassed a multi-million dollar fortune. He lived in a huge estate in San Francisco's Pacific Heights neighbourhood and had a world-renowned art collection.

Then he read a book on deep ecology, the philosophy pioneered by Norwegian Arne Naess, who calls for a radical re-evaluation of man's relationship with the planet.

Tompkins was an instant convert. He sold his estate, the art and everything else, then moved to the remote wilds of Patagonia.

Since 1992, Tompkins has spent nearly £110m buying or organising the purchase of around 25 properties covering 2.2m acres in Chile and Argentina.

Once purchased, the land is placed under strict environmental protection by its new owner. Tompkins has even coined a phrase for this movement - wildlands philanthropy.

When Tompkins met someone with the same philosophy and her own pile of money - Kristi McDivitt, the former CEO of the Patagonia Clothing company - they began to focus their business acumen on building coalitions of funders, environmentalists and governments to create national parks.

'Spend your money on land conservation,' says McDivitt. 'To restore a creek is patriotic in my mind. Restoring the land in any form is a patriotic act.'

This eco-power couple have now created two national parks - Parque Nacional Corcovado in Chile and Parque Nacional Monte León in Argentina.

Another two are being finalised, with a total area of close to two million acres. At the centre of Tompkins' conservation efforts is Chile's Parque Pumalin, a pristine wooded ecosystem that includes volcanoes, old growth forests and hidden hot springs. The park's 740,000 acres are off limits to all development except small-scale enterprises.

'I fundamentally believe in national parks,' Tompkins said. 'I don't believe in private parks. I believe that nations do best and have done best when they really value their parklands and areas that are off limits to development.'

Hansjörg Wyss, one of Europe's richest men, agrees. After amassing a fortune estimated at £4,200m from his position of CEO of Synthes - a company that produces artificial spinal discs and nails for repairing broken bones - Wyss has tackled a far larger reconstruction project: the wild areas of the American West.

Through The Wyss Foundation, he has donated millions of dollars to preserve wild lands in Utah and Montana.

As chairman of the board at the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, a grassroots conservation group in the American southwest, Wyss has instituted a corporate structure that includes a £3.5m cash surplus, investments in stocks and mutual funds and an £800,000 office building in Salt Lake City.

In order to save thousands of acres in the Rocky Mountains of Montana from development, Wyss bankrolled a simple solution; he offered to buy up the mineral rights from the mining companies.

Thanks to Wyss's understanding of corporate America, the Foundation had discovered a strategy for effectively paying the oil and gas companies to leave the area.

In that Montana battle, The Wyss Foundation was an early funder and longtime proponent of the 'buy 'em out' strategy.

	The Goldman Sachs ecosystem in Tierra del Fuego

Even investment bankers Goldman Sachs have caught the bug. In 2003, Goldman Sachs received 670,000 acres of forests in southern Chile and Argentina as the result of a bankruptcy settlement.

'It was part of a large package of distressed debt. We started asking, what do we do with a million acres of forest at the end of the earth? We had to get out an atlas,' laughs Lawrence Linden, an advisory director to Goldman Sachs.

He continues: 'As an investment bank, we know what to do with shopping malls and apartment complexes. But an ecosystem in Tierra del Fuego? So we called in The Nature Conservancy to study the land and they came back with the conclusion that it was actually a very valuable piece of land from an environmental point of view.'

Today the Goldman Sachs land is a vast tract of wilderness and is home to the guanaco, a llama-like animal that roams the forests. It also has an endowment of around £9m.

"We didn't want to be a burden for taxpayers. This is not just a question of preserving a pristine wilderness,' says Pete Rose, a Goldman Sachs spokesman. 'This is about using 21st-century science to preserve a pristine wilderness.'

Across Europe, eco-barons have also invested heavily in land conservation.

Dutch businessman Paul Fentener van Vlissingen, who died in 2006, was a leading figure in the movement. From his 82,000-acre estate in Scotland - which he proudly advertised as public lands - van Vlissingen managed supermarket chains, energy companies and investment trusts. His passion was Africa's beleaguered national parks.

In barely two years, Vlissingen poured millions of dollars into the then incomplete Marakele National Park in South Africa, a job that would have taken at least 10 years without his funding. Today Marakele is part of a far bigger park system and is a healthy home to African wildlife, including elephant, white and black rhinoceros, buffalo, hyena, cheetah, wild dog, giraffe and eland.

To consolidate his philosophy, Vlissingen helped create the African Parks Foundation, an NGO that continues to reinforce the infrastructure and funding for national parks in Africa.

Before his death, van Vlissingen was widely considered the richest man in Scotland, and with tens of thousands of acres, the country's biggest landowner.

But van Vlissingen refused that title, 'You can't own a place like this. It belongs to the planet,' he once said. 'I'm only the guardian.'

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Ocean 'dead zones' expanding worldwide: study

A view of the area that surrounds "hito uno" (landmark one), which divides the Chilean and Peruvian territories in January 2008. Oceanic "dead zones" where marine life cannot survive have been steadily increasing over the past five decades and now encompass 400 coastal areas of the world, a US-Swedish study said Friday.

Oceanic "dead zones" where marine life cannot survive have been steadily increasing over the past five decades and now encompass 400 coastal areas of the world, a US-Swedish study said Friday.

Dead zones now comprise around 245,000 square kilometers (95,000 square miles), according to researchers Robert Diaz of the Marine Sciences Institute at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and Rutger Rosenberg, a marine scientist at Gothenburg University in Sweden.

"The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in (pollution) ... fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels," the study said.

The phenomenon, called eutrophication, is caused by industrial pollution as well as runoff of water containing phosphates and nitrates into the oceans.

Oceans react to the boost in pollution by growing more algae and vegetation in coastal areas.

When the algae dies and sinks to the bottom, it decreases the amount of oxygen available in the bottom waters, a process called hypoxia, eventually wiping out fish and crustaceans that live there, as well as the foods they eat.

Dead zones tend to creep up in calm waters that see lower water exchange, but have more recently been affecting major fishery areas in the Baltic, Kattegat, and Black Seas as well as the Gulf of Mexico and East China Sea, the study said.

The researchers said the expansion of dead zones in these areas threatens commercial fishing and shrimping near the coastlines.

The phenomenon was first noted along the Adriatic Coast in the 1950s.

Seasonal dead zones affect the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Scandinavian waters.

It can take years to treat severe hypoxia in a coastal region, and only four percent of treated areas have shown any signs of improvement, though the trend is reversible, the study said.

"From 1970 to 1990, the hypoxic zone on the northwestern continental shelf of the Black Sea has expanded to 40,000 square kilometers (15,500 square miles)," the study noted.

"However, since 1989, the loss of fertilizer subsidies from the former Soviet Union reduced nutrient loading by a factor of two to four, with the result that by 1995 the hypoxic zone had gone."

The study authors said the global warming trend alone was likely to increase oceanic dead zones by increasing temperature, causing changes in rainfall patterns and changing discharges of fresh water and agricultural nutrients into the oceans.

"Climate change also has the potential to expand naturally occurring OMZs (oxygen minimum zones) into shallower coastal waters, damaging fisheries and affecting energy flows in the same way that eutrophication-driven hypoxia does," the authors wrote.

The researchers noted that any return to preindustrial levels of nutrient input into global waters would be "unrealistic."

However, they said "an appropriate management goal would be to reduce nutrient inputs to levels that occurred in the middle of the past century, before eutrophication began to spread dead zones globally."

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