Wednesday, January 31, 2007

American Solar Energy E-News ASES Releases Landmark Report - Tackling Climate Change in the U.S.: Potential Carbon Emissions Reductions from Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 2030 The result of more than a year of study, the report illustrates how energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can provide the emissions reductions required to address global warming. To develop the report, ASES recruited a volunteer team of top energy experts. These experts produced a series of nine papers that examined how energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions - the main cause of global warming. ASES collected the nine papers together and added an overview of the studies to create the report. It covers energy efficiency in buildings, transportation, and industry, as well as six renewable energy technologies: concentrating solar power, photovoltaics, wind power, biomass, biofuels, and geothermal power. The results indicate that these technologies can displace approximately 1.2 billion tons of carbon emissions annually by the year 2030 - the magnitude of reduction that scientists believe is necessary to prevent the most dangerous consequences of climate change. The report, edited by Chuck Kutscher, illustrates how energy efficiency measures could keep U.S. carbon emissions roughly constant over the next 23 years as the economy grows, and how renewable energy technologies could make deep cuts below today's emissions. Wind energy provides about 35% of the renewable energy contribution, while the rest is divided about evenly among the other technologies. "Energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies can begin to be deployed on a large scale today to help save us from the worst consequences of global warming," said Kutscher. "With continued R&D to lower costs and a reasonable level of policy support, they have the potential to meet most, if not all, of the carbon reductions that will be required in the future." The report is available as a free download at http://www.ases.org/climatechange. High-quality graphics showing the various emissions reductions and deployment locations are also available at that site. You can help by letting your friends, colleagues, co-workers, state and local government officials and representatives, and your local newspaper know about the report. A press release that you can forward is available at http://www.ases.org/climatechange 10:35:52 PM

Linguistic Search CNET Networks Invests In Linguistic Search Firm TextDigger. TextDigger, a yet-to-launch (but presenting at Demo conference this week) online search startup, has received $1.5 million in its first round funding, from CNET Networks and other investors. The service tries to infer the probable meanings of a user[base ']s query words, and presents users with probably query answers, while learning to judge meanings for future searches. Users can find documents that use different words to express the same idea, while avoiding those that use their words in a different sense. The CEO and founder Tim Musgrove was previously a Senior Research Fellow at CNEt, which explains the funding....before that he was CTO at Smartshop.com which was bought by CNET in 2002. Its public service is being developed to launch on Digger.com, and is expected to launch second half of this year. [PaidContent] 10:31:56 PM

A Hunter in Winter COROT Sees First Light. SPACE.com Image of the Day The first light detected by COROT comes from the constellation of the Unicorn near Orion, the great 'hunter' whose imposing silhouette stands out in the winter nights. By  (SPACE.com). [SPACE.com Image of the Day] 10:23:55 PM

Buongiorno Buongiorno to acquire Inventa. Buongiorno UK, the UK subsidiary of Italian digital media company Buongiorno, has agreed to acquire Inventa for £1m. [Digital Media Europe - digital media news from across Europe] 10:17:20 PM