Siting solar energy development to minimize biological impacts

Siting samplers to minimize expected time to detection.

We present a probabilistic approach to designing an indoor sampler network for detecting an accidental or intentional chemical or biological release, and demonstrate it for a real building. In an earlier article, Sohn and Lorenzetti developed a proof of concept algorithm that assumed samplers could return measurements only slowly (on the order of hours). This led to optimal "detect to treat" ar...

Biological solar energy.

Through the process of photosynthesis, the energy of sunlight has been harnessed, not only to create the biomass on our planet today, but also the fossil fuels. The overall efficiency of biomass formation, however, is low and despite being a valuable source of energy, it cannot replace fossil fuels on a global scale and provide the huge amount of power needed to sustain the technological aspira...

Environmental impacts from the solar energy technologies

Solar energy systems (photovoltaics, solar thermal, solar power) provide significant environmental benefits in comparison to the conventional energy sources, thus contributing, to the sustainable development of human activities. Sometimes however, their wide scale deployment has to face potential negative environmental implications. These potential problems seem to be a strong barrier for a fur...

Siting Solar PV Capacity to Maximize Environmental Benefits

The environmental benefits of solar electricity generating capacity vary across the U.S. according to solar irradiance, weather, conventional generation fleets, grid characteristics, and population. Though the 1.1 million distributed solar generation systems installed in the U.S are incentivized by local, state and federal programs, virtually none of these varies subsidies according to expected...

Integrating Solar Heating into an Air Handling Unit to Minimize Energy Consumption