The ramen burger that ate New York
BY STEVE TRAUTLEIN
AUG 22, 2013



It’s too early to tell if Aug. 3, 2013, will go down as a landmark date in culinary history, but for the hundreds of people who lined up that morning at a food fair in Brooklyn, New York, the excitement was palpable. The crowds had braved steady rain for a chance to try the ramen burger, an East-meets-West concoction whose arrival was accompanied by breathless coverage in both old media and new. Although the buzz has yet to reach the level that greets a new opening from the likes of Danny Meyer or David Chang, the debut of the ramen burger was widely hailed as the foodie event of the summer.

All of this is as unlikely as it seems. Few cultures are as associated with a single food as America is with hamburgers, a dish that for more than a century has been much loved and little changed. The ramen burger offers a reinterpretation of the classic as Asian-inflected soul food, with noodles in place of the buns, a soy-based sauce instead of ketchup, and arugula and scallions standing in for lettuce, tomatoes and onions.

Keizo Shimamoto, the chef who dreamed up the dish...

Translating Japan’s top cooking site
BY MAKIKO ITOH
AUG 22, 2013

The Internet isn’t all kitten videos and saucy stuff, you know. In Japan, food and cooking makes up a large part of the Net — and recipe-sharing site Cookpad is its biggest juggernaut. With 20 million users — including an astonishing 80 to 90 percent of all Japanese women in their 20s and 30s — and more than 1.5 million registered recipes, it’s the go-to source for Japanese home cooks.

Earlier this month it launched an English-language website (en.cookpad.com), a pared-down version with around 1,600 recipes initially translated from the mother site; this number is promised to grow to at least 30,000. I’ve been involved in working on several of the translations myself.

While the site’s primary objective, according to project and product manager Jun Kaneko, is to share Japanese recipes with the world, I think the people who will get the most out of the site are English-speakers living in Japan who want to cook at home using local ingredients and methods. Almost all the recipes on Cookpad are contributed by regular people, not cooking professionals.

The recipes are selected for translation by Cookpad based on their popularity on the Japanese site, giving you a glimpse into the surprisingly wide variety of cuisine types and cooking methods that are popular in the Japanese home kitchens of today.

Once we get a recipe to translate...

A Nevada Tribe’s Epic Battle To Replace A Deadly Coal Plant With Solar
BY JOANNA M. FOSTER ON AUGUST 23, 2013 AT 9:45 AM

MOAPA VALLEY, Nevada — Lots of people have dusty fans. Sometimes they seem to serve no other purpose but to make you feel guilty about your house-cleaning skills. But something is different in the homes in this valley just 50 miles northeast of Las Vegas. If you run your finger along the blades of any ceiling fan in this small town, your finger won’t just be dusty, it will be filthy — caked with black grime.

To understand the black layer that infiltrates even the most fastidiously swept and dusted home, here on the Moapa Paiute Reservation, all you have to do is walk to the beautifully maintained baseball field in the center of town.

From there, you have a direct view across the modest family homes — with well-used cars parked at odd angles, their windshields practically opaque with ashen dust — to the four smokestacks of the Reid-Gardner coal-fired power plant, which first started dumping ash laced with mercury, lead and arsenic in 1965. The plant, recently acquired by MidAmerican Energy when that company bought NV Energy, sits just a few hundred yards away from some of the homes on the reservation. Not many people here have air conditioning, but when demand in Las Vegas spikes, the plant starts belching dark clouds to keep the strip cool.

“I’m scared of it,” said Vickie Simmons, a leader of the Moapa Band of Paiutes Health and Environment Committees. “I don’t like to even look at it.”

Simmons does prefer to keep her blinds down and her curtains drawn...

California’s Carbon Trading System Is Going So Well They Sold Out Of Permits
BY JEFF SPROSS ON AUGUST 22, 2013

If sales from the latest auction of carbon permits under California’s new cap and trade system are any indication, industry is taking seriously the state’s determination to cut its emissions.

Friday’s auction was the fourth since the program’s debut last November, and it marked the first time demand for permits for the years beyond 2013 actually overwhelmed supply. The sellout “really shows that these companies, probably the big oil companies, are preparing for the longevity of this market,” Emily Reyna, senior manager of partnerships and alliances for the Environmental Defense Fund, told Bloomberg Businessweek.

To explain...

Germany Breaks Its Own Record For Solar Power Generation
BY KILEY KROH ON AUGUST 22, 2013 AT 9:09 AM


Germany just broke its monthly solar power generation record once again. In July, the grey-skied country logged 5.1 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity from solar power, slightly better than the 5 TWh of electricity generated by wind turbines it produced in January.

As Inhabitat points out, “The accomplishment proves once again that a lack of sunshine is no obstacle to scaling up solar energy — and if the Teutons can produce record amounts of solar power under grey skies, then the potential for countries with sunnier weather and more land mass (like the United States) is limitless.”

This recent milestone is one of many for the country that stands head and shoulders above the rest of the world in its rapid embrace of solar energy. As a point of comparison, Clean Technica notes,

In terms of total solar power capacity per capita, Germany crushes every other country. At the end of 2012, it had approximately 400 MW of solar power capacity per million people, considerably more than #2 Italy at 267 MW per million people, #3 Belgium at 254 MW per million people, and #4 Czech Republic at 204 MW per million, and #5 Greece at 143 MW per million people. The US came it at #20 with about 25 MW per million people.

As Germany strives for a lofty goal of receiving 80 percent of its power from renewable sources by 2050, government subsidies are playing a big role in the rapid growth of renewable energy. Germany’s simple feed-in tariff policy, which pays renewable energy producers (e.g. solar energy producers) a set amount for the electricity they produce under long-term contracts, has driven the solar power boom. As installations continue to outpace government targets, Germany announced it will begin scaling back its feed-in tariff beginning this month.

Germany’s long-term policies to incentivize renewable energy have had a significant impact on...

FERC Chair Jon Wellinghoff: Solar ‘Is Going to Overtake Everything’

One of the country’s top regulators explains why he is so bullish on solar.
HERMAN K. TRABISH: AUGUST 21, 2013

If anybody doubts that federal energy regulators are aware of the rapidly changing electricity landscape, they should talk to Jon Wellinghoff, chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

“Solar is growing so fast it is going to overtake everything,” Wellinghoff told GTM last week in a sideline conversation at the National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas.

If a single drop of water on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium is doubled every minute, Wellinghoff said, a person chained to the highest seat would be in danger of drowning in an hour.

“That’s what is happening in solar. It could double every two years," he said.

Indeed, as ...

Fukushima warning: danger level at nuclear plant jumps to 'serious'
Japan's nuclear agency dramatically raises status after saying a day earlier that radioactive water leak was only an 'anomaly'

Justin McCurry in Osaka
theguardian.com, Wednesday 21 August 2013 02.50 EDT

...The Nuclear Regulation Authority has now said it will dramatically raise the incident's severity level from one to three on the eight-point scale used by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for radiation releases. Each single-digit increase in the scale actually represents a tenfold increase in the severity of a radiological release, according to the IAEA.

...The leak is the single most dangerous failure at the plant since the 2011 meltdown, which warranted the maximum level of seven on the severity scale, putting it on a par with the Chernobyl disaster 25 years earlier.

...Tepco has admitted it has yet to identify the cause of the leak, in which highly radioactive water appears to have breached a steel storage tank and seeped into the ground. The leak from the tank, which can hold up to 1,000 tonnes of water, has yet to be stemmed, according to Japanese media reports.

The incident is separate from additional water leaks of up to 300 tonnes a day recently reported by Tepco.

Japan Approves 19 GW of Commercial Solar in 2012 After Incentives

Chisaki Watanabe, Bloomberg
August 20, 2013

TOKYO -- Japan approved almost 19,000 megawatts of non-residential solar applications by the end of the 2012 fiscal year, as part of the nation’s incentive program for clean energy started in July that year.

The country approved a total 21,090 megawatts of clean energy projects, including 18,681 megawatts of non-residential solar, data released today by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry showed. The approved projects also include residential solar, wind and biomass.

Japan is projected to add the most solar capacity in the world this year, boosted by above-market rates for clean energy. The country is trying to diversify its energy sources after the 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima.

Japan added 2,079 megawatts of clean energy capacity -- mostly solar -- in the fiscal year ended March 31, to a base of about 20,000 megawatts, according to the ministry. In the two months to May 31, Japan added another 1,280 megawatts, it said.

In March, applications for non-residential solar such as utility-scale power plants and panels on factory rooftops jumped to 7,669 megawatts...

How Solar Power and Ice Energy Can Play Together

Can thermal energy storage help shift solar power to cover evening peak loads?


JEFF ST. JOHN: AUGUST 19, 2013
Three years ago, Greentech Media covered the launch of an experiment in California to see if ice-making air conditioners could help solve a tricky problem for solar power.

The participants, solar PV giant SunPower and thermal energy storage startup Ice Energy, wanted to see how well sun and ice could work together to help shift solar PV‘s peak power production, which takes place in the mid-afternoon, to play a role in providing power during the “evening peaks” that come after 5 p.m. or so. That’s when people start getting off work, heading home and turning on their lights, TVs, electric appliances and, on hot summer evenings, their air conditioners.

Another thing that people do after work, of course, is go shopping. Malls, department stores and other retail centers also have an evening peak to deal with, as they start turning on their lights and cranking up their air conditioners to keep buildings cool. Heat, unlike sunlight, keeps gathering throughout the day, and tends to peak in the late afternoon. That means that those rooftop AC units are cranking their hardest right when solar power is already fast on its way to dropping off to its evening zero point.

SunPower, armed with a $1.475 million grant from the California Public Utilities Commission, set out in 2010 to team up with Ice Energy, along with battery company ZBB Energy (ZBB), the DOE’s Sandia National Laboratories and other parties, to test the capabilities of solar energy shifting across a variety of settings in California.

But while batteries can store solar-generated electricity for use at later times, Ice Energy’s rooftop units use that solar output to make ice, then use that ice later in the day to drastically reduce the amount of electricity those AC units need -- a procedure that’s known as "thermal energy storage." While thermal energy storage has been a part of district energy systems for decades, scaling it down to rooftop size is a newer development.

Earlier this month...

Wrecked Fukushima storage tank leaking highly radioactive water
By Yoko Kubota and Yuka Obayashi

TOKYO (Reuters) - Contaminated water with dangerously high levels of radiation is leaking from a storage tank at Japan's crippled Fukushima nuclear plant, the most serious setback to the cleanup of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

The storage tank breach of about 300 metric tons of water is separate from contaminated water leaks reported in recent weeks, plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co said on Tuesday.

The latest leak is so contaminated that a person standing half a meter (1 ft 8 inches) away would, within an hour, receive a radiation dose five times the average annual global limit for nuclear workers.

After 10 hours, a worker in that proximity to the leak would develop radiation sickness with symptoms including nausea and a drop in white blood cells.

"That is a huge amount of radiation. The situation is getting worse,"...