The book Chemistry on a Budget contains chemistry labs that are useful with inexpensive, easy to obtain materials.
For the 2018-19 school year, buy a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget. It’s a great resource for your class!
There are two versions of each lab, one with a ten-question conclusion and one with directions for a full lab report. This way the teacher has the option! Each lab is two pages to allow for one two-sided handout.
A 5-Star Customer Review of Chemistry on a Budget at amazon.com states:
“[S]traight forward, to the point, using household chemicals…this is the lab book for you.
I teach high school chemistry and this is exactly what [I] was looking for. Labs included simple household chemicals that could be easily found. Nice format, easy to follow along procedures, and touches on every topic of our chemistry curriculum.”
You can buy this lab book for $23 at amazon.com or lulu.com. It will take 1-2 weeks to get to you -- Order Now. It’s a great resource!
http://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Budget-Marjorie-R-Heesemann/dp/0578129159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389410170&sr=1-1&keywords=chemistry+on+a+budget
http://www.lulu.com/shop/marjorie-r-heesemann/chemistry-on-a-budget/paperback/product-21217600.html
*Some of you have already purchased my lab book – be sure to check out Page 141 !
“Today, China invests more each year in wind, hydro and solar power than any other country on earth. This week it further underlined its role as the global leader in renewable energy by switching on the world’s largest floating solar power plant.
The facility is located in the city of Huainan, in China’s eastern Anhui province. It has a capacity of 40 megawatts (MW), enough to power a small town. And in a stroke of pleasing symbolism, the plant floats over a flooded former coal-mining region. “
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/china-worlds-largest-floating-solar-power/
“More than 2.5 million people work in the solar power sector alone in China, compared with 260,000 people in the U.S., according to the most recent annual report from the International Renewable Energy Agency. …
Coal still makes up the largest part of China's energy consumption, but Beijing has been shutting coal mines and set out plans last year to cut roughly 1.3 million jobs in the industry. The Chinese government has also moved to restrict the construction of new coal power plants.
For the first time ever, China's National Energy Administration in January [date?] established a mandatory target to reduce coal energy consumption. It also set a goal for clean energy to meet 20% of China's energy needs by 2030.
Analysts expect China to easily meet that target. Greenpeace noted in a report earlier this year that the country's clean energy consumption rose to 12% at the end of 2015. Renewable energy sources account for about 10% of total U.S. energy consumption, according to official statistics. “
http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/18/technology/china-us-clean-energy-solar-farm/index.html
“By 2030, China aims to generate a fifth of its energy from renewable sources. Coal consumption has been falling for the last three years in a row. This may not be good news for coal producers—China gobbles 50 percent of the world's total output—it is certainly good news for pretty much everyone else….China is betting on solar, and it's betting big. It may well turn from the biggest polluter into the most vocal advocate of climate action. It's only in its best interest - all those coal miners losing their jobs with the shutdown of mine and the shift to cleaner energy will need jobs, for one. For another, it is important for the world's second-largest energy consumer to reduce its dependence on imported energy. All very good reasons to go renewable and do it quickly.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-completed-the-worlds-biggest-floating-solar-energy-farm-2017-6
“And not just for coalminers. China has some of the world’s worst air pollution, which scientists say may contribute to a third of deaths, and regularly grounds flights and keeps children entombed in their homes and classrooms. Coal burnt for power and steel smelting is the principle cause, as soot-stained miners burrow China into what’s the world’s second largest economy today. But the nation, like Sang, is changing tack and embracing sustainability—no longer beholden to the singular tenet of growth at any cost.
China is now the world’s largest renewable energy investor. The government promises to spend $360 billion on clean energy projects by 2020, creating 13 million new jobs in the process. And as the Huainan project demonstrates, the Asian superpower is pushing the boundaries of green tech, whether wind, solar or hydropower.
New panels are being developed specifically for arid deserts and others to withstand sultry rainforests. “China is leading the way in terms of finding green solutions,” says Wu Changhua, Greater China director for the Climate Group.”
http://time.com/china-massive-floating-solar-field/
“The renewables rollout has not been without its troubles. Vast fields of wind turbines have been erected in the country’s sparsely populated northwest, far from the big cities where electricity is most needed, and the construction of transmission lines to move all that power has failed to keep up.
‘They set up these huge wind farms and they don’t have connections to the grid,’ says Antung Liu of Indiana University Bloomington. ‘They just have this attitude that ‘We’ll build it, and hopefully we’ll be able to use it later.’
What’s more, grid operators have shown a bias toward coal production, so renewable power has sometimes gone unused even when the physical connections are there. Greenpeace estimates that 19 percent of Chinese wind power was wasted in the first three quarters of last year.
Leaders are now starting to reckon with those issues, installing new power lines and focusing on building smaller wind and solar farms in populated areas.
Not far from Jinko’s factory, another arm of the company operates just such an array. Inside rows of long, low buildings, a new season’s crop of mushrooms are about to be planted. They don’t need sunlight, so the greenhouse roofs have been given over to solar panels. Nearly 19,000 of them, mounted in rows overhead, generate electricity that is fed into the grid.
At first, China’s effort ‘was only about getting the gigawatts up,’ says Jukka-Pekka Mäkinen, CEO of The Switch, a Finland-based company manufacturing wind-power components in China. ‘Now it’s keeping up the gigawatts, but doing it much smarter, and focusing in areas where the consumption is.’
Despite such efforts, China is also still building coal-fired power plants, in part because of an incentive structure that encourages provincial officials to green-light unnecessary construction, even as the central government seeks to push cleaner options. But officials have also begun cancelling some that are already in the planning pipeline, aware that China already has more coal-fired power generation than it needs.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/china-renewables-energy-climate-change-pollution-environment/
“It’s worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world’s largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States.
According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country’s installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.
Of course, China is also the world’s largest carbon emitter, it burns more coal than any other nation, and its solar capacity is only a small fraction of its total energy portfolio. What’s more, capacity does not always equate to generation: the National Energy Administration estimates that nearly one-third of solar capacity in Gansu province, and more than one-quarter in Xinjiang, was idle last year.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601093/china-is-on-an-epic-solar-power-binge/
“The transformation is nothing without the corresponding decrease in fossil fuels, and China seems to be making strong headway towards its goals to decrease its coal usage and import. 2015 saw coal consumption decline 3.7%, year-over-year, and net coal imports dropped a much more significant 30.4% year-over-year, down to 198.7 million tonnes. This trend has already been seen to continue into 2016, with January’s net coal imports dropping by 11.6% year-over-year.
“IEEFA [Energy Finance Studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis] forecasts that China will install an additional 22 GW of wind, 16GW of new hydro, another 6GW of nuclear, and 18GW of solar (60% utility scale, 40% distributed rooftop solar) in 2016,’ explained Buckley.’“With electricity demand forecast to grow by 3.0-3.5% yoy in 2016, this 62GW of additional zero carbon electricity capacity will be more than sufficient to meet total electricity demand growth, such that coal consumption is forecast to fall again in 2016.””
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/06/china-renewable-growth-soars-fossil-fuel-use-declines/
“China currently hosts the world’s largest number of solar power plants with a total capacity of close to 80GW last year, according to the International Energy Agency. The installation in China is nearly twice the amount of the US.
Nearly half of the nation’s total capacity was added last year. Industrial experts have also predicted that new solar farms completed this year will exceed 2016’s record, according to Bloomberg.
This neck-breaking pace was driven by government’s drive to diversify the country’s energy supply structure, which at present relies heavily on fossil fuels such as coal and imported oil.
But the solar plants are relatively short-lived, and the government does not have any retirement plan for them yet.
A panel’s lifespan ranges from 20 to 30 years, depending on the environment in which they are used, according to the US Department of Energy. High temperatures can accelerate the ageing process for solar cells, while other negative factors – such as the weight of snow or dust storms – could cause material fatigue on the surface and internal electric circuits, gradually reducing the panel’s power output.”
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104162/chinas-ageing-solar-panels-are-going-be-big-environmental-problem
“This week, media welcomed the completion of what may well be the world's largest floating solar farm, in the eastern Anhui province. The 40 MW installation sits on a flooded coal-mining town, which adds a kind of poetic element to the story - a shift away from coal and to solar and wind. But poetry is certainly not the reason why this location was selected: according to a local government source, the cool surface of the water will improve power generation.
The floating farm is the latest demonstration that China is serious about its green energy plans. Earlier this year, Beijing said it would splash US$361 billion on expanding the country's renewable power capacity by 2020. By 2022, China should have 320 GW of wind and solar power capacity, along with 340 GW of hydropower.
These plans earned it the top spot in E&Y's raking of the top 40 renewable energy markets, followed by India, who has plans for 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022. That China is in the top spot is no wonder, given that China was the biggest spender on renewable energy globally in 2015, allocating US$102.9 billion, or 36 percent of the total spent on renewables in the world that year, according to the UN Environment Programme. Last year, China installed 35 GW of solar power generation capacity, which, according to one Greenpeace expert quoted by the National Geographic, equals the total solar capacity of Germany.
By 2030, China aims to generate a fifth of its energy from renewable sources. Coal consumption has been falling for the last three years in a row. This may not be good news for coal producers—China gobbles 50 percent of the world's total output—it is certainly good news for pretty much everyone else. “
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-completed-the-worlds-biggest-floating-solar-energy-farm-2017-6
Students can research these articles as a Homework assignment or an Extra Credit assignment.
Past blog posts focusing on alternative energy sources include:
07/02/2015 Hydrogen Production
08/20/2015 Thermoelectrics
02/06/2016 Carbon Dioxide Conversion to Methanol
04/24/2016 Electronics from Coal
05/29/2016 New Uses for Waste Glass
06/05/2016 Air Pollution in China
08/21/2016 Solar Cell Converts CO2 to Usable Fuel
01/13/2017 America's First Offshore Wind Farm
03/03/2017 China's Vertical Forests
11/17/2017 NYC Green Roofs
03/30/2018 China Vertical Forest Update
08/03/2018 Concrete That Traps CO2 Emissions Forever
I will not be able to post a blog next Friday, 11/2/18, but I plan to write again the following Friday, 11/9/18.
For the 2018/2019 school year, buy a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget – it is a great resource! You can examine the labs and decide what you want to use during the school year.
*This Blog contains several entries that would be helpful to your chemistry classroom. Check out the Topic List to help you to find past Blog entries.
Also, Write To Me about your successes, challenges, or questions in the Chemistry Classroom.
Have a great weekend!
For the 2018-19 school year, buy a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget. It’s a great resource for your class!
There are two versions of each lab, one with a ten-question conclusion and one with directions for a full lab report. This way the teacher has the option! Each lab is two pages to allow for one two-sided handout.
A 5-Star Customer Review of Chemistry on a Budget at amazon.com states:
“[S]traight forward, to the point, using household chemicals…this is the lab book for you.
I teach high school chemistry and this is exactly what [I] was looking for. Labs included simple household chemicals that could be easily found. Nice format, easy to follow along procedures, and touches on every topic of our chemistry curriculum.”
You can buy this lab book for $23 at amazon.com or lulu.com. It will take 1-2 weeks to get to you -- Order Now. It’s a great resource!
http://www.amazon.com/Chemistry-Budget-Marjorie-R-Heesemann/dp/0578129159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1389410170&sr=1-1&keywords=chemistry+on+a+budget
http://www.lulu.com/shop/marjorie-r-heesemann/chemistry-on-a-budget/paperback/product-21217600.html
*Some of you have already purchased my lab book – be sure to check out Page 141 !
“Today, China invests more each year in wind, hydro and solar power than any other country on earth. This week it further underlined its role as the global leader in renewable energy by switching on the world’s largest floating solar power plant.
The facility is located in the city of Huainan, in China’s eastern Anhui province. It has a capacity of 40 megawatts (MW), enough to power a small town. And in a stroke of pleasing symbolism, the plant floats over a flooded former coal-mining region. “
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/06/china-worlds-largest-floating-solar-power/
“More than 2.5 million people work in the solar power sector alone in China, compared with 260,000 people in the U.S., according to the most recent annual report from the International Renewable Energy Agency. …
Coal still makes up the largest part of China's energy consumption, but Beijing has been shutting coal mines and set out plans last year to cut roughly 1.3 million jobs in the industry. The Chinese government has also moved to restrict the construction of new coal power plants.
For the first time ever, China's National Energy Administration in January [date?] established a mandatory target to reduce coal energy consumption. It also set a goal for clean energy to meet 20% of China's energy needs by 2030.
Analysts expect China to easily meet that target. Greenpeace noted in a report earlier this year that the country's clean energy consumption rose to 12% at the end of 2015. Renewable energy sources account for about 10% of total U.S. energy consumption, according to official statistics. “
http://money.cnn.com/2017/07/18/technology/china-us-clean-energy-solar-farm/index.html
“By 2030, China aims to generate a fifth of its energy from renewable sources. Coal consumption has been falling for the last three years in a row. This may not be good news for coal producers—China gobbles 50 percent of the world's total output—it is certainly good news for pretty much everyone else….China is betting on solar, and it's betting big. It may well turn from the biggest polluter into the most vocal advocate of climate action. It's only in its best interest - all those coal miners losing their jobs with the shutdown of mine and the shift to cleaner energy will need jobs, for one. For another, it is important for the world's second-largest energy consumer to reduce its dependence on imported energy. All very good reasons to go renewable and do it quickly.”
http://www.businessinsider.com/china-completed-the-worlds-biggest-floating-solar-energy-farm-2017-6
“And not just for coalminers. China has some of the world’s worst air pollution, which scientists say may contribute to a third of deaths, and regularly grounds flights and keeps children entombed in their homes and classrooms. Coal burnt for power and steel smelting is the principle cause, as soot-stained miners burrow China into what’s the world’s second largest economy today. But the nation, like Sang, is changing tack and embracing sustainability—no longer beholden to the singular tenet of growth at any cost.
China is now the world’s largest renewable energy investor. The government promises to spend $360 billion on clean energy projects by 2020, creating 13 million new jobs in the process. And as the Huainan project demonstrates, the Asian superpower is pushing the boundaries of green tech, whether wind, solar or hydropower.
New panels are being developed specifically for arid deserts and others to withstand sultry rainforests. “China is leading the way in terms of finding green solutions,” says Wu Changhua, Greater China director for the Climate Group.”
http://time.com/china-massive-floating-solar-field/
“The renewables rollout has not been without its troubles. Vast fields of wind turbines have been erected in the country’s sparsely populated northwest, far from the big cities where electricity is most needed, and the construction of transmission lines to move all that power has failed to keep up.
‘They set up these huge wind farms and they don’t have connections to the grid,’ says Antung Liu of Indiana University Bloomington. ‘They just have this attitude that ‘We’ll build it, and hopefully we’ll be able to use it later.’
What’s more, grid operators have shown a bias toward coal production, so renewable power has sometimes gone unused even when the physical connections are there. Greenpeace estimates that 19 percent of Chinese wind power was wasted in the first three quarters of last year.
Leaders are now starting to reckon with those issues, installing new power lines and focusing on building smaller wind and solar farms in populated areas.
Not far from Jinko’s factory, another arm of the company operates just such an array. Inside rows of long, low buildings, a new season’s crop of mushrooms are about to be planted. They don’t need sunlight, so the greenhouse roofs have been given over to solar panels. Nearly 19,000 of them, mounted in rows overhead, generate electricity that is fed into the grid.
At first, China’s effort ‘was only about getting the gigawatts up,’ says Jukka-Pekka Mäkinen, CEO of The Switch, a Finland-based company manufacturing wind-power components in China. ‘Now it’s keeping up the gigawatts, but doing it much smarter, and focusing in areas where the consumption is.’
Despite such efforts, China is also still building coal-fired power plants, in part because of an incentive structure that encourages provincial officials to green-light unnecessary construction, even as the central government seeks to push cleaner options. But officials have also begun cancelling some that are already in the planning pipeline, aware that China already has more coal-fired power generation than it needs.”
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/china-renewables-energy-climate-change-pollution-environment/
“It’s worth taking a minute to appreciate the sheer scale of what China is doing in solar right now. In 2015, the country added more than 15 gigawatts of new solar capacity, surpassing Germany as the world’s largest solar power market. China now has 43.2 gigawatts of solar capacity, compared with38.4 gigawatts in Germany and 27.8 in the United States.
According to new projections, it seems that trend is going to continue. Under its 13th Five Year Plan, China will nearly triple solar capacity by 2020, adding 15 to 20 gigawatts of solar capacity each year for the next five years, according to Nur Bekri, director of the National Energy Administration. That will bring the country’s installed solar power to more than 140 gigawatts. To put that in context, world solar capacity topped 200 gigawatts last year and is expected to reach 321 gigawatts by the end of 2016.
Of course, China is also the world’s largest carbon emitter, it burns more coal than any other nation, and its solar capacity is only a small fraction of its total energy portfolio. What’s more, capacity does not always equate to generation: the National Energy Administration estimates that nearly one-third of solar capacity in Gansu province, and more than one-quarter in Xinjiang, was idle last year.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601093/china-is-on-an-epic-solar-power-binge/
“The transformation is nothing without the corresponding decrease in fossil fuels, and China seems to be making strong headway towards its goals to decrease its coal usage and import. 2015 saw coal consumption decline 3.7%, year-over-year, and net coal imports dropped a much more significant 30.4% year-over-year, down to 198.7 million tonnes. This trend has already been seen to continue into 2016, with January’s net coal imports dropping by 11.6% year-over-year.
“IEEFA [Energy Finance Studies at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis] forecasts that China will install an additional 22 GW of wind, 16GW of new hydro, another 6GW of nuclear, and 18GW of solar (60% utility scale, 40% distributed rooftop solar) in 2016,’ explained Buckley.’“With electricity demand forecast to grow by 3.0-3.5% yoy in 2016, this 62GW of additional zero carbon electricity capacity will be more than sufficient to meet total electricity demand growth, such that coal consumption is forecast to fall again in 2016.””
https://cleantechnica.com/2016/03/06/china-renewable-growth-soars-fossil-fuel-use-declines/
“China currently hosts the world’s largest number of solar power plants with a total capacity of close to 80GW last year, according to the International Energy Agency. The installation in China is nearly twice the amount of the US.
Nearly half of the nation’s total capacity was added last year. Industrial experts have also predicted that new solar farms completed this year will exceed 2016’s record, according to Bloomberg.
This neck-breaking pace was driven by government’s drive to diversify the country’s energy supply structure, which at present relies heavily on fossil fuels such as coal and imported oil.
But the solar plants are relatively short-lived, and the government does not have any retirement plan for them yet.
A panel’s lifespan ranges from 20 to 30 years, depending on the environment in which they are used, according to the US Department of Energy. High temperatures can accelerate the ageing process for solar cells, while other negative factors – such as the weight of snow or dust storms – could cause material fatigue on the surface and internal electric circuits, gradually reducing the panel’s power output.”
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2104162/chinas-ageing-solar-panels-are-going-be-big-environmental-problem
“This week, media welcomed the completion of what may well be the world's largest floating solar farm, in the eastern Anhui province. The 40 MW installation sits on a flooded coal-mining town, which adds a kind of poetic element to the story - a shift away from coal and to solar and wind. But poetry is certainly not the reason why this location was selected: according to a local government source, the cool surface of the water will improve power generation.
The floating farm is the latest demonstration that China is serious about its green energy plans. Earlier this year, Beijing said it would splash US$361 billion on expanding the country's renewable power capacity by 2020. By 2022, China should have 320 GW of wind and solar power capacity, along with 340 GW of hydropower.
These plans earned it the top spot in E&Y's raking of the top 40 renewable energy markets, followed by India, who has plans for 175 GW of renewable energy by 2022. That China is in the top spot is no wonder, given that China was the biggest spender on renewable energy globally in 2015, allocating US$102.9 billion, or 36 percent of the total spent on renewables in the world that year, according to the UN Environment Programme. Last year, China installed 35 GW of solar power generation capacity, which, according to one Greenpeace expert quoted by the National Geographic, equals the total solar capacity of Germany.
By 2030, China aims to generate a fifth of its energy from renewable sources. Coal consumption has been falling for the last three years in a row. This may not be good news for coal producers—China gobbles 50 percent of the world's total output—it is certainly good news for pretty much everyone else. “
https://www.businessinsider.com/china-completed-the-worlds-biggest-floating-solar-energy-farm-2017-6
Students can research these articles as a Homework assignment or an Extra Credit assignment.
Past blog posts focusing on alternative energy sources include:
07/02/2015 Hydrogen Production
08/20/2015 Thermoelectrics
02/06/2016 Carbon Dioxide Conversion to Methanol
04/24/2016 Electronics from Coal
05/29/2016 New Uses for Waste Glass
06/05/2016 Air Pollution in China
08/21/2016 Solar Cell Converts CO2 to Usable Fuel
01/13/2017 America's First Offshore Wind Farm
03/03/2017 China's Vertical Forests
11/17/2017 NYC Green Roofs
03/30/2018 China Vertical Forest Update
08/03/2018 Concrete That Traps CO2 Emissions Forever
I will not be able to post a blog next Friday, 11/2/18, but I plan to write again the following Friday, 11/9/18.
For the 2018/2019 school year, buy a copy of the lab book Chemistry on a Budget – it is a great resource! You can examine the labs and decide what you want to use during the school year.
*This Blog contains several entries that would be helpful to your chemistry classroom. Check out the Topic List to help you to find past Blog entries.
Also, Write To Me about your successes, challenges, or questions in the Chemistry Classroom.
Have a great weekend!
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