Go Green Tech Go

MIT Lab Creates the World's First Feasible 'Artificial Leaf'

2011-04-03T10:43:00.000-07:00

By Clay Dillow

Artificial Leaf Sun Catalytix

A practical artificial leaf that can turn sunlight and water into energy as efficiently as the real thing has long been a Holy Grail of chemistry, and researchers at MIT may have finally done it. Today at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society researchers from MIT’s Nocera Lab, led by Dr. Daniel Nocera, claimed that they’ve created an artificial leaf made from stable and--more importantly--inexpensive materials.
The artificial leaf looks nothing like the natural leaf that it mimics, but its inputs and outputs are the same. Made of silicon, electronics, and various catalysts that spur chemical reactions within the device, the artificial leaf uses sunlight to break water into hydrogen and oxygen which can then be used to create electricity in a separate fuel cell. Placed in a gallon of water and left in the sun, these artificial leaves could provide a home in the developing world with basic electricity for a day, Nocera said.

The Nocera Lab’s artificial leaf, it should be noted, isn’t the first working attempt at recreating photosynthesis in artificial materials. But previous attempts have led to artificial leaves full of unstable materials that are expensive and lead to short life spans. Nocera and his team identified a set of inexpensive, common catalysts including nickel and cobalt that get the job done with far less expense. And in the lab their playing-card-sized leaves have worked continuously for 45 straight hours without a drop in output.
Nocera and company will next try to boost both efficiency and lifespan of their photosynthetic material. It’s still a workbench technology at this point, but the leap forward presented here is significant. Scaled and mass produced, something like the Nocera Lab’s leaf could be the key component to shifting toward a hydrogen-based economy. In the nearer term, such technology could at the very least power parts of the globe that are currently off the grid with clean, plentiful, and easy-to-come-by energy.

SOURCE:http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-03/mit-lab-creates-worlds-first-practical-artificial-leaf

2010: An Untameable Spill, an Unpassable Bill

2011-01-01T10:16:00.000-08:00

By FELICITY BARRINGER

Top 10 lists are often relentlessly negative: the 10 most-polluting industrial plants, the 10 most befouled beaches, and so on.
The spirit of this list is slightly different: Good or bad, these are environmental moments in 2010 that are most likely to reverberate in the world of environmental news in 2011 and beyond.
The Spill: On April 20, a blowout in BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico killed 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon rig. Over the next 14 weeks, government scientists estimate, about 172 million gallons of oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico.
For weeks it seemed the ferocious leak would not be plugged; the spreading stain of surface oil was mapped and pursued the way the country once followed the progress of Allied armies in Normandy.
When efforts to stop the flow finally succeeded in July, the surface oil disappeared rapidly, but not before dozens of miles of coastline in five states were fouled, hundreds of pelicans, dolphins,and other animals were covered in the goo, fishing was halted for months and a six-month moratorium on new drilling in deep offshore waters was imposed by the Obama administration. Next year will be consumed with legal efforts to see how much more BP must pay. It has already set aside $20 billion in a compensation fund for spill victims.
The Bill: Many environmentalists seeking to curb the heat-trapping emissions that cause climate change saw 2010 as their year. But after nearly two decades of planning and cajoling and restructuring a program to cap greenhouse-gas pollution and allow polluting industries and financiers to trade pollution allowances, the Senate bill enshrining all this complexity died.

A companion measure had squeaked through the House in 2009, but no amount of compromise could save the bill sponsored by Senators Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut, and John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat. A third partner, Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, abandoned the effort in the spring.
The absence of legislation puts the Environmental Protection Agency in the spotlight in 2011; its regulations to curb the emissions linked to climate change go into effect Jan. 2, to the ire of many in Congress. Virtually all the Republicans elected for the first time this fall are skeptical of the evidence that the burning of fossil fuels is driving climate change.

The Heat: The chances are extremely good that 2010 will rank as the hottest year on record, at least to date, although the final verdict will not be available until the second week in January. But in northern regions like Hudson Bay, where the absence of ice was prolonged, temperature increases were greatest. Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were measured as high as 390 parts per million; 350 parts per million is the commonly-accepted threshold beyond which serious changes in sea levels and precipitation may occur. A summertime heat wave in Russia led to a series of peat fires that choked the air and threatened to spread to Ukrainian forests, where it could have unlocked radioactivity taken up by the trees after the catastrophic explosion of the plant nearly 25 years ago. (Authorities are also mulling over plans for guided tours of the “forbidden zone” around the reactor.)
The Reefs: The withering of coral reefs around the world accelerated, thanks to the increasing acidity of the oceans — caused by the absorption of the excess carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere — and their rising temperatures of the waters. There were indications that, at least in some regions of the globe, the bleaching and sometimes death of these corals in 2010 could exceed those of 1998, the worst year of coral die-off. Often called “the rain forests of the sea,” reefs not only nurture hundreds of species of fish, but also are at the center of a thriving tourism industry.

The Drought: The big question on the Colorado River, the source of some or all water for more than 25 million people in the Southwest, is whether 2011 will mark the end of the 11-year drought or make the tally an even dozen , forcing federal authorities to declare the first-ever water shortage on the river.
In the first week of November, Lake Mead, the reservoir created by the construction of Hoover Dam and the chief supply for the farms of southeastern California and for cities like San Diego, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix, reached a new low; its surface level was measured at 1081.90 feet above sea level, more than a foot below the previous low, recorded in 1956. With Lake Powell, upstream behind the Glen Canyon Dam, delivering high levels of water to Lake Mead daily, Mead’s water levels are back up above 1084 feet this week.
Elsewhere around the world, the overdrawing of surface waters has made farmers from Texas to China draw more water from underground aquifers, which are increasingly depleted. The search — and competition — for water supplies will intensify in 2011.
Solar Power: It was a topsy-turvy year for solar power in the United States. The good news was the development of promising new technologies to make solar cells more efficient; the approval of massive solar plants in the California desert; and the expansion of new policies and business practices to encourage their use everywhere from homes to store roofs to parking lots.
But Chinese manufacturers of solar cells were taking over a larger and larger segment of the market; by one estimate Chinese products represented 40 percent of total sales of photovoltaic products in California, the epicenter of the North American solar industry, where drought-plagued farmers started putting up photovoltaic arrays on San Joaquin Valley fields that once grew row crops. In 2011, the industry will continue its efforts to bring down the price of solar electricity, hoping to make it competitive with electricity generated by fossil fuels.

Electric Cars: Two new models, Chevrolet’s hybrid Volt and Nissan’s all-electric Leaf went on sale in 2010 and will become a growing part of the national automotive fleet in 2011. But they do not come cheap. The Leaf’s selling price is $33,600, in selected United States markets; the 20,000 slated for sale here have already been reserved. A New York Times reviewer wrote of the Volt, which sells for $41,000, “G.M. has nailed it, creating a hatchback that feels peppy and mainstream yet can sip less fuel than any gas- or diesel-powered car sold in America.” Both the Volt and the Leaf qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit.
The Oil Sands Pipeline: In July, the State Department postponed its decision on whether to approve a controversial 2,000-mile, $7 billion pipeline project to deliver crude oil from Canadian tars sands to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. The oil would be drawn from 178 billion barrels of proven reserves percolating through the sands of northern Alberta; the energy-intensive process of separating the oil from the earth has been the focus of environmental opposition. A decision by the Obama administration on the project — which could allow Canada to export up to 1.1 million barrels of oil daily — is expected in a few months.
Fracking: Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has been a common method used by the natural gas industry to open up sealed pockets of gas in underground formations. But the impact of the high-pressure injection of water, sand and chemicals on groundwater is not well documented. That has been a matter of sharp concern in eastern states like Pennsylvania and New York, which lie above the gas-rich area known as the Marcellus Shale. New York’s governor, David A. Paterson, rejected a legislative moratorium on such drilling, replacing it with his own, which lasts until July but narrows the definition of the prohibited kinds of drilling. While the companies are eager to start their drills, the federal Environmental Protection Agency is conducting a study, mandated by Congress, of the technique’s effect on drinking water supplies. The results are expected in 2012.

Tigers and Bears: With major reports on biodiversity all showing an accelerating loss of species on land and in the oceans, attention was focused most closely on polar bears, whose sea ice habitat is melting for longer periods almost every year. A team of climate scientists and biologists is promoting the idea of setting aside a “sea ice refuge” — a swath of the Arctic from northwest Greenland west through northern Canada where the ice remains thickest. Another study predicted that polar bears would breed with grizzlies, creating hybrids that are less resilient. Meanwhile, fears of the extinction of the wild tiger prompted a summit of sorts in Moscow, at which officials agreed to a goal of doubling the number of wild tigers — now about 3,200 — by 2022.

SOURCE: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/31/2010-an-untameable-spill-an-unpassable-bill/?ref=earth

Hertz Puts Electric Cars on the Fast Track, Starting in New York

2010-12-08T10:47:00.000-08:00

Hertz provided rides in several electric cars, as part of its announcement that it would begin renting electric cars in New York City on Dec. 15. By JIM MOTAVALLI

Early adopters unwilling to drop around $32,000 on a new Nissan Leaf will be able to rent that and several other electric cars from Hertz as soon as next week. On Monday, Hertz announced it would be adding electric cars and plug-in hybrids to its urban and college fleets worldwide, starting with New York City, where they’ll be available in Connect at Hertz car-sharing locations beginning Dec. 15.
Hertz has begun taking reservations for electric cars at Hertzev.com. The rental company is planning to offer the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, Smart electric drive, Nissan Leaf, Coda sedan and Toyota Prius plug-in hybrid to Connect customers. Hundreds of electric and plug-in hybrids will enter company fleets through the Hertz Global EV initiative over the next few months in New York, Washington and San Francisco, Hertz said. International rollouts are also planned in Britain and China. Not all the cars in the program are available yet — the Coda, for instance, is scheduled for the second half of 2011.
Hertz provided rides in all those cars (except for the Mitsubishi) in Midtown Manhattan on Monday. Tesla Roadsters were there, too, but that exotic electric will be offered to Prestige Collection Hertz rental customers. Hertz’s partnership with Smart was announced Monday, and the two-seat battery cars will be among the first available in the company’s Manhattan E.V. operations. Connect by Hertz has 1,000 members in Manhattan and two charging stations, according to its general manager, Jacalyn Vander Ploeg.

Also announced in New York was a new alliance with Starwood Hotels, which according to Julie McCaffrey, senior manager of global guest initiatives, will include Connect by Hertz electric cars stationed at the green-themed Element Times Square West hotel, which opened in November. “The charging station will be installed any day now,” she said. “It’s about new technology and a sustainable experience for our guests.”
Starwood became an early adopter when it installed a charging station at its Element hotel in Lexington, Mass., in July 2009. “The buzz has been great,” said Ms. McCaffrey, who conceded that the station hasn’t actually gotten much use without a dedicated fleet based there.
Rich Broome, a Hertz senior vice president, said in an interview that Hertz recognized 18 months ago that “2011 will be a watershed year for E.V. introductions and Hertz wanted to be part of that.” Mr. Broome said that the consumer cost for the E.V. share cars will vary from $6 to $10 per hour depending on their purchase prices (which will be brought down by federal and in some cases state incentives).
Jack Hidary, a global E.V. leader for Hertz and a “co-architect” of the cash-for-clunkers program, said that the company sees car-sharing fleets as a quick way to spread the electric drive experience to a large audience.
“Sales of these cars will only be in the tens of thousands, but now we have a way to get them to millions of people through flexible fleets like ours,” he said. He added that the use of cellphone-based mobile software, which can locate charging stations and even tell if they’re available or in use, is a “game changer” that helps makes electric vehicles practical.
And E.V. rental is about to get a sprinkle of stardust. According to Mr. Broome, the Hertz Entertainment Services division, which provides vehicles for film location shoots, is planning to provide electric vehicles for cast or crew and mobile truck-based chargers to keep them rolling. The units will include Level III fast charging, which can recharge a vehicle in half an hour, he said.

SOURCE: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/12/07/hertz-puts-electric-cars-on-the-fast-track-starting-in-new-york/

Cost of Green Power Makes Projects Tougher Sell

2010-11-11T00:38:00.000-08:00

By MATTHEW L. WALD and TOM ZELLER Jr.

Published: November 7, 2010

Michael Polsky’s wind farm company was doing so well in 2008 that banks were happy to lend millions for his effort to light up America with clean electricity.

But two years later, Mr. Polsky has a product he is hard-pressed to sell.
His company, Invenergy, had a contract to sell power to a utility in Virginia, but state regulators rejected the deal, citing the recession and the lower prices of natural gas and other fossil fuels.
“The ratepayers of Virginia must be protected from costs for renewable energy that are unreasonably high,” the regulators said. Wind power would have increased the monthly bill of a typical residential customer by 0.2 percent.
Even as many politicians, environmentalists and consumers want renewable energy and reduced dependence on fossil fuels, a growing number of projects are being canceled or delayed because governments are unwilling to add even small amounts to consumers’ electricity bills.
Deals to buy renewable power have been scuttled or slowed in states including Florida, Idaho and Kentucky as well as Virginia. By the end of the third quarter, year-to-date installations of new wind power dropped 72 percent from 2009 levels, according to the American Wind Energy Association, a trade group.
Mr. Polsky calls the focus on short-term costs short-sighted.
“They have to look for the ratepayers’ long-term interest,” he said, “not just the bills this year.”
Electricity generated from wind or sun still generally costs more — and sometimes a lot more — than the power squeezed from coal or natural gas. Prices for fossil fuels have dropped in part because the recession has reduced demand. In the case of natural gas, newer drilling techniques have opened the possibility of vast new supplies for years to come.
The gap in price can pit regulators, who see their job as protecting consumers from unreasonable rates, against renewable energy developers and utility companies, many of which are willing to pay higher prices now to ensure a broader energy portfolio in the future.
In April, for example, the state public utilities commission in Rhode Island rejected a power-purchase deal for an offshore wind project that would have cost 24.4 cents a kilowatt-hour. The utility now pays about 9.5 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity from fossil fuels.
The state legislature responded by passing a bill allowing the regulators to consider factors other than price. The commission then approved an agreement to buy electricity from a smaller wind farm, although that decision is being challenged in the courts.
Similarly, in Kentucky this year, the public service commission voted down a contract for a local utility, Kentucky Power, to buy electricity from NextEra Energy Resources in Illinois.
According to the commission, Kentucky Power argued that the contract would position the utility “to better meet growing environmental requirements and impending government portfolio mandates for renewable energy” and that it would benefit customers.
But Kentucky’s attorney general, Jack Conway, joined by business and industrial electricity users, opposed the deal, contending that it would have increased a typical residential customer’s rates by about 0.7 percent and was “a discretionary expense” that the utility’s customers could ill afford.
Commissioner James W. Gardner, the lone dissenting commissioner, protested that “there is a necessity for this power” and said that “there are great pressures nationally and in Kentucky to increase renewables.”
Companies that make solar cells and wind machines argue that a national energy policy is needed to guarantee them a market that will allow their industry to develop. Clean power will be an important industry globally for years, they say, and if the United States does not subsidize renewable energy now, it risks falling far behind other countries.
They point to China, which is rapidly increasing the amount of electricity it generates from renewable sources. In its most recent quarterly assessment of the renewable energy sector, the accounting and consulting firm Ernst & Young identified China as the most attractive market for investment in renewable energy.
In part, the analysis suggested, this reflected the failure of American lawmakers to pass a national renewable energy standard and the looming expiration of a Treasury program that allowed renewable developers to receive cash grants in lieu of tax credits.
In Europe, many national governments have guaranteed prices for energy from sun or wind. As a result, renewable advocates say, many countries are on track to meet the European Union’s goal of 20 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2020.
The United States has relied on a combination of state renewable energy mandates and federal tax credits to encourage greater reliance on energy from renewable sources. Legislation that would have set a price on carbon-dioxide emissions and included a standard for increasing the share of clean energy in the nation’s electricity portfolio failed in Congress this year.
“Our investors tell us they’re nervous about all the uncertainty,” said John Cusack, the president of Gifford Park Associates, a sustainability management and investment consulting firm in Eastchester, N.Y. “They don’t know what’s going to happen.”
To be sure, a lot of renewable power development is still going forward. The American Wind Energy Association estimates that wind farms capable of producing 6,300 megawatts of wind power are under construction, and that a busy second half of 2010 would leave installations about 50 percent behind last year. Solar power is becoming less expensive, and its use is expanding rapidly. But it still accounts for less than 1 percent of the nation’s electricity needs, providing enough to serve about 350,000 homes.
Renewable energy supporters argue that higher fossil fuel prices will eventually make renewable energy more competitive — and at times over the last two decades, when the price for natural gas has spiked, wind power in particular has been a relative bargain. Advocates also argue that while the costs might be higher now, as the technology matures and supply chains and manufacturing bases take root, clean sources of power will become more attractive.
Fold in the higher costs of extracting and burning fossil fuels on human health, the climate and the environment, many advocates argue, and renewable technologies like wind power are already cheaper.
“One of the problems in the United States is that we haven’t been willing to confront the tough questions,” said Paul Gipe, who sits on the steering committee of the Alliance for Renewable Energy, a group advocating energy policy reform.
“We have to ask ourselves, ‘Do we really want renewables?’ ” he said. “And if the answer to that is yes, then we’re going to have to pay for them.”

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/science/earth/08fossil.html?_r=1&ref=earth

Japan’s Auto Parts Makers Try to Anticipate Shift to Electric Cars

2010-11-07T02:56:00.000-08:00

By HIROKO TABUCHI Published: November 2, 2010

An electric-car mockup used by Masashi Terada to help his company, ASTI, determine how to make parts for such cars.

HAMAMATSU, Japan — People here refer to it as “electric vehicle shock.”

Sooner or, more likely, later the electric car could render thousands of companies superfluous here in the heart of Japan’s auto parts region.
No more engines. No call for exhaust pipes. Spark plugs? Gone with the electric-car wind.
Or so, in essence, warns a recent widely circulated study that predicts the eventual demise of much of Hamamatsu’s gasoline engine economy. Spurred by that study and a general sense of foreboding, carmakers, parts factories and local governments in this sprawling industrial town are joining forces to prepare for a future of electric vehicles.
Suzuki Motor, based in Hamamatsu, helped found a regionwide alliance in October that will help parts makers develop new automotive technologies geared toward electric cars, and even other industries.
The alliance will host a study group later this month in which engineers will dismantle an electric car motor made by Suzuki for parts makers to study.
“We are in the midst of an industrial revolution,” Osamu Suzuki, the automaker’s 80-year-old president, said on Oct. 7 at a rally to commemorate the start of the alliance.
“Our suppliers need to start studying how they can transform their businesses.”
Some experts in Japan warn that Hamamatsu is a microcosm of a wider challenge facing Japanese car manufacturing, which consists of a web of manufacturers like Toyota and Honda supported by thousands of companies that turn out engine blocks, exhaust pipes and hundreds of other parts specific to gas power.
According to a study published in August by the Shizuoka Economic Research Institute, almost 30 percent of sales in Japan’s 34.6 trillion yen ($430 billion) auto parts industry comes from parts that could be rendered obsolete by electricity-powered vehicles. In Shizuoka, the region surrounding Hamamatsu that is known for its strengths in engine technology, that number jumps to 48 percent, the institute says.
“Japan has always prided itself in developing the best engines, the best auto technology,” said Hisashi Nakajima, senior managing director at the institute and the author of the report. “If we don’t do something now, Japan’s strength could turn out to be its weakness.”
Hamamatsu is desperate to keep alive the estimated 2,000 auto parts makers in the city that makes up two-thirds of its 3 trillion yen ($37 billion) manufacturing economy and supports almost 100,000 jobs. Two other major industries in the city, textiles and musical instruments, have declined in the last decades, usurped by cheaper rivals in the rest of Asia.
Hamamatsu, locals say, now literally runs on gasoline engines. In addition to Suzuki, the city is also home to Yamaha Motor, a Japanese pioneer in internal combustion engines that has provided Toyota Motor with engines for some of its most revered models, including its 2000GT sports car, a highly prized collectors’ car from the 1960s. Yamaha continues to provide Toyota with engines for some domestic models like the Crown. The region’s auto parts suppliers had supported that effort by staying on the cutting edge of engine development. Building on that strength, these parts makers — which range from tiny factories run by a handful of employees to multinational corporations with more than 1,000 workers — supply parts to all but one of Japan’s major automakers. The exception is Mazda.
For the last 40 years, Harada Seiki has honed its precision metal-cutting technology for automobile engine parts: spark plugs, crankshafts and piston rings.
Now, Harada Seiki wants to participate in the regionwide alliance to study whether its production processes would be applicable to electric-vehicle motors.
“Electric cars will have far less of the kind of parts that we’ve always manufactured,” said Hirotoshi Harada, the parts maker’s president. “But they may require parts that never existed before,” he said. “That’s what we want to find out.”
But Mr. Harada and other executives point to challenges. For one, it is not clear how fast the shift toward electric vehicles will occur. The research company J. D. Power estimates that by 2015, hybrid gas-electric and all-electric vehicles will surpass three million units a year, or about 3.4 percent of global light-vehicle sales. But after that, adoption depends greatly on factors like government policies, the price of gas and how fast the infrastructure for batteries and recharging can be set up, analysts say.

Nor is it clear what technologies will eventually dominate — gas-electric hybrids, plug-in hybrids, pure electric vehicles or even fuel-cell cars — or whether gasoline cars will ever become obsolete. Even big auto makers seem reluctant to bet on one technology. Nissan, which will introduce what it says will be the first mass-produced all-electric vehicle next month, on Tuesday expanded its gas-electric hybrid lineup with its new Infiniti M.
But to the extent the car industry does shift toward electric vehicles, analysts say Japan’s auto industry could face new rivals overseas, and from industries and regions beyond those traditionally associated with car making.
China has emerged as a front-runner in electric vehicles, with a flurry of small companies producing simple, cheap plug-in cars. And in Silicon Valley, the start-up Tesla has sold luxury battery-powered sports cars since 2008.
Meanwhile, auto parts makers have surrendered a central part of the electric car, batteries, to the electronics industry. Even top automakers are working with electronics companies to develop and produce the powerful and complex batteries required for electric vehicle power trains. Toyota, for example, is working with Panasonic, while General Motors is working with a unit of LG Corporation of South Korea.
“The industry map is being redrawn,” said Mr. Nakajima of the Shizuoka Economic Research Institute. “In that turmoil, winners can become losers, and losers, winners.”
Meanwhile, many parts makers here, especially smaller ones, may see their research and development capabilities or financial resources stretched too thin to develop parts for electric vehicles while also keeping up with developments in gasoline-car production.
Indeed, many small factories in Japan are already struggling to survive, weighed down by a sluggish economy and a strong yen. The Japanese currency has surged to 15-year highs in recent months, punishing manufacturers by making their products more expensive overseas.
“The question is: Where do they spend their limited resources?” said Oliver Hazimeh, director at PRTM Management Consultants, based in Waltham, Mass., and a leader of the firm’s clean transportation work. “Do they focus on something that’s going to happen 10 or 15 years out, or do they keep on developing for gasoline cars?”
He added, “They still have time, but they need to think about what is their long-term strategy.”
If history is a guide, the region’s parts makers have shown an ability to adapt to change. ASTI, another Hamamatsu-based parts maker, had its roots in making piano connector parts and wire harnesses for Yamaha pianos and organs. When Yamaha’s business shifted to engines and motorbikes in the 1970s, ASTI adapted its wire harness for automotive use.
Now ASTI says it faces its biggest challenge yet: to develop wiring and cables that will withstand the greatly increased electricity needs of an electric car. A wire harness for conventional cars carries about 12 volts, says Masashi Terada, a director in charge of technical engineering at ASTI. In purely electric vehicles, some cables would need to channel more than 10 times that, he said.
“We want to figure out what automakers are looking for as they move towards zero-emissions cars,” Mr. Terada said. “Or even better, we ourselves want to take the lead and tell automakers what they need.”
Hiroshi Tsuda, a former president at Suzuki who now leads the local alliance that will help parts makers evolve into electric vehicle suppliers, is optimistic. “By acting now, both parts makers and car makers can stay ahead of the curve,” Mr. Tsuda said. “Japanese industry has always adapted with the times,” he said. “This is not a crisis. It’s a big opportunity.”

SOURCE: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/business/global/03japancar.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=earth

Pru External Battery Trailer Adds 700 Extra Miles of Range to Electric Cars

2010-11-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

By Dan Nosowitz

Modern electric cars are still in their infancy, and one of the most onerous growing pains has to be their limited range--even the otherwise-pretty-awesome Nissan Leaf can only go about 100 miles on a charge. In answer to that issue, the Pru trailer concept offers a 700-mile boost in range, extra storage space, and sweet details like topographical analysis via Google Earth.
The Pru trailer (it stands for Power Regeneration Unit) from Electric Motors and Vehicles is more than a simple extra battery on wheels attached by trailer hitch. Powered by software called the Smart Hitch, the Pru actually measures its own speed and powers itself along at the same speed as the car, thereby making sure it doesn't slow the EV down with its weight. It's even equipped with a GPS sensor that syncs with Google Earth, measuring topographical details that might affect its charge cycle.

It's actually a hybrid itself, boasting both a 750cc diesel motor and a substantial amount of lithium-ion batteries that combine to give about an extra 700 miles to an electric vehicle's range. It can also be used as a standalone charging unit, just in case. It's still a legitimate trailer, too--only about a quarter of the Pru's six-foot length is taken up by its batteries, leaving room for storage.

The Pru is just a design for now, not even in the prototype stage, though a representative says it could be ready in the first half of 2011. It might be sort of prohibitively priced, at around $15,000. Hopefully they can find a way to bring costs down, via government subsidies or whatnot. It enables a driver to actually use a short-range electric car as a main vehicle, even allowing weekend trips. It's definitely an interim solution, until battery efficiency and EV infrastructure is up to snuff in the States, but man, what a smart little interim solution it is.

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-11/pru-trailer-adds-storage-space-and-700-extra-miles-range-electric-cars

Reports Detail Global Investment and Other Trends in Green Energy

2010-10-26T09:26:00.000-07:00

This image is of Horse Hollow Wind Farm, US. (Credit: GWEC)

ScienceDaily (July 15, 2010) — In 2009, for the second year in a row, both the US and Europe added more power capacity from renewable sources such as wind and solar than conventional sources like coal, gas and nuclear, according to twin reports launched today by the United Nations Environment Programme and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century (REN21).

Renewables accounted for 60 per cent of newly installed capacity in Europe and more than 50 per cent in the USA in 2009. This year or next, experts predict, the world as a whole will add more capacity to the electricity supply from renewable than non-renewable sources.
The reports detail trends in the global green energy sector, including which sources attracted the greatest attention from investors and governments in different world regions.
They say investment in core clean energy (new renewables, biofuels and energy efficiency) decreased by 7% in 2009, to $162 billion. Many sub-sectors declined significantly in money invested, including large (utility) scale solar power and biofuels. However, there was record investment in wind power. If spending on solar water heaters, as well as total installation costs for rooftop solar PV, were included, total investment in 2009 actually increased in 2009, bucking the economic trend.
New private and public sector investments in core clean energy leapt 53 per cent in China in 2009. China added 37 gigawatts (GW) of renewable power capacity, more than any other country.
Globally, nearly 80 GW of renewable power capacity was added, including 31 GW of hydro and 48 GW of non-hydro capacity.
China surpassed the US in 2009 as the country with the greatest investment in clean energy. China's wind farm development was the strongest investment feature of the year by far, although there were other areas of strength worldwide in 2009, notably North Sea offshore wind investment and the financing of power storage and electric vehicle technology companies.
Wind power and solar PV additions reached a record high of 38 GW and 7 GW, respectively. Investment totals in utility-scale solar PV declined relative to 2008, partly a result of large drops in the costs of solar PV. However, this decline was offset by record investment in small-scale (rooftop) solar PV projects.
The reports also show that countries with policies encouraging renewable energy have roughly doubled from 55 in 2005 to more than 100 today -- half of them in the developing world -- and have played a critically important role in the sector's rapid growth.
The sister reports, UNEP's Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2010 and the REN21's Renewables 2010 Global Status Report, were released by UN Under-Secretary-General Achim Steiner, UNEP's Executive Director, and Mohamed El-Ashry, Chair of REN21. The UNEP report was prepared by London-based Bloomberg New Energy Finance. The REN21 report was produced by a team of authors in collaboration with a global network of research partners.
The UNEP report focuses on the global trends in sustainable energy investment, covering both the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors. The REN21 report offers a broad look at the status of renewable energy worldwide today, covering power regeneration, heating and cooling and transport fuels, and paints the landscape of policies and targets introduced around the world to promote renewable energy.
Says Mr. Steiner: "The sustainable energy investment story of 2009 was one of resilience, frustration and determination. Resilience to the financial downturn that was hitting all sectors of the global economy and frustration that, while the UN climate convention meeting in Copenhagen was not the big breakdown that might have occurred, neither was it the big breakthrough so many had hoped for. Yet there was determination on the part of many industry actors and governments, especially in rapidly developing economies, to transform the financial and economic crisis into an opportunity for greener growth.
"There remains however a serious gap between the ambition and the science in terms of where the world needs to be in 2020 to avoid dangerous climate change. But what this five years of research underlines is that this gap is not unbridgeable. Indeed, renewable energy is consistently and persistently bucking the trends and can play its part in realizing a low carbon, resource efficient Green Economy if government policy sends ever harder market signals to investors," he added.
Says Mr El-Ashry: "Favorable policies now in place in more than 100 countries have played a critical role in the strength of global renewable energy investments recently. For the upward trend of renewable energy growth to continue, policy efforts now need to be taken to the next level and encourage a massive scale up of renewable technologies."
Says Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance: "The relatively resilient performance of the sector during the current economic downturn shows that clean energy was not a bubble created by the late stages of the credit boom, but is instead an investment theme that will remain important for the years ahead."
In 2009 renewable sources represented:

25 per cent of global power (electricity) capacity (1,230 gigawatts (GW) out of 4,800 GW total all sources, including coal, gas, nuclear)
18 per cent of global power production
60 per cent of newly installed power capacity in Europe and more than 50 per cent in the US; the world as a whole should reach 50 per cent or more in newly-installed power capacity from renewables in 2010 or 2011.

SOURCE: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715105949.htm#

DARPA's Future Li-ion Batteries Will Be Smaller Than Grains of Salt

2010-10-25T11:25:00.000-07:00

By Rebecca Boyle

New DARPA-funded research could revolutionize portable power supplies, leading to lithium-ion batteries that are smaller than a grain of salt.
Jane Chang, an engineer at the University of California-Los Angeles, is designing a tiny solid electrolyte that allows charge to flow between two nanoscale electrodes. Eventually, the wee batteries could be used to power a host of micro and nanodevices.

The special electrolyte is basically just a series of nanowires coated with conductive material. Chang is using painstakingly slow atomic layer deposition to spray minuscule amounts of lithium aluminosilicate onto the nanowires. The solid compound allows current to flow within a battery. The nanowires are designed to have a high surface-to-volume ratio, making them more efficient. “We're trying to achieve the same power densities, the same energy densities, as traditional lithium ion batteries, but we need to make the footprint much smaller,” Chang says.
Nanoscale electrodes are being designed in other labs, but so far, no one has built a complete working nano-battery, according to UCLA.
If they work, they could be more effective, and perhaps less prone to scary malfunction, than nuclear microbatteries or virus-powered batteries. The batteries could be useful for powering devices for medical diagnostics and treatment, among other technologies.
Chang announced her latest results Tuesday at the AVS 57th International Symposium & Exhibition in Albuquerque.

Source: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-10/future-li-ion-batteries-will-be-smaller-grain-salt

Never Mind the Naysayers: The Chevy Volt is Excellent

2010-10-15T01:06:00.000-07:00

Behind the wheel, we find that GM’s highest-profile concept car has become a refreshing, radically different kind of production vehicle

By Seth Fletcher

That the Chevy Volt exists at all is something of a miracle. The project, which was announced at the Detroit Auto Show nearly four years ago and goes into production next month, has survived two CEO shakeups, major bankruptcy, and an unprecedented rescue by the Federal government. For every wave of goodwill, the Volt has endured a backlash of bile and skepticism. By now, the car has become a political football, a proxy for anger over the bailout of GM and Chrysler and a symbol of the future of the American auto industry. That’s a lot of baggage for a compact car to carry. And it’s a remarkable amount of baggage to accumulate before anyone even knew how the finished car would drive.
Now, after several hours and nearly 200 miles driving and riding in saleable Volts, we know how the finished product drives. And the news is very good.

The Volt launches from a stop with a punch that makes the car feel faster than its 0-to-60 time of 8.8 seconds would suggest. Around town it is solid, silent, and quick. At 85 mph it feels unshakeable, with plenty of passing power to spare. (Top speed is limited to 100 mph.) It is not light by any stretch, but its low center of gravity (which comes the 400-pound lithium-ion battery situated underneath the center console and back seat) makes it feel nimble. We squealed the tires on hard turns a few times, but never did it start to slide. Steering is silky and precise.
The loaded Volt is comfortable and pleasant to sit in, with soft leather seats, a leather-wrapped steering wheel, a sophisticated touch-screen navigation system (which also offers a vast amount of data about your driving efficiency), rear backup camera, seat warmers, cruise control, Bluetooth, iPod connectivity, and the rest of the usual upgrade amenities. It’s not spacious, but it doesn’t feel cramped; I spent my time in the car with two other sub-six-foot adults, and I never heard anyone complain about legroom, even in the back.
So GM has succeeded in making the Volt a perfectly solid, nicely appointed production car, never glitchy or cut-rate or compromised in any way. Good. For a car that starts at $41,500, this level of fit and finish should be the minimum.
But the Volt, of course, is not just any production car. Let’s start with the pure-electric (EV) mode. GM long said that the Volt would get 40 miles of gas-free driving on a full charge of its 16 kilowatt-hour battery. They recently replaced the number “40” with a range of 25 to 50 miles, and after spending time in the car I see why. The first leg of my trip was a 45.9-mile drive through the Detroit suburbs—no highway driving, many stoplights, an average speed limit of 45 mph. I made a reasonable effort to drive efficiently, which the Volt turns into a subtle and surprisingly compelling game; when the green bouncing ball that sits just below eye level is sitting still in the middle of a digital column, you’re doing well. And you don’t have to drive like a hypermiler to do well: Just don’t floor it from a stop, and let the regenerative braking (which is all but imperceptible and starts as soon as you lift your foot off the throttle) do as much of the deceleration work as possible. I made the 45-mile drive in pure electric mode with 6 miles left on the battery meter,. The next day, on the first leg of a 155.7-mile route, we did several miles of 80-plus-mph freeway driving, switched it for several miles to “sport” mode and generally tried to push it as much as we could given that we were driving in town, and we got a little over 37 miles of all-electric range.

After that, the battery was “customer empty”—the Volt’s software only allows it to use 65 percent of the battery’s capacity, a conservative decision meant to keep the battery running well for the extent of its eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty. At this point, the 1.4-liter, four-cylinder internal combustion starts up, to generate electricity for the battery. Initially, the transition between modes is seamless. You don’t hear or feel it as much as you suspect that that the gas engine is running.
Drive for a while in charge-sustaining mode, however, and you’ll eventually hear the RPMs rise, most likely under heavy acceleration. It’s a strange sensation, because the link between the movement of your foot and the sound of the engine is correlated but indirect—it’s muted and delayed. The car “leads with the battery,” meaning that even in charge-sustaining mode, the electric motor draws electricity from the battery; the engine then follows to replenish those electrons. In other words, when you punch the throttle from a complete stop, you’ll get to 20 mph on battery power alone, and then you’ll hear the engine rev up to a little over 3,000 rpm, but it’s not the direct relationship between engine noise and foot action that we’re accustomed to: The engine has a mind of its own, a software system that runs it as needed to supply electricity.
Charge-sustaining mode exposes one of the car’s few disappointments: weaker-than-expected gas mileage once the battery is down. I had long expected this mode to deliver some 50 mpg on average, and it’s possible to get there, but you have to earn it. My co-driver did a 10-mile stretch of aggressive hypermiling—windows up, no AC, slooooow acceleration, coasting whenever possible—and got above 51 mpg. Driving normally, I got 37.1 mpg over a 38-mile stretch that included some two-lane highway.
But these mid-30s mpg figures are misleading on their own. Remember, the first 40 or so miles come gas-free. If you drive 40 or so miles a day during the work week and charge the battery completely every night, you could theoretically never use gasoline unless you take the Volt on a longer trip.
Aside from its steep price (primarily due of the great expense of its massive lithium-ion battery pack) the thing about the Volt that has disappointed people the most is this week’s revelation that, in certain circumstances, the gas engine can, along with the electric motor, mechanically couple to the gears that drive the wheels.
Here’s how it works: In charge-sustaining mode, at 70 mph or above, the gasoline engine—which normally powers a second, smaller electric motor that acts like a generator—can connect to the gearset that drives the wheels. Doing so allows the larger, primary electric motor (which always turns the wheels, in all modes) to run at lower RPMs. At high speeds, with the battery depleted, this arrangement is 10-15 percent more efficient, and efficiency is, after all, the whole point of the Volt.
I’m not going to chase down every executive statement over the years on the nature of the powertrain and parse them to figure out whether GM “lied” (which is the charge that has spread across the Web this week), or whether they were technically always telling the truth (which is what GM maintains). And the reason is simply that I don’t care. Yes, you can argue that GM was misleading about the true nature of one of the Volt powertrain’s four operating modes. GM’s defense is that they’ve been waiting on the patent to clear on the technology and couldn’t talk about it for competitive reasons. Whatever. This strikes me as an esoteric non-issue that in no way changes what really matters, which is the performance of the car. And the Volt was never going to pass the electric-car purity test—since the very beginning we’ve known that it would have a gas engine on board.
During my test drive, my copilot and I tried repeatedly to feel or hear any difference in the car’s performance in charge-sustaining mode above 70 mph. We couldn’t. This is an esoteric engineering matter that happens automatically, deep within the car.
At the end of our full-day drive, a GM rep shrewdly handed over the keys to a 2010 Prius, a car I had driven before and enjoyed. The Prius is roomier than the Volt, but as soon as I turned on the ignition and started moving, the gas engine loudly snapped on, making me long for the comparatively silent, gliding operation of the Volt. The steering felt stiff, the transitions between battery and parallel power jarring. The Prius, of course, is cheaper, but not radically so.
This points to the Volt’s biggest weakness: Its $41,000 base price tag. Even after the $7,500 federal tax credit, the Volt is for the kind of person who is willing to shell out for a four-passenger car that isn’t from Germany. The car is so pleasant to drive that I can’t imagine finding early adopters to be a problem. But after that, I’d like to see the Volt become available to the rest of us. Which is why we should hope for a kind of EV arms race, for a significant drop in battery prices and a rapid expansion of plug-in infrastructure. Because after putting a couple dozen highway miles on a vehicle like the Volt, plenty of people simply won’t want to go back to a conventional car.

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/cars/article/2010-10/never-mind-naysayers-chevy-volt-excellent

.First Solar Power Projects Approved to be Built on U.S. Public Lands

2010-10-07T01:27:00.000-07:00

By Clay Dillow

Energy from the Sun Parabolic solar troughs harvest sunlight at a solar thermal power installation in California.

The U.S. may be years behind some European nations and China when it comes to taking advantage of solar power tech, but even global superpowers have to start somewhere. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar has approved the first large-scale solar energy projects to be built on public lands, a first step in unlocking the acres upon acres of federal and state managed real estate for clean energy production.
The approval paves the way for two projects: The Imperial Valley Solar Project managed by Texas-based Tessera Solar, a 6,360-acre site that will harvest up to 709 megawatts from 28,360 solar dishes, and the Chevron Lucerne Valley Solar Project, managed by Chevron and pulling in up to 45 megawatts from 40,500 solar panels. Together they will be able to power somewhere between 226,000 and 566,000 typical homes.

Both projects were approved under what the Department of the Interior calls its “fast track” program, though those who have been waiting for years for bureaucracy to catch up with both the technology and the times might not care to call it that. But now that they’re approved, the administration does want the companies to get their projects up and running quickly. Under the stimulus act, developers that have their projects under construction by the end of this year qualify for a good deal of public funding – specifically, $273 million for Tessera and $31 million for Chevron.

The slow approval process mostly stems from the fact that most of these public lands are managed for conservation purposes, so they are strictly governed by rules regarding the environmental ramifications of any construction taking place there, even seemingly green construction like solar farms. Both projects survived rigorous environmental review and must take extensive actions not to disrupt surrounding ecosystems. But it the projects can get off the ground without causing an oil spill or otherwise fouling their sites, they could serve as important proving grounds for further green energy development elsewhere on public lands.
Perhaps its no coincidence this announcement came on the same day Energy Secretary Steven Chu also announced the White House will become a source of solar power, receiving photovoltaic panels and a solar water heater on the roof by the end of spring. Presumably it’s a sign of the administration’s commitment to a green energy future, though it also goes to show just how slow Washington can be when it comes to implementing green initiatives

SOURCE; http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/sec-salazar-approves-first-solar-power-projects-be-built-public-lands

Solar Wind Could Replace Solar, Wind as Renewable Energy Source

2010-10-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

By Rebecca Boyle

Never mind using the solar wind to power spacecraft — that’s old hat. Scientists at Washington State University want to use solar wind to power the entire world. A humongous solar sail could be used to harvest the power of solar winds, generating 1 billion billion gigawatts of electricity. The problem is figuring out how to get the power back to Earth.
A solar wind power satellite, or a Dyson-Harrop satellite, after the scientists who invented it, would provide 100 billion times as much power as the Earth currently uses, as Discovery News points out. Researchers from Washington State University published a paper describing the system in the International Journal of Astrobiology.
It involves a .4-inch-wide copper wire pointed at the sun, and attached to a solar sail. The wire — which can range in length from 980 feet to more than half a mile — would generate a magnetic field that would capture electrons from the solar wind. The particles would be funneled into a spherical receiver, which produces a current.

Some of this electricity would be used to power the electron-harvesting magnetic field. The rest would power an infrared laser beam, which would be pointed at collectors on space stations, power bases or Earth. Satellites could be placed anywhere in the solar system, and networks of satellites could combine to generate terawatts of power, the researchers say.
The system would be cheaper than installing solar panels in space, because copper is cheaper than photovoltaic cells, according to International Business Times.
The main problem is getting all this energy back to the planet. Satellites would have to sail tens of millions of miles away from Earth in order to capture enough power, but even the most powerful laser beams would scatter over such great distances. The laser would spread to thousands of miles wide, according to John Mankins, president of solar power consulting firm Artemis Innovation. He is quoted in New Scientist saying you would need "stupendously huge optics, such as a virtually perfect lens between maybe 10 to 100 kilometers (6.2 to 62 miles) across," to capture the laser.
Researchers would have to design a more focused laser before solar wind satellites could be deployed, acknowledges to Dirk Schulze-Makuch, a co-author of the paper.
Still, the idea seems worth exploring — the solar wind is a vast source of energy, so why not try to capture some of it? If it could solve the world’s energy problems for good, it's worth a closer look.

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-10/solar-wind-could-replace-solar-wind-renewable-energy-source

Green-Tech Investment Plummets

2010-10-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

By TODD WOODY

Has the green tech recovery stalled?
Global venture capital investment in green technology companies fell 30 percent, to $1.53 billion, in the third quarter of 2010, according to a preliminary report issued Friday by the Cleantech Group, a San Francisco-based research and consulting firm.
The amount invested in North America, Europe, China, India and Israel in the third quarter was also 11 percent below the year-ago quarter, when investment tanked amid the recession.
The numbers are striking, given that investment in green-tech start-ups soared in the first half of this year, surpassing records set in 2008 at the height of the clean technology boom.
“Much like we see globally, I think businesses and investors are grappling a little bit with a recovery that hasn’t yet taken off, and I think people are trying to figure out how quickly will the growth occur,” Sheeraz Haji, president of the Cleantech Group, said during a conference call Friday. “I think we’re seeing a little bit of the same in clean tech.”
California, an epicenter of green technology innovation, suffered a precipitous decline, with investment falling 61 percent.
Mr. Haji questioned whether uncertainty over the fate of California’s global warming law, known as A.B. 32, played a role in the falloff in investment. A measure on the November ballot, Proposition 23, would suspend A.B. 32 until the state unemployment rate falls to 5.5 percent for four consecutive quarters.
“We can’t help but wonder that uncertainty around Prop 23 has impacted that,” he said, cautioning that it is difficult to draw hard conclusions based on one quarter’s data. “
The global warming law requires California to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Mr. Haji noted that venture investment soared after the law’s enactment in 2006 as investors poured money into solar start-ups and companies developing energy efficiency services and electric cars.
Even so, investors put $452 million into California companies in the third quarter, versus $126 million for second-place Texas.
While the rest of North America experienced a rise in investment in the third quarter, California’s poor performance led to a 42 percent decline for the region as a whole.
Not so with Asia. For instance, investment in China jumped to $153 million in the third quarter from $30 million in the second quarter of 2010.
“Asia absolutely defies the drop and China in particular has shown some strengths,” said Mr. Haji, who noted that on a recent trip he took to China, green-tech entrepreneurs repeatedly told him they had no trouble raising capital.
Over all, investment in Asia spiked to more than $300 million in the third quarter from less than $100 million in the second quarter.
Brian Goncher, director of the American clean-tech practice for Deloitte & Touche, said that a steep decline in the number of solar deals was one factor driving the decrease in investment worldwide. Only $144 million was invested in solar companies in the third quarter compared with $874 million in the second quarter.
“A lot of large solar projects have gotten their investment in the first half of the year,” Mr. Goncher said.

SOURCE: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/green-tech-investment-plummets/?ref=earth

Short on Roof Space? Adobe Plants Fuel Cells

2010-09-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

To green up its operations, Adobe Systems, the maker of the ubiquitous Flash media player, has done everything from installing waterless urinals to building a wind farm at its downtown San Jose, Calif., headquarters.
Now the company has put a dozen 100-kilowatt Bloom Energy fuel cells on top of a parking garage that will supply nearly a third of the three-tower complex’s electricity.
It will be the nation’s largest installation of Bloom Energy Servers, a cutting-edge solid oxide fuel cell that has been bought by Google, eBay and other big corporations.
Bloom Energy, a long-secretive Sunnyvale, Calif., start-up that has raised $400 million from some of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalists, introduced the energy servers to great fanfare at a February event attended by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California; Gen. Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state; and a host of technology chiefs.
Fuel cells convert hydrogen, natural gas or another fuel into electricity through an electrochemical process and then provide electricity directly to a building without the need for new transmission lines. Depending on the type of fuel used, Bloom claims its devices can sharply cut or eliminate greenhouse gas emissions.
Randy Knox, Adobe’s senior director for global workplace solutions, said the company aimed to obtain half of its electricity from renewable sources. But Adobe was stymied by the fact its operations are located in urban skyscrapers rather than on a sprawling corporate campus.
“We just don’t have space on our tower rooftops for large solar arrays,” said Mr. Knox.
Earlier this year, Adobe did install 20 1.2-kilowatt vertical wind turbines made by Windspire Energy on a sixth-floor plaza that connects two of its buildings. But the urban wind farm, which looks more like a modern art exhibit than a power plant, generates only enough electricity to power about 10 average homes –- when the wind is blowing.
A dozen Bloom Energy Servers, however, produce 1,200 kilowatts of power around the clock and fit comfortably on the roof of Adobe’s parking garage. Visible from neighboring towers and the 101 freeway, the polished metal cubes’ green-chic look owes more to Apple’s tech aesthetic than to old-school industrial design.
Each of the Bloom Energy Servers sells for $700,000 to $800,000, although state and federal tax incentives can halve the cost.
To minimize the fuel cells’ carbon footprint, Mr. Knox said Adobe had signed contracts to purchase methane, a potent greenhouse gas, emitted and captured at a landfill in Pennsylvania.
“In reality, the methane gas is probably not making it to San Jose,” he said. “But we’re actually paying for the gas in Pennsylvania and paying for the tariffs so it can be put in the pipeline and transported to California.”
Stu Aaron, Bloom Energy’s vice president for marketing and product management, said that about half of the company’s customers are buying methane produced by such sources as landfills or farm animals under arrangements similar to the one Adobe has made. While the fuel cells can operate on such biogas, most customers are not located near the source of the methane, he said.
Mr. Aaron said that Bloom expects to have 100 energy servers installed by the end of the year and that, on average, customers are buying five to 10 of the units.
Except for one installation in Chattanooga, Tenn., all of the Bloom Energy Servers are in California.
“We’re still focused on California because of a combination of the relatively high cost of electricity here, the cost of natural gas, the availability of incentives and the predisposition of customers’ being green,” Mr. Aaron said.
When incentives are taken into account, Bloom Energy Servers can generate electricity below retail rates, according to the company.
For Adobe’s part, it will continue to search for ways to generate more renewable energy, Mr. Knox said.
One option: Joining with other Silicon Valley corporations to buy land outside the city to build a cooperative solar farm.

Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/28/short-on-roof-space-adobe-plants-fuel-cells/?ref=earth

Japan Will Drill for Methane Off Its Shores

2010-09-28T00:14:00.000-07:00

Japan will attempt to tap frozen methane gas deposits off its southeast coast by drilling a series of deep-sea test wells early next year, the Guardian newspaper reported on Monday.
The project will assess the commercial viability of tapping the deposits, called methane hydrates, which lie below thousands of feet of seawater and sediment. The drilling will be done by the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, in association with the Japanese government. The Japanese Ministry of Trade has requested more than $1 billion for the project, slated to begin in the spring.
Methane hydrates form in cold, high-pressure environments and are found throughout the world’s oceans and beneath the frozen ground of high-latitude countries. Methane is a clean-burning fuel, but is also a powerful greenhouse gas, with roughly 21 times the heat-trapping potential of carbon dioxide.
The energy content of the Earth’s methane hydrates — sometimes called “fire ice” or “ice that burns” — is vast, possibly greater than that of all other fossil fuels combined, according to the United States Department of Energy.
The gas deposits have yet to be tapped successfully on a commercial scale, but Japan, which lacks much in the way of domestic energy supplies and imports more than 99 percent of its oil, is at the forefront of efforts to do so.
In 2008, Japanese engineers extracted methane from hydrate deposits nearly a mile beneath the Canadian tundra, in what was hailed as a major breakthrough in the field. The Japanese government has declared its intention to commercially tap methane hydrates by 2018.
India and China have discovered huge frozen methane deposits off their own coasts, and both countries are seeking ways to develop the finds into commercially exploitable energy sources.
The environmental risks posed by undersea hydrates alarm some scientists and environmentalists, however. Potential dangers involve inadvertently setting off undersea landslides, which could wipe out nearby seafloor life, and uncontrollable methane leaks from destabilized gas and hydrate formations.
Massive eruptions of methane gas from melting or collapsing undersea hydrates have occurred naturally in the distant past as a result of rapid climate warming, studies have shown.
Yet engineers involved in the hydrate exploration projects and some energy experts discount the possibility that drilling could trigger massive accidental releases of methane.
“Can environmental disaster happen by gas hydrate production? The answer is no,” Koji Yamamoto, a project director for the Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation, told The Asia Times in December 2009.

SOURCE: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/27/japan-will-drill-for-methane-off-its-shores/?ref=earth

In Arabian Desert, a Sustainable City Rises

2010-09-27T00:15:00.000-07:00

The terra-cotta-like exterior of a residential building in Masdar, a visionary city being built 20 miles from Abu Dhabi.

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

Published: September 25, 2010

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Back in 2007, when the government here announced its plan for “the world’s first zero-carbon city” on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, many Westerners dismissed it as a gimmick — a faddish follow-up to neighboring Dubai’s half-mile-high tower in the desert and archipelago of man-made islands in the shape of palm trees.
Designed by Foster & Partners, a firm known for feats of technological wizardry, the city, called Masdar, would be a perfect square, nearly a mile on each side, raised on a 23-foot-high base to capture desert breezes. Beneath its labyrinth of pedestrian streets, a fleet of driverless electric cars would navigate silently through dimly lit tunnels. The project conjured both a walled medieval fortress and an upgraded version of the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland.
Well, those early assessments turned out to be wrong. By this past week, as people began moving into the first section of the project to be completed — a 3 ½-acre zone surrounding a sustainability-oriented research institute — it was clear that Masdar is something more daring and more noxious.
Norman Foster, the firm’s principal partner, has blended high-tech design and ancient construction practices into an intriguing model for a sustainable community, in a country whose oil money allows it to build almost anything, even as pressure grows to prepare for the day the wells run dry. And he has worked in an alluring social vision, in which local tradition and the drive toward modernization are no longer in conflict — a vision that, at first glance, seems to brim with hope.
But his design also reflects the gated-community mentality that has been spreading like a cancer around the globe for decades. Its utopian purity, and its isolation from the life of the real city next door, are grounded in the belief — accepted by most people today, it seems — that the only way to create a truly harmonious community, green or otherwise, is to cut it off from the world at large.
Mr. Foster is the right man for this kind of job. A lifelong tech buff who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller, he talks about architecture in terms of high performance, as if his buildings were sports cars. And to some extent his single-minded focus on the craft of architecture — its technological and material aspects — has been a convenient way of avoiding trickier discussions about its social impact. (It’s hard to imagine Mr. Foster embroiled in the kind of public battles over modern architecture that his former partner, Richard Rogers, has fought with the traditionalist Prince Charles in London.)
Not that Mr. Foster doesn’t have ideals. At Masdar, one aim was to create an alternative to the ugliness and inefficiency of the sort of development — suburban villas slathered in superficial Islamic-style décor, gargantuan air-conditioned malls — that has been eating away the fabric of Middle Eastern cities for decades.
He began with a meticulous study of old Arab settlements, including the ancient citadel of Aleppo in Syria and the mud-brick apartment towers of Shibam in Yemen, which date from the 16th century. “The point,” he said in an interview in New York, “was to go back and understand the fundamentals,” how these communities had been made livable in a region where the air can feel as hot as 150 degrees.
Among the findings his office made was that settlements were often built on high ground, not only for defensive reasons but also to take advantage of the stronger winds. Some also used tall, hollow “wind towers” to funnel air down to street level. And the narrowness of the streets — which were almost always at an angle to the sun’s east-west trajectory, to maximize shade — accelerated airflow through the city.
With the help of environmental consultants, Mr. Foster’s team estimated that by combining such approaches, they could make Masdar feel as much as 70 degrees cooler. In so doing, they could more than halve the amount of electricity needed to run the city. Of the power that is used, 90 percent is expected to be solar, and the rest generated by incinerating waste (which produces far less carbon than piling it up in dumps). The city itself will be treated as a kind of continuing experiment, with researchers and engineers regularly analyzing its performance, fine-tuning as they go along.
But Mr. Foster’s most radical move was the way he dealt with one of the most vexing urban design challenges of the past century: what to do with the car. Not only did he close Masdar entirely to combustion-engine vehicles, he buried their replacement — his network of electric cars — underneath the city. Then, to further reinforce the purity of his vision, he located almost all of the heavy-duty service functions — a 54-acre photovoltaic field and incineration and water treatment plants — outside the city.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/arts/design/26masdar.html?_r=1&ref=science

Electricity Out of Thin Air Could Be The Next Big Power Source

2010-09-06T06:46:00.000-07:00

We're already making great strides at pulling electricity from the motion of the air and from the photons that stream through it, but what about pulling electric charges right out of the air itself? Researchers have solved a mystery about how electricity forms in the atmosphere, and in doing so may have found a way to pull electricity right out of the air.

We know a lot about how to manipulate electricity, but the way it forms naturally in the atmosphere has long stymied scientists. But research unveiled today at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society has defined the mechanism by which water vapor in the air become charged, a discovery which could lead to devices capable of creating electricity from the atmosphere's own charges.

For a long time, scientists though that water droplets adrift in the atmosphere remained electrically neutral even after attaching themselves to dust particles or other particulates in the atmosphere. But recent evidence has suggested otherwise, which led Dr. Fernando Galembeck and his colleagues to dig deeper. What they found, and then proved in the lab, is that in fact water in the atmosphere does pick up a slight charge.

Using small particles of aluminum phosphate and silica -- two particles found commonly in the atmosphere -- they showed that in the presence of water vapor silica particles become more negatively charged. Aluminum phosphate grows slightly more positively charged. This building of charges in humid air can accumulate and be transferred to other objects, explaining phenomena like the charge buildup where steam escapes from boilers that had baffled scientists for centuries.

Galembeck and company call the quality "hygroelectricity," meaning "humid electricity." The property could lead to generators that pull charge right out of humid air to power buildings, as well as to panels that prevent lightning from striking in certain areas.

Source: http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-08/hygroelectricity-could-enable-devices-pull-electricity-out-thin-air

The Future of Green Architecture: A Live-In Power Plant

2010-08-19T03:21:00.000-07:00

This concept skyscraper could generate enough energy to power 4,000 homes

At first glance, the plans for the 10MW Tower have all the trappings of pre-crash Dubai: the improbable height, the flashy facade, the swagger of a newbie in a crowded skyline. On closer inspection, however, it’s an eco-machine. The A-shaped, 1,969-foot concept skyscraper is designed to turn out as much as 10 times the energy it needs, enough to power up to 4,000 nearby homes.

Three separate systems make it work. First, a five-megawatt wind turbine in the hollow of the “A” generates energy in the powerful and unpredictable desert gusts. Second, mirrors dot the slanted, south-facing facade, beaming light to a molten-salt-filled collector that hangs off the building like an ultra-tall street lamp. Cooked to 932ºF, the liquefied salt transfers heat to a convection loop that runs a three-megawatt steam turbine. Finally, a two-megawatt solar updraft tower produces additional energy in clear weather. Sunlight warms air in a two-foot-wide gap that runs the length of the southern face. The airflow from rising heat powers an internal wind turbine.

If it were built (at an estimated cost of $400 million), 10MW could pay off its energy debt in 20 years. Extra juice feeds the municipal grid, and other sources in the area would adjust for the tower’s output. The building could house offices or residences or both, says designer Robert Ferry, 35, who helms the Dubai architecture firm Studied Impact with his wife, Elizabeth Monoian. The pair became interested in energy-generating skyscrapers on moving to the United Arab Emirates, where there are superstructures in spades but few that are any greener than their brochures. With the 10MW Tower, they hope to someday create a power plant you can live in. It may sound fantastic, but, Ferry says, “it’s only a matter of time before something like this is built.”

Revolutionary: A five-megawatt turbine contributes to the building’s annual output of 20,000 megawatt-hours. Courtesy Robert Ferry/Studied Impact Design

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-06/future-eco-friendly-architecture-live-power-plant

Record-Breaking Carbon Dioxide Storage Capacity Enhances Ability to Capture CO2

2010-07-16T11:26:00.000-07:00

This shows the crystal structure of MOF-200. Atom colors: UCLA blue = carbon, UCLA gold = oxygen, orange = zinc. Optical image of MOF-200 crystals. (Credit: UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry; UCLA Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics)

Chemists from UCLA and South Korea report the "ultimate porosity of a nano-material," achieving world records for both porosity and carbon dioxide storage capacity in an important class of materials known as MOFs, or metal-organic frameworks.

MOFs, sometimes described as crystal sponges, have pores -- openings on the nanoscale which can store gases that are usually difficult to store and transport. Porosity is crucial for compacting large amounts of gases into small volumes and is an essential property for capturing carbon dioxide.
The research could lead to cleaner energy and the ability to capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide emissions before they reach the atmosphere and contribute to global warming, rising sea levels and the increased acidity of oceans.
The research will be published July 23 in the print edition of the journal Science and is currently available in the journal's advance online edition.
"We are reporting the ultimate porosity of a nano-material; we believe this to be the upper limit or very near the upper limit for porosity in materials," said the paper's senior author, Omar Yaghi, a UCLA professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a member of both the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA and the UCLA-Department of Energy Institute of Genomics and Proteomics.
"Porosity is a way to do a lot with little," said Yaghi, who holds UCLA's Irving and Jean Stone Chair in Physical Sciences and directs the CNSI's Center for Reticular Chemistry. "Instead of having only the outside surface of a particle, we drill small holes to dramatically increase the surface."
With lead author Hiroyasu (Hiro) Furukawa, co-author Jaheon Kim and colleagues, Yaghi reports on two materials that not only break the porosity record, but do so by an extremely large margin. The materials are MOF-200, made at UCLA by Furukawa, a postdoctoral scholar in Yaghi's laboratory, and MOF-210, made at Seoul's Soongsil University in South Korea by Kim, a chemistry professor and former graduate student in Yaghi's laboratory, and colleagues.
"We have made not just incremental strides with MOFs," said Yaghi, whose research overlaps chemistry, materials science and engineering. "What is special about MOF-200 and MOF-210 is that they are approaching the limit of what you can get in a material. We may be able to design better structures, but they will not be easy to make."
Invented by Yaghi the early 1990s, MOFs are like scaffolds made of linked rods, with nanoscale pores that are the right size to trap carbon dioxide. The components of MOFs can be changed nearly at will, and Yaghi's laboratory has made several hundred MOFs, with a variety of properties and structures.
Since 1999, MOFs have held the record for having the highest porosity of any material. MOFs can be made from low-cost ingredients, such as zinc oxide, a common ingredient in sunscreen, and terephthalate, which is found in plastic soda bottles.
Yaghi discovered the key to making highly porous structures, which he and colleagues reported in the journal Nature in 2004 (MOF-177 broke the previous porosity record, which had been held since 1999 by Yaghi's MOF-5) and in Science in 2005. Since then, chemists have been in a race to make higher and higher surface areas for materials, with the highest porosity.
Now Yaghi, Furukawa and Kim have made MOFs that are twice the porosity of MOF-177, three times the porosity of MOF-5 and 10 times the porosity of the most porous material prior to 1999. This means they can now store twice as much gas as they could in 2004, an enormous increase.
"If I take a gram of MOF-200 and unravel it, it will cover many football fields, and that is the space you have for gases to assemble," Yaghi said. "It's like magic. Forty tons of MOFs is equal to the entire surface area of California.
"This is only the beginning of MOFs," he said, "because now we can see the platform of materials on which we can build. In science, achieving the limit by experiment is magnificent, and now we can test the properties of these materials for various applications. Requirements for making a viable material for carbon dioxide capture are high capacity and high selectivity. We reported before on how to get high selectivity for carbon dioxide; now we are showing how to get high capacity. The industrial applications are being deployed or, in certain cases, are in the process of being developed. Many companies are working on the development of MOFs."
For example, BASF, a global chemical company based in Germany, makes large quantities of MOFs, which are sold by Sigma-Aldrich, a life science and high-technology company.
Yaghi, Furukawa and Kim also report in Science a record for carbon dioxide storage capacity. MOF-200 and MOF-210 take up the highest amount of hydrogen, methane and carbon dioxide, by weight, ever achieved.
On Feb. 12 of this year, Yaghi, UCLA graduate student Hexiang Deng, Furukawa and UCLA colleagues reported in Science their creation of a synthetic "gene" that could capture carbon dioxide emissions.
Carbon dioxide is polluting Earth's atmosphere and damaging coral reefs and marine life -- impacts that are irreversible in our lifetime, Yaghi said.
With the new research, it is now possible to develop the synthetic gene with MOF-200 and MOF-210, giving it a much larger surface area.
"MOFs are a class of materials unparalleled by any other," Yaghi said. "MOFs are among the largest class of materials ever made, in number, variety and diversity of composition."
Furukawa, who has worked in Yaghi's laboratory for seven years, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo.
"Hiro discovered a way of evacuating completely the solvent that otherwise would fill the holes, which allowed access to the porosity," Yaghi said. "That was the magic."
Learning from 'As the World Turns' and 'Three's Company'
When Furukawa came to the United States on a Japanese fellowship, he spoke almost no English.
Yaghi, one of the world's great scientists, recalls without embarrassment how he watched "As the World Turns" and "Days of Our Lives" to learn English when he came to New York from Jordan at age 15.
"When I picked Hiro up," Yaghi said, "I thought, 'He has no clue about the world he is entering' -- America or my lab. I said to him, 'I will not talk with you until you buy a small TV and you watch soap operas every day; I want you to learn English.' The way I learned English was to read the newspaper with a dictionary and underline words I didn't understand. Almost every other line had an underlined word that I looked up, but you learn very quickly. I watched soap operas, too. I used to run back to my room from school to watch what happened. The stories don't move very fast; it's almost like doing research."
Furukawa took Yaghi's advice and watched reruns of "Three's Company."
"I couldn't understand it at first," he said, "but later, it was easy to follow."
How does Yaghi decide which students to accept into his laboratory?
"You have to look into their eyes and see whether there is passion and energy," Yaghi said. "Technical ability has to be coupled with the ability to harness your potential and elevate your mind."
Furukawa frequently works until 4 a.m., often on his computer at home.
"When I want to finish something, I like to keep working," he said.
"The best thing I learned from Professor Yaghi," Furukawa said, "is not chemistry but his way of thinking. When I joined his group, I was very surprised because I have never seen a professor who thinks like him in Japan. He publishes only exceptional results. That is why he is the leader of the field. He motivates us to find breakthroughs, new concepts and world records. The experience of working in his laboratory has definitely improved my mind and my thinking process."
The new Science research was funded by BASF, the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and South Korea's Hydrogen Energy R&D Center (one of the Korean Ministry of Education, Science and Technology's 21st Century Frontier R&D Programs).

SOURCE: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100715172044.htm

In Stores Soon: Graphene-Enhanced Li-ion Batteries That Charge In Minutes

2010-07-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Graphene-Enhanced Batteries Pacific Northwest National Laboratory scientist Jie Xiao prepares to test lithium ion batteries. The laboratory is working with a Princeton University spinoff firm to develop and commercialize graphene-enhanced Li-ion batteries. PNNL

Here's a new solution for the impatient gadget geek: graphene-enhanced batteries that can charge your cell phone and power tools in minutes, not hours.
The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is working with a private firm to develop and commercialize lithium-ion battery electrodes using "Vor-x," a proprietary graphene material invented at Princeton University.
Adding small amounts of high-quality graphene to a Li-ion battery can improve its power and cycling stability without sacrificing high storage capacity, according to Vorbeck Materials, which produces the graphene. Typically, you have to choose between high capacity and quick charging ability.

Vorbeck last year became the first company to commercialize a graphene product, offering graphene-based conductive ink for use in printed electronics. The firm spun out of graphene research conducted in Princeton's Ceramic Materials Laboratory, run by Ilhan Askay, who co-invented Vor-x.
Materials scientists are tinkering with several ways to improve the storage capacity, charging/discharging speed, and safety of Li-ion batteries, but graphene battery electrodes is a new step.
Li-ion batteries work by transferring lithium ions between a cathode and an anode using a liquid electrolyte. Improved cathodes can allow more ions to transfer, which can increase the battery's storage capabilities.
Graphene, made of carbon sheets one atom thick, is prized for its conductive properties and has potential for semiconductors or electronic displays. Now it could help power those electronics, too.

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-07/coming-soon-graphene-enhanced-li-ion-batteries-charge-your-gadgets-minutes

Boeing's Corpulent Hydrogen-Powered Spy Plane Will Fly at 65,000 Feet For Four Days

2010-07-14T12:04:00.000-07:00

The future of spycraft looks pretty heavy, if this new Boeing plane is any indication. Adding to today's parade of pretty new planes, Boeing unveiled a hydrogen-powered unmanned aircraft system Monday that will stay aloft at 65,000 feet for four days.
The Phantom Eye is not exactly sleek, but it's one of the greenest aircraft out there -- its only byproduct is water.
The aircraft heralds a potential new market in data and communications collection, Boeing says. Later this summer, it will be shipped from Boeing's Phantom Works facility in St. Louis to NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center for ground and taxi testing. The debut flight will likely take place next year and should last four to eight hours, a mere preview of the aircraft's apparent capabilities.

In terms of power, Phantom Eye is a lightweight -- it has two 2.3 liter, four-cylinder engines that provide 150 hp each, not much more than your average car. This makes sense, because Ford provided the engines, according to a Boeing news release.
The plane has a 150-foot wingspan and can carry up to a 450-pound payload, Boeing says. It will cruise at 150 knots, or 170 miles per hour.
It's the latest effort by Boeing to build aircraft powered by hydrogen. The firm claimed firsties on a hydrogen fuel cell aircraft back in 2008 when a different Phantom Works division flew a manned aircraft powered by hydrogen fuel cells.
Phantom Eye evolved from Boeing's Condor aircraft, also powered by a piston engine, which made history by reaching a top altitude of 67, 028 feet. Its likely descendants include the Phantom Ray drone, which looks like a slim B-2.

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2010-07/boeing-unveils-corpulent-hydrogen-powered-spy-plane-will-fly-65000-feet

Sunlight With Cooling Factor

2010-07-12T11:32:00.000-07:00

Although it sounds like a contradiction in terms, using the power of the sun for refrigeration is proving to be an original energy concept. In Tunisia and Morocco, Fraunhofer research scientists are using solar energy to keep perishable foodstuffs such as milk, wine and fruit fresh. (Credit: Image courtesy of Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft)

"Refrigerated by sunlight" -- we could well see an ecostatement like this printed on food packaging in the years ahead. Solar energy is already being used to power air-conditioning systems in buildings, but now researchers also want to refrigerate fruit and other perishable foodstuffs using energy from the sun. Scientists from the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE in Freiburg are demonstrating that this is feasible in the Mediterranean region using the examples of a winery in Tunisia and a dairy in Morocco. In the MEDISCO project (short for MEDiterranean food and agro Industry applications of Solar COoling technologies) solar plants for refrigerating milk and wine have been installed in cooperation with universities, energy agencies and European companies. The project funded by the European Commission is run by the Polytechnic University of Milan.
"Our method is ideal for countries which have many days of sunshine and in remote areas where there are no conventional means of refrigeration owing to a lack of water and non-existent or unreliable energy sources. It is environmentally friendly and reduces the use of expensive electricity for conventional refrigerators to a minimum," states Dr. Tomas Núñez, scientist at the ISE, listing the system's advantages. "Refrigeration is always available when the sun shines, which means that it is produced at the times when demand is at its highest."
The scientists have installed concentrating collectors which direct the sunlight onto an absorber by means of a reflector. This makes it possible to convert the solar radiation into hot water with a temperature of 200 degrees. "This extreme water temperature is necessary in order to drive the absorption refrigeration machine for the high external temperatures that prevail there. We do not use electricity to provide the refrigeration, we use heat. The result is the same in both cases: refrigeration in the form of cold water or -- in our case -- a water-glycol mixture," explains Núñez. As the absorption refrigeration machine produces temperatures of zero degrees, the experts use the mixture to prevent the water from freezing. The water-glycol solution is collected in cold accumulators and then pumped through a heat exchanger, which cools the milk. "We use a slightly different system for wine, with the refrigerant flowing through coiled pipes in the wine tanks," says Núñez.

SOURCE: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/05/100503111531.htm

You Built What?! The 200-MPG Aerocycle

2010-07-11T04:22:00.000-07:00

A motorcycle with an aerodynamic shell gets more than 200 miles per gallon

Dutch vehicle designer Allert Jacobs knew that his fuel-sipping, shell-encased motorcycle was street-legal. Unfortunately, the police didn’t, and impounded it after pulling him over during a test run.

Allert Jacobs' Aerocycle: Hans Pieterse

But Jacobs has a lot of patience. He first built a resistance-reducing nose cone in 2007, in an attempt to increase his Honda Innova 125i’s 114-mpg rating. That design fell short, so he built a 1:5 scale model, followed by a full-size polyurethane and wood mold. By 2009, he was crafting the fiberglass shell. Steel tubes welded to the bike’s frame attach it, and a frame and rails added to the front of the bike allow the front of the shell to slide forward like a door and lock shut. Last winter, he even made aerodynamic cones with indicator lights for his side-view mirrors.

In the Shell : The top view of the motorcycle Hans Pieterse

Most of the mileage boost comes from the aerodynamic shape, but Jacobs also converted the bike’s automatic clutch to manual to keep it from slipping. Altogether, the changes worked: On one long trip, the bike got 214 miles per gallon. And as for the impound? “I got it back,” he says, “and they had to apologize.” Time: 3 years Cost: $5,000

HANDLING

Jacobs can put his feet down to steady himself when stopped, but the shell prevents him from planting them out wide. He’s considering building a new version with open sides in order to reduce balance issues.

COMFORT

After lowering the seat and raising the footrests above the wheel, Jacobs decided that they would improve steering if they were closer to the hub, so he welded tubes to the frame parallel to the front forks and attached the footrests to them.

SECURITY

Jacobs welded and bolted a steel rail to the front of the bike so that half the shell can slide forward 18 inches, allowing him easy access and exit. There’s a security bonus too, since he can lock up his bike along with any valuables inside.

SOURCE: http://www.popsci.com/diy/article/2010-06/you-built-what-aerocycle

Nanoscale Light Mill Spins a Motor with a Beam of Light

2010-07-08T12:28:00.000-07:00

The Nanoscale Light Mill Motor Ignore the Reich-i-ness of the motor's shape and you'll notice that at a shorter 810-nanometer wavelength the light strikes the outside of the motors arms, turning the motor counterclockwise. A larger 1,700-nanometer wave passes through to strike the elbows, turning the motor the opposite direction. Image courtesy of Zhang group

While those wonderful light sabers in the Star Wars films remain the figment of George Lucas’ fertile imagination, light mills – rotary motors driven by light – that can power objects thousands of times greater in size are now fact. Researchers with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California (UC) Berkeley have created the first nano-sized light mill motor whose rotational speed and direction can be controlled by tuning the frequency of the incident light waves. It may not help conquer the Dark Side, but this new light mill does open the door to a broad range of valuable applications, including a new generation of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS), nanoscale solar light harvesters, and bots that can perform in vivo manipulations of DNA and other biological molecules.
“We have demonstrated a plasmonic motor only 100 nanometers in size that when illuminated with linearly polarized light can generate a torque sufficient to drive a micrometre-sized silica disk 4,000 times larger in volume,” says Xiang Zhang, a principal investigator with Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and director of UC Berkeley’s Nano-scale Science and Engineering Center (SINAM), who led this research. “In addition to easily being able to control the rotational speed and direction of this motor, we can create coherent arrays of such motors, which results in greater torque and faster rotation of the microdisk.”

The success of this new light mill stems from the fact that the force exerted on matter by light can be enhanced in a metallic nanostructure when the frequencies of the incident light waves are resonant with the metal’s plasmons – surface waves that roll through a metal’s conduction electrons. Zhang and his colleagues fashioned a gammadion-shaped light mill type of nanomotor out of gold that was structurally designed to maximize the interactions between light and matter. The metamaterial-style structure also induced orbital angular momentum on the light that in turn imposed a torque on the nanomotor.
“The planar gammadion gold structures can be viewed as a combination of four small LC-circuits for which the resonant frequencies are determined by the geometry and dielectric properties of the metal,” says Zhang. “The imposed torque results solely from the gammadion structure’s symmetry and interaction with all incident light, including light which doesn’t carry angular momentum. Essentially we use design to encode angular momentum in the structure itself. Since the angular momentum of the light need not be pre-determined, the illuminating source can be a simple linearly polarized plane-wave or Gaussian beam.”
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8449755104176253603
The results of this research are reported in the journal Nature Nanotechnology in a paper titled, “ Light-driven nanoscale plasmonic motors.” Co-authoring the paper with Zhang were Ming Liu, Thomas Zentgraf, Yongmin Liu and Guy Bartal.
It has long been known that the photons in a beam of light carry both linear and angular momentum that can be transferred to a material object. Optical tweezers and traps, for example, are based on the direct transfer of linear momentum. In 1936, Princeton physicist Richard Beth demonstrated that angular momentum – in either its spin or orbital form – when altered by the scattering or absorption of light can produce a mechanical torque on an object. Previous attempts to harness this transfer of angular momentum for a rotary motor have been hampered by the weakness of the interaction between photons and matter.
“The typical motors had to be at least micrometres or even millimeters in size in order to generate a sufficient amount of torque,” says lead author Ming Liu, a PhD student in Zhang’s group. “We’ve shown that in a nanostructure like our gammadion gold light mill, torque is greatly enhanced by the coupling of the incident light to plasmonic waves. The power density of our motors is very high. As a bonus, the rotational direction is controllable, a counterintuitive fact based on what we learn from wind mills.”
The directional change, Liu explains, is made possible by the support of the four-armed gammadion structure for two major resonance modes – a wavelength of 810 nanometers, and a wavelength of 1,700 nanometers. When illuminated with a linearly polarized Gaussian beam of laser light at the shorter wavelength, the plasmonic motor rotated counterclockwise at a rate of 0.3 Hertz. When illuminated with a similar laser beam but at the larger wavelength, the nanomotor rotated at the same rate of speed but in a clockwise direction.

“When multiple motors are integrated into one silica microdisk, the torques applied on the disk from the individual motors accumulate and the overall torque is increased,” Liu says. “For example, a silica disk embedded with four plasmonic nanomotors attains the same rotation speed with only half of the laser power applied as a disk embedded with a single motor.”
The nanoscale size of this new light mill makes it ideal for powering NEMS, where the premium is on size rather than efficiency. Generating relatively powerful torque in a nanosized light mill also has numerous potential biological applications, including the controlled unwinding and rewinding of the DNA double helix. When these light mill motors are structurally optimized for efficiency, they could be useful for harvesting solar energy in nanoscopic systems.
“By designing multiple motors to work at different resonance frequencies and in a single direction, we could acquire torque from the broad range of wavelengths available in sunlight,” Liu says.
This research was supported by DOE’s Office of Science.
Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research for DOE’s Office of Science and is managed by the University of California. Visit our Website at www.lbl.gov/

SOURCE: http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2010/07/05/nano-sized-light-mill/

Microbe Power as a Green Means to Hydrogen Production

2010-07-07T12:21:00.000-07:00

Scientists have been hard at work harnessing the power of microbes as an attractive source of clean energy. Now, Biodesign Institute at Arizona State University researcher Dr. Prathap Parameswaran and his colleagues have investigated a means for enhancing the efficiency of clean energy production by using specialized bacteria.

Dr. Prathap Parameswaran showing the electrode used in the microbial electrochemical cell (MEC). (Credit: Image courtesy of Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University)

Microbial electrochemical cells or MXCs are able to use bacterial respiration as a means of liberating electrons, which can be used to generate current and make clean electricity. With minor reconfiguring such devices can also carry out electrolysis, providing a green path to hydrogen production, reducing reliance on natural gas and other fossil fuels, now used for most hydrogen manufacture.
MXCs resemble a battery, with a Mason jar-sized chamber setup for each terminal. The bacteria are grown in the "positive" chamber (called the anode). The research team, led by Bruce Rittmann, director of Biodesign's Center for Environmental Biotechnology, had previously shown that the bacteria are able to live and thrive on the anode electrode, and can use waste materials as food, (the bacteria's dietary staples include pig manure or other farm waste) to grow while transferring electrons onto the electrode to make electricity.
In a microbial electrolysis cell (MEC), like that used in the current study, the electrons produced at the anode join positiviely charged protons in the negative (cathode) chamber to form hydrogen gas. "The reactions that happen at the MEC anode are the same as for a microbial fuel cell which is used to generate electricity, " Parameswaran says. "The final output is different depending on how we operate it."
When the bacteria are grown in an oxygen-free, or anaerobic environment, they attach to the MXC's anode, forming a sticky matrix of sugar and protein. In such environments, when fed with organic compounds, an efficient partnership of bacteria gets established in the biofilm anode, consisting of fermenters, hydrogen scavengers, and anode respiring bacteria (ARB). This living matrix, known as the biofilm anode, is a strong conductor, able to efficiently transfer electrons to the anode where they follow a current gradient across to the cathode side.
The present study demonstrates that the level of electron flow from the anode to the cathode can be improved by selecting for additional bacteria known as homo-acetogens, in the anode chamber. Homo-acetogens capture the electrons from hydrogen in waste material, producing acetate, which is a very favorable electron donor for the anode bacteria.
The study shows that under favorable conditions, the anode bacteria could convert hydrogen to current more efficiently after forming a mutual relationship or syntrophy with homo-acetogens. The team was also able to reduce the negative impact of other hydogen consuming microbes, such as methane-producing methanogens, which otherwise steal some of the available electrons in the system, thereby reducing current. The selective inhibition of methanogens was accomplished by the adding a chemical called 2-bromoethane sulfonic acid to the adode's microbial stew.
The group used both chemical and genomic methods to confirm the identify of homo-acetogens. In addition to detection of acetate, formate, an intermediary product, was also discovered. With the aid of quantitative PCR analysis, the team was also able to pick up the genomic signature of acetogens in the form of FTHFS, a gene specifically associated with acetogenesis.
"We were able to establish that these homo-acetogens can prevail and form relationships," Parameswaran says. Future research will explore ways to sustain syntrophic relations between homo-acetogens and anode bacteria, in the absence of the chemical inhibitors.
Further progress could pave the way for eventual large-scale commercialization of systems to simultaneously treat wastewater and generate clean energy. "One of the biggest limitations right now is our lack of knowledge," says Cesar Torres, one of the current study's co-authors, who stresses that there remains much to understand about the interactions of bacterial communities within MXCs.
The field is still very young, Torres points out, noting that work on MXCs only began about 8 years ago. "I think over the next 5-10 years the community will bring a lot of information that will be really helpful and that will lead us to good applications."
The team's results appear in the advanced online issue of the journal Bioresource Technology.

SOURCE: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100601205758.htm

Could Crystals Sponge Up the Carbon?

2010-07-06T10:46:00.000-07:00

Metal-organic frameworks boast a vast internal surface area, researchers say. If unfolded and flattened, they add, a sugar-cube-size piece could exceed the size of a football field and be adjusted to absorb huge quantities of power plants’ carbon dioxide.

As a climate change prevention strategy, carbon capture and storage is nowhere near ready for prime time. On the storage side of the equation, major questions remain on how and where to sequester the billions of tons of gas produced by power plants and industry every year. Another stumbling block, known as the parasitic energy cost, is the amount of energy needed to strip carbon out of power plant emissions. Carbon capture technologies being tested today, like amine scrubbing, exact an energy penalty as high as 30 percent, a vast and perhaps untenable expense to utilities and society.

Yet a breakthrough in chemistry may be able to radically reduce the cost of stripping carbon from power plant emissions, potentially making carbon capture and storage a far more realistic climate change solution. That is the hope, at least, of researchers studying a remarkable class of materials called metal-organic frameworks.

In their most common form, these crystalline powders resemble nothing more than ordinary table salt. But appearances can be deceiving: metal-organic frameworks are incredibly porous, with the highest internal surface area of any substance known to man. A single gram, unfolded and flattened, could cover a football field. And most promisingly, these crystals can be adjusted to absorb specific molecules like carbon dioxide.

Dr. Jeffrey Long, a chemist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is one researcher studying the carbon-capture potential of metal-organic frameworks.

“We think we can modify the surface so it will cause just the carbon dioxide to stick,” Dr. Long said in an interview. “It would be a sort of carbon-dioxide selective sponge.”

In a power plant setting, carbon would be captured simply by flowing the emissions through or over the absorbent crystals. Once full, the carbon could be “squeezed” out – probably in an underground storage chamber of some kind – and the crystals returned to use.

“Like a sponge, when it absorbs water, you can squeeze it and the water comes back out,” Dr. Long said.

Researchers have yet to identify the exact type of metal-organic framework that will work best in capturing carbon. But at the Berkeley lab, a program is under way to automate the synthesis of variants of the crystals using robots and to quickly screen them for their carbon-absorbing potential. The goal of the program is to identify a metal-organic framework that would remove carbon from a power plant’s emissions with an energy penalty of 10 percent or less.

If a suitable candidate can be found, it will still take years to develop practical applications for a power plant setting. But at least on the cost front, there is reason to be optimistic: The materials that go into making metal-organic frameworks – typically a metal salt, like zinc nitrate, and common organic solvents – are relatively inexpensive.

SOURCE: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/could-crystals-sponge-up-the-carbon/?ref=earth