Archive for the ‘Energy’ Category

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Wind Assisted Ferry Boats

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

In the pretty cool idea category this week we have a Napa, CA based outfit with an idea for carbon-fiber sails on ferry boats to help cut fuel costs / CO2 release.


“They wouldn’t eliminate the need for an engine.

They could, however, cut each ferry’s fuel use by at least 40 percent, said Gardner, with Wind+Wing Technologies.”

Read more:

But beyond the cool factor is the actuality of companies beginning to take seriously sun, wind, conservation and costs.

In San Francisco, Hornblower Cruises & Events started shuttling tourists to Alcatraz last year aboard its Hornblower Hybrid, which uses solar panels and two small, vertical wind turbines to generate electricity.

Hornblower considered using sails but decided the solar panels and wind turbines would be more useful. Unlike a sail, they provide power even when the ferry isn’t moving, said Cameron Clark, the company’s director of environmental affairs.

“With a ferryboat, you spend the majority of your time sitting at the dock,” he said. “You sit for 30 minutes and sail for 15.”

Together, the panels and wind turbines generate about 5 kilowatts of electricity, enough to run the ship’s electrical systems. When tied up at dock, the engines shut off, saving fuel. Before Hornblower retrofitted the ferry, burned 20 to 26 gallons of diesel per hour, Clark said. Now it burns six.

Read more:

Posted in Energy, Non Fossil Energy, Science & Technology | No Comments »

Vertical Windtowers at Adobe

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Adobe Systems in San Jose announced it had installed 20 vertical wind towers from Windspire to help its push towards more use of sustainable energy.

The towers won’t add a significant amount towards Adobe energy needs — four of them would just about power an average US home– but as a statement of recognition of the problem at hand, and as helping to encourage new ideas it will be a help. In the ultra-marathon facing us we can feel OK about cheering as runners round the first quarter mile. No one is thinking the race has anything but just begun. On! On!

SFGate article.

NBC report on YouTube

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Energy Pie in the Sky

Friday, November 6th, 2009

One of my favorite old folk tunes has always been Joe Hill’s The Preacher and the Slave, with it’s memorable line “Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.”

And so it may be with these energetically imaginative sky soaring wind turbines, but heck, we need some good news these days and there may be some spinning off one or the other of these ideas into genuine, here-and-now pie in the sky.

magenn-power-air-rotor-system-wind-turbine

The Magenn Power Air Rotator System
SkyWindPower

SkyWindPower

and others, covered by David Baker in a front page SF Chronicle story, and here at WorldChanging.com

There are all sorts of things to be considered, of course: the effect on airborne critters, the weight of the tethers, the safety if tethers fray, or the high altitude device falls. Some, however, already look good-to go in small scale, low-altitude, relief situations — to get electricity into areas following tsunami and earthquake disasters, for local health and rescue work.

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Water Current to Electrical Current

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

hydrokinetic-power-barge So what would this little boat be? A kiddie’s play boat? A platform for lake diving? Nope. It’s a design for a hydrokinetic barge — a floating platform tethered in appropriate river, or tidal currents, with a turbine suspended below it spinning as the water flows by, generating electricity. The beauty of the idea is that the turbines can be site specific, for low flow or high flow rivers. Since the blades spin at about the speed of the water the incidence of fish mortality found in turbines at the base of dams is not an issue. Not only that, since they are site specific and floatable they can be put in place seasonally, or in rural areas not well served by regular power infrastructure.

Read more at Alternative Energy

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Deep Ocean Windmills?

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

WindmillsSome days it seems there is just no good news to be found. Fortunately, lots of geeks keep their heads out of the news stream and immersed in their technologies of choice. It seems every other month a new wind power idea makes it off of someone’s drawing board. David Baker at the SF Chronicle does a good job of bringing some of them forward, though M.I.T.’s Technology Review is always filled with new items. Early in August the Chron’s front page showed an artist’s vision of deep-sea windmills, over the horizon from picky viewers and harnessed in large farms to under sea cables.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that the wind blowing across California’s deep water could generate as much as 130 gigawatts of electricity. That’s roughly twice as much electricity as the state needs on a hot summer afternoon.

Principle Power, based in Seattle, last fall signed an agreement with the Tillamook People’s Utility District in Oregon to install the WindFloat off the coast of central Oregon as early as 2012. The project will start with a single WindFloat, capable of generating a maximum of 5 megawatts of electricity when running at full tilt. Megawatts measure the amount of electricity generated in any given instant, and one megawatt is enough electricity for 750 homes.

If all works as planned, the WindFloat project will expand into an entire offshore wind farm, covering 12 to 15 square miles and capable of generating 150 to 200 megawatts.

Read more:

There are plenty of questions to be answered, and asking the right ones comes first: what about loose electrical cables in the water? What about magnetic fields produced by electrical current? What is needed to get the cost down to compete with more at-hand sources? But it’s good that small armies of engineers and scientists are beginning to look. There isn’t a lot of time left to phase out the carbon crapped energy sources.

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Geothermal Projects and Earthquakes

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

Very interesting article by James Glanz in the NY Times about new geothermal initiatives and their known relation to earthquakes.

There are generally two kinds of geothermal energy to be tapped. The first, which many are familiar with, is from close-to-the-surface water– heated by hot rising gases, deeper magma or hot rocks. The second is much deeper in the earth, as much as 2 miles or more. To use this energy deep holes are drilled and water is forced down into the super hot rocks, generating steam which then is used at the surface.

The problem is, in both cases but more significantly in the deep drilling, earthquakes. It’s not the drilling itself which causes them but pumping water into the rock. As the water expands it pushes out on the rock along all the tiny fractures inherent in the material, eventually setting off small, and some say, large, earthquakes.

The Times has a marvelous graphic of this which will explain it in about a minute. Click the Start button, here.

The reason this method is attracting interest is clear:

(more…)

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Peak Coal?

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

There has been for some time a notion of Peak Oil — that new finds of oil and new technologies to extract deeper and cheaper have peaked. Now, the Wall Street Journal puts in its front page a major story about worries in the coal industry that, as a graph is titled, there may be “Peak Coal.”

WSJ front-page shocker: “U.S. Foresees a Thinner Cushion of Coal,” warns rosy U.S. coal estimates “may be wildly overconfident”

Mining companies report they have to dig deeper and move more earth to extract coal from aging mines, driving up costs. Utilities have grown skittish about whether suppliers can ship promised coal on time. American Electric Power Co., the nation’s biggest coal buyer, says it has stepped up its due diligence to make sure its suppliers can make deliveries after some firms missed shipments last fall. It even bought a mine to lock down supplies.

“We are very much concerned, and it’s getting worse,” said Tim Light, senior vice president for AEP.

via Climate Progress

invest in solar now….

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LEDs –Life Enhancing Diodes

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

led

Prince Phillip is a big fan and wants all of us to be. Buckingham Palace has had a full lighting lift.

…the palace has installed the lighting in chandeliers and on the exterior, where illuminating the entire facade uses less electricity than running an electric teakettle.

A long article in Saturday’s NY Times, and carried by the SF Chron and others, takes a look at a small hopeful sign.

Studies suggest that a complete conversion to the lights could decrease carbon dioxide emissions from electric power use for lighting by up to 50 percent in just over 20 years; in the United States, lighting accounts for about 6 percent of all energy use. A recent report by McKinsey & Company cited conversion to LED lighting as potentially the most cost effective of a number of simple approaches to tackling global warming using existing technology.

The switch to LEDs is proceeding far more rapidly than experts had predicted just two years ago. President Obama’s stimulus package, which offers money for “green” infrastructure investment, will accelerate that pace, experts say. San Jose, Calif., plans to use $2 million in energy-efficiency grants to install 1,500 LED streetlights.

Thanks in part to the injection of federal cash, sales of the lights in new “solid state” fixtures — a $297 million industry in 2007 — are likely to become a near-billion-dollar industry by 2013, said Stephen Montgomery, director of LED research projects at Electronicast, a California consultancy. And after years of resisting what they had dismissed as a fringe technology, giants like General Electric and Philips have begun making LEDs.

So, yipee! They’re still hard to find for the house, and when you do they’re mighty expensive — though not as expensive as sea water creeping in over your hardwood floors. Watch for them. Demand them!

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Posted in Climate Change, Energy, Environment | No Comments »

Changing Culture: Cutting Energy

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

“Twenty-six students from some of the nation’s best business schools have taken on an unusual summer assignment: helping cut corporate America’s energy bills.

“They belong to an internship program organized by the Environmental Defense Fund that embeds MBA students with companies that want to use less energy, either to fight global warming or just to save money. The Climate Corps interns – drawn from such schools as Yale, UC Berkeley, Columbia and Michigan – will spend 10 weeks hunting for ways to trim the amount of power their host companies need.

“The Environmental Defense Fund has a history of partnering with businesses to tackle environmental problems. The internship, now in its second year, is the latest extension of that approach. Last year’s class of seven interns found enough savings to cut their host companies’ energy bills by $35 million over five years.

“…Before joining their host companies, the interns spend three days in the Climate Corps “boot camp,” getting tips on saving energy in different kinds of buildings and companies. Some sessions focus on saving power in heating and ventilation systems, lighting and data centers. Others focus on financing equipment upgrades. The students also learn how to overcome resistance from company executives and employees who don’t want to change.

“Real culture change is what we’re after,” Sturcken said. “And it’s so exciting to see business students who are so passionate about this.”

SF Gate

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China Going for Clean Tech?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Michael Standaert for the SF Chronicle reports that “China has environmental policies that are eons more progressive than in the U.S.”

In March, Beijing announced it would devote nearly $31 billion of its $586 billion stimulus package to “energy conservation and environment.” China also recently announced plans to spend $3 billion to subsidize the purchase of as many as 60,000 hybrid, electric and fuel-cell vehicles by 2012 for use in 13 major cities, including Shanghai and Beijing and provide subsidies of $8,800 to local governments that purchase electric cars for their fleets. The government has already ordered fuel-efficiency standards to jump from 36 mpg in 2008 to 43 mpg in 2009 in contrast to the current 25 mpg in the United States

“China is not waiting for anybody,” said Liu. “China has environmental policies that are eons more progressive than in the U.S. China has already made the decision to go green in full force.”

Coal, of course, is still the big killer, and despite progress of sorts being made in “clean coal” its contribution to climate chaning CO2 is enormous.

Good Article

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LED Lights Coming to a Home Near You

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Compact Fluorescent Lights (CFL) are now a near norm for environment minded consumers. Even with complaints about the brightness or color they’ve been installed in second bed-rooms, garages, any place people don’t sit and read by the hour. Their main shortcoming, however, has been the mercury that’s involved in their making. Use LED lights! cry the most CO2 conscious. Problem was LED lights for the home were hard to find, few in size and shape and expensive to buy. That seems to be changing if a report from LightFair International is to be believed.

LED bulbs and fixtures dominated nearly every booth on the show floor.

…the industry is rallying around LED lamps for many applications. They say LEDs last longer than current bulbs and compact fluorescent ones and their energy consumption could eventually be less than fluorescent lights’. They can also be made in many shapes and sizes, which was evident at the trade show. Unlike compact fluorescents bulbs, they contain no mercury and they work well in cold weather. They provide a more pleasing light than fluorescents.

Update: More about LEDs and new means to color correct them.

QD Vision adds an optic–a plastic cover with a special coating that snaps into place over the LEDs.

It’s that coating that makes the difference in the quality of the light. It consists of quantum dots–tiny bits of semiconductor material just a few nanometers in diameter. When excited by a light source–in this case, the LEDs–quantum dots radiate light in a wavelength that varies according to the size of the dot: a two-nanometer dot gives off blue light, a four-nanometer dot emits green, and a six-nanometer dot produces red. The company makes the dots in controlled sizes, then mixes them in the right ratio to get the desired color.

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It’s Not Just New Energy Sources, It’s Smarter Use of Existing Energy

Monday, May 11th, 2009

We often hear that the best and easiest thing we could do to slow down CO2 pollution is to get much more energy efficient. Tons of the CO2 stuff are blown skyward simply because it takes twice as much to keep a leaky house warm than a snug one.

It appears that some Venture Capitalists — those guys with the indispensible start up money — are beginning to see that, too. Instead of investing in say, new solar technology, they are looking at smart switches for existing power grids. All good.

Venture capital is starting to move away from its infatuation with alternative energy and returning to one of its traditional strengths: applying information technology to improve the efficiency of energy consumption.

Many investors say developing new forms of energy can consume hundreds of millions of dollars over many years before showing any return. Mr. Grosser’s firm, however, is looking for technologies that reduce demand for energy. “We need to move markets with small amounts of money,” he said.

… Sequoia invested in SynapSense, for example, which makes sensors that help data centers use less energy. MDV, an early investor in clean tech, backed Nanosolar, a thin-film solar cell company that has already raised $500 million. Now, MDV is focusing more on saving money. It invested in Gordon Murray Design, a company that will design eco-friendly cars but not build them

… Silver Spring, which was started in Milwaukee. It equips electric meters with networking cards so utilities can see power failures before customers call. In addition, customers can see which of their appliances use the most electricity and at which times of day they need to conserve.

Add Efficiency

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Kite Turbines to Capture High Altitude Wind Energy

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

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Solar Energy for 7,000,000,000

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Interesting technical talk from the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory Cyrus Wadia walks you through the economics and technology of moving from current high cost silicon photo voltaics to new and promising innovations in nanotechnolgy.

[ A trifle annoying that his laser pointer to the charts is not visible to us, as it is to his live audience.]

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PG&E Inches Toward Solar

Wednesday, February 25th, 2009

Pacific Gas and Electric announced plans yesterday to invest in new solar plants — some of which it would own outright and some of which would be owned by other companies which would sell the electricity to PG&E. Typically, public utilities like PG&E do not own their own power sources; they purchase it and are responsible for the distribution, so this represents a change in the business model, apparently in response to the world-wide economic crisis which has halted bank lending to companies in the alternative energy production business.

The utility announced plans Tuesday for a five-year program to build enough solar projects throughout its territory to generate as much as 500 megawatts of electricity, roughly the same output as a mid-size fossil fuel power plant. Using money from a proposed increase in electricity bills, PG&E would own half of those plants and buy power from the rest.


Baker: SF Gate

Though this, when complete, will only provide 1.3% of the energy demand for PG&E it’s at least a step forward.

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Wave Energy

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

Moving water stores massive amounts of energy. The trick is how to get at it and use it. Building water wheels on fast flowing rivers to grind grain is one of the few ideas mankind has come up with — not too helpful if you don’t live near fast flowing water. Damming rivers and using the released water to turn turbines is an obvious spin-off –again you need rivers, though not necessarily fast flowing. The environmental damage caused by dams, however, has been more and more noticed in recent decades — from depleted downstream run off, to earthquakes caused by the weight of the dammed up water.

With rising concern about climate change caused by the re-release of old CO2 back into the atmosphere, attention has turned to the largest sources of water energy — the oceans. How to harness the waves, tides and currents? Lot’s of interesting ideas being floated (heh heh), from bioWave turbines that mimic kelp, swaying on the ocean floor, to watermills that spin with the inflow and outflow of the tides, to Finavera’s aquabouys which rise and fall on the waves and tides there are a surge of innovative ideas.

Add Green Ocean’s WaveTreader to the list.

wave_treader

The WaveTreader is a further development of the initial OceanTreader, attaching the free standing design to fixed columns supporting windmills at sea, to get a double hit from wind and water.

The Treader comprises a Sponson at the front, a Spar Buoy in the center and a second Sponson at the aft end. As the wave passes along the device first the forward Sponson lifts and falls, then the Spar Buoy lifts and falls slightly less and finally the aft Sponson lifts and falls. The relative motion between these three floating bodies is harvested by hydraulic cylinders mounted between the tops of the arms and the Spar Buoy. The cylinders pressurise hydraulic fluid which, after smoothing by accumulators, spins hydraulic motors and then electric generators. The electricity is exported via a cable piggy-backed to the anchor cable..

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Big Solar Deal in SoCal

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

“In what could be the world’s largest solar deal to date, BrightSource Energy of Oakland announced Wednesday that it will sell Southern California Edison 1,300 megawatts of electricity from seven large solar plants planned for the California desert.

“That’s enough juice to light 845,000 homes, and it easily eclipses other recent deals signed by utilities here and abroad that are trying to expand their use of renewable power.

“BrightSource’s plants won’t use the solar photovoltaic panels that homeowners bolt to their rooftops. Instead, large fields of mirrors will focus sunlight on a central tower. The heat generated by all that focused light will boil water within the tower, the boiling water will produce steam and the steam will turn a turbine to generate electricity.

“Variations of the same “solar thermal” technology have been used for decades”

Baker at SF Gate

More and more news about such projects, most of which won’t be up and running for 4-5 years. It seems like good news, though of course simply creating electricity with solar doesn’t, by itself, mean the oil formerly used stays in the ground. Close monitoring and rule-making have to accompany this growth in solar power so it isn’t simply an occasion for resources shifting, as in, we’re not having sweets after dinner any more. OK, I’ll add those to what I have at lunch….

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Climate Work: US and China

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

In more promising news, Secretary of State Clinton is heading to China with climate and energy high on her agenda.

Todd Stern, the newly created special envoy on climate change for the United States, will be with Mrs. Clinton in China. In an e-mail message, he said a top goal is to end the endless sparring between the two giant sources of greenhouse gases over who needs to do what first.

“Secretary Clinton is keenly aware that the United States — as the largest historic emitter of greenhouse gases — and China — as the largest emitter going forward — need to develop a strong, constructive partnership to build the kind of clean energy economies that will allow us to put the brakes on global climate change,” Mr. Stern said. “We need to put finger-pointing aside and focus on how our two leading nations can work together productively to solve the problem.”

Revkin: Dot Earth

Geoffrey Lean at the Independent (UK) is positively giddy.

Maybe we are on the brink of one of those rare moments that transform the world for the better. For the Obama administration’s moves to forge a climate partnership with China offer much the best chance yet of averting the most serious crisis civilisation has faced.

Hillary Clinton’s visit to Beijing next week could prove far more important than President Nixon’s “China initiative”, which opened up the giant country to the world almost 40 years ago.

And a second article:

Hillary Clinton, his Secretary of State, is to raise the prospect of a “strong, constructive partnership” to combat climate change on a visit to Beijing next week, and the President is seriously considering a proposal from many of his most senior advisers to hold a summit with the Chinese leadership to launch the plan.

Last week, China’s ambassador to the US, Zhou Wenzhong, made it clear that his government would welcome “co-operation on energy and climate change” with the US. Such unprecedented teamwork would transform the world’s prospects for agreeing radical measures to combat global warming, and – senior Obama administration officials believe – lay the foundation of a new relationship between the two most powerful countries in the world.

Oh please please please let it be true….

And just for good measure, here is Bill Hewitt’s Climate Change blog at the Foreign Policy Association

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Posted in Asia, Climate Change, Energy, Environment | No Comments »

Thermal PhotoVoltaics

Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

“A new approach to converting heat into electricity using solar cells could make a technology called thermal photovoltaics (TPVs) more practical. MTPV, a startup based in Boston that has raised $10 million, says that it has developed prototypes that are large enough for practical applications. The company recently announced agreements to install the devices in glass factories to generate electricity from hot exhaust.

“In general, thermal photovoltaics use solar cells to convert the light that radiates from a hot surface into electricity. While the first applications will be generating electricity from waste heat, eventually the technology could be used to generate electricity from sunlight far more efficiently than solar panels do. In such a system, sunlight is concentrated on a material to heat it up, and the light it emits is then converted into electricity by a solar cell.

Thermal Photovoltaics

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Despoilers Proud Of Work On Way Out

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

“The U.S. Interior Department, acting in President Bush’s final days in office, proposed on Friday opening up 130 million acres off of California’s coast to drilling for oil and natural gas, including areas off Humboldt and Mendocino counties and from San Luis Obispo south to San Diego.

On Friday, the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Commercial Horrors and other business groups greeted the news with praise, saying it is time for domestic energy supplies to be released from the moratorium.”

Drill Idiots, Drill!

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