All In One Boat

From the University of New Mexico comes an intriguing idea for desalinization. By placing two 30 foot tall cylinders near each other, one with salt water the other with fresh water, and a connecting pipe at the top, a small amount of heat applied to the salt water side will create enough of a vacuum at the top for vaporization to take place below the boiling point. The fresh condensate moves to the fresh water side replacing that drawn out at the bottom for irrigation, washing etc.

While clever, there are several problems. Keeping the water columns at the necessary height with shut off valves and intake valves can presumably be done automatically. The automation will have to be rugged and simple. 30 feet however, is fairly high, and likely not suitable except in rural areas. The amount of water, however, is not so insignificant. A 30 foot column with a 4 foot diameter can hold about 3,000 gallons of water. As I understand the scheme, the fresh water side has to be primed almost to the top, meaning the primer water has to be found or transported to the spot before the device works, perhaps not easy in water stricken areas. The article does not mention the evaporation rate possible, thus the gallons per hour transformed and the return on investment. Finally, there is the matter of the brine left on the saline side. How often does it have to be drained, and how? Where does the brackish water go — and at what cost to the environment? It will be interesting to see where UNM takes the idea.

The heat requirements are said to be so low that small solar, or even the exhaust from other household or industrial appliances, such as air conditioners, may be enough to create the vacuum.

Then for another approach to desalinization and energy usage there is the PX Pressure Exchanger which recaptures energy in the waste product, brine, of reverse osmosis.

State-of-the-art desalination plants suck in seawater and then use electricity-driven pumps to put it under pressure. This salty stream is then slammed against filters designed to let the fresh water bleed through while sequestering the high-pressure brine - a process called reverse osmosis.

“It takes a lot of pressure to get the pure water to go away from the salt, and it takes a lot of energy to pressurize the water,” Stover said.

That’s where Energy Recovery comes into play. The company designed its pump to capture the pressure trapped in that left-behind brine and recycle its energy into repressurizing the next batch of virgin seawater destined to be slammed against those reverse-osmotic filters.

Desal Pump

The world’s first commercial tidal-power system has been connected to the National Grid in Northern Ireland. Built by the British tidal-energy company Marine Current Technologies (MCT), the 1.2-megawatt system consists of two submerged turbines that are harvesting energy from Strangford Lough’s tidal currents. The company expects that once the system, called SeaGen, is fully operational, it will be able to provide electricity to approximately one thousand homes.

Technology Review

The problem with ethanol as a fuel source isn’t that bio-mass conversion of living matter to fuel doesn’t work but that the first big effort was to grab the low hanging fruit — the grains that we all need just to live, much less to be mobile at high speeds. Work is continuing on converting weeds, switch grass and even garbage into fuel. Those pushing corn and other grains into the hopper are running into some serious push back.

The ethanol industry, until recently a golden child that got favorable treatment from Washington, is facing a critical decision on its future.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas is asking the Environmental Protection Agency to temporarily waive regulations requiring the oil industry to blend ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into gasoline. A decision is expected in the next few weeks.

Mr. Perry says the billions of bushels of corn being used to produce all that mandated ethanol would be better suited as livestock feed than as fuel.

Feed prices have soared in the last two years as fuel has begun competing with food for cropland.

Ethanol Push Back

Switch grass can be grown on non agricultural land and used intelligently could be used as a bio fuel without increasing the price of corn and the foods that depend on it.

Switch Grass.

A big new solar plant was approved by the California PUC this week, though not of the solar thermal kind. To be built down near Blythe, this will be acres and acres of solar panels — the largest installation in the state when it’s finished.

Solar Gets Hot

[Another, similar, is going up in Florida, slightly larger at 25 MW, than the California plant.]

They need to hurry it up though. There are only about 136 megawatts of solar in California now, roughly enough for 136,000 homes. This new one will add 21 MW more. There are something like 5.6 million households in California and while not every household is necessarily a home, the gap is still enormous. Solar and wind together only contribute about 2% of current energy needs.

The articles today that the federal tax credits deemed necessary for faster renewables development are in jeopardy of not being renewed show once again how little focused on our energy problems the Congress is.

The ship may be finally starting to turn, or at least the officers — those in control — are starting to talk about turning it. Yep, looks like a serious situation out there. Better nudge the helm a half a point to port…

Intel Capital is boosting its investments in clean technology startups as a way to develop new sources of power for Intel processors.

The chipmaker’s corporate venture arm, one of Silicon Valley’s largest, said this week it put 24 million euros in a German company, Sulfurcell, which converts sunlight into electricity by using modules coated with a thin metallic film.

Intel Raising Stake in Clean Tech

The SunTory Mermaid, a boat propelled forward entirely by wave power, has made the 4,350 mile trip from Honolulu, Hawaii, to the Kii Channel off the east coast of Japan.

The bow-mounted mechanism, which harnesses wave power to provide a dolphinlike tail kick from two independently mounted flippers, was designed and built by Dr. Yutaka Terao of the department of naval architecture and ocean engineering at the Tokai University School of Marine Science and Technology in Japan.

The design team originally estimated that the 31-foot-long, three-ton catamaran would average three to four knots and arrive off the east coast of Japan about 60 days after its departure on March 16. But, unusually good weather and calm seas resulted in the boat traveling an average of only 1.5 knots and the Mermaid’s maiden voyage ended up taking 111 days. Nevertheless, Dr. Terao and his team were satisfied with the result.

“We were able to prove that our propulsion system delivers a 7,000-kilometer voyage,” Dr. Terao said

NY Times

Kenichi Horie, the ecologically minded sailor who captained the Mermaid, has set two world records for piloting environmentally sensitive boats, the first in 1993 for the longest distance traveled in a human-powered pedal boat, 4,660 nautical miles, the second in 1996 for the fastest Pacific crossing in a solar-powered boat, 148 days.

At a dockside celebration on Sunday at Shin Nishinomiya Yacht Harbor, Mr. Horie told the gathering: “The time has come for us to shift from fossil fuels. I hope this voyage will increase awareness and interest in natural energy.”

For more about the SunTory Mermaid II see here.

“A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel. Researchers say the device could revolutionize global energy production.

The prototype is a 12-foot-wide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.

“This is actually the most efficient solar collector in existence,” said Doug Wood, an inventor based in Washington state who patented key parts of the dish’s design — the rights to which he has signed over to a team of students at MIT. ”

Solar Fire

Get this into China now!

Very good, detailed article in the New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert about Samsø, an island in Denmark, which has gone to zero, in ten years, in its CO2 production.

quite deliberately, the residents of the island set about changing [their oil consumption. They formed energy coöperatives and organized seminars on wind power. They removed their furnaces and replaced them with heat pumps. By 2001, fossil-fuel use on Samsø had been cut in half. By 2003, instead of importing electricity, the island was exporting it, and by 2005 it was producing from renewable sources more energy than it was using.

Victory over CO2

While adoption of solar energy steps up around the world, two key challenges remain: how to store the energy created during the day so it can be used through the night and how to dispatch the energy to where it is needed. Both of these problems may be solved by coupling molten salt with concentrating solar power (CSP), according to a June 26 article in Renewable Energy World.

CleanTechnica.Com

Project Better Place, a Silicon Valley alternative fuels initiative is moving out into the big world. Shai Agassi, an Israel born high-tech entrepreneur left the software field several years ago to do what he wanted to do: create electric driven cars and the new infrastructure needed to make them real alternatives to internal combustion. He’s just got Israel to sign on to helping create the network, and Denmark, with wind produced electricity, may soon follow suite.

Agassi said that because most rides are less than 100 miles, drivers can recharge batteries at home, at work or at thousands of charging points throughout Israel. On longer trips, they can exchange batteries in a five-minute operation at about 200 “swap stations.”

“We have a second battery for every driver in the swap stations. It’s waiting for you in case you need it. You don’t need to carry it with you in the trunk,” Agassi said.

Moreover, Nissan’s global product planning chief, Tom Lane, has said his firm will soon announce a battery breakthrough, one that could increase driving range to around 200 miles per charge while recharging in as little as 20 minutes.

Electric Cars for Israel

Project Better Place has its own web site with photos of the cars as well as technical and business talk about the project.

On Monday, Honda Motor celebrated the start of production of its FCX Clarity, the world’s first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production. In a ceremony at a factory an hour north of Tokyo, the first assembly-line FCX Clarity rolled out to the applause of hundreds of Honda employees wearing white jump suits.

Honda will make just 200 of the futuristic vehicles over the next three years, but said it eventually planned to increase production volumes, especially as hydrogen filling stations became more common. On Monday, Honda announced its first five customers, who included the actress Jamie Lee Curtis.

Hydrogen Car

Now if I could just get a date with Jamie Lee Curtis I’d get to ride in one!

“A proposed Central Valley power plant will tap three potent sources of renewable energy at once - the sun, crop stubble and cow manure.

The plant, near the old oil-patch town of Coalinga in Fresno County, will combine a large solar farm with a generator that burns orchard trimmings, agricultural waste and, yes, excrement.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. will announce Thursday that it will buy electricity from the plant, which will be built by Martifer Renewables, a U.S. subsidiary of a Portuguese company. Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

The plant’s design will allow it to do something not typically associated with solar power. It will keep running, and generating power, at night. ”

80,000 Homes

This article, Running Circles over Carbon, is about the lack of financial motivation for ramping back on CO2 production. It focuses on two older technologies: coal burning and the attempts to capture and sequester the emitted CO2, and nuclear energy. Both have start-up or reconfiguration costs that are substantial with substantial fear that the rewards won’t compensate.

While this inability for companies to jump in as solution-providers can be cast as troubling as the threat of CO2 effects grow, it may also mean that truly clean and innovative technologies such as wind and solar will draw more interest and capital — such as legendary oil man T. Boone Pickens major push into wind.

Lots of interesting new devices using “bio-mimicry” to generate power. There are a couple of links in the article to “motion” graphics.

This is a pretty cool idea. Actually. Using an idea called biomimicry, Envision Solar has come up with the idea of Solar Trees. Instead of leaving the flat, hot parking lots as is, where your car bakes in the sun while you shop, the Solar Tree is erected with solar panels on top. The “tree” shades your car, and the panels generate electricity for the property. Excellent.

Poking around to follow up a story I read in the Klamath Fall Herald and News back in February, I came upon this wonderful resource right in Marin County.

The Geothermal Education Office has all sorts of on-line information, from a slide show to a database of where geothermal sites are in use.

What got me interested originally was hearing, on a snowy disk-slipping day of ice in Klamath Falls, that the sidewalks there are warmed by geothermal energy and thus kept free of snow. The Oregon Institute of Technology is located in Klamath Falls and naturally enough has a large interest in understanding geothermal and making use of it in this energy hungry, self-suffocating world of ours. The several proposals listed here are pretty interesting. For the particularly wonkish among you a list of consultants and equipment manufacturers is provided. And here is a list of some states and communities with geothermal resources in their bag of energy tricks. Get hot!

“Investors and utilities intent on building solar power plants are increasingly turning to solar thermal power, a comparatively low-tech alternative to photovoltaic panels that convert sunlight directly into electricity. This month, in the latest in a string of recent deals, Spanish solar-plant developer Abengoa Solar and Phoenix-based utility Arizona Public Service announced a 280-megawatt solar thermal project in Arizona. By contrast, the world’s largest installations of photovoltaics generate only 20 megawatts of power.

In a solar thermal plant, mirrors concentrate sunlight onto some type of fluid that is used, in turn, to boil water for a steam turbine.

Solar Thermal

The Solar Impulse is an adrenaline driven project to circumnavigate the globe in a wide-winged aircraft, powered only by the sun.

In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields…

The Challenge

Watch the flash animation at the bottom of A Crazy Gamble.

Commentary at The Weather Chanel.