We could have used some of this in Marin in recent weeks.
Scientists from CEA/Leti-Minatec, an R&D institute in Grenoble, France, specializing in microelectronics, have recently developed a system that recovers the vibration energy from a piezoelectric structure impacted by a falling raindrop. The system works with raindrops ranging in diameter from 1 to 5 mm, and simulations show that it’s possible to recover up to 12 milliwatts from one of the larger “downpour” drops.
I’ve long wanted a year to ruminate and write about my notion that the bottom line for human behavior, to which almost every action can be traced, is power. As soon as a three year old wails “she doesn’t want to be my friend” we are acting out the cellular knowledge that without friends we are alone in the world, and in great danger. Sexual jealousy, high-school cliques, road-rage, consummerism, on and on, are related at not too many degrees of separation to the need to be part of groups and within the groups to attain high status — to have power. Now Natalie Angier has a short, totally interesting article, in the NY Times Tuesday Science Section about animal behavior and just such behavior built on the same basic drive.
Wherever animals must pool their talents and numbers into cohesive social groups, scientists said, the better to protect against predators, defend or enlarge choice real estate or acquire mates, the stage will be set for the appearance of political skills — the ability to please and placate, manipulate and intimidate, trade favors and scratch backs or, better yet, pluck those backs free of botflies and ticks.
Over time, the demands of a social animal’s social life may come to swamp all other selective pressures in the environment, possibly serving as the dominant spur for the evolution of ever-bigger vote-tracking brains. And though we humans may vaguely disapprove of our political impulses and harbor “Fountainhead” fantasies of pulling free in full glory from the nattering tribe, in fact for us and other highly social species there is no turning back. A lone wolf is a weak wolf, a failure, with no chance it will thrive.
In the January 2008 issue of Scientific American the cover story is “A Grand Plan for Solar Energy.” The authors, with all the numbers in place, project 2050 as the goal posts for a massive conversion drive.
* A massive switch from coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power plants to solar power plants could supply 69 percent of the U.S.’s electricity and 35 percent of its total energy by 2050.
* A vast area of photovoltaic cells would have to be erected in the Southwest. Excess daytime energy would be stored as compressed air in underground caverns to be tapped during nighttime hours.
* Large solar concentrator power plants would be built as well.
* A new direct-current power transmission backbone would deliver solar electricity across the country.
* But $420 billion in subsidies from 2011 to 2050 would be required to fund the infrastructure and make it cost-competitive.
and the discussion online that follows.
When I saw the headline AirCar I imagined at first it meant walking, perhaps with a lean on the corners and some sort of idle motion while waiting for street lights. But no. There is actually such a car, or better, such an engine. Using compressed air, released to drive pistons, along with a fuel module as in the now familiar hybrid models, the Midi is said to have achieved a driving range of 200 km before needing a “fill up” of more air.
There remains the problem of compressing the air, of course. Using dirty coal to do it, won’t do.
Some days I think climate change is going to get more of us faster than the public health disaster of ongoing wars. Some days I think the opposite. At least science and technology can have an effect on changing our energy consumption away from fossil fuels, whereas they only seem to increase the numbers and agonies of deaths in war, never decrease them.
Imagine a solar panel without the panel. Just a coating, thin as a layer of paint, that takes light and converts it to electricity. From there, you can picture roof shingles with solar cells built inside and window coatings that seem to suck power from the air. Consider solar-powered buildings stretching not just across sunny Southern California, but through China and India and Kenya as well, because even in those countries, going solar will be cheaper than burning coal. That’s the promise of thin-film solar cells: solar power that’s ubiquitous because it’s cheap. The basic technology has been around for decades, but this year, Silicon Valley–based Nanosolar created the manufacturing technology that could make that promise a reality.
Popular Science: Innovation of the Year
There are other companies deep into R&D for thin-film solar, this Australian firm, for example as well as BPSolar, Kyocera and the big Chinese giant, SunTechPower. What seems to be unique about the Nanosolar product is its lack of silicon and the “printing press” technology for production. The weight reduction and lack of need to be mounted give this some definite advantages.
[Cross posted at Ruthgroup.org]
This can only wrench a wry smile from from your lips.
At Frito-Lay’s factory here, more than 500,000 pounds of potatoes arrive every day from New Mexico to be washed, sliced, fried, seasoned and portioned into bags of Lay’s and Ruffles chips. The process devours enormous amounts of energy, and creates vast amounts of wastewater, starch and potato peelings.
Vacuum hoses at an Arizona plant recapture water and reduce the amount of heat needed to cook potato chips.
Now, Frito-Lay is embarking on an ambitious plan to change the way this factory operates, and in the process, create a new type of snack: the environmentally benign chip.
Its goal is to take the Casa Grande plant off the power grid, or nearly so, and run it almost entirely on renewable fuels and recycled water. Net zero, as the concept is called, has the backing of the highest levels of corporate executives at PepsiCo, the parent company of Frito-Lay.
We smile because it seems so odd, this idea of cleaning up the world while still pumping out billions of tons of stuff we don’t really need, and which, in the case of potato chips, are almost synonymous with ‘junk food.’ But then I have to smile at myself for my smile. It shows that I view human behavior as a seamless cloak when in fact it is a patchwork quilt of contradictory motivations, responses to pushes and pulls, rationality trying to mix into emotionality like vinegar into oil.
It turns out, that accepting Global Climate Change as a danger, is not a Damascus moment for most. It does not lead to complete changes of lives, to the rending of clothes and eating only what drops from trees. It leads to incremental changes — just what seems necessary, just what will get us by, just what — in this case– will shore up profitability.
As Robert Reich has argued, these go-to-green guys should not be praised for their morality and new care-for-the-earth sensibility. That’s not what it is about, mostly. They should be praised though — for re-reading their balance sheets, understanding the costs of energy burned and energy wasted, and understanding that their markets are changing, that people want not just the cheap but the good. Their customers — even those who can’t keep their fingers out of the potato chips — actually do want to pass on the world to their kids though it’s hard to put that into quantifiable value. So praise is due for being smart businessmen, albeit belatedly. Urging is due that they get on with it faster.
So it’s ok with me. I’d rather have less junk, and I’d rather have the junk produced closer to the consumers from raw materials closer to them. But, I’d a lot rather have the water re-cycled and the heat captured, and the solar panels arrayed in these existing mega-plants than not.
“The European Union voted Tuesday to impose quotas on the emission of carbon dioxide by airlines, setting up a fight with the United States, which argues against unilateral actions on aviation, a relatively small but rapidly growing source of global warming gases.”
“On average, studies have found, a traveler making a typical trip in a plane accounts for roughly the same greenhouse gas emissions as one traveling alone by car — although much depends on the details of any particular trip.
At a conference last month in Washington on global aircraft emissions, Shigenori Hiraoka, a researcher at the Japan International Transport Institute, pointed out that transportation emissions were 14 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in 2004, but that aviation was just 6 percent of those emissions. That puts emissions from aviation in the range of 1 percent of all emissions. “Aviation’s share is still small,” he said. “Why bother?”
The answer, he said, was that aviation is galloping ahead, with growth of about 4.4 percent a year, overwhelming the fuel economy gains of about 1.3 percent a year. ”
Somehow I think CO2 emissions from aircraft are only part of the story of their contribution. The fact this is happening at 35,000 feet instead of at road level is not trivial, and CO2 is not all that is being exhausted. I don’t know that we’d ever all want to travel by dirigible to distant lands but there is lots to be done to crank down emissions of all kinds in high speed, high altitude travel.
Interesting small scale technology to help clean up the oil mess in San Francisco.
Using mats made of hair, volunteers are absorbing the droplets of oil that have washed ashore since a cargo ship rammed the base of a Bay Bridge tower last week, spilling 58,000 gallons of fuel.
Hair, which naturally absorbs oil from air and water, acts as a perfect sponge, said Lisa Gautier of San Francisco, who provided 1,000 hair mats. They are about the size of a doormat, tightly woven with dark hair, and feel somewhat like an S.O.S pad. …
Once the mats are soaked with black gunk, oyster mushrooms will take over, growing on the mats and absorbing the oil. …
Gautier said the mushrooms will absorb the oil within 12 weeks, Gautier said, turning the hair mats into nontoxic compost.
The American Museum of Natural History in New York has a fabulous new exhibition.
Read Edward Rothstein in the NY Times has a review
Interesting article about the effort to come up with the Toyota Prius, and hopes of new non-fossil fuel automobiles.
Creating a hybrid would demand excruciating labor, and management had moved up the deadline to 1997. The engineering obstacles were tremendous, especially the development of the hybrid battery, which must deliver power and recharge in spurts as the car is being driven.
Uchiyamada ditched the usual back-up plans and multiple scenarios, focusing his team on one plan at a time and moving on when each failed.
As Uchiyamada tells it, the Prius wasn’t the kind of car Toyota would have ever approved as a project, if standard decision-making had been followed. It was sure to be a money loser for years.
Conventional wisdom was wrong; Toyota’s once skeptical rivals are now all busy making hybrids.
The Frankfurt auto show in August had hybrids galore.
The very interesting Solar Decathlon — ten requirements each contestant had to satisfy — announced the winners today.
Overall
First Place: Technische Universität Darmstadt
This team from Germany came to the Solar Decathlon hoping to have an impact on people, and it’s safe to say that this happened. Darmstadt won the Architecture, Lighting, and Engineering contests. The Architecture Jury said the house pushed the envelope on all levels and is the type of house they came to the Decathlon hoping to see. The Lighting Jury loved the way this house glows at night. The Engineering Jury gave this team an innovation score that was as high as you could go, and said nobody did the integration of the PV system any better
Check out all the winners…
On the way to work today I heard on Click and Clack, the NPR car show, a reference to HybridCenter.org. It’s a pretty decent site to help you see what is available, compare mileage, CO2 emissions and learn technical details if you like. A project of Union of Concerned Scientists. Check it out.
The same folks who came up with the Lunar X prize and who awarded $10 million for the first private space flight to loft three people 100 km above the earth, twice in two weeks, also have an Automotive X Prize, a $10 million dollar prize offered for earth saving automotive designs, with say, 100 mpg bonafides.
People love their cars. They are vital links to our jobs, our community, ourselves. For everything we love about them, cars are chained to the most severe global crises of our time: oil dependence and climate change.
We aim to break this deadlock through the most radical approach to innovation yet - the X PRIZE.
The Automotive X PRIZE will invite teams from around the world to focus on a single goal: design viable, clean and super-efficient cars that people want to buy.
This will be a race for the ages, with major publicity and a big sack of cash waiting for the champion, and perhaps our future hanging in the balance.
More from the CosmicLog
The Union Of Concerned Scientists applauds the prize…
Heard an ad on the radio this morning for ewastedropoff.com [e-waste drop-off] This is a service of A.S.L. a large silicon valley company which came into being when the founders saw the opportunity in excess capacity electronics manufacturing. Consumer recycling is a newer sideline.
Good for them. From the write up about their operations it looks like the disposal of parts and extraction of precious metals is done more safely than in the third world dumping grounds we have read about.
Their pick-up sites and dates are not widely dispersed — mostly in the East San Francisco Bay area. They do invite you to sponsor a pick up event. You supply the site and they haul it away. [I'm sure there is more to it than that.]
Fortunately Marinites have the Marin Computer Resource Center in Novato as well as the Marin Sanitary Service, and the western East Bay has the Alameda Country Computer Resource Center at 1501 Eastshore Highway at Gilmore just north of Berkeley.
This kind of recycling is good — for now. What we really need are recycling taxes, to add further incentives to folks, and using the “cradle to cradle” design ethos that is slowly making its way onto the national scene.
Caught a squib in the papers about the Wired (a magazine) NextFest in Los Angeles this weekend. It’s a geek world fair. The lede in the article was about a solar-electric car from Venturi Astrolab in France.
See a picture of it here (wait, there are several pictures in rotation.)
More about it at treehugger.com
“Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.”
I feel very conservative about my hold on this finding: unlikely to let it go.
“Researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO, have shown that silicon nanocrystals can produce two or three electrons per photon of high-energy sunlight instead of the one typical of current silicon solar cells.
As in earlier work with other materials, the extra electrons come from photons of blue and ultraviolet light, which have much more energy than those from the rest of the solar spectrum, especially red and infrared light. In most solar cells, the extra energy in blue and ultraviolet light is wasted as heat.”
It will surprise no one that this article in the NY Science Tuesday pages caught my eye.
cooperation is one of the three basic principles of evolution. The other two are mutation and selection. On their own, mutation and selection can transform a species, giving rise to new traits like limbs and eyes. But cooperation is essential for life to evolve to a new level of organization. Single-celled protozoa had to cooperate to give rise to the first multicellular animals. Humans had to cooperate for complex societies to emerge.
“We see this principle everywhere in evolution where interesting things are happening,” Dr. Nowak said.
While cooperation may be central to evolution, however, it poses questions that are not easy to answer. How can competing individuals start to cooperate for the greater good? And how do they continue to cooperate in the face of exploitation? To answer these questions, Dr. Nowak plays games.
His games are the intellectual descendants of a puzzle known as the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Imagine two prisoners are separately offered the same deal: if one of them testifies and the other doesn’t talk, the talker will go free and the holdout will go to jail for 10 years. If both refuse to talk, the prosecutor will only be able to put them in jail for six months. If each prisoner rats out the other, they will both get five-year sentences. Not knowing what the other prisoner will do, how should each one act? …
Dr. Nowak and his colleagues found that when they put players into a network, the Prisoner’s Dilemma played out differently. Tight clusters of cooperators emerge, and defectors elsewhere in the network are not able to undermine their altruism. “Even if outside our network there are cheaters, we still help each other a lot,”
You won’t get normative rules from the article — how we should behave — but interesting confirmation, through good research, of how sentient beings — from cells to homo sapiens — do behave.
Interesting article tucked away in the Business Section of the SF Chronicle: Small, Vertically Spinning Wind Turbines — for your roof.
At $5,000 a pop and only generating 10% of needed electricity for a home it’s not ready for prime time, but it shows innovative thinking and hands-on problem solving which we’ll need a lot of in the coming years. I’d also want to know what the spinning sounds like, in the house or to the neighbors; what the torque does to the supporting pipe — you know, wobble, damage to the roof, maintenance costs, etc. But hey, keep trying!
*
For a recent article about big wind power — in Texas — and the feuds it is raising:
