But the Friday ceremony also served as a reminder of how voters were woefully over-promised by county leaders earlier this decade. The Earlington Heights project may well prove to be the only major Metrorail expansion produced from the tax.
In 2002 Miami-Dade County officials said the half-cent tax would deliver 88.9 miles of new rail lines crisscrossing the county as part of the People's Transportation Plan. The county also promised new buses, improved traffic signalization and roadway improvements.
Instead, nearly three-fourths of the $900 million collected for new projects has been spent on inflated salaries and maintenance of existing operations. There is scant evidence the county will be able to do much more than the 2.4-mile connector, which starts construction Monday.
''I think it will be difficult,'' said Commissioner Katy Sorenson.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Action Line Information
Q: Where can we recycle newspapers, glass, aluminum? We just moved into a condo.
• A: If you live in a condo or apartment complex in Miami-Dade, your management association, by county ordinance, is required to set up recycling services. If yours doesn't, let the Department of Solid Waste Management know by calling 305-594-1500. Unfortunately, the ordinance doesn't have much in the way of teeth, so the department can do little to see that it's enforced. Making it worse, the county doesn't offer any recycling drop-off facilities, either.
The department's website, www.miamidade.gov/dswm, offers information about selecting a recycler. Landlords or condo associations can refer to the Yellow Pages or ask their waste hauler for recommendations.
Single family homes and duplexes in Miami-Dade receive weekly curbside recycling. Who's responsible for picking it up depends on whether you live in unincorporated Dade, in which case DSWM handles it, or in a municipality. If it's the latter, check with your city hall.
The DSWM website explains what items may be recycled.
As in Dade, residents in multifamily dwellings in Broward's relatively small unincorporated areas are also to implement and maintain a recycling program. Residents in municipalities should check with their city's recycling coordinator. Call your city hall or the county's recycling hotline, 954-765-4999. To learn what can be recycled and what Broward does with it 450 tons of recyclables it collects daily, visit www.broward.org/waste.
• Q: How can I recycle a perfectly good computer? All parts are working.
• A: Search www.mygreenelectronics.org, a project of the Consumer Electronics Association. In addition, try the Electronic Industries Alliance, which has created E-cycling Central, with resources organized by state for recycling and reusing electronics at www.eiae.org. It also lists places to recycle batteries and electronics, such as LCD monitors, that contain mercury.
Also organized by state is www.earth911.org, which offers resources for recycling a variety of household and business items, including electronics.
You can list reuseable electronics and business equipment at www.recycle.org. The website acts as an exchange, sending the details to nonprofit organizations that need the equipment. Arrangements are worked out between the donor and recipients.
• Q: I'm clearing out my shed, which is full of old containers of pesticides, fertilizers, paint, solvents and similar stuff. I don't think any of it belongs in the regular trash, so what should I do with it?
• A: You're right, it doesn't belong in the garbage.
All these items can be dropped of at your county's home chemicals collection site. You may want to confirm before hand the times of opening and whether the site accepts the items you want to bring. (Some take electronics, for example.)
Here are the details:
Miami-Dade County has two home chemical collection sites: 8831 NW 58th Street in West Dade, and 23707 SW 97th Ave., Gate-B in South Dade. They're open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Additional information is available at www.miamidade.gov/dswm or by calling 305-594-1500.
Broward County has three household hazardous waste collection sites: 2780 N. Powerline Rd., Pompano Beach, and 5601 W. Hallandale Beach Blvd., Hollywood, which are open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays; and 5490 Reese Road, Davie, which is open on Saturdays only and accepts a more limited list of items. Learn more at www.broward.org/waste or call 954-765-4999.
• A: If you live in a condo or apartment complex in Miami-Dade, your management association, by county ordinance, is required to set up recycling services. If yours doesn't, let the Department of Solid Waste Management know by calling 305-594-1500. Unfortunately, the ordinance doesn't have much in the way of teeth, so the department can do little to see that it's enforced. Making it worse, the county doesn't offer any recycling drop-off facilities, either.
The department's website, www.miamidade.gov/dswm, offers information about selecting a recycler. Landlords or condo associations can refer to the Yellow Pages or ask their waste hauler for recommendations.
Single family homes and duplexes in Miami-Dade receive weekly curbside recycling. Who's responsible for picking it up depends on whether you live in unincorporated Dade, in which case DSWM handles it, or in a municipality. If it's the latter, check with your city hall.
The DSWM website explains what items may be recycled.
As in Dade, residents in multifamily dwellings in Broward's relatively small unincorporated areas are also to implement and maintain a recycling program. Residents in municipalities should check with their city's recycling coordinator. Call your city hall or the county's recycling hotline, 954-765-4999. To learn what can be recycled and what Broward does with it 450 tons of recyclables it collects daily, visit www.broward.org/waste.
• Q: How can I recycle a perfectly good computer? All parts are working.
• A: Search www.mygreenelectronics.org, a project of the Consumer Electronics Association. In addition, try the Electronic Industries Alliance, which has created E-cycling Central, with resources organized by state for recycling and reusing electronics at www.eiae.org. It also lists places to recycle batteries and electronics, such as LCD monitors, that contain mercury.
Also organized by state is www.earth911.org, which offers resources for recycling a variety of household and business items, including electronics.
You can list reuseable electronics and business equipment at www.recycle.org. The website acts as an exchange, sending the details to nonprofit organizations that need the equipment. Arrangements are worked out between the donor and recipients.
• Q: I'm clearing out my shed, which is full of old containers of pesticides, fertilizers, paint, solvents and similar stuff. I don't think any of it belongs in the regular trash, so what should I do with it?
• A: You're right, it doesn't belong in the garbage.
All these items can be dropped of at your county's home chemicals collection site. You may want to confirm before hand the times of opening and whether the site accepts the items you want to bring. (Some take electronics, for example.)
Here are the details:
Miami-Dade County has two home chemical collection sites: 8831 NW 58th Street in West Dade, and 23707 SW 97th Ave., Gate-B in South Dade. They're open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday. Additional information is available at www.miamidade.gov/dswm or by calling 305-594-1500.
Broward County has three household hazardous waste collection sites: 2780 N. Powerline Rd., Pompano Beach, and 5601 W. Hallandale Beach Blvd., Hollywood, which are open from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays; and 5490 Reese Road, Davie, which is open on Saturdays only and accepts a more limited list of items. Learn more at www.broward.org/waste or call 954-765-4999.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Habitat Green
Any Color You Like, As Long As It’s Green
Rising energy costs and environmental awareness power a new emphasis on building tighter, more efficient homes
By Rebekah Daniel
The Anatomy of a Green House
A Partnership for the Future
Hitting the Mark
When passersby glance at Robin Marks’ house in Indianapolis, they might notice that the grass is nicely cut or that the front porch would be a convenient place to put the groceries down and fish for the key. They would see evergreen landscaping and durable-looking siding. Close observers might even see evidence of the two children who live there — a toy drum in the entryway or a glimpse of a High School Musical decorating theme through a bedroom window.
They won’t see the $50 per month that Robin doesn’t have to pay the electric company to power her energy-efficient appliances and fluorescent light bulbs. As the owner of one of Greater Indianapolis Habitat for Humanity’s “green” homes, Robin enjoys paying as much as 50 percent less in energy bills than she did when she lived in a two-bedroom apartment. And as a single mom and teacher at a private day care, every little bit helps. “Either I put it away and save it for the kids or get odds and ends for the house,” she says. “Most of the time, I save it for the emergency fund in case the car breaks down or something happens.”
An emergency fund, the real possibility of a short family vacation, the cushion that protects parents from anxiety about birthdays with no gift — these “treats” are offshoots of green building, a construction trend that is good both for homeowners and the world they live in.
A Green Process for a Greener Result
The green building movement is a broad umbrella sheltering everyone, from the eco-conscious couple who chooses sustainably harvested hardwoods for the floors in their otherwise traditional house to the eco-adventurous homesteader living off the grid in a cabin in the woods. The concept isn’t new. Environmentally conscious home buyers, especially those with the means to afford luxury housing, have had an array of products available to them for years. Green affordable housing, however, has lagged despite the growing market for houses with lower operating costs and the obvious health benefits of living in a dry, clean house — until recently.
In the last several years, Habitat for Humanity affiliates have had an increasing number of green building resources at their disposal: new high-efficiency products at lower prices, better publicized building techniques, partnerships that share costs, and standardized rating criteria to evaluate energy use. And as it turns out, the leap to green building has not been as far or as risky as some Habitat affiliates anticipated.
When Dallas Area Habitat agreed to take on a project called Frazier Courtyards, it found that many of the practices it originally had adopted to save money were considered green as well. Building in already-urban areas and reusing existing utility hookups is green; Frazier Courtyards is a 51-house development on the site of a former housing authority project. Building modestly sized houses that fit families’ needs without wasting space is green; of the 40 houses Habitat is scheduled to build, 13 will be “empty nesters” — 824-square-foot, 2-bedroom and 1-bath garden homes to be sold to partner families who no longer need extra bedrooms to support growing families.
“Some of what we’ve been doing is kind of incremental from what we were already doing,” says Leo Putchinsky, deputy director with Dallas Area Habitat. “For the last five years, we’ve been building our walls in the shop. That lets us minimize the wasted lumber on site. We have a volunteer that lays out the homes in the most efficient use of lumber that we can in terms of how the walls are built. Best building practices are greener.”
Treading Lightly
The philosophy of reducing waste, recycling everything possible and taking advantage of energy efficiencies during construction can result in a home as green as the construction practices that built it. In 2005, Metro Denver Habitat for Humanity partnered with energy experts to build a house that completes each year with a net-zero energy bill.
“The Zero Energy House is a result of a partnership with the National Renewable Energy Lab,” says Bruce Carpenter, construction manager at Metro Denver Habitat. “We typically will partner with the experts and understand what the cutting edge innovations are, and then determine what we can actually do. Part of our philosophy is to learn what we can, take what we can and leave the rest.”
The process of learning the most energy-efficient techniques and adapting them to Habitat’s volunteer-friendly, cost-conscious methods means the affiliate sometimes walks a line between being willing to experiment with new products and staying careful to spend donor dollars wisely. Through the years, however, Metro Denver Habitat has derived a list of energy-saving techniques that apply to each house build, some of which are now included in the housing code, Carpenter says.
“I’ve been here 11 years, and since early on we have, as most affiliates have, tried to limit the operational cost of our families’ houses,” Carpenter says. “We don’t want to give anyone a mortgage and have them not be able to afford the utilities. We’re always about passive solar, having the orientations correct, the right amount of windows and right amount of glass.”
A Breath of Fresh Air
New York City is not the first place that might come to mind when people think of green building, but Habitat for Humanity New York City executive director Josh Lockwood thinks perhaps it should be.
“In some ways, living in New York City is a much greener way to live than living in another part of the country where things are more spread out and the population is not so dense,” he says. “Our carbon footprint is much smaller because we live in small spaces, we use public transportation, and the rate of car ownership is far less. Land is scarce here, so when we get a piece of land here at New York Habitat … we build up and accommodate more families.”
As a case in point, the affiliate is in the midst of building a 41-unit multi-family housing development in Brooklyn that takes environmental impact, and especially indoor air quality, very seriously. In addition to building with non-toxic finishes, New York City’s Habitat houses feature timer-controlled mechanical ventilation to ensure an adequate supply of fresh air.
“We had found that many of the families we were serving, before they moved into their Habitat housing, were suffering from childhood asthma and other ailments related to volatile organic compounds and paints and sealants,” Lockwood says. “We thought it was important to build green for the physical health of the families.”
Looking Ahead
Though few would dispute the benefits of green building from an environmental or energy-savings point of view, there are extra costs involved: Energy-efficient appliances are more expensive, and formaldehyde-free cabinetry could be harder to find, for example. However, many other green techniques are cost-neutral if planned for in advance. After all, if the landscaping includes a new sapling anyway, why not plant it where it will grow to shade the house during hot, sunny afternoons?
Habitat affiliates continue to explore the new opportunities green building offers as a natural outgrowth of the constant desire to build more houses for more families with less unnecessary expense and waste.
“As a mission-based and faith-based organization, we see ourselves as stewards of our planet,” Lockwood says, “and an important component of building as a faith-based organization is taking care of this earth. If we can create homes that are more beneficial to the people and environment, that’s a great thing.”
Habitat keeps energy efficiency and affordable design in mind as it builds around the world. Look for international examples of green building in the June 2009 issue.
Rising energy costs and environmental awareness power a new emphasis on building tighter, more efficient homes
By Rebekah Daniel
The Anatomy of a Green House
A Partnership for the Future
Hitting the Mark
When passersby glance at Robin Marks’ house in Indianapolis, they might notice that the grass is nicely cut or that the front porch would be a convenient place to put the groceries down and fish for the key. They would see evergreen landscaping and durable-looking siding. Close observers might even see evidence of the two children who live there — a toy drum in the entryway or a glimpse of a High School Musical decorating theme through a bedroom window.
They won’t see the $50 per month that Robin doesn’t have to pay the electric company to power her energy-efficient appliances and fluorescent light bulbs. As the owner of one of Greater Indianapolis Habitat for Humanity’s “green” homes, Robin enjoys paying as much as 50 percent less in energy bills than she did when she lived in a two-bedroom apartment. And as a single mom and teacher at a private day care, every little bit helps. “Either I put it away and save it for the kids or get odds and ends for the house,” she says. “Most of the time, I save it for the emergency fund in case the car breaks down or something happens.”
An emergency fund, the real possibility of a short family vacation, the cushion that protects parents from anxiety about birthdays with no gift — these “treats” are offshoots of green building, a construction trend that is good both for homeowners and the world they live in.
A Green Process for a Greener Result
The green building movement is a broad umbrella sheltering everyone, from the eco-conscious couple who chooses sustainably harvested hardwoods for the floors in their otherwise traditional house to the eco-adventurous homesteader living off the grid in a cabin in the woods. The concept isn’t new. Environmentally conscious home buyers, especially those with the means to afford luxury housing, have had an array of products available to them for years. Green affordable housing, however, has lagged despite the growing market for houses with lower operating costs and the obvious health benefits of living in a dry, clean house — until recently.
In the last several years, Habitat for Humanity affiliates have had an increasing number of green building resources at their disposal: new high-efficiency products at lower prices, better publicized building techniques, partnerships that share costs, and standardized rating criteria to evaluate energy use. And as it turns out, the leap to green building has not been as far or as risky as some Habitat affiliates anticipated.
When Dallas Area Habitat agreed to take on a project called Frazier Courtyards, it found that many of the practices it originally had adopted to save money were considered green as well. Building in already-urban areas and reusing existing utility hookups is green; Frazier Courtyards is a 51-house development on the site of a former housing authority project. Building modestly sized houses that fit families’ needs without wasting space is green; of the 40 houses Habitat is scheduled to build, 13 will be “empty nesters” — 824-square-foot, 2-bedroom and 1-bath garden homes to be sold to partner families who no longer need extra bedrooms to support growing families.
“Some of what we’ve been doing is kind of incremental from what we were already doing,” says Leo Putchinsky, deputy director with Dallas Area Habitat. “For the last five years, we’ve been building our walls in the shop. That lets us minimize the wasted lumber on site. We have a volunteer that lays out the homes in the most efficient use of lumber that we can in terms of how the walls are built. Best building practices are greener.”
Treading Lightly
The philosophy of reducing waste, recycling everything possible and taking advantage of energy efficiencies during construction can result in a home as green as the construction practices that built it. In 2005, Metro Denver Habitat for Humanity partnered with energy experts to build a house that completes each year with a net-zero energy bill.
“The Zero Energy House is a result of a partnership with the National Renewable Energy Lab,” says Bruce Carpenter, construction manager at Metro Denver Habitat. “We typically will partner with the experts and understand what the cutting edge innovations are, and then determine what we can actually do. Part of our philosophy is to learn what we can, take what we can and leave the rest.”
The process of learning the most energy-efficient techniques and adapting them to Habitat’s volunteer-friendly, cost-conscious methods means the affiliate sometimes walks a line between being willing to experiment with new products and staying careful to spend donor dollars wisely. Through the years, however, Metro Denver Habitat has derived a list of energy-saving techniques that apply to each house build, some of which are now included in the housing code, Carpenter says.
“I’ve been here 11 years, and since early on we have, as most affiliates have, tried to limit the operational cost of our families’ houses,” Carpenter says. “We don’t want to give anyone a mortgage and have them not be able to afford the utilities. We’re always about passive solar, having the orientations correct, the right amount of windows and right amount of glass.”
A Breath of Fresh Air
New York City is not the first place that might come to mind when people think of green building, but Habitat for Humanity New York City executive director Josh Lockwood thinks perhaps it should be.
“In some ways, living in New York City is a much greener way to live than living in another part of the country where things are more spread out and the population is not so dense,” he says. “Our carbon footprint is much smaller because we live in small spaces, we use public transportation, and the rate of car ownership is far less. Land is scarce here, so when we get a piece of land here at New York Habitat … we build up and accommodate more families.”
As a case in point, the affiliate is in the midst of building a 41-unit multi-family housing development in Brooklyn that takes environmental impact, and especially indoor air quality, very seriously. In addition to building with non-toxic finishes, New York City’s Habitat houses feature timer-controlled mechanical ventilation to ensure an adequate supply of fresh air.
“We had found that many of the families we were serving, before they moved into their Habitat housing, were suffering from childhood asthma and other ailments related to volatile organic compounds and paints and sealants,” Lockwood says. “We thought it was important to build green for the physical health of the families.”
Looking Ahead
Though few would dispute the benefits of green building from an environmental or energy-savings point of view, there are extra costs involved: Energy-efficient appliances are more expensive, and formaldehyde-free cabinetry could be harder to find, for example. However, many other green techniques are cost-neutral if planned for in advance. After all, if the landscaping includes a new sapling anyway, why not plant it where it will grow to shade the house during hot, sunny afternoons?
Habitat affiliates continue to explore the new opportunities green building offers as a natural outgrowth of the constant desire to build more houses for more families with less unnecessary expense and waste.
“As a mission-based and faith-based organization, we see ourselves as stewards of our planet,” Lockwood says, “and an important component of building as a faith-based organization is taking care of this earth. If we can create homes that are more beneficial to the people and environment, that’s a great thing.”
Habitat keeps energy efficiency and affordable design in mind as it builds around the world. Look for international examples of green building in the June 2009 issue.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Altering Planes, and the Way They Fly, to Save Fuel
Altering Planes, and the Way They Fly, to Save Fuel
CHRISTINE NEGRONI
Published: April 29, 2009
FOR the aviation industry, its fate inextricably linked to the price of oil, fuel conservation is more than environmentally sound — it’s a matter of survival. That is why, in research labs and in airline conference rooms, any measure is open for discussion if it reduces the use of fuel.
Todd Wade/American Airlines
UPLIFTING At the American Airlines maintenance base in Kansas City, mechanics secure a winglet to a jet’s wingtip. Winglets reduce drag and increase the amount of weight a plane can carry.
“Fuel economy and carbon emissions are exactly the same thing,” said Alan Epstein, vice president for technology and the environment at Pratt & Whitney, the jet engine manufacturer. “If you want to reduce carbon emissions, you reduce the fuel consumption.”
The most significant improvements come from broad changes in the way planes fly. Using global positioning information, airliners fly shorter, more direct routes to destinations rather than following rigid paths that can take them miles out of the way as they move from one ground-based radar beacon to another. Special landing procedures called continuous descent approaches let pilots reduce fuel to the engines to the idle setting as they begin their descent.
“The ultimate goal is to be able to push back, roll to the runway, take off and land and go to the gate, all without ever having to hit the brakes,” said Bob Smith, vice president of advanced technologies for Honeywell Aerospace in Phoenix. “If you can get that level of sophistication in the system, that’s a big deal.”
It’s a big deal because these kinds of operational changes affect an airline’s costs. In the past four years, fuel has surpassed labor as the airlines’ largest operating expense, so conservation efforts are bound to have an impact.
Environmental benefits are secondary but significant. In the United States, commercial aviation accounts for 2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Air Transport Association, an industry group.
On a recent trial flight, Southwest Airlines used satellite navigation and continuous descent approaches on a round trip between Dallas and Houston and determined it could reduce fuel consumption by 6 percent.
“If we were able to reduce and get 6 percent savings across all our flights, that would equal 90 million gallons a year in fuel reduction and a reduction in carbon emissions of 1.9 billion pounds,” said Jeff Martin, Southwest’s senior director of flight operations.
Nancy Young, vice president of environmental affairs for the Air Transport Association, said that changing from a radar-based system to a satellite-based one was “a big, big thing.”
But incorporating the new flights into an older traffic infrastructure takes time. Air traffic control centers and airlines are in transition, with some updating equipment faster than others. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, about 80 percent of American airliners have the necessary devices.
Brian Will, program manager for American Airlines and a pilot, said the agency needed to do more to reward companies that make an investment in new technology. Air traffic control “is compelled to maintain a system that will accommodate everybody,” he said. “In my opinion, this is a mistake.”
The aviation authority is considering ways to expedite satellite-guided planes through the system. “Clearly there is a policy that we’re looking at right now to try and improve our delivery of services to those who are better equipped,” said Carl E. Burleson, the F.A.A.’s deputy acting administrator for policy planning and the environment.
If America’s air traffic infrastructure wasn’t so well established, it might be more nimble. Instead, less developed countries seem to be adapting faster, according to one industry expert.
“You’ll see this first in places like China; they’re leapfrogging a generation of technology,” said Ken Shapero, director of marketing communications for Naverus, an advanced navigation company in Kent, Wash. “But in the U.S., so much investment and infrastructure is in the old ways of doing things.”
Since fuel is consumed in the engine, manufacturers are eager to develop new models. Mr. Epstein of Pratt & Whitney said that 20 years ago, when jet fuel was less expensive, the company spent $1 billion inventing a gear to allow the engine fan to run at a slower speed than the turbine so that each part could work most effectively. That technology, called PurePower, had its first sale last month, when the Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier bought Pratt & Whitney’s engine for its CSeries airliners, which the company trumpets with the slogan “New Planet New Plane.”
Mr. Epstein said that when the work began, he didn’t know what its environmental impact would be. “We weren’t ahead thinking about carbon but we were thinking about fuel,” he said.
A plane’s design and the weight it carries also contribute to fuel consumption, which is why jetliners like the CSeries, Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 are being made from lighter-than-metal composite materials. Planes already in service are undergoing expensive modifications to take advantage of new knowledge about aerodynamic efficiency.
In Kansas City, Mo., mechanics at American Airlines are making an extensive after-market change to many planes in their fleet by installing 11-foot vertical panels called winglets on the wingtips of 58 long-range Boeing 767’s. The winglets reduce drag and increase the amount of weight the plane can carry by 12,000 pounds, increasing the profit-making potential of those flights.
Other airlines are adding winglets to their airplanes for a fuel savings that can be as much as half a million gallons per plane a year, said Patrick LaMoria, vice president of sales and marketing at Aviation Partners Boeing, in Seattle, the designer of the winglets. Winglets for the 767 can take a month to install and cost nearly $2 million per plane, he said.
Environmental concerns even extend to contrails, the white streams of condensation that trail the engine, as cooling exhaust gases freeze into ice crystals. These wispy clouds can remain in the atmosphere for up to eight hours, and studies have shown that they could be altering the earth’s temperature. On the list of priorities, contrails rank below anything else that saves fuel, money or greenhouse gas emissions.
“People are studying how to eliminate contrails,” Mr. Epstein said. “And if I could eliminate them for free I would, but if there’s a cost, particularly in carbon, you’d better understand the relative importance.”
CHRISTINE NEGRONI
Published: April 29, 2009
FOR the aviation industry, its fate inextricably linked to the price of oil, fuel conservation is more than environmentally sound — it’s a matter of survival. That is why, in research labs and in airline conference rooms, any measure is open for discussion if it reduces the use of fuel.
Todd Wade/American Airlines
UPLIFTING At the American Airlines maintenance base in Kansas City, mechanics secure a winglet to a jet’s wingtip. Winglets reduce drag and increase the amount of weight a plane can carry.
“Fuel economy and carbon emissions are exactly the same thing,” said Alan Epstein, vice president for technology and the environment at Pratt & Whitney, the jet engine manufacturer. “If you want to reduce carbon emissions, you reduce the fuel consumption.”
The most significant improvements come from broad changes in the way planes fly. Using global positioning information, airliners fly shorter, more direct routes to destinations rather than following rigid paths that can take them miles out of the way as they move from one ground-based radar beacon to another. Special landing procedures called continuous descent approaches let pilots reduce fuel to the engines to the idle setting as they begin their descent.
“The ultimate goal is to be able to push back, roll to the runway, take off and land and go to the gate, all without ever having to hit the brakes,” said Bob Smith, vice president of advanced technologies for Honeywell Aerospace in Phoenix. “If you can get that level of sophistication in the system, that’s a big deal.”
It’s a big deal because these kinds of operational changes affect an airline’s costs. In the past four years, fuel has surpassed labor as the airlines’ largest operating expense, so conservation efforts are bound to have an impact.
Environmental benefits are secondary but significant. In the United States, commercial aviation accounts for 2 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Air Transport Association, an industry group.
On a recent trial flight, Southwest Airlines used satellite navigation and continuous descent approaches on a round trip between Dallas and Houston and determined it could reduce fuel consumption by 6 percent.
“If we were able to reduce and get 6 percent savings across all our flights, that would equal 90 million gallons a year in fuel reduction and a reduction in carbon emissions of 1.9 billion pounds,” said Jeff Martin, Southwest’s senior director of flight operations.
Nancy Young, vice president of environmental affairs for the Air Transport Association, said that changing from a radar-based system to a satellite-based one was “a big, big thing.”
But incorporating the new flights into an older traffic infrastructure takes time. Air traffic control centers and airlines are in transition, with some updating equipment faster than others. According to the Federal Aviation Administration, about 80 percent of American airliners have the necessary devices.
Brian Will, program manager for American Airlines and a pilot, said the agency needed to do more to reward companies that make an investment in new technology. Air traffic control “is compelled to maintain a system that will accommodate everybody,” he said. “In my opinion, this is a mistake.”
The aviation authority is considering ways to expedite satellite-guided planes through the system. “Clearly there is a policy that we’re looking at right now to try and improve our delivery of services to those who are better equipped,” said Carl E. Burleson, the F.A.A.’s deputy acting administrator for policy planning and the environment.
If America’s air traffic infrastructure wasn’t so well established, it might be more nimble. Instead, less developed countries seem to be adapting faster, according to one industry expert.
“You’ll see this first in places like China; they’re leapfrogging a generation of technology,” said Ken Shapero, director of marketing communications for Naverus, an advanced navigation company in Kent, Wash. “But in the U.S., so much investment and infrastructure is in the old ways of doing things.”
Since fuel is consumed in the engine, manufacturers are eager to develop new models. Mr. Epstein of Pratt & Whitney said that 20 years ago, when jet fuel was less expensive, the company spent $1 billion inventing a gear to allow the engine fan to run at a slower speed than the turbine so that each part could work most effectively. That technology, called PurePower, had its first sale last month, when the Canadian aircraft maker Bombardier bought Pratt & Whitney’s engine for its CSeries airliners, which the company trumpets with the slogan “New Planet New Plane.”
Mr. Epstein said that when the work began, he didn’t know what its environmental impact would be. “We weren’t ahead thinking about carbon but we were thinking about fuel,” he said.
A plane’s design and the weight it carries also contribute to fuel consumption, which is why jetliners like the CSeries, Boeing 787 and Airbus A350 are being made from lighter-than-metal composite materials. Planes already in service are undergoing expensive modifications to take advantage of new knowledge about aerodynamic efficiency.
In Kansas City, Mo., mechanics at American Airlines are making an extensive after-market change to many planes in their fleet by installing 11-foot vertical panels called winglets on the wingtips of 58 long-range Boeing 767’s. The winglets reduce drag and increase the amount of weight the plane can carry by 12,000 pounds, increasing the profit-making potential of those flights.
Other airlines are adding winglets to their airplanes for a fuel savings that can be as much as half a million gallons per plane a year, said Patrick LaMoria, vice president of sales and marketing at Aviation Partners Boeing, in Seattle, the designer of the winglets. Winglets for the 767 can take a month to install and cost nearly $2 million per plane, he said.
Environmental concerns even extend to contrails, the white streams of condensation that trail the engine, as cooling exhaust gases freeze into ice crystals. These wispy clouds can remain in the atmosphere for up to eight hours, and studies have shown that they could be altering the earth’s temperature. On the list of priorities, contrails rank below anything else that saves fuel, money or greenhouse gas emissions.
“People are studying how to eliminate contrails,” Mr. Epstein said. “And if I could eliminate them for free I would, but if there’s a cost, particularly in carbon, you’d better understand the relative importance.”
Solar Tech: Not Just on the Roof Anymore
Solar Tech: Not Just on the Roof Anymore
Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times
SMALL WONDERS Flexible photovoltaic cells created by John Rogers, below, of the University of Illinois, can be printed on many materials.
By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: April 29, 2009
PHOTOVOLTAIC cells are already a familiar sight on rooftops. But one day, miniature cells may also be found in more unconventional places: power-generating windows, car sunroofs or even awnings.
Next: The Solar Shirt
Related
Video from Sciencentral.com
Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times
John Rogers of the University of Illinois. More Photos »
Sara D. Davis for The New York Times (Semprius)
The flexible photovoltaic cell technology is being developed by Semprius, in Durham, N.C. More Photos >
The new technology is the work of a researcher and his colleagues who developed a way to print ultrathin, semitransparent and flexible cells on plastic, cloth and other materials. If the technology succeeds, it may provide the solar industry with alternatives to the fixed installations that are common today: cells may be printed on plastic rolls that could be unfurled for dozens of uses, or stamped onto fabric for T-shirts or other clothes that collect energy while worn.
The researcher, John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his team use a standard printing technique to create solar cells that are a tenth the thickness of conventional semiconductor cells, or even thinner. The cells are so flexible that dense arrays of them can be rolled tightly around a pencil. The technology has been licensed to Semprius, a semiconductor company in Durham, N.C., that expects to begin a pilot project making solar modules in about a year. Dr. Rogers’s approach offers a unique strategy for making highly efficient, flexible solar cells for large-scale production, said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-wrote a review of the work for the journal Nature Materials
Traditional silicon solar cells are rigid, heavy and opaque, but they dominate the technology because they are very reliable and efficient, he said, and because silicon is abundant. Still, the brittleness of silicon limits its uses. Dr. Rogers “has figured out how to grab thin layers of silicon or other inorganics, and put them on whatever substrates you want,” Dr. Javey said.
Dr. Rogers’s work is an extension of techniques that he and his collaborators have developed for making flexible electronics over the past five years. The thin solar cells are first fabricated on semiconductor wafers using standard lithographic techniques and then transferred by a soft rubber stamp onto another material, Dr. Rogers said.
The sticky surface of the stamp “picks up the cells,” he said, “and now your stamp is inked with these silicon cells. Then we use the stamp to print them on, for instance, a sheet of plastic.”
George M. Whitesides, a renowned chemist and professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, said that Dr. Rogers’s research took advantage of years of progress in silicon fabrication, while at the same time overcoming a basic restriction. “Silicon does work well, but it’s always been the limitation that you make silicon devices on hard, rigid, planal surfaces,” Dr. Whitesides said.
Dr. Rogers has retained the technology for creating silicon devices but developed new forms that were previously off-limits because of silicon’s lack of flexibility. “He’s extended an important technology in directions that will certainly open new applications,” Dr. Whitesides said.
And the ability to make the cells semitransparent may lead to novel uses, for example, in tinted window coatings that also produce energy, Dr. Javey said. The transparency in the cells can be adjusted by controlling their density by printing sheets with fewer cells to enable more light to come though. “Then you can see through the cells as you could through tinted film,” he said.
At its plant in Durham, N.C., where Semprius is developing technology for solar cell arrays, Joe Carr, the company’s chief executive, said, “We almost can’t keep up with all of the opportunities that have been presented to us.” Semprius is working on photovoltaic modules for potential customers including automotive companies interested in the new cells for car roofs, he said.
Dr. Rogers said he was pleased with the new cells’ flexibility and thinness but said that they offered another even more critical advantage. “That the technology is rollable and transparent is important,” he said. “But cost is the paramount consideration for a lot of solar applications, which have to be low-cost per watt generated.” The technology is producing cells that are often only two microns thick (a micron is one-millionth of a meter). “Thinner allows cheaper,” he said
Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times
SMALL WONDERS Flexible photovoltaic cells created by John Rogers, below, of the University of Illinois, can be printed on many materials.
By ANNE EISENBERG
Published: April 29, 2009
PHOTOVOLTAIC cells are already a familiar sight on rooftops. But one day, miniature cells may also be found in more unconventional places: power-generating windows, car sunroofs or even awnings.
Next: The Solar Shirt
Related
Video from Sciencentral.com
Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times
John Rogers of the University of Illinois. More Photos »
Sara D. Davis for The New York Times (Semprius)
The flexible photovoltaic cell technology is being developed by Semprius, in Durham, N.C. More Photos >
The new technology is the work of a researcher and his colleagues who developed a way to print ultrathin, semitransparent and flexible cells on plastic, cloth and other materials. If the technology succeeds, it may provide the solar industry with alternatives to the fixed installations that are common today: cells may be printed on plastic rolls that could be unfurled for dozens of uses, or stamped onto fabric for T-shirts or other clothes that collect energy while worn.
The researcher, John A. Rogers, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his team use a standard printing technique to create solar cells that are a tenth the thickness of conventional semiconductor cells, or even thinner. The cells are so flexible that dense arrays of them can be rolled tightly around a pencil. The technology has been licensed to Semprius, a semiconductor company in Durham, N.C., that expects to begin a pilot project making solar modules in about a year. Dr. Rogers’s approach offers a unique strategy for making highly efficient, flexible solar cells for large-scale production, said Ali Javey, an electrical engineer and assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who co-wrote a review of the work for the journal Nature Materials
Traditional silicon solar cells are rigid, heavy and opaque, but they dominate the technology because they are very reliable and efficient, he said, and because silicon is abundant. Still, the brittleness of silicon limits its uses. Dr. Rogers “has figured out how to grab thin layers of silicon or other inorganics, and put them on whatever substrates you want,” Dr. Javey said.
Dr. Rogers’s work is an extension of techniques that he and his collaborators have developed for making flexible electronics over the past five years. The thin solar cells are first fabricated on semiconductor wafers using standard lithographic techniques and then transferred by a soft rubber stamp onto another material, Dr. Rogers said.
The sticky surface of the stamp “picks up the cells,” he said, “and now your stamp is inked with these silicon cells. Then we use the stamp to print them on, for instance, a sheet of plastic.”
George M. Whitesides, a renowned chemist and professor in the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, said that Dr. Rogers’s research took advantage of years of progress in silicon fabrication, while at the same time overcoming a basic restriction. “Silicon does work well, but it’s always been the limitation that you make silicon devices on hard, rigid, planal surfaces,” Dr. Whitesides said.
Dr. Rogers has retained the technology for creating silicon devices but developed new forms that were previously off-limits because of silicon’s lack of flexibility. “He’s extended an important technology in directions that will certainly open new applications,” Dr. Whitesides said.
And the ability to make the cells semitransparent may lead to novel uses, for example, in tinted window coatings that also produce energy, Dr. Javey said. The transparency in the cells can be adjusted by controlling their density by printing sheets with fewer cells to enable more light to come though. “Then you can see through the cells as you could through tinted film,” he said.
At its plant in Durham, N.C., where Semprius is developing technology for solar cell arrays, Joe Carr, the company’s chief executive, said, “We almost can’t keep up with all of the opportunities that have been presented to us.” Semprius is working on photovoltaic modules for potential customers including automotive companies interested in the new cells for car roofs, he said.
Dr. Rogers said he was pleased with the new cells’ flexibility and thinness but said that they offered another even more critical advantage. “That the technology is rollable and transparent is important,” he said. “But cost is the paramount consideration for a lot of solar applications, which have to be low-cost per watt generated.” The technology is producing cells that are often only two microns thick (a micron is one-millionth of a meter). “Thinner allows cheaper,” he said
page 2 smart technology, Stockholm,
(Page 2 of 2)
The company used its computer chip factory in Burlington, Vt., as a test bed for improving the efficiency of industrial water use. Using sensors to calibrate water flows and temperatures, analytics software and optimizing models, I.B.M. reduced its water consumption at the plant by 27 percent, or 20 million gallons a year, even as manufacturing output increased 30 percent.
From the Web to the Power Grid (April 30, 2009)
A Little Give and Take on Electricity (April 30, 2009)
A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.
The plant saves $3 million a year, partly from reduced costs for water and treatment, I.B.M. said, and energy savings — less pumping, cooling and heating the water — account for 60 percent of the cost reduction.
“It started out as a water-saving program and then we really saw the energy savings,” Ms. Nunes said. “And that’s true in industrial, agricultural and household use, this incredible interplay between energy and water.”
Today, I.B.M. is building smart traffic systems in cities including London and Brisbane, Australia, but its standout success has been in Stockholm.
In 2006, Stockholm experimented with congestion pricing, charging cars up to $4 to enter the downtown area, depending on the time of day. The cars were monitored with RFID cards and webcams that photographed license plate numbers. Drivers had to pay within two weeks or faced penalties, but I.B.M. linked the driver data to 400 convenience stores in the city to make payment easier.
Within a few weeks, the impact in Stockholm was evident, and it has proved permanent. Car traffic in downtown Stockholm has been reduced by 20 percent, carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 12 percent, and the city’s public transport system has added 40,000 daily riders, I.B.M. said. The webcams accurately read license plates, even on snowy days, more than 95 percent of the time. So the RFID tags are no longer in use. After expenses, the smart traffic system generates $80 million a year for the city.
Stockholm is a city in a Scandinavian country with a long environmental tradition, in a socially democratic nation. Yet even in Stockholm, there were complaints initially. The city also took the risk of installing the entire system, calling it a trial, and then having residents vote on it seven months later, after the benefits were apparent.
“These systems can be pretty hard to implement politically,” observed Naveen Lamba, a transportation expert in I.B.M.’s global services unit.
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg learned that lesson last year, when state legislators brushed off his plan for a smart traffic system in Manhattan. Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal to charge drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone south of 60th Street during peak hours was supported by civic, labor and environmental groups as a way to ease traffic and to finance improvements in mass transit. But many New Yorkers, especially those outside Manhattan, viewed the mayor’s plan as a tax on their ability to move around their own city.
In Amsterdam, which hopes to cut its carbon footprint 40 percent by 2025, the city is trying a different approach, by persuading commuters to stay put instead of taxing them when they come.
As part of a “smart city” project, Amsterdam is working with Cisco and other companies to set up remote, high-tech work centers. A pilot smart work center opened in September in Almere, whose residents routinely commute to Amsterdam. The center is equipped with high-speed, Internet-linked computer work stations, high-definition video conferencing and even child day care. The Dutch experiment, Cisco says, is being closely followed by dozens of cities.
In San Francisco, Cisco has experimented with enticing commuters to try public transportation by offering a bus that has wireless Internet access for passengers and on-board touch screens that are fed constantly updated information on connections and wait times. Reliable journey times, surveys show, are what commuters most value.
The hybrid-fuel bus — a pilot project that ended earlier this year — also had a “green gauge” feature that allowed passengers to calculate the carbon-emission savings on their trips. “Visibility is crucial,” said Rick Hutley, a Cisco consultant. “When people see the environmental impact and can measure it, they jump on board and participate.”
Even railroads, a 19th-century technology, are getting more high-tech intelligence. In a trial with one of the nation’s largest railroads, G.E. is using sensors on tracks, sidings and locomotives; sophisticated computer models; and optimization software to fine-tune the flow of traffic across the railway network.
As a result, trains wait less and travel at higher speeds, an increase of 2 miles per hour on average. That may seem small, but each mile per hour improvement translates into $100 million in efficiency gains including energy savings, G.E. said. And new locomotives amount to computers on rails, wirelessly downloading information on trips, traffic, terrain and loads, and making adjustments. Such automated cruise control delivers energy savings of up to 13 percent.
“Both the trains and the tracks are evolving and getting smarter and smarter,” said Christopher Johnson, an expert in computing and decision science at G.E.’s research labs.
The company used its computer chip factory in Burlington, Vt., as a test bed for improving the efficiency of industrial water use. Using sensors to calibrate water flows and temperatures, analytics software and optimizing models, I.B.M. reduced its water consumption at the plant by 27 percent, or 20 million gallons a year, even as manufacturing output increased 30 percent.
From the Web to the Power Grid (April 30, 2009)
A Little Give and Take on Electricity (April 30, 2009)
A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.
The plant saves $3 million a year, partly from reduced costs for water and treatment, I.B.M. said, and energy savings — less pumping, cooling and heating the water — account for 60 percent of the cost reduction.
“It started out as a water-saving program and then we really saw the energy savings,” Ms. Nunes said. “And that’s true in industrial, agricultural and household use, this incredible interplay between energy and water.”
Today, I.B.M. is building smart traffic systems in cities including London and Brisbane, Australia, but its standout success has been in Stockholm.
In 2006, Stockholm experimented with congestion pricing, charging cars up to $4 to enter the downtown area, depending on the time of day. The cars were monitored with RFID cards and webcams that photographed license plate numbers. Drivers had to pay within two weeks or faced penalties, but I.B.M. linked the driver data to 400 convenience stores in the city to make payment easier.
Within a few weeks, the impact in Stockholm was evident, and it has proved permanent. Car traffic in downtown Stockholm has been reduced by 20 percent, carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 12 percent, and the city’s public transport system has added 40,000 daily riders, I.B.M. said. The webcams accurately read license plates, even on snowy days, more than 95 percent of the time. So the RFID tags are no longer in use. After expenses, the smart traffic system generates $80 million a year for the city.
Stockholm is a city in a Scandinavian country with a long environmental tradition, in a socially democratic nation. Yet even in Stockholm, there were complaints initially. The city also took the risk of installing the entire system, calling it a trial, and then having residents vote on it seven months later, after the benefits were apparent.
“These systems can be pretty hard to implement politically,” observed Naveen Lamba, a transportation expert in I.B.M.’s global services unit.
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg learned that lesson last year, when state legislators brushed off his plan for a smart traffic system in Manhattan. Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal to charge drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone south of 60th Street during peak hours was supported by civic, labor and environmental groups as a way to ease traffic and to finance improvements in mass transit. But many New Yorkers, especially those outside Manhattan, viewed the mayor’s plan as a tax on their ability to move around their own city.
In Amsterdam, which hopes to cut its carbon footprint 40 percent by 2025, the city is trying a different approach, by persuading commuters to stay put instead of taxing them when they come.
As part of a “smart city” project, Amsterdam is working with Cisco and other companies to set up remote, high-tech work centers. A pilot smart work center opened in September in Almere, whose residents routinely commute to Amsterdam. The center is equipped with high-speed, Internet-linked computer work stations, high-definition video conferencing and even child day care. The Dutch experiment, Cisco says, is being closely followed by dozens of cities.
In San Francisco, Cisco has experimented with enticing commuters to try public transportation by offering a bus that has wireless Internet access for passengers and on-board touch screens that are fed constantly updated information on connections and wait times. Reliable journey times, surveys show, are what commuters most value.
The hybrid-fuel bus — a pilot project that ended earlier this year — also had a “green gauge” feature that allowed passengers to calculate the carbon-emission savings on their trips. “Visibility is crucial,” said Rick Hutley, a Cisco consultant. “When people see the environmental impact and can measure it, they jump on board and participate.”
Even railroads, a 19th-century technology, are getting more high-tech intelligence. In a trial with one of the nation’s largest railroads, G.E. is using sensors on tracks, sidings and locomotives; sophisticated computer models; and optimization software to fine-tune the flow of traffic across the railway network.
As a result, trains wait less and travel at higher speeds, an increase of 2 miles per hour on average. That may seem small, but each mile per hour improvement translates into $100 million in efficiency gains including energy savings, G.E. said. And new locomotives amount to computers on rails, wirelessly downloading information on trips, traffic, terrain and loads, and making adjustments. Such automated cruise control delivers energy savings of up to 13 percent.
“Both the trains and the tracks are evolving and getting smarter and smarter,” said Christopher Johnson, an expert in computing and decision science at G.E.’s research labs.
From the Web to the Power Grid
By STEVE LOHR
Published: April 29, 2009
IN the mid-1990s, the Internet took off because its technological time had come. Years of steady progress in developing more powerful and less expensive computers, Web software and faster communications links finally came together.
Back Story With The Times's Steve Lohr
Related
From the Web to the Power Grid (April 30, 2009)
A Little Give and Take on Electricity (April 30, 2009)
Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times
LAB TIME Sharon Nunes, right, who heads I.B.M.’s environmental innovation group, watches Young-Hye Na demonstrate a project that makes inexpensive membranes for desalinization.
A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.
A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure — more efficient and environmentally friendlier systems for managing, among other things, commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. This time, the crucial technological ingredients include low-cost sensors and clever software for analytics and visualization, as well as computing firepower.
Wireless sensors can now collect and transmit information from almost any object — for instance, roads, food crates, utility lines and water pipes. And the improved software helps interpret the huge flow of information, so raw data becomes useful knowledge to monitor and optimize transport and other complex systems. The efficiency payoff, experts say, should translate into big reductions in energy used, greenhouse gases emitted and natural resources consumed.
Smart infrastructure is a new horizon for computer technology. Computers have proven themselves powerful tools for calculation and communication. The next step, experts say, is for computers to become intelligent instruments of control, linking them to data-generating sensors throughout the planet’s infrastructure. “We are entering a new phase of computing, in which computers will be interacting with the physical world as never before,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
Computer-enhanced infrastructure promises to be a lucrative market. And the outlook has seemingly improved in the economic downturn, as governments around the world embrace stimulus spending that relies heavily on public works projects, both high-tech and low.
A handful of big technology corporations, including I.B.M., Cisco and General Electric, have major initiatives under way — I.B.M. has even branded its campaign, “Smarter Planet.” Yet many other companies, both large and small, are also pursuing opportunities.
Just how large the market will be and how quickly it will develop remain uncertain. The early smart-infrastructure ventures often seem like applied science projects, encouraging but small scale. It is not clear whether they will work outside the laboratory, where they must turn a profit or justify higher taxes or user fees. Much of the early Internet investment, after all, came to grief.
The smart infrastructure wave, analysts warn, could bring a similar cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment. Yet, like the Internet, they say, the technology will prevail in the long run.
“There will be a lot of hype and a lot of things that don’t pan out,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. “But the direction is absolutely right. We’ve barely scratched the surface of how information technology can help control and conserve energy use.”
I.B.M., with its large research labs and technology services business, has the most experience in the widest range of digital infrastructure projects. Many of its most advanced projects are in Europe, where energy costs are higher than in the United States. But while Europe remains a few years ahead, there is growing interest and investment in America, said Sharon Nunes, a scientist who heads I.B.M.’s environmental innovations group.
In the utility sector, I.B.M. has “smart grid” programs under way with several governments and companies, using sensors, software and computerized household meters to maintain power lines and reduce energy consumption. A Department of Energy demonstration project in Washington State, using I.B.M. technology, concluded that peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by 15 percent. Nationally, such a reduction over a 20-year period would eliminate the need for the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants.
In the field of distribution, I.B.M. is working with food producers and retailers to begin reducing the $48 billion of food that is thrown away in the United States each year. In Norway, it has a project with the nation’s largest food supplier that uses radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags and tracking software over the Internet to optimize shipments from the farm to supermarket shelves, reducing spoilage.
In China, I.B.M. worked with the China Ocean Shipping Company, a big international shipper, using optimization and simulation models to consolidate 100 distribution centers into 40. The re-engineering of its distribution network cut the Chinese company’s operating costs by 23 percent and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent, I.B.M. said.
In water management, I.B.M. is collaborating with the Nature Conservancy on its Water for Tomorrow project, which is monitoring and creating computer modeling for large river basins in Brazil, China and the United States, to help guide land use and water policies.
Published: April 29, 2009
IN the mid-1990s, the Internet took off because its technological time had come. Years of steady progress in developing more powerful and less expensive computers, Web software and faster communications links finally came together.
Back Story With The Times's Steve Lohr
Related
From the Web to the Power Grid (April 30, 2009)
A Little Give and Take on Electricity (April 30, 2009)
Jessica Brandi Lifland for The New York Times
LAB TIME Sharon Nunes, right, who heads I.B.M.’s environmental innovation group, watches Young-Hye Na demonstrate a project that makes inexpensive membranes for desalinization.
A blog about energy, the environment and the bottom line.
A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure — more efficient and environmentally friendlier systems for managing, among other things, commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. This time, the crucial technological ingredients include low-cost sensors and clever software for analytics and visualization, as well as computing firepower.
Wireless sensors can now collect and transmit information from almost any object — for instance, roads, food crates, utility lines and water pipes. And the improved software helps interpret the huge flow of information, so raw data becomes useful knowledge to monitor and optimize transport and other complex systems. The efficiency payoff, experts say, should translate into big reductions in energy used, greenhouse gases emitted and natural resources consumed.
Smart infrastructure is a new horizon for computer technology. Computers have proven themselves powerful tools for calculation and communication. The next step, experts say, is for computers to become intelligent instruments of control, linking them to data-generating sensors throughout the planet’s infrastructure. “We are entering a new phase of computing, in which computers will be interacting with the physical world as never before,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
Computer-enhanced infrastructure promises to be a lucrative market. And the outlook has seemingly improved in the economic downturn, as governments around the world embrace stimulus spending that relies heavily on public works projects, both high-tech and low.
A handful of big technology corporations, including I.B.M., Cisco and General Electric, have major initiatives under way — I.B.M. has even branded its campaign, “Smarter Planet.” Yet many other companies, both large and small, are also pursuing opportunities.
Just how large the market will be and how quickly it will develop remain uncertain. The early smart-infrastructure ventures often seem like applied science projects, encouraging but small scale. It is not clear whether they will work outside the laboratory, where they must turn a profit or justify higher taxes or user fees. Much of the early Internet investment, after all, came to grief.
The smart infrastructure wave, analysts warn, could bring a similar cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment. Yet, like the Internet, they say, the technology will prevail in the long run.
“There will be a lot of hype and a lot of things that don’t pan out,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. “But the direction is absolutely right. We’ve barely scratched the surface of how information technology can help control and conserve energy use.”
I.B.M., with its large research labs and technology services business, has the most experience in the widest range of digital infrastructure projects. Many of its most advanced projects are in Europe, where energy costs are higher than in the United States. But while Europe remains a few years ahead, there is growing interest and investment in America, said Sharon Nunes, a scientist who heads I.B.M.’s environmental innovations group.
In the utility sector, I.B.M. has “smart grid” programs under way with several governments and companies, using sensors, software and computerized household meters to maintain power lines and reduce energy consumption. A Department of Energy demonstration project in Washington State, using I.B.M. technology, concluded that peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by 15 percent. Nationally, such a reduction over a 20-year period would eliminate the need for the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants.
In the field of distribution, I.B.M. is working with food producers and retailers to begin reducing the $48 billion of food that is thrown away in the United States each year. In Norway, it has a project with the nation’s largest food supplier that uses radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags and tracking software over the Internet to optimize shipments from the farm to supermarket shelves, reducing spoilage.
In China, I.B.M. worked with the China Ocean Shipping Company, a big international shipper, using optimization and simulation models to consolidate 100 distribution centers into 40. The re-engineering of its distribution network cut the Chinese company’s operating costs by 23 percent and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent, I.B.M. said.
In water management, I.B.M. is collaborating with the Nature Conservancy on its Water for Tomorrow project, which is monitoring and creating computer modeling for large river basins in Brazil, China and the United States, to help guide land use and water policies.
Fluorescents Are So Over
September 7, 2007, 6:24 pm
Fluorescents Are So Over
By Barnaby J. Feder
It’s been a notable couple of weeks for solid state lighting.
At the end of last month, Royal Philips Electronics completed a $791 million acquisition of Color Kinetics, the leader in computer-controlled advertising and entertainment displays fashioned out of arrays of light-emitting diodes. Coming just two years after Philips took full control of Lumileds, the Hewlett Packard spin-off that pioneered many of today’s L.E.D. applications, the Color Kinetics deal solidified the Dutch company’s leadership position in high-powered L.E.D. applications. It will be intriguing to see what Philips does with it.
Cree XLamp 7090 XR Series LEDBut a very different type of announcement today might be, forgive us, more illuminating. One of Philips’ major component suppliers, Cree, issued a press release from its headquarters in Durham, N.C., claiming it had designed a light-emitting chip that could power an L.E.D. bulb producing light comparable to the 75-watt incandescent bulbs so common in American homes. If past product development trends are any guide, Philips or some other Cree customer could have a finished product for sale within two years, according to John Edmond, Cree’s director of advanced optoelectronics.
“There’s not anything so far out about this that it won’t go into production,” Mr. Edmond said.
The home will be the last major frontier in solid state lighting’s conquest of incandescent light, the energy hog it has already largely replaced in traffic signals and many other public lighting applications. Solid state lights can do a better job than the current energy-saving alternative, fluorescents, at matching the warm hues consumers are used to from incandescents.
They also last far longer, consume less energy and not require the use of mercury, a toxic component of fluorescents that raises disposal issues.
The sticking point may be the cost — no one knows what the price will be but it will undoubtedly be higher than fluorescents for many years. Incandescents will still look like the best deal to many consumers.
There’s no Moore’s law operating here to rapidly change the cost-to-performance equation — getting a chip to make photons instead of heat out of electrical current and then shepherding most of the photons out of the chip is a far tougher job than the Intels of the world face. But Mr. Edmond forecasts that solid state lighting will eventually get to the finish line of consumer acceptance.
“This is what’s going to replace the light bulb in the home,” he said.
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23 Comments
1. September 7, 2007
11:53 pm
Link
Are these chips actually more efficient than fluorescent? Last time I looked into the matter, white LEDs were about 10%, while fluorescents were 20% efficient. And fluorescents can be made in warm colors too. So the competitiion is on.
— Mark Troll
2. September 8, 2007
8:38 am
Link
This is wonderful. I’ve been working with led’s in the aerospace industry for around 10 yrs or so. Once they make it into homes, they’ll make cf’s look like energy hogs.
— nm
3. September 8, 2007
1:27 pm
Link
the latest research that I read claims that average LED output is only 20 lumens/watt compared to CFLs at 60 lumens/watt. Is that likely to change in consumer products in the near future?
— R Higgin
4. September 8, 2007
4:15 pm
Link
>>Solid state lights can do a better job than the current energy-saving alternative, fluorescents
Is this really a given conclusion in all circumstances? In my experience, the larger the LED in lumens the more uncomfortably close they come to the same energy use as good quality compact fuorescents. The biggest LEDs still waste energy as heat and need heatsinks. Can they work 24/7 without diminshed life? Mercury is mentioned as hazardous waste, but the amount in a compact fluorescent need be no more than pinpoint drop size, just enought to evaporate in the sealed tube to fill it with mercury vapor, which is part of the mechanism how fluorescents work. And yes, there is cost. Something tells me that all three forms of lighting will fill a niche for some time to come, industry promises notwithstanding. Remember it took 50+ years before we had decent, regular, large, hang-on-the-wall, flat screen televisions from the time Popular Science first trumpeted the notion in the early 1950’s.
— Yacko
5. September 9, 2007
6:53 am
Link
Can I get one installed in my refrigerator, like, today? That bulb in there is throwing a lot of heat!
— TomG
6. September 9, 2007
10:36 am
Link
Kudos to Philips for coming with LED-solid lighting solution.
— JOTHI NARAYANAN
7. September 9, 2007
10:59 am
Link
It seems to me this is s question of maturity of enginering. For instance everybody agrees that the internal combustion engine is a terrible way to extract the energy out of gas and turn it into work. But the fantastic, eficent and reliable engines that we have today ate sitting on a mountain of almost 100 years of engenering refinement. The current LED bulb is the Model T of its time. They will get much better in every way, efficency, reliability, recycle-ability and price.
— Howard
8. September 9, 2007
1:05 pm
Link
Completely False: “There’s no Moore’s law operating here to rapidly change the cost-to-performance equation.”
Haitz Law shows that the brightness per watt increase by a factor of 10 per decade since 1968 and the cost per lumen drops by a factor of 20 per decade.
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v1/n1/fig_tab/nphoton.2006.44_F1.html
— Joel
9. September 9, 2007
9:05 pm
Link
Fluorescents Are So Over, Barnaby J. Feder, September 10, 2007
Politely put, Mr. Feder’s article is rubbish.
Mr. Feder, never an expert at long division, forgot his calculator.
We adopted compact fluorescent lamps in 1974.
For the last five years, we got them at Home Deport for $0.002 per lumen or less.
As a specialty product, white LED lamps are about $0.200 per lumen.
Once they overcome a 100:1 cost disadvantage, we’ll be happy to use white LEDs.
In the meantime, you might want to review Mr. Feder’s employment contract.
— Craig Bolon
10. September 9, 2007
11:42 pm
Link
Politely put, Craig Bolon didn’t read Mr. Feder’s article very carefully.
Mr. Feder didn’t say there was currently a cost benefit to LED over CFL.
He said LED does a better job of matching incandescent’s warm hues. They also last longer and consume less energy than incandescents or CFLs.
Mr. Feder explicitly said that LEDs are more expensive than CFLs: “The sticking point may be the cost — no one knows what the price will be but it will undoubtedly be higher than fluorescents for many years. Incandescents will still look like the best deal to many consumers.”
His headline was meant to be provacative. It did its job in attracting both my and Mr. Bolon’s attention.
— Glenn Harvey
11. September 10, 2007
1:28 am
Link
TomG, the light in your refrigerator goes off when the door is closed…
— janet
12. September 10, 2007
9:49 am
Link
Janet, don’t be so sure- GE makes both light refrigerators AND light bulbs…
— Ed B
13. September 10, 2007
10:00 am
Link
janet,
How do you know?
— Jim G
14. September 10, 2007
11:51 am
Link
For the people wondering about the current relative efficiency of LED to CFL to incandescent, see http://www.netl.doe.gov/ssl/PDFs/energyEfficiency_oct25_06.pdf which contains a table as well as other interesting information. A couple of excerpts:
“DOE’s long-term research and development goal calls for white-light LEDs producing 160 lm/W in cost-effective, market-ready systems by 2025.”
As of Oct. 2006:
Incandescent 10-18
Linear flourescent 50-100
CFL 35-60
Cool white LED 45-59
Warm white LED (what we most want) 22-37
One other resource that appeared reputable to me was: http://lighting.sandia.gov/XlightingoverviewFAQ.htm
— Mike L.ippert
15. September 10, 2007
1:26 pm
Link
To: R Higgin, Yacko and Mark the Troll
From Cree’s press release: “Efficacy of the cool-white LED was 72 lumens per watt”. They have, according to a previous press release, also already demonstrated “131 lumens per watt white LED efficacy”.
IMHO, the point of this article is to highlight that LEDs are getting better and will find their way into residential lighting applications. Please don’t make arguments based on stale data.
— Bagel T Banana
16. September 10, 2007
2:04 pm
Link
People, people. I just checked! I closed the refrigerator door, and the light is still on! GE is da bomb. (I am writing this on shelf two, next to the cottage cheese.)
— ken
17. September 11, 2007
11:05 am
Link
A little follow-on to Glenn’s comment that “His headline was meant to be provocative.” Actually, it wasn’t my headline but one of the blog editors (I’m not sure which one). Bloggers here get to suggest a headline but in my experience it usually isn’t used. In this case, I committed the cardinal sin of proposing a pun: “L.E.D. There Be Light.”
— Barnaby Feder
18. September 26, 2007
10:18 am
Link
Both Cree and Lumileds have recently introduced white LEDs providing 90-95 lumens per watt, which enable lighting fixture manufacturers to offer LED fixtures with higher efficiency than compact fluorescents. These LEDS are likely to be initially used in commercial-grade lighting fixtures, but it’s only a matter of time before they become available to the consumer market.
— Keith Bahde
19. October 2, 2007
3:14 pm
Link
How do you email Mr. Feder? Is he aware of all the innaccuracies in this article? I am as excited for LED as the next guy… but it will be quite some time before it replaces fluorescents in most applications, if ever in some applications. The NY Times should have higher standards for printing accurate information.
Now my organization will spend the next couple years lowering expectations of the people who have read this article!
— Gabe Arnold, PE, LC, CEM
20. October 21, 2007
10:01 pm
Link
The post by Mr. Arnold, PE, LC, CEM is totally misinformed and not Mr. Feder. When Mr. Arnold uses our lights in his home, he will no doubt; “SEE THE LIGHT.” :-) Amen!
— Dr. David Deak
21. November 13, 2007
10:18 am
Link
White LED’s have indeed finally overtaken cfl’s in efficiency (see http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v1/n1/full/nphoton.2006.44.html, and all the other sources mentioned by others).
Given their zero mercury content and long life (durability–less waste–being a key ‘green’ procurement standard), they should be the preferred option for every use they are adapted to suit from today on.
the only question is getting them suited to the various needs out there. As a consultant to a green event and show producer, I was encouraged when I learned that LED spot and flood lights are now available, and from more than one source
it is worth pressing your vendor/distributor for LED solutions to your lighting needs-this is what will push the industry into higher gear, getting us even more lumens per watt with each new product.
— brendan
22. April 27, 2008
7:47 pm
Link
Update! The light in the fridge does appear to stay on, based on my miniaturizing myself and crawling into the fridge. (BTW, something is rotten in here). However, it turns out that when you miniaturize the human body (and therefore the retina) your eyes become much more sensitive to infrared radiation. The element of the light bulb being much warmer than the fridge even after turning off, appeared bright to my miniature retinas.
Sorry, the light really does turn off after all.
— JB
23. June 9, 2008
3:11 pm
Link
Well, hurry up LEDs because as you may or may not know, in December of 2007 Congress passed legislation that will phase out the incandescent by the end of 2014. See -http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59298
Bushwaq’d again.
— Stephen
Fluorescents Are So Over
By Barnaby J. Feder
It’s been a notable couple of weeks for solid state lighting.
At the end of last month, Royal Philips Electronics completed a $791 million acquisition of Color Kinetics, the leader in computer-controlled advertising and entertainment displays fashioned out of arrays of light-emitting diodes. Coming just two years after Philips took full control of Lumileds, the Hewlett Packard spin-off that pioneered many of today’s L.E.D. applications, the Color Kinetics deal solidified the Dutch company’s leadership position in high-powered L.E.D. applications. It will be intriguing to see what Philips does with it.
Cree XLamp 7090 XR Series LEDBut a very different type of announcement today might be, forgive us, more illuminating. One of Philips’ major component suppliers, Cree, issued a press release from its headquarters in Durham, N.C., claiming it had designed a light-emitting chip that could power an L.E.D. bulb producing light comparable to the 75-watt incandescent bulbs so common in American homes. If past product development trends are any guide, Philips or some other Cree customer could have a finished product for sale within two years, according to John Edmond, Cree’s director of advanced optoelectronics.
“There’s not anything so far out about this that it won’t go into production,” Mr. Edmond said.
The home will be the last major frontier in solid state lighting’s conquest of incandescent light, the energy hog it has already largely replaced in traffic signals and many other public lighting applications. Solid state lights can do a better job than the current energy-saving alternative, fluorescents, at matching the warm hues consumers are used to from incandescents.
They also last far longer, consume less energy and not require the use of mercury, a toxic component of fluorescents that raises disposal issues.
The sticking point may be the cost — no one knows what the price will be but it will undoubtedly be higher than fluorescents for many years. Incandescents will still look like the best deal to many consumers.
There’s no Moore’s law operating here to rapidly change the cost-to-performance equation — getting a chip to make photons instead of heat out of electrical current and then shepherding most of the photons out of the chip is a far tougher job than the Intels of the world face. But Mr. Edmond forecasts that solid state lighting will eventually get to the finish line of consumer acceptance.
“This is what’s going to replace the light bulb in the home,” he said.
Hardware, Color Kinetics, Cree, L.E.D., light bulb, Philips Related Posts
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Dean Kamen’s ‘LED Nation’
Edison, Make Way for the L.E.D.’s
LED Lighting Gaining Acceptance (Sort Of)
Lighting Up the Darkness in Rural Africa
Do Energy-Saving LED Lamps Save Energy?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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23 Comments
1. September 7, 2007
11:53 pm
Link
Are these chips actually more efficient than fluorescent? Last time I looked into the matter, white LEDs were about 10%, while fluorescents were 20% efficient. And fluorescents can be made in warm colors too. So the competitiion is on.
— Mark Troll
2. September 8, 2007
8:38 am
Link
This is wonderful. I’ve been working with led’s in the aerospace industry for around 10 yrs or so. Once they make it into homes, they’ll make cf’s look like energy hogs.
— nm
3. September 8, 2007
1:27 pm
Link
the latest research that I read claims that average LED output is only 20 lumens/watt compared to CFLs at 60 lumens/watt. Is that likely to change in consumer products in the near future?
— R Higgin
4. September 8, 2007
4:15 pm
Link
>>Solid state lights can do a better job than the current energy-saving alternative, fluorescents
Is this really a given conclusion in all circumstances? In my experience, the larger the LED in lumens the more uncomfortably close they come to the same energy use as good quality compact fuorescents. The biggest LEDs still waste energy as heat and need heatsinks. Can they work 24/7 without diminshed life? Mercury is mentioned as hazardous waste, but the amount in a compact fluorescent need be no more than pinpoint drop size, just enought to evaporate in the sealed tube to fill it with mercury vapor, which is part of the mechanism how fluorescents work. And yes, there is cost. Something tells me that all three forms of lighting will fill a niche for some time to come, industry promises notwithstanding. Remember it took 50+ years before we had decent, regular, large, hang-on-the-wall, flat screen televisions from the time Popular Science first trumpeted the notion in the early 1950’s.
— Yacko
5. September 9, 2007
6:53 am
Link
Can I get one installed in my refrigerator, like, today? That bulb in there is throwing a lot of heat!
— TomG
6. September 9, 2007
10:36 am
Link
Kudos to Philips for coming with LED-solid lighting solution.
— JOTHI NARAYANAN
7. September 9, 2007
10:59 am
Link
It seems to me this is s question of maturity of enginering. For instance everybody agrees that the internal combustion engine is a terrible way to extract the energy out of gas and turn it into work. But the fantastic, eficent and reliable engines that we have today ate sitting on a mountain of almost 100 years of engenering refinement. The current LED bulb is the Model T of its time. They will get much better in every way, efficency, reliability, recycle-ability and price.
— Howard
8. September 9, 2007
1:05 pm
Link
Completely False: “There’s no Moore’s law operating here to rapidly change the cost-to-performance equation.”
Haitz Law shows that the brightness per watt increase by a factor of 10 per decade since 1968 and the cost per lumen drops by a factor of 20 per decade.
http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v1/n1/fig_tab/nphoton.2006.44_F1.html
— Joel
9. September 9, 2007
9:05 pm
Link
Fluorescents Are So Over, Barnaby J. Feder, September 10, 2007
Politely put, Mr. Feder’s article is rubbish.
Mr. Feder, never an expert at long division, forgot his calculator.
We adopted compact fluorescent lamps in 1974.
For the last five years, we got them at Home Deport for $0.002 per lumen or less.
As a specialty product, white LED lamps are about $0.200 per lumen.
Once they overcome a 100:1 cost disadvantage, we’ll be happy to use white LEDs.
In the meantime, you might want to review Mr. Feder’s employment contract.
— Craig Bolon
10. September 9, 2007
11:42 pm
Link
Politely put, Craig Bolon didn’t read Mr. Feder’s article very carefully.
Mr. Feder didn’t say there was currently a cost benefit to LED over CFL.
He said LED does a better job of matching incandescent’s warm hues. They also last longer and consume less energy than incandescents or CFLs.
Mr. Feder explicitly said that LEDs are more expensive than CFLs: “The sticking point may be the cost — no one knows what the price will be but it will undoubtedly be higher than fluorescents for many years. Incandescents will still look like the best deal to many consumers.”
His headline was meant to be provacative. It did its job in attracting both my and Mr. Bolon’s attention.
— Glenn Harvey
11. September 10, 2007
1:28 am
Link
TomG, the light in your refrigerator goes off when the door is closed…
— janet
12. September 10, 2007
9:49 am
Link
Janet, don’t be so sure- GE makes both light refrigerators AND light bulbs…
— Ed B
13. September 10, 2007
10:00 am
Link
janet,
How do you know?
— Jim G
14. September 10, 2007
11:51 am
Link
For the people wondering about the current relative efficiency of LED to CFL to incandescent, see http://www.netl.doe.gov/ssl/PDFs/energyEfficiency_oct25_06.pdf which contains a table as well as other interesting information. A couple of excerpts:
“DOE’s long-term research and development goal calls for white-light LEDs producing 160 lm/W in cost-effective, market-ready systems by 2025.”
As of Oct. 2006:
Incandescent 10-18
Linear flourescent 50-100
CFL 35-60
Cool white LED 45-59
Warm white LED (what we most want) 22-37
One other resource that appeared reputable to me was: http://lighting.sandia.gov/XlightingoverviewFAQ.htm
— Mike L.ippert
15. September 10, 2007
1:26 pm
Link
To: R Higgin, Yacko and Mark the Troll
From Cree’s press release: “Efficacy of the cool-white LED was 72 lumens per watt”. They have, according to a previous press release, also already demonstrated “131 lumens per watt white LED efficacy”.
IMHO, the point of this article is to highlight that LEDs are getting better and will find their way into residential lighting applications. Please don’t make arguments based on stale data.
— Bagel T Banana
16. September 10, 2007
2:04 pm
Link
People, people. I just checked! I closed the refrigerator door, and the light is still on! GE is da bomb. (I am writing this on shelf two, next to the cottage cheese.)
— ken
17. September 11, 2007
11:05 am
Link
A little follow-on to Glenn’s comment that “His headline was meant to be provocative.” Actually, it wasn’t my headline but one of the blog editors (I’m not sure which one). Bloggers here get to suggest a headline but in my experience it usually isn’t used. In this case, I committed the cardinal sin of proposing a pun: “L.E.D. There Be Light.”
— Barnaby Feder
18. September 26, 2007
10:18 am
Link
Both Cree and Lumileds have recently introduced white LEDs providing 90-95 lumens per watt, which enable lighting fixture manufacturers to offer LED fixtures with higher efficiency than compact fluorescents. These LEDS are likely to be initially used in commercial-grade lighting fixtures, but it’s only a matter of time before they become available to the consumer market.
— Keith Bahde
19. October 2, 2007
3:14 pm
Link
How do you email Mr. Feder? Is he aware of all the innaccuracies in this article? I am as excited for LED as the next guy… but it will be quite some time before it replaces fluorescents in most applications, if ever in some applications. The NY Times should have higher standards for printing accurate information.
Now my organization will spend the next couple years lowering expectations of the people who have read this article!
— Gabe Arnold, PE, LC, CEM
20. October 21, 2007
10:01 pm
Link
The post by Mr. Arnold, PE, LC, CEM is totally misinformed and not Mr. Feder. When Mr. Arnold uses our lights in his home, he will no doubt; “SEE THE LIGHT.” :-) Amen!
— Dr. David Deak
21. November 13, 2007
10:18 am
Link
White LED’s have indeed finally overtaken cfl’s in efficiency (see http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v1/n1/full/nphoton.2006.44.html, and all the other sources mentioned by others).
Given their zero mercury content and long life (durability–less waste–being a key ‘green’ procurement standard), they should be the preferred option for every use they are adapted to suit from today on.
the only question is getting them suited to the various needs out there. As a consultant to a green event and show producer, I was encouraged when I learned that LED spot and flood lights are now available, and from more than one source
it is worth pressing your vendor/distributor for LED solutions to your lighting needs-this is what will push the industry into higher gear, getting us even more lumens per watt with each new product.
— brendan
22. April 27, 2008
7:47 pm
Link
Update! The light in the fridge does appear to stay on, based on my miniaturizing myself and crawling into the fridge. (BTW, something is rotten in here). However, it turns out that when you miniaturize the human body (and therefore the retina) your eyes become much more sensitive to infrared radiation. The element of the light bulb being much warmer than the fridge even after turning off, appeared bright to my miniature retinas.
Sorry, the light really does turn off after all.
— JB
23. June 9, 2008
3:11 pm
Link
Well, hurry up LEDs because as you may or may not know, in December of 2007 Congress passed legislation that will phase out the incandescent by the end of 2014. See -http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59298
Bushwaq’d again.
— Stephen
LED Lighting Gaining Acceptance (Sort Of)
April 30, 2009, 8:30 am
LED Lighting Gaining Acceptance (Sort Of)
By Eric A. Taub
The recent replacement of the incandescent lamps in Grand Central Terminal in New York with compact fluorescent bulbs notwithstanding, the lighting industry continues to believe that LEDs, not C.F.L.s, will eventually be the technology of choice for many lighting applications.
As I note in an article about the commercial use of LED lighting in today’s Business of Green special section, lighting designers who just one year ago were wary of recommending LED products now are much more confident in doing so.
That’s partly due to the move, spearheaded by the Department of Energy, to set Energy Star guidelines for the next generation of lighting to convince consumers and businesses that LED products will perform as claimed.
But it’s also due to the improvement of the lighting itself. LED lamps are becoming more efficient, producing warmer, more inviting colors at higher brightness levels.
On Tuesday, I was shown a new reflector lamp from Nexxus Lighting, similar to the type installed in many kitchen and office ceilings, that produced a warm, pleasing light. It weighs about one-third of a competing lamp and uses 8 watts to produce the light of a 50-watt bulb.
But how many homes and businesses are satisfied with 50-watt lamps? When the industry starts producing 75- and 100-watt equivalents, LEDs will begin to gain traction. (Cree, a lighting company, has announced a reflector lamp that it says produces a similar look to a halogen lamp, uses 12 watts, and can replace up to a 90-watt incandescent lamp.)
Are LED lamps ready for the consumer? Hardly. Most of the strange-looking LED products sold in home improvement stores remain below par. Many manufacturers make unsubstantiated claims about lamp life and brightness.
But for the well-heeled set, there are plenty of highly regarded products that use a fraction of the power of an incandescent bulb. But they come at a high initial price. I recently visited a home in the tony Brentwood section of Los Angeles that was entirely lit with LED “downlights” made by Cree, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the light from those fixtures and standard bulbs. And Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter, has lighted the home he owns on a small island only with Color Kinetics LED products.
The Department of Energy is conducting a seminar in a few weeks to discuss the state of LED lamps that can replace standard incandescents. And more commercial buildings, including a wing of the Pentagon and even a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant, have switched over to the new technology.
But despite these successes, many engineers remain resistant to using LEDs. A major real estate developer in Los Angeles recently showed me correspondence from his engineering team questioning why anyone in his right mind would use LED lamps in a commercial project, citing high cost as a reason to eschew their use. For now, the lighting industry and the building industry often seem to be speaking different languages.
Company News, Green Technology, Innovations and Ideas, Technology and Society, Color Kinetics, Cree, LEDs, lighting Related Posts
From Bits
Dean Kamen’s ‘LED Nation’
Fluorescents Are So Over
Do TV Buyers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Do Energy-Saving LED Lamps Save Energy?
LED’s Good Housekeeping Seal
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Next post
The $100 Million Mobile App Question
11 Comments
1. April 30, 2009
10:14 am
Link
It is just a matter of time. Taiwanese companies are spending significant sums to manufacture better and less expensive LED lighting. (By the way, I cannot believe that your copy editor let you write LED instead of L.E.D.)
All lighting should be evaluated on a TCO basis. And, for lighting, the equation is:
TCO = Initial cost + electricity costs over the lifetime of the “bulb” + labor to replace the bulb
That is why the first mass application for LED lighting was for traffic lights. The labor cost for replacement is HUGE (specialized truck, crew, length of time on site).
The problem for home use is twofold:
1. Labor cost is usually measured as $zero. The homeowner values his time at $zero and the lights are physically easy to replace.
2. Homeowners are very poor at calculating energy costs over a decade and therefore tend to cost them at near zero.
Once LEDs are 3x and not 7x the cost of halogens, we will see a much larger uptake by homeowners.
— Dave Barnes
2. April 30, 2009
1:27 pm
Link
the developers will always use the technology with low initial cost and higher lifecycle cost. This is simple economics.
But our society does not allow developers to build physically unsafe buildings and we should not allow them to build environmentally unsafe buildings either.
Mandate LEDs and the costs will fall as volume ramps up
CFLs are a health hazard - mercury, a safety hazard due to low initial lumens and should be banned from residential use
— dave
3. April 30, 2009
1:31 pm
Link
l. e. d.’s were installed in Portland Oregon traffic lights in furtherance of Portland’s maniacal plunge into assumed energy savings at any cost
During the first substantial snow fall, MOST OF THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS WENT OUT!
Our finest minds ultimately determined that the l. e. d.’s gave out insufficient heat to melt the snow and ice from the lenses.
But we will be alright until next winter..
— donovan Jacobs
4. April 30, 2009
2:32 pm
Link
I think people need to start buying them now. The initial price is well worth it for many reasons, including, the fact that no mercury is inside them (unlike compact fluorescents). The low wattage and long life is another reason (less power consumed, less in landfills). Also, the fact you are contributing (in a small way admittedly) to the price coming down for everyone by increasing demand. The same logic goes for buying organic cotton products.
— Ken
5. April 30, 2009
3:01 pm
Link
Luddites Against LED Lights!
— Bill Mahiger
6. April 30, 2009
3:36 pm
Link
By “warmer” light, do you mean that ugly yellow tinge that comes from incandescent bulbs? The color that made be go out and by compact fluorescents in the first place so that I could have white light? I don’t know why you would want that hideous effect.
— Adam
7. April 30, 2009
3:39 pm
Link
As an aside, L.E.D. lights are making huge headway in professional film and video applications. They are increasingly brighter, cheaper, and heat free.
I just returned from the NAB conference and was struck by the changes over last year.
Two vendors stand out:
Litepanels
http://www.s131567196.onlinehome.us/
and
Zylights
http://www.zylight.com/servlet/StoreFront
I would suspect the same technology to make inroads in
commercial locations.
— Elliot porter
8. April 30, 2009
5:36 pm
Link
Please , please , stop bleating about mercury in Compact Fluorescent bulbs. It is a minute amount.
For God”s sake find something worth worrying about.
Swine flu is a candidate.
— Bruce
9. April 30, 2009
5:37 pm
Link
donovan jacobs, then all Portland has to do is put hoods back on the lights (they shouldn’t have been taken off to begin with) as the older-style traffic lights had. And I’m in no way a ‘green hardliner.’
— Larry
10. April 30, 2009
6:36 pm
Link
Mandate LEDs? Whilst I sympathise with the intent, it is almost always a bad idea to manadate a particular solution. Instead, require a certain*performance*and allow any solution that meets that goal.
In this case, require a suitable lumens/watt and perhaps include some time-to-full-light and light spectrum benchmarks. If some clever company can produce the same light as a 100W incandescant with 0.1W by using rotating polarisation casimir phased doohickey quantulates why would we want to have a law demanding only LEDs?
— tim Rowledge
11. April 30, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
LED bulbs are better than CFL spiral fluorescents because:
1) they last 10 times as long before “burning out” (dimming to half brightness)
2) they don’t release mercury and don’t break
3) they take a little bit less energy than CFL and a lot less than regular incandescent.
On the other hand, LED bulbs cost as much as 50x the price of a CFL - literally $50 vs. $1. At that price the only justification is a savings in costly or dangerous labor such as having a union employee climb a tall ladder to replace the bulb.
For normal home lighting, switching from incandescent to fluorescent pays for itself in a month and can save literally hundreds of dollars a year. Switching to LEDs instead essentially takes all that savings and gives it to the LED bulb makers. LED bulbs do pay for themselves over a long enough time frame, but if your goal is saving money the right choice today is CFL.
LED Lighting Gaining Acceptance (Sort Of)
By Eric A. Taub
The recent replacement of the incandescent lamps in Grand Central Terminal in New York with compact fluorescent bulbs notwithstanding, the lighting industry continues to believe that LEDs, not C.F.L.s, will eventually be the technology of choice for many lighting applications.
As I note in an article about the commercial use of LED lighting in today’s Business of Green special section, lighting designers who just one year ago were wary of recommending LED products now are much more confident in doing so.
That’s partly due to the move, spearheaded by the Department of Energy, to set Energy Star guidelines for the next generation of lighting to convince consumers and businesses that LED products will perform as claimed.
But it’s also due to the improvement of the lighting itself. LED lamps are becoming more efficient, producing warmer, more inviting colors at higher brightness levels.
On Tuesday, I was shown a new reflector lamp from Nexxus Lighting, similar to the type installed in many kitchen and office ceilings, that produced a warm, pleasing light. It weighs about one-third of a competing lamp and uses 8 watts to produce the light of a 50-watt bulb.
But how many homes and businesses are satisfied with 50-watt lamps? When the industry starts producing 75- and 100-watt equivalents, LEDs will begin to gain traction. (Cree, a lighting company, has announced a reflector lamp that it says produces a similar look to a halogen lamp, uses 12 watts, and can replace up to a 90-watt incandescent lamp.)
Are LED lamps ready for the consumer? Hardly. Most of the strange-looking LED products sold in home improvement stores remain below par. Many manufacturers make unsubstantiated claims about lamp life and brightness.
But for the well-heeled set, there are plenty of highly regarded products that use a fraction of the power of an incandescent bulb. But they come at a high initial price. I recently visited a home in the tony Brentwood section of Los Angeles that was entirely lit with LED “downlights” made by Cree, and I couldn’t tell the difference between the light from those fixtures and standard bulbs. And Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway scooter, has lighted the home he owns on a small island only with Color Kinetics LED products.
The Department of Energy is conducting a seminar in a few weeks to discuss the state of LED lamps that can replace standard incandescents. And more commercial buildings, including a wing of the Pentagon and even a KFC/Taco Bell restaurant, have switched over to the new technology.
But despite these successes, many engineers remain resistant to using LEDs. A major real estate developer in Los Angeles recently showed me correspondence from his engineering team questioning why anyone in his right mind would use LED lamps in a commercial project, citing high cost as a reason to eschew their use. For now, the lighting industry and the building industry often seem to be speaking different languages.
Company News, Green Technology, Innovations and Ideas, Technology and Society, Color Kinetics, Cree, LEDs, lighting Related Posts
From Bits
Dean Kamen’s ‘LED Nation’
Fluorescents Are So Over
Do TV Buyers Dream of Electric Sheep?
Do Energy-Saving LED Lamps Save Energy?
LED’s Good Housekeeping Seal
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Previous post
I.B.M. Pledges $2 Billion For Economic Recovery Gap
Next post
The $100 Million Mobile App Question
11 Comments
1. April 30, 2009
10:14 am
Link
It is just a matter of time. Taiwanese companies are spending significant sums to manufacture better and less expensive LED lighting. (By the way, I cannot believe that your copy editor let you write LED instead of L.E.D.)
All lighting should be evaluated on a TCO basis. And, for lighting, the equation is:
TCO = Initial cost + electricity costs over the lifetime of the “bulb” + labor to replace the bulb
That is why the first mass application for LED lighting was for traffic lights. The labor cost for replacement is HUGE (specialized truck, crew, length of time on site).
The problem for home use is twofold:
1. Labor cost is usually measured as $zero. The homeowner values his time at $zero and the lights are physically easy to replace.
2. Homeowners are very poor at calculating energy costs over a decade and therefore tend to cost them at near zero.
Once LEDs are 3x and not 7x the cost of halogens, we will see a much larger uptake by homeowners.
— Dave Barnes
2. April 30, 2009
1:27 pm
Link
the developers will always use the technology with low initial cost and higher lifecycle cost. This is simple economics.
But our society does not allow developers to build physically unsafe buildings and we should not allow them to build environmentally unsafe buildings either.
Mandate LEDs and the costs will fall as volume ramps up
CFLs are a health hazard - mercury, a safety hazard due to low initial lumens and should be banned from residential use
— dave
3. April 30, 2009
1:31 pm
Link
l. e. d.’s were installed in Portland Oregon traffic lights in furtherance of Portland’s maniacal plunge into assumed energy savings at any cost
During the first substantial snow fall, MOST OF THE TRAFFIC LIGHTS WENT OUT!
Our finest minds ultimately determined that the l. e. d.’s gave out insufficient heat to melt the snow and ice from the lenses.
But we will be alright until next winter..
— donovan Jacobs
4. April 30, 2009
2:32 pm
Link
I think people need to start buying them now. The initial price is well worth it for many reasons, including, the fact that no mercury is inside them (unlike compact fluorescents). The low wattage and long life is another reason (less power consumed, less in landfills). Also, the fact you are contributing (in a small way admittedly) to the price coming down for everyone by increasing demand. The same logic goes for buying organic cotton products.
— Ken
5. April 30, 2009
3:01 pm
Link
Luddites Against LED Lights!
— Bill Mahiger
6. April 30, 2009
3:36 pm
Link
By “warmer” light, do you mean that ugly yellow tinge that comes from incandescent bulbs? The color that made be go out and by compact fluorescents in the first place so that I could have white light? I don’t know why you would want that hideous effect.
— Adam
7. April 30, 2009
3:39 pm
Link
As an aside, L.E.D. lights are making huge headway in professional film and video applications. They are increasingly brighter, cheaper, and heat free.
I just returned from the NAB conference and was struck by the changes over last year.
Two vendors stand out:
Litepanels
http://www.s131567196.onlinehome.us/
and
Zylights
http://www.zylight.com/servlet/StoreFront
I would suspect the same technology to make inroads in
commercial locations.
— Elliot porter
8. April 30, 2009
5:36 pm
Link
Please , please , stop bleating about mercury in Compact Fluorescent bulbs. It is a minute amount.
For God”s sake find something worth worrying about.
Swine flu is a candidate.
— Bruce
9. April 30, 2009
5:37 pm
Link
donovan jacobs, then all Portland has to do is put hoods back on the lights (they shouldn’t have been taken off to begin with) as the older-style traffic lights had. And I’m in no way a ‘green hardliner.’
— Larry
10. April 30, 2009
6:36 pm
Link
Mandate LEDs? Whilst I sympathise with the intent, it is almost always a bad idea to manadate a particular solution. Instead, require a certain*performance*and allow any solution that meets that goal.
In this case, require a suitable lumens/watt and perhaps include some time-to-full-light and light spectrum benchmarks. If some clever company can produce the same light as a 100W incandescant with 0.1W by using rotating polarisation casimir phased doohickey quantulates why would we want to have a law demanding only LEDs?
— tim Rowledge
11. April 30, 2009
6:46 pm
Link
LED bulbs are better than CFL spiral fluorescents because:
1) they last 10 times as long before “burning out” (dimming to half brightness)
2) they don’t release mercury and don’t break
3) they take a little bit less energy than CFL and a lot less than regular incandescent.
On the other hand, LED bulbs cost as much as 50x the price of a CFL - literally $50 vs. $1. At that price the only justification is a savings in costly or dangerous labor such as having a union employee climb a tall ladder to replace the bulb.
For normal home lighting, switching from incandescent to fluorescent pays for itself in a month and can save literally hundreds of dollars a year. Switching to LEDs instead essentially takes all that savings and gives it to the LED bulb makers. LED bulbs do pay for themselves over a long enough time frame, but if your goal is saving money the right choice today is CFL.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Florida facts
Background on the Off Shore Oil Drilling Bill:
What the bill does
- Authorizes oil drilling as close as one mile off shore without evaulation of environmental risks. Leases would be possible right up to the mean high water line.
- Grants easements for pipelines, storage facilities and other infrastructure which will industrialize our coasts.
- Creates an expedited timeline on which the Cabinet must make a determination on the best of the drilling proposals
- Slants the decision against the public interest by requiring the Cabinet to make a case against any proposal (rather than the applicant making the case for it) and limiting the objections the Cabinet can raise.
- Exempts the process from the state's competitive bidding rules.
- Creates a compensation structure of low royalty fees, one-time application fees and in-kind payment options that favors the oil companies and sells our public trust resources cheaply.
Government in the Sunshine.
- A decision to end the decades-long ban on nearshore drilling deserves ample legislative and public discussion.
-Introducing this language through a late-filed amendment nine days before the end of Session is not the kind of Government in the Sunshine Floridians expect or deserve.
Potential for economic disaster
- Tourism is responsible for 20% of Florida's economy.
- More than $800 million worth of commercial fish are caught annually in Florida waters and more than $7.6 billion is spent annually on recreational fishing expenditures.
- Florida's coastal economy generated almost $562B in 2006.
- This coastal economy is dependent upon abundant, healthy natural resources and the pristine beaches tourists expect.
Potential for environmental disaster
- As a result of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the US Coast Guard documented more than 9 million gallons (214,286 barrels) of oil were released (and this does not include the 5,000 so-called minor spills recorded). For comparison, the Exxon-Valdez spill was 240,000 barrels.
- Spills don't just occur during storms. In 2008, the US Coast Guard documented 1300 spills from rigs and 1300 spills from pipelines alone. They documented an additional 2400 spills from storage tanks.
Effects on Global Warming
- We have alternatives to foreign oil: efficiency, mass transit and renewable fuels. A renewable portfolio and vehicle emissions standards would help us wean ourselves off of foreign oil... but they will be undercut by further committing ourselves to petroleum-based energy production.
What the bill does
- Authorizes oil drilling as close as one mile off shore without evaulation of environmental risks. Leases would be possible right up to the mean high water line.
- Grants easements for pipelines, storage facilities and other infrastructure which will industrialize our coasts.
- Creates an expedited timeline on which the Cabinet must make a determination on the best of the drilling proposals
- Slants the decision against the public interest by requiring the Cabinet to make a case against any proposal (rather than the applicant making the case for it) and limiting the objections the Cabinet can raise.
- Exempts the process from the state's competitive bidding rules.
- Creates a compensation structure of low royalty fees, one-time application fees and in-kind payment options that favors the oil companies and sells our public trust resources cheaply.
Government in the Sunshine.
- A decision to end the decades-long ban on nearshore drilling deserves ample legislative and public discussion.
-Introducing this language through a late-filed amendment nine days before the end of Session is not the kind of Government in the Sunshine Floridians expect or deserve.
Potential for economic disaster
- Tourism is responsible for 20% of Florida's economy.
- More than $800 million worth of commercial fish are caught annually in Florida waters and more than $7.6 billion is spent annually on recreational fishing expenditures.
- Florida's coastal economy generated almost $562B in 2006.
- This coastal economy is dependent upon abundant, healthy natural resources and the pristine beaches tourists expect.
Potential for environmental disaster
- As a result of Hurricanes Rita and Katrina, the US Coast Guard documented more than 9 million gallons (214,286 barrels) of oil were released (and this does not include the 5,000 so-called minor spills recorded). For comparison, the Exxon-Valdez spill was 240,000 barrels.
- Spills don't just occur during storms. In 2008, the US Coast Guard documented 1300 spills from rigs and 1300 spills from pipelines alone. They documented an additional 2400 spills from storage tanks.
Effects on Global Warming
- We have alternatives to foreign oil: efficiency, mass transit and renewable fuels. A renewable portfolio and vehicle emissions standards would help us wean ourselves off of foreign oil... but they will be undercut by further committing ourselves to petroleum-based energy production.
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Dow Chemical's green-meets-green vision
May 20, 2008 12:51 PM PDT
Dow Chemical's green-meets-green vision
by Stefanie Olsen 2 comments
SAN MATEO, Calif.--How does Dow Chemical, the world's second-largest chemical producer, turn itself into a sustainable business?
"It's where green meets green," Neil Hawkins, vice president of sustainability at the company, said here Tuesday at the opening of the two-day Dow Jones Environmental Ventures conference.
Hawkins, who was interviewed in a morning keynote address, was referring to the 110-year-old company's efforts to make money by being more energy-efficient, investing in new clean-tech technologies, and working with manufacturers on new green chemistry.
For example, from 1994 to 2005, Dow spent roughly $1 billion on refining its energy efficiency practices. That investment has paid off fivefold for Dow, Hawkins said. Since 1990, Dow has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent, surpassing guidelines set by the Kyoto Protocol. And going forward, Dow has set sustainability goals by 2015 for chemistry, climate change, and product safety.
The idea can seem discombobulating, considering that Dow is known for producing the chemical weapon napalm during the Vietnam War, as well as toxic pesticides that have caused sterility in men. Hawkins acknowledged that the company isn't green yet, but he said there are pockets of green throughout the 47,000-employee conglomerate.
"The Dow of today is focused on delivering solutions to the world's problems...in clean drinking (water), alternative energy, alternative feedstock, and public health," said Hawkins, who has been with Dow for 20 years.
The company, for example, has a unit called Dow Building Solutions, in which it is examining new technologies that can help business owners reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The company produces a Styrofoam insulation that has received an Energy Star recommendation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example.
He said the most exciting area Dow is looking at in building tech is photovoltaic technology for roofing and siding. The company is working on bringing costs down for the technology to those of comparable levels of the grid. "In the short term, the single most important thing we can do is improve CO2 (emissions) in buildings...where people are doing a lot more insulating."
Dow also has its own venture fund, with $500 million invested in public health, clean technology, and water products, according to Hawkins. He said the company is looking for the right partnerships.
For example, the company has invested in WaterHealth International, a San Francisco Bay Area for-profit that has developed a water system that has provided drinking water to 10 million people in India, according to Hawkins. He said that in addition to an investment, Dow has provided loan guarantees of $30 million to help the company's growth.
It has also teamed with the nongovernmental organization International Aid, which has developed a plastic filter for drinking water. With that technology, nearly 2 million people in the Sudan and Cambodia will get access to potable water, he said.
Dow is also involved in U.S. Climate Action Partnerships (USCAP), a collaboration of environmental groups and companies aimed at shifting U.S. policy on climate change.
"The existence of USCAP has really moved this administration and Congress to have us participate in a more friendly policy," he said.
The company is also trying to help customers with sustainability efforts. For example, he said, Dow is thinking of new battery technology for Toyota's future initiatives.
"This trend of sustainability is very real. It will impact our profit for the next 20 years," he said. "I'm hoping to lead a culture change."
Dow Chemical's green-meets-green vision
by Stefanie Olsen 2 comments
SAN MATEO, Calif.--How does Dow Chemical, the world's second-largest chemical producer, turn itself into a sustainable business?
"It's where green meets green," Neil Hawkins, vice president of sustainability at the company, said here Tuesday at the opening of the two-day Dow Jones Environmental Ventures conference.
Hawkins, who was interviewed in a morning keynote address, was referring to the 110-year-old company's efforts to make money by being more energy-efficient, investing in new clean-tech technologies, and working with manufacturers on new green chemistry.
For example, from 1994 to 2005, Dow spent roughly $1 billion on refining its energy efficiency practices. That investment has paid off fivefold for Dow, Hawkins said. Since 1990, Dow has reduced its carbon dioxide emissions by 20 percent, surpassing guidelines set by the Kyoto Protocol. And going forward, Dow has set sustainability goals by 2015 for chemistry, climate change, and product safety.
The idea can seem discombobulating, considering that Dow is known for producing the chemical weapon napalm during the Vietnam War, as well as toxic pesticides that have caused sterility in men. Hawkins acknowledged that the company isn't green yet, but he said there are pockets of green throughout the 47,000-employee conglomerate.
"The Dow of today is focused on delivering solutions to the world's problems...in clean drinking (water), alternative energy, alternative feedstock, and public health," said Hawkins, who has been with Dow for 20 years.
The company, for example, has a unit called Dow Building Solutions, in which it is examining new technologies that can help business owners reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. The company produces a Styrofoam insulation that has received an Energy Star recommendation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, for example.
He said the most exciting area Dow is looking at in building tech is photovoltaic technology for roofing and siding. The company is working on bringing costs down for the technology to those of comparable levels of the grid. "In the short term, the single most important thing we can do is improve CO2 (emissions) in buildings...where people are doing a lot more insulating."
Dow also has its own venture fund, with $500 million invested in public health, clean technology, and water products, according to Hawkins. He said the company is looking for the right partnerships.
For example, the company has invested in WaterHealth International, a San Francisco Bay Area for-profit that has developed a water system that has provided drinking water to 10 million people in India, according to Hawkins. He said that in addition to an investment, Dow has provided loan guarantees of $30 million to help the company's growth.
It has also teamed with the nongovernmental organization International Aid, which has developed a plastic filter for drinking water. With that technology, nearly 2 million people in the Sudan and Cambodia will get access to potable water, he said.
Dow is also involved in U.S. Climate Action Partnerships (USCAP), a collaboration of environmental groups and companies aimed at shifting U.S. policy on climate change.
"The existence of USCAP has really moved this administration and Congress to have us participate in a more friendly policy," he said.
The company is also trying to help customers with sustainability efforts. For example, he said, Dow is thinking of new battery technology for Toyota's future initiatives.
"This trend of sustainability is very real. It will impact our profit for the next 20 years," he said. "I'm hoping to lead a culture change."
GE to lower own water use, raise Ecomagination target
May 28, 2008 7:44 AM PDT
GE to lower water use, raise Ecomagination target
by Martin LaMonica Post a comment
General Electric is pledging to lower its water use 20 percent by 2012 and is boosting its revenue target for environmentally oriented products.
CEO Jeffrey Immelt said Wednesday at a customer presentation in Beijing that Ecomagination--GE's initiative to make goods that conserve energy and natural resources--brought in $14 billion in revenue last year, a 15 percent increase over the previous year.
(Credit: GE)
GE, a tech, media, and finanical services conglomerate with more than 300,000 employees, had originally targeted $20 billion in revenue from Ecomagination by 2010, but on Wednesday raised the forecast to $25 billion by that time.
It also said that investments in clean-tech research and development topped $1 billion last year. Its target is to hit $1.5 billion in annual clean-tech investments this year.
As expected, GE announced a program at the event to reduce its internal water usage. It will report annually its water reductions progress, similar to how it now does with its carbon emissions.
The company said it intends to use its own water treatment technologies to reduce its consumption and free up 7.4 million cubic meters of fresh water a year. That's 2 billion U.S. gallons, or the equivalent of 3,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, GE said.
In 2006, which will serve as its baseline to measure future reductions, GE used 37,850,000 cubic meters, or 10 billion U.S. gallons, of fresh water--enough for almost 400,000 people in the U.S. per year, it said.
GE will reuse waste water at its manufacturing and power-generation facilities and seek to apply those techniques for agriculture, municipal water-treatment plants, and industrial customers.
The company made the water consumption commitment to highlight revenue growth from Ecomagination and the importance of fresh water technologies.
"Ecomagination is one of the most successful cross-company business initiatives in our recent history," Immelt said in a statement. "It is a clear amplifier of our strong reputation for innovation and execution, harnessing the strength of every GE business to maximize returns for GE investors while minimizing our own energy use and greenhouse gas emissions."
GE to lower water use, raise Ecomagination target
by Martin LaMonica Post a comment
General Electric is pledging to lower its water use 20 percent by 2012 and is boosting its revenue target for environmentally oriented products.
CEO Jeffrey Immelt said Wednesday at a customer presentation in Beijing that Ecomagination--GE's initiative to make goods that conserve energy and natural resources--brought in $14 billion in revenue last year, a 15 percent increase over the previous year.
(Credit: GE)
GE, a tech, media, and finanical services conglomerate with more than 300,000 employees, had originally targeted $20 billion in revenue from Ecomagination by 2010, but on Wednesday raised the forecast to $25 billion by that time.
It also said that investments in clean-tech research and development topped $1 billion last year. Its target is to hit $1.5 billion in annual clean-tech investments this year.
As expected, GE announced a program at the event to reduce its internal water usage. It will report annually its water reductions progress, similar to how it now does with its carbon emissions.
The company said it intends to use its own water treatment technologies to reduce its consumption and free up 7.4 million cubic meters of fresh water a year. That's 2 billion U.S. gallons, or the equivalent of 3,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, GE said.
In 2006, which will serve as its baseline to measure future reductions, GE used 37,850,000 cubic meters, or 10 billion U.S. gallons, of fresh water--enough for almost 400,000 people in the U.S. per year, it said.
GE will reuse waste water at its manufacturing and power-generation facilities and seek to apply those techniques for agriculture, municipal water-treatment plants, and industrial customers.
The company made the water consumption commitment to highlight revenue growth from Ecomagination and the importance of fresh water technologies.
"Ecomagination is one of the most successful cross-company business initiatives in our recent history," Immelt said in a statement. "It is a clear amplifier of our strong reputation for innovation and execution, harnessing the strength of every GE business to maximize returns for GE investors while minimizing our own energy use and greenhouse gas emissions."
90 percent of produced water and turn it into clean water.
May 29, 2008 4:00 AM PDT
Squeezing water out of oil
by Stefanie Olsen
Excavating oil and gas has a little-known byproduct that costs the energy industry billions of dollars annually in removal--smelly sludge water.
A New Mexico start-up is trying to deal with the problem. Privately held Altela has developed a hydrothermal system that aims to turn the ancient groundwater extracted in oil or gas production into clean drinking water. The company calls its system "clean technology" because it can produce potable water with less energy than other desalinization methods, such as carbon filtration, without the use of pumps. Its technology can also be considered more energy efficient than hiring 18-wheel trucks to port the water away for burial in specialized wells, according to company CEO Ned Godshall.
"There's a great need for cleaning up this water rather than putting it back three miles underground, which is what's happening," Godshall said in an interview with CNET News.com.
A schematic of Altela's desalinization process. So-called produced water is the oil and gas industry's dirty big secret. In the United States, an average of 9 out of every 10 gallons of liquid extracted in oil or gas production is salty, mineralized water that's thought to be between 30 million and 60 million years old. (In the Middle East, the ratio is more like three to one.) In 1993, for example, the energy industry generated 1.09 trillion gallons of produced water--enough to flow over Niagara Falls for nine days, according to the scientific group Produced Water Society.
After production, the onus is on the energy companies to separate the water from oil, and treat the water before it can be reused, or otherwise truck it away for disposal "down hole." That's because it typically contains oil and metals that can be harmful to the environment. Offshore oil rigs, for example, must ensure that they dilute produced water to 29 parts per million, or something like the equivalent of an eyedropper of oil (produced water) in a five-gallon bucket, before it can put it back into the Gulf of Mexico. Anything higher will cause a sheen on the ocean.
For that reason, the energy industry must invest in equipment like reverse osmosis systems to clean the water. Reverse osmosis separates silt or salt from freshwater by moving it through a semipermeable membrane with applied pressure, but it can be expensive because of the energy needed to produce large amounts of pressure. At land excavation sites, energy companies will also spend as much as $63 a barrel to truck away the water for removal, according to Altela's estimations.
"It's kind of a black magic industry," said Brad Tinder, president of Maverick Energy Services, an oil and gas consultant who's on the board of the Produced Water Society. "There are so many different technologies that aid in the removal of oil from water. And all have professed over the years to do it the best. But it is a million-dollar piece of equipment that does not produce the energy industry any money."
That's where Altela hopes to be of some use. The three-year-old company, which first unveiled its technology in March 2007, said it can take 90 percent of produced water and turn it into clean water.
The standard system, which is about the size of a residential water heater, includes boilers, holding tanks, water treatment towers, and a satellite-based communications system for remote monitoring. The device can treat about 4,000 gallons of produced water per day.
Unlike reverse osmosis or other filtration methods, Altela's system uses virtually no energy to drive pumps or pressurized systems to clean the water. Rather, Altela uses waste energy like methane released in the industrial process to power its own thermal distillation system, Godshall said.
"Every gas and oil well produces some amount of waste energy in the form of gas or energy that can't be sold," Godshall said. "We turn that into our driver."
"Our system goes out to a well site, and instead of it venting methane into the atmosphere, we use it to make steam, and that steam is what drives our process of desalinization."
Beyond that detail, Godshall wouldn't divulge how the patent-pending technology works. But he said key to Altela's system is that it's made with a low-cost plastic. It's light enough to be ported to excavation sites in shipping containers.
What's unclear is exactly how much the system costs, and how it differs from the cost of other technologies. Godshall said that he doesn't sell or lease his system. Rather, Altela charges the energy company per gallon to convert produced water into reusable water. Without disclosing the per-gallon conversion fee, he said it's as much as "120 times less money than trucking away the water." And it's less environmentally damaging.
"The liability of produced water is converted into an asset of clean water," Godshall said.
What happens to that water? Godshall said the company deals with the clean water in one of two ways for its four current customers, which include New Mexico-based Yates Petroleum. (It has seven systems installed in areas around New Mexico, Colorado, and Canada.) One is to give away the water to local ranchers to feed cattle or green their land.
The other is to reuse the water for so-called frac jobs, short for fracturing. Fracturing is a process in which energy companies use huge amounts of clean water to exert energy on a rock underground in order to release new gas and oil.
It's a fairly new and growing method of finding natural resources. Tinder said, for example, that his company has worked with Siemans Water Technology in Arkansas and in the Black Hills of Wyoming on recovery of produced water for frac jobs. He said the industry often takes freshwater from lakes, rivers, and streams for frac jobs, but because water is such a precious commodity, it's trying to reuse produced water several times over.
"We're using carbon filtration, but that takes a lot of power because you're running pumps and filters," said Tinder, who wasn't familiar with Altela's technology.
Still, the technology helps out in a high-need field. Tinder said Shell, for example, was sending 30 trucks in each day to an excavation site in Wyoming to haul out 3,000 gallons of produced water per truck, 300 miles away for disposal. With desalinization technology, it cut down the process to three trucks per day, Tinder said.
For its part, Altela is in talks with investors to raise $26 million in a series B round of funding to expand its manufacturing facility in Albuquerque. It has already raised about $10 million from venture capitalists, including EnerTech Ventures in Philadelphia.
After oil and gas, Altela hopes to tackle the treatment of industrial wastewater, such as the semiconductor industry or the food and beverage business.
"The industry has huge needs to get rid of and reuse dirty water," Godshall said
Squeezing water out of oil
by Stefanie Olsen
Excavating oil and gas has a little-known byproduct that costs the energy industry billions of dollars annually in removal--smelly sludge water.
A New Mexico start-up is trying to deal with the problem. Privately held Altela has developed a hydrothermal system that aims to turn the ancient groundwater extracted in oil or gas production into clean drinking water. The company calls its system "clean technology" because it can produce potable water with less energy than other desalinization methods, such as carbon filtration, without the use of pumps. Its technology can also be considered more energy efficient than hiring 18-wheel trucks to port the water away for burial in specialized wells, according to company CEO Ned Godshall.
"There's a great need for cleaning up this water rather than putting it back three miles underground, which is what's happening," Godshall said in an interview with CNET News.com.
A schematic of Altela's desalinization process. So-called produced water is the oil and gas industry's dirty big secret. In the United States, an average of 9 out of every 10 gallons of liquid extracted in oil or gas production is salty, mineralized water that's thought to be between 30 million and 60 million years old. (In the Middle East, the ratio is more like three to one.) In 1993, for example, the energy industry generated 1.09 trillion gallons of produced water--enough to flow over Niagara Falls for nine days, according to the scientific group Produced Water Society.
After production, the onus is on the energy companies to separate the water from oil, and treat the water before it can be reused, or otherwise truck it away for disposal "down hole." That's because it typically contains oil and metals that can be harmful to the environment. Offshore oil rigs, for example, must ensure that they dilute produced water to 29 parts per million, or something like the equivalent of an eyedropper of oil (produced water) in a five-gallon bucket, before it can put it back into the Gulf of Mexico. Anything higher will cause a sheen on the ocean.
For that reason, the energy industry must invest in equipment like reverse osmosis systems to clean the water. Reverse osmosis separates silt or salt from freshwater by moving it through a semipermeable membrane with applied pressure, but it can be expensive because of the energy needed to produce large amounts of pressure. At land excavation sites, energy companies will also spend as much as $63 a barrel to truck away the water for removal, according to Altela's estimations.
"It's kind of a black magic industry," said Brad Tinder, president of Maverick Energy Services, an oil and gas consultant who's on the board of the Produced Water Society. "There are so many different technologies that aid in the removal of oil from water. And all have professed over the years to do it the best. But it is a million-dollar piece of equipment that does not produce the energy industry any money."
That's where Altela hopes to be of some use. The three-year-old company, which first unveiled its technology in March 2007, said it can take 90 percent of produced water and turn it into clean water.
The standard system, which is about the size of a residential water heater, includes boilers, holding tanks, water treatment towers, and a satellite-based communications system for remote monitoring. The device can treat about 4,000 gallons of produced water per day.
Unlike reverse osmosis or other filtration methods, Altela's system uses virtually no energy to drive pumps or pressurized systems to clean the water. Rather, Altela uses waste energy like methane released in the industrial process to power its own thermal distillation system, Godshall said.
"Every gas and oil well produces some amount of waste energy in the form of gas or energy that can't be sold," Godshall said. "We turn that into our driver."
"Our system goes out to a well site, and instead of it venting methane into the atmosphere, we use it to make steam, and that steam is what drives our process of desalinization."
Beyond that detail, Godshall wouldn't divulge how the patent-pending technology works. But he said key to Altela's system is that it's made with a low-cost plastic. It's light enough to be ported to excavation sites in shipping containers.
What's unclear is exactly how much the system costs, and how it differs from the cost of other technologies. Godshall said that he doesn't sell or lease his system. Rather, Altela charges the energy company per gallon to convert produced water into reusable water. Without disclosing the per-gallon conversion fee, he said it's as much as "120 times less money than trucking away the water." And it's less environmentally damaging.
"The liability of produced water is converted into an asset of clean water," Godshall said.
What happens to that water? Godshall said the company deals with the clean water in one of two ways for its four current customers, which include New Mexico-based Yates Petroleum. (It has seven systems installed in areas around New Mexico, Colorado, and Canada.) One is to give away the water to local ranchers to feed cattle or green their land.
The other is to reuse the water for so-called frac jobs, short for fracturing. Fracturing is a process in which energy companies use huge amounts of clean water to exert energy on a rock underground in order to release new gas and oil.
It's a fairly new and growing method of finding natural resources. Tinder said, for example, that his company has worked with Siemans Water Technology in Arkansas and in the Black Hills of Wyoming on recovery of produced water for frac jobs. He said the industry often takes freshwater from lakes, rivers, and streams for frac jobs, but because water is such a precious commodity, it's trying to reuse produced water several times over.
"We're using carbon filtration, but that takes a lot of power because you're running pumps and filters," said Tinder, who wasn't familiar with Altela's technology.
Still, the technology helps out in a high-need field. Tinder said Shell, for example, was sending 30 trucks in each day to an excavation site in Wyoming to haul out 3,000 gallons of produced water per truck, 300 miles away for disposal. With desalinization technology, it cut down the process to three trucks per day, Tinder said.
For its part, Altela is in talks with investors to raise $26 million in a series B round of funding to expand its manufacturing facility in Albuquerque. It has already raised about $10 million from venture capitalists, including EnerTech Ventures in Philadelphia.
After oil and gas, Altela hopes to tackle the treatment of industrial wastewater, such as the semiconductor industry or the food and beverage business.
"The industry has huge needs to get rid of and reuse dirty water," Godshall said
Junk journey highlights 'plastic soup' of Pacific Ocean
June 4, 2008 5:13 PM PDT
Junk journey highlights 'plastic soup' of Pacific Ocean
by Elsa Wenzel 14 comments
The junk is made, literally, from junk: 15,000 plastic bottles, a Cessna cockpit, and a used sail.
(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn't waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.
The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.
To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.
The sailors plan to collect samples from plastic-polluted ocean water, but this mission's main aim is to attract attention.
(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)The 1.5-ton junk features a solar panel and wind turbine to power GPS and other devices. It's made of six pontoons each 30 feet long, filled with 2,000 soda and sports drink bottles, and triple-wrapped in used fishing nets. Twenty sailboat masts provide a frame, secured to a cabin cut from a Cessna 310 fuselage.
On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.
In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.
"They haven't finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic," said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita's education adviser. "What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting."
Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn't well understood because satellites can't spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.
"No one really knows what's out in the other gyres," Cummins said. "In the north Pacific alone there's Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members."
Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.
Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.
The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council.
"Recycling isn't the solution," Cummins said. "We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic."
Cummins said she backs the attention-getting adventure but feels nervous about the safety of Paschal and Eriksen, her fiance.
For more than a decade Algalita researchers have been collecting samples from the North Pacific Gyre, which traps untold amounts of plastic particles in its eddies.
(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)
"Yes, we are risking our lives, but the issue of petroleum-based plastic and our national dependence on petroleum, warrant urgent action," noted Eriksen on a blog that will chronicle the journey.
However, he added, the sailboat masts and aluminum airplane fuselage are easy for radar to detect. "We have a better chance of being seen by big ships than typical fiberglass sailboats do."
Two satellite telephones keep the sailors in touch with the rest of the world. They also have several GPS units, VHF radios, and a Coast Guard beacon. Three months' worth of food includes a bucket of Hershey's Kisses.
It's not the first junk journey for Eriksen, who holds a doctorate in science education. After serving as a Marine in the Gulf War, he traveled the Mississippi River in a handmade raft of plastic bottles, then wrote a book about the trip.
The current odyssey is costing between $40,000 to $50,000, with big support from donations, Cummins said. Most of the bottles were given by a Burbank, Calif., recycling center. Patagonia gave the crew 500 Nalgene bottles being phased out due to concerns about bisphenol-A leaching from them.
The crew, towed first to San Nicolas Island before setting sail, encountered gale force winds Tuesday night. They plan to arrive in Hawaii in about six weeks.
The junk, floating on bottles meant to support 6 tons of weight, left Long Beach on Sunday.
(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)
Junk journey highlights 'plastic soup' of Pacific Ocean
by Elsa Wenzel 14 comments
The junk is made, literally, from junk: 15,000 plastic bottles, a Cessna cockpit, and a used sail.
(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)Sailing 4,000 miles on the Pacific Ocean made Marcus Eriksen and Joel Paschal sick. It wasn't waves that turned their stomachs, but the amount of plastic garbage they encountered on a voyage with the Algalita Marine Research Foundation earlier this year.
The activists wanted more people to share their disgust about plastic litter that swirls, relatively unexplored, in continent-size patches of ocean.
To that end, they have built a motor-less craft from 15,000 recycled beverage bottles, fishing nets, and the cockpit of a Cessna, and are sailing it more than 2,000 miles from southern California to Hawaii. They left Long Beach, Calif., on Sunday.
The sailors plan to collect samples from plastic-polluted ocean water, but this mission's main aim is to attract attention.
(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)The 1.5-ton junk features a solar panel and wind turbine to power GPS and other devices. It's made of six pontoons each 30 feet long, filled with 2,000 soda and sports drink bottles, and triple-wrapped in used fishing nets. Twenty sailboat masts provide a frame, secured to a cabin cut from a Cessna 310 fuselage.
On the last Pacific voyage that ended in February, Eriksen and Paschal helped marine researcher Charles Moore assess the extent of pollution in the waters leading up to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling mass of plastic debris some estimate to be as large as the United States.
In early tests, a sample showed 48 parts of plastic to each part of plankton.
"They haven't finished processing the samples, but there was an exponential increase in the plastic," said Anna Cummins, who was also aboard and serves as Algalita's education adviser. "What looked on the surface like clean water, when you pulled it up, it looked like plastic soup. It was disgusting."
Algalita researchers said the floating, soupy landfill isn't well understood because satellites can't spot the translucent particles. And although efforts by scientists to explore plastic in five gyres around the world have been lacking, interest is expanding as the public learns more.
"No one really knows what's out in the other gyres," Cummins said. "In the north Pacific alone there's Capt. Moore with his research boat. We are a small organization with five or six paid staff members."
Eighty percent of the plastic comes not from ships but from land, where tossed consumer goods eventually travel from beaches and rivers into the ocean, according to Algalita.
Plastic concentrates poisons such as PCBs at levels a million times higher than found in the water, according to Japanese researchers.
The amount of plastic produced in the United States has nearly doubled in the past two decades, according to the American Chemistry Council.
"Recycling isn't the solution," Cummins said. "We think there absolutely needs to be a reduction in the overall use and consumption of plastic."
Cummins said she backs the attention-getting adventure but feels nervous about the safety of Paschal and Eriksen, her fiance.
For more than a decade Algalita researchers have been collecting samples from the North Pacific Gyre, which traps untold amounts of plastic particles in its eddies.
(Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation)
"Yes, we are risking our lives, but the issue of petroleum-based plastic and our national dependence on petroleum, warrant urgent action," noted Eriksen on a blog that will chronicle the journey.
However, he added, the sailboat masts and aluminum airplane fuselage are easy for radar to detect. "We have a better chance of being seen by big ships than typical fiberglass sailboats do."
Two satellite telephones keep the sailors in touch with the rest of the world. They also have several GPS units, VHF radios, and a Coast Guard beacon. Three months' worth of food includes a bucket of Hershey's Kisses.
It's not the first junk journey for Eriksen, who holds a doctorate in science education. After serving as a Marine in the Gulf War, he traveled the Mississippi River in a handmade raft of plastic bottles, then wrote a book about the trip.
The current odyssey is costing between $40,000 to $50,000, with big support from donations, Cummins said. Most of the bottles were given by a Burbank, Calif., recycling center. Patagonia gave the crew 500 Nalgene bottles being phased out due to concerns about bisphenol-A leaching from them.
The crew, towed first to San Nicolas Island before setting sail, encountered gale force winds Tuesday night. They plan to arrive in Hawaii in about six weeks.
The junk, floating on bottles meant to support 6 tons of weight, left Long Beach on Sunday.
(Credit: Peter Bennett/Ambient Images Inc.)
Cities take lead in climate change
June 12, 2008 4:00 AM PDT
Cities take lead in climate change
by Martin LaMonica
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--City governments' response to climate change ranges from cutting-edge distributed energy to adding more bike lanes and trees.
Climate change experts from four cities--London, Toronto, Chicago, and New York--spoke about the connections between sustainable urban design, energy, the economy, and human health on Monday at the Mass Impact Symposium, organized by the Boston Society of Architects and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)
The cities' climate action plans, some of which have yet to be fully rolled out, call for aggressive goals to measure, reduce, and monitor greenhouse gas levels--on the range of 50 percent to 80 percent in the next three decades.
Under that over-arching goal are dozens of programs, including promotion of green technologies to lower energy consumption in transportation and buildings.
"We can't just do one thing," said Ariella Maron, deputy director of New York's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. She said the city's plan covers clean energy, efficient buildings, transportation, and avoiding sprawl--all of which impact water, land use, and air quality.
Called PlaNYC, the program stems from simple demographics: another 1 million people will join its current population of 8.25 million by 2030.
It's not just New York. Urbanization is rapidly accelerating around the world. That means the "tipping point" toward greenhouse gas reductions will come from making cities more sustainable, particularly in developing countries, said John Fernandez, an associate professor at MIT's architecture department.
More than half of the world's residents now live in cities, and 85 percent of the world's population growth will be in urban areas in the coming decades, mostly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Fernandez said.
Green retrofits
Top on the list of these cities' programs is building energy efficiency. Overall, energy use in buildings is about one-third of the U.S.' energy use but it can be a lot higher in cities--in New York, it's 80 percent of energy use and rising.
Chicago requires city buildings requesting funding to meet the U.S. Green Building Council's Silver-level LEED certification.
But while cities can make visible commitments to environment stewardship, it's typically a drop in the bucket when it comes to carbon emissions. That's because 80 percent of buildings that exist today will still be around in two decades, making technologies to retrofit existing buildings more important, city representatives said.
There are also opportunities for individuals or neighborhoods to generate their own energy. Toronto is experimenting with a program called SolarCity to encourage communities to purchase solar hot water systems.
At the end of this month, the PlaNYC program will announce details of a program to lower buildings' carbon emissions 30 percent by 2017 by promoting micro-power generation and waste-to-power technologies, Maron said.
London, meanwhile, is exploring more futuristic approaches, where whole neighborhoods would generate their own energy.
Nicky Gavron, the former deputy mayor of London, said city planners envision replacing natural gas production either by producing bio-gas from organic wastes in anaerobic digesters or using waste to make synthetic gas through plasma arc gasification.
The energy from waste would be used in either individual or neighborhood combined heat and power systems. "We have an opportunity to usher in a new era of municipally owned enterprises around low-carbon technologies," said Gavron, who was member of a hydrogen committee.
Not keeping pace with technology?
City governments are eager to show leadership by adopting green technologies in their own operations.
Toronto's LightSavers pilot is testing to see whether more efficient LED lighting with controls can be used for street lights, parking garages, and pedestrian areas.
And the FleetWise plug-in hybrid pilot has allowed the city government to improve its fuel economy by 50 percent, said Philip Jessup, director of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. In Winnipeg, Canada, already 70 percent of taxis are hybrids.
Water treatment is an important feature of climate change response, according to planners.
With more extreme precipitation, New York is enlisting trees to try to capture run-off and pollutants. The city is trying to add more green spaces to its streets and change the tree pit specifications so that they are big enough to retain more water, Maron said.
It's also looking to reestablish its mussel and oyster industry, which will filter pollutants from storm water run-off--a move that stresses energy-intensive treatment plants, she said.
"We are already feeling the impacts of climate change," with higher levels of precipitation and higher temperatures, she said. "If a category 3 hurricane hit New York, it's catastrophic."
Despite the good intentions, representatives from these cities said that politics--particularly with regard to funding--make climate change all the more challenging.
To get different sources of revenue, London has taken a minority stake in an energy services company that uses savings from energy efficiency to offset upfront investments.
Toronto's Atmospheric Fund was created and sustained by the savings from building energy retrofits.
Another challenge is that political institutions are falling behind the technology advances in areas like lighting and transportation, said Toronto's Jessup.
"The job descriptions, the bureaucracies, have not changed fast enough for these new technologies so they just don't get it," he said.
Cities take lead in climate change
by Martin LaMonica
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--City governments' response to climate change ranges from cutting-edge distributed energy to adding more bike lanes and trees.
Climate change experts from four cities--London, Toronto, Chicago, and New York--spoke about the connections between sustainable urban design, energy, the economy, and human health on Monday at the Mass Impact Symposium, organized by the Boston Society of Architects and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(Credit: Tom Krazit/CNET News.com)
The cities' climate action plans, some of which have yet to be fully rolled out, call for aggressive goals to measure, reduce, and monitor greenhouse gas levels--on the range of 50 percent to 80 percent in the next three decades.
Under that over-arching goal are dozens of programs, including promotion of green technologies to lower energy consumption in transportation and buildings.
"We can't just do one thing," said Ariella Maron, deputy director of New York's Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability. She said the city's plan covers clean energy, efficient buildings, transportation, and avoiding sprawl--all of which impact water, land use, and air quality.
Called PlaNYC, the program stems from simple demographics: another 1 million people will join its current population of 8.25 million by 2030.
It's not just New York. Urbanization is rapidly accelerating around the world. That means the "tipping point" toward greenhouse gas reductions will come from making cities more sustainable, particularly in developing countries, said John Fernandez, an associate professor at MIT's architecture department.
More than half of the world's residents now live in cities, and 85 percent of the world's population growth will be in urban areas in the coming decades, mostly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Fernandez said.
Green retrofits
Top on the list of these cities' programs is building energy efficiency. Overall, energy use in buildings is about one-third of the U.S.' energy use but it can be a lot higher in cities--in New York, it's 80 percent of energy use and rising.
Chicago requires city buildings requesting funding to meet the U.S. Green Building Council's Silver-level LEED certification.
But while cities can make visible commitments to environment stewardship, it's typically a drop in the bucket when it comes to carbon emissions. That's because 80 percent of buildings that exist today will still be around in two decades, making technologies to retrofit existing buildings more important, city representatives said.
There are also opportunities for individuals or neighborhoods to generate their own energy. Toronto is experimenting with a program called SolarCity to encourage communities to purchase solar hot water systems.
At the end of this month, the PlaNYC program will announce details of a program to lower buildings' carbon emissions 30 percent by 2017 by promoting micro-power generation and waste-to-power technologies, Maron said.
London, meanwhile, is exploring more futuristic approaches, where whole neighborhoods would generate their own energy.
Nicky Gavron, the former deputy mayor of London, said city planners envision replacing natural gas production either by producing bio-gas from organic wastes in anaerobic digesters or using waste to make synthetic gas through plasma arc gasification.
The energy from waste would be used in either individual or neighborhood combined heat and power systems. "We have an opportunity to usher in a new era of municipally owned enterprises around low-carbon technologies," said Gavron, who was member of a hydrogen committee.
Not keeping pace with technology?
City governments are eager to show leadership by adopting green technologies in their own operations.
Toronto's LightSavers pilot is testing to see whether more efficient LED lighting with controls can be used for street lights, parking garages, and pedestrian areas.
And the FleetWise plug-in hybrid pilot has allowed the city government to improve its fuel economy by 50 percent, said Philip Jessup, director of the Toronto Atmospheric Fund. In Winnipeg, Canada, already 70 percent of taxis are hybrids.
Water treatment is an important feature of climate change response, according to planners.
With more extreme precipitation, New York is enlisting trees to try to capture run-off and pollutants. The city is trying to add more green spaces to its streets and change the tree pit specifications so that they are big enough to retain more water, Maron said.
It's also looking to reestablish its mussel and oyster industry, which will filter pollutants from storm water run-off--a move that stresses energy-intensive treatment plants, she said.
"We are already feeling the impacts of climate change," with higher levels of precipitation and higher temperatures, she said. "If a category 3 hurricane hit New York, it's catastrophic."
Despite the good intentions, representatives from these cities said that politics--particularly with regard to funding--make climate change all the more challenging.
To get different sources of revenue, London has taken a minority stake in an energy services company that uses savings from energy efficiency to offset upfront investments.
Toronto's Atmospheric Fund was created and sustained by the savings from building energy retrofits.
Another challenge is that political institutions are falling behind the technology advances in areas like lighting and transportation, said Toronto's Jessup.
"The job descriptions, the bureaucracies, have not changed fast enough for these new technologies so they just don't get it," he said.
better understand the river.
June 20, 2008 8:25 AM PDT
Mini-subs exploring Sacramento River
by Carl-Gustav Linden Post a comment
If you reel in a small sub instead of a rainbow trout from the Sacramento River this summer, don't call Homeland Security.
It belongs to a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley trying to learn more about the river currents in the delta.
The researchers are working with propelled 4-foot-long submarines and floating drifters equipped with GPS-receivers for positioning, GSM-modules for communication, and sensors inside for recording temperature, salinity, and currents.
Researchers prepare to launch a submarine.
(Credit: UC Berkeley)
"We are prototyping an infrastructure and testing it in the delta," said Professor Alexander Bayen, who leads the team at UC Berkeley's Civil Systems Department.
The purpose of all this is to collect data to help the state better understand the river. And researchers have good reason to believe there's urgency to their work. With drought looming for most of California, understanding the state's water supply (much of the state's population drinks run-off from snow melting in the Sierra Nevada range) and how the system works is critical.
The Sacramento River is already monitored by 50 permanent water stations in about 1,000 miles of water channels, but that collection of data is not designed to handle emergency situations, according to the researchers.
"It's totally undersampled if you want a precise, online, real-time measurement of the whole state of the delta," Bayen said.
Heavy rains, levee breaches, or contaminant spills are situations when accurate and up-to-date data is needed. In the river delta in 2004, for example, one of the levees breached and a large agricultural area was flooded. Pumps normally move fresh water from sources in the north down to the south, but silt was confounding in the system. The pumps had to be shut down for a whole month at a cost of around $1 million a day.
"In retrospect, that was too long. But given the information they had, they were forced to act very conservatively. They could not turn the pumps on," said graduate student and researcher Andrew Tinka.
Floaters equipped with sensors deployed on site could have provided real-time information on how the water was flowing and where the silt was heading.
Development of the floating devices starts from scratch at a UC Berkeley workshop.
(Credit: Carl-Gustav Linden/CNET News.com)
In a recent workshop at UC Berkeley, undergraduate students and university staff worked on floater prototypes that will be tested this summer in the river. Inside the floaters are a GSM-module, a GPS-receiver and a $120 Gumstix computer running on Linux. (A Gumstix is a computer the size of a stick of gum.)
"They are great little computers that are about as powerful as a 1996-era Pentium. All the power you had at your disposal can be yours in a floating sensor for very little money now, and that's really cool as far as I'm concerned," Tinka said.
The self-guided submarines are developed in Portugal by the University of Porto.
That is the hardware involved. The other part of the project are the algorithms calculated for the complex hydrodynamics models. The software is based on two commercial packages, Telemac and Mike 21, with programs for GPS tracking added.
Bayen said that the combination of the hardware and software is the novelty here. He calls it a "cyber physical system," where the cyber part monitors the flow of information and the physics is the hardware--the floaters.
"In five years, cyber physical system is going to be a tech buzz word," Bayen said.
If the research project is successful, the innovations can be put to use in other parts of the world where there is a need for improved river management. The Berkeley team is already cooperating with Professor Linda Bushnell of the University of Washington on a project in the Mekong--the troubled river that floats through China, Laos, and Cambodia out in its delta in Vietnam
Mini-subs exploring Sacramento River
by Carl-Gustav Linden Post a comment
If you reel in a small sub instead of a rainbow trout from the Sacramento River this summer, don't call Homeland Security.
It belongs to a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley trying to learn more about the river currents in the delta.
The researchers are working with propelled 4-foot-long submarines and floating drifters equipped with GPS-receivers for positioning, GSM-modules for communication, and sensors inside for recording temperature, salinity, and currents.
Researchers prepare to launch a submarine.
(Credit: UC Berkeley)
"We are prototyping an infrastructure and testing it in the delta," said Professor Alexander Bayen, who leads the team at UC Berkeley's Civil Systems Department.
The purpose of all this is to collect data to help the state better understand the river. And researchers have good reason to believe there's urgency to their work. With drought looming for most of California, understanding the state's water supply (much of the state's population drinks run-off from snow melting in the Sierra Nevada range) and how the system works is critical.
The Sacramento River is already monitored by 50 permanent water stations in about 1,000 miles of water channels, but that collection of data is not designed to handle emergency situations, according to the researchers.
"It's totally undersampled if you want a precise, online, real-time measurement of the whole state of the delta," Bayen said.
Heavy rains, levee breaches, or contaminant spills are situations when accurate and up-to-date data is needed. In the river delta in 2004, for example, one of the levees breached and a large agricultural area was flooded. Pumps normally move fresh water from sources in the north down to the south, but silt was confounding in the system. The pumps had to be shut down for a whole month at a cost of around $1 million a day.
"In retrospect, that was too long. But given the information they had, they were forced to act very conservatively. They could not turn the pumps on," said graduate student and researcher Andrew Tinka.
Floaters equipped with sensors deployed on site could have provided real-time information on how the water was flowing and where the silt was heading.
Development of the floating devices starts from scratch at a UC Berkeley workshop.
(Credit: Carl-Gustav Linden/CNET News.com)
In a recent workshop at UC Berkeley, undergraduate students and university staff worked on floater prototypes that will be tested this summer in the river. Inside the floaters are a GSM-module, a GPS-receiver and a $120 Gumstix computer running on Linux. (A Gumstix is a computer the size of a stick of gum.)
"They are great little computers that are about as powerful as a 1996-era Pentium. All the power you had at your disposal can be yours in a floating sensor for very little money now, and that's really cool as far as I'm concerned," Tinka said.
The self-guided submarines are developed in Portugal by the University of Porto.
That is the hardware involved. The other part of the project are the algorithms calculated for the complex hydrodynamics models. The software is based on two commercial packages, Telemac and Mike 21, with programs for GPS tracking added.
Bayen said that the combination of the hardware and software is the novelty here. He calls it a "cyber physical system," where the cyber part monitors the flow of information and the physics is the hardware--the floaters.
"In five years, cyber physical system is going to be a tech buzz word," Bayen said.
If the research project is successful, the innovations can be put to use in other parts of the world where there is a need for improved river management. The Berkeley team is already cooperating with Professor Linda Bushnell of the University of Washington on a project in the Mekong--the troubled river that floats through China, Laos, and Cambodia out in its delta in Vietnam
Rainwater harvesting,
June 20, 2008 4:13 PM PDT
Rainwater harvesting advocates bring filter tech to the U.S.
by Hanna Sistek 2 comments
SPICEWOOD SPRINGS, Texas--When Joe Wheeler built his new house here in 2001, he was told that it would cost $10,000 to drill a well, and that he wouldn't be able to drink or bathe in the water. Undaunted, he turned to the old-fashioned idea of rainwater collection to solve his water problem.
Wheeler talked to people who had experience with rainwater collection, and eventually installed what was available on the market at that time, so-called first-flush technology. The first-flush system he had installed sent the first, dirty batch of water from the roof into a diverter tube, and collected the rest in a tank. But he soon started questioning the efficiency.
"I don't think it's a valid idea to take 10 percent of the water off your roof and then assume that the rest of the water is fine. Just think about how long it takes to clean up your windscreen from whatever the birds leave on it," Wheeler continued.
Wheeler browsed around on the Internet and found WISY, a German rainwater filter manufacturer. Apart from buying a set himself, he became the company's first U.S. distributor.
How the WISY system works.
(Credit: Rainfilters of Texas)
How WISY works
Under the WISY system, which Wheeler distributes under the name Rainfilters of Texas, the gross filter first gets rid of the initial batch of water and all larger particles in it.
The first of the four WISY filters removes the larger particles.
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)
Then, the water flows to a calming inlet in the storage tank. In the third step, water is pumped back from the tank through a floating suction filter, avoiding sucking up the bottom tank water where bacteria accumulates. Last but not least, a surface-skimming tube on the tank gets rid of particles floating on top.
WISY system's floating suction filters
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)Once pumped up from the storage tank, Wheeler's water runs through two filters (the blue ones in the photo) and finally the last germs are eliminated with UV light (the metallic cylinder in the photo). This makes the water safe enough to drink.
WISY system's surface skimming tube
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)Wheeler's sewage water goes through two barrels. In the first one, all the feces is collected and is broken down by bacteria. After passing another barrel, the residual water flows into a low-pressure-dose septic tank, which is buried in the ground and never needs to be emptied. Most of the water evaporates from the tank, Wheeler said.
The cost of WISY's rainwater collection system depends on the size of the tank, but it can range from $4,000 to $10,000 or more, plus labor. Filters cost around $300, a pump $500 to $800, and the UV light sterilization $1,200 to $2,000. The tank cost around $1,000.
Maintaining the system costs about $250 a year for new UV bulbs and filter cartridges, Wheeler said.
Cost-savings
There is money to saved here: the fee to hook up a new house to the community water grid can be as much, or more, as buying a rain harvesting system. In California, for example, it costs $4,000 to $20,000 to get connected to the grid, according to Jim English, client services manager at Black and Veatch, an engineering firm that conducts water-rate studies. The monthly fees differ between water agencies and range between about $12 and $70, but are generally $25 to $35, or $300 to $420 annually.
To get drinking quality, the water is run through the two blue filters and finally through the UV light sterilizer.
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)Wheeler's company is not the only one in this space. Stark Environmental, a small Columbia, Pa.-based company, is also importing German rainwater filter solutions from a manufacturer called 3P Technik. Stark Environmental's solutions are similar to WISY's, but the filters are made out of polyethylene rather than stainless steel. The price tag of a 3P Technik 1,700-gallon filter system excluding a UV light sterilizer, is in the range of $5,000 to $7,000.
Rainwater collection may get a boost from new storm water guidelines mandated by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency. The so-called MS4 program (Municipal Separate Storm Sewage System) addresses the earth disturbance caused by construction projects. When a new warehouse is built, for example, the amount of soil able to absorb large water masses in the area decreases. In order to diminish the erosion and transfer of sediment that heavy rainfall may cause, MS4 guidelines require municipalities to arrange systems for dealing with the water.
The man behind Stark Environmental, Michael Stark, noted that lately municipalities' focus has changed from simply getting rid of the water to reusing it. With climate change and increasing water shortages, rainwater is an excellent source for irrigation, toilet flushing, and clothes washing, he said. In the case of irrigation, it is even preferable to chlorinated tap water.
"The chlorine kills the bacteria. But in soil there is both good and bad bacteria, and to kill the good bacteria will not help in landscaping," said Stark. Both he and Wheeler believe it is a waste of energy to treat all water up to drinking standards.
"Compare it to how people are hooked on bottled water. How many of them would buy bottled water in the store, just to flush it down the toilet?" Stark asked.
The U.S. is not the only country where rainwater harvesting is heading toward a renaissance. Indian farmers, for instance in the northern state of Punjab, used to be good at rainwater harvesting until they were given free pumps and electricity by populist politicians. Now, with the ground water level sinking--thereby increasing the levels of arsenic in the water--and temperatures rising, non-governmental organizaitons like SIDA, the Swedish International Development Agency, are running programs to encourage farmers to resume their old water collecting habits
Rainwater harvesting advocates bring filter tech to the U.S.
by Hanna Sistek 2 comments
SPICEWOOD SPRINGS, Texas--When Joe Wheeler built his new house here in 2001, he was told that it would cost $10,000 to drill a well, and that he wouldn't be able to drink or bathe in the water. Undaunted, he turned to the old-fashioned idea of rainwater collection to solve his water problem.
Wheeler talked to people who had experience with rainwater collection, and eventually installed what was available on the market at that time, so-called first-flush technology. The first-flush system he had installed sent the first, dirty batch of water from the roof into a diverter tube, and collected the rest in a tank. But he soon started questioning the efficiency.
"I don't think it's a valid idea to take 10 percent of the water off your roof and then assume that the rest of the water is fine. Just think about how long it takes to clean up your windscreen from whatever the birds leave on it," Wheeler continued.
Wheeler browsed around on the Internet and found WISY, a German rainwater filter manufacturer. Apart from buying a set himself, he became the company's first U.S. distributor.
How the WISY system works.
(Credit: Rainfilters of Texas)
How WISY works
Under the WISY system, which Wheeler distributes under the name Rainfilters of Texas, the gross filter first gets rid of the initial batch of water and all larger particles in it.
The first of the four WISY filters removes the larger particles.
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)
Then, the water flows to a calming inlet in the storage tank. In the third step, water is pumped back from the tank through a floating suction filter, avoiding sucking up the bottom tank water where bacteria accumulates. Last but not least, a surface-skimming tube on the tank gets rid of particles floating on top.
WISY system's floating suction filters
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)Once pumped up from the storage tank, Wheeler's water runs through two filters (the blue ones in the photo) and finally the last germs are eliminated with UV light (the metallic cylinder in the photo). This makes the water safe enough to drink.
WISY system's surface skimming tube
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)Wheeler's sewage water goes through two barrels. In the first one, all the feces is collected and is broken down by bacteria. After passing another barrel, the residual water flows into a low-pressure-dose septic tank, which is buried in the ground and never needs to be emptied. Most of the water evaporates from the tank, Wheeler said.
The cost of WISY's rainwater collection system depends on the size of the tank, but it can range from $4,000 to $10,000 or more, plus labor. Filters cost around $300, a pump $500 to $800, and the UV light sterilization $1,200 to $2,000. The tank cost around $1,000.
Maintaining the system costs about $250 a year for new UV bulbs and filter cartridges, Wheeler said.
Cost-savings
There is money to saved here: the fee to hook up a new house to the community water grid can be as much, or more, as buying a rain harvesting system. In California, for example, it costs $4,000 to $20,000 to get connected to the grid, according to Jim English, client services manager at Black and Veatch, an engineering firm that conducts water-rate studies. The monthly fees differ between water agencies and range between about $12 and $70, but are generally $25 to $35, or $300 to $420 annually.
To get drinking quality, the water is run through the two blue filters and finally through the UV light sterilizer.
(Credit: Hanna Sistek)Wheeler's company is not the only one in this space. Stark Environmental, a small Columbia, Pa.-based company, is also importing German rainwater filter solutions from a manufacturer called 3P Technik. Stark Environmental's solutions are similar to WISY's, but the filters are made out of polyethylene rather than stainless steel. The price tag of a 3P Technik 1,700-gallon filter system excluding a UV light sterilizer, is in the range of $5,000 to $7,000.
Rainwater collection may get a boost from new storm water guidelines mandated by the U.S. Environment Protection Agency. The so-called MS4 program (Municipal Separate Storm Sewage System) addresses the earth disturbance caused by construction projects. When a new warehouse is built, for example, the amount of soil able to absorb large water masses in the area decreases. In order to diminish the erosion and transfer of sediment that heavy rainfall may cause, MS4 guidelines require municipalities to arrange systems for dealing with the water.
The man behind Stark Environmental, Michael Stark, noted that lately municipalities' focus has changed from simply getting rid of the water to reusing it. With climate change and increasing water shortages, rainwater is an excellent source for irrigation, toilet flushing, and clothes washing, he said. In the case of irrigation, it is even preferable to chlorinated tap water.
"The chlorine kills the bacteria. But in soil there is both good and bad bacteria, and to kill the good bacteria will not help in landscaping," said Stark. Both he and Wheeler believe it is a waste of energy to treat all water up to drinking standards.
"Compare it to how people are hooked on bottled water. How many of them would buy bottled water in the store, just to flush it down the toilet?" Stark asked.
The U.S. is not the only country where rainwater harvesting is heading toward a renaissance. Indian farmers, for instance in the northern state of Punjab, used to be good at rainwater harvesting until they were given free pumps and electricity by populist politicians. Now, with the ground water level sinking--thereby increasing the levels of arsenic in the water--and temperatures rising, non-governmental organizaitons like SIDA, the Swedish International Development Agency, are running programs to encourage farmers to resume their old water collecting habits
Wave and tidal power looks for its footing
October 13, 2008 6:30 AM PDT
Wave and tidal power looks for its footing
by Martin LaMonica 1 comment
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The fledgling ocean energy industry is awash in ideas for making electricity from moving water but it is still reaching for a toehold in the commercial world.
Greentech Media last week released a summary of an ocean energy report that forecasts great potential for wave and tidal energy.
Credit: Ocean Power Delivery)
Ocean power--a resource often located near large population centers--could ultimately generate 25 percent of today's total electricity usage, said report co-author Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.
In the next six years, electricity production from the ocean could swell from just 10 megawatts now to 1 gigawatt a year, a $500 million market.
Before ocean power becomes an economic reality, however, there are huge hurdles to overcome, including too many competing turbine designs, lengthy environmental permitting, costly installation, and, in many cases, a harsh working environment at sea.
Research in ocean energy is active, with most of it done in the U.K. There are a number of pilot projects in the works which, if completed, would total 650 megawatts of electricity production. That's roughly the size of one coal or natural gas power plant.
But charting the course from prototype to grid-connected generator has proven tricky, according to a number of speakers at an event last week hosted by the UK Trade and Investment initiative, Flagship Ventures, and Greentech Media.
"The challenges have been greater and the timelines have all slipped. It hasn't been an easy ride so far," said Andrew Mill, CEO of the U.K.'s New and Renewable Energy Center (NaREC). "Most of the devices to date haven't actually reached the water."
Many wave power machines are designed to capture the energy of the wave's motions through a bobbing buoy-like device. Another approach is a Pelamis wave generator, now being tested in Scotland and in Portugal, which transfers the motion of surface waves to a hydraulic pump connected to a generator.
Tidal power typically uses underwater spinning blades to turn a generator, similar to how a wind turbine works. Because water is far more dense than air, spinning blades can potentially be more productive than off-shore wind turbines for the same amount of space.
In addition to being renewable, another key advantage of ocean power is that it's reliable and predictable, said Daniel Englander, an analyst at Greentech Media.
Although they can't generate power on-demand like a coal-fired plant, the tides and wave movements are well understood, giving planners a good idea of energy production over the course of year.
Because it's an immature industry, ocean power is more expensive than other renewables. In the coming years, the costs are projected to go down to about the range of wind and solar today, according to Greentech Media. "But the fact that you know when the generator is going to spin gives you a lot more value," Englander said.
Wind circa 1980?
Many people consider ocean energy to be roughly at the same stage that wind power was at in early 1980s: there were a number of competing turbine and blade designs, and the cost of wind power was far higher than it is now.
As the number of ocean generator types consolidates and components become standardized--as has happened in wind power--the costs of ocean power devices should go down.
The visible portion of an underwater turbine that captures tidal energy in Port MacKenzie Inlet in Alaska.
(Credit: Ocean Renewable Power)
There has been about $500 million invested in ocean power since 2001, mostly in the form of government research and some venture capital, according to Greentech Media. That's tiny compared to wind or solar; several solar start-ups have individually raised more than that in the past year.
The report's authors predict that venture capitalists will be investing in ocean power as they seek new green-technology areas.
Big energy companies have dabbled in ocean power as well. General Electric purchased a stake in Pelamis Wave Power, while Chevron and Shell have invested in ocean companies through their venture capital arms, Englander said.
One positive sign is that ocean power appears to be developing quicker than wind, said John Cote, a vice president at General Electric's financial services arm.
"The wind industry, their Valley of Death (from product prototype to commercialization) was much longer," Cote said. "The development of standards is happening much quicker in the marine industry."
Tough sailing
But despite the optimism, life on the water is tough, according to executives at ocean power companies.
With almost no infrastructure around the industry, companies need to build a lot of their own equipment. To install and test devices, they have to hire expensive vessels, typically used for offshore drilling.
Ocean Renewable Power is testing two of its horizontal turbine design tidal machines in Maine and Alaska. It's working on a new design that uses composite materials instead of steel, which it hopes to finish by the end of year and test extensively next year.
While working in freezing temperatures and 30-mile-per-hour winds in the Bay of Fundy off the Maine coast, it found that "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong," said Ocean Renewable Power CEO Chris Sauer.
Most of the failures were related to weather and marine conditions and equipment problems. "As a start-up, we have to make our own instrumentation systems put together on the cheap," he said.
Wavebob's wave-power machine. Bobbing devices that convert wave motion to electricity are one of the most common designs.
(Credit: Wavebob)New York City's East River, meanwhile, is the test site for another tidal power installation being led Verdant Power, which makes underwater turbines that get energy from changing currents.
In the space of three weeks, all six turbines being tested failed the same way--a mechanical problem in the connections point between the blade and hubs, said Ronald Smith, Verdant Power's CEO.
But the biggest hurdles with the project has been environmental concerns, he said
Regulators want to make sure that fish, or other marine life, will not be killed in the blades. The company has equipped its devices with acoustic and other sonar devices to gather data for regulators, Smith said.
Another big potential cost for ocean power devices is operations and maintenance. Simply getting vessels--and staff--to service machines can be expensive, making the "survivability" of ocean energy gear a top priority.
Executives at the panel predicted that ocean power installations in the future will be several units, rather than one large device. For example, Ocean Renewable Power's 250-kilowatt modules can be stacked on top of them other, so if one machine fails, the entire operation isn't taken offline.
Even relatively successful companies--like Wavebob, which is set to build a 250-megawatt ocean power installation in Ireland--are doing software simulations, environmental reviews, and additional engineering to increase the odds of success.
"We're stopping on the edge of commercialization and taking two steps backward," Derek Robertson, the general manager of the company's North American business. "We're investing in detailed operations and systems engineering process to retire risk."
Wave and tidal power looks for its footing
by Martin LaMonica 1 comment
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--The fledgling ocean energy industry is awash in ideas for making electricity from moving water but it is still reaching for a toehold in the commercial world.
Greentech Media last week released a summary of an ocean energy report that forecasts great potential for wave and tidal energy.
Credit: Ocean Power Delivery)
Ocean power--a resource often located near large population centers--could ultimately generate 25 percent of today's total electricity usage, said report co-author Travis Bradford, president of the Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.
In the next six years, electricity production from the ocean could swell from just 10 megawatts now to 1 gigawatt a year, a $500 million market.
Before ocean power becomes an economic reality, however, there are huge hurdles to overcome, including too many competing turbine designs, lengthy environmental permitting, costly installation, and, in many cases, a harsh working environment at sea.
Research in ocean energy is active, with most of it done in the U.K. There are a number of pilot projects in the works which, if completed, would total 650 megawatts of electricity production. That's roughly the size of one coal or natural gas power plant.
But charting the course from prototype to grid-connected generator has proven tricky, according to a number of speakers at an event last week hosted by the UK Trade and Investment initiative, Flagship Ventures, and Greentech Media.
"The challenges have been greater and the timelines have all slipped. It hasn't been an easy ride so far," said Andrew Mill, CEO of the U.K.'s New and Renewable Energy Center (NaREC). "Most of the devices to date haven't actually reached the water."
Many wave power machines are designed to capture the energy of the wave's motions through a bobbing buoy-like device. Another approach is a Pelamis wave generator, now being tested in Scotland and in Portugal, which transfers the motion of surface waves to a hydraulic pump connected to a generator.
Tidal power typically uses underwater spinning blades to turn a generator, similar to how a wind turbine works. Because water is far more dense than air, spinning blades can potentially be more productive than off-shore wind turbines for the same amount of space.
In addition to being renewable, another key advantage of ocean power is that it's reliable and predictable, said Daniel Englander, an analyst at Greentech Media.
Although they can't generate power on-demand like a coal-fired plant, the tides and wave movements are well understood, giving planners a good idea of energy production over the course of year.
Because it's an immature industry, ocean power is more expensive than other renewables. In the coming years, the costs are projected to go down to about the range of wind and solar today, according to Greentech Media. "But the fact that you know when the generator is going to spin gives you a lot more value," Englander said.
Wind circa 1980?
Many people consider ocean energy to be roughly at the same stage that wind power was at in early 1980s: there were a number of competing turbine and blade designs, and the cost of wind power was far higher than it is now.
As the number of ocean generator types consolidates and components become standardized--as has happened in wind power--the costs of ocean power devices should go down.
The visible portion of an underwater turbine that captures tidal energy in Port MacKenzie Inlet in Alaska.
(Credit: Ocean Renewable Power)
There has been about $500 million invested in ocean power since 2001, mostly in the form of government research and some venture capital, according to Greentech Media. That's tiny compared to wind or solar; several solar start-ups have individually raised more than that in the past year.
The report's authors predict that venture capitalists will be investing in ocean power as they seek new green-technology areas.
Big energy companies have dabbled in ocean power as well. General Electric purchased a stake in Pelamis Wave Power, while Chevron and Shell have invested in ocean companies through their venture capital arms, Englander said.
One positive sign is that ocean power appears to be developing quicker than wind, said John Cote, a vice president at General Electric's financial services arm.
"The wind industry, their Valley of Death (from product prototype to commercialization) was much longer," Cote said. "The development of standards is happening much quicker in the marine industry."
Tough sailing
But despite the optimism, life on the water is tough, according to executives at ocean power companies.
With almost no infrastructure around the industry, companies need to build a lot of their own equipment. To install and test devices, they have to hire expensive vessels, typically used for offshore drilling.
Ocean Renewable Power is testing two of its horizontal turbine design tidal machines in Maine and Alaska. It's working on a new design that uses composite materials instead of steel, which it hopes to finish by the end of year and test extensively next year.
While working in freezing temperatures and 30-mile-per-hour winds in the Bay of Fundy off the Maine coast, it found that "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong," said Ocean Renewable Power CEO Chris Sauer.
Most of the failures were related to weather and marine conditions and equipment problems. "As a start-up, we have to make our own instrumentation systems put together on the cheap," he said.
Wavebob's wave-power machine. Bobbing devices that convert wave motion to electricity are one of the most common designs.
(Credit: Wavebob)New York City's East River, meanwhile, is the test site for another tidal power installation being led Verdant Power, which makes underwater turbines that get energy from changing currents.
In the space of three weeks, all six turbines being tested failed the same way--a mechanical problem in the connections point between the blade and hubs, said Ronald Smith, Verdant Power's CEO.
But the biggest hurdles with the project has been environmental concerns, he said
Regulators want to make sure that fish, or other marine life, will not be killed in the blades. The company has equipped its devices with acoustic and other sonar devices to gather data for regulators, Smith said.
Another big potential cost for ocean power devices is operations and maintenance. Simply getting vessels--and staff--to service machines can be expensive, making the "survivability" of ocean energy gear a top priority.
Executives at the panel predicted that ocean power installations in the future will be several units, rather than one large device. For example, Ocean Renewable Power's 250-kilowatt modules can be stacked on top of them other, so if one machine fails, the entire operation isn't taken offline.
Even relatively successful companies--like Wavebob, which is set to build a 250-megawatt ocean power installation in Ireland--are doing software simulations, environmental reviews, and additional engineering to increase the odds of success.
"We're stopping on the edge of commercialization and taking two steps backward," Derek Robertson, the general manager of the company's North American business. "We're investing in detailed operations and systems engineering process to retire risk."
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