Philadelphia likes solar-powered 'BigBelly'
City finds it can stuff more trash with compactors, saving money
The solar-powered trash compactor at right is one of hundreds of BigBelly units being deployed in Philadelphia, Penn.
Matt Rourke / AP
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updated 11:13 a.m. ET, Fri., July 24, 2009
PHILADELPHIA - Is it any surprise that a city known for its love of cheesesteaks, soft pretzels and cannolis would embrace a solar-powered trash compactor called a BigBelly?
In the largest rollout yet, Philadelphia has replaced 700 downtown trash bins with 500 of the high-tech compactors, which use solar energy to condense trash — cutting down collection trips by 75 percent.
Facing a $1.4 billion, five-year budget deficit, the city estimates it will save $875,000 a year with the compactors, bought with state grant money. Cities from Vienna to Boston to Vancouver have tried the devices in smaller numbers, but Philadelphia put them along four collection routes in its heavily traveled downtown area.
Streets Commissioner Carmina Tolson said the compactors, the last of which was installed this month, usually need to be emptied five times a week — as opposed to 19 times for a regular can. The change frees up 25 streets department employees, who are now filling vacancies on trucks that collect household recycling.
"We now can go all day," Tolson said of the 32-gallon compactors, which can hold 150 to 200 gallons of trash.
The devices are being piloted by governments and other entities in 40 states and 20 countries, but no other group is trying an approach as comprehensive as what Philadelphia is doing, said Richard Kennelly, vice president of marketing for BigBelly Solar, based in Needham, Mass.
The BigBelly is powered by sun, but it does not need direct light, Kennelly said. When trash gets to the top of the bin, it breaks an electronic beam that triggers a motor that pushes it down. As trash gets more densely packed, the machine senses the resistance and changes a light out front from green to yellow.
'We're full' alerts
In Philadelphia, the cans also have a wireless monitoring system that notifies the city when they're full. In addition, the city is introducing curbside recycling containers next to many of the compactors.
Boston first got the solar-powered compactors in 2006 and now has 160, using them everywhere from historic Faneuil Hall to Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox.
"Our problem with them right now is we don't have them concentrated, we've got them spread," said Dennis Royer, Boston's chief of public works and transportation, who estimates the compactors pay for themselves in 18 months.
Royer said he would love to replace more of his 1,595 trash cans with the BigBelly. The city has also gotten businesses to purchase 20 or 30 of the compactors, which cost from $3,195 to $3,995 apiece.
About 100 BigBelly compactors are being used by various entities in New York, including the Bronx Zoo. Chicago has 90. Overseas, Vienna has 60, Vancouver about 30 and they are also being used in parts of Australia, Israel and France.
But Philadelphia is the first to use them in such big numbers, along whole collection routes.
"They really moved forward on this, primarily because of the cost savings," Kennelly said of Philadelphia officials.
Mayor's double-take
In a city once dubbed the nation's fattest, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter initially did a double-take when an aide told him about the devices.
"What? Who's got a big belly?" he recalled asking.
Matt Rourke / AP
A BigBelly gets fed in Philadelphia.
But when he saw how they could save money and when the city came up with grant money to purchase them, he said, he warmed quickly. The city tested three of them last year and began adding them by the hundreds this year.
The targeted approach is also being tested in Somerville, Mass., where officials have focused them in densely packed areas.
Somerville has saturated its main square and several other areas, freeing up several streets department workers to repair potholes, trim trees and fix playground equipment, said Michael Lambert, director of transportation and infrastructure.
One lesson Royer learned in Boston was that workers needed to keep the cans very clean so that people didn't shy away from them.
And even though they need to be emptied less often, he said, their fullness needs to be carefully monitored — especially during big events.
"You don't want anything to discourage people from using them," he said.
Friday, August 28, 2009
Corn cobs eyed for ethanol, fertilizer
Corn cobs eyed for ethanol, fertilizer
Farmers could get cash crop if affordable equipment is available
Corn cobs like these have long been leftovers in the farming process.
Dirk Lammers / AP
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updated 5:32 p.m. ET, Fri., July 17, 2009
DES MOINES, Iowa - Two new technologies offer the promise that corn growers could turn their cobs into cash.
Cobs, the refuse left behind after harvest, are now plowed back into fields. But companies from California and South Dakota plan to start changing that by building two plants in Iowa, one to turn the material into ethanol and another to produce fertilizer.
"We're excited about it," corn farmer Jim Boyer said, "that there's an opportunity for another profit stream off our farm."
Boyer already sells much of the corn from his farm in Ringsted in northern Iowa to a traditional ethanol plant in nearby Emmetsburg. Most ethanol in the U.S. is made from corn kernels.
But a $200 million plant being built by Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Poet Energy will make cellulosic ethanol, which comes from plant material such as cobs, wood chips and switchgrass. About two dozen cellulosic ethanol projects are being developed or built around the country, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
The projects vary by region, with companies using whatever local crop is available. Louisiana and Florida companies, for instance, are using sugar cane, while one based in Oregon plans to convert poplar trees and wood chips into ethanol.
"There isn't an ethanol producer today that isn't looking at those kinds of biomass materials that can be converted into ethanol," said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the association.
In Iowa, it's corn, and a switch from regular to cellulosic could mean more kernels are available for human food and livestock feed.
The push for new ways to produce cellulosic ethanol comes as many ethanol makers are struggling to turn a profit. They've had to drop prices to remain competitive as gas prices have fallen, but the cost of corn used to make ethanol has remained relatively high, said David Swenson, a researcher at Iowa State University.
Some of the largest producers have declared bankruptcy or been sold.
Poet spokesman Nathan Schock said the company hasn't yet figured out how much it will pay farmers, but it could be $30 to $60 per ton for corn stover, which includes cobs and some stalk. An average acre in Iowa yields about 1.5 tons of corn stover.
The company's payments to farmers could be supplemented by the federal government through the Biomass Crop Assistance Program.
Poet's plant in Emmetsburg, about 120 miles northwest of Des Moines, is expected to produce about 25 million gallons of ethanol per year when it opens in 2011. It could generate as much as $10 million per year in extra income for farmers.
Fertilizer plant to be a first
Meanwhile, San Francisco-based SynGest, Inc., plans to build an $80 million facility in Menlo, about 40 miles west of Des Moines, that will be the first to make ammonia fertilizer from corn cobs.
The plant, expected to be completed by fall 2011, will process 130,000 tons of cobs per year into 50,000 tons of fertilizer, or enough for 100,000 acres of corn, SynGest CEO Jack Oswald said. Farmers would get about $50 per ton of cobs.
The company plans to market ammonia fertilizer to nearby farms as alternative to nitrogen fertilizer, which is made from oil. More than half the nation's supply of nitrogen fertilizer is imported, which drives up the price to farmers, Oswald said.
"There's a lot of reasons why this is a smart and valuable thing to do," he said. "This is a huge industry opportunity."
Poet expects $100 million in federal and state aid to build its plant, while SynGest has applied for $40 million in federal aid and additional state help.
Collecting cobs could be costly
Farmers said they'd like to trade their trash for cash, but most lack equipment to easily scoop up cobs. Prototypes for such machines are being built, but they could cost more than the cobs bring in. Boyer said a lot of questions remain.
"If we have another stream of product coming off the field, is it going to take more equipment?" he asked. "Is it going to take more manpower? Are we going to have to store those cobs ourselves or are we going to be able to deliver them to the plant, or is the plant going to come pick them up?"
Clark Bredahl, who raises corn, soybeans and cattle 320 acres near Greenfield, also said he'd need to figure out whether selling his cobs made economic sense.
"If the company is willing to pay enough so that it becomes feasible for farmers to collect the cobs and deliver them to their plant, then that definitely has some promise," he said. "But we don't know what those details will be yet."
Farmers could get cash crop if affordable equipment is available
Corn cobs like these have long been leftovers in the farming process.
Dirk Lammers / AP
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updated 5:32 p.m. ET, Fri., July 17, 2009
DES MOINES, Iowa - Two new technologies offer the promise that corn growers could turn their cobs into cash.
Cobs, the refuse left behind after harvest, are now plowed back into fields. But companies from California and South Dakota plan to start changing that by building two plants in Iowa, one to turn the material into ethanol and another to produce fertilizer.
"We're excited about it," corn farmer Jim Boyer said, "that there's an opportunity for another profit stream off our farm."
Boyer already sells much of the corn from his farm in Ringsted in northern Iowa to a traditional ethanol plant in nearby Emmetsburg. Most ethanol in the U.S. is made from corn kernels.
But a $200 million plant being built by Sioux Falls, S.D.-based Poet Energy will make cellulosic ethanol, which comes from plant material such as cobs, wood chips and switchgrass. About two dozen cellulosic ethanol projects are being developed or built around the country, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
The projects vary by region, with companies using whatever local crop is available. Louisiana and Florida companies, for instance, are using sugar cane, while one based in Oregon plans to convert poplar trees and wood chips into ethanol.
"There isn't an ethanol producer today that isn't looking at those kinds of biomass materials that can be converted into ethanol," said Matt Hartwig, a spokesman for the association.
In Iowa, it's corn, and a switch from regular to cellulosic could mean more kernels are available for human food and livestock feed.
The push for new ways to produce cellulosic ethanol comes as many ethanol makers are struggling to turn a profit. They've had to drop prices to remain competitive as gas prices have fallen, but the cost of corn used to make ethanol has remained relatively high, said David Swenson, a researcher at Iowa State University.
Some of the largest producers have declared bankruptcy or been sold.
Poet spokesman Nathan Schock said the company hasn't yet figured out how much it will pay farmers, but it could be $30 to $60 per ton for corn stover, which includes cobs and some stalk. An average acre in Iowa yields about 1.5 tons of corn stover.
The company's payments to farmers could be supplemented by the federal government through the Biomass Crop Assistance Program.
Poet's plant in Emmetsburg, about 120 miles northwest of Des Moines, is expected to produce about 25 million gallons of ethanol per year when it opens in 2011. It could generate as much as $10 million per year in extra income for farmers.
Fertilizer plant to be a first
Meanwhile, San Francisco-based SynGest, Inc., plans to build an $80 million facility in Menlo, about 40 miles west of Des Moines, that will be the first to make ammonia fertilizer from corn cobs.
The plant, expected to be completed by fall 2011, will process 130,000 tons of cobs per year into 50,000 tons of fertilizer, or enough for 100,000 acres of corn, SynGest CEO Jack Oswald said. Farmers would get about $50 per ton of cobs.
The company plans to market ammonia fertilizer to nearby farms as alternative to nitrogen fertilizer, which is made from oil. More than half the nation's supply of nitrogen fertilizer is imported, which drives up the price to farmers, Oswald said.
"There's a lot of reasons why this is a smart and valuable thing to do," he said. "This is a huge industry opportunity."
Poet expects $100 million in federal and state aid to build its plant, while SynGest has applied for $40 million in federal aid and additional state help.
Collecting cobs could be costly
Farmers said they'd like to trade their trash for cash, but most lack equipment to easily scoop up cobs. Prototypes for such machines are being built, but they could cost more than the cobs bring in. Boyer said a lot of questions remain.
"If we have another stream of product coming off the field, is it going to take more equipment?" he asked. "Is it going to take more manpower? Are we going to have to store those cobs ourselves or are we going to be able to deliver them to the plant, or is the plant going to come pick them up?"
Clark Bredahl, who raises corn, soybeans and cattle 320 acres near Greenfield, also said he'd need to figure out whether selling his cobs made economic sense.
"If the company is willing to pay enough so that it becomes feasible for farmers to collect the cobs and deliver them to their plant, then that definitely has some promise," he said. "But we don't know what those details will be yet."
Cancer Cells That Glow
A Beacon to Guide Cancer Surgery
A modified virus makes cancer cells fluoresce to better identify tumors.
By Courtney Humphries
Friday, August 28, 2009
Removing tumors from cancer patients always brings uncertainty. Surgeons fear that cells they don't spot and remove might re-emerge. Researchers have been looking for ways to make cancer cells visible so that none is left behind. Some of these strategies rely on injecting fluorescent probes or nanoparticles like quantum dots that will attach to the surface of cancer cells. Now a company is working on technology that makes cancer cells fluoresce from the inside out. The approach, developed by San Diego-based company AntiCancer, in partnership with scientists at Okayama University in Japan, uses a virus that infects cancer cells to integrate a fluorescence gene into tumors. The result is cancer that permanently glows, which the company hopes would allow surgeons to remove tumors with more precision and to monitor any cancer that re-emerges.
A bright idea: Mice carrying tumors from human colon cancer cells were given a virus that causes cancer cells to fluoresce. Researchers were able to visualize the dispersed tumors (in green) and remove them surgically. The small intestine is shown in red.
Credit: Hiroyuki Kishimoto and Robert M. Hoffman, AntiCancer
To make cancer cells fluoresce, the researchers used a virus called OBP-401, a modified cold virus that can enter all cells but will only replicate in those that have activated telomerase, an enzyme that is expressed in cancer cells and allows them to divide indefinitely. Normally a cell can only divide a limited number of times before dying, because at every division it loses part of its telomeres, caps of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that keep the genome stable. But cancer cells can keep dividing because telomerase replaces the telomeres every time the cell divides.
The OBP-401 virus had been developed as an anticancer therapy. Here, the researchers modified the virus to carry green fluorescent protein (GFP), a protein derived from jellyfish that fluoresces in blue light. When the virus is injected into an animal, the gene becomes active in cells that express telomerase. Robert Hoffman, president of AntiCancer and a surgeon at the University of California, San Diego, explains that GFP is permanently integrated into the genome of cancer cells, making this technology fundamentally different from approaches that rely on attaching a fluorescent particle to a protein on the surface of cancer cells. Hoffman believes that by creating a genetic marker, the approach "takes advantage of the tumor biology more effectively."
In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hoffman's team used the virus to illuminate tumors in mice that were scattered throughout the body. During surgery to remove the tumors, they could visualize them by exposing tumors to light of the proper wavelength and looking through a filter that picks up GFP fluorescence. "In principle it should pick up any cancer cell," says Hoffman. The team has not yet reached single-cell precision, but they are able to see and remove small cancerous areas that would otherwise be invisible.
Although new cancers that form after the virus is delivered would not be fluorescent, Hoffman says that any of the original cancer that began to grow again should still express GFP, allowing clinicians the opportunity to monitor the results of the surgery over time.
Hisataka Kobayashi, a scientist in the molecular imaging program at the National Cancer Institute, says the advantages of this method are that it very specifically targets cancer cells and makes it possible to monitor the cancer over time. The method also allows for flexibility; for instance, a gene that would cause the cancer cells to kill themselves could be added to the virus along with GFP, pairing imaging with treatment.
Kobayashi says that one of the key questions of the technology is safety. Giving patients a virus carrying a gene for imaging is very similar to giving them a gene to correct a disease, he says, and consequently "all the problems with gene therapy apply to this method." Many gene therapy approaches have been stalled because of immune reactions to the treatment. However, Lily Wu, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who develops cancer therapies, points out that similar gene therapy treatments for cancer have so far been found safe in clinical trials, whereas safety "is still not determined for other synthetic vectors such as quantum dots." Wu believes that this method offers several advantages over other ways of labeling tumors but says that it will require a more thorough quantitative analysis to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Hoffman says AntiCancer hopes to complete further safety testing that will allow it to bring the technology into clinical trials. Although fluorescence in mice can be visualized throughout the body, in humans the task will be more difficult, because the light scatters easily and doesn't penetrate very far into tissues. For that reason, the researchers envision this technique being used during surgery where the tumor can be seen directly.
A modified virus makes cancer cells fluoresce to better identify tumors.
By Courtney Humphries
Friday, August 28, 2009
Removing tumors from cancer patients always brings uncertainty. Surgeons fear that cells they don't spot and remove might re-emerge. Researchers have been looking for ways to make cancer cells visible so that none is left behind. Some of these strategies rely on injecting fluorescent probes or nanoparticles like quantum dots that will attach to the surface of cancer cells. Now a company is working on technology that makes cancer cells fluoresce from the inside out. The approach, developed by San Diego-based company AntiCancer, in partnership with scientists at Okayama University in Japan, uses a virus that infects cancer cells to integrate a fluorescence gene into tumors. The result is cancer that permanently glows, which the company hopes would allow surgeons to remove tumors with more precision and to monitor any cancer that re-emerges.
A bright idea: Mice carrying tumors from human colon cancer cells were given a virus that causes cancer cells to fluoresce. Researchers were able to visualize the dispersed tumors (in green) and remove them surgically. The small intestine is shown in red.
Credit: Hiroyuki Kishimoto and Robert M. Hoffman, AntiCancer
To make cancer cells fluoresce, the researchers used a virus called OBP-401, a modified cold virus that can enter all cells but will only replicate in those that have activated telomerase, an enzyme that is expressed in cancer cells and allows them to divide indefinitely. Normally a cell can only divide a limited number of times before dying, because at every division it loses part of its telomeres, caps of DNA at the ends of chromosomes that keep the genome stable. But cancer cells can keep dividing because telomerase replaces the telomeres every time the cell divides.
The OBP-401 virus had been developed as an anticancer therapy. Here, the researchers modified the virus to carry green fluorescent protein (GFP), a protein derived from jellyfish that fluoresces in blue light. When the virus is injected into an animal, the gene becomes active in cells that express telomerase. Robert Hoffman, president of AntiCancer and a surgeon at the University of California, San Diego, explains that GFP is permanently integrated into the genome of cancer cells, making this technology fundamentally different from approaches that rely on attaching a fluorescent particle to a protein on the surface of cancer cells. Hoffman believes that by creating a genetic marker, the approach "takes advantage of the tumor biology more effectively."
In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hoffman's team used the virus to illuminate tumors in mice that were scattered throughout the body. During surgery to remove the tumors, they could visualize them by exposing tumors to light of the proper wavelength and looking through a filter that picks up GFP fluorescence. "In principle it should pick up any cancer cell," says Hoffman. The team has not yet reached single-cell precision, but they are able to see and remove small cancerous areas that would otherwise be invisible.
Although new cancers that form after the virus is delivered would not be fluorescent, Hoffman says that any of the original cancer that began to grow again should still express GFP, allowing clinicians the opportunity to monitor the results of the surgery over time.
Hisataka Kobayashi, a scientist in the molecular imaging program at the National Cancer Institute, says the advantages of this method are that it very specifically targets cancer cells and makes it possible to monitor the cancer over time. The method also allows for flexibility; for instance, a gene that would cause the cancer cells to kill themselves could be added to the virus along with GFP, pairing imaging with treatment.
Kobayashi says that one of the key questions of the technology is safety. Giving patients a virus carrying a gene for imaging is very similar to giving them a gene to correct a disease, he says, and consequently "all the problems with gene therapy apply to this method." Many gene therapy approaches have been stalled because of immune reactions to the treatment. However, Lily Wu, a scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who develops cancer therapies, points out that similar gene therapy treatments for cancer have so far been found safe in clinical trials, whereas safety "is still not determined for other synthetic vectors such as quantum dots." Wu believes that this method offers several advantages over other ways of labeling tumors but says that it will require a more thorough quantitative analysis to demonstrate its effectiveness.
Hoffman says AntiCancer hopes to complete further safety testing that will allow it to bring the technology into clinical trials. Although fluorescence in mice can be visualized throughout the body, in humans the task will be more difficult, because the light scatters easily and doesn't penetrate very far into tissues. For that reason, the researchers envision this technique being used during surgery where the tumor can be seen directly.
Energy-Aware Internet Routing
Energy-Aware Internet Routing
Software that tracks electricity prices could slash energy costs for big online businesses.
By Will Knight
Monday, August 17, 2009
An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.
Data beast: Google maintains a huge datacenter in The Dalles, OR.
Credit: John Nelson
Modern datacenters gobble up huge amounts of electricity and usage is increasing at a rapid pace. Energy consumption has accelerated as applications move from desktop computers to the Internet and as information gets transferred from ordinary computers to distributed "cloud" computing services. For the world's biggest information-technology firms, this means spending upwards of $30 million on electricity every year, by modest estimates.
Asfandyar Qureshi, a PhD student at MIT, first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm that would track electricity prices to reduce costs in a paper presented in October 2008. This year, Qureshi and colleagues approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea. Akamai's distributed servers cache information on behalf of many large Web sites across the US and abroad, and process some 275 billion requests per day; while the company does not require many large datacenters itself, its traffic data provides a way to model the demand placed on large Internet companies.
The researchers first analyzed 39 months of electricity price data collected for 29 major US cities. Energy prices fluctuate for a variety of reasons, including seasonal changes in supply, fuel price hikes, and changes in consumer demand, and the researchers saw a surprising amount of volatility, even among geographically close locations.
"The thing that surprised me most was that there was no one place that was always cheapest," says Bruce Maggs, vice president of research at Akamai, who contributed to the project while working as a professor at Carnegie Mellon and is currently a professor at Duke University. "There are large fluctuations on a short timescale."
The team then devised a routing scheme designed to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country. The resulting algorithm weighs up the physical distance needed to route information--because it's more expensive to move data further--against the likely cost savings from reduced energy use. Data collected from nine Akamai servers, covering 24 days of activity, provided a way to test the routing scheme using real-world data. The team found that, in the best scenario--one in which energy use is proportional to computing--a company could slash its energy consumption by 40 percent. "The results were pretty surprising," Maggs says.
The ability to throttle back energy consumption could have another benefit for massive Internet companies, the researchers say. If an energy company were struggling to meet demand, it could negotiate for computation to be moved elsewhere; the researchers say that the market mechanisms needed to make this possible are already in place.
[1] 2 Next »
Tags Akami electric grid electricity Google Microsoft
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Open 1 Comment
Price Standards Needed
Writing this kind of software and many other kinds of software to manage usage is pretty straightforward-- really, no fancy routers needed. The only hard part is just getting the price data! Most likely, a complex perl script would be required for each utility to scrape data off a web page-- if it's even available. It could be that some special equipment would be required to receive and decode price data-- then it's very difficult to even get data.
The FERC should solicit proposals for a simple standard format to post current and predicted prices for power via WWW (or even email/NNTP). Ideally, a simple format would be used as the early internet RFCs did. I suppose XML could be used, though I think a simpler text format would be better. Coming up with a generic way to represent "smart-grid" status, and then requiring the information to be posted by all utilities the same way is the main step needed to make grids smarter. Otherwise, we could end up with the Grid of Babble, where each utility uses proprietary equipment, networks, and protocols, and innovation is hobbled.
Software that tracks electricity prices could slash energy costs for big online businesses.
By Will Knight
Monday, August 17, 2009
An Internet-routing algorithm that tracks electricity price fluctuations could save data-hungry companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon millions of dollars each year in electricity costs. A study from researchers at MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and the networking company Akamai suggests that such Internet businesses could reduce their energy use by as much as 40 percent by rerouting data to locations where electricity prices are lowest on a particular day.
Data beast: Google maintains a huge datacenter in The Dalles, OR.
Credit: John Nelson
Modern datacenters gobble up huge amounts of electricity and usage is increasing at a rapid pace. Energy consumption has accelerated as applications move from desktop computers to the Internet and as information gets transferred from ordinary computers to distributed "cloud" computing services. For the world's biggest information-technology firms, this means spending upwards of $30 million on electricity every year, by modest estimates.
Asfandyar Qureshi, a PhD student at MIT, first outlined the idea of a smart routing algorithm that would track electricity prices to reduce costs in a paper presented in October 2008. This year, Qureshi and colleagues approached researchers at Akamai to obtain the real-world routing data needed to test the idea. Akamai's distributed servers cache information on behalf of many large Web sites across the US and abroad, and process some 275 billion requests per day; while the company does not require many large datacenters itself, its traffic data provides a way to model the demand placed on large Internet companies.
The researchers first analyzed 39 months of electricity price data collected for 29 major US cities. Energy prices fluctuate for a variety of reasons, including seasonal changes in supply, fuel price hikes, and changes in consumer demand, and the researchers saw a surprising amount of volatility, even among geographically close locations.
"The thing that surprised me most was that there was no one place that was always cheapest," says Bruce Maggs, vice president of research at Akamai, who contributed to the project while working as a professor at Carnegie Mellon and is currently a professor at Duke University. "There are large fluctuations on a short timescale."
The team then devised a routing scheme designed to take advantage of daily and hourly fluctuations in electricity costs across the country. The resulting algorithm weighs up the physical distance needed to route information--because it's more expensive to move data further--against the likely cost savings from reduced energy use. Data collected from nine Akamai servers, covering 24 days of activity, provided a way to test the routing scheme using real-world data. The team found that, in the best scenario--one in which energy use is proportional to computing--a company could slash its energy consumption by 40 percent. "The results were pretty surprising," Maggs says.
The ability to throttle back energy consumption could have another benefit for massive Internet companies, the researchers say. If an energy company were struggling to meet demand, it could negotiate for computation to be moved elsewhere; the researchers say that the market mechanisms needed to make this possible are already in place.
[1] 2 Next »
Tags Akami electric grid electricity Google Microsoft
Related Articles
»Netbook Chips Create a Low-Power Cloud
04/16/2009 »A Picowatt Processor
07/08/2008 »Saving Energy in Data Centers
03/11/2008 Comments Close Comments
Open 1 Comment
Price Standards Needed
Writing this kind of software and many other kinds of software to manage usage is pretty straightforward-- really, no fancy routers needed. The only hard part is just getting the price data! Most likely, a complex perl script would be required for each utility to scrape data off a web page-- if it's even available. It could be that some special equipment would be required to receive and decode price data-- then it's very difficult to even get data.
The FERC should solicit proposals for a simple standard format to post current and predicted prices for power via WWW (or even email/NNTP). Ideally, a simple format would be used as the early internet RFCs did. I suppose XML could be used, though I think a simpler text format would be better. Coming up with a generic way to represent "smart-grid" status, and then requiring the information to be posted by all utilities the same way is the main step needed to make grids smarter. Otherwise, we could end up with the Grid of Babble, where each utility uses proprietary equipment, networks, and protocols, and innovation is hobbled.
Plug-in Hybrids Get Green Grades
Plug-in Hybrids Get Green Grades
Overall, plug-in cars are a plus for the environment, despite the fact that they would increase the demand for electricity.
By Kevin Bullis
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Plug-in hybrids, which use electricity from the grid to replace gasoline for daily driving, would cut gas consumption and save commuters from high fuel prices. But some experts have been concerned that switching from gas to electricity, much of which is generated from fossil fuels, would actually significantly increase pollution in some parts of the country, as opposed to decreasing it.
Battery power: Plug-in hybrids, like this concept car from General Motors, could help cut both gasoline consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.
Credit: General Motors
A study released last week by the environmental group National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the largely utility-funded Electric Power Research Institute shows that plug-ins, once they're on the market, will significantly cut greenhouse gases. Across the country, the vehicles will on average also decrease other pollutants, but the impact in local areas will depend on the source of electricity.
In plug-in hybrids, a large battery pack that is recharged by plugging it in stores enough energy to power a car entirely, or almost entirely, with electricity for the first 40 miles or so of driving. For longer trips, the car reverts to conventional hybrid operation, relying largely on gasoline for power but improving efficiency: by storing energy from braking in the battery and using it for acceleration, for example.
The study shows that if plug-in hybrids are adopted widely in the United States, and if measures are taken to clean up power plants, by 2050, plug-in hybrids could reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 612 million metric tons, or roughly 5 percent of the total U.S. emissions expected in that time frame, according to Marcus Sarofim, a researcher at MIT's Joint Program for the Science and Policy of Global Change. That's a significant amount, he says, considering that transportation accounts for only about a third of the total greenhouse-gas emissions.
But if plug-in hybrids account for only a small part of the total vehicle sales in 2050 (about 20 percent, compared with 80 percent in the first scenario), and if little is done to improve pollution from power plants, the vehicles will still reduce greenhouse emissions by about 163 metric tons, according to the study.
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Alternative sources
I really do not know whether this is practical or not at this time, but I have always thought that a car, with its large flat areas consisting of the bonnet, roof and sides, are ideal places to incorporate solar panels / cells.
These could possibly provide some amount of on-going electric power to a vehicle that has to travel more than the 40 miles stated in the article. Another advantage is that during the day, at any given time, the roof plus one side at least would get direct sunlight.
Further, with the vehicle moving at typical speeds of 40 mph plus, vents that collect on-rushing air to drive miniature wind turbines possible?
This would decrease the load on large, centralised power plants like those stated.
Anyway, talk of timelines like 2050 etc scare me in to thinking of the type of world that we will be leaving for the next generation!
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deejay
07/24/2007
Posts:23Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
This is being done in competitions in Australia by one of the Universities. They already have solar powered cars which can travel long distances. The competition is a race across Australia. I think the problem currently is that the solar panels need so much surface area that there's only a driver area and it's tiny and cramped. However, this does show that the technology is already in place, and, coupled with other technologies, is viable.
http://www.unisa.edu.au/solarcar/
http://www.wsc.org.au/
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bj
07/24/2007
Posts:37Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
Boeing just hit forty percent efficiency with solar panels. One would think that a literal "sun roof" would recharge a hybrid (at least partially) while the car was parked. This, of course, provided it was in the open.
Envision parking garages with solar panels for a top roof...each of which went to plugs for people to charge their cars. One solar panel roof likely wouldn't charge all the cars. But still....
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Hardheadjarh...
07/26/2007
Posts:15Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
I just emailed Boeing about putting together some higher efficient cells and was told the cost currently would be prohibitive. I was trying to get 1 KW of cells into the area of a hood and top of a Saturn Station Wagon. My logic was during a 9 hour work day with 6 hours of good sun I would get 6 KWhr of energy. At 200 watts/mile that would drive the car ~ 30 miles. If the cost of cells around 30% efficient can get down to $5 per watt that makes a solar car a reality.
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Gypsy_EV
07/30/2007
Posts:15Avg Rating:
TANSTAAFL
Using "turbines over 40mph to recharge the batteries" (paraphrased) -- Good luck with that. Do that and make it work, and you've found a perpetual motion machine.
TANSTAAFL == There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
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jesup
07/24/2007
Posts:8Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
For southern regions of the US and other sunny climes, solar panels on PHEVs are eminently practical now and could displaced a portion of the battery pack while lessening GHGs vehicle weight and costs, especially if the panels were eligible for solar subsidies.
PHEV batteries have an installed cost about $1K per kWh with perhaps an 8-year warranty and store off-peak electricity which costs 6 – 10 ¢ per kWh. Thin film solar cells have an installed cost of $6K per peak kilowatt (kWp) with a 20-year warranty and, for cities in the lower tier of states, provide a daily average of 5 kWh per kWp at 0 ¢ per kWh. (ref. http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/solar-insolation-levels/ )
The kicker is variability of solar radiation, daily and seasonally. Other issue is that the horizontal area on a medium sized car is limited - about 3 sq. meters and thin film solar cells have an efficiency of about 10% (less for a-Si; more for CIGS and CdTe). So, this means that only 300 watts of peak power, or an average of 1.5 kWh daily, is available using thin film cells. Crystalline silicon solar panels have an efficiency of about 20% but their integration into the car's skin would be more difficult than with flexible thin film panels.
(1.5 kWh would translate to about 4 or 5 miles of travel.)
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pmcha5e
07/24/2007
Posts:1
Re: Alternative sources
We must be practical. Who would buy a car that would lose its charge if parked in a garage, or in the shade?
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lambdafunds
07/25/2007
Posts:9Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
"Further, with the vehicle moving at typical speeds of 40 mph plus, vents that collect on-rushing air to drive miniature wind turbines possible?"
I believe that you have just suggested a perpetual motion machine. :-D
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JRT
07/14/2008
Posts:4
Couple with wind power
This makes alot of sense to me. There is huge untapped potential in wind energy. Germany, Spain, Denmark, Scotland are way ahead of us (see the sponsor adds for Tech Review from Spain Technology for good links. With their wind at bay, I am baffled why Europe has not led the charge on plug-in cars (no pun intended !) Seriously, look at how wind energy stocks have soared with wind production increasing 20-30 % a year in W. Europe with the U.S. not far behind and China making major commitments. All of the technology for both electricity production and plug-in cars is in place. With no emmissions this is clearly a win-win for everyone, with money to be made from improvement in transferring the energy and developing/manufacturing components, for which there is a shortage right now. Energy from tides, waves and solar are not far behind. Burning things like ethanol is a waste of farmland, causes emmissions, uses water, is fraught with waste issues, and is increasing the price of food. I want to know why the U.S. is not spear-heading both plug-in vehicles and wind production simultaneously. There's an open invite here to make some serious dollars. HS
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hansy
07/24/2007
Posts:2Avg Rating:
Re: Couple with wind power
I see what youre saying & agree. I think one of the major problems with power in the USA, as well as most places, is that it is produced in one place & consumed in another, and it is wasteful & expensive to keep moving it back and forth between places. If we can produce it & consume it in the same place (as close as possible) we are way ahead of where we are today. Now, thinking on those lines, if we can have small wind turbines on the roofs of people's houses that plug-in to their panel to power the house or alternatively power the car plugged-in in the garage, to charge it at night (when consumption by the house might be lower) then we would really have something. I am the (somewhat smug) new owner of a Prius & it has changed my life in three weeks. I already drive slower (yes, grandpa was right, it only changes a couple minutes of arrival time, at most) is safer, and uses far less energy then jamming it at every light & passing every car you can & all that nonsense. Combined with the nearly 50 mpg I get (not quite but almost) I really want to get it over 50 a regular basis to really feel great. If the car could be plugged-in as night, I'm thinking we would be there easily. Please some one more brilliant than I do this for us. I will buy it. Thanks. Peace. Jason Sjobeck
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Sjobeck
07/30/2007
Posts:17Avg Rating:
Re: Couple with wind power
I could not agree more with your comments. Electric Cars are the future if we want a sustainable way of living. It means energy independence, better on the environment, and less costs to fill-up than petro/oil. Don't even get me started on biofuels. They are a joke when comapred to electric cars with electricity from a clean energy source. We can always build another wind plant or solar plant, but oil resources are finite and from many countries that we should not be sending our money too.
It's too bad the U.S. didn't pour more resources into battery technology (companies like A123)and wind and solar earlier. We could have taken the $500 Billion spent on Iraq to secure oil and built some renewable energy plants instead, which would make alot more sense. Hopefully our Congress will do what's right here rather than what the special interests want, and we'll be charging in our cars from cleaner, more sustainable energy sources in the future.
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kdigiovi
07/30/2007
Posts:1
Power distribution
If they're not careful, this could require huge new power-distribution powerlines, cutting huge swaths through formerly forested/protected areas (and the Federal government is trying to take control of this away from the states).
You'd want the power stations near the use, but most of those areas are both a) expensive, and b) unlikely to be easy to site in due to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard - see the Cape wind power fiasco). And then there's the environmental damage of mining all that additional coal (see West Virgina), and acid rain issues (especially if the new plants aren't cleaner, though perhaps using the existing pollution-trading methods may help).
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jesup
07/24/2007
Posts:8Avg Rating:
Re: Power distribution
If that was necessary it certainly reduces the appeal this technology
has to me but one would hope that - especially with batteries improving - plug-in are mostly plugged in during the night when the demand for electric power is lower anyway.
Christoph
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cwl
07/24/2007
Posts:2
Gasoline vs Electricity
The standard wisdom is to get rid of any use of gasoline, but when you compare the amound of CO2 produced by a coal fired plant to that of a Prius, the Prius is actually cleaner at 50 mpg. If you add in replacing the gas engine with the high compression engine, you could get up to 200 mpg. Add in ultra high capacitors and that 200 mpg could reach 800 mpg. At some point in there, the Prius starts becoming cleaner then a natural gas plant. Change the batteries to lithium ions that can recharge in 6 minutes, and gas mileage improves again. While I seriously doubt we will see 800 mpg cars, it does seem that 400 mgp is quite possible, and that trying to make 50 yr policy decisions at the start of a new technology may not be the smartest move.
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tsaidak
07/24/2007
Posts:13Avg Rating:
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
I'll take the full-electric approach over hybrid technologies. Primarily because they're perfectly clean, and because I am told we are more effective in controlling emissions and implementing other efficiencies at the central power-generation facilities than in millions of individual owner-maintained automobiles.
One entry into that market already on the road is the Tesla. The design is poised to take ready advantage of any progress in electrical storage media, but in the meantime it's a sharp, fast, uncompromising design and free of emissions.
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burnside
07/24/2007
Posts:7Avg Rating:
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
The problem with electric vehicles is - what happens if you need to go one kilometer farther than the max range on a charge? With a hybrid vehicle you not only have a range of about 500 miles per tank, but the time to refill is 3-5 minutes. Typical electric vehicles have a range of less than 200 miles, and it takes hours to recharge.
Thus you force people into a two-vehicle strategy - one for short trips, another for long.
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cullen
07/25/2007
Posts:3
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
Most trips are not that long. True, the pure electric does not make the perfect cross-country vehicle, but by far most people never leave a small radius of geography. And ... let us start some where, yes, get some momentum, experience, shared knowledge, popularity, design, support, funding, science, innovation, and then conquer that problem for the long-term.
It is no surprise that the short-term mentality of US auto makers (who ought to be ashamed of themselves on so many levels, not just this issue) are no where on this one. (We need all the fat white 58 year old men holding out for retirement in Detroit to just get out of the way & let this generation who is raring & ready to do this thing get on with it)
I drive around Oregon & am stunned how many hybrids there are ... let us take this to the next level.
Thanks.
Jason Sjobeck
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Sjobeck
07/30/2007
Posts:17Avg Rating:
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
I can only speak to my own experience. While I freely admit that most days my trips are not that long, I do make trips of 500 miles or more. A current generation pure-play electric vehicle simply doesn't work in those situations. I am then forced into the choice of either owning another gasoline vehicle for those situations or renting. Hybrid vehicles - particularly in my area - are pretty decent choices (which I've owned for 4 years now).
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cullen
07/30/2007
Posts:3
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
I can almost see getting close to 200 mpg but 400, no way. The body is not streamlined enough and it is too heave, too much friction in its current configuration. It would need to be lighter and completely electric drive, no friction breaks and lower drag bearings. Granted some world champion cars get over 4000 mpg but they are a one passenger vehicle with rock hard tires. I still like an all electric and work on charging it with wind or solar. If the Ultra capacitor did come to pass all the better for the EV.
Either way it would be a huge improvement to current choices.
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Gypsy_EV
07/31/2007
Posts:15Avg Rating:
Here's what I don't understand...
I'm not an auto engineer by any stretch. Just a software engineer who finds the topic interesting. However, I've always wondered why I've never seen a series hybrid built with a small engine highly tuned for efficiency paired with a medium size battery pack. The engine, I would think, would need to generate just enough power to cruise the car along at 80mph on the interstate and the battery pack would only need to hold enough juice to buffer the engine from the powertrain (probably less than 50% the normal size). I think that setup (in a Toyota Camry for example) would get in excess of 60mph and would meet the driving habits of over 99.9% of the population. So, what am I not understanding?
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RichardL
07/24/2007
Posts:3Avg Rating:
Re: Here's what I don't understand...
you are largely correct.....altho' what you would really want to use is a gas turbine which is very efficient but can really only be run at two speeds, on full or off....you can turn it off when it reaches 80% or so that breaking energy isnt wasted...the battery pack might have to be bigger than you think tho. Still, this is by far the most inherently efficient setup we can easily create w/ current tech. It is a wonder to me why it hasn't been done myself. The only thing i can think of is that there might be problems handling the precession or the turbine, but that doesn't seem too difficult to handle.....modern chainsaws have systems to dampen the effects of precession [really the effects of angular momentum in a precessing system].
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cripdyke
07/24/2007
Posts:17Avg Rating:
Re: Here's what I don't understand...
Your analysis is correct as far as it goes.
If you have a small Otto or Diesel engine, a large electric motor, and a battery that can run it for a short time, there is a rather large problem: how do you charge the battery?
The answer is that you are going to need some sort of an auxiliary power unit to supply either mechanical or electrical power to charge the battery and to help run the vehicle when the battery has been depleted.
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JRT
07/14/2008
Posts:4
>>> a SIMPLE solution for ELECTRIC CARS >>>
.
in my latest article ("Cellphone Battery Electric Cars") you can find a SIMPLE solution to the main problem of all Electric Cars: the (still) low autonomy
http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/033cellphoneCAR.html
.
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Gaetano Mara...
07/24/2007
Posts:102Avg Rating:
Lifestyle vs mpg
More important impact can be made by lifestyle choice. Live close to town, ride a bike, walk, buy local. So many get hyped up about mpg that they forget what makes the most impact.
While I do think the electric car technology is cool and important, you can make an impact today without waiting for the next generation of plug ins.
How about a solar array on the garage roof to charge the car while parked? That would be my dream.
But I would still ride a bike.....
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sroszko
07/24/2007
Posts:1
Re: Lifestyle vs mpg
I think you're entirely right. But perhaps it is also important to consider what the majority of people are likely actually to do as opposed to what they should be doing.
That Calif. car builder I mentioned above (no, I'm not an investor) makes essentially a duplicate of a production Lotus Exige. The gas-fired variety gets 23 city/29 hwy while its electric twin will travel considerably more than 200mi on a four-dollar charge. At current prices that's easily in excess of 100mpg, so you see the implications.
Incidentally, one of my old college chums installed a 24kw solar array at his home in FL. He likes the power bills much better now - I think it's only a connection charge. He's feeding excess power INTO the grid during the day, draws what he needs at night, the net is just about zero.
Overall, plug-in cars are a plus for the environment, despite the fact that they would increase the demand for electricity.
By Kevin Bullis
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
Plug-in hybrids, which use electricity from the grid to replace gasoline for daily driving, would cut gas consumption and save commuters from high fuel prices. But some experts have been concerned that switching from gas to electricity, much of which is generated from fossil fuels, would actually significantly increase pollution in some parts of the country, as opposed to decreasing it.
Battery power: Plug-in hybrids, like this concept car from General Motors, could help cut both gasoline consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions.
Credit: General Motors
A study released last week by the environmental group National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the largely utility-funded Electric Power Research Institute shows that plug-ins, once they're on the market, will significantly cut greenhouse gases. Across the country, the vehicles will on average also decrease other pollutants, but the impact in local areas will depend on the source of electricity.
In plug-in hybrids, a large battery pack that is recharged by plugging it in stores enough energy to power a car entirely, or almost entirely, with electricity for the first 40 miles or so of driving. For longer trips, the car reverts to conventional hybrid operation, relying largely on gasoline for power but improving efficiency: by storing energy from braking in the battery and using it for acceleration, for example.
The study shows that if plug-in hybrids are adopted widely in the United States, and if measures are taken to clean up power plants, by 2050, plug-in hybrids could reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 612 million metric tons, or roughly 5 percent of the total U.S. emissions expected in that time frame, according to Marcus Sarofim, a researcher at MIT's Joint Program for the Science and Policy of Global Change. That's a significant amount, he says, considering that transportation accounts for only about a third of the total greenhouse-gas emissions.
But if plug-in hybrids account for only a small part of the total vehicle sales in 2050 (about 20 percent, compared with 80 percent in the first scenario), and if little is done to improve pollution from power plants, the vehicles will still reduce greenhouse emissions by about 163 metric tons, according to the study.
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Alternative sources
I really do not know whether this is practical or not at this time, but I have always thought that a car, with its large flat areas consisting of the bonnet, roof and sides, are ideal places to incorporate solar panels / cells.
These could possibly provide some amount of on-going electric power to a vehicle that has to travel more than the 40 miles stated in the article. Another advantage is that during the day, at any given time, the roof plus one side at least would get direct sunlight.
Further, with the vehicle moving at typical speeds of 40 mph plus, vents that collect on-rushing air to drive miniature wind turbines possible?
This would decrease the load on large, centralised power plants like those stated.
Anyway, talk of timelines like 2050 etc scare me in to thinking of the type of world that we will be leaving for the next generation!
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deejay
07/24/2007
Posts:23Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
This is being done in competitions in Australia by one of the Universities. They already have solar powered cars which can travel long distances. The competition is a race across Australia. I think the problem currently is that the solar panels need so much surface area that there's only a driver area and it's tiny and cramped. However, this does show that the technology is already in place, and, coupled with other technologies, is viable.
http://www.unisa.edu.au/solarcar/
http://www.wsc.org.au/
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bj
07/24/2007
Posts:37Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
Boeing just hit forty percent efficiency with solar panels. One would think that a literal "sun roof" would recharge a hybrid (at least partially) while the car was parked. This, of course, provided it was in the open.
Envision parking garages with solar panels for a top roof...each of which went to plugs for people to charge their cars. One solar panel roof likely wouldn't charge all the cars. But still....
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Hardheadjarh...
07/26/2007
Posts:15Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
I just emailed Boeing about putting together some higher efficient cells and was told the cost currently would be prohibitive. I was trying to get 1 KW of cells into the area of a hood and top of a Saturn Station Wagon. My logic was during a 9 hour work day with 6 hours of good sun I would get 6 KWhr of energy. At 200 watts/mile that would drive the car ~ 30 miles. If the cost of cells around 30% efficient can get down to $5 per watt that makes a solar car a reality.
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Gypsy_EV
07/30/2007
Posts:15Avg Rating:
TANSTAAFL
Using "turbines over 40mph to recharge the batteries" (paraphrased) -- Good luck with that. Do that and make it work, and you've found a perpetual motion machine.
TANSTAAFL == There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
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jesup
07/24/2007
Posts:8Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
For southern regions of the US and other sunny climes, solar panels on PHEVs are eminently practical now and could displaced a portion of the battery pack while lessening GHGs vehicle weight and costs, especially if the panels were eligible for solar subsidies.
PHEV batteries have an installed cost about $1K per kWh with perhaps an 8-year warranty and store off-peak electricity which costs 6 – 10 ¢ per kWh. Thin film solar cells have an installed cost of $6K per peak kilowatt (kWp) with a 20-year warranty and, for cities in the lower tier of states, provide a daily average of 5 kWh per kWp at 0 ¢ per kWh. (ref. http://www.solarpanelsplus.com/solar-insolation-levels/ )
The kicker is variability of solar radiation, daily and seasonally. Other issue is that the horizontal area on a medium sized car is limited - about 3 sq. meters and thin film solar cells have an efficiency of about 10% (less for a-Si; more for CIGS and CdTe). So, this means that only 300 watts of peak power, or an average of 1.5 kWh daily, is available using thin film cells. Crystalline silicon solar panels have an efficiency of about 20% but their integration into the car's skin would be more difficult than with flexible thin film panels.
(1.5 kWh would translate to about 4 or 5 miles of travel.)
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pmcha5e
07/24/2007
Posts:1
Re: Alternative sources
We must be practical. Who would buy a car that would lose its charge if parked in a garage, or in the shade?
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lambdafunds
07/25/2007
Posts:9Avg Rating:
Re: Alternative sources
"Further, with the vehicle moving at typical speeds of 40 mph plus, vents that collect on-rushing air to drive miniature wind turbines possible?"
I believe that you have just suggested a perpetual motion machine. :-D
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JRT
07/14/2008
Posts:4
Couple with wind power
This makes alot of sense to me. There is huge untapped potential in wind energy. Germany, Spain, Denmark, Scotland are way ahead of us (see the sponsor adds for Tech Review from Spain Technology for good links. With their wind at bay, I am baffled why Europe has not led the charge on plug-in cars (no pun intended !) Seriously, look at how wind energy stocks have soared with wind production increasing 20-30 % a year in W. Europe with the U.S. not far behind and China making major commitments. All of the technology for both electricity production and plug-in cars is in place. With no emmissions this is clearly a win-win for everyone, with money to be made from improvement in transferring the energy and developing/manufacturing components, for which there is a shortage right now. Energy from tides, waves and solar are not far behind. Burning things like ethanol is a waste of farmland, causes emmissions, uses water, is fraught with waste issues, and is increasing the price of food. I want to know why the U.S. is not spear-heading both plug-in vehicles and wind production simultaneously. There's an open invite here to make some serious dollars. HS
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hansy
07/24/2007
Posts:2Avg Rating:
Re: Couple with wind power
I see what youre saying & agree. I think one of the major problems with power in the USA, as well as most places, is that it is produced in one place & consumed in another, and it is wasteful & expensive to keep moving it back and forth between places. If we can produce it & consume it in the same place (as close as possible) we are way ahead of where we are today. Now, thinking on those lines, if we can have small wind turbines on the roofs of people's houses that plug-in to their panel to power the house or alternatively power the car plugged-in in the garage, to charge it at night (when consumption by the house might be lower) then we would really have something. I am the (somewhat smug) new owner of a Prius & it has changed my life in three weeks. I already drive slower (yes, grandpa was right, it only changes a couple minutes of arrival time, at most) is safer, and uses far less energy then jamming it at every light & passing every car you can & all that nonsense. Combined with the nearly 50 mpg I get (not quite but almost) I really want to get it over 50 a regular basis to really feel great. If the car could be plugged-in as night, I'm thinking we would be there easily. Please some one more brilliant than I do this for us. I will buy it. Thanks. Peace. Jason Sjobeck
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Sjobeck
07/30/2007
Posts:17Avg Rating:
Re: Couple with wind power
I could not agree more with your comments. Electric Cars are the future if we want a sustainable way of living. It means energy independence, better on the environment, and less costs to fill-up than petro/oil. Don't even get me started on biofuels. They are a joke when comapred to electric cars with electricity from a clean energy source. We can always build another wind plant or solar plant, but oil resources are finite and from many countries that we should not be sending our money too.
It's too bad the U.S. didn't pour more resources into battery technology (companies like A123)and wind and solar earlier. We could have taken the $500 Billion spent on Iraq to secure oil and built some renewable energy plants instead, which would make alot more sense. Hopefully our Congress will do what's right here rather than what the special interests want, and we'll be charging in our cars from cleaner, more sustainable energy sources in the future.
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kdigiovi
07/30/2007
Posts:1
Power distribution
If they're not careful, this could require huge new power-distribution powerlines, cutting huge swaths through formerly forested/protected areas (and the Federal government is trying to take control of this away from the states).
You'd want the power stations near the use, but most of those areas are both a) expensive, and b) unlikely to be easy to site in due to NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard - see the Cape wind power fiasco). And then there's the environmental damage of mining all that additional coal (see West Virgina), and acid rain issues (especially if the new plants aren't cleaner, though perhaps using the existing pollution-trading methods may help).
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jesup
07/24/2007
Posts:8Avg Rating:
Re: Power distribution
If that was necessary it certainly reduces the appeal this technology
has to me but one would hope that - especially with batteries improving - plug-in are mostly plugged in during the night when the demand for electric power is lower anyway.
Christoph
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cwl
07/24/2007
Posts:2
Gasoline vs Electricity
The standard wisdom is to get rid of any use of gasoline, but when you compare the amound of CO2 produced by a coal fired plant to that of a Prius, the Prius is actually cleaner at 50 mpg. If you add in replacing the gas engine with the high compression engine, you could get up to 200 mpg. Add in ultra high capacitors and that 200 mpg could reach 800 mpg. At some point in there, the Prius starts becoming cleaner then a natural gas plant. Change the batteries to lithium ions that can recharge in 6 minutes, and gas mileage improves again. While I seriously doubt we will see 800 mpg cars, it does seem that 400 mgp is quite possible, and that trying to make 50 yr policy decisions at the start of a new technology may not be the smartest move.
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tsaidak
07/24/2007
Posts:13Avg Rating:
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
I'll take the full-electric approach over hybrid technologies. Primarily because they're perfectly clean, and because I am told we are more effective in controlling emissions and implementing other efficiencies at the central power-generation facilities than in millions of individual owner-maintained automobiles.
One entry into that market already on the road is the Tesla. The design is poised to take ready advantage of any progress in electrical storage media, but in the meantime it's a sharp, fast, uncompromising design and free of emissions.
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burnside
07/24/2007
Posts:7Avg Rating:
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
The problem with electric vehicles is - what happens if you need to go one kilometer farther than the max range on a charge? With a hybrid vehicle you not only have a range of about 500 miles per tank, but the time to refill is 3-5 minutes. Typical electric vehicles have a range of less than 200 miles, and it takes hours to recharge.
Thus you force people into a two-vehicle strategy - one for short trips, another for long.
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cullen
07/25/2007
Posts:3
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
Most trips are not that long. True, the pure electric does not make the perfect cross-country vehicle, but by far most people never leave a small radius of geography. And ... let us start some where, yes, get some momentum, experience, shared knowledge, popularity, design, support, funding, science, innovation, and then conquer that problem for the long-term.
It is no surprise that the short-term mentality of US auto makers (who ought to be ashamed of themselves on so many levels, not just this issue) are no where on this one. (We need all the fat white 58 year old men holding out for retirement in Detroit to just get out of the way & let this generation who is raring & ready to do this thing get on with it)
I drive around Oregon & am stunned how many hybrids there are ... let us take this to the next level.
Thanks.
Jason Sjobeck
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Sjobeck
07/30/2007
Posts:17Avg Rating:
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
I can only speak to my own experience. While I freely admit that most days my trips are not that long, I do make trips of 500 miles or more. A current generation pure-play electric vehicle simply doesn't work in those situations. I am then forced into the choice of either owning another gasoline vehicle for those situations or renting. Hybrid vehicles - particularly in my area - are pretty decent choices (which I've owned for 4 years now).
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cullen
07/30/2007
Posts:3
Re: Gasoline vs Electricity
I can almost see getting close to 200 mpg but 400, no way. The body is not streamlined enough and it is too heave, too much friction in its current configuration. It would need to be lighter and completely electric drive, no friction breaks and lower drag bearings. Granted some world champion cars get over 4000 mpg but they are a one passenger vehicle with rock hard tires. I still like an all electric and work on charging it with wind or solar. If the Ultra capacitor did come to pass all the better for the EV.
Either way it would be a huge improvement to current choices.
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Gypsy_EV
07/31/2007
Posts:15Avg Rating:
Here's what I don't understand...
I'm not an auto engineer by any stretch. Just a software engineer who finds the topic interesting. However, I've always wondered why I've never seen a series hybrid built with a small engine highly tuned for efficiency paired with a medium size battery pack. The engine, I would think, would need to generate just enough power to cruise the car along at 80mph on the interstate and the battery pack would only need to hold enough juice to buffer the engine from the powertrain (probably less than 50% the normal size). I think that setup (in a Toyota Camry for example) would get in excess of 60mph and would meet the driving habits of over 99.9% of the population. So, what am I not understanding?
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RichardL
07/24/2007
Posts:3Avg Rating:
Re: Here's what I don't understand...
you are largely correct.....altho' what you would really want to use is a gas turbine which is very efficient but can really only be run at two speeds, on full or off....you can turn it off when it reaches 80% or so that breaking energy isnt wasted...the battery pack might have to be bigger than you think tho. Still, this is by far the most inherently efficient setup we can easily create w/ current tech. It is a wonder to me why it hasn't been done myself. The only thing i can think of is that there might be problems handling the precession or the turbine, but that doesn't seem too difficult to handle.....modern chainsaws have systems to dampen the effects of precession [really the effects of angular momentum in a precessing system].
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cripdyke
07/24/2007
Posts:17Avg Rating:
Re: Here's what I don't understand...
Your analysis is correct as far as it goes.
If you have a small Otto or Diesel engine, a large electric motor, and a battery that can run it for a short time, there is a rather large problem: how do you charge the battery?
The answer is that you are going to need some sort of an auxiliary power unit to supply either mechanical or electrical power to charge the battery and to help run the vehicle when the battery has been depleted.
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JRT
07/14/2008
Posts:4
>>> a SIMPLE solution for ELECTRIC CARS >>>
.
in my latest article ("Cellphone Battery Electric Cars") you can find a SIMPLE solution to the main problem of all Electric Cars: the (still) low autonomy
http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/033cellphoneCAR.html
.
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Gaetano Mara...
07/24/2007
Posts:102Avg Rating:
Lifestyle vs mpg
More important impact can be made by lifestyle choice. Live close to town, ride a bike, walk, buy local. So many get hyped up about mpg that they forget what makes the most impact.
While I do think the electric car technology is cool and important, you can make an impact today without waiting for the next generation of plug ins.
How about a solar array on the garage roof to charge the car while parked? That would be my dream.
But I would still ride a bike.....
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sroszko
07/24/2007
Posts:1
Re: Lifestyle vs mpg
I think you're entirely right. But perhaps it is also important to consider what the majority of people are likely actually to do as opposed to what they should be doing.
That Calif. car builder I mentioned above (no, I'm not an investor) makes essentially a duplicate of a production Lotus Exige. The gas-fired variety gets 23 city/29 hwy while its electric twin will travel considerably more than 200mi on a four-dollar charge. At current prices that's easily in excess of 100mpg, so you see the implications.
Incidentally, one of my old college chums installed a 24kw solar array at his home in FL. He likes the power bills much better now - I think it's only a connection charge. He's feeding excess power INTO the grid during the day, draws what he needs at night, the net is just about zero.
Pickens Plan Particulars - Another View
The Wind Cries 'Bailout!'
By Steven Milloy
July 10, 2008
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens launched a media blitz this week to announce his plan for us "to escape the grip of foreign oil." Now he's got himself stuck between a crock and a wind farm.
Announced via TV commercials, media interviews, a Wall Street Journal op-ed (July 9) and a web site, Pickens wants to substitute wind power for the natural gas currently used to produce about 22 percent of our electricity and then to substitute natural gas for the conventional gasoline currently used to power vehicles.
Pickens claims this plan can be accomplished within 10 years, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce the cost of transportation, create thousands of new jobs, reduce our carbon footprint, and "build a bridge to the future, giving is time to develop new technologies."
It sounds great and gets even better, according to Pickens.
Don't sweat the cost, he says, "It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation."
What's not to like?
First, it's worth noting Pickens' claim made in the op-ed that his plan requires no new government regulation. Two sentences later, however, he calls on Congress to "mandate" wind power and its subsidies.
Next, Pickens relies on a 2008 Department of Energy study claiming the U.S. could generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind by 2030.
Setting aside the fact that the report was produced in consultation with the wind industry, the 20-by-2030 goal is quite fanciful. Even if wind technology significantly improves, electrical transmission systems (how electricity gets from the power source to you) are greatly expanded, and environmental obstacles (like environmentalists who protest wind turbines as eyesores and bird-killing machines) can be overcome, the viability of wind power depends on where, when and how strong the wind blows -- none of which are predictable.
Wind farm siting depends on the long-term forecasting of wind patterns -- but climate is always changing. When it comes to wind power, it is not simply, "build it and the wind will come."
Even the momentary loss of wind can be a problem. As Reuters reported on Feb. 27, "Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency." The electric grid operator was forced to curtail 1,100 megawatts of power to customers within 10 minutes.
Wind isn't a standalone power source. It needs a Plan B for when the wind "just don't blow."
This contrasts with coal- or gas-fired electrical power which can be produced on demand and as needed. A great benefit of modern technology is that it liberates us from Mother Nature's harsh whims. Pickens wants to re-enslave us with 12th century technology.
Then there's the cost of the 20-by-2030 goal -- $43 billion more than the cost of non-wind assets, according to DOE -- and this doesn't include many billions of dollars more for additional transmission lines.
Could the 20-by-2030 goal even be accomplished?
According to Electric Utility Week (June 9), a DOE official informed attendees at a June wind industry meeting that reaching the goal would entail replicating the entire existing U.S. wind system (about 17,000 megawatts of capacity constructed over the past decade) every year starting in 2018.
What about Pickens' plan to shift us into natural gas vehicles?
Well, they cost a lot more: an extra $3,000 to $6,000 for cars and $30,000 to $40,000for buses and trucks. There are only about 1,300 natural gas refueling stations in the U.S., as compared to about 180,000 conventional gas stations -- that's a lot of infrastructure to build and finance.
Will Pickens' plan reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Doubtful.
Even if the fleet of natural gas-powered vehicles is enlarged, the bulk of existing and new vehicles will continue to depend for the foreseeable future on gasoline. Americans currently own about 260 million vehicles, a total that grows by more than 3million new vehicles every year. Turnover is low as about 60 percent are owned for more than seven years.
Besides, as demand for natural gas increases, so will prices. In the Washington, D.C. area, natural gas is already about two-thirds as costly as gasoline -- and that's with hardly any demand.
None of these facts and circumstances are new to Pickens. So what's up with him?
Not only does Pickens' firm, BP capital, have significant investments in natural gas, but last June he announced plans to build the world's largest wind farm in west Texas, capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.
The federal government currently subsidizes wind farm operators with a tax credit worth 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour -- potentially making for a tidy annual taxpayer gift to Pickens based on his anticipated capacity.
But all is not well in Wind Subsidy-land.
Since Congress didn't renew the wind subsidy as part of the 2007 energy bill, it will expire at the end of this year unless reauthorized.
Subsidies are perhaps more important to the wind industry that wind itself. Without them, wind can't compete against fossil fuel-generated power. As pointed out by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (July 9), "In 1999, 2001 and 2003, when Congress temporarily killed the credits, the number of new turbines dropped dramatically."
It's little wonder that Pickens is waging a $58 million PR campaign to promote his plan. If it works, his short-term gain will be saving the tax credit and his wind farm investment. In the long-term, he stands to line his already overflowing pockets with hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
What will the rest of us get from this T. Boone-doggle? That's anybody's guess, but it probably won't be cheaper energy, energy independence or a cleaner environment.
By Steven Milloy
July 10, 2008
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens launched a media blitz this week to announce his plan for us "to escape the grip of foreign oil." Now he's got himself stuck between a crock and a wind farm.
Announced via TV commercials, media interviews, a Wall Street Journal op-ed (July 9) and a web site, Pickens wants to substitute wind power for the natural gas currently used to produce about 22 percent of our electricity and then to substitute natural gas for the conventional gasoline currently used to power vehicles.
Pickens claims this plan can be accomplished within 10 years, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, reduce the cost of transportation, create thousands of new jobs, reduce our carbon footprint, and "build a bridge to the future, giving is time to develop new technologies."
It sounds great and gets even better, according to Pickens.
Don't sweat the cost, he says, "It will be accomplished solely through private investment with no new consumer or corporate taxes or government regulation."
What's not to like?
First, it's worth noting Pickens' claim made in the op-ed that his plan requires no new government regulation. Two sentences later, however, he calls on Congress to "mandate" wind power and its subsidies.
Next, Pickens relies on a 2008 Department of Energy study claiming the U.S. could generate 20 percent of its electricity from wind by 2030.
Setting aside the fact that the report was produced in consultation with the wind industry, the 20-by-2030 goal is quite fanciful. Even if wind technology significantly improves, electrical transmission systems (how electricity gets from the power source to you) are greatly expanded, and environmental obstacles (like environmentalists who protest wind turbines as eyesores and bird-killing machines) can be overcome, the viability of wind power depends on where, when and how strong the wind blows -- none of which are predictable.
Wind farm siting depends on the long-term forecasting of wind patterns -- but climate is always changing. When it comes to wind power, it is not simply, "build it and the wind will come."
Even the momentary loss of wind can be a problem. As Reuters reported on Feb. 27, "Loss of wind causes Texas power grid emergency." The electric grid operator was forced to curtail 1,100 megawatts of power to customers within 10 minutes.
Wind isn't a standalone power source. It needs a Plan B for when the wind "just don't blow."
This contrasts with coal- or gas-fired electrical power which can be produced on demand and as needed. A great benefit of modern technology is that it liberates us from Mother Nature's harsh whims. Pickens wants to re-enslave us with 12th century technology.
Then there's the cost of the 20-by-2030 goal -- $43 billion more than the cost of non-wind assets, according to DOE -- and this doesn't include many billions of dollars more for additional transmission lines.
Could the 20-by-2030 goal even be accomplished?
According to Electric Utility Week (June 9), a DOE official informed attendees at a June wind industry meeting that reaching the goal would entail replicating the entire existing U.S. wind system (about 17,000 megawatts of capacity constructed over the past decade) every year starting in 2018.
What about Pickens' plan to shift us into natural gas vehicles?
Well, they cost a lot more: an extra $3,000 to $6,000 for cars and $30,000 to $40,000for buses and trucks. There are only about 1,300 natural gas refueling stations in the U.S., as compared to about 180,000 conventional gas stations -- that's a lot of infrastructure to build and finance.
Will Pickens' plan reduce our dependence on foreign oil? Doubtful.
Even if the fleet of natural gas-powered vehicles is enlarged, the bulk of existing and new vehicles will continue to depend for the foreseeable future on gasoline. Americans currently own about 260 million vehicles, a total that grows by more than 3million new vehicles every year. Turnover is low as about 60 percent are owned for more than seven years.
Besides, as demand for natural gas increases, so will prices. In the Washington, D.C. area, natural gas is already about two-thirds as costly as gasoline -- and that's with hardly any demand.
None of these facts and circumstances are new to Pickens. So what's up with him?
Not only does Pickens' firm, BP capital, have significant investments in natural gas, but last June he announced plans to build the world's largest wind farm in west Texas, capable of producing 4,000 megawatts of electricity.
The federal government currently subsidizes wind farm operators with a tax credit worth 1.9 cents per kilowatt hour -- potentially making for a tidy annual taxpayer gift to Pickens based on his anticipated capacity.
But all is not well in Wind Subsidy-land.
Since Congress didn't renew the wind subsidy as part of the 2007 energy bill, it will expire at the end of this year unless reauthorized.
Subsidies are perhaps more important to the wind industry that wind itself. Without them, wind can't compete against fossil fuel-generated power. As pointed out by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (July 9), "In 1999, 2001 and 2003, when Congress temporarily killed the credits, the number of new turbines dropped dramatically."
It's little wonder that Pickens is waging a $58 million PR campaign to promote his plan. If it works, his short-term gain will be saving the tax credit and his wind farm investment. In the long-term, he stands to line his already overflowing pockets with hard-earned taxpayer dollars.
What will the rest of us get from this T. Boone-doggle? That's anybody's guess, but it probably won't be cheaper energy, energy independence or a cleaner environment.
More Info On The Pickens Plan
Pickens Gives New Meaning to 'Self-Government'
By Steven Milloy
July 31, 2008
The more you learn about T. Boone Pickens’ plan to switch America to wind power, the more you realize that he seems willing to say and do just about anything to make another billion or two.
This column previously discussed the plan’s technical and economic shortcomings and marketing ruses. Today, we’ll look into the diabolical machinations behind it.
Simply put, Pickens’ pitch is “embrace wind power to help break our ‘addiction’ to foreign oil.” There is, however, another intriguing component to Pickens’ plan that goes unmentioned in his TV commercials, media interviews and web site -- water rights, which he owns more of than any other American.
Pickens hopes that his recent $100 million investment in 200,000 acres worth of groundwater rights in Roberts County, Texas, located over the Ogallala Aquifer, will earn him $1 billion. But there’s more to earning such a profit than simply acquiring the water. Rights-of-way must be purchased to install pipelines, and opposition from anti-development environmental groups must be overcome. Here’s where it gets interesting, according to information compiled by the Water Research Group, a small grassroots group focusing on local water issues in Texas.
Purchasing rights-of-way is often expensive and time-consuming -- and what if landowners won’t sell? While private entities may be frustrated, governments can exercise eminent domain to compel sales. This is Pickens’ route of choice. But wait, you say, Pickens is not a government entity. How can he use eminent domain? Are you sitting down?
At Pickens’ behest, the Texas legislature changed state law to allow the two residents of an 8-acre parcel of land in Roberts County to vote to create a municipal water district, a government agency with eminent domain powers. Who were the voters? They were Pickens’ wife and the manager of Pickens’ nearby ranch. And who sits on the board of directors of this water district? They are the parcel’s three other non-resident landowners, all Pickens’ employees.
A member of a local water conservation board told Bloomberg News that, “[Pickens has] obtained the right of eminent domain like he was a big city. It’s supposed to be for the public good, not a private company.”
What’s this got to do with Pickens’ wind-power plan? Just as he needs pipelines to sell his water, he also needs transmission lines to sell his wind-generated power. Rights of way for transmission lines are also acquired through eminent domain -- and, once again, the Texas legislature has come to Pickens’ aid.
Earlier this year, Texas changed its law to allow renewable energy projects (like Pickens’ wind farm) to obtain rights-of-way by piggybacking on a water district’s eminent domain power. So Pickens can now use his water district’s authority to also condemn land for his future wind farm’s transmission lines.
Who will pay for the rights-of-way and the transmission lines and pipelines? Thanks to another gift from Texas politicians, Pickens’ water district can sell tax-free, taxpayer-guaranteed municipal bonds to finance the $2.2 billion cost of the water pipeline. And then earlier this month, the Texas legislature voted to spend $4.93 billion for wind farm transmission lines. While Pickens has denied that this money is earmarked for him, he nevertheless is building the largest wind farm in the world.
Despite this legislative largesse, a fly in the ointment remains.
Although Pickens hopes to sell as much as $165 million worth of water annually to Dallas alone, no city in Texas has signed up yet -- partly because they don’t yet need the water and partly because of resentment against water profiteering.
Enter the Sierra Club.
While Green groups support wind power, “the privatization of water is an entirely different thing,” says the Sierra Club. Moreover, the activist group has long opposed further exploitation of the very groundwater Pickens wants to use -- the Ogallala Aquifer.
“The source of drinking water and irrigation for Plains residents from Nebraska to Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer is one of the world's largest -- as well as one of the most rapidly dissipating… If current irrigation practices continue, agribusiness will deplete the Ogallala Aquifer in the next century,” says the Sierra Club.
In March 2002, the Sierra Club opposed the construction of a slaughterhouse in Pampa, Texas, because it would require a mere 275 million gallons per year from the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet Pickens wants to sell 65 billion gallons of water per year -- to Dallas alone. In a 2004 lamentation about local government facilitation of Pickens’ plan for the Ogallala, the Sierra Club slammed Pickens as a “junk bond dealer” who wanted to make “Blue Gold” from the Ogallala.
But while the Sierra Club can’t seem to do anything about Pickens’ influence with state legislators, they do have enough influence to make his water politically unpotable. This opposition may soon abate, however, now that Pickens has buddied up with Sierra Club president Carl Pope.
As noted last week, Pope now flies in Pickens’ private jet and publicly lauds him. The two are newly-minted “friends,” since Pope needs the famous Republican oilman to lend propaganda value to the Sierra Club’s anti-oil agenda and Pickens needs Pope to ease up on the Ogallala water opposition.
This alliance isn’t sitting well with everyone on the Left.
A TreeHugger.com writer recently observed, “… I am left asking myself why the green media have neglected [the water] aspect of Pickens’ wind-farm plans? Have we been so distracted by the prospect of Texas’ renewable energy portfolio growing by 4000 megawatts that we are willing to overlook some potentially dodgy aspects to the project?”
It shouldn’t sit well with the rest of us either. Pickens has gamed Texas for his own ends, and now he’s trying to game the rest of us, too. Worse, his gamesmanship includes lending his billionaire resources, prominent stature and feudal powers bestowed upon him by the Texas legislature to help the Greens gain control over the U.S. energy supply.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
By Steven Milloy
July 31, 2008
The more you learn about T. Boone Pickens’ plan to switch America to wind power, the more you realize that he seems willing to say and do just about anything to make another billion or two.
This column previously discussed the plan’s technical and economic shortcomings and marketing ruses. Today, we’ll look into the diabolical machinations behind it.
Simply put, Pickens’ pitch is “embrace wind power to help break our ‘addiction’ to foreign oil.” There is, however, another intriguing component to Pickens’ plan that goes unmentioned in his TV commercials, media interviews and web site -- water rights, which he owns more of than any other American.
Pickens hopes that his recent $100 million investment in 200,000 acres worth of groundwater rights in Roberts County, Texas, located over the Ogallala Aquifer, will earn him $1 billion. But there’s more to earning such a profit than simply acquiring the water. Rights-of-way must be purchased to install pipelines, and opposition from anti-development environmental groups must be overcome. Here’s where it gets interesting, according to information compiled by the Water Research Group, a small grassroots group focusing on local water issues in Texas.
Purchasing rights-of-way is often expensive and time-consuming -- and what if landowners won’t sell? While private entities may be frustrated, governments can exercise eminent domain to compel sales. This is Pickens’ route of choice. But wait, you say, Pickens is not a government entity. How can he use eminent domain? Are you sitting down?
At Pickens’ behest, the Texas legislature changed state law to allow the two residents of an 8-acre parcel of land in Roberts County to vote to create a municipal water district, a government agency with eminent domain powers. Who were the voters? They were Pickens’ wife and the manager of Pickens’ nearby ranch. And who sits on the board of directors of this water district? They are the parcel’s three other non-resident landowners, all Pickens’ employees.
A member of a local water conservation board told Bloomberg News that, “[Pickens has] obtained the right of eminent domain like he was a big city. It’s supposed to be for the public good, not a private company.”
What’s this got to do with Pickens’ wind-power plan? Just as he needs pipelines to sell his water, he also needs transmission lines to sell his wind-generated power. Rights of way for transmission lines are also acquired through eminent domain -- and, once again, the Texas legislature has come to Pickens’ aid.
Earlier this year, Texas changed its law to allow renewable energy projects (like Pickens’ wind farm) to obtain rights-of-way by piggybacking on a water district’s eminent domain power. So Pickens can now use his water district’s authority to also condemn land for his future wind farm’s transmission lines.
Who will pay for the rights-of-way and the transmission lines and pipelines? Thanks to another gift from Texas politicians, Pickens’ water district can sell tax-free, taxpayer-guaranteed municipal bonds to finance the $2.2 billion cost of the water pipeline. And then earlier this month, the Texas legislature voted to spend $4.93 billion for wind farm transmission lines. While Pickens has denied that this money is earmarked for him, he nevertheless is building the largest wind farm in the world.
Despite this legislative largesse, a fly in the ointment remains.
Although Pickens hopes to sell as much as $165 million worth of water annually to Dallas alone, no city in Texas has signed up yet -- partly because they don’t yet need the water and partly because of resentment against water profiteering.
Enter the Sierra Club.
While Green groups support wind power, “the privatization of water is an entirely different thing,” says the Sierra Club. Moreover, the activist group has long opposed further exploitation of the very groundwater Pickens wants to use -- the Ogallala Aquifer.
“The source of drinking water and irrigation for Plains residents from Nebraska to Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer is one of the world's largest -- as well as one of the most rapidly dissipating… If current irrigation practices continue, agribusiness will deplete the Ogallala Aquifer in the next century,” says the Sierra Club.
In March 2002, the Sierra Club opposed the construction of a slaughterhouse in Pampa, Texas, because it would require a mere 275 million gallons per year from the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet Pickens wants to sell 65 billion gallons of water per year -- to Dallas alone. In a 2004 lamentation about local government facilitation of Pickens’ plan for the Ogallala, the Sierra Club slammed Pickens as a “junk bond dealer” who wanted to make “Blue Gold” from the Ogallala.
But while the Sierra Club can’t seem to do anything about Pickens’ influence with state legislators, they do have enough influence to make his water politically unpotable. This opposition may soon abate, however, now that Pickens has buddied up with Sierra Club president Carl Pope.
As noted last week, Pope now flies in Pickens’ private jet and publicly lauds him. The two are newly-minted “friends,” since Pope needs the famous Republican oilman to lend propaganda value to the Sierra Club’s anti-oil agenda and Pickens needs Pope to ease up on the Ogallala water opposition.
This alliance isn’t sitting well with everyone on the Left.
A TreeHugger.com writer recently observed, “… I am left asking myself why the green media have neglected [the water] aspect of Pickens’ wind-farm plans? Have we been so distracted by the prospect of Texas’ renewable energy portfolio growing by 4000 megawatts that we are willing to overlook some potentially dodgy aspects to the project?”
It shouldn’t sit well with the rest of us either. Pickens has gamed Texas for his own ends, and now he’s trying to game the rest of us, too. Worse, his gamesmanship includes lending his billionaire resources, prominent stature and feudal powers bestowed upon him by the Texas legislature to help the Greens gain control over the U.S. energy supply.
Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com. He is a junk science expert, and advocate of free enterprise and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute
The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008 - Wired
The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008
By Alexis Madrigal December 29, 2008 | 11:29 am | Categories: Earth Science, Energy, Environment
Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas.
But there’s trouble on the horizon. The economy is hovering somewhere between catatonic and hebephrenic, and funding for the big plans that green tech companies laid in 2008 might be a lot harder to come by in 2009. Recessions haven’t always been the best times for environmentally friendly technologies as consumers and corporations cut discretionary spending on ethical premiums.
Still, green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR
With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling’s company Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country. (Image: Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique)
9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON
Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil —
so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.
It turns out, however, that it’s not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth’s crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.
That’s where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play,
ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he’d made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier — and therefore, more cost effective.
Perhaps better still, Yaghi’s lab’s technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above. (Image: Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA)
8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL
On the federal and state levels, several historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills passed over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee’s ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be settled).
In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past.
7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR
In July, MIT chemist Daniel Nocera announced that he’d created a catalyst that could drop the cost of extracting the hydrogen and oxygen from water.
Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar’s), the system could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.
"You’ve made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT told Wired.com. "I’ve gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."
The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.
6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That’s why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy.
Of course, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.
5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS
When most people think of harnessing the sun’s power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity.
Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first serious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource’s Israeli demo plant is shown above. (Image: BrightSource)
4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE
President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White
House.
That’s because green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are serious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don’t seem quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It’s happened before, after all.
Back in the ’70s, geopolitical events sent the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White House. The green tech industry collapsed.
History has given U.S. alternative energy research a second chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result. (Image: DOE)
3. SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG
Every clean tech advocate’s dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility, which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities.
Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That’s the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV’s Erik Straser.
"[It's the] first time in industry a single tool with a 1GW throughput," Straser wrote in an e-mail. "It’s a key part of how the company is achieving grid parity with coal."
2. PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES
Green technologies are dime a dozen, but a business model that could allow an entirely new, green infrastructure to be built is a rare thing.
Doing just that is the centerpiece of Sun Microsystems’ SAP veteran Shai Agassi’s vision for Project Better Place, a scheme that would distribute charging and swappable battery stations throughout smallish geographies like Israel, Hawaii and San Francisco.
So far, there’s very little steel in the ground, but in early December, the company’s first charging location opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agassi’s plan is one of several projects — like new biofuels rail terminals — that could create fundamentally new energy ecosystems.
Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University, likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric.
1. CALERA’S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS
Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year.
But here’s the reason: making cement — and many other materials —
takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels.
Calera’s technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting. By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered.
With more than 2.3 billion tons of cement produced each year, reversing the carbon-balance of the world’s cement would be a solution that’s the scale of the world’s climate change problem.
In August, the company opened its first demonstration site next to Dynegy’s Moss Landing power plant in California, pictured here.
See Also:
Top 10 New Organisms of 2008
Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008
Only Greentech Can Save U.S. Economy, Says Über-Investor
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook.
Tags: Chemistry, Clean Tech, Climate, Engineering, Geology, Science, Survival, Sustainability
Posted by: allen | 12/29/08 | 12:01 pm
Isn’t Pickens’ multi-billion dollar grab for tax dollars, err, wind project DOA with the financial bailout? God, I hope so.
Posted by: John Carter | 12/29/08 | 12:14 pm
This is a great overview, if you want to learn and profit from the rapidly changing landscape of greentech, look no further than:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/
Posted by: gaetano marano - ghostNASA.com | 12/29/08 | 12:17 pm
.
………………………………………
.
I agree with the “battery swap” since I’ve ALREADY suggested in MY July 23, 2007 “cellphoneCAR” article:
.
http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/033cellphoneCAR.html
.
then posted in July 24, 2007 in a comment in this Technology Review article:
.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19085/
.
it’s a great idea to solve the main electric cars’ problem: the (4+ hours) too long recharge time but it’s NOT a “Shai Agassi’s vision” NOR a “Better Place project” (a company born LATER)
.
“sell electric cars without batteries and just swap them” was/is/will be an idea of MINE, while, the only “vision” Mr. Agassi has (probably) had is the READING of MY article or some of my comments and posts on Technology Review and several other forums and blogs!
.
Posted by: Joe Stanley | 12/29/08 | 1:17 pm
This is an excellent review of the Green Market in 2008. 2009 would be a turning point for the green economy!
Posted by: Joe Stanley | 12/29/08 | 1:19 pm
This is an excellent review of the Green Market in 2008. 2009 would be a turning point for the green economy! Technologies such as the solar cell and solar thermal plants should be developed further.
———————
http://www.greeneconomyinitiative.com
Posted by: sci_guy | 12/29/08 | 1:28 pm
@gaetano marano: The conspiracy against you continues I see. Hopefully the dastardly villans will soon be crushed. I will you Godspeed….LOL. Nutcase….
Posted by: gaetano marano - ghostNASA.com | 12/29/08 | 1:55 pm
@ sci_guy
generally talking, those who have MANY ideas always are systematically plundered by those who do not have NO ONE good idea!
.
however, in my “cellphoneCAR” article there is HALF of MY idea, so, they just have HALF of the “access code” to succeed in this project… .
Posted by: taoist | 12/29/08 | 2:04 pm
You’re actually trying to cite Congress’ actions this past year as a good thing for anything (item #8)?
Congress’ actions, especially Chris Dodd’s and Barney Frank’s, are directly responsible for the financial disaster that our economy has become, and the porkfest spending disasters that all of the bailout bills have been.
When the economy goes south, luxuries are the first thing to go, and make no mistake, environmental spending is a luxury.
As for the EPA’s freeze on coal plants, until we actually start using alternatives able to provide baseline power such as nuclear, and, yes, (clean) coal, all we do by restricting ourselves from any energy source is give ourselves more economic trouble down the road.
Posted by: Matt | 12/29/08 | 3:08 pm
Hi, sorry to do this, but spotted an error… Shai Agassi is an SAP veteran not their competitor Sun.
Posted by: aromahand | 12/29/08 | 3:48 pm
amazing breakthroughs!
thanks so much for all the wisdom
aromahand
Posted by: Eric | 12/29/08 | 4:02 pm
I’m surprised that Wired failed to mention the vast amount of underwater renewable energy sources that are coming to the fore. Its a fact that wind turbines are practically useless and only serve as feel-good machines for green fanatics. They cost millions of dollars to erect, maintain, and replace, all the while producing very little energy at all. Water produces much more torque, which equals substantially more energy. We should look into aquatic solutions because water covers 70% of the planet!
Posted by: Cinch | 12/29/08 | 4:15 pm
There are no technologies listed here that produces a good EROEI number. Consequently, most of these projects will become deadends or they won’t ever scale up.
Posted by: John K. Wright | 12/29/08 | 5:07 pm
There is a new fuel additive on the market that is a green product, it is called Efuel, from Fuel Legacy, you can take a look at this product at http://www.fuellegacy.com/kensgreenway
Take a look and see if this product can help cars and trucks to burn cleaner for a healther tommorrow.
Posted by: Ross | 12/29/08 | 5:29 pm
Nothing really exciting to see here. Catalyst guy especially is kind of a joke.
Nuclear power is still the way to go…
Posted by: lordmorgul | 12/29/08 | 5:31 pm
HAHAH. Picking a ‘greenie’ to head DOE is a ‘tech breakthrough’?? Way to make this article worthless.
Posted by: zeke | 12/29/08 | 5:33 pm
we don’t need ads for snake-oil fuel additives, thanks
Wired — please ditch them
Posted by: ..What Was Start Learning..It Was End Of Equations.. | 12/29/08 | 5:48 pm
..What Was Start Learning..
..It was End Of Equations..
..This remind me of, what was tools makers are griping two different markets..I like the tool and drill for the bankings..And some lost in tools for home industry, before market home leaving..Some tools for most lady driving big buck corps..I know many people looking at lost and every other ladies and everyone can use the code systems..
Posted by: Justin | 12/29/08 | 5:50 pm
I’m not entirely sure it fits into Green Tech, specifically, but what about Daniel Burd’s “using bacteria to decompose plastic bag” project/discovery?
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/teen-decomposes.html
Posted by: username | 12/29/08 | 6:42 pm
Article on solar houses, solar water heaters, or indoor sunlighting might be interesting
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | 12/29/08 | 8:16 pm
@Eric: I think hydrokinetic power is going to be a big story in 2009. Right now, it’s a little early, I think. And I wouldn’t write off wind so quickly. It is cheap and we know how it works; been harnessing it in very large amounts in the US for more than a hundred years. That goes a long way.
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | 12/29/08 | 8:19 pm
@lordmogul: It’s kind of a fallacy that tech acts on its own. It’s pretty clear that government has and will play a role in the future of the technologies used on the planet. Chu will enable more green tech to be developed than most other candidates, we think, so his appointment is on the list. It’s not new tech, per se, but it enables new tech.
Posted by: Nigel | 12/29/08 | 9:17 pm
Great information thanks heaps
Posted by: Drew | 12/29/08 | 9:40 pm
“The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House.”
To be nitpicky about it, the energy secretary isn’t physically based in the White House, although he probably travels there regularly for meetings. The Secretary of Energy’s office is at the Forrestal Building in downtown D.C., which is a few blocks south and east of the White House.
This was a great article for someone like me who hasn’t had the time to keep up with green tech developments lately.
Posted by: Mike | 12/30/08 | 7:50 am
Really, Pickens? As far as green energy goes a metaphor for Pickens is he’s the weird Uncle that your family puts up with his inappropriate touching of the children because of the big checks he puts in the birthday and Christmas cards. The good parts of his plan marginally outweigh the bad parts of his plan. He’s like Microsoft with all advertising to stimulate demand and no real working reasons to prefer them over others. Thumbs down to Wired for not looking into Pickens enough; or did he pay you to put him on the list?
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | 12/30/08 | 8:02 am
@Mike: We didn’t say that Pickens plan was perfect — or even that we liked — but more that it was visible and heavily marketed. That’s all we said. And in pushing energy problems, and maybe some pieces of the solution, in front of people, the Pickens plan was important.
Also: what admirable belief you have in the free market that you think Microsoft’s business model of “advertising to stimulate demand and no real working reasons to prefer them over others” isn’t the standard method of operation for corporations around the world.
Posted by: Smorgasbord | 12/30/08 | 9:43 am
Your number six story (PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM) might not be about wind power. A story from JunkScience.com suggests Pickens might be using it as a ruse to get water rights. The story is at (http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080731.html). I am neutral on this suggestion, but from what the article says, I want more information about his intentions.
Posted by: Leora | 12/30/08 | 10:50 am
You forgot to mention the creation of the fabulous green social network http://www.greenwala.com
Posted by: Leora | 12/30/08 | 10:50 am
You forgot to mention the creation of the fabulous green social network http://www.greenwala.com
Posted by: lucybarker | 12/30/08 | 11:44 am
Alexis is right to pick Pickens. The Pickens plan matters because he pushed green energy to a level where 10 million Californians got to vote on whether or not we would mandate green.
People like me debated between shutting down a self-serving jerk and sending a loud message to foot-dragging govt and power cos. that we WILL have renewable energy whether they drag their feet or not. Most of the money against it came from big power cos., who would have sued to shut it down had the initiative passed.
I voted yes to send the message that we want an end to burning coal and I was delighted to have the chance on Pickens’ dime.
Posted by: dnynumberone | 12/30/08 | 12:41 pm
here i was expecting wired to put the iphone at the number one spot, for whatever reasons could be drummed up.
Posted by: Deborah Gold | 12/30/08 | 1:01 pm
One again Wired Magazine proves it is the Tech resource for Liberal Arts majors.
Posted by: techgm | 12/30/08 | 7:02 pm
“Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year,” reads the article.
Since investors are motivated by expectations of a return on their investments (i.e., profit), then their having invested is indication that they believe the technologies have true market merit. That is, private market initiative will deliver the technologies that are needed/useful and that make economic sense – as it always has. Those technologies will, consequently, be the ones that create sustainable employment and a net benefit to consumers. If those investments fail to make a good return, they are abandoned, and the money is invested in more promising endeavors.
So, why do so many look to government to make “investments” in technology”? What business or competence does government have making such “investments”? How can we expect the entity that brings us the efficiencies and blessings of the US Postal Service, the IRS, FEMA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., be expected to make good judgments about investments? How can we expect an entity whose decisions are driven by politics, back-scratching, and pork be expected to make good investment decisions, especially when those making the decisions are spending other peoples’ money and assume no financial risk themselves for bad decisions?
And Pickens was trying to use his ”green” message as a smoke screen to get a government-mandated monopoly on water supplies in west Texas. He is a corporate rent-seeker, using politicians to grant him a gold-egg-laying goose – as have other self-promoted “greens,” both individuals and corporations.
If a program truly has economic and technical merit, private industry will be in it. If a program has been rejected by private industry as having no such merit, the charlatans behind the program will tap their politicians to have the government step in to save it. And the taxpayers pay the bill, and consumers will see little/no benefit.
Posted by: pewpd | 12/31/08 | 1:49 pm
krapt
http://www.FilthyRichmond.com
Posted by: John Watson | 12/31/08 | 2:01 pm
Not bad, I think you might have hit the nail right on the head!
Jess
http://www.online-privacy.cz.tc
Posted by: J-Dogg | 01/1/09 | 1:33 am
Nothing about the Japanese Water Car?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxfMz2eDME
Posted by: greengoblin | 01/1/09 | 7:22 am
Excellent post. Its good to see so much progressed made in 2008 towards a greener world. I think the ridiculously high fuel prices during the mid-2008 help spur consumer demand for alternative fuel as well.
http://www.greendustbin.com
Posted by: Ashok | 01/1/09 | 9:43 am
great information shared…thanks a lot for posting.
–
Regards,
Ashok Gunasekaran
http://www.ashokgunasekaran.blogspot.com
http://www.health-capsule.blogspot.com
http://www.quality-excellence.blogspot.com
Posted by: Free Xbox 360 Games | 01/1/09 | 3:50 pm
This is a pretty good list.
http://how-to-get-free-xbox-360-games.blogspot.com
http://free-xbox-360-elite-free.blogspot.com
http://free-apple-ipod-gear.blogspot.com
Posted by: Anonymous | 01/1/09 | 11:03 pm
What a great variety of topics! summarization is quite impressive to learn new topic.This article is totally amazing to read which is done in prospective manner.
Posted by: Anonymous | 01/2/09 | 7:39 am
If those are 2008, 2009 ones would be amazing!
–
http://free-xbox-360-premium.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Jason | 01/3/09 | 8:59 am
No matter how many dollars Obama promises to spend on green jobs, none of these technologies is going to be practical during the next four years of the Obama administration. Most of them will probably never be economically viable, that’s why the people developing them have to be leeches and get money from the taxpayers.
Posted by: Brock | 01/4/09 | 8:21 am
Great list of green topics…To bad the powers that be really don’t care about any of this!
http://www.thinkgreenarticles.com
Posted by: ElizabethM | 01/4/09 | 11:14 pm
This article really gives me hope that America is waking up. Let’s hope the $’s follow the innnovation.
Posted by: Clean coal companies | 01/5/09 | 4:08 am
This article is quit interesting it shows the world is waking up its America which have waked up for green technology.Hope say it may furnish through out.
Posted by: P S Kandanathan | 01/5/09 | 9:02 am
Good piece of information. Awakening facts and more such inputs can wake up the world from its slumber on these aspects.
Posted by: dandanyu | 01/9/09 | 11:50 pm
Life Science ecological environment；生态平衡 ecological balance
Posted by: harley(conspiracy theorist) | 01/15/09 | 9:32 am
i think that klean energy development may continue, but will not be applied until the very last minute, when the population begins to complain about the rising cost of energy/fuel due to the slowing down of oil extraction, because we’ve already reached peak production. and a lot of these energy generating processes are pretty inefficient anyways, at least compared to sterling engines (about 20-30%, compared to the 10-20%of solar panels) and they will probably remain more expensive than fossil fuels, due to the lack of green energy plants.
Posted by: Cindy Taliaferro | 01/30/09 | 11:18 am
New Aerospace Technology, “Aerogel”, the Highest Insulating material in
existence, now available to the Building Industry
(Tampa, Florida) With energy costs continually on the rise and taking its toll on the world population and the environment, the need for energy conservation has never been greater. It is estimated that 40% of our energy is used controlling the temperature in buildings. Of this, over 30% escapes from the building primarily through the conventionally insulated walls (metal or wood studs) in a process termed Thermal Bridging.
Taking the newly discovered Aerogel insulation technology developed by NASA, which is the highest insulating material in existence, Thermablok™ developed an amazing product that may soon become a requirement in the building industry. Aerogel, also referred to as “frozen smoke”, has been difficult to adapt to most uses because of its fragility. The patented Thermablok material however overcomes this by using a unique fiber to suspend a proprietary formula of Aerogel such that it can be bent or compressed while still retaining its amazing insulation properties.
Now available to the building industry, just one ¼’’ x 1 ½’’ (6.25mm x 38mm) strip of Thermablok™ added to each stud in a wall before drywall, breaks the “thermal bridging” and can increase the thermal insulation factor of a wall by over 40%!
While sounding too good to be true, for something so simple to produce such incredible results, the figures are substantiated by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Laboratory and J.M. Laboratory. They compared two identical (metal stud/drywall) walls; one with one strip of the material on each 2×4 stud edge (one side only) and the second wall without the material. The results were amazing. A ¼” of the material increased the insulation factor by 30% and 3/8’’ increased the insulation factor by an amazing 42%.
Thermablok™ was developed by the international acoustical research company Acoustiblok®. Mark Nothstine,
head of Research and Development at Acoustiblok stated, “Thermal transmission is greater through solid
objects, and of course, the least through air or a vacuum. Thus, in a regular wood or metal stud wall, the area
that continues to conduct thermally are the studs which mechanically connect one side of a wall to the other.
On an infrared thermal test of a wall, the studs show up very clearly as the points of conductivity. Thermal
bridging is the prime energy loss in a building. As the Thermablok™ Aerogel material is 95% air, and is
between the stud and the drywall, it breaks the mechanical connection (thermal bridging) exceptionally well.”
NASA has been developing Aerogel insulation technology for several years, using it on the space shuttle, space suits, and for many other advanced insulation requirements, including the last Mars mission. This technology has the potential to revolutionize energy conservation. As recently reported on the “Science Channel”, Aerogel will be the breakthrough in building energy conserving buildings.
Nothstine also stated, “The thermal increases achieved with Thermablok will provide continuing energy cost and environmental savings. As an example; a Midwest residential home, 2,400 sqft with 16’’ on center stud framing, R13 insulation and wood siding should result in a $746 per year in energy cost savings with a reduction of 3.9 tons of CO2 emissions. Add to this the many tax deductions offered by the government and you should recover your entire cost in the first year.”
C.E.O. & Founder of Acoustiblok, Lahnie Johnson, who has worked in the Aerospace industry is very enthusiastic about their new product, which is an extension of the company’s already environmentally friendly product, Acoustiblok. Johnson takes pride in developing products that are not only environmentally friendly, but also energy conserving. He said, “The applications of this product are endless. It solves major energy conservation issues in conventional construction as well as increasing privacy through increased acoustic performance. Considering that over 50% of energy in the U.S. is used within buildings (not transportation).
Thermablok™ has the capability to drastically alter our expectations on energy conservation and CO2 emissions.”
Johnson believes in conserving energy versus producing more. Stating, “Real energy conservation is far better and less expensive than producing more for that which is wasted. Thermablok’s technology couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Review of Benefits:
• Very significant saving in energy costs
• 100% recyclable
• Contains no ozone depleting substances
• Uses 30% recycled content
• Composite material consisting of over 95% air
• Hydrophobic, unaffected by moisture, mold or water
• Easily applied via stick-on-back
• “Class A” fire rated
• Economical
• Virtually no weight means low cost (& low emissions) shipping
• Adds acoustical isolation
• Not affected by age as it does not react with moisture of the atmosphere
• Made in USA
Acoustiblok, Inc. International Headquarters
6900 Interbay Boulevard Tampa, Florida 33616 U.S.A. (sales@acoustiblok.com)
01/10/09 Telephone: (813) 980-1400 Fax: (813) 549-2653 http://www.thermablok.com
Posted by: zayiflama | 05/9/09 | 3:04 pm
There is a new fuel additive on the market that is a green product, it is called Efuel, from Fuel Legacy, you can take a look at this product at http://lidaal-zayiflama.klipci.org/
Take a look and see if this product can help cars and trucks to burn cleaner for a healther tommorrow.
Posted by: zayiflama | 06/26/09 | 9:35 am
Thank you so much for content, you would track;)
http://djkantik.org
By Alexis Madrigal December 29, 2008 | 11:29 am | Categories: Earth Science, Energy, Environment
Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas.
But there’s trouble on the horizon. The economy is hovering somewhere between catatonic and hebephrenic, and funding for the big plans that green tech companies laid in 2008 might be a lot harder to come by in 2009. Recessions haven’t always been the best times for environmentally friendly technologies as consumers and corporations cut discretionary spending on ethical premiums.
Still, green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR
With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling’s company Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country. (Image: Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique)
9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON
Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil —
so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.
It turns out, however, that it’s not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth’s crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.
That’s where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play,
ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he’d made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier — and therefore, more cost effective.
Perhaps better still, Yaghi’s lab’s technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above. (Image: Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA)
8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL
On the federal and state levels, several historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills passed over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee’s ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be settled).
In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past.
7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR
In July, MIT chemist Daniel Nocera announced that he’d created a catalyst that could drop the cost of extracting the hydrogen and oxygen from water.
Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar’s), the system could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.
"You’ve made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT told Wired.com. "I’ve gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."
The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.
6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That’s why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy.
Of course, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.
5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS
When most people think of harnessing the sun’s power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity.
Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first serious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource’s Israeli demo plant is shown above. (Image: BrightSource)
4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE
President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White
House.
That’s because green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are serious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don’t seem quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It’s happened before, after all.
Back in the ’70s, geopolitical events sent the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White House. The green tech industry collapsed.
History has given U.S. alternative energy research a second chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result. (Image: DOE)
3. SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG
Every clean tech advocate’s dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility, which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities.
Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That’s the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV’s Erik Straser.
"[It's the] first time in industry a single tool with a 1GW throughput," Straser wrote in an e-mail. "It’s a key part of how the company is achieving grid parity with coal."
2. PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES
Green technologies are dime a dozen, but a business model that could allow an entirely new, green infrastructure to be built is a rare thing.
Doing just that is the centerpiece of Sun Microsystems’ SAP veteran Shai Agassi’s vision for Project Better Place, a scheme that would distribute charging and swappable battery stations throughout smallish geographies like Israel, Hawaii and San Francisco.
So far, there’s very little steel in the ground, but in early December, the company’s first charging location opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agassi’s plan is one of several projects — like new biofuels rail terminals — that could create fundamentally new energy ecosystems.
Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University, likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric.
1. CALERA’S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS
Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year.
But here’s the reason: making cement — and many other materials —
takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels.
Calera’s technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting. By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered.
With more than 2.3 billion tons of cement produced each year, reversing the carbon-balance of the world’s cement would be a solution that’s the scale of the world’s climate change problem.
In August, the company opened its first demonstration site next to Dynegy’s Moss Landing power plant in California, pictured here.
See Also:
Top 10 New Organisms of 2008
Top Technology Breakthroughs of 2008
Only Greentech Can Save U.S. Economy, Says Über-Investor
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal’s Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook.
Tags: Chemistry, Clean Tech, Climate, Engineering, Geology, Science, Survival, Sustainability
Posted by: allen | 12/29/08 | 12:01 pm
Isn’t Pickens’ multi-billion dollar grab for tax dollars, err, wind project DOA with the financial bailout? God, I hope so.
Posted by: John Carter | 12/29/08 | 12:14 pm
This is a great overview, if you want to learn and profit from the rapidly changing landscape of greentech, look no further than:
http://www.greentechmedia.com/
Posted by: gaetano marano - ghostNASA.com | 12/29/08 | 12:17 pm
.
………………………………………
.
I agree with the “battery swap” since I’ve ALREADY suggested in MY July 23, 2007 “cellphoneCAR” article:
.
http://www.gaetanomarano.it/articles/033cellphoneCAR.html
.
then posted in July 24, 2007 in a comment in this Technology Review article:
.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Biztech/19085/
.
it’s a great idea to solve the main electric cars’ problem: the (4+ hours) too long recharge time but it’s NOT a “Shai Agassi’s vision” NOR a “Better Place project” (a company born LATER)
.
“sell electric cars without batteries and just swap them” was/is/will be an idea of MINE, while, the only “vision” Mr. Agassi has (probably) had is the READING of MY article or some of my comments and posts on Technology Review and several other forums and blogs!
.
Posted by: Joe Stanley | 12/29/08 | 1:17 pm
This is an excellent review of the Green Market in 2008. 2009 would be a turning point for the green economy!
Posted by: Joe Stanley | 12/29/08 | 1:19 pm
This is an excellent review of the Green Market in 2008. 2009 would be a turning point for the green economy! Technologies such as the solar cell and solar thermal plants should be developed further.
———————
http://www.greeneconomyinitiative.com
Posted by: sci_guy | 12/29/08 | 1:28 pm
@gaetano marano: The conspiracy against you continues I see. Hopefully the dastardly villans will soon be crushed. I will you Godspeed….LOL. Nutcase….
Posted by: gaetano marano - ghostNASA.com | 12/29/08 | 1:55 pm
@ sci_guy
generally talking, those who have MANY ideas always are systematically plundered by those who do not have NO ONE good idea!
.
however, in my “cellphoneCAR” article there is HALF of MY idea, so, they just have HALF of the “access code” to succeed in this project… .
Posted by: taoist | 12/29/08 | 2:04 pm
You’re actually trying to cite Congress’ actions this past year as a good thing for anything (item #8)?
Congress’ actions, especially Chris Dodd’s and Barney Frank’s, are directly responsible for the financial disaster that our economy has become, and the porkfest spending disasters that all of the bailout bills have been.
When the economy goes south, luxuries are the first thing to go, and make no mistake, environmental spending is a luxury.
As for the EPA’s freeze on coal plants, until we actually start using alternatives able to provide baseline power such as nuclear, and, yes, (clean) coal, all we do by restricting ourselves from any energy source is give ourselves more economic trouble down the road.
Posted by: Matt | 12/29/08 | 3:08 pm
Hi, sorry to do this, but spotted an error… Shai Agassi is an SAP veteran not their competitor Sun.
Posted by: aromahand | 12/29/08 | 3:48 pm
amazing breakthroughs!
thanks so much for all the wisdom
aromahand
Posted by: Eric | 12/29/08 | 4:02 pm
I’m surprised that Wired failed to mention the vast amount of underwater renewable energy sources that are coming to the fore. Its a fact that wind turbines are practically useless and only serve as feel-good machines for green fanatics. They cost millions of dollars to erect, maintain, and replace, all the while producing very little energy at all. Water produces much more torque, which equals substantially more energy. We should look into aquatic solutions because water covers 70% of the planet!
Posted by: Cinch | 12/29/08 | 4:15 pm
There are no technologies listed here that produces a good EROEI number. Consequently, most of these projects will become deadends or they won’t ever scale up.
Posted by: John K. Wright | 12/29/08 | 5:07 pm
There is a new fuel additive on the market that is a green product, it is called Efuel, from Fuel Legacy, you can take a look at this product at http://www.fuellegacy.com/kensgreenway
Take a look and see if this product can help cars and trucks to burn cleaner for a healther tommorrow.
Posted by: Ross | 12/29/08 | 5:29 pm
Nothing really exciting to see here. Catalyst guy especially is kind of a joke.
Nuclear power is still the way to go…
Posted by: lordmorgul | 12/29/08 | 5:31 pm
HAHAH. Picking a ‘greenie’ to head DOE is a ‘tech breakthrough’?? Way to make this article worthless.
Posted by: zeke | 12/29/08 | 5:33 pm
we don’t need ads for snake-oil fuel additives, thanks
Wired — please ditch them
Posted by: ..What Was Start Learning..It Was End Of Equations.. | 12/29/08 | 5:48 pm
..What Was Start Learning..
..It was End Of Equations..
..This remind me of, what was tools makers are griping two different markets..I like the tool and drill for the bankings..And some lost in tools for home industry, before market home leaving..Some tools for most lady driving big buck corps..I know many people looking at lost and every other ladies and everyone can use the code systems..
Posted by: Justin | 12/29/08 | 5:50 pm
I’m not entirely sure it fits into Green Tech, specifically, but what about Daniel Burd’s “using bacteria to decompose plastic bag” project/discovery?
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/05/teen-decomposes.html
Posted by: username | 12/29/08 | 6:42 pm
Article on solar houses, solar water heaters, or indoor sunlighting might be interesting
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | 12/29/08 | 8:16 pm
@Eric: I think hydrokinetic power is going to be a big story in 2009. Right now, it’s a little early, I think. And I wouldn’t write off wind so quickly. It is cheap and we know how it works; been harnessing it in very large amounts in the US for more than a hundred years. That goes a long way.
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | 12/29/08 | 8:19 pm
@lordmogul: It’s kind of a fallacy that tech acts on its own. It’s pretty clear that government has and will play a role in the future of the technologies used on the planet. Chu will enable more green tech to be developed than most other candidates, we think, so his appointment is on the list. It’s not new tech, per se, but it enables new tech.
Posted by: Nigel | 12/29/08 | 9:17 pm
Great information thanks heaps
Posted by: Drew | 12/29/08 | 9:40 pm
“The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House.”
To be nitpicky about it, the energy secretary isn’t physically based in the White House, although he probably travels there regularly for meetings. The Secretary of Energy’s office is at the Forrestal Building in downtown D.C., which is a few blocks south and east of the White House.
This was a great article for someone like me who hasn’t had the time to keep up with green tech developments lately.
Posted by: Mike | 12/30/08 | 7:50 am
Really, Pickens? As far as green energy goes a metaphor for Pickens is he’s the weird Uncle that your family puts up with his inappropriate touching of the children because of the big checks he puts in the birthday and Christmas cards. The good parts of his plan marginally outweigh the bad parts of his plan. He’s like Microsoft with all advertising to stimulate demand and no real working reasons to prefer them over others. Thumbs down to Wired for not looking into Pickens enough; or did he pay you to put him on the list?
Posted by: Alexis Madrigal | 12/30/08 | 8:02 am
@Mike: We didn’t say that Pickens plan was perfect — or even that we liked — but more that it was visible and heavily marketed. That’s all we said. And in pushing energy problems, and maybe some pieces of the solution, in front of people, the Pickens plan was important.
Also: what admirable belief you have in the free market that you think Microsoft’s business model of “advertising to stimulate demand and no real working reasons to prefer them over others” isn’t the standard method of operation for corporations around the world.
Posted by: Smorgasbord | 12/30/08 | 9:43 am
Your number six story (PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM) might not be about wind power. A story from JunkScience.com suggests Pickens might be using it as a ruse to get water rights. The story is at (http://www.junkscience.com/ByTheJunkman/20080731.html). I am neutral on this suggestion, but from what the article says, I want more information about his intentions.
Posted by: Leora | 12/30/08 | 10:50 am
You forgot to mention the creation of the fabulous green social network http://www.greenwala.com
Posted by: Leora | 12/30/08 | 10:50 am
You forgot to mention the creation of the fabulous green social network http://www.greenwala.com
Posted by: lucybarker | 12/30/08 | 11:44 am
Alexis is right to pick Pickens. The Pickens plan matters because he pushed green energy to a level where 10 million Californians got to vote on whether or not we would mandate green.
People like me debated between shutting down a self-serving jerk and sending a loud message to foot-dragging govt and power cos. that we WILL have renewable energy whether they drag their feet or not. Most of the money against it came from big power cos., who would have sued to shut it down had the initiative passed.
I voted yes to send the message that we want an end to burning coal and I was delighted to have the chance on Pickens’ dime.
Posted by: dnynumberone | 12/30/08 | 12:41 pm
here i was expecting wired to put the iphone at the number one spot, for whatever reasons could be drummed up.
Posted by: Deborah Gold | 12/30/08 | 1:01 pm
One again Wired Magazine proves it is the Tech resource for Liberal Arts majors.
Posted by: techgm | 12/30/08 | 7:02 pm
“Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year,” reads the article.
Since investors are motivated by expectations of a return on their investments (i.e., profit), then their having invested is indication that they believe the technologies have true market merit. That is, private market initiative will deliver the technologies that are needed/useful and that make economic sense – as it always has. Those technologies will, consequently, be the ones that create sustainable employment and a net benefit to consumers. If those investments fail to make a good return, they are abandoned, and the money is invested in more promising endeavors.
So, why do so many look to government to make “investments” in technology”? What business or competence does government have making such “investments”? How can we expect the entity that brings us the efficiencies and blessings of the US Postal Service, the IRS, FEMA, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, etc., be expected to make good judgments about investments? How can we expect an entity whose decisions are driven by politics, back-scratching, and pork be expected to make good investment decisions, especially when those making the decisions are spending other peoples’ money and assume no financial risk themselves for bad decisions?
And Pickens was trying to use his ”green” message as a smoke screen to get a government-mandated monopoly on water supplies in west Texas. He is a corporate rent-seeker, using politicians to grant him a gold-egg-laying goose – as have other self-promoted “greens,” both individuals and corporations.
If a program truly has economic and technical merit, private industry will be in it. If a program has been rejected by private industry as having no such merit, the charlatans behind the program will tap their politicians to have the government step in to save it. And the taxpayers pay the bill, and consumers will see little/no benefit.
Posted by: pewpd | 12/31/08 | 1:49 pm
krapt
http://www.FilthyRichmond.com
Posted by: John Watson | 12/31/08 | 2:01 pm
Not bad, I think you might have hit the nail right on the head!
Jess
http://www.online-privacy.cz.tc
Posted by: J-Dogg | 01/1/09 | 1:33 am
Nothing about the Japanese Water Car?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrxfMz2eDME
Posted by: greengoblin | 01/1/09 | 7:22 am
Excellent post. Its good to see so much progressed made in 2008 towards a greener world. I think the ridiculously high fuel prices during the mid-2008 help spur consumer demand for alternative fuel as well.
http://www.greendustbin.com
Posted by: Ashok | 01/1/09 | 9:43 am
great information shared…thanks a lot for posting.
–
Regards,
Ashok Gunasekaran
http://www.ashokgunasekaran.blogspot.com
http://www.health-capsule.blogspot.com
http://www.quality-excellence.blogspot.com
Posted by: Free Xbox 360 Games | 01/1/09 | 3:50 pm
This is a pretty good list.
http://how-to-get-free-xbox-360-games.blogspot.com
http://free-xbox-360-elite-free.blogspot.com
http://free-apple-ipod-gear.blogspot.com
Posted by: Anonymous | 01/1/09 | 11:03 pm
What a great variety of topics! summarization is quite impressive to learn new topic.This article is totally amazing to read which is done in prospective manner.
Posted by: Anonymous | 01/2/09 | 7:39 am
If those are 2008, 2009 ones would be amazing!
–
http://free-xbox-360-premium.blogspot.com/
Posted by: Jason | 01/3/09 | 8:59 am
No matter how many dollars Obama promises to spend on green jobs, none of these technologies is going to be practical during the next four years of the Obama administration. Most of them will probably never be economically viable, that’s why the people developing them have to be leeches and get money from the taxpayers.
Posted by: Brock | 01/4/09 | 8:21 am
Great list of green topics…To bad the powers that be really don’t care about any of this!
http://www.thinkgreenarticles.com
Posted by: ElizabethM | 01/4/09 | 11:14 pm
This article really gives me hope that America is waking up. Let’s hope the $’s follow the innnovation.
Posted by: Clean coal companies | 01/5/09 | 4:08 am
This article is quit interesting it shows the world is waking up its America which have waked up for green technology.Hope say it may furnish through out.
Posted by: P S Kandanathan | 01/5/09 | 9:02 am
Good piece of information. Awakening facts and more such inputs can wake up the world from its slumber on these aspects.
Posted by: dandanyu | 01/9/09 | 11:50 pm
Life Science ecological environment；生态平衡 ecological balance
Posted by: harley(conspiracy theorist) | 01/15/09 | 9:32 am
i think that klean energy development may continue, but will not be applied until the very last minute, when the population begins to complain about the rising cost of energy/fuel due to the slowing down of oil extraction, because we’ve already reached peak production. and a lot of these energy generating processes are pretty inefficient anyways, at least compared to sterling engines (about 20-30%, compared to the 10-20%of solar panels) and they will probably remain more expensive than fossil fuels, due to the lack of green energy plants.
Posted by: Cindy Taliaferro | 01/30/09 | 11:18 am
New Aerospace Technology, “Aerogel”, the Highest Insulating material in
existence, now available to the Building Industry
(Tampa, Florida) With energy costs continually on the rise and taking its toll on the world population and the environment, the need for energy conservation has never been greater. It is estimated that 40% of our energy is used controlling the temperature in buildings. Of this, over 30% escapes from the building primarily through the conventionally insulated walls (metal or wood studs) in a process termed Thermal Bridging.
Taking the newly discovered Aerogel insulation technology developed by NASA, which is the highest insulating material in existence, Thermablok™ developed an amazing product that may soon become a requirement in the building industry. Aerogel, also referred to as “frozen smoke”, has been difficult to adapt to most uses because of its fragility. The patented Thermablok material however overcomes this by using a unique fiber to suspend a proprietary formula of Aerogel such that it can be bent or compressed while still retaining its amazing insulation properties.
Now available to the building industry, just one ¼’’ x 1 ½’’ (6.25mm x 38mm) strip of Thermablok™ added to each stud in a wall before drywall, breaks the “thermal bridging” and can increase the thermal insulation factor of a wall by over 40%!
While sounding too good to be true, for something so simple to produce such incredible results, the figures are substantiated by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Laboratory and J.M. Laboratory. They compared two identical (metal stud/drywall) walls; one with one strip of the material on each 2×4 stud edge (one side only) and the second wall without the material. The results were amazing. A ¼” of the material increased the insulation factor by 30% and 3/8’’ increased the insulation factor by an amazing 42%.
Thermablok™ was developed by the international acoustical research company Acoustiblok®. Mark Nothstine,
head of Research and Development at Acoustiblok stated, “Thermal transmission is greater through solid
objects, and of course, the least through air or a vacuum. Thus, in a regular wood or metal stud wall, the area
that continues to conduct thermally are the studs which mechanically connect one side of a wall to the other.
On an infrared thermal test of a wall, the studs show up very clearly as the points of conductivity. Thermal
bridging is the prime energy loss in a building. As the Thermablok™ Aerogel material is 95% air, and is
between the stud and the drywall, it breaks the mechanical connection (thermal bridging) exceptionally well.”
NASA has been developing Aerogel insulation technology for several years, using it on the space shuttle, space suits, and for many other advanced insulation requirements, including the last Mars mission. This technology has the potential to revolutionize energy conservation. As recently reported on the “Science Channel”, Aerogel will be the breakthrough in building energy conserving buildings.
Nothstine also stated, “The thermal increases achieved with Thermablok will provide continuing energy cost and environmental savings. As an example; a Midwest residential home, 2,400 sqft with 16’’ on center stud framing, R13 insulation and wood siding should result in a $746 per year in energy cost savings with a reduction of 3.9 tons of CO2 emissions. Add to this the many tax deductions offered by the government and you should recover your entire cost in the first year.”
C.E.O. & Founder of Acoustiblok, Lahnie Johnson, who has worked in the Aerospace industry is very enthusiastic about their new product, which is an extension of the company’s already environmentally friendly product, Acoustiblok. Johnson takes pride in developing products that are not only environmentally friendly, but also energy conserving. He said, “The applications of this product are endless. It solves major energy conservation issues in conventional construction as well as increasing privacy through increased acoustic performance. Considering that over 50% of energy in the U.S. is used within buildings (not transportation).
Thermablok™ has the capability to drastically alter our expectations on energy conservation and CO2 emissions.”
Johnson believes in conserving energy versus producing more. Stating, “Real energy conservation is far better and less expensive than producing more for that which is wasted. Thermablok’s technology couldn’t have come at a better time.”
Review of Benefits:
• Very significant saving in energy costs
• 100% recyclable
• Contains no ozone depleting substances
• Uses 30% recycled content
• Composite material consisting of over 95% air
• Hydrophobic, unaffected by moisture, mold or water
• Easily applied via stick-on-back
• “Class A” fire rated
• Economical
• Virtually no weight means low cost (& low emissions) shipping
• Adds acoustical isolation
• Not affected by age as it does not react with moisture of the atmosphere
• Made in USA
Acoustiblok, Inc. International Headquarters
6900 Interbay Boulevard Tampa, Florida 33616 U.S.A. (sales@acoustiblok.com)
01/10/09 Telephone: (813) 980-1400 Fax: (813) 549-2653 http://www.thermablok.com
Posted by: zayiflama | 05/9/09 | 3:04 pm
There is a new fuel additive on the market that is a green product, it is called Efuel, from Fuel Legacy, you can take a look at this product at http://lidaal-zayiflama.klipci.org/
Take a look and see if this product can help cars and trucks to burn cleaner for a healther tommorrow.
Posted by: zayiflama | 06/26/09 | 9:35 am
Thank you so much for content, you would track;)
http://djkantik.org
Green Jobs Growing
Green jobs growth outpaced other-colored job classifications by nearly 250 percent over the last decade, growing 9.1 percent between 1998 and 2007, versus 3.7 percent for the overall job market.
There are now 770,000 green jobs spread out among 68,200 businesses, according to the new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. While that’s a tiny slice of the overall American jobs pie, it is already approaching the same scale as the traditional energy sector — coal mining, utilities, big oil — which employs 1.27 million people. As a job creator, it stacks up even better against biotechnology, which (despite a longer history and greater investment) employs only 200,000 people.
The report differs from government projections or most industry association estimates in that it counts individual jobs, not entire industries. In other words, only the electricians who actually install solar panels were counted as green electricians.
“Although our numbers are conservative, our report provides the most precise depiction to date of the clean energy economy in the United States,” the Pew researchers wrote.
Green jobs are a major part President Obama’s plan for economic recovery and energy transformation. Manufacturing jobs have declined a few percent a year over the last decade, and in the bullet-point language of Whitehouse.gov, his administration wants to “Drive the development of new, green jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced.” The report shows that environmentally friendly jobs already exist, but most of the “green” jobs aren’t in clean energy at all. A full 65 percent of the jobs fell into the “conservation and pollution mitigation” category, which includes recycling.
That leaves a lot of room for growth in clean energy, even if some jobs are lost in traditional energy companies. Right now, there’s a small base. There were only 89,000 “clean energy” jobs in 2007. Current research indicates that for renewable energy sources to really make an impact on greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel dependence, we’re going to need a lot of manpower.
University of California Berkeley researchers found the renewable energy industry was more labor intensive than traditional fossil-fuel businesses (pdf).
“Across a broad range of scenarios, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs than the fossil fuel-based energy sector per unit of energy delivered (i.e., per average megawatt),” wrote a team from the Goldman School of Public Policy.
To deliver megawatts and jobs, the Pew researchers recommended a “comprehensive, economy-wide energy plan” and implicitly endorsed the President’s stated desire to sign a climate and energy bill like the Waxman-Markey bill wending its way through Congress.
“President Obama has expressed his support for a federal market-based system that would substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and national standards that would help America draw more of its energy supply from clean, renewable sources and achieve greater energy efficiency,” the Pew report concluded. “Those federal and state policies, together with continued private-sector support, will position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy economy.”
See Also:
Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama’s Green Ambitions
Bailout Bill Is Rife With Tasty Green Pork
Green Tech Could Get Economy High, With a Little Help From the Feds
Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
FutureGen “Cleanish Coal” Plant Cancelled
Clean Tech
Posted by: purvisa | 06/10/09 | 9:07 pm
Let’s see how quickly people jump in here and attack global climate change, Obama, progressives, and others.
(Your terminology may be as outdated as Reagan’s breath, but that’s how things go with regressives these days.)
Posted by: sh0em0nkey | 06/10/09 | 11:03 pm
@purvisa - It’s not a problem when we are discussing climate change - it’s a problem when someone refers to it as “global warming.”
Much like when Obama gives out stimulus packages and says it’s not trickle down economics.
It’s not progress, it’s not change - it’s the same product with different packaging.
Q.: What’s the difference between people preparing for global warming and people expecting an ice age?
A.: People preparing for global warming will freeze to death.
http://www.iceagenow.com/
Posted by: Gifftor | 06/11/09 | 9:54 am
Responding to the actual article instead of which climate change model to which I cater…
I work in that “green” sector and ya’ know what? We’re so busy not only have I never worried about my job security, we’ve done some hiring.
Posted by: Gifftor | 06/11/09 | 9:57 am
oh, @ sh0em0nkey: “UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth -
New explanation for Tunguska” is not sound science.
Posted by: xenobiologista | 06/11/09 | 11:25 am
770000 jobs / 68200 businesses = pretty small businesses. That’s a good thing if you want to encourage entrepreneurship.
Posted by: Gifftor | 06/11/09 | 12:04 pm
@xenobiolgista - True for us - 10 full-time employees plus lots of sub-contractor work for guys in formerly “anti-green” jobs (e.g.: drillers).
Posted by: Ender27182818 | 06/11/09 | 12:31 pm
Let’s assume green jobs are a good thing, as the government posits. Why then, are we doing so little to promote something good? Why not tax every sector except the green sector and give all the money to the green sector until every job is green? In fact, why not confiscate profits from non-green industries to force them to become green?
The reason we can’t do this is because if the green sector is not self-sustaining (ie makes enough money to continue business without subsidies) then what we are doing is taking money from industries that work to feed a money destruction machine. When you tax profitable sectors into oblivion, who will you tax next year to continue subsidizing green companies?
The market self-regulates via price. If you screw with prices by taxing some to give to others, you create anomalies in the market that will require further tweaking to fix. Then the government asserts more control to tweak things. And creates more anomalies. Eventually your choices are to have either total government control or none. Which would you prefer?
Posted by: techgm | 06/11/09 | 3:21 pm
Consider the source of the data (Pew) and the nature of its political activism. Then, consider the validity of the data, the validity of definitons, and who benefits from the touting big growth in “green jobs.”
Posted by: PhucNguyen57 | 06/11/09 | 4:13 pm
I’ve been looking for one of those jobs. Where are they?
Posted by: Admiral_Obvious | 06/11/09 | 5:43 pm
What if you have two jobs that kind of conflict in terms of “green” and “anti-green”?
Like, hypothetically, if you have a part-time job installing solar panels while the other job is serving on a whaling ship during the summer.
I mean, people can’t be too picky in this economy, can they?
Posted by: M3kT3k | 06/11/09 | 8:03 pm
I start my new green job in january. I guess the difference though is that instead of solar panels Ill be kicking in doors with an M16. Somehow along the way people forgot the first green jobs were people in green uniforms.
Posted by: anikolchev | 06/12/09 | 12:18 am
Are you left wondering what green jobs may look like? Watch my 5 minute online video about a Veggie Green Team for NOW on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/522/veggie-van.html Not only did I learn that green jobs are growing fast but green jobs translate into greener lifestyles for employees. Thanks for the article!
Posted by: Baranjik | 06/27/09 | 7:49 pm
That’s a good thing if you want to encourage entrepreneurship.porno izle,sikiş izle
Posted by: exclaim | 07/24/09 | 4:54 pm
Nice article. The real source of green jobs is green projects. Whether it be business need or stimulus package, the rubber hits the road when a project is launched. And when a project is launched, a project manager is needed. So what people should also be considering in their career planning is green project management. We’ve started to look at that seriously at EarthPM. We have been studying the intersection of PM and green and feature stories like this one as well as interviews with green leaders and a budding green PM certification program. Check it out at http://earthpm.com .
There are now 770,000 green jobs spread out among 68,200 businesses, according to the new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts. While that’s a tiny slice of the overall American jobs pie, it is already approaching the same scale as the traditional energy sector — coal mining, utilities, big oil — which employs 1.27 million people. As a job creator, it stacks up even better against biotechnology, which (despite a longer history and greater investment) employs only 200,000 people.
The report differs from government projections or most industry association estimates in that it counts individual jobs, not entire industries. In other words, only the electricians who actually install solar panels were counted as green electricians.
“Although our numbers are conservative, our report provides the most precise depiction to date of the clean energy economy in the United States,” the Pew researchers wrote.
Green jobs are a major part President Obama’s plan for economic recovery and energy transformation. Manufacturing jobs have declined a few percent a year over the last decade, and in the bullet-point language of Whitehouse.gov, his administration wants to “Drive the development of new, green jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced.” The report shows that environmentally friendly jobs already exist, but most of the “green” jobs aren’t in clean energy at all. A full 65 percent of the jobs fell into the “conservation and pollution mitigation” category, which includes recycling.
That leaves a lot of room for growth in clean energy, even if some jobs are lost in traditional energy companies. Right now, there’s a small base. There were only 89,000 “clean energy” jobs in 2007. Current research indicates that for renewable energy sources to really make an impact on greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel dependence, we’re going to need a lot of manpower.
University of California Berkeley researchers found the renewable energy industry was more labor intensive than traditional fossil-fuel businesses (pdf).
“Across a broad range of scenarios, the renewable energy sector generates more jobs than the fossil fuel-based energy sector per unit of energy delivered (i.e., per average megawatt),” wrote a team from the Goldman School of Public Policy.
To deliver megawatts and jobs, the Pew researchers recommended a “comprehensive, economy-wide energy plan” and implicitly endorsed the President’s stated desire to sign a climate and energy bill like the Waxman-Markey bill wending its way through Congress.
“President Obama has expressed his support for a federal market-based system that would substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and national standards that would help America draw more of its energy supply from clean, renewable sources and achieve greater energy efficiency,” the Pew report concluded. “Those federal and state policies, together with continued private-sector support, will position the United States as a leader in the global clean energy economy.”
See Also:
Biofuel Startup Strives to Meet Obama’s Green Ambitions
Bailout Bill Is Rife With Tasty Green Pork
Green Tech Could Get Economy High, With a Little Help From the Feds
Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
FutureGen “Cleanish Coal” Plant Cancelled
Clean Tech
Posted by: purvisa | 06/10/09 | 9:07 pm
Let’s see how quickly people jump in here and attack global climate change, Obama, progressives, and others.
(Your terminology may be as outdated as Reagan’s breath, but that’s how things go with regressives these days.)
Posted by: sh0em0nkey | 06/10/09 | 11:03 pm
@purvisa - It’s not a problem when we are discussing climate change - it’s a problem when someone refers to it as “global warming.”
Much like when Obama gives out stimulus packages and says it’s not trickle down economics.
It’s not progress, it’s not change - it’s the same product with different packaging.
Q.: What’s the difference between people preparing for global warming and people expecting an ice age?
A.: People preparing for global warming will freeze to death.
http://www.iceagenow.com/
Posted by: Gifftor | 06/11/09 | 9:54 am
Responding to the actual article instead of which climate change model to which I cater…
I work in that “green” sector and ya’ know what? We’re so busy not only have I never worried about my job security, we’ve done some hiring.
Posted by: Gifftor | 06/11/09 | 9:57 am
oh, @ sh0em0nkey: “UFO Crashed Into Meteorite to Save Earth -
New explanation for Tunguska” is not sound science.
Posted by: xenobiologista | 06/11/09 | 11:25 am
770000 jobs / 68200 businesses = pretty small businesses. That’s a good thing if you want to encourage entrepreneurship.
Posted by: Gifftor | 06/11/09 | 12:04 pm
@xenobiolgista - True for us - 10 full-time employees plus lots of sub-contractor work for guys in formerly “anti-green” jobs (e.g.: drillers).
Posted by: Ender27182818 | 06/11/09 | 12:31 pm
Let’s assume green jobs are a good thing, as the government posits. Why then, are we doing so little to promote something good? Why not tax every sector except the green sector and give all the money to the green sector until every job is green? In fact, why not confiscate profits from non-green industries to force them to become green?
The reason we can’t do this is because if the green sector is not self-sustaining (ie makes enough money to continue business without subsidies) then what we are doing is taking money from industries that work to feed a money destruction machine. When you tax profitable sectors into oblivion, who will you tax next year to continue subsidizing green companies?
The market self-regulates via price. If you screw with prices by taxing some to give to others, you create anomalies in the market that will require further tweaking to fix. Then the government asserts more control to tweak things. And creates more anomalies. Eventually your choices are to have either total government control or none. Which would you prefer?
Posted by: techgm | 06/11/09 | 3:21 pm
Consider the source of the data (Pew) and the nature of its political activism. Then, consider the validity of the data, the validity of definitons, and who benefits from the touting big growth in “green jobs.”
Posted by: PhucNguyen57 | 06/11/09 | 4:13 pm
I’ve been looking for one of those jobs. Where are they?
Posted by: Admiral_Obvious | 06/11/09 | 5:43 pm
What if you have two jobs that kind of conflict in terms of “green” and “anti-green”?
Like, hypothetically, if you have a part-time job installing solar panels while the other job is serving on a whaling ship during the summer.
I mean, people can’t be too picky in this economy, can they?
Posted by: M3kT3k | 06/11/09 | 8:03 pm
I start my new green job in january. I guess the difference though is that instead of solar panels Ill be kicking in doors with an M16. Somehow along the way people forgot the first green jobs were people in green uniforms.
Posted by: anikolchev | 06/12/09 | 12:18 am
Are you left wondering what green jobs may look like? Watch my 5 minute online video about a Veggie Green Team for NOW on PBS: http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/522/veggie-van.html Not only did I learn that green jobs are growing fast but green jobs translate into greener lifestyles for employees. Thanks for the article!
Posted by: Baranjik | 06/27/09 | 7:49 pm
That’s a good thing if you want to encourage entrepreneurship.porno izle,sikiş izle
Posted by: exclaim | 07/24/09 | 4:54 pm
Nice article. The real source of green jobs is green projects. Whether it be business need or stimulus package, the rubber hits the road when a project is launched. And when a project is launched, a project manager is needed. So what people should also be considering in their career planning is green project management. We’ve started to look at that seriously at EarthPM. We have been studying the intersection of PM and green and feature stories like this one as well as interviews with green leaders and a budding green PM certification program. Check it out at http://earthpm.com .
Smart Grid Goes Wireless
WiFi network technology originally developed to connect people to the internet are acquiring a green tinge as they are pressed into service as the backbone of the smart grid.
Cable, DSL, and cellular won the battle to deliver internet service for most people, but the physical network for the Internet-of-Things remains to be built. And some of the losers of that battle could end up being better a better match for the smart grid, which needs a different set of specs than cable and phone companies.
Thursday, Trilliant, a smart grid network builder, acquired Skypilot, a broadband wireless company that used to specialize in long-range, high-capacity WiFi for rural areas and cities.
“The unique technology in Skypilot was helpful in the municipal WiFi market but maybe not determinative,” said Eric Miller, senior VP at Trilliant. “But you take that technology and move into the utility market, and it’s a breakthrough technology.”
The acquisition follows a move by another former municipal WiFi player, Tropos, into smart grid networking. This month, Cisco started talking big about energy, too. It’s a natural area for these companies to expand their businesses because the smart grid is fundamentally about about networking the pieces of the energy system. Right now, the power plants, transmission machinery, and consumption spots are physically connected, but they can’t communicate. Your utility can’t tell you in real-time how much power you’re using. Their engineers just know they need to have X amount of power plants running the normal power needs of Y customers.
“Historically, power supply infrastructure has been created to serve load as a passive element of the system,” a Department of Energy report noted.
In other words, right now the grid is just a bunch of wires.
Without good information, utilities have to be very risk averse, and even so, brownouts and blackouts are estimated to cost the country $150 billion a year. Add in that it’s harder to incorporate renewable energy sources like wind and you can see why the Obama administration pumped at least $4.5 billion into upgrading the system.
Now, though, the real network solutions have to emerge. Utilities need bandwidth and sensors and standards for different pieces to interconnect.
“There’s a couple of challenges that aren’t met by most of today’s communications systems and one of them is bandwidth,” said Jesse Berst, a smart grid analyst with SmartGridNews.com. “Most of the systems being offered today have enough bandwidth for starter applications including smart metering, but the real power of the smart grid is when you have telemetry all up and down the system and every piece of the system is monitored.”
Finding really, really reliable bandwidth is tough enough, but unlike other communications networks, utilities don’t have the luxury of by-passing any consumers. They have to serve everyone, which means the network they deploy will have to hit every single customer. That’s one reason some utilities are looking to technologies like Sypilot’s instead of using previously existing infrastructure.
“Most utilities are going to choose a separate technology for that last mile rather than going over the internet connection that’s going into the house,” Berst predicted. “It’ll still use internet protocol, talk the same language, but it’ll be a separate connection because utilities don’t want to rely on Comcast if there is a problem.”
Cable, DSL, and cellular won the battle to deliver internet service for most people, but the physical network for the Internet-of-Things remains to be built. And some of the losers of that battle could end up being better a better match for the smart grid, which needs a different set of specs than cable and phone companies.
Thursday, Trilliant, a smart grid network builder, acquired Skypilot, a broadband wireless company that used to specialize in long-range, high-capacity WiFi for rural areas and cities.
“The unique technology in Skypilot was helpful in the municipal WiFi market but maybe not determinative,” said Eric Miller, senior VP at Trilliant. “But you take that technology and move into the utility market, and it’s a breakthrough technology.”
The acquisition follows a move by another former municipal WiFi player, Tropos, into smart grid networking. This month, Cisco started talking big about energy, too. It’s a natural area for these companies to expand their businesses because the smart grid is fundamentally about about networking the pieces of the energy system. Right now, the power plants, transmission machinery, and consumption spots are physically connected, but they can’t communicate. Your utility can’t tell you in real-time how much power you’re using. Their engineers just know they need to have X amount of power plants running the normal power needs of Y customers.
“Historically, power supply infrastructure has been created to serve load as a passive element of the system,” a Department of Energy report noted.
In other words, right now the grid is just a bunch of wires.
Without good information, utilities have to be very risk averse, and even so, brownouts and blackouts are estimated to cost the country $150 billion a year. Add in that it’s harder to incorporate renewable energy sources like wind and you can see why the Obama administration pumped at least $4.5 billion into upgrading the system.
Now, though, the real network solutions have to emerge. Utilities need bandwidth and sensors and standards for different pieces to interconnect.
“There’s a couple of challenges that aren’t met by most of today’s communications systems and one of them is bandwidth,” said Jesse Berst, a smart grid analyst with SmartGridNews.com. “Most of the systems being offered today have enough bandwidth for starter applications including smart metering, but the real power of the smart grid is when you have telemetry all up and down the system and every piece of the system is monitored.”
Finding really, really reliable bandwidth is tough enough, but unlike other communications networks, utilities don’t have the luxury of by-passing any consumers. They have to serve everyone, which means the network they deploy will have to hit every single customer. That’s one reason some utilities are looking to technologies like Sypilot’s instead of using previously existing infrastructure.
“Most utilities are going to choose a separate technology for that last mile rather than going over the internet connection that’s going into the house,” Berst predicted. “It’ll still use internet protocol, talk the same language, but it’ll be a separate connection because utilities don’t want to rely on Comcast if there is a problem.”
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