In my past two blogs, I’ve outlined Google’s Clean Energy 2030 proposal for reducing carbon emissions and increasing renewable energy production in the US, and added my personal comments. Here’s a few more…let us know what you think.
I like the fuel efficiency standard of 45mpg by 2030, although from a technology standpoint I think it can go a bit higher, considering that Europe has set the same standards for 3 years from now. Obviously this is a behavior issue though, as Americans like large inefficient cars. Perhaps that will change in the next 20 years though, where we will find we can eclipse this mark. (Read more…)
This week my new computer showed up. I was excited to get it set up and start using it right away. There was only one problem. Before I could put my new computer on my desk, I had to pull apart all of the wires and cables, sort them out, and decide which ones were needed for the new computer. There was a power cable for the computer, a power cable for the monitor, a cable for the camera attached to the computer, power cables for the computer’s speakers, cables going to and from the USB hub, a cable connecting the computer to the printer and another cable to power the printer, and various cables for plugging in iPods, cameras, etc. There was even a loose cable tangled in with the others that seemed to have no purpose.
They were all in such a twisted mess that I was reminded why I kept them all stuffed down behind my desk and kept out of sight. Untangling all of the cables and then figuring out how to connect them all to my new computer was the most time consuming part of installing the computer. If only someone would invent a way to power a computer and all of the peripheral devices without the need for all of the cables. What if there were such a thing as wireless transmission of electricity? (Read more…)
In my previous blog I outlined Google’s Clean Energy 2030 proposal for reducing carbon emissions and increasing renewable energy production in the US. As promised, I have gone through the proposal in detail and now offer my thoughts on what I like and dislike about it. As always, these issues are open to debate, and I encourage everyone to get involved, or at least to educate themselves on the subject. I will try to provide links for external sources of information where applicable. The first half of my comments are as follows, in no particular order:
I like that the renewable energy goals are being achieved through three main areas: wind, solar, and geothermal. Nathan Lewis at the California Institute of Technology outlines the total energy that can be potentially captured from natural resources in a series of talks and papers. Of these, wind, solar, and geothermal comprise the three largest, although solar by far is greater than the other two. With that in mind, I think the goal with respect to wind is reasonable in that the technology is currently close to maturity and is cost effective. In my opinion however, the geothermal goals seem a bit inflated considering the level of investment that will be needed for widespread implementation of enhanced geothermal systems. Globally speaking, I think solar (thermal and photovoltaic) will be the best solution, but utilizing all of our mix of resources for a near-term national solution is advisable. (Read more…)
Those interested in the science, economics, and policy of clean energy initiatives do not have far to look these days. Besides the government’s Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which maps out a plan for investment in clean energy technologies, many private sector institutions are getting their feet wet as well. And I don’t mean with investments alone. Many institutions are taking the time to make internal company policies as well as external proposals for the United States as a whole with regards to reducing our carbon footprint.
One notable participant, and leader in my opinion, is Google, whose “Clean Energy 2030” proposal for reducing US dependence on fossil fuel was first presented in October of 2008. The proposal is organized to address three main areas of action: energy efficiency, renewable (carbon-free) electricity, and personal vehicles. By addressing these areas in combination, their analysis concludes that by the year 2030 the following reductions can be made from the predicted EIA baseline numbers: fossil fuel-based electricity down 88%, vehicle oil consumption down 44%, and overall US CO2 emissions down 49%.
Google is unique in that they have used their resources to not only hire staff to take the time to develop such proposals, but they also have started to implement these solutions within Google and throughout the community. (Read more…)
I’ve never been a big fan of bottled water. Initially, my distaste for bottled water was due to my feelings that drinkers of bottled water were trying to either appear more refined than me or healthier than me. Either way, I didn’t like it.
Eventually, my distaste for bottled water focused on how the whole concept of bottling and selling water in an industrialized nation, like the U.S., is incredibly unfriendly towards the environment. When I think of how much fossil fuel goes into the manufacture of all of those little plastic bottles which are then filled with water and then flown to America from places like France and Fiji at the expense of burning more fossil fuels so that Americans can drive around in their fossil fuel burning monster-sized SUVs while drinking the stuff and then the empty bottles are carted away by fossil fuel burning trucks and are deposited in land fills where they then take about 450 years to decompose…..well, I think you get my point.
Now I have a new reason to not like bottled water. Could bottled water be dangerous to human health? (Read more…)
A news story broke a few weeks ago (courtesy of a study by McAfee, the virus protection software company) pertaining to the global energy costs of email spam. The study outlined a very thorough breakdown of the life-cycle of spam, from creation and dissemination to filtering and viewing. The energy usage per year for each step was analyzed for each major country and also generalized over the global scale. The conclusion: over 33 billion kilowatt-hours (KWh) of electricity are used globally each year as a result of spam. According to McAfee’s numbers, this is equivalent to the electricity usage of 2.4 million homes in the U.S., and equals the GHG emissions of 3.1 million passenger cars. Not a small amount.
This story reflects a burgeoning trend by companies to spin their products in a way that shines favorably on the environment. We probably never thought about the impact of spam on CO2 emissions, but thanks to McAfee, we can now feel good about buying their product. This is all well and good, and simply reflects the very positive cultural and societal movement towards cleaner and more efficient energy production and usage in order to reduce our environmental imprint. However, as with all science, it is necessary to analyze studies like this in detail, and to be cognizant of any conflicts of interest that may exist. In the case of corporate advertising, the vested interest of the company in producing data which leads to more sales is glaring.
The most interesting part of the McAfee study is that about 80% of the energy associated with spam comes from the user end: viewing and deleting spam, manually filtering, and searching for false positives (scanning the spam folder for valuable emails accidentally filtered from the inbox). The energy associated with each of these categories is defined as “user hours,” calculated by multiplying the time spent for these acts by the average power required by the computer.
It is in the application of these “user hours” that McAfee confuses and distorts the issue, and inflates the environmentally deleterious impact of spam presumably for its own economic benefit. The energy associated with user hours is only a factor if, in lieu of viewing and filtering spam, the computer would have been off. It is the difference in energy between normal non-spam behavior and behavior with spam, the opportunity cost (to use a business term), that should be used in the analysis. The only scenario where the McAfee analysis is correct would be where the computer is on an extra amount of time due to the user time spent dealing with spam. If you spend 15 minutes a day dealing with spam, do you stay an extra 15 minutes at work, or at home on the computer, AND do you turn your computer on and off each time you use it? It is safe to say that most people’s computing behavior does not follow this pattern. (Read more…)
Compared to many other battery technologies out there, the EESU battery has advantages in many areas, especially in terms of charge time and weight. Typically, electric cars, laptops, cell phones, and all manner of portable electronics are now powered by lithium ion batteries. The problem with these batteries is several layers deep.
One, Li ion batteries can be bulky when designed to power something like a car; for a typical laptop, to get about 5 hours of battery life, you need a reasonably large battery, bigger than the standard one they come fitted with. Two, li-ions have a finite number of discharge cycles – this means that as they are used over time, their charge capacity (how long they last) degrades, until they die. The more they are used, the faster they die, leaving a near useless husk of toxic chemicals. There are some agencies that take in old batteries and recycle them, but the fact remains that reliability over time must go down.
What this means for electric cars, is that a typical unit designed to power them would keep the range of the car limited between recharges, with that range constantly decreasing, until the large battery would need to be removed and replaced. This is seen in cell phones often – their batteries typically last a couple of years, just long enough in most contracts to be eligible for a phone upgrade. This leads to a massive amount of cell phone trash – instead of buying new batteries, which are nearly as expensive as the phones themselves, people just get new phones and throw their old ones away.
The way EESUs work is quite different. (Read more…)
Some of you may have seen the film, Who killed the Electric Car (2006), a documentary about the rise and fall of electric cars in the United States. For those who haven’t, you should definitely see it – as much as it is biased, it makes some good points about where our electric cars went. However, a return to electricity-powered cars is coming; hybrids are just one step down that road. The main issues people had with the electric cars of old were the lack of range, problems of recharging and battery replacement, and overall market penetration. For manufacturers, that was the ever-present question – if they made these electric cars, would people buy them? First and foremost is always money. However, to achieve what Obama’s administration has been working toward, freedom from energy dependence and a course change away from eco-damaging energy sources, we are going to need changes on every step of the way: changes in attitude, changes in energy sources and efficiency of transfer, changes in social norms, changes in how we get around.
Perhaps most shocking is the way our society has shifted itself towards personal transportation – commuters going to work are driving cars by themselves, fuel efficiency is among the lowest standards in the world, and there is a general dislike of public transit compared to European nations. EEStor, a Texas based company, is working with Zenn motors, a company devoted to efficient and clean cars, to produce a battery and consequently an electric car able to meet society’s needs. The battery, called an EESU, is a ceramic ultracapacitor, a different technology than our current lithium-ions that address many of the weaknesses of the li-ion batteries. Lightweight, easily recycled, high energy capacity and low recharge time, these EESU batteries are ideal for making electric cars viable.According to company press releases, it would only require $9 worth of electricity for an EESU-powered vehicle to travel 500 miles with zero emissions, versus $60 worth of gasoline in an average combustion engine car (average 22mpg, fuel prices based on 2004 averages). EESUs carry 10 times the power of traditional lead acid batteries without the toxic chemicals and materials. EESUs could very well be the return of the electric car. More on this next week.
What is “peak energy”, and does it exist? What effect does it have on the global community’s drive to develop sustainable energy technologies?
Peak energy is the theoretical proposition that at some point – past, current, or future – our capability to extract and process fossil fuels will reach a maximum, and then start to decrease until reserves are wholly depleted. Peak energy has become a widely discussed and disputed subject as carbon emissions and alternative energy have become ubiquitous topics in today’s society.
The idea was first introduced in the 1950s, when M. King Hubbert proposed that the production of a fuel roughly follows a bell curve, with a distinct maximum – and hence, a distinct total reserve of fuel that is known to exist and be economically feasible to extract. This idea has become widely accepted, despite that substantial historical evidence points to a more adaptive theory most notably defended by Morris Adelman at MIT. His proposal is that Hubbert’s peak energy theory posits two major flaws: (1) humans will never know, or be able to know, the entire supply of fuels that exists on earth, a value that is required or assumed in Hubbert’s model, and (2) the model neglects that development of technologies will continue to expand the reserves in a balance with demand and cost.
Proponents of both theories cite historical reserves and production data as evidence in support of their respective positions. (Read more…)
An inspiring segment on last night’s episode of 60 Minutes profiled the work of DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) “Revolutionizing Prosthetics” program, a $100 million project intent on advancing a field that, in some respects, hasn’t changed much in more than 50 years.
The piece concentrated on the DARPA-funded DEKA arm, developed by inventor Dean Kamen and his team of 40 engineers. Size and comfort were key issues in designing the limb. The final product is the size of an average person’s arm, weighs around nine pounds, and is buffered from the wearer’s body by small balloons that expand and deflate as pressure on the arm changes (the balloons inflate when the wearer picks up something heavy, and deflate when the arm is at rest). Controlling the arm using their shoulders and pedals in a specially designed shoe, volunteers demonstrated their ability to pick up and drink from a soda bottle and eat a grape.
The end of the segment touched on the future of prosthetic control, featuring Duke University engineer Jonathan Kuniholm. Kuniholm, who lost his forearm in Irag, demonstrated his ability to control a prosthetic hand using the nerves still intact in the remaining part of his arm. These nerves send out small electrical signals, which a processor in a prosthetic arm can be trained to interpret.
Similar work is being done here by Northwestern faculty member Todd Kuiken and his research team at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. They are using an exciting new procedure called targeted reinnervation to reroute nerves that used to control a missing limb to different, intact muscle areas (rerouting nerves that used to control an amputee’s arm to his or her chest muscles, for example). These reinnervated muscles can then communicate with a prosthesis, again allowing the wearer to control their limb intuitively. Click here to read an SiS article on the Kuiken team’s work.
