CleanTechnica

Total, a French oil company, recently agreed to give the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) $4 million for a 5-year research project to develop stationary batteries that can more efficiently store solar energy.

More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular.

Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen?
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Veteran solar installer Parkson Corporation is lending its expertise to a new wastewater treatment plant upgrade for the town of Berlin near the Maryland coast.  When it’s finished, the new plant will almost eliminate the use of fossil fuels for drying and converting biosolids, also known as sludge, into a lightweight Class A soil amendment or sustainable fuel.  The process is pushed along by a stainless steel “Electric Mole” that automaticaly mixes, aerates, and granulates the sludge as it dries.

The $16 million upgrade project is funded by ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act).  Parkson’s Thermo-System Active Solar Sludge Drying Chambers will enable the sludge conversion process to operate under more than 90% solar power rather than using gas or oil.  For disposing sludge in landfills, that translates into a significant savings in preparation and transportation costs.  Even better, it makes sludge products more cost-competitive with conventional soil amendments and fossil fuels, effectively taking the “waste” out of wastewater.

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An inter-agency work group headed by the White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to find the real cost of a ton of carbon emitted. It turns out to be a hard number to agree on.

Would our grandchildren really miss Florida if it was under water? How about no more fruit or nuts from California? What about the loss of our breadbasket? Would the end of corn and soy from the Midwest really bother the grandchildren of our children? How much?

Cost/benefit analysis. Economists do it all the time. So, just what is the cost to society of a ton of carbon?  The Institute for Policy Integrity consulted 144 top economists and released the result: (pdf) Economists and Climate Change: Consensus and Open Questions. By sensibly limiting the sample to economists with the most expertise on climate change, the survey was able to avoid the ignorance of economists who have not studied climate change.

84 percent agreed that the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies. A near unanimous 98 percent agreed that putting a price on carbon through a tax or cap-and-trade will increase incentives for efficiency and innovation. 55% preferred a tax, and 35% preferred cap-and‐trade.

But they came up with very widely divergent numbers for both the costs and the benefits. The cost estimates ranged from $10 a to $10 million a ton, with a median of $50 a ton. The benefits of prevention also ranged between $383 billion and $5.5 trillion over the next five decades.

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The U.S. Department of the Interior reports that overall water consumption in the United States has declined in the past 25 years, even though the population has increased 30% and use by individual American households has increased.  The statistics were compiled by the U.S. Geological Survey.

What’s the secret?  The 25-year patterns of water consumption revealed in the DOI report provide tantalizing clues about the ability of the U.S. to sustain its legendarily consumer-centric lifestyle while stabilizing and ultimately decreasing its contribution to carbon emissions and other greenhouse gasses.

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Renewable Funding’s PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) solar funding, begun by Cisco DeVries with Berkeley First was a breakthrough in making solar affordable. Now VC high-flyers Draper Fisher Jurvetson, New Cycle Capital, and RWE Ventures have just invested $12.2 million in a first round of financing to make this sober and sensible solar funding available to more homeowners.

Renewable Funding is a business in the Common Good. And it could be big too. There’s potentially a gigaton of greenhouse gas reductions to be made, at no cost to local, state, or federal governments from a $280 billion potential market in PACE solar funding in the US, acording to a UC Berkeley study published in Environment Magazine.
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Bokashi is a centuries-old Japanese method of recycling household food waste into all-natural compost.  By employing a special culture of yeast and other microorganisms, bokashi is a compact, odorless process that takes only days instead of weeks or months. Now the Bokashicycle company is breaking the process out of the kitchen and into a commercial-scale food waste recycling operation, in partnership with New Earth Farm in Hillsboro, Oregon.

New Earth Farm takes in food scraps from Bon Appetit cafeterias on the nearby Intel Hawthorn Farm campus, which provides a significant waste disposal savings compared to disposing the scraps in landfills.  Waste reduction is one goal, and in an even more sustainable twist the composted soil is used to grow crops for Abundant Harvest, a local consumer-supported agriculture (CSA) store.

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Maldives, one of the most beautiful nations on earth, held the artistic, theatrical event of an underwater government meeting last month, to try to bring more attention to the threats of climate change. Now, they are getting more practical but still grabbing headlines — they are looking to build a wind farm that will generate 40% of the island nation’s electricity needs.

The wind farm plans were announced earlier this week. The project will include 30 turbines and is expected to provide the nation with 75 MW of power, powering the capital city, their international airport, and more!
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SolarReserve; a California start-up spin-out from United Technologies’ Rocketdyne has filed an application with the CPUC to build a 150-megawatt heliostat solar farm with seven hours of after-sunset energy stored in molten salt. These are the rocket scientists responsible for our solar-powered space exploration.

Theirs would be the first heliostat type of solar array to produce grid power in California. Abengoa has several in Spain, and plans one in Arizona. United Technologies has licensed the original technology to the new company SolarReserve and its wholly owned subsidiary Rice Solar Energy, LLC, (RSE).
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A couple weeks ago, I wrote about China’s new policy to focus on buying (almost entirely) “China-grown” wind turbines and wind turbine technologies with Chinese patents. That policy wasn’t a big hit internationally and China is back-tracking.

However, is it changing its stance out of international moral pressure or a major financial incentive (recent deal) in the US? And who is to benefit the most from this shift?
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Researchers at Rice University have announced the discovery of a new breakthrough method for producing carbon nanotubes in bulk fluids.  Rice’s new nanotube “stew” could spur the inexpensive mass production of carbon nanotube-based products, much like the plastics industry employed bulk loads of melted polymers as a cheap base for making everything from medical equipment to polyester shirts to plastic bags, and countless other things in between.

Rice’s nanotube research was sponsored in party by U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy.  Aside from their military application, carbon nanotubes have a practically unlimited potential for sustainable civilian products because of their strength, light weight, and electrical conductivity among other properties. Lightweight nanomaterials could boost the gas mileage in cars and airplanes, make thinner and more flexible solar cells, increase the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries (in combination with another new high tech material, graphene), and be used in artificial photosynthesis to generate hydrogen fuel.

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