CleanTechnica

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For those of you who are bettin’ folks, traders on the Chicago Climate Exchange view the Democrats as more bullish on cap-and-trade systems. So if you’re betting on a Democratic victory, you’ll want to buy those contracts now, in anticipation of a price spike on Nov. 5 (Politico).

Toyota Prius sales have topped 1 million and dealers in most markets simply can’t keep them on the shelves. Toyota says domestic inventory is limited by production capacity in Japan, which is shared by the Asian and European markets. The U.S. supply is at its lowest level in two years (Wired).

Imagine a high-speed train that could get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in two hours forty minutes. Well, that dream is now one step closer to reality as the California High Speed Rail Authority has cleared environmental impact assessments and is beginning construction of what will be the most substantial high-speed rail network in the U.S. But don’t make travel arrangements just yet. The project is not scheduled to be completed until 2030 (gas 2.0).

A joint biofuel effort was announced Thursday involving Air Bus, JetBlue, Honeywell, and Aero Engines that plans to study ways to make commercial aviation fuels out of second-generation feedstocks such as algae (Green Tech Blog).

A new wave of nuclear power plants in the U.S. is likely to cost $5 billion to $12 billion a plant, two to four times previous estimates, driving up electricity bills for consumers and inevitably reigniting public concerns about the costs and benefits of nuclear power (The Wall St. Journal).      

Photo credits:

Karl Gunnarrsson via flickr Creative Commons License

compicpie via flickr Creative Commons License

Bistrosavage via flickr Creative Comons License

Truck stop electrification is boosting fuel efficiency and minimizing dependence on foreign oil from idling trucks

There are 1.3 million long-haul diesel trucks with sleeper cabs in the United States, with most drivers averaging over 100,000 miles annually. These trucks are highly affected by skyrocketing fuel prices and are dependent on foreign oil. As the value of the dollar diminishes, transportation costs are partly to blame.

Idling Trucks Waste Fuel

Truck drivers are required to rest for 10 hours for every 11 hours of driving. A large amount of fuel is consumed when drivers leave trucks idling to maintain comfort. 85% of the energy is wasted sleeper cabs are heated by an idling truck. It is even more inefficient to cool the sleeper cab, wasting 94% of the fuel’s energy.

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300 garbage collection trucks in California will soon be fueled by the same trash that they haul. Landfill gas will be purified and liquefied, producing up to 13,000 gallons of liquefied natural gas (LNG) daily.

This facility at Waste Management’s (WMI: NYSE) Altamont Landfill in Livermore, California will begin operation in 2009. It comes with a price tag of $15.5 million, with grants providing $1.4 million.

Cleaner Fuel

Waste Management is the largest waste management company in North America and operates the largest US fleet of heavy-duty collection trucks. The company has a goal to reduce fleet emissions by 15% by 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Billboard beat me too it. It’s probably better that way–because they focused on a few bands I didn’t even know existed. I was going to do a piece on Jack Johnson and his ability to create music from a studio powered by the solar panels that cover the roof, and create change from a sustainable lifestyle powered by his words and actions. Then I decided I’d branch out to include more bands, since Jack isn’t the only musician with sustainable style. Then I found this Billboard article.

I wasn’t too bummed, because as I alluded to earlier, it did open my eyes to Mana and their Selva Negra Foundation, and Missy Higgins and her carbon neutral tour. The article also highlighted the other things their top ten green bands, or “Green Ten”, are doing to share their music and their ideals. Like, The Roots giving away autographed compost bins, or Radiohead’s desire to travel only when needed, and to partner with Best Foot Forward when they do, or Serj Tankian’s Sky Is Over website, or a whole fleet of biodiesel buses, etc… (I’ll let you read the article for more).

I was also happy that Billboard did leave out one of Jack’s most important “green” features, so that I could be left with a little writing of my own…
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As we pointed out in an earlier posting, one of the problems with biofuels such as corn-based ethanol is that they are diverting food crops from food source to fuel source. Miriam Sticklen, a crop and soil scientist from Michigan State University, announced this week that she has used an enzyme from a cow’s stomach to create a new strain of corn.

This new kind of corn, in an ideal scenario, would allow the kernels to be used as food, while the (formerly) wasted part of the corn plant could be converted to biofuel. A gene from a cow’s stomach, one of the most effective digesters of plant sugars in the world, is implanted into a corn cell using genetic engineering, fundamentally changing the corn plant. As reported in Biofuels Journal: Read the rest of this entry »

An announcement made this week is stirring excitement in the aviation industry as a scientist turned inventor claims he can dramatically reduce or perhaps remove fossil fuels from modern flight. His innovative design employs wind power to make an airplane version of popular hybrid cars. He claims his prototype is cheap and scaleable–and it can easily be added to existing aircraft. The implications are far reaching as the aviation industry comes under increasing pressure to reduce their green house gas emissions.According to inventor Dr. Josef Popf, “The idea struck me as I was driving through a wind farm in Kentucky. Why not strap one of those puppies to an airplane? When I first started doing the math, it was really just for fun. I expected the wind turbine to slow down the airplane. But the deeper I delved into the problem, the more plausible it started to appear. Then, after about two solid months, I found the answers I needed and filed for a patent.”
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Craig Venter, who mapped his own genome and jump-started the biotechnology business, announced this week that he is turning his attention to the creation of fourth-generation fuels — life forms that feed on CO2 and generate methane fuel as waste. The challenge, according to Venter, is not in creating the organisms to consume CO2, which already exist, it is extracting the CO2 in quantities large enough to create a fuel supply. Venter presented his ideas this week at the influential Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference. You can watch his presentation at this link.

Dr. Jeffrey Martin and William L. Kubic, Jr. have proposed a concept to synthesize gasoline from carbon dioxide emissions, and have dubbed their idea “Green Freedom.” “The idea is simple,” (a sure bet that it’s anything but) says Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:

Air would be blown over a liquid solution of potassium carbonate, which would absorb the carbon dioxide [which] would then be extracted and subjected to chemical reactions that would turn it into fuel: methanol, gasoline or jet fuel.

The resulting gasoline would not emit carbon dioxide. Developed at Los Alamos, the idea is based on sound physics, though so far it has not been proven at the factory level. The problem with the concept is that it uses an enormous amount of energy — so much so that it can’t be produced economically except by a nuclear power plant. Oh, and thousands of them would need to be built in order to replace petroleum at current levels of use. The scientists are estimating that the process could produce gasoline at a cost of $3.40 a gallon to the consumer.

If this sounds like a contorted process, it may be because the carbon emissions problem remains a hard nut to crack. Electric cars just move the energy use to the power plant, unless those cars are powered by solar-charged batteries. Hydrogen fuel cells take large amounts of energy to create the hydrogen. And biofuels take up valuable farmland or replace rainforests needed to offset carbon emissions. So you can’t blame a scientist for trying. Martin and Kubic will present their idea today at the Alternative Energy Now conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

For another take on the “Green Freedom” project, see Steve Verhey’s post on Gas 2.0.

CSR Wire has announced IBM’s launch of “PowerUp,” a video game in which players simulate the saving of Planet Helios. The game is targeted to teenagers, or the teenager in all of us:

“The game is part of IBM’s TryScience initiative and [was] launched at Engineer’s Week 2008 opening on February 16 in Washington, D.C. The game, which can be played alone or together, features a planet in near ecological ruin where three exciting missions for solar, wind and water power must be solved before sandstorms, floods or SmogGobs thwart the rescue.”

Timothy Hurst recently wrote an article about U.S. Investors and renewable energy. This post is designed as a complement to that news story.

Renewable energy has attracted a lot of attention lately as the world looks for cleaner ways to power our world. Wind and solar stand as the most recognizable clean, green dynamos, but they still struggle to compete with traditional and entrenched power producers. True to conventional economic values, competition is everything. Yet, in the U.S.A. these technologies have survived in the dog-eat-dog industry for decades mostly without the aid of government subsidies (unlike coal and oil), and many claim that renewables could take off with just a little help from Uncle Sam. What are the obstacles? Are government subsidies the only saving grace for renewables? This post hopes to shed some light on the topic and burn through the conflicting noise that surrounds this fundamental and controversial industry.

It seems like I’m always reading articles about improvements, investments, and the promise of renewable energy. For a more practical perspective, I recently asked a successful businessman, who sometimes works with solar panels, for his opinion. Did he think that solar was going to boom in the next few years? His opinion was that the industry would need more government subsidies to really take off. Even with high oil prices, it was still simply too expensive to invest on a small scale. You might regain your initial investment in 15+ years in ideal conditions. Even in states with incentives to support renewable energy, it’s expensive. His view echoed my cousin’s frustration. Yet despite the initial cost, renewables are still an attractive option. As expensive as it may be to buy and install solar panels, it’s also very expensive ($1.8-billion and rising) to build a new coal-fired power plant with “clean coal” technologies. Hidden costs also plague coal power plants: the cost to clean up mercury emissions, the water required to operate, and in some places, the cost of carbon credits. Finally, the bottom line: how much does it cost to generate each kilowatt hour? Compare two graphs, one for coal and one for solar, and you may be surprised. Read the rest of this entry »