CleanTechnica

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It comes as no surprise to me to see time and time again examples of human stupidity. I’m not the sunniest of people on my best day, and when all around me the world is going to hell in a handbasket for a veritable multitude of reasons, one can only get depressed, or rise above it and become as arrogant as me.

This most recent spate of reviling the human race was sparked by an opinion piece by Elizabeth R. Sawin from the Sustainability Institute. Her title was enough to make me smile: “$4.00 per Gallon Gasoline and Climate Change Both Call for the Same Solution: Collective Investment in Clean Energy.” I smiled again when she opened with a question she was recently asked: “What do you have to say about global warming to the whole segment of Americans who are just waking up to energy issues with $4.00 per gallon gasoline?”

Needless to say, my revulsion of the human species, or at least a vast majority of them (I have a variety of revulsions, this one is environmentally based), seem to have only just realized that maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to have a look for something other than fossil fuels to power our transportation.

And the terms “climate change” or “global warming” do not even register.

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco board of supervisors has approved the country’s largest municipal solar program. The program is designed to reduce the cost of solar for city residents and leverage private dollars to get more solar on San Franciscans’ roofs (earth2tech).

GM is backing a hydrogen refueling station near Los Angeles. The station will be located at Clean Energy’s compressed natural gas (CNG) facility and should be operational by the fall (gas 2.0).

U.S. Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA) will introduce a national renewable energy feed-in tariff. Under the bill, utilities would be required to pay a set price to anyone supplying less than 20MW of renewable electricity to the grid. Inslee plans to introduce the bill in the next week or two. But requiring utilities to pay a mandated amount for renewable energy is “a new idea to D.C., and like a fine wine it’ll need time” (ecopolitology).

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There is a growing recognition that a world based on ever increasing consumption of fossil fuels is a world of constrained human development. Some people think that is a good thing, I tend toward the view that people have a lot of room for improvement and growth. We could use a new basis on which to build the devices that we will use to provide choices for our personal environment, to take us places where we want to go, and to make the goods that enable us to survive no matter what the weather brings.

My contention is that such a discovery has already been made, and that there is a growing recognition of the potential for that basis to expand the boundaries of our growth, creativity and development. The uranium oxide fuel pellet - that tiny black cylinder shown in the photo next to one of my favorite coffee mugs - is made of material with incredible potential compared to the fossil fuels that supply the heat that we use for the vast majority of our controllable power. I like to think of these tiny pellets as equivalent to early stage transistors at the time when most of the system controllers, radios, televisions, and computers in the world depended on magnetic amplifiers or vacuum tubes.

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The privately held, venture backed industrial biotechnology company, LS9, maintains that the answer to our gas crisis is renewable petroleum technology that they have custom engineered, a Designer Biofuel. Researchers at the San Francisco-based company have been able to alter existing bacteria to yield new, diesel-producing strains. They are also working on developing a bacteria strain that makes crude oil that canbe trucked and go through the refining process.

The hydrocarbon based biofuel mimics fuel properties of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, which allows it to run through existing pipeline infrastructure and run in any vehicle, setting it apart from other biofuel products. While LS9’s Designer Biofuel emits the same amount of greenhouse gas as regular crude oil and petroleum products in a combustible engine, the company purports that ultimately that they will have a much smaller impact since they don’t have to drill for the feedstock. Their product also produces twice the energy of regular petroleum products; so, it requires half of the amount of feedstock to yield the same amount of energy.

Aside from the environmental questions of emissions, the company is also competing with the challenge of moving this laboratory production to full scale industrial production.

… for production of renewable energy and maybe carbon sequestration.

Carbon neutral is gaining popularity these days, but Mantria Corporation is taking it a step further.

“We pledge Mantria Place will be the first carbon negative community in the nation by 2011,” states Troy Wragg, Mantria Corporation Chairman and CEO. “Carbon neutral is simply not good enough given today’s environmental issues. At Mantria, we believe that we must go much further to truly help our planet. Our goal is to be carbon negative.”

Located in Sequatchie County, Tennessee,  Mantria Place will be Tennessee’s largest master planned community weighing it at 5,500 acres. Nearly half of that will be green space in addition to two championship golf courses. A big question looms: can new, luxurious development really be green? With luxuries like two golf courses, how can their carbon footprint make it below par? Mr. Troy Wragg was kind enough to speak with me to answer that very question. Read the rest of this entry »

(Quote shamelessly borrowed from Star Wars via Lucasfilm Ltd.)
There’s a basic law of physics that everyone can agree on: you can’t create energy from nothing. So when an invention comes along and seems to do exactly that, scientists are skeptical. Some get downright prickly. The problem is, these inventions exist, and everyone who looks at it agrees: it works.

Fortunately, no laws of the universe were harmed in the making of this device, though Star Wars geeks like myself could have reason to rejoice.

The Dark Side

The idea stems from some of the most bizarre, puzzling, and dark corners of Physics, specifically Quantum Physics. Here’s the very basic idea: there is energy/matter everywhere in the universe, even the deepest, emptiest depths of space. Since there’s almost no normal energy/matter in the deepest, emptiest depths of space, the fact that all that space exists (and is expanding) means that it must be filled with something. Enter Dark Matter/Dark Energy. It is believed to exist everywhere in small amounts, but since it fills the universe, that means that there’s A LOT of it - as close to infinity as you can get. While this matter/energy is not literally “dark” in any sense of the word, it does prove that energy exists everywhere, and that it affects normal matter so that (in theory) we could use it. (Watch a video for more details about this concept) Read the rest of this entry »

As a long time proponent of the increased use of nuclear energy, I have been involved in thousands of conversations on the topic. (Trust me, I am a boring guest at a cocktail party and a real pain around the water cooler.) Nearly every one of them eventually included the comment that sounds like a question but is usually offered as a trump card aimed at stopping the conversation - “That sounds pretty good, Rod, but what do you do about the waste?”

That is the point where - if the person that I am speaking to has not totally run out of patience or simply cannot wait to get another drink - the conversation gets really interesting. You see, “the waste issue” is the best news that there is about nuclear power. I am not alone in that feeling; many of my long time colleagues like Ted Rockwell, author of The Rickover Effect, How One Man Made a Difference, believe that the byproducts that remain after producing energy with fission are valuable raw materials that should not be considered to be waste products. (See, for example, Why Throw Away a Priceless Resource?)

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Disclosure: I have been following the development of this device for several years and own Medis stock.

As a long time business traveler who likes to listen to music and podcasts and who occasionally needs to participate in lengthy phone calls, I have often gathered with others around the few electric sockets available at airports to grab a bit of juice for my portable devices. Some airports have finally started making more outlets available - perhaps they recognize that forcing some of their best customers to sit on the floor next to the columns where their cleaning crews plug in vacuum cleaners was not a good form of customer service.

However, there are still plenty of times when there is no source of ready power and I have a battery operated device that needs to be charged.

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One of my frequent frustrations is getting involved in an energy policy discussion with someone that goes something like this:

Them: I am deeply concerned about global climate change and the effects of mankind’s continued use of dirty fossil fuels on our planet’s health.
Me: I used to operate power plants that produced zero emissions. What do you think about taking a new look at using nuclear power to replace fossil fuel consumption? Them: I do not like nuclear power. We can get all the power that we need by conservation, wind, solar and biomass.
Me: How do you expect for windmills and solar panels to produce power when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining? Can you really shut down fossil plants if you build wind turbines and put solar panels on buildings?
Them: No, but the grid can provide all the back-up we need. We already have paid for building the existing plants and should not spend any money on building new ones while we transition to a new economy where we can live within our natural energy income.
Me: But that means that we have to continue extracting and burning fossil fuels when we could be building plants that make them unnecessary.
Them: I do not like nuclear power and do not want to replace one poison with another.

These conversations often go on far longer until either I or my opponent gives up from frustration or exhaustion. Read the rest of this entry »

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