the Town-Green Times

2010-01-15T10:29:00.000-08:00

From a cost/benefit perspective, the self-assembly described below requires propylene-terephthalate (PET), a nasty plastic, and, I imagine, a fair amount of petroleum for both materials and manufacturing. The dilemma of renewable energy technology! Traditional ways alone will not transform the giant landfill we've created but virtually every technology contributes to that landfill.

Steve

Self-assembling solar panels a step closer

January 14th, 2010 in Chemistry / Materials Science

The self assembly process made a device of 64,000 parts in 3 minutes. Image: Heiko O. Jacobs

(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists Robert J. Knuesel and Heiko O. Jacobs of the University of Minnesota have developed a way to make tiny solar cells self-assemble.

The researchers had previously been unsuccessful in their attempts to make self-assembling electronic components. In large systems gravity can be used to drive self-assembly, and in nanoscale systems chemical processes can be used, but between the two scales, in the micrometer range, it is much more difficult.

To overcome the difficulties, Kneusel and Jacobs designed a flexible substrate of a thin layer of copper covered with propylene-terephthalate (PET). Regular depressions the same size as the "chiplets" were etched into the PET layer and then the sheet was dipped into a bath of molten solder, which coated the exposed copper in the etched depressions. Each chiplet consisted of a 20-60 µm silicon cube with one gold face. The silicon sides had a coating of hydrophobic (water-repelling) molecules, while the gold side had a hydrophilic (water-attracting) coating.

When the elements were placed in a container containing oil and water, they neatly arranged themselves in a sheet at the boundary between the liquids, with the gold side pointed down to the water layer. The substrate was then pulled slowly up through the boundary like a conveyor belt, and the elements neatly dropped in place in the depressions as the solder attracted the gold side. Accuracy was 98%. The assembly was covered with epoxy to keep the chiplets in place, and then a conducting electrode layer was added.

The device was able to assemble 62,000 elements, each of them thinner than a human hair, in only three minutes. The elimination of a dependency on gravity and sedimentation meant the chiplets could be reduced to below 100 micrometers in size. It was important to limit the assembly time to avoid oxidation of the surfaces, which would reduce surface energies and interfere with self-assembly. The water layer had to be acidic, at pH 2.0, and the temperature had to be kept at 95C to keep the solder molten.

The self assembly process. Elements align at the oil/water boundary. The "blank" solar cell has pre-cut places for the elements and is dipped through the boundary. As it is slowly drawn upwards, the elements pop into place.

The researchers think they can adapt their method to smaller components and larger assembled devices, and it could be used to cheaply and quickly assemble all kinds of high-quality electronic components on a wide range of flexible or inflexible substrates including plastics, semiconductors and metals. The assemblages could find uses in numerous applications such as solar cells, video displays and tiny semiconductors.
The use of this method in solar cell production would reduce the cost considerably since less silicon is needed, and it should also be possible to assemble solar chiplets into transparent, flexible materials, which would extend their range of uses.

The paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

More information: Self-assembly of microscopic chiplets at a liquid-liquid-solid interface forming a flexible segmented monocrystalline solar cell, Robert J. Knuesel and Heiko O. Jacobs, PNAS, DOI:10.1073/pnas.0909482107

© 2010 PhysOrg.com

2009-12-24T11:12:00.000-08:00

Another example of what continues to attract research funding and investment dollars. As others have pointed out, after seeing how well top down planning has solved so many transportation issues, I will continue to choose walking and biking as a bottom up alternative type of intelligent vehicles.

The holistic perspective, however, tends to undermine the legitimacy of the techno-fix approach with the fact that the most intelligent and healthy vehicles are self powered! Steve

Steve

How Intelligent Vehicles Will Increase the Capacity of Our Roads

As the percentage of computer-controlled cars on the road increases, traffic should flow smoothly for longer, says a new study.

Adaptive cruise control systems work by monitoring the road ahead using a radar or laser-based device and then use both the accelerator and brake to maintain a certain distance from the vehicle ahead. (Other variations can bring the car to a halt in the event of a potential accident).

These devices have been available on upmarket cars for ten years or more and are now becoming increasingly common. If you drive regularly on freeways, the chances are you regularly come across other vehicles being driven by these devices, especially in Europe and Japan (here, the density of traffic means that ordinary cruise control has never caught on in the way it has in the U.S.).

So how does the presence of computer-controlled vehicles affect traffic dynamics? Today, Arne Kesting and pals at the Technical University of Dresden in Germany provide an answer of sorts using a model of traffic flow in which both human and computer-driven cars share the road.

They say that the presence of computer-driven cars increases the amount of traffic that can flow on a road before jamming occurs. And the more of these cars, the greater the capacity becomes. "1 percent more [computer-controlled] vehicles will lead to an increase of the capacities by about 0.3 percent," they say.

That's interesting but there have been other studies suggesting that computer-controlled cars can lead to greater congestion and it's not at all clear why Kesting and company's analysis is superior.

Either way, the argument is probably moot. Computer-controlled cars are just the first step in what many expect to be a revolution in car travel. The big increases in traffic capacity are likely to come when cars are able to communicate with each other. This should allow entire platoons of vehicles to travel as one unit, with just a few centimetres gap between cars and the vehicle in the front communicating its intentions to all the others. Platooning should improve fuel efficiency, too.

Of course, that won't be possible until there is a critical mass of computer-controlled cars on the roads. Even then there is a bigger hurdle to overcome of creating the legal framework in which all this can happen: imagine the insurance claims if one of these platoons were to crash.

The biggest challenge for the makers of cars that drive themselves is no longer technical but legal.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0912.3613: Enhanced Intelligent Driver Model to Access the Impact of Driving Strategies on Traffic Capacity

2009-12-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

A sign [article] of what's trending in California. Reusing landfill makes sense [you may even be able to capture the landfill's methane]; the conversion of ag land into power generation land is already creating battlelines as 'we' struggle to maintain our "way of life". In the words of Stewart Brand, "The climate change problem is principally an energy problem". Steve

Stanislaus County Board of Supervisors Watch (12/23/09)

last updated: December 22, 2009 10:53:17 PM
By unanimous vote, Stanislaus County supervisors Tuesday:
• Awarded a one-year exclusive negotiating period to Sol Orchard, which wants to build a solar energy farm at the former Greer Road Landfill. Sol's response beat those submitted by two other companies, including JKB Energy, which recently won a one-year negotiating period for a much larger solar farm next to the county's Fink Road landfill near Crows Landing. Sol has a pending partnership with Solar Power Partners, the nation's third-largest solar energy developer. Preliminary plans include a mounting system that doesn't penetrate soil. Sol will have a year to do environmental studies, make a power-selling deal and negotiate a lease with the county.
-- Garth Stapley

Vulcan Logic and the Missing Sink

2009-11-16T16:37:00.000-08:00

By: David Richardson

The daily carbon dioxide emissions report probably doesn't come up very often at America's dining room tables, but Kevin Gurney and researchers from the Vulcan Project hope to soon see that change.

Gurney leads Purdue University's Vulcan Project , which has produced the nation's first county-by-county, hour-by-hour snapshot of CO2 emissions. With Vulcan — named after the Roman god of fire and funded by the federal government through the North American Carbon Program — it is possible to peer, literally, into your own backyard (or your neighbor's) to see how your local area is contributing to the global problem that ultimately leads to global warming.

A little goes a long way
The gases nitrogen and oxygen account for 98 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. As one of the alphabet soup of trace gases naturally present in the air, CO2 accounts for a mere .038 percent of the atmosphere by mass; however, it has a disproportionate impact on warming.

As Gurney , the associate director of the Climate Change Research Center at Purdue University, explained, "It comes down to how we look at the atmosphere. If we look at it in terms of mass — just the weight of things — then CO2 is very small, but if we think about it in terms of the amount of infrared radiation it would trap, then CO2 would look huge."

Although the oceans remove one-third to one-half of the carbon dioxide produced each year, "the bad news is, their ability to do so appears to be diminishing," Gurney said. Meanwhile, the thousand-year atmospheric lifespan of CO2 means levels will continue to ratchet up even if emissions ended immediately.

Nevertheless, given what is known about carbon dioxide sources and sinks (locales or processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere), scientists say CO2 has not accumulated as fast as one might expect, leading to the ironic question, "Why is the atmosphere not more polluted?"

Gurney and Daniel Mendoza, a graduate student with the Vulcan Project, suspect the answer may lie in an unrecognized carbon sink somewhere on the planet, and in light of the diminishing CO2 capacity of the seas, they believe this "missing sink" will play an important role in the carbon policy equation.

Though Gurney said CO2 concentration varies by no more than a few parts per million from pole to pole, he believes that mapping these barely perceptible peaks and valleys in CO2 levels could lead the way to the missing carbon sinks.

"In effect the weather map is a great analogy," he said. "Most people know that the air has temperature everywhere, but we know that in some places it's a bit higher and in some places it's a bit lower just like a weather map shows. CO2 is kind of like that. It's everywhere but it definitely has little bumps and valleys depending upon what's happening at the surface.

"The absence of the gas, where it would otherwise be expected, would indicate the possible location of the missing sinks."

To find the hidden sink, Gurney explained, research must first pin down where the observed carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originates. But that is not easy. CO2 mixes thoroughly with air as it travels over the planet. "You can find CO2 at the South Pole that was generated by industrial activity in the Northern Hemisphere."

Nonetheless, Gurney said, "We've known at the national level how much is coming from the U.S. as a whole," but prior to the Vulcan Project, the best estimates of emissions at the state level were based on fuel sales figures and shipping records.

Drilling down to the local level the math gets even fuzzier. Gurney says "the gold standard" of CO2 emissions estimates merely apportioned total discharges among jurisdictions on the basis of population density. Noting the obvious flaw in that approach, he points out that major CO2 emitters such as interstate highways and power plants, which alone account for 40 percent of U.S. emissions, are often a considerable distance from the population centers they serve.

To get a more accurate view of emissions sources Gurney turned to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and its network of local air pollution monitors . "Emission monitoring has gone on for 40 years — since the 1960s — which is an amazing legacy of information and infrastructure built and perfected over four decades," he explained. "In fact it is so good that we almost take it for granted now."

Reverse engineering
Although the EPA monitoring system was never intended to record CO2 levels, Gurney said their reports can be reverse-engineered to quantify the CO2 component of the exhaust that produced the pollution, "provided you know the type of device and fuel."

Mendoza is using data recycled from transportation studies picked up by "the thin wires that you can see that run across the road."

"They're the Federal Highway Administration 's weight and motion sensors," he said. "They classify vehicles as either light duty or heavier duty" as they pass over the counter. Mendoza says from this and similar data, Vulcan can generate CO2 emissions figures along major roads.

Although Vulcan collects no original field data, Mendoza says an incredible amount of detail can be coaxed from archival sources. Looking back to the year 2002, he says, Vulcan provides a sector-by-sector breakdown of CO2 emissions from the power plant sector, residential, commercial sectors, and the cement sector. "We can bring it down to a 10-kilometer-by-10-kilometer grid and provide a temporal pattern for most sectors," he said.

"We were a little bit floored by how much emissions actually come out of very unpopulated areas — a lot of that is due to electricity generation, which is such a great part of the economy here," Mendoza noted.

He said Vulcan delivered an additional surprise, revealing large cities to be "much more" CO2 efficient than smaller communities. Aside from the efficiency of urban mass transit, Mendoza believes lifestyle plays a role in the disparity. "Here in rural Indiana, we have large houses out in the middle of two acres, so the heating cost are much larger, but in the city you have the urban heat island effect keeping costs down."

The Vulcan Project Web page offers animated displays that show local CO2 emissions ramping up and down in response to heating and cooling needs, traffic patterns or other cycles of daily American life for the year 2002.

International Appeal
Gurney said U.S. government officials asked him if Vulcan can be used for "verification purposes" for an eventual climate treaty. It's an idea he finds appealing: "It would certainly be better to have an independent scientific body perform that function than a government."

He believes the average citizen can benefit from a dialogue with Vulcan as well. (You can take a look immediately using Google Earth .)

"I was pretty amazed at how interested people were when we released the maps and the movies," he said. "It's always been difficult to communicate the essence of this problem because it's very abstract in a certain way. One of the things that Vulcan has done is start to make this problem a bit more real and at least make it recognizable to people's lives.

"It brings the discussion down to the human scale, to the scale people live, in their state, their county, in some cases, their city. It brings it into their living rooms."

Mendoza said his next tasks will include adding data from Mexico and Canada so the Vulcan grid covers the entire continent.

Gurney, who predicts Vulcan eventually will produce emissions forecasts three months in advance, said he has received funding for a global version of the project and is currently exploring partnership opportunities with candidates in Europe, Asia and South America.

Despite the detour down the public awareness road, Gurney says he has not wavered from his initial quest to discover the missing sink. However, with a better grasp on where the CO2 originates, he says it will take direct observation, on a global scale, to determine where it might be going, and that job he said, is best performed from space.

Print

Intelligent Lighting Controls Deliver ROI in 3 Years

2009-11-02T16:54:00.001-08:00

October 16, 2009

More building owners and managers are considering intelligent lighting systems to cut energy use because lighting, on average, accounts for approximately one-quarter of a building’s overall electricity use, rivaled only by HVAC and office equipment, according to Gary Meshberg, LEED, AP, and director of sales for Encelium Technologies .

State-of-the-art lighting systems reduce costs, demonstrate an overall commitment to being environmentally friendly, as well as contribute toward higher building values, higher tenant retention rates and overall end-user satisfaction, said Meshberg.

As an example, Encelium Technologies’ Energy Control System (ECS) uses addressable networking technology in combination with advanced control hardware and software, which can be integrated with HVAC, security and irrigation systems.

ECS uses a universal I/O (input/output) module to connect to standard lighting components such as low-voltage non-dimming ballasts, and occupancy sensors or photo sensors for digital control capabilities. The system allows each person to control his or her own workspace light levels from their desktop computer, and provides facility managers with energy management capabilities.

Installation of an intelligent lighting system also provides a significant return on investment (ROI), said Meshberg. He cites the following example. ECS installations, which cost between $3.00 and $3.50 per square foot for existing space, are designed to reduce lighting-related energy costs by 50 to 75 percent, so the projected savings of 75 cents to $1.25 per square foot per year means that the installation cost is amortized in less than three years.

As an example, the Rogers Centre sports and entertainment complex in Toronto, with approximately 7,000 light fixtures, cut its energy use by 77 percent, or by 3,731,000 KWh annually, with an ECS installation, according to Meshberg. The complex also achieved a 39 percent reduction in energy demand and a savings of 76 percent for energy costs. This translates into a cost savings of about $300,000 per year for the complex.

Meshberg also said ECS installations ease the way for buildings to earn the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental (LEED) certification, contributing up to 18 points needed for certification, as well as facilitate a building’s compliance with ASHRAE 90.1, EPAct, Title 24 of the California Code of Regulations and various utility rebate programs.

Spinning flywheels said to make greener energy

2009-10-06T12:18:00.001-07:00

Sep 21, 2009
Associated Press Online
By JAY LINDSAY

TYNGSBOROUGH, Mass., Sep. 21, 2009 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- Spinning flywheels have been used for centuries for jobs from making pottery to running steam engines. Now the ancient tool has been given a new job by a Massachusetts company: smooth out the electricity flow, and do it fast and clean.
Beacon Power's flywheels -- each weighing one ton, levitating in a sealed chamber and spinning up to 16,000 times per minute -- will make the electric grid more efficient and green, the company says. It's being given a chance to prove it: the U.S. Department of Energy has granted Beacon a $43 million conditional loan guarantee to construct a 20-megawatt flywheel plant in upstate New York.
"We are very excited about this technology and this company," said Matt Rogers, a senior adviser to the Secretary of Energy. "It's a lower (carbon dioxide) impact, much faster response for a growing market need, and so we get pretty excited about that."
Beacon's flywheel plant will act as a short-term energy storage system for New York's electrical distribution system, sucking excess energy off the grid when supply is high, storing it in the flywheels' spinning cores, then returning it when demand surges. The buffer protects against swings in electrical power frequency, which, in the worst cases, cause blackouts.
Such frequency regulation makes up just 1 percent of the total U.S. electricity market, but that's equal to more than $1 billion annually in revenues. The job is done now mainly by fossil-fuel powered generators that Rogers said are one-tenth the speed of flywheels and create double the carbon emissions.
Beacon said the carbon emissions saved over the 20-year life of a single 20-megawatt flywheel plant are equal to the carbon reduction achieved by planting 660,000 trees.
Flywheels also figure into the emerging renewable energy market, where intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar provide power at wildly varying intensities, depending on how long the breeze blows and sun shines. That increases the need for the faster frequency buffering, Rogers said.
Dan Rastler of the Electric Power Research Institute, an industry research group, added that if a carbon tax is passed by Congress, flywheels start looking a lot better than fossil-fuel powered alternatives.
Beacon's flywheels, massive carbon and fiberglass cylinders, have already been tested on a small scale in New York, California and the company's Tyngsborough offices. Chief executive officer Bill Capp hopes the Stephentown, N.Y., plant will be up and running by the end of 2010.
Flywheels are rotating discs or cylinders that store energy as motion, like the bicycle wheel that keeps rotating long after a pedal's been turned. That energy can be drawn off smoothly depending on the needs of the user, such as when the speed of a potter's wheel is adjusted to shape the clay as desired.
The basics of Beacon's flywheels seem simple enough as they spin silently in their chambers in a small facility outside Beacon's Tyngsborough plant. But the technological challenges to create them were immense and have cost Beacon $180 million, so far.
For instance, the one-ton flywheel had to be durable enough to spin smoothly at exceptionally high speeds. To avoid losing stored energy to friction, the flywheel levitates between magnets in a vacuum chamber.
"We've pretty much demonstrated that it works, it's just a question of scaling," Capp said. "The more we run, the more people get comfortable with us."
Beacon's flywheels are powered by the excess energy they take off the grid. When demand for electricity surges, the flywheels even things out and return the energy to the grid by slowing down.
Flywheels have some clear benefits in energy storage, including the durability to store and release power hundreds of thousands of times over a long, 20-year life, said Yuri Makarov, chief scientist in power systems at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which tested Beacon's system for the DOE. Chemical batteries being developed for the same job wear out after a couple thousand charge-and-discharge cycles.
Flywheels use less energy than fossil-fuel powered generators because they adjust more quickly to the ever-shifting demands of the electric grid by simply slowing down or spinning faster, Makarov said. Fossil-fuel generators are slower and less efficient as they constantly fire up and down.
The disadvantage of flywheels, Makarov said, is that they can only store a limited amount of energy for a limited amount of time. That can shut them out of numerous other services the grid demands -- and that other storage technologies can perform -- such as long-term power storage.
Regulations in many markets are also lagging. Beacon will bid against other power generators to provide frequency regulation, but in some markets, the bidding system doesn't even exist yet for energy storage.
Beacon's reward for taking on the technology is that it's the first flywheel company in the nation ready to provide utility-scale frequency regulation in the electric grid. Rogers said the New York project will help show whether the flywheels can do the job:
"If they're successful in New York, we'd expect this kind of technology to be picked up in many other markets around the country," he said.

Superefficient Solar from Nanotubes

2009-09-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Carbon nanotube photovoltaics can wring twice the charge from light.
By Katherine Bourzac

Today's solar cells lose much of the energy in light to heat. Now researchers at Cornell University have made a photovoltaic cell out of a single carbon nanotube that can take advantage of more of the energy in light than conventional photovoltaics. The tiny carbon tubes might eventually be used to make more-efficient next-generation solar cells.

"The main limiting factor in a solar cell is that when you absorb a high-energy photon, you lose energy to heat, and there's no way to recover it," says Matthew Beard , a senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO. Loss of energy to heat limits the efficiency of the best solar cells to about 33 percent. "The material that can convert at a much higher efficiency will be a game-changer," says Beard.

Researchers led by Paul McEuen , professor of physics at Cornell, began by putting a single nanotube in a circuit and giving it three electrical contacts called gates, one at each end and one underneath. They used the gates to apply a voltage across the nanotube, then illuminated it with light. When a photon hits the nanotube, it transfers some of its energy to an electron, which can then flow through the circuit off the nanotube. This one-photon, one-electron process is what normally happens in a solar cell <http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/23459/> . What's unusual about the nanotube cell, says McEuen, is what happens when you put in what he calls "a big photon" -- a photon whose energy is twice as big as the energy normally required to get an electron off the cell. In conventional cells, this is the energy that's lost as heat. In the nanotube device, it kicks a second electron into the circuit. The work was described last week in the journal Science <http://sciencemag.org/> .

There's evidence that another class of nanomaterials called quantum dots can also convert the energy of one photon into more than one electron. However, making operational quantum-dot cells that can do this has proved a major hurdle, says Beard, whose lab, led by Arthur Nozik , is working on the problem. One of the challenges with quantum-dot solar is that it's very difficult to get the freed electrons to leave the quantum dot and enter an external circuit. "The system is teasing you; you can't get those charge carriers out, so what's the point?" says Ji Ung Lee , professor of nanoscale engineering at the State University of New York in Albany. "McEuen's group has shown this in a system where you can get the extra carriers out."

McEuen cautions that his work on carbon nanotube photovoltaics is fundamental. "We've made the world's smallest solar cell, and that's not necessarily a good thing," he says. To take advantage of the nanotubes' superefficiency, researchers will first have to develop methods for making large arrays of the diodes. "We're not at a point where we can scale up carbon nanotubes, but that should be the ultimate goal," says Lee, who developed the first nanotube diodes while a researcher at General Electric.

It's not clear why the nanotube photovoltaic cell offers this two-for-one energy conversion. "It's mysterious to us," says McEuen. However, the most likely reason is that while conventional solar materials have only one energy level for electrons to move through, carbon nanotubes have several. And two of them just happen to be very well matched: one of the energy levels, or bandgaps, is twice as high as the other. "We may have gotten lucky, and it has very little to do with the fact that it's a carbon nanotube," says McEuen. This means, McEuen hopes, that even if it proves too challenging to make arrays of nanotube solar cells, materials scientists can look for pairs of materials that have these kinds of matched bandgaps, and layer them to make solar cells that do with two materials what the single nanotube cells can do. "Maybe the answer won't be in nanotubes, but in another pair of materials," McEuen says.

Copyright Technology Review 2009.

Panels of Light Fascinate Designers

2009-09-08T12:17:00.000-07:00

September 7, 2009
By ERIC A. TAUB

LED light bulbs, with their minuscule energy consumption and 20-year life expectancy, have grabbed the consumer’s imagination.

But an even newer technology is intriguing the world’s lighting designers: OLEDs, or organic light-emitting diodes , create long-lasting, highly efficient illumination in a wide range of colors, just like their inorganic LED cousins. But unlike LEDs, which provide points of light like standard incandescent bulbs, OLEDs create uniform, diffuse light across ultrathin sheets of material that eventually can even be made to be flexible.

Ingo Maurer , who has designed chandeliers of shattered plates and light bulbs with bird wings , is using 10 OLED panels in a table lamp in the shape of a tree. The first of its kind, it sells for about $10,000.

He is thinking of other uses. “If you make a wall divider with OLED panels, it can be extremely decorative. I would combine it with point light sources,” he said.

Other designers have thought about putting them in ceiling tiles or in Venetian blinds, so that after dusk a room looks as if sunshine is still streaming in.

Today, OLEDs are used in a few cellphones, like the Impression from Samsung, and for small, expensive, ultrathin TVs from Sony and soon from LG. (Sony’s only OLED television, with an 11-inch screen, costs $2,500.) OLED displays produce a high-resolution picture with wider viewing angles than LCD screens.

In 2008, seven million of the one billion cellphones sold worldwide used OLED screens, according to Jennifer Colegrove, a DisplaySearch analyst. She predicts that next year, that number will jump more than sevenfold, to 50 million phones.

But OLED lighting may be the most promising market. Within a year, manufacturers expect to sell the first OLED sheets that one day will illuminate large residential and commercial spaces. Eventually they will be as energy efficient and long-lasting as LED bulbs, they say.

Because of the diffuse, even light that OLEDs emit, they will supplement, rather than replace, other energy-efficient technologies, like LED, compact fluorescent and advanced incandescent bulbs that create light from a single small point.

Its use may be limited at first, designers say, and not just because of its high price. “OLED lighting is even and monotonous,” said Mr. Maurer, a lighting designer with studios in Munich and New York. “It has no drama; it misses the spiritual side.”

“OLED lighting is almost unreal,” said Hannes Koch, a founder of rAndom International in London, a product design firm. “It will change the quality of light in public and private spaces.”

Mr. Koch’s firm was recently commissioned by Philips to create a prototype wall of OLED light, whose sections light up in response to movement.

Because OLED panels could be flexible, lighting companies are imagining sheets of lighting material wrapped around columns. (General Electric created an OLED-wrapped Christmas tree as an experiment.) OLED can also be incorporated into glass windows; nearly transparent when the light is off, the glass would become opaque when illuminated.

Because OLED panels are just 0.07 of an inch thick and give off virtually no heat when lighted, one day architects will no longer need to leave space in ceilings for deep lighting fixtures, just as homeowners do not need a deep armoire for their television now that flat-panel TVs are common.

The new technology is being developed by major lighting companies like G.E., Konica Minolta, Osram Sylvania, Philips and Universal Display.

“We’re putting significant financial resources into OLED development,” said Dieter Bertram, general manager for Philips’s OLED lighting group. Philips recently stepped up its investment in this area with the world’s first production line for OLED lighting, in Aachen, Germany.

Universal Display, a company started 15 years ago that develops and licenses OLED technologies, has received about $10 million in government grants over the last five years for OLED development, said Joel Chaddock, a technical project manager for solid state lighting in the Energy Department.

Armstrong World Industries and the Energy Department collaborated with Universal Display to develop thin ceiling tiles that are cool to the touch while producing pleasing white light that can be dimmed like standard incandescent bulbs. With a recently awarded $1.65 million government contract, Universal is now creating sheetlike undercabinet lights.

“The government’s role is to keep the focus on energy efficiency,” Mr. Chaddock said. “Without government input, people would settle for the neater aspects of the technology.”

G.E. is developing a roll-to-roll manufacturing process, similar to the way photo film and food packaging are created; it expects to offer OLED lighting sheets as early as the end of next year.

“We think that a flexible product is the way to go,” said Anil Duggal, head of G.E.’s 30-person OLED development team. OLED is one of G.E.’s top research priorities; the company is spending more than half its research and development budget for lighting on OLED.

Exploiting the flexible nature of OLED technology, Universal Display has developed prototype displays for the United States military, including a pen with a built-in screen that can roll in and out of the barrel.

The company has also supplied the Air Force with a flexible, wearable tablet that includes GPS technology and video conferencing capabilities.

As production increases and the price inevitably drops, OLED will eventually find wider use, its proponents believe, in cars, homes and businesses.

“I want to get the price down to $6 for an OLED device that gives off the same amount of light as a standard 60-watt bulb,” said Mr. Duggal of G.E. “Then, we’ll be competitive.”

The Next Evolution in Economics: Rethinking Growth

2009-08-31T13:43:00.000-07:00

1:30 PM Wednesday August 19, 2009
by Stan Stalnaker

The credit crunch has forced people across many sectors to rethink their assumptions about how they do business, the roles of the individual in the larger system, and the very future of the system itself.

These reflections are beginning to bear fruit. We've begun to see a shift from the old, linear transaction-based approach to business toward a new, circular view, in which shared resources can better benefit all in a way that adds depth (and value) to this future economy.

Economists describe this new model in many ways. One way is to use human cellular structures as a metaphor for economic growth. Call it cellular economic theory.

What do cells tell us about business? Well, consider that cells that grow continually and exponentially (like we've been taught our economies should grow) are a form of cancer. We know intuitively and logically that continuous growth can't be sustained in living things. It's likewise unsustainable (and undesirable) in business.

But that's our current model--to just keep growing. And in this model there's no alternative to growth, only stagnation which leads to death. The result of this is policy at every level (micro, macro, corporate and public) that champions growth at all costs.

Cellular economic theory suggests an alternative to linear growth: circular growth. In the body, cells grow. Cells die. New cells grow. New cells die. On and on. We sustain ourselves through regeneration. In business, a form of staged, regenerative growth could become the norm. The growth may not even change the size of the "economic body."

Here, growth is not seen as the ultimate byproduct of an economic life cycle, but just an important one. Growth becomes one of several life cycle stages that are primarily about replenishment. Instead of growing in size and scope, companies grow in capabilities, processes and offerings. New ones come along. Old ones dies. Just like cells, growth becomes regenerative--only what needs replacing is replaced, reducing waste and improving society along the way.

For example, a brewery in India is using cellular economic thinking to grow its bottom line without producing and selling more beer. Instead it's using chaff and grain detritus to create fertilizer and biofuels--regenerating resources to lower their own production costs while widening the life cycles of their inputs.

KATIKA, a Swiss wood furniture maker, is reforesting at a rate greater than their production, using profits from their sales today to ensure the availability of resources later. In the meantime, their reforestation projects create local jobs and other sustainable benefits (home for wildlife and food, CO2 reduction) while increasing the value of formerly degraded land holdings.

In a cellular economy, key metrics change. GDP growth is less important than GDP regeneration. Successful growth takes into account the sustainability of that growth.

The most profound change in a cellular economy is the devaluation of the transaction. Today, economic value is determined primarily by the value of the transaction. To grow (even just to survive), we must keep trading, keep consuming--no matter how wasteful the process becomes--because success is creating more transactions. This keeps us locked into a linear, growth oriented paradox.

Fortunately, (if not painfully), the Internet is exposing the impossibility of sustaining a transaction-based economy. As the net drives the cost of certain goods and services toward zero, it strips profit from transactions.

In publishing, for example, the cost of information is falling while sources multiply. Same for music and other creative enterprises. Same for micro-lending versus traditional banking. Fashion and retail. Oil. Anywhere there's a middle man between the natural resource and the end consumer, the Internet is obviating the need for the middle man.

And, in place of transactions and supply chains (which are, essentially, series of middle men), communities are gaining leverage and power from these shared commodities like news and gas.

A low-level web of constant relationships, circular, cellular systems where shared, collaborative contributions are the norm, is developing. Here, the value resides with relationships, not transactions. Maybe, instead of buying and selling more and more in a mad race for grabbing the most growth, the future will be about a collaborative, community-oriented regenerative growth model.

This "economy of shares" relies on crowd-sourced contributions, a free market, and a fair dose of incentives for sustainability. When it becomes bad business to waste resources in pursuit of profit, then the regenerative model takes hold and we can kiss goodbye to the things we know we don't need but can't seem to give up. Wasteful packaging. Super-sized food portions. Environmentally damaging newspapers. Gas-guzzling SUVs.

Eventually, in a regenerative economy, we learn to focus on kaizen --constant improvements, as opposed to an ever expanding volume of low-quality transactions and markets. Call it the co-op economy. It's the kind of economic system we always say we want but can't bring ourselves to build.

If the experts are right and we do indeed need to find more sustainable ways of living, and the bankers are right in saying that we have to live within our means, and the technologists are right saying that collaborative systems are the future, then it stands to reason that the next evolution in economics is to a more natural, life-like system.

We are moving to a world where transactions will happen instantly, on demand, for free. We are moving to a time when transactions can't sustain an economy. We are realizing all systems are like biological systems--even economic ones. Growth-at-all-costs business is malignant.

It's time to apply that broad realization in new ways to the situation at hand.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/hbr/hbr-now/2009/08/a-new-approach-to-economics.html

Stan Stalnaker is the Founder and Creative Director of Hub Culture Ltd , a social network that merges online and physical world environments.

Keeping it local

2009-08-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

Jul 30th 2009 | AUSTIN
From The Economist print edition

A rising vogue for shopping near home

IN 2002 the city of Austin planned to extend about $2m in incentives to a developer who wanted to build a new Borders bookstore on a prominent downtown corner. This was an unpleasant prospect for the owners of two local independent businesses, BookPeople and Waterloo Records. If the deal had gone through they would have faced a big competitor located directly across the street. Steve Bercu, the owner of BookPeople, says that he always assumed that local businesses were better for Austin for sound economic reasons. But in the circumstances, he wanted to test the proposition.

So BookPeople and Waterloo called in Civic Economics, a consultancy. They went through the books and found that for every $100 spent at the two locals, $45 stayed in Austin in wages to local staff, payments to other local merchants, and so on. When that sum went to a typical Borders store, only $13 went back into circulation locally.

Although the study was part-funded by BookPeople and Waterloo it gave a boost to the growing “buy local” movement in America. For years business and community leaders have been full of reasons for people to do their shopping close to home. They say that local and independent businesses have more individual character, and that they are owned by your friends and neighbours. Some stores, particularly grocers, point out that it takes much less carbon to haul a truck from a few towns over than from halfway across the country.

At the moment, the economic argument has special traction. Dan Houston, a partner at Civic Economics, says that in recent studies he has found that locally-owned businesses put about twice as much money back into the community as the chains do, not three times, as the Austin study found. But that is still enough of a “local multiplier” to catch people’s attention. Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance in Portland, Maine, reckons that some 30,000 local independents have joined about 130 independent business alliances around the nation.

Big companies are taking note that customers are rooting for the home team. Ms Mitchell points to a telling development in Seattle, Washington, where Starbucks got its start. On July 24th the company opened a new coffee shop there. The newcomer is not called a Starbucks; it is called “15th Ave. Coffee & Tea”. It promises “a deep connection to the local community,” and its seats are recycled from a local theatre.

There is an insular element to the trend. “Is it pure local protectionism? Sure, to some extent it is,” says Mr Houston. But the advocates are not zealots. One national campaign is asking people to shift a mere 10% of their spending to local outfits.

The Borders project in Austin eventually fell through, and the proposed site is now occupied by the flagship of Whole Foods Market. The chain was founded in Austin and is local in a sense, although it is now publicly traded. Throughout the shop, produce advertises its credentials: local, organic, fairly traded, made in-house, vegan, and so on. This week its customers faced an ethical dilemma: is it better to buy the organic watermelon from California, or the conventionally-grown kind from Lexington, Texas?

Water Scarcity Looms

2009-08-06T10:15:00.000-07:00

Worldwatch Institute
by Gary Gardner/ August 6, 2009

Water scarcity grows in urgency in many regions as population growth, climate change, pollution, lack of investment, and management failures restrict the amount of water available relative to demand. The Stockholm International Water Institute calculated in 2008 that 1.4 billion people live in "closed basins"-regions where existing water cannot meet the agricultural, industrial, municipal, and environmental needs of all.1 Their estimate is consistent with a 2007 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) calculation that 1.2 billion people live in countries and regions that are water-scarce.2 And the situation is projected to worsen rapidly: FAO estimates that the number of water-scarce will rise to 1.8 billion by 2025, particularly as population growth pushes many countries and regions into the scarcity column.3

"Water scarcity" has several meanings. Physical water scarcity exists wherever available water is insufficient to meet demand: parts of the southwestern United States, northern Mexico, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, northern China, and southeastern Australia are characterized by physical water scarcity.4 Economic water scarcity occurs when water is available but inaccessible because of a lack of investment in water provision or poor management and regulation of water resources. Much of the water scarcity of sub-Saharan Africa falls into this category. 5

Signs of scarcity are plentiful. Several major rivers, including the Indus, Rio Grande, Colorado, Murray-Darling, and Yellow, no longer reach the sea year-round as a growing share of their waters are claimed for various uses.6 Water tables are falling as groundwater is overpumped in South Asia, northern China, the Middle East, North Africa, and the southwestern United States, often propping up food production unsustainably.7 The World Bank estimates that some 15 percent of India's food, for example, is produced using water from nonrenewable aquifers.8 Another sign of scarcity is that desalination, a limited and expensive water supply solution, is on the rise.

Water scarcity has many causes. Population growth is a major driver at the regional and global levels, but other factors play a large role locally. Pollution reduces the amount of usable water available to farmers, industry, and cities. The World Bank and the government of China have estimated, for instance, that 54 percent of the water in seven main rivers in China is unusable because of pollution.9 In addition, urbanization tends to increase domestic and industrial demand for water, as does rising incomes-two trends prominent in rapidly developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil.10

In some cases, water scarcity leads to greater dependence on foreign sources of water. A country's "water footprint"-the volume of water used to produce the goods and services, including imports, that people consume-can be used to demonstrate this.11 The ratio between the water footprint of a country's imports and its total water footprint yields its water import dependence. The higher the ratio, the more a country depends on outside water resources. In the Netherlands, for example, imported goods and services account for 82 percent of the country's total water footprint.12 (See Table 1.)

A looming new threat to water supplies is climate change, which is causing rainfall patterns to shift, ice stocks to melt, and soil moisture content and runoff to change.13 According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the area of our planet classified as "very dry" has more than doubled since the 1970s, and the volume of glaciers in many regions and snow pack in northern hemisphere mountains-two important freshwater sources-has decreased significantly.14

Climate change is expected to have a net negative impact on water scarcity globally this century. By the 2050s, the area subject to greater water stress due to climate change will be twice as large as the area experiencing decreased water stress.15 Less rainfall is expected in already arid areas, including the Mediterranean Basin, western United States, southern Africa, and northeastern Brazil, where various models all indicate that runoff will decrease by 10-30 percent in the coming decades.16 And loss of snowpack will remove a natural, off-season water reservoir in many regions: by the 2020s, for example, 41 percent of the water supply to the populous southern California region is likely to be vulnerable to warming as some of the Sierra Nevada and Colorado River basin snowpacks disappear.17

Policymakers look to a variety of solutions to address water scarcity. Desalination is increasingly feasible for small-scale water supply, as technological advances reduce costs. This involves removing most salt from salt water, typically by passing it through a series of membranes. Global desalination capacity doubled between 1995 and 2006, and according to some business forecasts it could double again by 2016.18 But production is tiny: global capacity in 2005 was some 55.4 million cubic meters, barely 0.003 percent of the world's municipal and industrial water consumption, largely because desalination remains an energy-intensive and expensive option.19 Not surprisingly, 47 percent of global capacity in 2006 was in the Middle East, where the need is great and energy is cheap.20 In addition, the technology is plagued by environmental concerns, especially disposal of salt concentrates.

Another limited solution to scarcity involves accounting for "virtual water"-the water used to produce a crop or product-when designing trade policy. Nations conserve their own water if they import products having a large virtual water component, such as foodstuffs, rather than producing them domestically. Imports to Jordan, for instance, including wheat and rice from the United States, have a virtual water content of some 5-7 billion cubic meters per year compared with domestic water use of some 1 billion cubic meters per year.21 Jordan's import policy yields enormous water savings for the country, although it also increases its food dependency. The bulk of North and South America, Australia, Asia, and Central Africa are net exporters of virtual water.22 Most of Europe, Japan, North and South Africa, the Middle East, Mexico, and Indonesia, in contrast, are net importers of virtual water.23

Other solutions focus on structural shifts in water use, including growing crops that are less water-intensive, changing dietary patterns to reduce meat consumption, and shifting to renewable sources of energy. Diets heavy in livestock products, for example, are water-intensive because of the huge quantities of water required for livestock production.24 (See Table 2.) Similarly, fossil fuel production requires many times more water than renewable energy sources do. 25 (See Table 3.)

Complete trends will be available with full endnote referencing, Excel spreadsheets, and customizable presentation-ready charts as part of our new subscription service, Vital Signs Online, slated to launch this fall.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/6213?emc=el&m=279787&l=4&v=7c1e33b23a

LEDs Are As Energy Efficient as Compact Fluorescents

2009-08-05T11:34:00.000-07:00

NYT August 4, 2009, 12:01 am

By Eric A. Taub

While there’s no question that LED lamps use a fraction of the energy to produce the same amount of light compared with a standard incandescent bulb, several Bits readers have pointed out that that’s only half the story.

If the energy used to create and dispose of the LED lamp is more than that for a comparable standard bulb, then all of the proclaimed energy savings to produce light are for naught.

Until recently, no one knew if that was the case. In March, a preliminary study reported by Carnegie Mellon indicated that LED lamps were more energy efficient throughout their life, but the researchers pointed out that not every aspect of the production process was taken into account.

A new study released on Tuesday by Osram, the German lighting giant, claims to have confirmed the efficiency findings.

Conducted by the Siemens Corporate Technology Centre for Eco Innovations (Siemens is the parent of Osram and Sylvania), the report examines the energy needed to create and power an LED lamp. Even the energy needed to ship a lamp from the factory in China to an installation in Europe was taken into account.

The study used a 25,000-hour LED lamp life as a constant, comparing the energy needed throughout its life to that used for 25 1,000-hour incandescents and 2.5 10,000-hour compact fluorescents.

The findings, according to a summary of the study: today’s LED lamps are essentially as energy efficient as compact fluorescents, in the amount of energy needed to create, recycle and provide light. Osram said it expected those numbers to improve as LEDs become more energy efficient.

The company issued no in-depth information to support its claims. It said that confirming data will be released this fall, after review by three independent analysts.

But assuming the numbers hold, this total Life Cycle Assessment should put to rest any lingering doubts about the overall “greenness” of LEDs.

* Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
* Privacy Policy
* NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

Solar Industry: No Breakthroughs Needed

2009-08-03T13:04:00.001-07:00

Monday, August 03, 2009

The solar industry says incremental advances have made transformational technologies unnecessary.
By Kevin Bullis

The federal government is behind the times when it comes to making decisions about advancing the solar industry, according to several solar-industry experts. This has led, they argue, to a misplaced emphasis on research into futuristic new technologies, rather than support for scaling up existing ones. That was the prevailing opinion at a symposium last week put together by the National Academies in Washington, DC, on the topic of scaling up the solar industry.

The meeting was attended by numerous experts from the photovoltaic industry and academia. And many complained that the emphasis on finding new technologies is misplaced. "This is such a fast-moving field," said Ken Zweibel, director of the Solar Institute at George Washington University. "To some degree, we're fighting the last war. We're answering the questions from 5, 10, 15 years ago in a world where things have really changed."

In the past year, the federal government has announced new investments in research into "transformational" solar technologies that represent radical departures from existing crystalline-silicon or thin-film technologies that are already on the market. The investments include new energy-research centers sponsored by the Department of Energy and a new agency called ARPA-Energy, modeled after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Such investments are prompted by the fact that conventional solar technologies have historically produced electricity that's far more expensive than electricity from fossil fuels.

In fact, Energy Secretary Steven Chu has said that a breakthrough is needed for photovoltaic technology to make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gases. Researchers are exploring solar cells that use very cheap materials or even novel physics that could dramatically increase efficiency, which could bring down costs.

But industry experts at the Washington symposium argued that new technologies will take decades to come to market, judging from how long commercialization of other solar technologies has taken. Meanwhile, says Zweibel, conventional technologies "have made the kind of progress that we were hoping futuristic technologies could make." For example, researchers have sought to bring the cost of solar power to under $1 per watt, and as of the first quarter of this year one company, First Solar, has done this.

These cost reductions have made solar power cheaper than the natural-gas-powered plants used to produce extra electricity to meet demand on hot summer days. With subsidies, which Zweibel argues are justified because of the "externalities" of other power sources, such as the cost from pollution, solar can be competitive with conventional electricity even outside peak demand times, at least in California. And projected cost decreases will make solar competitive with current electricity prices in more areas, even without subsidies.

Representatives of the solar industry say the federal government should do more to remove obstacles that are slowing the industry's development. One issue is financing for new solar installations, which can be much more expensive if lending institutions deem them high risk. A recent extension of federal tax credits and grants for solar investments is a step in the right direction, many solar experts say. But more could be done. A price on carbon would help make solar more economically competitive and more attractive to lenders.

A New Approach to Fusion

2009-07-31T14:47:00.000-07:00

Technology Review Friday, July 31, 2009

A startup snags funding to start early work on a low-budget test reactor.
By Tyler Hamilton

General Fusion, a startup in Vancouver, Canada, says it can build a prototype fusion power plant within the next decade and do it for less than a billion dollars. So far, it has raised $13.5 million from public and private investors to help kick-start its ambitious effort.

Unlike the $14 billion ITER project under way in France, General Fusion's approach doesn't rely on expensive superconducting magnets--called tokamaks--to contain the superheated plasma necessary to achieve and sustain a fusion reaction. Nor does the company require powerful lasers, such as those within the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, to confine a plasma target and compress it to extreme temperatures until fusion occurs.

Instead, General Fusion says it can achieve "net gain"--that is, create a fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it--using relatively low-tech, mechanical brute force and advanced digital control technologies that scientists could only dream of 30 years ago.

It may seem implausible, but some top U.S. fusion experts say General Fusion's approach, which is a variation on what the industry calls magnetized target fusion, is scientifically sound and could actually work. It's a long shot, they say, but well worth a try.

"I'm rooting for them," says Ken Fowler, professor emeritus of nuclear engineering and plasma physics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading authority on fusion-reactor designs. He's analyzed the approach and found no technical showstoppers. "Maybe these guys can do it. It's really luck of the draw."

The prototype reactor will be composed of a metal sphere about three meters in diameter containing a liquid mixture of lithium and lead. The liquid is spun to create a vortex inside the sphere that forms a vertical cavity in the middle. At this point, two donut-shaped plasma rings held together by self-generated magnetic fields, called spheromaks, are injected into the cavity from the top and bottom of the sphere and come together to create a target in the center. "Think about it as blowing smoke rings at each other," says Doug Richardson, chief executive of General Fusion.

On the outside of the metal sphere are 220 pneumatically controlled pistons, each programmed to simultaneously ram the surface of the sphere at 100 meters a second. The force of the pistons sends an acoustic wave through the lead-lithium mixture, and that accelerates into a shock wave as it reaches the plasma, which is made of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.

If everything works as planned, the plasma will compress instantly and the isotopes will fuse into helium, releasing a burst of energy-packed neutrons that are captured by the lead-lithium liquid. The rapid heat buildup in the liquid will be extracted through a heat exchanger, with half used to create steam that spins a turbine for power generation, and the rest used to recharge the pistons for the next "shot."

The ultimate goal is to inject a new plasma target and fire the pistons every second, creating pulses of fusion reactions as part of a self-sustaining process. This contrasts with ITER, which aims to create a single fusion reaction that can sustain itself. "One of the big risks to the project is nobody has compressed spheromaks to fusion-relevant conditions before," says Richardson. "There's no reason why it won't work, but nobody has ever proven it."

He says it look longer than expected to raise the money for the prototype project, but the company can now start the first phase of building the test reactor, including the development of 3-D simulations and the technical verification of components. General Fusion aims to complete the reactor and demonstrate net gain within five years, assuming it can raise another $37 million.

If successful, it believes it can build a grid-capable fusion reactor rated at 100 megawatts four years later for about $500 million, beating ITER by about 20 years and at a fraction of the cost.

"I usually pass up these quirky ideas that pass my way, but this one really fascinated me," says Fowler. He notes that there are immense challenges to overcome, but the culture of a private startup may be what it takes to tackle them with a sense of urgency. "In the big programs, especially the fusion ones, people have gotten beat up so much that they've become so risk averse."

General Fusion's basic approach isn't entirely new. It builds on work done during the 1980s by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, based on a concept called Linus. The problem was that scientists couldn't figure out a fast-enough way to compress the plasma before it lost its donut-shaped magnetic confinement, a window of opportunity measured in milliseconds. Just like smoke rings, the plasma rings maintain their shape only momentarily before dispersing.

Nuclear-research giant General Atomics later came up with the idea of rapidly compressing the plasma using a mechanical ramming process that creates acoustic waves. But the company never followed through--likely because the technology to precisely control the speed and simultaneous triggering of the compressed-air pistons simply didn't exist two decades ago.

Richardson says that high-speed digital processing is readily available today, and General Fusion's mission over the next two to four years is to prove it can do the job. Before building a fully functional reactor with 220 pistons on a metal sphere, the company will first verify that smaller rings of 24 pistons can be synchronized to strike an outer metal shell.

Glen Wurden, program manager of fusion energy sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory and an expert on magnetized target fusion, says General Fusion has a challenging road ahead and many questions to answer definitively. Can they produce spheromaks with the right densities, temperature, and life span? Can they inject two spheromaks into opposite ends of the vortex cavity and make sure they collide and merge? Will the acoustic waves travel uniformly through the liquid metal?

"You can do a good amount of it through simulations, but not all of it," says Wurden. "This is all very complex, state-of-the-art work. The problem is you're dealing with different timescales and different effects on materials when they're exposed to shock waves."

Los Alamos and General Fusion are collaborating as part of a recently signed research agreement. But Richardson isn't planning on a smooth ride. "The project has many risks," he says, "and we expect most of it to not perform exactly as expected." However, if the company can pull off its test reactor, it hopes to attract enough attention to easily raise the $500 million for a demonstration power plant.

Says Fowler, "Miracles do happen."

Copyright Technology Review 2009.

White House to Push Forward on National Urban Policy Agenda

2009-07-20T15:05:00.000-07:00

Administration to Host Daylong Talks Tomorrow;Tour of U.S. Cities Planned
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 12, 2009; 11:12 AM

After remaining out of the public eye since its creation in February, the White House Office of Urban Affairs plans on Monday to launch a public conversation to create a national urban policy agenda, said Adolfo Carrión Jr., its director.
The White House will host a daylong urban policy discussion including mayors, county executives, governors, urban policy experts, and heads of various agencies, Carrión said in a telephone interview yesterday .
President Obama is expected to address the conference and announce plans to send Carrión and other senior administration officials on a tour of American cities to discuss urban issues, Carrión said.
The conference is the first indication that the White House could back its urban policy office with the kind of muscle that Obama suggested during his campaign, before the economic collapse. He called for a new kind of urban policy to address cities and also their suburbs, and urban advocates hoped that this could be a focus of his administration's economic development approach.
"We have not had a national urban policy for decades," said Carrión. "Meanwhile, the economy has changed."
Those gathered Monday will consider local initiatives that could become best practices to emulate, with the goals of increasing the competitiveness, sustainable development and opportunity of metropolitan regions.
The conference is to present an interdisciplinary approach to urban issues and include the heads of the Departments of Labor, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development, and of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Small Business Administration.
Carrión said discussion will include initiatives like Choice Neighborhoods, a new HUD program that provides poor neighborhoods not only with housing, but also social and economic benefits, like day care and farmers' markets; and Promise Neighborhoods, a Department of Education program modeled after the Harlem Children's Zone, to improve academic achievement and life skills by offering after school and weekend sports, social and arts activities.
The conference will include several dozen policy experts, including Bruce Katz, the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, who developed some of the ideas that led to the creation of the Office of Urban Affairs. Bankers, planners, and advocates will also attend.
Meanwhile, the listening tour is to begin this month, said Carrión, and continue through the fall, reaching public school auditoriums and factory plants, and including developers, housing and environmental advocates, educators, health care providers, public safety officials, and local elected officials.
Analysts have said that the most important thing Carrión's office can do is outline a national agenda for metropolitan areas, after decades of federal inaction.
Carrión said the listening tour reflects Obama's philosophy that "the best solutions are in communities," where answers have "bubbled up" despite a lack of federal guidance and support.
Obama grew up in Honolulu and Jakarta, and forged his career in Chicago, as a community organizer, and he has been shaped by cities to a greater degree than any president in nearly a century.
"For too long government has operated from the top down," said Carrión. "We've always heard why does the national government send down these unfunded mandates, under funded mandates, mandates that are not necessarily universally applicable. The bottom-up approach speaks to the need for this to be flexible."

Eco-friendly light bulbs flip switch on problems

2009-07-20T09:40:00.000-07:00

Ann Geracimos – Washington Times
July 20, 2009

An energy efficiency measure is turning into a ticking time bomb.

The federal government plans to require consumers over the next several years to replace incandescent light bulbs with more expensive but more energy-efficient and longer-lasting compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs).

But improper disposal of the mercury-powered bulbs poses an environmental hazard, and the federal government has given little guidance to consumers. The outlets for safe disposal are few and haphazard, and history suggests that compliance will be spotty.

"The problem to the environment comes when millions get disposed of and the cumulative effect becomes problematic. That is when the [Environmental Protection Agency] gets concerned," said Neal Langerman, a former chairman of the American Chemical Society Division of Chemical Health and Safety. "If you have a municipal urban landfill and have a population of 450,000 households disposing of one or two CFLs a year - you do the arithmetic. Put one-half milligram of mercury per bulb, it amounts to a significant loading, and mercury does migrate into groundwater."

Although California has banned CFLs from trash since 2006, local governments there estimate that less than 10 percent of CFLs receive proper disposal and recycling, said San Francisco's KGO-TV.

Revised standards for home appliances and lighting under the December 2007 energy bill require incandescent light bulbs - the basic model that has been used for 130 years - to be phased out in order to achieve about 25 percent greater efficiency for bulbs by 2014 and about 200 percent greater efficiency by 2020.

Without organized programs to educate consumers on safe handling and disposal of used or broken bulbs, landfills are likely to become even more polluted, Mr. Langerman told The Washington Times.

"The appropriate thing for us as a nation is not to dispose but have an aggressive take-back program," said Mr. Langerman, who advocates a profit incentive for recycling, a system where "if you go out of your way [to safely dispose or recycle the bulbs] you get some money back. People will do this if made convenient."

The federal Web site Energy Star (www.energystar.gov) notes that each CFL bulb contains an average of 4 milligrams of mercury, compared with the 500 milligrams contained in old-style glass thermometers. None of the mercury is released in operation, and leakage is a risk only if the bulbs are broken.

The site says "electricity use is the main source of mercury emissions in the U.S.," so it's important that CFLs use less electricity than incandescent lights. The EPA says that "a 13-watt, 8,000-rated-hour-life CFL (60-watt equivalent; a common light bulb type)" will save enough energy over its lifetime to offset even all of its mercury leakage into landfills.

EPA spokeswoman Tisha Petteway wrote in an e-mail: "Once a CFL or a fluorescent lamp is at the end of its life, EPA strongly encourages Americans to recycle it."

The CFLs sold at supermarkets and drugstores have small warnings that the bulbs contain mercury. A 13-watt model from General Electric Co. does not elaborate on the risks beyond telling consumers to "manage in accord with disposal laws." The packaging refers buyers to a recycling information Web site (www.lamprecycle.org) and provides a toll-free phone number.

Breaking a thermometer "can raise mercury levels in a tight bedroom to high enough levels to cause symptoms in a child in a short amount of time," Mr. Langerman said. "The biggest difference is the amount of ventilation."

No federal mandate requires households to recycle or safely dispose of such bulbs. The massive energy bill in Congress offers no guidance on the question of disposal, and the subject has generated little discussion during debate. That leaves this issue subject to a hodgepodge of state and local rules, some more serious than others about regulation.

The EPA gives consumers advice about finding safe disposal and recycling facilities across the country on its Web site www.epa.gov/waste/hazard/wastetypes/universal/lamps/live.htm.

D.C. residents, for example, are directed to trash transfer stations in Northeast. Contractors accept items for recycling from those with proof of local residency or from vehicles with D.C. license plates.

The two D.C. stations take recyclables only on Saturdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. A total of "620 unit pounds" of CFL bulbs and mercury lamps were dropped off in an eight-month period since collection was made available last year, said Nancy Lyons, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Public Works.

Home Depot, Ace Hardware, Ikea and other retailers collect the bulbs for recycling as a customer service.

Chris Jensen, the employee in charge of lighting supplies at Frager's Hardware on Capitol Hill, said the store considered offering a disposal center but found that it would cost "one grand a month."

The store advises customers to go to Prudential Carruthers Realtors sales office at 216 Seventh St. SE, where bulbs can be dropped off for recycling in a cardboard box with a heavy plastic liner.

Prudential manager Larry Kamins said the office periodically buys the package for $95 from a professional recycling company he found on the Internet. He said he decided to offer the community service because, when he started using the bulbs, he couldn't find any information on recycling locations.

"They certainly don't go out of their way" for this, Mr. Kamins said.

He said people often drop off bulbs on his doorstep overnight and that a Capitol Hill resident voluntarily collects used bulbs from neighbors and brings them to Prudential.

Mark Kohorst, senior manager for environment, health and safety at the Rosslyn-based National Electrical Manufacturers Association, said federal business regulations classify mercury-containing lamps as a subcategory of hazardous waste.

"A nationwide network of recyclers exists to serve that sector," he said.

The rule exempts households but gives states the right to adopt the federal law and apply it to households, thereby making it illegal for anyone to dispose of the bulbs in any way other than recycling.

Mr. Kohorst said Maine has enacted "the first law of its kind requiring manufacturers to fund recycling," forcing the development and implementation of state-approved programs by January. Manufacturers that do no comply will not be allowed to sell the lamps in Maine.

"We do need a national program because what good does it do for California to ban it" when neighboring states don't, said Leonard Robinson, chief deputy director of California's Department of Toxic Substances Control.

He plans to address the subject when he visits Washington with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, "a Californian," he said, who "knows the situation."

A pilot project in Humboldt County in Northern California allows households to mail used bulbs directly to a recycler, he said.

With the cooperation of the U.S. Postal Service and funding provided by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., about 58,000 residences have used direct shipment since February, he said. "That takes care of the rural people, because not everybody has a Wal-Mart or Ikea nearby."

New compact fluorescent light bulbs that carry the "Energy Star Qualified" label are supposed to last up to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs and use one-quarter of the energy to produce the same amount of light. Although the CFLs numbers are higher, the bulbs save money because they last longer.

Mr. Jensen noted, however, that most CFLs on the market don't work with motion sensors or "dusk to dawn" fixtures, "and many models warn they are 'not for use with dimmers.' "

Lane Burt, an energy policy analyst with the Natural Resources Defense Council's Washington office, said CFL bulbs are just "a stopover" before an even more efficient type of light bulb arrives.

"Everyone should know where we want to go is LEDs [light-emitting diodes]. They are much more efficient and costs are coming down quickly. They have improved tenfold in the past decade."

Congressional Hearing on Transportation's Role in Climate Change and Greenhouse Gases

2009-07-17T11:11:00.001-07:00

July 14, 2009

Excerpt:

Addressing VMT growth plays a key role in decreasing transportation related GHG emissions and should be included in overall efforts to prevent climate change. One way to achieve significant reductions in VMT is to develop more livable communities. The effects of reduced VMT on greenhouse gas emissions have repeatedly been demonstrated. A report aired on National Public Radio evaluated the carbon footprint of two families living in Atlanta. One family moved from a walkable, transit-served community to a car dependent one and another family moved from a car dependent area to a livable community. The greatest difference in CO2 emissions between the families was in transportation related emissions. The carbon footprint for the family that moved to a car dependent area was 40 percent higher, and transportation accounted for almost 85 percent of the difference. This report, among others, indicates the relevance of VMT to greenhouse gas emissions and indicates that we should accelerate our efforts to identify ways to reduce VMT growth in order to meet our climate goals.

There are several steps that can be taken to spur the development of more livable communities and reduce VMT:

First, we can provide more transportation choices in more communities across the country. Single occupancy vehicles should be only one of many transportation options available to Americans to reach their destinations. Walking, bicycling, light rail and buses can be made available in more places.

Second, we can promote development of housing in close proximity to transit. In addition to reducing VMT and greenhouse gas emissions from cars driven by commuters, such planning would have the added benefits of decreasing transportation costs for families and reducing traffic congestion.

Third, we can promote mixed-use development, which incorporates residential and commercial buildings, allowing individuals the choice to walk, drive a shorter distance or easily use public transportation to reach their destination. Residents should have the option to live in an area with services and goods that are easily accessible. In addition to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this would also reduce travel times involved in driving to and from grocery and department stores, medical service providers or even entertainment centers such as movie theaters.

While many view community planning and multi-modal transportation as affecting only urban or larger suburban areas, there are many ways in which such provisions would benefit smaller towns and rural areas as well. A strong, well planned town center could provide smaller towns or rural communities with easy access to jobs and services in one centralized location and increase foot traffic around locally owned small businesses. These town centers will also protect open spaces and valuable farmland. Additionally, all people, whether in urban or rural areas, need access to job centers, medical services and schools. In urban settings this access might take the form of sidewalks and bike lanes. In rural areas, it might look more like intercity rail and bus service. But, especially as populations age, non-driving access to essential services is increasingly central to making towns more livable for 21st century populations. This poses a particular challenge for rural areas.

All of these factors will be critical elements of our livability initiative. Our work will not be easy, but it offers great promise for improving the lives of all Americans and reducing our use of energy and greenhouse gas emissions. The Department of Transportation and other agencies are already working closely to determine the best means to support sustainable, livable communities.

On June 16, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson, and I announced a new partnership to help American families in all communities - rural, suburban and urban - develop sustainable communities. Over the course of our collective work, we have defined six guiding principles. We are committed to

• providing more transportation choices,
• promoting equitable, affordable housing,
• enhancing economic competitiveness,
• supporting existing communities,
• coordinating policies and leverage investment, and
• valuing the uniqueness of communities and neighborhoods.

These principles will guide the interagency working group as we continue our efforts.

As we consider surface transportation reauthorization -- both in the short and longer-term -- the Department will prioritize creating a livability program that measurably works to reduce VMT, greenhouse gas emissions, and also provide added economic benefits to Americans in all geographic locations. Multi-modal transportation combined with mixed-use development and smart community planning are important issues to address when we consider transportation’s role in climate change. Combined with more efficient vehicles and cleaner burning fuels, these strategies will be important to reaching our GHG reduction goals. They will also reduce our reliance on foreign oil

The Senate now has the opportunity, for the first time, to create a system of clean energy incentives designed to jumpstart a clean energy economy and confront the threat of carbon pollution. As the President has said, it is important that we accomplish these goals while protecting consumers, and helping sensitive industries transition. I have outlined in my testimony today some of the ways in which the Department of Transportation can contribute to this effort. We would be particularly pleased if the final legislation gave the Department better tools to integrate climate change considerations into the transportation planning, financing, and implementation process and to facilitate system improvements. Failing to recognize the connection between transportation and climate change will likely jeopardize our ability to achieve our GHG reduction goals.

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=2127b852-f4ce-437c-83a1-1eda266059ab

Feed-in tariff and spate of other climate-related bills move forward

2009-07-10T09:44:00.000-07:00

Debra Kahn – ClimateWire

July 9, 2009

A bill that would boost the state's feed-in tariff to apply to renewable energy projects larger than 1.5 megawatts passed a key California Senate committee this week.
A.B. 1106, by state Rep. Felipe Fuentes (D), would establish two tiers of profits for renewable energy generators selling electricity to utilities. The first tier would include projects up to 5 megawatts, while the second would encompass those from 5 to 10 MW. Utilities would only have to offer the guaranteed pricing for up to 500 MW of generation total.

Both tiers would boost the guaranteed price by a few cents above the current level, which is the 20-year levelized cost of electricity from a combined-cycle gas turbine. The California Public Utilities Commission would be in charge of determining the costs of production plus a "reasonable profit" for each form of renewable energy: solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, wind, biogas, biomass, hydropower and geothermal.
Adam Browning, executive director of the Vote Solar Initiative, said the bill will likely be revised substantially before it passes the full Senate.
It differs from a proposal the state Public Utilities Commission made last month, which calls for a cap of 10 MW per project and a program-wide cap of 1500MW. The agency is planning to request comments within a few weeks on how to determine pricing.

The bill is moving ahead despite CPUC's request in May for legislators to wait until the agency finishes its proceedings. "It was only let through with the understanding that there would be a lot of changes to it," Browning said.
The Senate Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee also passed bills dealing with overall renewable energy targets, energy efficiency audits and spending proceeds from a potential cap-and-trade auction.
Passing the committee Tuesday were Sen. Paul Krekorian's (D) bill establishing a 33 percent renewable portfolio standard, A.B. 64, and A.B. 758, requiring the state Energy Commission to develop a plan to reduce energy use in existing residential and commercial buildings, as well as requiring utilities to perform a certain number of low-cost energy efficiency audits annually.
It also approved A.B. 1405, which would establish a fund for low-income communities directly affected by climate change. Thirty percent of the state's revenue from auctioning cap-and-trade CO2 allowances would go into the fund.

Solar for Dark Climates

2009-07-08T12:59:00.000-07:00

Technology Review Wednesday, July 08, 2009

Solar technology that generates both heat and electricity could make solar energy practical in places that aren't sunny.
By Kevin Bullis

Cool Energy, a startup based in Boulder, CO, is developing a system that produces heat and electricity from the sun. It could help make solar energy competitive with conventional sources of energy in relatively dark and cold climates, such as the northern half of the United States and countries such as Canada and Germany.

The company's system combines a conventional solar water heater with a new Stirling-engine-based generator that it is developing. In cool months, the solar heater provides hot water and space heating. In warmer months, excess heat is used to drive the Stirling engine and generate electricity.

Samuel Weaver, the company's president and CEO, says that the system is more economical than solar water heaters alone because it makes use of heat that would otherwise be wasted during summer months. The system will also pay for itself about twice as quickly as conventional solar photovoltaics will, he says. That's in part because it can efficiently offset heating bills in the winter--something that photovoltaics can't do--and in part because the evacuated tubes used to collect heat from the sun make better use of diffuse light than conventional solar panels do.

The system is designed to provide almost all of a house's heating needs. But the generator, which will produce only 1.5 kilowatts of power, won't be enough to power a house on its own. The system is designed to work with power from the grid, although the power is enough to run a refrigerator and a few lights in the event of a power failure.

The company's key innovation is the Stirling engine, which is designed to work at temperatures much lower than ordinary Stirling engines. In these engines, a piston is driven by heating up one side of the engine while keeping the opposite side cool. Ordinarily, the engines require temperatures of above 500 °C, but Cool Energy's engine is designed to run at the 200 degrees that solar water heaters provide.

The success of the technology, however, hinges on achieving the efficiency targets, says Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, who is developing high-temperature Stirling engines for other applications, including transportation. "We need data," he says. The company's second prototype was only 10 percent efficient at converting heat into electricity. Its engineers hope to reach 20 percent with a new prototype.

A Stirling engine's efficiency is limited by the difference in temperature between the cool and hot side. Typically, reaching the necessary high temperatures using sunlight requires mirrors and lenses for concentrating the light and tracking systems for keeping the concentrators pointed at the sun. The concentrators require direct sunlight, so they don't work on overcast days, and they're too bulky to be mounted on the roof of a house.

To make a practical Stirling engine that runs at low temperatures and doesn't require concentrators, the engineers at Cool Energy addressed a problem with conventional engines that leads to wasted energy: heat leaks from the hot side of the system to the cool side, lowering the temperature difference between them. This happens because the materials required for high temperatures and pressures--typically metals--conduct heat. Working at lower temperatures, the engineers concluded, allows them to use materials such as plastics and certain ceramics that don't conduct heat, reducing these losses. These materials also help lower costs: they're cheaper than some of the metals typically used, and they don't require lubrication, improving the reliability of the engines and reducing maintenance costs.

Cool Energy's engineers are currently assembling the company's third prototype, which they say will allow them to reach their efficiency targets by the end of this summer, after which they plan to test pilot systems outside the lab. Within two years, they plan to manufacture enough systems to drive costs down and achieve their payback targets.

Copyright Technology Review 2009.

'Milking' Microscopic Algae Could Yield Massive Amounts Of Oil

2009-06-23T22:11:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (June 23, 2009) —

Scientists in Canada and India are proposing a surprising new solution to the global energy crisis —"milking" oil from the tiny, single-cell algae known as diatoms, renowned for their intricate, beautifully sculpted shells that resemble fine lacework.

Richard Gordon, T. V. Ramachandra, Durga Madhab Mahapatra, and Karthick Band note that some geologists believe that much of the world's crude oil originated in diatoms, which produce an oily substance in their bodies. Barely one-third of a strand of hair in diameter, diatoms flourish in enormous numbers in oceans and other water sources. They die, drift to the seafloor, and deposit their shells and oil into the sediments. Estimates suggest that live diatoms could make 10-200 times as much oil per acre of cultivated area compared to oil seeds, Gordon says.

"We propose ways of harvesting oil from diatoms, using biochemical engineering and also a new solar panel approach that utilizes genetically modifiable aspects of diatom biology, offering the prospect of "milking" diatoms for sustainable energy by altering them to actively secrete oil products," the scientists say. "Secretion by and milking of diatoms may provide a way around the puzzle of how to make algae that both grow quickly and have a very high oil content."

Journal reference:

1. Ramachandra et al. Milking Diatoms for Sustainable Energy: Biochemical Engineering versus Gasoline-Secreting Diatom Solar Panels. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, 2009; 090609115002039 DOI: 10.1021/ie900044j

New US climate report dire, but offers hope

2009-06-16T16:37:00.000-07:00

By SETH BORENSTEIN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rising sea levels, sweltering temperatures, deeper droughts, and heavier downpours — global warming's serious effects are already here and getting worse, the Obama administration warned on Tuesday in the grimmest, most urgent language on climate change ever to come out of any White House.

But amid the warnings, scientists and government officials seemed to go out of their way to soften the message. It is still not too late to prevent some of the worst consequences, they said, by acting aggressively to reduce world emissions of heat-trapping gases, primarily carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.

The new report differs from a similar draft issued with little fanfare or context by George W. Bush's administration last year. It is paradoxically more dire about what's happening and more optimistic about what can be done.

The Obama administration is backing a bill in Congress that would limit heat-trapping pollution from power plants, refineries and factories. A key player on a climate bill in the Senate, California Democrat Barbara Boxer, said the report adds "urgency to the growing momentum in Congress" for passing a law.

"It's not too late to act," said Jane Lubchenco, one of several agency officials at a White House briefing. "Decisions made now will determine whether we get big changes or small ones." But what has happened already is not good, she said: "It's happening in our own backyards and it affects the kind of things people care about."

Lubchenco, a marine biologist, heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In one of its key findings, the report warned: "Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems." The survival of some species could be affected, it said.

The document, a climate status report required periodically by Congress, was a collaboration by about three dozen academic, government and institute scientists. It contains no new research, but it paints a fuller and darker picture of global warming in the United States than previous studies.

Bush was ultimately forced by a lawsuit to issue a draft report last year, and that document was the basis for this one. Obama science adviser John Holdren called the report nonpartisan, started by a Republican administration and finished by a Democratic one.

"The observed climate changes that we report are not opinions to be debated. They are facts to be dealt with," said one of the report's chief authors, Jerry Melillo of Marine Biological Lab in Woods Hole, Mass. "We can act now to avoid the worst impacts."

Among the things Melillo said he would like to avoid are more flooding disasters in New Orleans and an upheaval of the world's food supply.

The scientists softened the report from an earlier draft that said "tipping points have already been reached and have led to large changes." Melillo said that is because some of the changes seen so far are still reversible.

Even so, Tom Karl of the National Climatic Data Center said that at least one tipping point — irreversible sea level rise — has been passed.

A point of emphasis of the report, which is just under 200 pages, is what has already happened in the United States. That includes rapidly retreating glaciers in the American West and Alaska, altered stream flows, trouble with the water supply, health problems, changes in agriculture, and energy and transportation worries.

"There are in some cases already serious consequences," report co-author Anthony Janetos of the University of Maryland told The Associated Press. "This is not a theoretical thing that will happen 50 years from now. Things are happening now."

For example, winters in parts of the Midwest have warmed by 7 degrees in just 30 years and the frost-free period has grown a week, the report said.

Shorter winters have some benefits, such as longer growing seasons, but those are changes that require adjustments just the same, the authors note.

The "major disruptions" already taking place will only increase as warming continues, the authors wrote. The world's average temperature may rise by as much as 11.5 degrees by the end of the century, the report said. And the U.S. average temperature could go even higher than that, Karl said.

Environmental groups praised the report as a call for action, with the Union of Concerned Scientists calling it what "America needs to effectively respond to climate change."

Scott Segal, a Washington lobbyist for the coal industry, was more cautious: "Fast action without sufficient planning is a route to potential economic catastrophe with little environmental gain."

Associated Press Writer Dina Cappiello in Washington contributed to this report.

Roll-Up Solar Panels

2009-06-10T11:45:00.000-07:00

Technology Review Thursday, June 04, 2009

A startup is making thin-film solar cells on flexible steel sheets.
By Prachi Patel

Xunlight, a startup in Toledo, Ohio, has developed a way to make large, flexible solar panels. It has developed a roll-to-roll manufacturing technique that forms thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells on thin sheets of stainless steel. Each solar module is about one meter wide and five and a half meters long.

As opposed to conventional silicon solar panels, which are bulky and rigid, these lightweight, flexible sheets could easily be integrated into roofs and building facades or on vehicles. Such systems could be more attractive than conventional solar panels and be incorporated more easily into irregular roof designs. They could also be rolled up and carried in a backpack, says the company's cofounder and president, Xunming Deng. "You could take it with you and charge your laptop battery," he says.

Amorphous silicon thin-film solar cells can be cheaper than conventional crystalline cells because they use a fraction of the material: the cells are 1 micrometer thick, as opposed to the 150-to-200-micrometer-thick silicon layers in crystalline solar cells. But they're also notoriously inefficient. To boost their efficiency, Xunlight made triple-junction cells, which use three different materials--amorphous silicon, amorphous silicon germanium, and nanocrystalline silicon--each of which is tuned to capture the energy in different parts of the solar spectrum. (Conventional solar cells use one primary material, which only captures one part of the spectrum efficiently.)

Still, Xunlight's flexible PV modules are only about 8 percent efficient, while some crystalline silicon modules on the market are more than 20 percent efficient. As a result, Xunlight's large modules produce only 330 watts, whereas an array of crystalline silicon solar panels covering the same area would produce about 740 watts.

United Solar Ovonic, based in Auburn Hills, MI, is already selling flexible PV modules. The company also uses triple-junction amorphous silicon cells, and its modules can be attached to roofing materials. But Xunlight's potential advantage is its high-volume roll-to-roll technique. "If their roll-to-roll process allows them to go to lower cost and larger area, that's the central advantage," says Johanna Schmidtke, an analyst with Lux Research, in Boston. "But they have to prove it with manufacturing."

Other companies, notably Heliovolt and Nanosolar, are in a race to make thin-film panels using copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) cells. These have shown efficiencies on par with crystalline silicon and can be made on flexible substrates. In comparison with amorphous silicon, CIGS is a relatively difficult material to work with, and no one has been able to create low-cost products consistently in large quantities, says Ryan Boas, an analyst with Photon Consulting, in Boston.

Building integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), especially rooftop applications, would be the biggest market for flexible PV technology, Boas says. That's because flexible products are inherently very light, in addition to being quick and easy to install. "Imagine carrying a roll of flexible product on the roof and unrolling it," he says. "Workers are already used to unrolling roofing material."

But there are hidden risks and costs associated with BIPV, Schmidtke says. "BIPV is often touted as low cost," she says, "but in actuality, you've got greater risk in terms of a watertight system [for roofing materials] or fire risk, and that increases total installation cost." However, BIPV does have the advantage of being more aesthetically pleasing, which is important to consumers, she says.

So far, Xunlight has raised $40 million from investors. In December, the state of Ohio gave the company a $7 million loan to speed up the construction of a 25-megawatt production line for its flexible solar modules. The company expects to have commercial products available in 2010.

Copyright Technology Review 2009.

City 2.0: Using tech building blocks in tomorrow's urban centers

2009-05-20T12:40:00.000-07:00

It's closer than you may think and is mostly a matter of connecting all the pieces
John Brandon

May 15, 2009 (Computerworld) Science fiction writers call it Utopia, the glorious City of the Future. But short of downtown atriums being guarded by invisible walls and flying cars, City 2.0 is not as far off as you may think.

Ubiquitous wireless networks are already available in cities including Baltimore and Minneapolis, corporations such as Thomson Reuters have sustainable data centers that sell power back to the local utility, the smart energy grid is well on its way, and city-provided social networks are common. Indeed, the next steps toward the city of tomorrow are all about integrating these services cohesively, making them widely available across the entire metropolis and managing the services more efficiently.

"The reality is that the city of the future will likely have many aspects of a contained and managed ecosystem," says Rob Enderle, a consumer analyst with Enderle Group based in San Jose, Calif.

While the concept of City 2.0 is monumental, these key technology advancements are already helping pave the road to the next-generation city.

Smart grid
The smart use of energy is one of the most important goals for urban centers today. The smart grid concept centers around the idea of using electricity when it's available cheaply, rather than at peak times when it's more expensive, and allows wind and solar and other renewable sources to be integrated into the energy grid. This requires two-way communication between utility companies and the businesses and individuals who use their power. We're nowhere near a comprehensive smart grid yet, but some cities and energy companies are taking steps in that direction.

Today, a few cities, such as Boulder, Colo. and Houston, have pilot programs where customers can visit a Web site to see their real-time energy usage. Google is currently testing a PowerMeter project so employees can see not only how much energy they're using, but when and for what. EnerNOC, a provider of IP-based sensors and monitoring, is giving financial incentives to customers and utility companies that adjust supply and demand according to real-time data.

A good example of smart grid technology in action is at the Des Moines, Iowa state capitol grounds, where city officials have set up a smart grid that feeds to a central kiosk. It shows the power usage for each building in the capitol complex. To create the smart grid, the capitol buildings were wired with sensors that connect a fiber backbone, feed through a central server and then report usage data in real time to the kiosk.

"Today, departments have no incentive to save power from a government perspective," says State CIO John Gillispie. "We are working toward billing the individual departments for how much they use."

Gillispie is already planning on adding sensors for floor-level power monitoring, and envisions a day when sensors are added across the state and in multiple cities -- even on roadways and in cars, office buildings, schools and homes.

City-centric social networking
We're all familiar by now with using public social networks to catch up with friends and family or even to find a job, but wouldn't it be nice if your city had a social network where you could keep abreast of local developments and weigh in on neighborhood issues?

In Dublin, Ohio, the city operates a Novell Teaming portal where government officials can run blogs, chat over instant messaging and share documents. In the next few months, the city plans to make the private network available to all citizens. In a future city scenario, a social network like this could allow residents to submit ideas for city improvements, chat with politicians and blog about their neighborhood over a secure and city-centric portal that caters to their local needs.

San Jose, Calif., is one of the most high-tech cities in the U.S. Over the next few years, the city will create a social network on Wikiplanning that helps citizens learn about the city, chat over instant messaging, complete surveys and download city podcasts.

"Frequently, only small groups of residents come to public meetings, and in the case of a multiple meeting project, it's largely the same group of citizens who continue to participate," says Kim Walesh, San Jose's chief strategist. "Participation by small groups may not offer a good representation of the community as a whole. An advantage of Wikiplanning is that activities can be done day or night at the user's convenience, allowing for far greater participation by people in the workforce."

WiMax and citywide wireless
The concept of readily available wireless service has been around the block a few times, so to speak. Cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago have tried to provide Wi-Fi access without too much success. Minneapolis is one of the few large cities that have deployed Wi-Fi successfully.

City WiMax
In Portland, a Wi-Fi network didn't fare so well either, but a WiMax project seems to be off to a much stronger start.

WiMax, widely seen as the next generation of mobile data access after Wi-Fi, stalled over the past few years due to the complexity of the technology, changes in partnerships and reluctance on the part of city officials to adopt an emerging technology. Even so, WiMax promises more ubiquitous access than Wi-Fi, because Wi-Fi hot spots require users to seek them out but WiMax is available throughout a given area. WiMax requires fewer base stations across the metropolis, at a lower infrastructure cost, using licensed spectrum that does not interfere with other wireless LANs.

Tim Sweeney, a product manager at Intel, says the prospects of WiMax for cities are high because it means greater bandwidth for city services.

"Wi-Fi was never intended to support a wide area; it is really for inside buildings," he says. Sweeney gave a future city scenario where cars report their fuel tank levels over WiMax, gas stations bid on the cost of fuel, and an electric car communicates with a smart grid about its energy usage -- whether an alternative route would save on power used.

Sustainable data center
Sustainability is a key part of future cities. The idea is that a highly efficient, well-monitored and "green" data center could allow a city to realize major energy-savings benefits. It would also lead to being able to use data centers for most city services, not just for computing. For example, a single city data center could provide services for government and monitor automobile traffic in city streets. Today, these functions are wildly disparate and difficult to consolidate.

According to Enderle, most city services are not connected to each other today, but some individual components such as electrical usage in government buildings already have the sensors required for monitoring city services. At some point in the next 10 years, cities will need to decide when patching an aging infrastructure no longer makes sense and will instead start using more modern technology, Enderle says. In a sustainable data center model, city services could be part of a vast "network of networks" that monitors real-time power, water, wireless and data usage for all citizens.

One example of how this sustainability could be tied to city services is at Thomson Reuters, a news and information gathering service that operates 100,000 square feet of multiple data centers for its Westlaw division in Eagan, Minn. Rick King, the global head of technology and operations, has designed operations with close ties to the local Dakota Electric utility.

Data center batteries
The company has about 900 batteries in one data center and four diesel generators in another, which it uses as a backup for power delivered by the local utility. The company also has two massive diesel fuel tanks. Today, the company uses the batteries for short bursts (about 15 minutes) of backup power and can use its generators for a day or two as needed, allowing the local utility to sell the unused power.

Enterprise IT today serves as an excellent example of how future cities could operate. Thomson Reuters monitors 15,000 IT assets such as servers and storage arrays in real time in a central operations center, and the power usage is controlled automatically -- when the diesel generators are needed, they start up on their own. Extending this model to a city could mean that power companies are highly connected, and home owners could even see their own usage at the individual appliance level to be able to adjust usage patterns, tying back into the notion of the previously mentioned smart grid.

How the cloud ties it all together
It's easy to see how the cloud could contribute to future cities. There might be a central command center for monitoring and adjusting power usage and for providing IT services over WiMax, but the actual IT operation could be "in the cloud" and abstracted from a physical data center.

Yankee Group calls this the Anywhere initiative, which is partly about making mobility in a city infrastructure more flexible, efficient and scalable. In this model, anything can be an end point, including portable gadgets, your vehicle, an office building and your home.

Jeffrey Breen, chief technology officer at the Yankee Group, says that the IP-based, packet-switched cloud model in the enterprise can apply to city infrastructure -- that is, as a vast, interconnected smart grid and social network with widespread and reliable wireless access. Mobile citizens would be a click away from city services.

"One way or another, we will get to the point in cities where anyone who wants high-speed access will get it -- and the city won't have to worry about the details of how," says Breen.

A highly connected city with smart grids, widely available wireless access and a sustainable data center is well within reach. Over the next 20 years, cities in the U.S. and abroad will likely take these and other steps toward the goal, building the infrastructure with a view towards better connectivity and better living.

John Brandon is a veteran of the computing industry, having worked as an IT manager for ten years and a tech journalist for another ten. He has written over 2,000 feature articles. He is a regular contributor to Computerworld.

Climate Change: Garbage Gets Fresh Look as Source of Energy

2009-05-20T12:26:00.000-07:00

Jeffrey Ball – Wall Street Journal

May 15, 2009

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. -- Times change, and yesterday's environmental problem starts to look like today's solution. That is what is happening with trash.
Over the past two decades, the U.S. has shut down hundreds of pollution-spewing waste incinerators on the belief that burning detritus was a bigger environmental sin than burying it. Today, most American garbage is sent to landfills, some spanning hundreds of acres miles from the cities that generate the refuse. New York City, which tosses about eight million tons of nonindustrial trash each year, trucks much of it to big landfills in states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania.
Landfills have been convenient. But they are falling out of favor as improved technology and changing environmental priorities start to upend the old thinking about garbage.
Past orthodoxy held that burning trash was bad because it spewed toxic substances into the air. In an era when the big environmental threat was localized pollution like smog and cancer-causing plumes, landfills seemed the lesser evil.
Dirty air is still a concern, but now it has been eclipsed by fears of global climate change. In that calculus of environmental harm, recent research suggests, burning trash is better than burying it.
The appeal of most modern incinerators is that they don't only torch trash. They also use the heat from the incineration to boil water, which creates steam, which in turn generates electricity. Yet trash incineration produces just 0.4% of the country's electricity. Even if all U.S. garbage were burned, it wouldn't produce anywhere near enough power to meet the country's energy needs. But as concern about climate change grows, any renewable source of energy -- even a pile of garbage -- seems appealing.
Landfills, too, produce potential fuel -- in the form of methane, which can be captured and used to generate electricity. But a recent study by U.S. Environmental Protection Agency researchers said that most landfills fail to capture all of their methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The study concluded that incinerating a ton of trash emits at least 35% less greenhouse gas and yields 10 times as much electricity as burying it.
Old incinerators were infamous polluters. They coughed out large quantities of soot, the components of acid rain and carcinogenic dioxins.
John Waffenschmidt, a 53-year-old New Yorker who is a vice president for Covanta Energy Corp., the country's biggest owner of waste-to-energy plants, recalls delivering newspapers as a boy in the city in the 1960s. "I'd go out in the morning and there would be little flakes coming down," he says, "because there were 4,000 or 5,000 apartment-building incinerators."
The energy crisis of the late 1970s prompted a push for plants that burned trash to make electricity. Today, 87 waste-to-energy plants are operating in the U.S., with the biggest clusters in Florida, New York and Minnesota.
Some 13% of U.S. garbage is burned -- far less than the 54% buried in landfills and the 33% that is recycled. The modern plants turn prodigious piles of trash into ash yet often sit in the middle of heavily populated areas. New York's Long Island has four incinerators, one of the densest concentrations in the country. Its biggest, a Covanta plant in the town of Hempstead, burns 950,000 tons of garbage a year, right next door to a strip mall. Its 39-story steam tower is the tallest structure on Long Island.

Trucks carrying trash from Long Island and New York City roll into a cavernous room in the plant at a rate of about one every five minutes. The trash is pushed into another room, the "pit," where a crane operator tosses it around with a nine-ton steel claw. He is "fluffing" the rubbish -- mixing in air to help it burn.
After being fluffed, the trash moves by conveyor belt into furnaces, where it is incinerated at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, creating the heat that is used to generate electricity.
Today's incinerators are markedly cleaner than their predecessors, yet they still pollute. "One percent of a very toxic substance is still a very toxic substance," says Marchant Wentworth, a renewable-energy campaigner with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental group.
Trash disposal of any sort is problematic. Ideally, society would produce less trash. Recycling is the next-best option.
In Congress and in many state capitals, lawmakers are considering whether to endorse trash incineration as a "renewable" source of power. A green imprimatur would be a boon to the trash-burning industry, which is lobbying feverishly for the move.
Covanta's Hempstead, N.Y., incinerator is applying for permission to expand and burn more trash. Meanwhile, Long Island's main highways, like the roads leading out of New York City, are filled with trucks ferrying the rest of the area's garbage to landfills in other states.

Making farmers cool again (Michael Pollan talk)

2009-05-12T11:32:00.001-07:00

by Kevin Kelly

Farming has become an occupation and cultural force of the past. Michael Pollan’s talk promoted the premise — and hope — that farming can become an occupation and force of the future. In the past century American farmers were given the assignment to produce lots of calories cheaply, and they did. They became the most productive humans on earth. A single farmer in Iowa could feed 150 of his neighbors. That is a true modern miracle. “American farmers are incredibly inventive, innovative, and accomplished. They can do whatever we ask them, we just need to give them a new set of requirements.”

The benefit of a reformed food system, besides better food, better environment and less climate shock, is better health and the savings of trillions of dollars. Four out of five chronic diseases are diet-related. Three quarters of medical spending goes to preventable chronic disease. Pollan says we cannot have a healthy population, without a healthy diet. The news is that we are learning that we cannot have a healthy diet without a healthy agriculture. And right now, farming is sick.

Pollan outlined what this recovery for American farmers and food producers should be. First a post-modern food system should be “resolarized.” Right now it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to manufacture 1 calorie of food on average, and 55 calories to produce 1 calorie of beef. If any industry should be solar-based it should be food, which was the “original solar economy.” Instead, right now “we are eating oil.” Cheap oil and farm policies subsidize the 5 main crops (and only those crops), upon which the rest of our cheap food system is based. These main crops are planted as monocultures, which require cheap pesticides and fertilizers and produce wastes that are all problems in themselves. Pollan’s solution is not to dismantle the food system but to redirect it. Because of the long-term planning and learning that stewarding land requires, he believes subsidies of some type are essential for agriculture. Agriculture, he stated, should not be a freemarket. By picking the proper incentives we can re-localize, re-solarize, and revive the healing power of balanced farms and wholesome gardens.

Governments should reward farmers for diversifying away from monocultures. Pollan gave a few examples of where this has worked at scale. They should be rewarded for growing cover crops with the benefit of reducing erosion. Rewarded for returning animals to the mix. Rewarded for the amount of carbon they sequester in soil. Rewarded for halting urban sprawl by keeping farmland intact. In fact farmland should find a similar status as wetlands; developers and communities get “credit” for retaining farmland. Farmers should be rewarded for localize food provision. If only 2% of government contracts for food (as in school lunch programs, or government-run hospitals) required that the food be produced within 100 miles, it would transform the food system.

How might such change happen? Only if consumers and citizens demand it. One thing that might help is if web cams and images of the actual feed lot, or slaughterhouse, were required to be available for food that flowed through it. Imagine getting a carton of milk that showed not a metaphorical alpine meadow, but the real cages of the real dirty cows that produced that liter of milk. Or put a second calories count on labels, this one showing how many calories of energy it takes to deliver the item to you.

The major problem with his vision? He says there are simply not enough farmers. Only 1 million now feed the US and other people of the world. Many more people, many more college educated people, many more innovators and entrepreneurs, and many more backyard gardeners need to produce this new food system. Start in educational programs, such as one promoted by Alice Waters, where kids learn to grow food, cook, and eat smarter. “Make lunch an academic subject.” Follow the lead of Michelle Obama and make turning lawns into organic gardens fashionable, respectable.

Make farms and farmers cool again.

-Kevin Kelly

Waxman, Markey Still Searching for Votes

2009-05-01T15:57:00.000-07:00

Ian Talley and Stephen Power – Wall Street Journal
May 1, 2009

House Democratic leaders appeared to still be short of the votes needed to pass climate-change legislation out of a key subcommittee, but a spokeswoman for one of the lawmakers leading the talks said negotiations were continuing.

Several moderate Democrats on the House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment said Thursday that fundamental issues such as how to soften the impact of the legislation on constituents and industries in their regions are still unresolved and that the panel might not be ready to vote on the measure by next week as Democratic leaders have called for.

The qualms expressed over legislation sponsored by House Energy and Commerce Waxman (D., Calif.), and Edward Markey (D., Mass.) along with possible Republican obstruction, point to the difficulty Democrats are having in finding consensus on climate and energy issues.

“I don’t think the votes are there in the subcommittee,” Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D., N.C.) said in an interview. Mr. Butterfield said he was particularly concerned about the bill’s impact on low-income Americans, adding “What do I tell a single mom making eight dollars an hour?”

The legislation sponsored by Messrs Waxman and Markey calls for cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20% below 2005 levels by 2020 and by roughly 80% below 2005 levels by 2050. Earlier this week, Mr. Markey, who leads the energy and environment subcommittee, postponed a planned vote on the measure after having difficulty trying to forge consensus on who should bear the burden for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for Mr. Waxman said “we are encouraged by the progress that we are making, and the Committee will continue meeting with members to discuss the legislation.”

Mr. Waxman has said he wants the full committee to pass climate legislation by Memorial Day. Despite several days of talks with him and Mr. Markey this week, some moderate Democrats on the subcommittee said Thursday that there was still no agreement between them and Messrs. Waxman on Markey on how to resolve some of their concerns about the measure.

“As I speak, I don’t know if (Markey and Waxman) are agreeable to some of the language that I would like,” Rep. Charlie Gonzalez (D., Texas) said in an interview. Mr. Gonzalez said he is pressing Messrs. Waxman and Markey to amend the bill to include greater incentives for nuclear power and to give electric utilities a free allocation of the emission permits that companies would be required to hold under the bill.

“If the language is not in there, I think it’s going to be hard to pull off at the mark up,” Mr. Gonzalez said, either because there won’t be the support from moderate Democrats or because Republicans may try to block the measure.

The legislation before the House panel would institute a cap-and-trade-system, in which the government would set an overall cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, and companies would have to buy and sell the right to emit gases such as carbon dioxide. Over time, the cap would become more stringent, and fewer permits would be issued by the government, bringing emissions down. But the bill is largely silent on who will bear the costs of the legislation. It does not specify, for example, the degree to which industries will have to pay for emissions permits, and how revenue raised from selling those permits at government auctions would be used.

Lawmakers from regions heavily reliant on the coal industry, fossil-fuel generation and energy-intensive industries want the government to give out the emission credits to those sectors for free to soften the fiscal impact.

“I can’t vote for a bill unless my refineries (are protected) because of the nature of my district, it’s a job base and a tax base,” Rep. Gene Green (D., Texas), another moderate member of the panel, said in an interview. “Frankly it’s a national security issue, I don’t want to transfer production offshore for refined products, relying on imports from the Middle East and Venezuela.”

Collaborating for Systemic Change

2009-04-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

By Peter M. Senge, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Katrin Kaeufer, Hilary Bradbury and John S. Carroll

January 1, 2007

Meeting the sustainability challenge will require the kind of cross-sector collaboration for which there is still no real precedent. It must be co-created by various stakeholders by interweaving work in three realms: the conceptual, the relational and the action-driven.

For more than a century and a half, industrial growth has been weaving an ever-thickening web of interdependence around the world. Today, consumer choices on one side of the planet affect living conditions for people on the other side. Complex supply chains span the globe; for example, the average pound of food travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles before it reaches an American consumer.1 But these developments do not alter biological or social realities that have taken shape over thousands and millions of years. Consequently, businesses operating within this growing web are facing a host of “sustainability” problems: social and ecological imbalances created by this globalization, such as a widening social divide between haves and have-nots, global climate change, exponentially growing chemical and material waste and loss of habitat and species.

Traditionally, businesses have thought such problems to be the result of economic externalities that require governments’ attention. But while governments are a crucial part of lasting change, relying on governmental leadership to effectively deal with sustainability is questionable for many reasons. The first limitation is geography. Even the largest governmental institutions are limited by their borders and can’t attack sustainability problems that are global in nature. The second limitation is time. Elected officials are limited by their election cycles and struggle to deal with problems that develop over decades.

Today, as consumer choices on one side of the planet affect living conditions for people on the other side and complex supply chains span the globe, businesses are facing a host of "sustainability" problems--social and ecological imbalances created by that globalization. Beginning in the late 1990s, organizational members of the Society for Organizational Learning (SOL--including Shell, Harley-Davidson, HP, Xerox, and Nike, among others) began a series of initiatives focusing on collaborative solutions to a variety of sustainability issues. The group's goals have included the application of systems thinking, working with mental models, and fostering personal and shared vision to face these complex sustainability issues. Through its work, SOL (of which two of the authors are founding members) has learned that successful collaborative efforts embrace three interconnected types of work--conceptual, relational, and action-driven--which together build a healthy "learning ecology" for systemic change. In this article, the authors offer examples from particular projects in which learning ecology provided an important foundation for substantive progress, and they draw lessons for companies and managers regarding each of the three types of work. Ultimately, the authors conclude that conceptual, relational, and action-driven work must be systemically interwoven and that there is little real precedent for that. They offer several guidelines for how it can be accomplished, emphasizing leadership and transactional networks. Finally, they pose three questions that must be answered if systemic solutions are to be successful: (1) How can we get beyond benchmarking to building learning communities? (2) What is the right balance between specifying goals and creating space for reflection and innovation? and (3) What is the right balance between private interest and public knowledge?

Today, as consumer choices on one side of the planet affect living conditions for people on the other side and complex supply chains span the globe, businesses are facing a host of “sustainability” problems — social and ecological imbalances created by this globalization.

Beginning in the late 1990s, organizational members of the Society for Organizational Learning (including Shell, Harley-Davidson, HP, Xerox and Nike, among others) began a variety of initiatives focusing on collaborative solutions to a variety of sustainability issues. The group’s goals have included the application of systems thinking, working with mental models, and fostering personal and shared vision to face these complex sustainability issues.

Through its work, SoL (of which two of the authors are founding members) has learned that successful collaborative efforts embrace three interconnected types of work — conceptual, relational and action-driven — which together build a healthy “learning ecology” for systemic change. In this article, the authors offer examples from particular projects in which this learning ecology provided an important foundation for substantive progress, and they draw lessons for companies and managers regarding each of the three types of work.

Ultimately, the authors conclude that conceptual, relational and action-driven work must be systemically interwoven and that there is little real precedent for that. They offer several guidelines for how it can be accomplished, emphasizing leadership and transactional networks. Finally, they pose three questions that must be answered if systemic solutions are to be successful: (1) How can we get beyond benchmarking to building learning communities? (2) What is the right balance between specifying goals and creating space for reflection and innovation? (3) What is the right balance between private interest and public knowledge?

Peter M. Senge is the founding chairperson of the Society for Organizational Learning and a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Benyamin B. Lichtenstein is assistant professor of management and entrepreneurship at the College of Management, University of Massachusetts, Boston. Katrin Kaeufer is research director of the Presencing Institute and founding research member of SoL. Hilary Bradbury is the director of Sustainable Business Programs at the Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California. John S. Carroll is a professor of behavioral and policy sciences, MIT Sloan School of Management.

California's new power source a solar farm

2009-04-14T10:12:00.000-07:00

David R. Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, April 14, 2009
An artist's rendering shows what solar panels might look ...

California's next source of renewable power could be an orbiting set of solar panels, high above the equator, that would beam electricity back to Earth via a receiving station in Fresno County.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. has agreed to buy power from a startup company that wants to tap the strong, unfiltered sunlight found in space to solve the growing demand for clean energy.

Sometime before 2016, Solaren Corp. plans to launch the world's first orbiting solar farm. Unfurled in space, the panels would bask in near-constant sunshine and provide a steady flow of electricity day and night. Receivers on the ground would take the energy - transmitted through a beam of electromagnetic waves - and feed it into California's power grid.

The idea has been discussed for decades. It appeared in science fiction as far back as 1941 and later received serious study by NASA and the Pentagon. At times, it has been dismissed as fantasy.

But San Francisco's PG&E considers it realistic enough to support. The company asked the California Public Utilities Commission on Friday for permission to buy 200 megawatts of electricity from Solaren's orbiting power plant when and if it's built. That's enough electricity for 150,000 homes.

"We're convinced it's a very serious possibility that they can make this work," said PG&E spokesman Jonathan Marshall. "It's staggering how much power is potentially available in space. And I say 'potentially' because a lot remains unknown about the cost and other details."

Many of the project's details remain under wraps, and others haven't been decided yet, said Cal Boerman, Solaren's director of energy services. For example, Solaren still hasn't decided whether to use crystalline silicon solar cells or newer, thin-film cells that weigh less than silicon but aren't as efficient.

But the young company, a collection of aerospace engineers based in Manhattan Beach (Los Angeles County), has the technology and expertise to make it work, Boerman said.

"We'd all read about it, thought about it, and it seemed to be a good, next challenging project for the space industry," he said. "The timing is right."
Not a 'laser death ray'

He also dismissed fears, raised in the past, that the transmission beam could hurt birds or airline passengers who stray into its path. The beam would be too diffuse for that.

"This isn't a laser death ray," Boerman said. "With an airplane flying at altitude, the sun is putting about four or five times more energy on the airplane than we would be."

Placing solar panels in orbit would solve two of the biggest problems facing the solar industry.

Terrestrial large-scale solar farms only generate electricity during the day, and their output varies with the seasons. They also require large tracts of land, often hundreds of acres for a single installation.

Those problems vanish in space. The Solaren project would experience constant sunlight except for brief interruptions during the spring and fall equinox periods. Obviously, land wouldn't be an issue. And the sunlight hitting Solaren's facility would be eight to 10 times more powerful than the light reaching Earth through the planet's atmosphere.
Failure to launch

But orbiting solar installations face their own difficulties, problems that have kept the idea Earth-bound for decades.

Space is a harsh environment, and equipment sent there must be able to operate year after year without repairs. Lifting the gear into orbit is expensive and a bit risky, since some rocket launches fail. Boerman said the solar installation would require four rocket launches. It would not, however, require assembly by astronauts, instead unfolding on its own in space.

"Obviously, there are going to be a lot of very hard questions," said Ralph Cavanagh, head of the energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "My prediction is this is going to be much more about economics than the environment."

PG&E has not disclosed how much money it has agreed to spend on Solaren's electricity, money that would come from the utility's customers.

"I can say it will be comparable to other renewable energy that's been approved recently by the California Public Utilities Commission," Marshall said.
Global crunch

Like California's other utilities, PG&E is under state orders to expand its use of renewable power as part of California's fight against global warming. By the end of 2010, 20 percent of the electricity PG&E sells must come from renewable sources. The utility has been signing contracts with companies planning wind farms and large solar arrays, but some of those projects have been stalled by the global credit crisis.

Mark Toney, head of The Utility Reform Network watchdog group, fears that the difficulty of meeting the state's requirements has pushed PG&E into supporting an expensive distraction.

"It really seems like an act of desperation," he said. "We really think PG&E should be spending more time on proven technologies closer to home that we can really count on. This just seems so remote, in more ways than one."

Cavanagh said, however, that given the world's problems of global warming and rising demand for energy, utilities need to explore some unconventional ideas.

"You want to encourage them to try lots of different things," he said. "But the caution is that some of these things won't work."

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

Calif. offset firm seeks to nationalize its reach

2009-04-10T13:10:00.000-07:00

Debra Kahn – E&E News

April 6, 2009

SAN DIEGO -- By playing their cards right, offset firms -- which have until now marketed to a small niche of environmentally conscious businesses and consumers -- have a chance to turn their voluntary programs into huge opportunities if the mandatory House cap-and-trade bill passes.
At the "Navigating the American Carbon World" conference here, the mood was jubilant, thanks to the bill introduced last week by Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.). The draft legislation would permit covered industries to use offsets -- reductions in emissions not covered by the cap -- for up to 2 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year, as a cost-lowering mechanism.
For the California Climate Action Registry, a state-created nonprofit that monitors voluntary emissions reporting, the news was especially timely. Less than 48 hours after the new House cap-and-trade bill dropped, CCAR announced it was changing its name from the California Climate Action Registry to the Climate Action Reserve. The nonprofit has shifted its focus from reporting to verifying offset projects in recent years, and wanted its name to reflect that shift, group President Gary Gero said.
The group is also pushing to have its projects' emissions reductions recognized as legitimate reductions under California and the West Coast's budding cap-and-trade system, by setting aside some allowances specifically for reductions taken before 2012.
"We are now well beyond the borders of California, and our focus has shifted from being a registry for emission inventories to focus on offsets and project reductions," he said. "What we have been saying now is our members should be recognized by the state of California as they develop their cap-and-trade program by the allocation of set-aside allowances from the cap. That is a fundamental promise that we need to make sure is kept."
Offsets are one of several thorny issues in any cap-and-trade system. Originally conceived as a way for environmentally minded businesses and individuals to support emissions-reducing efforts outside of their own actions, they have given rise to a national market that reached $254 million in 2007, or 42 megatons of CO2 equivalent, according to Ecosystems Marketplace. Whether the emissions reductions would have happened anyway, without the project's sponsorship, is notoriously difficult to prove, and various standards have emerged to give buyers a sense of authenticity.
Now advocates are trying to ensure a niche for offsets in a mandatory emissions program, arguing that they can be a cheaper way for businesses to meet their obligations. An alliance of businesses and environmental groups including General Motors, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Shell, BP, Duke Energy and the Nature Conservancy has been particularly influential. The Waxman-Markey discussion draft includes several of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership's recommendations, such as unlimited banking of credits, multi-year compliance periods and incentives for research into carbon capture and storage.
Gero said the timing of CCAR's rebranding, two days after the release of a major cap-and-trade bill, was coincidental. "It's just reflective of how fast things are moving," he said. "We had developed a strategic plan to do this about 6 months ago, and were planning to do it over the course of 12 to 18 months," he said. "But just as the world has taken off, our board said it's time for us to do this sooner."
Leading the pack in a complex, potentially lucrative business
It appears the Climate Action Registry is well-placed to take a leading role in offset verification if Waxman-Markey's offset provisions remain intact. According to the World Resources Institute, of the 17 existing voluntary standards for offsets, only two meet the bill's requirements: the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and CCAR.
"Offsets will unquestionably play a role, and likely a significant one," said WRI Senior Associate Alexia Kelly.
"We're awfully proud of the way the bill recognizes us for the quality work we do," said Gero, who testified to Waxman's Energy and Commerce Committee last month on the environmental integrity of offsets and has answered technical questions for committee staffers. While the bill does not recognize CCAR by name, he noted, "we're absolutely thrilled and excited and proud that WRI would think we're one of the only two that qualify."
Gero compared the potential relationship between government and nonprofit offset verifiers to that of the North American Electric Reliability Corp. and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which recognized NERC as an enforcer of mandatory reliability standards in 2006.
If the bill passes and EPA decides to give the Climate Action Reserve an official role verifying offset projects, the group will have its work cut out for it in terms of meeting demand. It's aiming to have 1.5 million tons of projects registered by this fall and 4-5 million tons by 2010 -- compared to the 1 billion tons per year that the bill gives domestic offsets. "That's still clearly not a billion, but we're not the only game in town, and we don't cover all sectors yet," Gero said.
Agriculture and forestry are ripe for expansion of offset projects, he said, as are ozone-depleting substances and gases with high global warming potential. "I don't know whether we can get a billion, but there's an awful lot of domestic opportunity," he said. "We're one little ice cube on the tip of the iceberg."
On the state level, California is under pressure to figure out how to reward businesses that have already taken action to reduce their emissions below business-as-usual levels. It's working on a list of "additional" actions that would qualify, but might not finish the process until the regional cap-and-trade program takes effect in 2012 -- or is superseded by a national system.
"It's unfortunate that we do have to go through a set procedure to do these things, and it is going to take time," said Michael Gibbs, California EPA's assistant secretary for climate change. "We could end up not finishing the early action rules until it's too late, and that's clearly not acceptable. Then, we're always faced with the question of how much to invest in what we're doing locally as a national program comes into existence, as well."
"The pressure for quick action is of course hugely intense," he said. "An entity that's going to have a regulatory compliance obligation decides to take action in advance and wants that action recognized and reported. It's the single largest pressure point in terms of trying to move quickly."

Show Us the Ball

2009-04-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

Thomas L. Friedman – New York Times Op-Ed

April 8, 2009

I am really encouraged by President Obama’s commitment to clean energy and combating climate change. I just have three worries: whether he has the right policies, the right politics and the right official to sell his program to the country. Other than that, things look great!
Last week, House Democrats, with administration support, introduced a 600-page draft bill on energy and climate. At the center of it is a plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions through a complicated cap-and-trade system. These people have the very best of intentions, but I wish they would step back and ask again: Can cap-and-trade pass? Will it really work? And is it the best strategy, with all the bureaucracy it will require to monitor, auction emissions permits and manage the trading?
Advocates of cap-and-trade argue that it is preferable to a simple carbon tax because it fixes a national cap on carbon emissions and it “hides the ball” — it doesn’t use the word “tax” — even though it amounts to one. So it can get through Congress. That was true as long as no one thought cap-and-trade could ever pass, but now that it might under Mr. Obama, opponents are not playing hide the ball anymore.
In the past two weeks, you could hear a chorus of Republicans, coal-state Democrats, right-wing think tanks and enviro-skeptics all singing the same tune: “Cap-and-trade is a tax. Obama is going to raise your taxes and sacrifice U.S. jobs to combat this global-warming charade, which many scientists think is nonsense. Worse, cap-and-trade will be managed by Wall Street. If you liked credit-default swaps, you’re going to love carbon-offset swaps.”
Some of the refrains from this song have a very catchy appeal. They could easily kill this effort. So, if the Obama team cares about the “ends” of a stronger America and a more livable planet, as much as the “means,” I hope it will consider an alternative strategy, message and messenger.

STRATEGY
Since the opponents of cap-and-trade are going to pillory it as a tax anyway, why not go for the real thing — a simple, transparent, economy-wide carbon tax?
Representative John B. Larson, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, has circulated a draft bill that would impose “a per-unit tax on the carbon-dioxide content of fossil fuels, beginning at a rate of $15 per metric ton of CO2 and increasing by $10 each year.” The bill sets a goal, rather than a cap, on emissions at 80 percent below 2005 levels by 2050, and if the goal for the first five years is not met, the tax automatically increases by an additional $5 per metric ton. The bill implements a fee on carbon-intensive imports, as well, to press China to follow suit. Larson would use most of the income to reduce people’s payroll taxes: We tax your carbon sins and un-tax your payroll wins.

People get that — and simplicity matters. Americans will be willing to pay a tax for their children to be less threatened, breathe cleaner air and live in a more sustainable world with a stronger America. They are much less likely to support a firm in London trading offsets from an electric bill in Boston with a derivatives firm in New York in order to help fund an aluminum smelter in Beijing, which is what cap-and-trade is all about. People won’t support what they can’t explain.

MESSAGE
Climate change is a real threat to a healthy planet Earth — the only home we have. But because the worst effects are in the future, many Americans have more immediate concerns. That is why our energy policy should be focused around “American renewal,” not mitigating climate change.
We need a price on carbon because it will stimulate massive innovation in the next great global industry — E.T. — energy technology. In a warming world with huge population growth, clean power systems are going to be in huge demand. The scientific research and innovation needed for America to dominate E.T. the way it did I.T. could be the foundation for a second American industrial revolution, plus it would tip the whole planet onto a greener path. So American economic renewal is the goal, but mitigating climate change would be the great byproduct.

MESSENGER
The Obama administration’s carbon tax spokesman — the one who should sell this to the country — should be the president’s national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, not the environmentalists. The imposing former head of the Marine Corps could make a powerful case that a carbon tax is vitally necessary to stimulate investments in the clean technologies that would enable the U.S. to dominate E.T., while also shifting consumers to buy these new, more efficient and cleaner power systems, homes and cars.
He could make the case that the country with the most powerful clean-technology industry in the 21st century will have the most energy security, national security, economic security, healthy environment, innovative companies and global respect. That country must be America. So let’s stop hiding the ball and have a strategy, message and messenger that tell it like it is — and make it so.

Archer Daniels Midland project aims to bury carbon dioxide

2009-04-08T13:56:00.000-07:00

The experiment will help determine whether storing greenhouse gases underground, or sequestration, is a viable solution for global warming.

Joshua Boak – Los Angeles Times
April 6, 2009
Decatur, Ill. — The drillers have gnawed through a mile of rock here, almost down to a 600-million-year-old layer of sandstone where they hope to bury about 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide -- equal to the annual emissions of 220,000 automobiles.

The $84-million project, of which $66.7 million comes from the Energy Department, will help determine whether storing greenhouse gases underground, so-called sequestration, is a viable solution for global warming.

The project by Archer Daniels Midland Co., in which greenhouses gases from a corn mill will be buried beneath shale, is important because it's the furthest along of the seven federally sponsored partnerships nationwide to study the matter.

Near the drilling derrick are steel drill bits caked with mud and worn to nubs. Drillers have already burrowed 5,300 feet deep, and they have 2,700 feet left to go.

The idea is that by burying emissions, coal power plants and factories would cause less damage to the environment.

"The day has to come when we can remove coal from the ground and return carbon dioxide" to the ground, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said at the official groundbreaking Monday of ADM's project.

Durbin has been a proponent of sequestration on Capitol Hill, having included $1 billion in the stimulus package to potentially restart FutureGen, an experimental coal power plant to be built in Mattoon, Ill., that would use sequestration. The Bush administration had pulled the plug on FutureGen.

Yet environmental groups say the government should not fund sequestration projects because of the risk of leaks.

"It is complete hubris to believe we can sink carbon dioxide into the ground and think there will be no leakage," said Carroll Muffett, a Greenpeace deputy campaigns director. "We see carbon capture as a serious distraction from real solutions. It's certainly not where public money should be going."

A gushing leak not only could release the emissions back into the atmosphere, it might also pose health risks to people in the form of "immediate death from asphyxiation" or prolonged exposure to high amounts of carbon dioxide, said David Gerard, executive director of the Center for the Study and Improvement of Regulation at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

The major question is whether shale will stop the waste from escaping. Shale resembles a series of overlapping flat plates that contain no room for the gases to pass through; the shale is a rock layer just above the sandstone at the ADM site.

"Right now we're evaluating the shale to make sure it will hold the carbon dioxide," said Jared Walker, a supervisor on the site for Schlumberger Carbon Services.

"With carbon dioxide, it's important that if we put it in the ground, it stays in the ground," said Scott Marsteller, a project manager for Schlumberger Carbon Services. "We're doing a lot of monitoring."

Also at stake with the ADM project is whether similar geological formations around the country and world can be used for sequestration.

If storage cannot be duplicated on a widespread basis, "it's not the option we're going to pursue," said Scott Klara, director of the Energy Department's Strategic Center for Coal.

The key to sequestration is dealing with different types of rock beneath the Earth's surface. Sandstone is porous, sort of like a box of marbles, explained Robert Finley, director of the Energy and Earth Resources Center of the Illinois State Geological Survey.

ADM plans to inject a liquid form of carbon dioxide waste from its mill into the space between the "marbles." Beginning about a year from now, ADM would deposit 1,000 metric tons of emissions each day, shooting them about 8,000 feet into the ground.

The injections at the ADM project would stop in 2013 with about 1 million metric tons, at which point the partnership would continue to study the site for potential leaks.

Stern's approach to climate talks cautious but optimistic

2009-04-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

Lisa Friedman – ClimateWire
April 6, 2009
The cheering that greeted America's presence at U.N. global warming talks last week was "gratifying" and a little surprising, President Obama's climate envoy, Todd Stern, said upon returning to Washington, D.C., after his first foray into international negotiations.

"I was quite taken aback for a moment, because it's not typical for people in that world to do that," Stern said of the loud applause that broke out in Bonn, Germany, after he pledged to a crowd of staid diplomats that America will "make up for lost time" in reaching a global emissions treaty.

"I was just kind of cranking through my speech, and I looked up a bit surprised and pleased," Stern recalled. "It was quite gratifying to get a good reception. There's no question that in the absence of U.S. leadership and engagement for the past eight years, there was a lot of pent-up hopefulness and desire for the United States to indicate that we're back."

In his first interview since being tapped to lead the global negotiations toward a new international emissions treaty, Stern acknowledged criticism from Europe's left and America's right on everything from emissions targets to raising money to help vulnerable countries confront climate change amid the newfound international goodwill. He also distanced the administration from the possibility that the United States could impose an import tax on countries that don't put a price on carbon.

But he stood firm on the main goals he has twice outlined since joining the Obama administration: that America will return to 1990 emissions levels by 2020, that the government is intent upon building a clean-energy, low-carbon economy, and that fast-developing nations like China must take serious -- but still unspecified -- steps to brake their output of greenhouse gas emissions.

'The Chinese are actually doing a lot'

"It is important to take cognizance of the fact that the Chinese are actually doing a lot," Stern said. "They have a significant energy intensity target, renewable target and auto standards that, to date, are higher than our own, and a whole number of not insignificant efficiency standards. So they are doing things, without a doubt."

Together, the United States and China release about 41 percent of the world's greenhouse gases. Neither is currently bound by international commitments to reduce emissions. In hammering out a new treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, world leaders are aiming to craft a measure that demands serious actions from both countries.

For the United States, that will mean ambitious targets. Less clear is what form the "actions" from China, India, and other countries whose economies are growing fast but where millions of people still live without electricity and on less than $2 per day will take. Some proposals call for the so-called "emerging economies" to slow the rate of growth and agree to take actual caps on emissions in two or three decades. Others are calling for full commitments -- U.N. climate code for legally binding acts.

America's new negotiating team under Obama has not spelled out precisely what it hopes to see from China, and Stern only pointed out -- as he did in a major speech in Washington, D.C., last month -- that if unchecked, developing country emissions could push the world to dangerous levels of warming even with major action from the United States and others (ClimateWire, March 4).

"The Chinese need to take action at a level of ambition that keeps it possible for the world to be on the longer-range trajectory that it needs to be on," he said.

Stern also put some space between the administration and the threat that U.S. legislation capping emissions could include a tax on imports from countries that do not also put a price on carbon. The proposal, backed by steel and manufacturing interests as well as many Democrats on Capitol Hill, is aimed at protecting American industry from Chinese competition. Analysts worry that such a move could spark a trade war.

Last month, Energy Secretary Steven Chu acknowledged that the so-called border adjustment tax would "level the playing field" between U.S. companies and those not obligated to reduce emissions under proposed domestic law.

No administration position on border tax

"That's not administration policy at this point," Stern said of the carbon levy. "It's out there, and it's undoubtedly going to be debated. I'm sure if it happens, it's not going to be popular with other countries," he said.

But, he added, "We haven't taken any administration position in support of a policy like that, and we do as a general matter take as a given ... that whatever we mean to do, be consistent with our trade obligations."

Right now the major vehicle for enacting a cap-and-trade system is a sweeping climate and energy bill (pdf) that House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) unveiled last week.

The proposal aims to curb U.S. emissions 20 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, with a midcentury target of 83 percent reductions of greenhouse gases. While the long-term goal is consistent with the Obama aministration's plan to curb heat-trapping gases, it goes further over the course of this decade.

Delegates at the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Bonn hailed the more powerful midterm targets, calling them a strong sign as countries work toward a final deal in Copenhagen at the end of the year. Stern -- who has warned repeatedly that America is politically unable to curb greenhouse gas output 25 to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, as Europe would like -- declined to say whether the Democrats' target is reachable.

"I think that generally, the administration sees the Waxman-Markey bill as pointing in exactly the same direction that the president is trying to point in terms of building a low-carbon economy, which is a huge endeavor with enormous economic potential," Stern said.

It remains unclear still, Stern said, whether the U.S. commitment in a Copenhagen agreement will be reflected in a specific target or other actions. He also claimed ignorance as to whether President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would attend the December talks in Copenhagen.

"I have no idea," Stern said. "All I know is that I'll be there with a big U.S. delegation behind me."

A Catalyst for Cheaper Fuel Cells

2009-04-03T12:56:00.000-07:00

Thursday, April 02, 2009

The material could replace platinum in hydrogen vehicles.
By Kevin Bullis

A new catalyst based on iron works as well as platinum-based catalysts for accelerating the chemical reactions inside hydrogen fuel cells. The finding could help make fuel cells for electric cars cheaper and more practical.

Fuel cell researchers have been looking for cheaper, more abundant alternatives to platinum, which costs between $1,000 and $2,000 an ounce and is mined almost exclusively in just two countries: South Africa and Russia. One promising catalyst that uses far less expensive materials--iron, nitrogen, and carbon--has long been known to promote the necessary reactions, but at rates that are far too slow to be practical.

Now researchers at the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (INRS) in Quebec have dramatically increased the performance of this type of iron-based catalyst. Their material produces 99 amps per cubic centimeter at 0.8 volts, a key measurement of catalytic activity. That is 35 times better than the best nonprecious metal catalyst so far, and close to the Department of Energy's goal for fuel-cell catalysts: 130 amps per cubic centimeter. It also matches the performance of typical platinum catalysts, says Jean-Pol Dodelet, a professor of energy, materials, and telecommunications at INRS who led the work.

The improvement, reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, is "quite surprising," says Radoslav Adzic, a senior chemist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, NY, who also develops catalysts for fuel cells. The new material meets a benchmark for hydrogen fuel cells set five years ago that "we thought nobody would ever meet," adds Hubert Gasteiger, a visiting professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. "For the very first time, a nonprecious metal catalyst makes sense."

The INRS researchers' key insight was finding a way to increase the number of active catalytic sites within the material--with more sites for chemical reactions, the overall rate of the reactions in the material increases. In previous work, the researchers had shown that heating carbon black (a powdery form of carbon similar to graphite) to high temperatures in the presence of ammonia and iron acetate created gaps in the carbon that are just a few atoms wide. Nitrogen atoms bind to opposite sides of these tiny gaps, and an iron ion bridges these atoms, forming an active site for catalysis.

To increase the number of these sites, the researchers used a commercially available form of carbon that already has a large number of similarly narrow pores. Filling these pores with a nitrogen-and-iron-containing material and then heating up the mixture resulted in the much improved reaction rates.

The catalyst is designed to work in proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells, a type of fuel cell favored by automakers because it operates at relatively low temperatures and has high power density--that is, a relatively small fuel cell can produce enough electricity to propel a car. PEM fuel cells use catalysts at two electrodes. One catalyst splits hydrogen and the other promotes a reaction that combines protons and oxygen to produce water. The second reaction is more difficult to perform: in conventional fuel cells, platinum is used in both electrodes, but 10 times as much is needed on the water-producing side. The new catalyst replaces platinum on the water-producing side, eliminating almost all of the platinum in the fuel cell.

Recently, other nonprecious metal catalysts have been demonstrated in another type of fuel cell, called an alkaline cell, but these may not work in the acidic environment in PEM fuel cells. At the same time, many researchers are finding ways to reduce the amount of platinum needed, rather than replacing the material altogether. This could make fuel cells more affordable in the short term, although eventually, if fuel cells are to be used widely, a nonprecious metal catalyst will be needed, Adzic says.

Dodelet believes that while his group has "solved the problem" of increasing the activity of the catalyst, two more significant hurdles remain before it can be practical in fuel cells. First, the catalyst's durability needs to be improved. After 100 hours of testing, the reaction rates decreased by half. Second, because the catalyst can only work as fast as the reactants are provided, the transport of oxygen and protons into the material needs to be improved, something Dodelet plans to leave to fuel-cell engineers. Adzic says that the first step toward addressing the materials' durability will be closely studying the catalyst to better understand how it works.

New Urbanism in a Nutshell

2009-04-01T11:45:00.000-07:00

Andres Duany on NPR

Concentrating solar powered desalination - a water solution?

2009-03-31T10:33:00.002-07:00

Wednesday, 11 March 2009
By Stewart Taggart

Australia needs electricity and Australia needs water. Concentrating solar power can help provide both.

Unlike solar photovoltaics, which creates electricity directly from sunlight, concentrating solar power first creates heat. This heat can then be used either to generate electricity or to desalinate water. Properly configured, concentrating solar power can switch back and forth from creating electricity to water.

Given these attributes, Concentrating solar powered desalination is a technology with hugely positive potential implications for global drinking water supplies. With futurists warning that water could emerge as a 21st Century flashpoint for strife, solar desalination is an avenue that should be explored aggressively.

Australia is ideally suited to take a global lead in concentrating solar-powered desalination. Australia has sunshine, seafront land, an advanced industrial economy and pressing water and energy needs. More favorable conditions for developing an infant industry like solar desalination are hard to imagine.

One solar powered desalination plant is already in development in Australia.

Known as 'Acquasol 1,' the plant will be located outside Port Augusta, South Australia. It will mesh together parabolic trough concentrating solar power, combined cycle gas turbines, multi-effects desalination and solar salt harvesting. In so doing, it will achieve the closest thing yet to a 'closed loop' in desalination.

The plant is being built by Acquasol Infrastructure Ltd., an Adelaide-based company of which I'm a director. To better understand 'Acquasol 1,' it pays to look at the underlying technologies.

Concentrating solar power

There are four main technologies in concentrating solar power: parabolic troughs, solar dishes,solar towers and compact linear fresnel reflectors. Of the four, parabolic troughs are the most commercially proven, with plants operating in California, Nevada and Spain.

Solar thermal storage and combined cycle natural gas

Solar thermal energy storage allows excess solar heat gathered during morning hours to be stored for use during afternoon electricity demand peak periods. Adding a combined cycle natural gas turbine provides provides redundancy and the ability to double up power production when needed, for instance on hot afternoons when grid demand spikes.

Desalination

There are two main forms of desalination: reverse osmosis and multi-effects distillation. Reverse osmosis uses electricity to push seawater through screens to separate water from salt. Multi-effects uses heat to boil seawater under pressure and then recondenses the vapor. Given that concentrating solar power can create temperatures of 400-1,000+ degrees Celsius, the thermal energy can be used as a direct input to desalination.

Solar salt harvesting

Solar salt harvesting involves putting hypersaline byproduct waste brine from the desalination process into land-based holding ponds and then allowing the sun to evaporate the water. This leaves only salt which can be sold as an additional revenue stream. Solar salt harvesting keeps brine out of sensitive coastal marine environments where its impact remains poorly understood.

By bundling existing technologies in a novel way, 'Acquasol 1' aims to create lower cost power for consumers, enhanced grid stability, more assured water supplies and safeguarded marine environments.

Solar-powered desalination is benefiting from favorable cost trends. Desalination technology costs are falling by about 5-7 per cent per year and concentrating solar power costs are falling at about the same rate. Meanwhile, depletion and pollution of natural water resources is causing the cost of traditional water extraction to rise.

Research conducted for the Western Australian government in 2004 estimated the three cost trends could mean that desalinated water becomes cheaper than groundwater in some parts of that state as early as 2020. The 'cross-over' point for other states may not be far behind.

Australia needs solutions to its energy and water problems. Australia is a 'smart country.' But what Australia needs is a sense of adventure, a sense of open frontiers and a sense of prudent risk-taking in pursuit of climate change and environmental problems in pressing need of solutions.

'Acquasol 1' is just one good idea. There are many others, including those in wave energy, tidal energy, geothermal and hydrogen creation -- all of which may yield 1+1=3 solutions down the track similar to the potential of solar powered desalination.

Stewart Taggart is a director of Acquasol Infrastructure Ltd., a developer of environmentally-friendly power and water solutions building a municipal-scale solar desalination plant in South Australia's Upper Spencer Gulf. Stewart is also founder/administrator of DESERTEC-Australia, DESERTEC-USA and DESERTEC-China. DESERTEC promotes the concept of "Clean Power From Deserts."

Barack Obama Announces Another $1.2 billion for Energy R&D

2009-03-26T16:01:00.000-07:00

March 24th, 2009 in Technology / Energy
Renewable energy

(PhysOrg.com) -- One of the more interesting areas of technological development in the coming years is likely to be energy development -- specifically green energy development. With new advances in physics allowing for such items as organic thin-film solar cells, it appears that energy technology could be one of the uses for cutting edge scientific advancements. U.S. President Barack Obama is hoping to spur further advancements in energy technology through increased funding for research and development.

Monday, President Obama announced that money would be provided for research at the national laboratories for the Department of Energy. Additionally, grants will be available for those wishing to do research in renewable energy. Areas such as wind, solar, biofuels and hydrogen will be encouraged. Even nuclear energy and questions about storing carbon dioxide underground will be eligible for grant funding under the new rules. The funding is in addition to tax credits and spending approved in the recently passed economic stimulus package.

Some of the technologies and companies that are like to benefit from energy R&D funding include:

* Serious Materials, which uses energy efficient materials to make drywall.an energy-draining process of mixing raw materials in a wet slurry and then using outside energy to dry it, the company has a recipe that makes use of chemicals -- and their reactions -- for the drying heat necessary.

* Solyndra, a solar power start-up. This company is receiving the first Department of Energy loan given out in years. Instead of using silicon, Solyndra manufactures soalr cells out of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) and shapes them into cylinders that are placed on panels. The efficiency of Solyndra's solar panels is between 12 an 14 percent -- a number boosted by a special reflective coating on the roof below the panel.

* 1366 Technologies is on a quest to make solar energy cheaper than coal. The company is associated with Emanuel Sachs, who is on leave from MIT right now. The company claims it cracked the $1 barrier using cadmium telluride for its thin-film cells. But further advances in chemistry and physics are needed to reach that sort of cost-efficiency using silicon.

* Winsupply, a company that offers geothermal, wind and solar equipment, could use tax credits and other funding to make its products more widely available.

* Universities might also receive some funding. MIT is one of the hottest places right now for developing technology that can boost energy efficiency. Additionally, projects like those at different universities to use LED lights as wi-fi access points could also bring energy use dollars to higher education institutions languishing due to the economic crisis.

The biggest needs in green technology R&D involve using scientific breakthroughs to make renewable energy cost-efficient. Until science and technology can give us energy that costs less than fossil fuels, renewable/green energy will be limited. But this funding may put energy R&D on that track.

© 2009 PhysOrg.com

EPA Raises Heat on Emissions Debate

2009-03-25T15:45:00.001-07:00

Ian Talley – Wall Street Journal
March 24, 2009

WASHINGTON -- The Environmental Protection Agency has sent the White House a proposed finding that carbon dioxide is a danger to public health, a step that could trigger a clampdown on emissions of greenhouse gases across a wide swath of the economy.

If approved by the White House Office of Management and Budget, the endangerment finding could clear the way for the EPA to use the Clean Air Act to control emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases believed to contribute to climate change. In effect, the government would treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant. The EPA submitted the proposed rule to the White House on Friday, according to federal records published Monday.

Such a finding would raise pressure on Congress to enact a system that caps greenhouse gases -- which trap the sun's heat in the earth's atmosphere -- and creates a market for businesses to buy and sell the right to emit them, as President Barack Obama has proposed.

A White House representative said Monday that Mr. Obama's "strong preference is for Congress to pass energy security legislation that includes a cap on greenhouse-gas emissions. The Supreme Court ruled that the EPA must review whether greenhouse-gas emissions pose a threat to public health or welfare, and this is simply the next step in what will be a long process that engages stakeholders and the public."

The administration has proposed a cap-and-trade system that could raise $646 billion by 2019 through government auctions of emission allowances. Environmentalists want the administration to act on climate change before December, ahead of talks aimed at forging a successor to the Koyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that commits many industrialized countries to reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions.

EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn declined to comment on the details of the endangerment proposal, saying it is "still [an] internal and deliberative" document. But in a move that indicated the potential scope of regulation, the agency earlier this month proposed a national system for reporting carbon-dioxide and other greenhouse-gas emissions by major emitters. The EPA has said about 13,000 facilities, accounting for about 85% to 90% of greenhouse gases emitted in the U.S., would be covered under the proposal.

Industry officials say it will still take months, possibly even years, for the administration to finalize rules for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions.

According to an internal document presented by the EPA to White House officials earlier this month, the EPA believes the health effects of elevated greenhouse-gas levels could cause "severe heat waves...with likely increases in mortality and morbidity, especially among the elderly, young and frail." The agency also said climate change caused by higher greenhouse-gas levels could result in more severe storms and more suffering related to "floods, storms, droughts and fires."

Business groups such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers warn that if the EPA moves forward on regulation of CO2 under the Clean Air Act -- instead of a measured legislative approach -- it could hobble the already weak economy.

Coal-fired power plants, oil refineries and domestic industries, such as energy-intensive paper, cement, fertilizer, steel, and glass manufacturers, worry that increased cost burdens imposed by climate-change laws will put them at a severe competitive disadvantage to their international peers that aren't bound by similar environmental rules.

Environmentalists have called for the endangerment finding, and say action by Congress or the Obama administration to curb greenhouse gases is necessary to halt the ill effects of climate change.

Looking ahead with tech icon Bob Metcalfe

2009-03-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

March 18th, 2009 By Mike Cassidy

One of the great things about living in Silicon Valley is that the history of technology is alive all around us.

I mean really alive, as in walking around, the way Bob Metcalfe was the other day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Metcalfe - Xerox PARC researcher, inventor, 3Com founder, former InfoWorld columnist and museum fellow - was to take the stage that evening for one of those "Bob Metcalfe in Conversation" deals. It wasn't exactly his thing.

See, when Metcalfe takes the stage, everyone wants to hear the old stories and about how he co-invented Ethernet, a stunning breakthrough in the '70s and a key way computers talk to each other today. But Metcalfe would prefer to talk about what lies ahead.

Metcalfe, who lives in Boston now, was telling me this at the end of an informal lunch at the computer museum with about 30 of the institution's backers. He'd just finished provoking, inspiring and entertaining the lunch crowd with a brief talk about the future of energy production. A talk that he warned would be in parts "controversial and annoying."

But that's the way Metcalfe is. Not so much controversial and annoying, but old-school Silicon Valley. He's not afraid to say what he thinks. But he doesn't say it just to upset people. He says what he says because he thinks ideas have value, that ideas are the way things get invented and problems get solved. If you disagree with him? Good. Let's hear it.

Metcalfe, 62, was happy to have a lunch crowd willing to hear his thoughts about the future, a group that understands he still has a pulse. He wants to be clear about one thing: He's no relic.

"I'm not finished," he told me as he pointed to a museum display case honoring the Ethernet. "I worked on that in 1973 and they're not going to get me into that box."

No they're not. See, Metcalfe is an out-of-the-box guy. Take his lunchtime talk on green energy. Run-of-the-mill topic. Not a run-of-the-mill approach.

First off, he doesn't like the label "green." The green movement, he says, conjures up "anti-capitalism, anti-technology, anti-Americanism." Why not blue tech? Blue for power coming maybe from the sky (sun) or the oceans. Global warming? It could be happening, but it's overblown by the media and others. The United States' skittishness about nuclear power? Silly.

And why are we so focused on energy conservation? Metcalfe isn't against it. He just downsized from a Mercedes to a Smart car. But forget conservation long term. The goal in the next six or seven decades should be to produce "squanderably abundant, cheap and clean energy."

How can we do that? Metcalfe takes the Internet's evolution as his guide. In the beginning no one working on the Internet could have foreseen where it would end up or all it would be used for.

"When we started building the Internet, and I remember this clearly," Metcalfe said, "we did not set out to build a network to support YouTube."

There were innovations no one saw coming that made the Internet possible and better - the semiconductor, the PC, packet-switching, Ethernet, TPC/IP protocol. There will be surprises in the energy field, too.

Metcalfe, now a venture capitalist, believes that squanderable energy supply will come from people who paid a lot of attention in science class: Maybe we'll create abundant biofuel out of algae, or use the sun to turn water into high-energy fuel. We might rely on nuclear schemes that don't require hulking power plants. No doubt we'll rely on many technologies.

You might find much to disagree with in Metcalfe's specifics. But it's hard to argue with his general optimism. After all, this is a man who made history but isn't finished living it.

___

Mike Cassidy is a technology columnist for the San Jose Mercury News.
(c) 2009, San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.).

Brown Is the New Green

2009-03-18T17:28:00.001-07:00

APA March 2009

More and more brownfields are being developed, not just cleaned up. And they're going green in a variety of ways.

By JoAnn Greco

Since Americans first became acquainted with the idea of revitalizing brownfields, the economic impact of saving these former wastelands has been remarkable. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, its brownfields program has leveraged more than $12 billion in cleanup and redevelopment funding from the private and public sectors and created about 50,000 new jobs.

The agency began distributing funds to local governments through a pilot program in 1994. That program is designed to help states with voluntary brownfield cleanups. As the years passed, the program expanded its definition of what merits cleanup, broadening it to encompass much more than the public health emergencies associated with Superfund sites — a program, officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, that got its start in 1980 in response to New York State's Love Canal disaster.

Then, in 2003, funding for the brownfields program was officially separated from the Superfund program. A lot has changed in the five years since then, especially at the local level. Brownfields are increasingly given priority in economic development offices and, consequently, are increasingly on the radar of planners and private developers.

"More states are channeling resources to properties with a clearly identified end use or economic development activity," reports the EPA in a recent update of state activity. State and local governments have compiled brownfield inventories and instituted other marketing programs to keep developers informed. Thinking has shifted from a "cleanup-only mentality to a cleanup and reuse strategy," the EPA report concludes. And, both facets — cleanup and reuse — are going green.

A long drive from here to there

Cathedral Kitchen, a soup kitchen in Camden, New Jersey, was built on a reclaimed site that once housed a series of light industriesProgress, yes, but there's still a long way to go. The rough-hewn outskirts of America's big cities and small river towns taunt the eye with hulking factories, their windows broken and brick crumbling; seldom-used rail yards, overgrown with weeds and litter; and acres of empty lots protected by barbed wire. Whether filled with muck and ooze underground, or decay and blight above, these brownfields — defined by the EPA as "property, the expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be complicated by the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant" — too often remain unremediated and undeveloped.

According to David Lloyd, director of the EPA's office of Brownfields and Land Revitalization, the nation has between 450,000 and one million of these in-limbo properties. Still, Lloyd is encouraged.

"In the last two years alone, our state and tribal response programs — which include all 50 states and some 60 tribes — reported that they had cleaned 19,000 properties, for a total of 250,000 acres," he says, adding that this exceeds the pace of previous years. And, many in the field agree, the hurdles associated with the cleanup and redevelopment of brownfields are gradually disappearing.

"Slowly, the stigma associated with brownfields is being removed," says Evangeline Linkous, planning analyst at the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, which serves nine counties in Philadelphia and New Jersey. "Planners see them as a development opportunity that can be placed into context with other areas they're interested in, such as transit-oriented development, and developers are becoming more comfortable as they understand the wealth of new choices for remediation and for use."

Governments, too, are coming around. Pennsylvania just passed a bill, modeled on a New Jersey program, that could be signed into law soon. The Pennsylvania act allows up to 75 percent of remediation costs to be reimbursed by the state. And TIFs (tax increment financing districts) are being used in all kinds of brownfield projects. Linkous acknowledges that these financial measures "can be controversial, but we need to remember that brownfields present a strong economic catalyst and opportunity to change the market," she says.

The ravaged city of Camden, New Jersey (pop. 80,000), has come to this realization. It recently hired a locally based consulting firm, Brownfield Redevelopment Solutions, to conduct an inventory of priority brownfields and other underused industrial and manufacturing sites, as part of a plan to reestablish the city's manufacturing base.

"If every municipality did this, they'd get a better handle on whether these properties were sufficiently productive, whether they could be more consistent with surrounding land uses, and whether there was land with contamination issues that still need to be addressed," says Judy Shaw, AICP, of the National Center for Neighborhood and Brownfields Redevelopment at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. (The university also has a major presence in Camden.)

"It puts them in a good position to initiate a discussion with their community and with developers. For too long, it's been very easy to warehouse our brownfield sites," Shaw continues. "But now there's a much stronger understanding of their planning and use aspects and their value. There are developers who will come in and take risks and who know there's money to be made. It's a matter of the community taking a leadership role."

While Camden may be looking for manufacturing sites, ex-brownfields can, of course, be converted into housing, retail, entertainment, and office uses. Some of the largest mixed use developments under construction or recently completed are reclamations of rubber-making plants and railroad yards, of steel mills and textile mills.

These include: Atlanta's $2 billion, 138-acre Atlantic Station; Denver's $1 billion Cherokee Denver; Las Vegas's $6 billion, 61-acre Union Park; Bridgeport, Connecticut's $1.5 billion, 52-acre Steel Point; North Carolina's $1.5 billion, 350-acre multiuniversity research campus; and Elizabeth, New Jersey's $2 billion, 30-acre Celadon. Several redevelopment projects are slated for the sprawling, swampy New Jersey Meadowlands, some of which includes brownfields, and an $800 million casino intends to incorporate much of the massive ruins of Bethlehem Steel in Pennsylvania.

Hundreds of much smaller projects are under way, too, promising to turn ground that once was home to neighborhood gas stations, dry cleaning facilities, and auto repair shops into green community centers, high school athletic fields, and affordable housing developments.

Take the brand new home of Cathedral Kitchen, a Camden, New Jersey, soup kitchen.

Initially, the nonprofit intended to build on a lot it had bought closer to downtown. But because that area is slated for a major redevelopment project to be anchored by the new headquarters of Campbell Soup, the city suggested a swap, offering to pick up remediation costs at a brownfield site. Today, the soup kitchen's low-slung building occupies a reclaimed site that had housed a series of light industries.

"This worked out perfectly for us," says Karen Talarico, the group's executive director. "Not only did we get to design the space from scratch, but we hope our presence will bring other development to the neighborhood." Further, in what looks like a first, Cathedral Kitchen hopes to apply for LEED certification. The building features water-efficient landscaping and interior finishes manufactured from recycled materials. A large quantity of construction waste was salvaged during excavation of the site and demolition of its one burned-out building.

Going green

The building under constructionThis small, $4 million project is just the beginning of a trend that's turning brownfields into green sites. New site remediation strategies are using green technology to limit air pollution caused by particulate matter disturbed during demolition, soil erosion and nutrient depletion, and emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Remedies include leaving as much soil as possible in place during excavation (to cut down both on transportation and on particulate disturbance), taking measures to capture stormwater runoff, and using alternative fuels to run construction equipment.

After they're cleaned, some properties are even being transformed into solar and wind farms. Others redirect gases emitted by contaminated soil, generating fossil fuel.

One interesting example of the latter is a 121-acre landfill Superfund site in Antioch, Illinois (pop. 14,000), north of Chicago, which is transporting methane produced onsite to a nearby high school, which has not only gained cheap heat, but also a new athletic field on top of the landfill. "As part of remediation, the gas has to be captured no matter what," explains Jack Dowden, an area director at Waste Management, the private firm that operates the landfill. "Energy use is one of the few practical applications that really works."

Typically, such gas-to-energy byproducts are sold to manufacturing facilities and industrial boiler systems, Dowden says. He's confident the process has greater applications, especially for older landfills — Antioch's dates to the early 1960s — that were placed closer to residential areas.

Similar convergences between brown and green have been "brewing for a few years now," says Kristeen Gaffney of the EPA's Region 3 (Mid-Atlantic) brownfields office. "Our initial focus on green buildings for brownfield sites is just coming to fruition. These buildings are up and functioning, and there's a lot of success to report. Now we're ready to go beyond just the buildings."

Even though the EPA's main goal is still cleaning up contaminated sites, she adds, "we want to go full cycle — to take the site from being a terrific problem to being a cutting-edge example of green living."

LEED-ND fills a niche

To that end, the EPA helped develop a new LEED certification category, LEED for Neighborhood Development, which evaluates newly built neighborhoods using criteria related to location, neighborhood patterns and overall design, green construction and technology, and water and energy conservation. The program also awards separate points for brownfield reuse and, thus far, an estimated 25 percent of applicants have sought credits in that area.

One already designated project is Union Park in Las Vegas, which is being built on land that once served a rail terminal and switching yard. "Everyone thought we were crazy when we acquired this contaminated downtown land for $32 million in 2000," says Scott Adams, director of business development for the Las Vegas Redevelopment Agency. "But a recent appraisal put its value at between $150 million and $200 million."

The city is operating as a master developer for the entire 17-block parcel, whose individual projects include a performing arts complex and a Frank Gehry-designed brain research center. For Las Vegas, says Adams, "this site cleanup is a top priority; it's allowing us to reclaim the very heart of the city."

The EPA'S Gaffney agrees that many brownfields are desirable because of their central location. "Just think about it: A lot of brownfields are ideally located in the first place," she says. "They're near where people live and work, they're near transportation centers."

In addition to its involvement with LEED-ND, the EPA has worked on several other initiatives designed to encourage communities to green their brownfields. The "Lifecycle Building Challenge," an EPA partnership with, among others, the American Institute of Architects, promises national recognition to designs and projects that maximize material recovery in demolitions and excavations and lead to plans to reuse building components. Early last year, the EPA also released its first Green Remediation Primer, aimed at helping developers understand environmentally friendly cleanup techniques.

Most sweeping of all, the agency announced last summer that it would provide more than $500,000 in technical assistance grants to 16 brownfields sustainability pilots. The projects demonstrate reuse and recycling of construction and demolition materials, renewable energy development, and native landscaping.

"We're hoping that when these projects are complete — and most are already under way — we'll be able to use them as specific examples for other communities, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel," says Lloyd. He cites as an example a 300-acre landfill where the city of Houston hopes to build a solar plant.

One project that was a natural fit is The Waterfront, in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Dunn Twiggar, a developer there, is the only builder to be awarded one of the grants. "Looking at this site, it's not difficult to imagine the reuse and recycling of materials," says Andrew Twiggar, a partner in the firm.

Located along the Lehigh River, this 26-acre brownfield once housed iron and steel plants. What interested the EPA was the potential to restore and enhance a riparian property.

"I've been passing it for 15 years, thinking there has to be a better use," Twiggar says, "something that acknowledges the prime waterfront location." One day his firm approached the property owner with an idea for a mixed use community that would be lively at all times of the day. "We've looked at a lot of successful waterfront developments across the country, and we think we've pieced together the elements of success," he says.

Riverfront park space and walking trails play a large role in the redevelopment, which is not slated to begin for another 18 months or so, or until the leases of the current industrial tenants expire. Twiggar notes that the riverbank is graded on a steep, 30-foot slope, built on slag and other fill material. "It's not attractive, it's not natural — and it's just a waste, in more ways than one. The grant will help us see how we can remediate and remove that slag."

Plants do the work

Summerset at Frick Park was built on a brownfield site five miles from downtown PittsburghOne idea is to put nature to work. That's what Design Workshop, the Denver-based landscape design and planning firm, did during remediation of a Superfund site in Sugar Creek, Missouri (pop. 3,500). The site, a 500-acre oil refinery that neighbors could smell half a mile away on a windy day, presented a major challenge for the firm.

"You'd step in the soil, and the oil would just ooze to the surface and leave a film of scum on your boots," says principal Gyles Thornley. Capping the site by covering it with a thick layer of impenetrable clay would cost tens of millions of dollars and would only "paper over the problem, from our perspective," Thornley recalls thinking.

As he considered the vegetation that had grown back since 1982, when the site had been shut down, Thornley conceived of a novel approach: Why not let the trees and grasses do the heavy lifting through a process called phytoremediation? To minimize runoff, Design Workshop channeled the site's stormwater through swales — "more of a given today, but something new when we began this project several years back," says Thornley — and then lined them with willows and poplars, part of the natural habitat that has taken over the site.

"Plants absorb the bad stuff through their roots, transpirate it through their leaves, and it comes out clean, instead of removing and transporting the soil," Thornley says.

Making use of what's there also helped the site's owners, BP Amoco, save millions of dollars on pipes and treatment plants. Ongoing for 10 years now, and just ready to house new facilities for the town's police and fire departments, the project was a first for Thornley. But he's become a convert.

"The end result, as far as green buildings or green uses goes, is wonderful," he says. "But it's the cherry, a few sprinkles, really, on the great big wedding cake of the cleanup. We can't just continue moving contaminated material from place to place. It's going to come back and bite us. We really need to start approaching these sites differently."

JoAnn Greco is a freelance writer based in Philadelphia.

Who owns Colorado's rainwater?

2009-03-18T11:14:00.001-07:00

Environmentalists and others like to gather it in containers for use
in drier times. But state law says it belongs to those who bought the
rights to waterways.

By Nicholas Riccardi March 18, 2009
Reporting from Denver --

Every time it rains here, Kris Holstrom
knowingly breaks the law.

Holstrom's violation is the fancifully painted 55-gallon buckets
underneath the gutters of her farmhouse on a mesa 15 miles from the
resort town of Telluride. The barrels catch rain and snowmelt, which
Holstrom uses to irrigate the small vegetable garden she and her
husband maintain.

But according to the state of Colorado, the rain that falls on
Holstrom's property is not hers to keep. It should be allowed to fall
to the ground and flow unimpeded into surrounding creeks and streams,
the law states, to become the property of farmers, ranchers,
developers and water agencies that have bought the rights to those
waterways.

What Holstrom does is called rainwater harvesting. It's a practice
that dates back to the dawn of civilization, and is increasingly in
vogue among environmentalists and others who pursue sustainable
lifestyles. They collect varying amounts of water, depending on the
rainfall and the vessels they collect it in. The only risk involved is
losing it to evaporation. Or running afoul of Western states' water
laws.

Those laws, some of them more than a century old, have governed the
development of the region since pioneer days.

"If you try to collect rainwater, well, that water really belongs to
someone else," said Doug Kemper, executive director of the Colorado
Water Congress. "We get into a very detailed accounting on every
little drop."

Frank Jaeger of the Parker Water and Sanitation District, on the arid
foothills south of Denver, sees water harvesting as an insidious
attempt to take water from entities that have paid dearly for the
resource.

"Every drop of water that comes down keeps the ground wet and helps
the flow of the river," Jaeger said. He scoffs at arguments that
harvesters like Holstrom only take a few drops from rivers.
"Everything always starts with one little bite at a time."

Increasingly, however, states are trying to make the practice more
welcome. Bills in Colorado and Utah, two states that have limited
harvesting over the years, would adjust their laws to allow it in
certain scenarios, over the protest of people like Jaeger.

Organic farmers and urban dreamers aren't the only people pushing to
legalize water harvesting. Developer Harold Smethills wants to build
more than 10,000 homes southwest of Denver that would be supplied by
giant cisterns that capture the rain that falls on the 3,200-acre
subdivision. He supports the change in Colorado law.

"We believe there is something to rainwater harvesting," Smethills
said. "We believe it makes economic sense."

Collected rainwater is generally considered "gray water," or water
that is not reliably pure enough to drink but can be used to water
yards, flush toilets and power heaters. In some states, developers try
to include a network of cisterns and catchment pools in every
subdivision, but in others, those who catch the rain tend to do so
covertly.

In Colorado, rights to bodies of water are held by entities who get
preference based on the dates of their claims. Like many other Western
states, Colorado has more claims than available water, and even those
who hold rights dating back to the late 19th century sometimes find
they do not get all of the water they should.

"If I decide to [take rainwater] in 2009, somewhere, maybe 100 miles
downstream, there's a water right that outdates me by 100 years"
that's losing water, said Kevin Rein, assistant state engineer.

State Sen. Chris Romer found out about this facet of state water
policy when he built his ecological dream house in Denver, entirely
powered by solar energy. He wanted to install a system to catch
rainwater, but the state said it couldn't be permitted.

"It was stunning to me that this common-sense thing couldn't be done,"
said Romer, a Democrat. He sponsored a bill last year to allow water
harvesting, but it did not pass.

"Welcome to water politics in Colorado," Romer said. "You don't touch
my gun, you don't touch my whiskey, and you don't touch my water."

Romer and Republican state Rep. Marsha Looper introduced bills this
year to allow harvesting in certain circumstances. Armed with a study
that shows that 97% of rainwater that falls on the soil never makes it
to streams, they propose to allow harvesting in 11 pilot projects in
urban areas, and for rural users like Kris Holstrom whose wells are
depleted by drought.

In contrast to the high-stakes maneuvering in the capital, Holstrom
looks upon the state's regulation of rainwater with exasperated
amusement.

Holstrom, director of sustainability for Telluride, and her husband,
John, have lived on their farm since 1988. During the severe drought
at the start of this decade, their well began drying up. Placing rain
barrels under the gutters was the natural thing to do, said Holstrom,
51.

"Rain out here comes occasionally, and can come really hard," she
said. "To be able to store it for when you need it is really great."

Holstrom had a vague awareness of state regulations. She decided to
test it last summer when she was teaching a class on water harvesting.
She called the state water department, which told her it was
technically illegal, though it was unlikely that she would be cited.

Holstrom is known in southwestern Colorado for a lifestyle and causes
that many deem quixotic. The land she and her husband own holds a yurt
and tepees to house "interns" who help on their organic farm in the
summers. It boasts a greenhouse, which even on a recent snowy day held
an oasis of rosemary, artichokes, salad greens and a fig tree.

She plucked a bit of greens from one plant and munched on it as
goldfish swam in a small, algae-filled pond that helps heat the
enclosure. "This has been my passion for a long time -- trying to live
the best way I know how," she said.

nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

Scientists are grim, economists more optimistic about climate change's effects

2009-03-17T12:11:00.001-07:00

Jean-Marie MacAbrey – ClimateWire

March 13, 2009

COPENHAGEN -- Scientists are gloomy; economists are more upbeat. Such was the bottom line of an epic, three-day international congress of climate change experts that ended here yesterday.
At the congress, it seemed that all the scientists had to share with their peers was bad news, but a number of economists saw the climate crisis rather as an historic opportunity to reorganize the world economy and develop new, clean and job-creating activities.
At the opening of yesterday's session, Lord Nicholas Stern, former chief economist for the World Bank, added his own dose of gloom by saying that his now-famous report on the risks of global warming, written for the British government in 2006, had underestimated them. "The reason is that emissions are growing faster than we thought, the absorption capacity of the planet is less than we thought, the probability of high temperatures is likely higher than we thought, and some of the effects are coming faster than we thought," he explained.
Stern called for $400 billion in extra public funding -- 20 percent of a global package of $2 trillion -- to be made available for the 'green component' of the world stimulus over the next year or two.
Several other economists also sent messages of growth promotion via support for green investments. These included Terry Barker, director of the Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research of the University of Cambridge. "The current global financial crisis must be seen as a timely stimulus to tackling climate change, not a hindrance," Barker said.
Obama's 'green New Deal' praised
"If all G-20 countries adopted a 'green New Deal' similar to the one proposed by President Obama, the world economy would be greatly strengthened, especially the sectors producing low-carbon technologies," he went on. "But global coordination is critical. Any single country's New Deal may fail if its extra demand for goods and services is met with imports. If we act together, everyone's exports will increase and we can recover employment much more quickly."
Barker went a step further, saying, "Where many current calculations get it wrong is in the assumption that more stringent [climate mitigation] measures will necessarily raise the overall cost, especially when there is substantial unemployment and underuse of capacity as there is today."
He added: "There is some evidence that harder greenhouse gas targets and regulation may actually increase benefits through improved innovation and distribution of low-carbon technologies and increased revenues from taxes or permits. These revenues can be spent to further support new technology and to lower other indirect taxes, ensuring the fiscal neutrality of these measures."
Stern and most of the economists at the conference strongly supported the cap-and-trade approach to reducing emissions. Stern said it "has many advantages -- including a much greater quantity and certainty than taxation would give you, and allows funds to cross borders in a way which couldn't happen through [carbon] taxes."
In an interview, Stern said he was impressed by the Obama administration's climate policy, though he noted that Europeans are questioning the credibility of Obama's proposed emissions reductions, which they believe push the more difficult cuts too far into the future.
"Barack Obama has said that, on the way to an 80 percent cut [in U.S greenhouse gas emissions] by 2050, he would aim at returning to 1990 levels by 2020. This would mean that the U.S. would accomplish its entire 80 percent in three decades instead of six. Is this credible? So that's the challenge. Europe has to recognize where the United States is and show some understanding, but the U.S. has to go a bit further."

'Major migrations' will be part of social disruptions
As the congress wound down, members produced a list of six key conclusions that will be included in a report to U.N. decision-makers prior to December's climate change protocol negotiations in Copenhagen.
On climate trends, the conference noted: "Given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are becoming a reality. There is a significant risk that many of the trends will accelerate, leading to an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climatic shifts."
On social disruption, it said: "Societies are highly vulnerable to even modest levels of climate change, with poor nations and communities particularly at risk. Temperature rises above 2° C will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with, and will increase the level of climate disruption for the remainder of the century."
Major migrations will be part of these potential social disruptions. On this topic, one of the conference's key speakers, John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact and Research, proposed that rich countries accommodate future climate refugees on their soil according to their historical share of greenhouse gas emissions.
"So, if the USA produces 25 percent of emissions, it would have to accommodate 25 percent of the world's climate refugees," he said, to hearty applause from some conference participants.

Ocean expected to rise 5 feet along coastlines

2009-03-16T17:16:00.000-07:00

I know you’ve already read or heard this ad nauseum. However, a friend and colleague, Mike Mehaffy is attending the IPPC in Copenhagen reports that “...the models are getting quite good, with much of the former uncertainty now eliminated. The latest models have a number of redundant ways of testing the predictions – looking back in the fossil record (where there is a very tight correlation between average global temperature and sea level, for example), and making back-dated model predictions from a point in the past, say, 1980 or 1900, and then running the models and seeing how they actually track with measured reality. So it’s getting very, very close now.

Jane Kay, SF Chronicle Environment Writer

Thursday, March 12, 2009

(03-11) 18:04 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- Driven by global warming, the ocean is expected to rise nearly 5 feet along California's coastline by the end of the century, hitting San Francisco Bay the hardest of all, according to a state study released Wednesday.

Nearly half a million people and $100 billion in property, two-thirds of it concentrated around the bay, are at risk of major flooding, researchers found in the most comprehensive study to date of how climate change will alter the state's coastal areas.

Rising seas, storms and extreme high tides are expected to send saltwater into low-lying areas, flooding freeways, the Oakland and San Francisco airports, hospitals, power plants, schools and sewage plants. Thousands of structures at risk are the homes of low- and middle-income people, the study said.

Vast wetlands that nourish fish and birds and act as a buffer against flooding will be inundated and could turn into dead pools. Constructing seawalls and levees, if needed, could cost $14 billion plus an annual maintenance cost of $1.4 billion, the study said.

The study shows a greater sea-level rise for California than previous studies because it takes into account recent changes in glaciers and ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland.
Worldwide forecasts

Scientists worldwide forecast that sea levels will rise for centuries even if greenhouse gas emissions are halted immediately, and California cities and counties must learn to deal with that inevitability just as they plan for earthquakes, the study advises.

Regional planners are recommending that some new construction be halted, other properties protected and still others abandoned.

The study was conducted by the internationally known Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group in Oakland, and was paid for by the California Energy Commission, Caltrans and the state Ocean Protection Council.

With California leading the nation in regulating greenhouse gas emissions, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005 ordered state agencies to form a Climate Action Team to research and plan for global warming. Three dozen studies are expected this year, on air quality and health, frequency of wildfires, the use of energy and fresh water supplies.

"No other state has done this kind of assessment of coastal risk," said Peter Gleick, president and founder of the Pacific Institute and a leading water expert. The new assessment, he said, puts the state "far ahead in our ability to both identify possible impacts and implement effective policies to prevent them."

Although large sections of the Pacific Coast are not vulnerable to flooding, sea-level rise is expected to accelerate erosion, resulting in a loss of 41 square miles of the coast and affecting 14,000 people, the study said.
Flooding projections

Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey prepared maps of San Francisco Bay showing projected inundation, though they don't include the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. Calculations for inundation don't take into account existing seawalls and levees along the Peninsula and at Oakland International Airport.

Large portions of the Bay Area are at risk because European settlers in the 1800s filled shoreline marshes to build towns and cities.

Will Travis, executive director of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, said the Pacific Institute study struck him because two-thirds of the projected property damage was in low-lying areas around San Francisco Bay. Cities and counties haven't planned for the rise, he said, and his agency is trying to build awareness.

"We as a region have to get out in front of the state and nation in dealing with the problem. The study shows that low- and moderate-income people will be dealing with it. We have the equivalent of New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward."

Lessons from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina are not to build below sea level, he said. But parts of northern Silicon Valley - where pumping groundwater in past decades has caused land to subside - are already below sea level, he said, leaving Google, Sun, Intel and other large company complexes vulnerable to inundation.
Earthquake lessons

Just as Californians learned about seismic safety in response to earthquakes, "we have to learn to build in areas that will someday be below sea level," he said. It's particularly difficult, he said, because there is "no certainty which areas would be below sea level." His agency is co-sponsoring an international design competition to come up with designs for sea-level rise.

As the atmosphere and oceans warm, ice sheets and glaciers melt, swelling the volume of oceans. Oceans already have started to rise. Over the past century, San Francisco waterfront tidal gauges show a rise of 8 inches.

The new projection of a 4.6-foot, or 55-inch, rise is higher than the 23-inch estimate of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body that compiles findings of international scientists.

In its last calculations, the panel didn't include melt from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which have accelerated over the past decade. Since then, scientists have begun to forecast higher rises.

For the regional study, Pacific Institute scientists used the 4.6-foot sea-level rise based on forecasts by a Scripps Institution of Oceanography team led by oceanographer Daniel Cayan, which draws on sophisticated models, satellite sensors and a broad range of data.

Concentrations of greenhouse gases have been increasing in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution, and the bulk of climate scientists agree that the gases are trapping the sun's radiation emanating from Earth, warming the planet.
Infrastructure in danger along the bay, coast

Some of the infrastructure at risk along the 1,000-mile- long shore of San Francisco Bay and the 1,200-mile-long California coast, according to a new study on the rising sea level:

3,500 miles of roads and highways

330 hazardous waste sites, including several in Alameda, Santa Clara, San Mateo and Los Angeles counties

280 miles of railway

140 schools

34 police and fire stations

30 coastal power plants

29 sewage-treatment plants, including 22 on the bay and seven on the Pacific Coast

2 Bay Area airports:

San Francisco and Oakland international

To learn more: Read the study at links.sfgate.com/ZGJX.

Source: Pacific Institute

E-mail Jane Kay at jkay@sfchronicle.com.