Renew News

When I first started recycling in the 1980s it took some effort to find a place that would accept office paper. Lots of people recycled cans, since you got money back, and a few people would take in glass bottles, but that was about it. You couldn’t recycle plastic anywhere.

When I buy office products, I always try to buy paper products that have the highest recycled content I can find. Initially, I couldn’t find anything that had recycled paper in it at all, but over the years recycled paper products have become more and more available, and in steadily higher percentages of recycled content. The problem is that they are usually more expensive, and sometimes way more expensive.

On a recent trip to Staples for office paper, not only did I find 100% recycled paper (100%!), but it was actually cheaper than the other stuff. That is so great. I honestly never thought I would see this happen. Sometimes you have to look at the little things in order to see progress, but I would say that this is actually huge.

Yup, a stirling engine that uses the heat from your mother boards CPU to cool it. All at a 70% efficiency.

This is a weird time for tech, and isn’t the tiny stirling engine cute? The article is here.

Well here we are again, cheap hydrogen, the holy grail of environmental energy storage. We have the way to use the stuff (fuel cells) and some ways to store it, but now we need to produce it from water.

The problem is it’s not too efficient to split water into the stuff (and oxygen of course). The Department of Energy’s goal for efficiency by 2010 is 10%. Now comes along QuantumSphere Inc. They have figured out a way that with nano-particles (ones they developed) they can increase the surface area of the anodes used in conversion and they’ve got it working at a 85% efficiency. Keep in mind, it’s is working, with a theoretical goal of 96%.

Kevin Maloney, president, chief executive officer and co-founder of QuantumSphere says “Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car.” …. Oooo, Detroit will love this.

Now is this a pipe dream? No. Things are coming out very soon. They’ve got a battery using these particles that will increase alkaline cells power by 320% (more power in ratio to nasty chemicals) that will ship in the 2nd half of this year!. They have and are doing lots of cool things here, read this article to get the rest of the scoop on things like hyper efficient Metal Hydride batteries.

One last thing to get excited about. Their goal was to make a thimbul full of these nano particles. But they are way ahead of schedule. They now have a plant that can make TONS of the stuff!

There is a new proposal from two scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory for creating gasoline from carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.  Although all of the idea is not new, some modifications, and the current high price of gasoline make their idea plausible.  The downside?  It requires a lot of energy.

Read the fascinating  article here.

One of the most surprising things about this new invention is that it was (in a roundabout way) inspired by the SuperSoaker. Lonnie Johnson, the man who made “squirt gun” synonymous with inadequacy, is currently working on a prototype heat engine which would use heat from the sun to force hydrogen ions through a molecular membrane from a lower-pressure hydrogen chamber to a high-pressure one. If that made total sense to you, then you clearly have a lot more engineering under your belt than I do! For a more detailed explanation try this page.

The engine will be more efficient as the difference in temperature between the heat source and the heat sink goes up, reaching 60% at about a 600-degree-to-room-temperature differential. Achieving such a temperature is no problem for parabolic mirror solar thermal collectors, which can easily reach 800 degrees.

Johnson is hoping that a variation of his heat engine could generate electricity from the heat of an internal combustion engine or even from human body heat! Sounds like The Matrix could come true!

Nanolsolar Inc. has been talking big lately about making a leap in solar panel technology that will drop the cost to under $1 a watt. The current standard for solar panels has been hovering around $4 a watt (wholesale cost) for a while.

Well, on December 18th Nanosolar announced their first shipment of solar panels that are profitably produced at $.99 a watt. Batch 1 went to a solar electricity utility in Germany and residential panels won’t be available for at least 12 months.

The big jump down in price was due to their new no-silicon method of printing a copper-indium-gallium-diselenide nanoparticle ink onto a metallic film substrate with inkjet technology. And, fortunately for us, this new type of panel will maintain the current 15%-20% standard of efficiency found in crystalline silicon panels!

Because of their ease of production and short-circuiting the current silicon shortage, I think this announcement will herald in the age of a flood of cheap solar power for everyone. And with the advent of new batteries for home energy storage like the nanosilicon wire lithium-ion cell (technical paper for the true geek here) in development now, the power grid may just become one more way to date films and old photos.

All those sci-fi novels with the hero of the story taking a nap in the back of the car while driving across the country are starting to look like they could come true.

DARPA, the US military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,  sponsored a rally in November of 2007 offering a $2 million prize to the company or individual who could navigate an urban setting the fastest with a driverless vehicle.  There were a lot of SUV’s in the race (you need a lot of room for all the sensors and hardware, apparently) and one monster truck.

The winning vehicle, coming in at a blistering average speed of 14 mph, was outfitted and programmed by a Carnegie Mellon Team.  It took more than a dozen lasers, radars and cameras to make the AI truck capable of following the rules of the road, parallel park and avoid obstacles, and over 500,000 lines of code to process the information.

Unbelievably, the race had only one collision:  a 10 mph bump between two vehicles.  I wonder how that compares to human-driver accident rates?

I know we’re all waiting for the day we can don our jet packs and wingsuits for the morning commute, but this AI car idea is a pretty good concept for diverting our attention until then.

I just found this great page of one- or two-person electric cars that are available today or will be soon.  There are good descriptions an pictures of these odd-looking little wonders, whose price tags range from $8,000 to an incredible $84,000!

My favorite (and the priciest–imagine that) is the Tango T600, looking like a laterally-compressed ocean fish, leaving a plume of tire smoke behind it as it peels out on a race track!

If better batteries come out, as has been promised by Chevy for its Volt electric/biodiesel/E-85/gasoline hybrid, I can only see the price and performance of these cars getting better.  As gas prices go up, the demand should rise and as the renewable percentage of our electricity production rises, I can see these goofy-looking little honeys getting more attractive and solving more of our climate problems.

Get ready to live in the future, folks!

In late November, Google announced that it plans to spend somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars to support the development of renewable energy infrastructure in 2008 and hundreds of millions in the near future. Their plan is to spur the development of high-altitude wind generation (a technology as yet untested), solar thermal electricity generation and geothermal power first, then other technologies later, with the final goal of making renewable energy cheaper than coal. Take a look at TheDailyGreen.com article for more.  And here’s Google’s webpage on the project.
I can’t wait to see where this goes, especially what with being employed in the solar industry. Now, if only the federal government would follow suit…

Last year I had the privilege of attending the US Green Building Council’s 2006 Greenbuild Conference and seeing, among other wonders, Shaw Industries’ amazing Ecoworx carpet.

Just like any other carpet, you lay it down and use it for years (it’s available in tiles so you can replace the most-used portions without re-carpeting the whole house), but when you need to replace it you simply pull it up, dial the toll-free number printed on the back and arrange for it to be picked up.

This is the cool part and I got to see a demonstration of it given by a Shaw lab techie. They dissolve the old carpet in an organic solvent which isn’t consumed by the process or flushed down the drain or evaporated off into the atmosphere. The resulting plasticy goo is then allowed to reharden, chopped up and pulled back out into fibers to reweave into new carpet.

There is no loss (except from wear at the home) of either the carpet material or the solvent and the process can be repeated infinitely. The techie I talked to said she had performed the transformation on one sample 27 times in a row with no hitches!

Better yet, Shaw worked to make this carpet with William McDonough (one of my heroes), who made sure that the ingredients used would not off-gas and would contain no substances that would be toxic alone or combined.

For more on the Cradle-To-Cradle concept, look here. And for a great video of a lecture William McDonough gave on Cradle-To-Cradle design, look at this.