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.

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.

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.

Geothermal is possibly one of the best natural power sources in the world. The geothermal resources of the USA alone in theory could provide 3000 times our current energy needs. The issue has never been using it, but it has been one of finding it cheaply. The technique so far has been to guess and drill. Then guess and drill again. It’s not been cost effective except where the sources have been obvious. At this point there are Sixty plants in the USA. Well the cool researchers at Arizona State University have a possible solution to finding these locations. They discovered that they can figure out where water has been by checking the Helium content of the water.

In a paper from Arizona State University: they say: Different parts of the Earth are composed of a variety of elements in varying amounts. Earth’s crust contains a variety of noble gases, one of those being helium. Natural helium occurs as two isotopes, helium-4 (4He) and helium-3 (3He.) Typically, helium-4 is more abundant in Earth’s crust, whereas helium-3 is more abundant in the mantle below. Thus, the helium-3/helium-4 ratio of the gas found in groundwater can provide an indication of the extent to which the water has interacted with volcanic rocks derived from the mantle.

In short, by testing water, these scientist think they can find where to put plants.

Now what they are not saying is this could cause a land cash boom as energy from this could be found on peoples properties, and such energy rights would belong to the property holders. This happens with things like oil. Own the land, make the money off the power. So far Geothermal plants are only in Alaska, California, Hawaii, Nevada and Utah, but there are other possible locations, and with this technique we will probably find out if they are there or not.

Now these other potential locations for Geothermal sources are in places like New Mexico, Montana and Much of the Midwest … Now nobody is talking about this, but you conspiracy folks are going to love this. Here is your homework assignment. Try to figure out where geothermal energy could be and match that to Ted Turners land holdings and notice that his interest seems to be to own land over aquifers. Keep in mind this is something I’ve noticed in passing, not something I have hard facts on. His Florida holdings are probably unusable for geothermal, we don’t have bedrock here so we don’t do the geothermal power stuff.

That being said, I did get a geothermal heat pump for my new house. But that is another story that I will tell some day in one of my renovation articles.

-GReg

Photo: Imperial Valley California Geothermal Plant

One last off subject note. I was looking at that page about Ted Turner, and it said he owned land in New Mexico to the tune of 1,105,905 acres. I had no idea how big this was. So I looked up the area of Rhode Island, a state I’ve driven across and around to use as a measure. It’s 1,044.93 (square miles). A quick visit to Google will tell us that 1,044.93 (square miles) = 668,755.2 acres. So Rhode Island is 40% smaller than Ted Turners holdings in New Mexico.

Skyonic has a cool idea. The type of idea I like. Take some sodium hydroxide, add some heat, and you can trap co2 by changing it into sodium bicarbonate (Baking Soda) and release hydrogen. Now the CO2 is in a solid form and it’s useful. All you need is some heat.

Now put this at an existing Coal Fired power plant, and in tests it’s trapping up to 90% of the CO2, and producing hydrogen using the waste heat of the plant. Better yet, you end up with products you can sell to pay for this (so it’s a profit venture) Super pure sodium bicarbonate and Hydrogen. As a bonus, it also removes most of the heavy metals from the plant emissions. The company is called Skyonic (an Austin based company), and they hope build a full sized plant to do just this in 2009. The process is not perfect, and not done, but heck, this is a direction I’ve not seen anyone go in before.

Now if they just had a publicly traded stock …

Here are a few easy things you can do that will lessen your car’s impact on the environment, and reduce your guilt, all while saving you money on gas at the same time. Of course, your first consideration when driving should be your safety, and the safety of those around you, but once you’ve got that covered you can think about the things on this list.

1. Don’t accelerate up hills- Who doesn’t love punching it all the way to the top of a big hill? You’ve worked hard, you bought a great car, and it’s great to get out there and see what it’s got. Because cars are so good now, it’s easy to forget how much energy it takes to move your 3000 pound vehicle up a hill. To jog your memory, get on a bike and ride it up a hill. Now try it again from a standstill, and continually speed up until you reach the top. Most of the time when you are driving up a hill, it’s not going to kill you to maintain your current speed until you get to the top, and then accelerate when you are going down the other side in order to get up to the speed you want. It’s a minor change that will save you a bunch of fuel.
2. Check your tire pressure regularly- Boring, I know… but this is actually a big deal. Not only is this a huge safety issue (incorrect tire pressure affects cornering, braking, stability, and can even lead to tire failure), but under-inflated tires allow more tire to touch the road, increasing friction (and tire wear), which causes you to lose fuel economy.
3. Slow down- The faster you drive, the more gas you use, but let’s be realistic here. We are all busy, and I’m sure you need to get where you are going quickly. If you slow down just one or two miles-per-hour you probably won’t even notice the difference, but you will save gas, reduce your emissions, and be a safer driver all at the same time. This is especially easy to do on the highway: just set that cruise-control one or two notches lower.
4. Cut down on quick starts and stops- Of course quick starts and stops are fun, and sometimes necessary, so maybe you continue to be a bug-eyed, caffeine-crazed NASCAR driver on the way to work, and just drive home in a relaxed manner. With quick starts you burn a lot of gas to get up to speed that quickly, and with quick stops you are turning all that energy you bought (in the form of gas) into wasted heat with your brakes and tires. If you take your foot off the gas a little sooner on your way up to a red light you can coast into it and maybe even take it on the fly once it turns green, thereby saving gas, and your brakes.
5. Warm up your car by driving it- I know it sounds crazy, but modern cars don’t need to be warmed up the way cars of the past did. Even in the depths of winter, the best way to warm up your car is by driving slowly for a few blocks before you punch it to get to work.
6. Drive Less- This one is not so easy, and that is why it is number six on a list of five things, but I had to include it. The best way to lessen your impact and save money is to use less gas. This is not possible for everyone, but if you rode your bike to work one day a week, took mass-transit, or walked to the coffee shop instead of driving, it would make a big difference.

Interestingly enough, several of these lessons were really taught to me by driving my Prius. I think we would all drive very differently if every car had a real-time fuel-efficiency gauge.

If you like lists of simple things, check this one out:

5 Simple Things You Can Do To Help Save The World