Renew News

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.

The Renewable Energies Heating Law just passed in Germany requires all new homes built after January 1st, 2009 to provide 14% of their heating and hot water energy with renewable sources. The German government is promising $517 million dollars a year in grants to help make this happen. Then, starting in 2010, existing homes will have to be remodeled to include renewable energy heating systems. There will be a lot of new solar thermal panels, heat pumps and wood pellet stoves and boilers installed over there in the coming years!

Israel and Spain began this trend (Spain also required photovoltaic energy systems in new buildings as of 2005–Wikipedia) and I sure hope we’ll be continuing the trend here in the U.S.!

Take a look here for more on the new law.

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 …

In my ever on-going house renovation I found myself up against Florida Building codes. They want a 1 inch foam layer on the outside of all new construction. This is to provide both an air barrier and insulation. It goes under whatever siding you are using. This usually provides a R2 to R3.5 insulation value to your house. Also these traditional materials can be mading using CFC or HCFC’s. Well no more. The Polyiso Corporation now makes a polyisocyanurate foam board that meets the 1 inch requirement that has a R7.1 to R8+ rating, and uses no Ozone depleting materials in it’s manufacture. It has a wider temperature range that it works in (-100F to +250F). It’s not cheap, but it’s twice the R value and it’s safer for the environment. I’m placing my order tomorrow (really I am). Depending on the manufacture (they are listed on the Polyiso web site) they make various version of this for roofs, walls, flat roofs, heck they even have vent channels in it to vent the air outward. Some versions also come with radiant heat barriers or OSB pre-attached to save time in construction.

Good for the environment, better insulation and made to be convenient for contractors to install and work with. What more could you ask for out of a green product but to provide more bang for the buck (this stuff should save more money than it’s increased price costs) and it’s designed for builders (wow, what a weird concept).

The S-Blade Delta 1

photo: Pacwind Inc.

The show Modern Marvels (on the History Chanel) has been running green shows all week, and they recently ran a show called Environmental Tech 2. There is all kinds of great new stuff on the horizon, and some of it is here already.  The show will air again on Saturday November 17th at 4pm Eastern time.

Vertical axis wind turbines seem to have solved some of the problems with the large propeller-style windmills, especially the bird-kill problem. Pacwind Inc. is the company that has outfitted Jay Leno’s garage with wind power. The system looks great from their website, and I would love to talk with someone who is more knowledgeable about wind to see what they think. Please leave a comment if you can tell me more about this technology.

Now Fluorescent bulbs are not good enough, here is a firm that seems to be making plug in LED bulb replacements for traditional Fluorescent bulbs. I guess it was a matter of time … cool though. I wonder if they flicker as well as Fluorescent bulbs. I’ll miss the flicker. More on it [here]