The Oyster’s Garter

Despite the enormous flow of money into new solar projects (the free market, trying to work), this has been a rotten 12 months for solar energy. Last year California Sen. Dianne Feinstein led the effort to increase fuel efficiency standards to 35 mpg by 2020, and in the process she dropped provisions that would have extended  tax breaks for solar and wind power development. Still, as the manager of millions of acres of desert land, companies flooded the BLM with applications to construct big solar power projects that could potentially provide enormous quantities of clean electricity for electricity-sucking SoCal, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and the rest of the region.

But today we learn that the Bush administration has placed a moratorium on all new large solar projects on Bureau of Land Management property, which, of course, means millions of acres of desert in the southwest which happen to, you know, get a lot of sunlight. They argue that they need to do an environmental assessment of the impact of large solar projects, which could take up to two years. I can’t be alone when I lean my head out the window and belt out a hearty, “AAARGH!”

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There is no place on earth, no matter how remote, untouched by humans. We are mighty: we can trawl the deep, explore the South Pole, and fish every single island in the South Pacific. But as every young nerdling knows, with great power comes great responsibility. “The Managed World” series in the Oyster’s Garter explores the hard choices that come from a human-dominated world.

The first Managed World was about a top land predator: wolves in Yellowstone, and whether we really want wild wolves after all. It seems fitting that the second Managed World is about a top sea predator: sea lions in Oregon, and whether we really want wild salmon after all. This is the conflict: salmon are tasty, and sea lions like to eat them. Salmon populations are plummeting over the Pacific Northwest, but sea lions don’t care and still like to eat them, especially when the salmon are conveniently trapped against the side of a dam. So the sea lions get trapped and removed, unless somebody shoots them when they’re in the traps.

Are sea lions and cormorants really competing with people for fish? If they are, does that justify moving or killing them? What if the fish are endangered (as in the case of the Oregon salmon run)? Does it matter that sea lions are fuzzy and charismatic and about as smart as a dog?

Being just as cold-hearted as my beloved marine invertebrates, I would have said that last question was the least interesting. Who cares if the sea lions are fuzzy? It’s the ecosystem that matters. However, that is not how most people think. (more…)

OK, I understand that we all want a zero-emissions car, but this is getting out of hand. Just this past weekend a woman called up the Car Talk guys to ask if her husband was crazy for trying to modify the family SUV into a water-powered car. Coincidentally, veteran technology query-artist Sam and her boyfriend sent me a note a few weeks ago with a YouTube video they’d found of a newscast interviewing the inventor of just such a car. To their credit, Sam, her man, and the Car Talk caller were extremely skeptical about this seeming solution to our energy and global-warming crises. And with good reason, as it turns out (for the record, a Wikipedia entry debunks the water-fueled car, too, but I thought it a bit dense).

OK, we’ll start with what the water-powered car advocates claims it will do: Generate energy from water. How? First, electrolyze the water. That will split the water into its component elements, namely, hydrogen and oxygen. Then pump that H₂ and O₂ mixture (known to the Car Talk caller’s husband as “hydroxy” and the fellow in the video as “H-O-H”, but we’ll stick with the common names) over to the engine. Now burn the gasses to move the pistons and thus move the car. The waste product will be water, once again (O₂ + 2H₂ —–> 2H₂O). Water in, water out. Perfect!

Of course, Oyster’s Garter readers are all smarty-pantses (Bet you didn’t know the plural of that word. We’re a full-service operation here at TOG.), so you’re wondering about step 1, with the electrolyzing of the water. “Where does the electricity come from?” I hear you asking. Sadly, that’s the downfall of the water-powered car. The electricity comes from the battery, of course. And where does the battery get its energy? Why, from the battery factory, of course. Well, water-powered car advocates will argue that the battery is recharged from the alternator with the normal running of the car, just like any car battery. But it takes far more energy from the battery to split the water atoms then you get back from burning the component gases (water is very stable and its bonds prefer not to break), so there’s a substantial net loss.

Ultimately, the water-powered car is not actually water-powered at all. It’s battery powered, but very inefficiently battery powered. Of course, given our current experience with fueling our cars from food, maybe it’s for the best that we don’t fuel them with water.

I’ll close with this wonderfully understated line from the Wikipedia entry:

It is theoretically possible to extract energy from water by nuclear fusion, but fusion power plants of any scale remain impractical, much less on an automotive platform.

Imagine it: Paintable solar panels! Not yet, of course, but scientists at several universities have discovered ways to put chemicals into paint that would generate electricity. The theory is simple: paint fades with sunlight, right? Therefore, the paint is already reacting to the sunlight in some way. The trick then is to use the energy getting dumped into the paint and convert it into electricity.

Here are a couple of companies and scientists with more specific applications:

* Nanosolar, in sunny California, has devised a kind of film that can be applied directly to steel. They’re not profitable yet, but they began commercial production in November.

• Scientists at the University of Swansea, in jolly old England, have invented a kind of paste that can be rolled onto steel panels of the sort that’s often used for bridges, and similar to aluminum siding. They think they’re 2.5 years away from mass production.

• Our friends to the north, or in my case to the north east, at the University of Toronto, has devised a way to capture specific wavelengths of light using “quantum dots”. I’m not certain of the technology here, but Ted Sargent, the primary investigator, thinks he can tune his dots so they capture specific wavelengths of light, including the infrared spectrum, a part of the suns energy that no solar cells currently capture. He thinks he can put the dots into paint that we could spray on to any surface. He’s a good decade away from production, but I can already envision great, electricity generating murals painted onto the sides of buildings.

My question that remains unanswered for all of these, though, is I’m not clear how the engineers actually extract the charged up electrons from the paint. Do you just attach some copper wire to it or something? Any engineers out there have a guess?

[Via Treehugger, and thanks to inhabitat for the picture.]

Eric’s Apocalypse Averting Plan No. 1: Use electricity to power as many devices as is reasonably possible. Electricity, once you’ve got it, runs totally cleanly. No carbon output, less noise, fewer moving parts required, and therefore less maintenance needed. And the first machine that should go all electric would have to be our cars, right? Even though the Tesla is technically on the market, the cheapest way to use an electric motor in everyday driving is through the use of conventional hybrids or plug-in hybrids. Conventional hybrids use the gas motor and braking action to recharge, while plug-ins recharge by plugging into the wall at night. Plug-ins also have a small gas motor to extend their range.

But when I start spouting on about electricity and cars, I often get the same response: “But Eric, sure you eliminate tailpipe emissions, but you’re just adding to the pollution at the power plant. We’d have to burn even more nasty, dirty coal to power those snazzy machines.” It’s a major flaw in EAAP1, you know?

Thankfully the Electrical Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense council also got tired of hearing that argument, so they did some research. The study (PDF) compares the CO2-per-mile of normal gas-powered cars, regular hybrids (like Priuses), and plug-in hybrids. The results were most gratifying: the plug-in hybrid produces far less greenhouse gas than conventional cars, even if all the electricity they slurp up at night is produced at a sooty old coal plant. The MIT magazine Technology Review used the study to generate the table I’ve included after the jump. It shows that conventional cars produce 452 grams of CO2/mile, about 28% more than plug-in hybrids, even if the plug-ins get all their electricity from coal-burning power plants.

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In so much as biofuels are a good idea, they’re a really good idea for jets. Jet engines produce vast amounts of carbon (A gallon of jet fuel gives off 21 lbs of Co2) but there’s no alternative when you want to visit your dear old grammy who lives on the opposite coast. So the headlines about Virgin Atlantic running an actual test flight powered by coconut- and palm oil-based fuel had me gleefully reaching for the “O frabjous day!” category for this post. Alas. The 747 Virgin used to fly from London to Amsterdam has four tanks, three of which were nothing but regular jet fuel, and the fourth of which was 80% jet fuel and 20% coconut biofuel. So really the flight was 5% biofuel, which means that proportionally it flew 11 miles on coconuts, roughly from London to, err …London.

Even Virgin Atlantic owner Richard Branson himself admits that coconut-based biofuels won’t power the future air fleet. The world couldn’t possibly produce enough coconuts to fly the Monty Python troop to Camelot, let alone the entire world fleet, and the movers and shakers are starting to realize it’s probably not a great idea to use food for fuel anyway. Branson wants to extract energy from the thorny jatropha plant, which grows on non-arable land in South America., and I found a goofy company that thinks they can filter oxygen out of the air, while flying, and burn it as fuel immediately. But we all know the better answer: Poop fuel!

The BBC and the Times of London are all ahoo over the possibility that French inventor Guy Negre may have finally developed a commercially viable car that runs on compressed air. I say “finally”, because Negre, who used to be a Formula One engineer, has spent 15 years trying to bring his air car to market. In 2003 he was promising air cars as soon as “next year” in Germany. Still, he now claims to have a made a breakthrough, and apparently he’s convinced the owner of Indian car maker Tata and an Australian auto maker that he’s got the real deal, and both are hoping to produce air cars for their local markets possibly by the end of this year, or early 2009. We’ll see about that.

Is it even a good idea? (more…)

No joke - a tiny New Zealand startup called Aquaflow Bionomics has figured out out to harvest the algae that grows naturally in, ahem, “effluent ponds”. After a person poops, all the waste gets piped to a sewage treatment plant (let’s assume dry weather. Storm water overflow is too gross to be thought about to deeply). It then sits in a settling pond to separate solids from liquids. When the liquid is piped off for further treatment, the solid remains, and it becomes a tasty feeding ground for algae. Once you’ve got algae, it’s no great trick to convert it into biofuel, and in fact, there’s far more energy in algae fuel than in ethanol from corn or sugar. You can get 10,000 gallons of ethanol from an acre of algae, compared to 60 gallons from an acre of corn. And growing the algae on human waste - that’s just genius. The company’s website says that Boeing is looking into Aquaflow’s process for possible distillation into jet fuel.

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I’ve often mentioned my love for apocalyptic fiction. Now I can get my fix from reality. The Center for Strategic and International Studies released a new report entitled “The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change.” It envisions three scenarios: “expected,” “severe”, and “catastrophic.” I haven’t read the whole report yet, so here’s Real Climate’s summary with my comments:
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A town in India is using human waste to produce electricity. As the waste decomposes, it produces methane, which can be burned to turn the turbines. Never mind toilet to tap - this is toilet to toaster!