In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

Full Story: MIT News

(via Cryptogon)

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CNN has a brief article on the possibility of beaming solar power to earth from space:

The satellites would electromagnetically beam gigawatts of solar energy back to ground-based receivers, where it would then be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids. And because in high Earth orbit, satellites are unaffected by the earth’s shadow virtually 365 days a year, the floating power plants could provide round-the-clock clean, renewable electricity. […]

American scientist Peter Glaser introduced the idea of space solar power in 1968.

NASA and the United States Department of Energy studied the concept throughout the 1970s, concluding that although the technology was feasible, the price of putting it all together and sending it to outer space was not.

“The estimated cost of all of the infrastructure to build them in space was about $1 trillion,” said John Mankins, a former NASA technologist and president of the Space Power Association. “It was an unimaginable amount of money.”

NASA revisited space solar power with a so-called “Fresh Look” study in the mid-90s but the research lost momentum when the space agency decided it did not want to further pursue the technology, Mankins told CNN. By around 2002 the project was indefinitely shelved — or so it seemed.

“The conditions are ripe for something to happen on space solar power,” said Charles Miller, a director of the Space Frontier Foundation, a group promoting public access to space. “The environment is perfect for a new start.”

Full Story: CNN

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(above: part of the Mechabolic)

At WorldChanging Jeremy Faludi speculates on the combined use of gasification and terra preta for the creation of carbon-negative fuel:

I can’t promise that using gasification for energy and using the resulting char as terra preta fertilizer will be a carbon negative fuel, because I haven’t seen a credible lifecycle analysis of it. (If anyone has, please post it to the comments.) But it’s quite plausible. Consider that it takes a certain amount of CO2 to grow a crop, such as corn. You harvest the crop and sell the food part, which leaves you with all the agricultural waste. Instead of burning it in the open air, or landfilling it (which is what’s done today — basically topsoil mining), you gasify it. You then burn the fuel gas you get from gasification, putting some fraction of that CO2 into the air; the agri-char (terra preta) that you’re left with contains the rest of the embodied CO2 which the crops sucked up while growing. There’s more carbon here than there was in the fuel gas. You spread the terra preta on the fields as fertilizer to grow more crops, and repeat the cycle — and with each repeat, you pull more carbon back into the soil than you burn, resulting in a carbon negative fuel as well as crops fertilized with fewer petrochemicals. It’s a double win.

Full Story: WorldChanging

A group of Burners have created a project using these principles called the “Mechabolic”:

Our intention with the Mechabolic is recast combustion machines and their related petroleum fuels –the foundations of our industrial energy economy– as somewhat of a veiled project of artificial life. Where usually a dry technical problem is seen, we want to suggest that what is really at issue here is the the “third leg” of the grand human engineering project of replicating ourselves.

More Info: The Mechabolic

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Ford and GM are asking for subsidies to accomplish a fraction of what Fayez Annan has already done… under siege conditions. Never mind Think, Phoenix, Aptera and all the rest. Let’s look at Ford and GM vs. a man living under siege conditions to see who can produce a better EV.

Story 1: DOE Awards $30 Million for Plug-in Hybrid Electric Car Research

Story 2: In Besieged City, Man Builds Electric Vehicle with 110 Mile Range

Full Story: Cryptogon

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A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to make oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.

That’s a fraction of the 20 million or so barrels of petroleum the United States consumes each day, but Sapphire Energy says “green crude” production could ramp up to a level sufficient to ease our dependence on foreign oil, if not end it altogether.

[…]

He wouldn’t disclose how the process works or what it costs but said it is competitive with deep-water oil drilling and extracting petroleum from tar sands.

Full Story: Wired

I file this under “If it sounds too good to be true…”

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1. Wired’s Inconvenient Truths (did Stewart Brand write this? It sounds a lot like this)

2. Counterpoint: Dangers of Focusing Solely on Climate Change by WorldChanging’s Alex Steffen

3. EcoGeek point by point response

4. More from Alex Steffen

I mostly agree with EcoGeek’s response. But here are a few additional thoughts:

“Accept Genetic Engineering”

In general, yes. Specific GM projects might be bad, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with biohacking. Every technology must be considered on a case by case basis.

“Carbon Credits Were a Great Idea, But the Benefits Are Illusory”

I’ve generally been more in favor of carbon tax than carbon credits, but EcoGeek makes a valid point about about the sulfur dioxide cap-and-trade market. So I’ll have to give this one some more thought. But offsetting’s not off to a good start.

“Embrace Nuclear Power”

If nuclear waste can be managed effectively (a big if), there’s still the insane cost to be reckoned with. Alex is right to say it’s not just about carbon.

“Used Cars, Not Hybrids”

EcoGeek’s objection here makes little sense. Certainly hybrids are better than other new cars, or used cars with below average gas mileage (or maybe even average gas mileage). But that’s hardly the point. But really, like Alex says, the greenest car is the one that doesn’t exist. (Sadly, I’ve had to take up driving again, due to work requirements.)

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Cold fusion, the act of producing a nuclear reaction at room temperature, has long been relegated to science fiction after researchers were unable to recreate the experiment that first “discovered” the phenomenon. But a Japanese scientist was supposedly able to start a cold fusion reaction earlier this week, which—if the results are real—could revolutionise the way we gather energy.

Yoshiaki Arata, a highly respected physicist in Japan, demonstrated a low-energy nuclear reaction at Osaka University on Thursday. In front of a live audience, including reporters from six major newspapers and two tv studios, Arata and a co-professor Yue-Chang Zhang, produced excess heat and helium atoms from deuterium gas.

Full Story: Gizmodo

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Is this for real?

The self-described computer geek from Kennedale bought the 1993 Eagle Talon from a junkyard for just $750.

“First thing I did when I got the car home was pull the engine out,” Murray said.

He then spent about $4,000 more to convert the gas-guzzler to run on electricity alone, doing all the work himself in his garage at home.

“I bought the electric motor and I was like well, I gotta figure out a way to couple it together with the original transmission,” he said.

The car can hit 55 mph, driving right past the high prices at gas stations.

“I hear people complain about them at work all the time. I just grin,” he said.

Murray spends just $7 per month on electricity to charge the batteries — enough to go about 300 miles.

Full Story: NBC5i

(via Cryptogon)

I’ve been thinking for a while that the key to making oil-free/oil-low cars practical is the cheap conversion of old vehicles into new renewable-energy powered cars. It’s just not practical for everyone to have to throw away all the old cars on the road. (I wasn’t surprised to read that buying a fuel efficient used car is more environmentally friendly than buying a new hybrid.) It looks like this guy might have found the beginnings of a solution.

Update: He has much more information, including an updated cost ($6,456.92) and schematics on his website.

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Creating cheap, clean energy is a huge problem.

So, how’s this for a big solution: Swiss researcher Thomas Hinderling wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power.

He’s the CEO of the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, a privately held R&D company, and he’s already received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility in that country.

full Story: Wired

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“There are wars going on in London to get the oil,” said Tom Lasica, who runs Pure Fuels, London’s largest refiner of vegetable oil. “Spanish and German companies are moving in to buy up British used vegetable oil. People are stealing it from each other and selling it abroad. We heard that one fish and chip shop in Southend was broken into just to steal the waste oil.”

Full Story: Guardian

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Crucial to make this transition more efficient is the development of crops that sequester more CO2 than normal plants. Such high-carbon plants withdraw the greenhouse gas from the atmosphere and use it to grow more lignocellulose. When during their conversion into biohydrogen (or bio-electricity) more CO2 is captured and stored, it means they become more carbon-negative. The first crops with a higher CO2 storing capacity have meanwhile been developed: an eucalyptus tree that stores more CO2 and grows less ligning but more cellulose (previous post), and a hybrid larch that sequesters up to 30% more CO2 (earlier post).

Full Story: Biopact.

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I wrote a blog entry over at Klintron’s Brain that went from being a couple hundred words to basically a full length article:

Two economic crises face the world today: the credit crunch resulting from the subprime mortgage crisis, and the food prices crisis precipitated by the demand for biofuels. Both are problems we should have identified and solved years ago, but didn’t. Why did we ignore the warning signs and allow ourselves to be hoodwinked into this mess? I believe they both relate to our tendency for wishful thinking.

Full Story: Klintron’s Brain.

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The Brazilian Copaifera langsdorfii, to use its botanical name, can be tapped not unlike a rubber tree, but instead of yielding rubbery latex it gives up a natural diesel. According to the nurseryman selling the trees, one hectare will yield about 12,000 litres annually.

Once filtered—no complex refining required, apparently—it can be placed straight into a diesel tractor or truck. We read that a single Copaifera langsdorfii will continue to produce fuel oil for an impressive 70 years, with the only negative being that its particular form of diesel needs to be used within three months of extraction.

Oddly this is not news. The Center for New Crops & Plant Products, at Purdue University reports that it was first reported to the western world as far back as 1625. They observe reports from 1979 saying “Natives … drill a 5 centimeter hole into the 1-meter thick trunk and put a bung into it. Every 6 months or so, they remove the bung and collect 15 to 20 liters of the hydrocarbon.” The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation noted in a paper at the Eleventh world forestry congress back in 1997 on the topic of tree oil for cars that “… the potential of other alternatives such as the Amazon Copaifera langsdorfii need to be investigated.”

Full Story: Tree Hugger.

(via Neatorama).

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WorldChanging has a good round-up of anti-biofuel literature here. I looked into getting a biodiesel car last year but eventually decided that biodiesel wasn’t actually preferable to petroleum. Currently, I have no car and would prefer to keep it that way, but if I think if you must drive, it’s better to focus on getting a car with very good gas mileage rather than trying to get something that runs on biodiesel or ethanol.

Perhaps the most promising area of future biofuel development is algae for biofuel. Currently it costs too much, but if someone can figure out how to get the costs down (industrial production in giant vats?) it could work.

It was encouraging to see some open mindedness about nuclear energy from WorldChanging as well:

Sure, the mining, refining and shipping of uranium means that it’s not really a carbon-free technology. And sure, some nuclear plants are finding it hard to keep running, because the rivers they use to cool their reactors are getting too warm during the increasingly hotter summer months.

But at least these are problems we know about, whereas biofuels are suddenly looking like a jack-in-the-box of unpleasant surprises, ranging from higher food prices to ecosystem destruction to an actual worsening of the greenhouse gas emissions problem. I have been staunchly anti-nuclear for all of my adult life; but even I am beginning to scratch my head and wonder whether shutting down Sweden’s nuclear power plants — which the country originally committed to doing by 2010 — is such a good idea just now.

See what Stewart Brand had to say about nuclear here.

(For the record I’m highly skeptical about nuclear, but I do think it should be considered, especially as the risks involved are more and more mediated).

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“Navajo tribal members who believe their voices are needed in the fight against the proposed Desert Rock Power Plant their government supports claim a host of alternatives to burning coal exist on the Navajo Nation. The group, called Diné CARE, holds a viewpoint that is squarely opposite of Desert Rock supporters, such as project spokesman Frank Maisano, of the Washington, D.C., law firm Bracewell & Giuliani LLC.

“It’s a Navajo project and the Navajo are choosing to take part of their vast resources, which include coal, and advance the cause of their people,” Maisano said. “The plant will generate $50 million in revenue per year, bring thousands of construction jobs, 400 permanent jobs and a wealth of indirect benefits.” The massive project, however, is held up in the federal permitting process. Project developers hope to begin construction sometime this year near Burnham in San Juan County.

Diné CARE’s recent release of a report stating its views about the Desert Rock Power Plant project preceded by less than two weeks letters from Navajo President Joe Shirley, Jr. and the Bracewell & Giuliani firm notifying the Environmental Protection Agency of the tribe’s intent to sue to force EPA’s release of its Prevention of Significant Deterioration (air) permit. Desert Rock organizers submitted its air permit application to the EPA in May 2004. A draft permit was issued in August 2006, followed by a series of public meetings and hearings. EPA officials are still evaluating and responding to concerns from comments received at those meetings.”

(via The Farmington Daily Times)

(Related: Interview with Dr. Gregory Cajete, author of “Native Science”, and his article “A Contemporary Pathway For Ecological Vision”)

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Alexander Cockburn has recently published an article called “I am an intellectual blasphemer,” about the treatment he has received as a global warming doubter. Full Article: Spiked.

I’m not a scientist, much less a climate scientist. So as a concerned citizen it’s up to me to look to scientists and science journalists to form an educated opinion about human-centric global warming. My conclusion: it appears that the scientific consensus is that global warming is occurring and that it is at least partially caused by human activities. It also appears that global warming doubters have been defecting at a greater rate than global warming believers.

Scientific consensus has been wrong before, and will be wrong again. The case of Galileo is often brought up by those who wish to challenge the authority of the scientific community. And indeed scientific opinion can at times be as ridged as any religion. But history provides us with far more discredited cranks than vindicated Galileos. So if the fate of the planet is at stake, I’ll bet with the scientific community even if I’m rooting for the dark horse (really, it would be nice if there were no such thing as global warming).

But that isn’t really the point of Cockburn’s article. He seems mostly to be miffed at the treatment he’s received for having taken such a politically incorrect view. But how would Cockburn expect people to react if he suddenly took up the creationism, phrenology, radionics, or some other discredited theory? Would he really expect people to take his arguments seriously then?

(more…)

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We’ve all heard claims of green inventions that are too good to be true: the zero-point energy generator, the water-powered car, the device for talking with dolphins to achieve world peace. Sometimes they amuse us; sometimes they confuse us, as we try to determine whether they’re legitimate or not; and sometimes they just annoy us. But can they ever help us? Yes: by keeping our imaginations open, and by honing our evaluation skills — skills which are useful both when deciding between existing technologies, and when thinking about technologies on the

Full Story: WorldChanging.

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Once the subject of science fiction and conspiracy theory, at least three different cars fueled by water are waiting to enter the market place.

Full Story: Alterati.

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The best, IMHO, alternate explanation for global warming is looking a bit less likely:

“The upshot is that somewhere between 1985 and 1987 all the solar factors that could have affected climate have been going in the wrong direction. If they were really a big factor we would have cooling by now.”

Reason Magazine science editor Ronald Baily adds:

Of course in areas that are prey to big uncertainties, no study is definitive. However, as the evidence for man-made global warming continues to accumulate, policymakers and citizens should turn our attention to what should be done about it. See some of my thoughts on the carbon taxes vs. carbon markets here.

Disclosure: Just in case any H&R readers missed it, I am a former skeptic of man-made global warming. See my mea culpa here.

Full Story: Hit and Run.

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According to MIT’s Neil Gershenfeld, the digital revolution is over, and the good guys won. The next big change will be about manufacturing. Anyone with a PC will be able to build anything just by hitting ‘print.’

(Fortune Magazine) — Imagine a machine with the ability to manufacture anything. Now imagine that machine in your living room. What would you build first? Would you start a business? Would you ever buy anything retail again? According to MIT physicist Neil Gershenfeld, it’s not too early to think about these questions, because that machine, which he calls a personal fabricator, is not so far off - or so far-fetched - as you might think.

Gershenfeld is director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA), an interdisciplinary outfit studying the intersection between information theory and industrial design. He also teaches a course called How to Make (Almost) Anything.

Five years ago the National Science Foundation awarded the CBA $14 million to build a manufacturing lab full of futuristic hardware. That includes a nanobeam writer that can etch microscopic patterns on metal, and a supersonic waterjet cutter that generates 60,000 pounds of water pressure, enough to shear through almost any material. The CBA factory can churn out anything, from the tiniest semiconductor to an entire building.

continue reading via money.cnn.com

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I’m pleased to announce that I’ve joined the team at WorldChaning as part of their local blog initiative. I’ll be a regular contributor to the Portland blog and will likely be involved in whatever local events take place. I’ll be at the WorldChanging tour stops in Portland as well. E-mail me or comment if you’re planning on being there.

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Bennu left Future-Hi, which is now under temporary new management, and is now involved with Dreamtime Healing Arts. As I understand it, Bennu’s had enough pie in the sky techno-utopianism, and his new project is earthier and more spiritual.

Those interested in something between the “hippieness” of Dreamtime Healing Arts and the utopian fringe science of Future-Hi might want to check out World Changing.

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For millennia, people have hitched beasts to plows to exploit the animals’ strength and energy. In a modern variant of that practice, scientists have chemically harnessed bacteria to a micromotor so that they can make the device’s rotor slowly turn.

Full Story: Science News.

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Alex Steffen from World Changing (one of my personal favorite web sites) talks about clean energy on this week’s NeoFiles.

MP3 from NeoFiles.

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A 16-year-old high school student has invented a new way of producing electricity by harnessing the brawny power of bacteria.

Kartik Madiraju, an 11th-grader from Montreal, was able to generate about half the voltage of a normal AA battery with a fifth of an ounce of naturally occurring magnetic bacteria. And the bacteria kept pumping current for 48 hours nonstop.

Full Story: Wired News.

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