EcoGreenius

Don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely excited about Bloom Energy. I honestly think that their technology is a good thing for the world and that it might very well revolutionize the power infrastructure in America and throughout the world. And yes, it will create jobs and make a select few people very rich.

In fact, I think it’s so revolutionary that it doesn’t need to be inflated by false or misleading claims…which is why I’m a little put off by a few naughty little lies in the Bloom press release I got this morning.

Annoying press point #1: The Bloom Box “energy server” works with “nearly any fuel source.” To me, “nearly any fuel source” means anything containing carbon/hydrogen compounds, ranging from gasoline to wood. The Bloom Box doesn’t run on “nearly any fuel source” it runs on methane or methane or methane. That methane can be pumped out of the ground or captured from landfills, but it’s still methane, and as I count it, that’s one fuel source.

Annoying press point #2: Companies using the Bloom Box can “expect a three to five year payback on their capital investment.” This is insane. The average cost per kW/h in California is 14 cents and a Bloom Box produces 100 kW. 100 kW multiplied by 8760 hours in a year times $0.14 per kW means 100 kW of continual electricity consumption over the course of the year will cost a company about $122,000 a year. Add in the cost of the fuel (in whatever form) the cost of maintenence and financing, and I doubt these companies are saving more than $60,000 per year per box. So I don’t see how they’re going to pay for a $700,000 piece of equipment (even with a 50% government subsidy that won’t last forever) over the course of three years. That number seems to be just plain false.

Annoying press point #3: Probably what annoys me most about Bloom’s press release is that they claim the box “provides a cleaner, more reliable, and more affordable alternative to both today’s electric grid as well as traditional renewable energy sources.” Again, if it’s not an outright lie, it’s at least very misleading. The Bloom Box might be more reliable than both, but it isn’t cheaper than the grid and it isn’t cleaner than solar or wind. Marketing double-speak isn’t good for anyone. If you take that sentence at face value, then you might as well cease all development of solar and wind and put 100% of the country’s resources into Bloom Boxes.

Bloom Energy’s technology is fantastic and exciting. It’s much cleaner than our current electricity infrastructure and more practical than distributed solar. It’s great, but there’s no reason to make false claims when your product is this revolutionary.

By telling 60 Minutes that the device can run on solar power (Huh? How?) and saying that it doesn’t perform “dirty combustion” they’re implying that this is the same order of clean energy as solar or wind power. But it’s simply not, they’re turning hydrocarbons into carbon dioxide (and a host of other pollutants, of course) just like every other power plant in the world.

I’m tired of news organizations taking this press release at face value, but I’m even more annoyed that Bloom fed them all these exciting bits of B.S..

The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy’s emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I’m proud to say that we got got the broad picture right, but the details are still tantalizing.

Bloom Energy’s current product is a relatively inexpensive and versatile fuel cell that can power roughly 100 American homes. The devices cost $700,000 a piece an are roughly twice as efficient as natural gas power transmitted through the grid. They’ve sold a bunch of these boxes (with hefty federal and state subsidies) to a bunch of large businesses in California, including Google, eBay, FedEx, WalMart and Staples. The boxes are busy creating “clean” energy as we speak.

Bloom has finally opened the doors to its operation to the press, allowing 60 Minutes a walk-through of their facility as well as providing interviews with the CEO of eBay and former Secretary of State Colin Powell. But I put “clean” in quotation marks because, despite the fact that the words “carbon dioxide” are never mentioned, Bloom Boxes still pump CO2 into the atmosphere, albeit far less than a traditional grid-scale natural gas plant would.

Bloom’s energy is certainly cleaner energy, but while they’re busy comparing themselves to solar power and wind, they’re not true clean energy unless they use bio-gas. I applaud them for using bio-gas when they can, but there simply isn’t enough of the stuff to power Bloom Boxes on a significant scale.

But let’s not spend too much time arguing about whether “cleaner” counts as “clean.” In my book, this is certainly good enough.

Bloom’s true potential is in super-charging the distributed power system. Bloom (very optimistically) wants to shrink its box (in size and cost) so that every American can have one in their basement for around $3000. The box would power the entire house, basically making a connection to the grid a convenience, not a necessity. This may not seem important until we realize that up to half of the power produced at a power plant is lost in transit.

Bloom Energy might also help power the developing world without expensive power infrastructure just as cell phones have created a cheap communications infrastructure.

Bloom’s goals are lofty and it may be that distributed power is going to be a long time in coming if it comes at all, but while they’re doing a great job of making this revelation sound more important than it is in the short term, the chance remains that this could actually be a very big deal.

Solar power towers have proven to be a fairly efficient way of converting solar energy into electricity. In a solar power tower, energy from a large array of mirrors focused onto a tower that captures the heat in some way, and then converts that heat to electricity using a boiler and turbine. It’s a great system, but building that heat-resistant tower and pumping all of those fluids up and down can be pretty expensive.

Which is why researchers at the Masdar Institute, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Cosmo Oil are working together on “beam down” solar. Instead of having the heat-capturing system up on that big tower, a second set of mirrors directs the light back down at the ground where it can be captured by a system that doesn’t have to be suspended many stories in the air.

It’s certainly cheaper than a traditional solar power tower. The bad news is that the extra set of mirrors lowers the efficiency of the system by about 20%. If that can be made up for with reduced capital costs, however, they could be in business. In the end, creating cheap ways of capturing solar energy is probably going to be more important than creating efficient ways.

Of course, the project is still in the early phases…they haven’t even hooked it up to a boiler yet. But the initial prototype seems promising.

Via GreenTechMedia

The line between species is pretty clear. Dolphins most recent common ancestor with us is a long way down the line. But the question of whether Dolphins are, in a rather philosophically scientific way, people is a lot more complicated. Now, of course, the ethics are confusing. What do we value about the non-human world? What makes intelligence more important than other attributes? Should all non-humans be treated equally well (or poorly)? Etc. But if the question is one of intelligence, then science has already started to answer those questions.

Lori Marino at Emory University is taking a scientific approach to determining how human dolphis are. She’s simply running them through an MRI and measuring the complexity of their brains. The result, unsurprisingly, is that dolphins are extremely smart. Their brains, according to Emory, are more complex than any other non-human brain, beating out Chimpanzees for the title.

Of course, we might not have needed MRIs to tell us this. Dolphins have the largest non-human brain to body-size ratio and the same folds that make our brains so useful. And, just behaviorally, they’ve been shown to teach eachother, have regionally specific “languages” and appear to have a defined concept of self.

The question is, can science answer a question that has, thus far, been philosophical. Can we determine whether dolphins are, in effect, an alien species with a mysterious technology and culture just as we are to them. And, if so, is it possible to stop the “harvesting” that might, in fact, be murder.

Via TreeHugger

Busses are greener than cars, and apartment buildings are greener than houses. But is a 747 greener than a Cessna? Is an interstate greener than Route 66? Is a 55 inch flat screen greener than a 20 inch tube television? Is a cruise ship greener than a pontoon boat?

There’s been some focus on going green by going bigger recently. But often, efficiency just becomes one more pathway to profligate waste. Let’s take interstate highways as an example here, since they’re both the solution to and cause of so many of our problems.

Let’s say you wanted to move a 100,000 cars from one city to the next city before interstates. The gridlock would have been tremendous. Cars would have idled for days, travelling at low, inefficient speeds with start and stop traffic that would have wasted a huge amount of gasoline. With interstates, those 100,000 cars can speed along a seven lane highway at efficient speeds without ever tapping the breaks. Highways are much more efficient.

Of course, before Atlanta had seven lane highways, no one was driving 60 miles to work every morning. The waste per mile driven has dropped dramatically, but much more dramatic is the rise in miles driven. In the end, interstates led us to build our cities in an extremely unstable way that I believe is responsible for a great deal of the current economic turmoil in the world, not to mention an unstable global climate.

This story re-plays itself over and over again. Technology lets us build more efficient televisions, so we make them gigantic. Technology allows us to build the Airbus A380, with room for 853 passengers, by far the most efficient plane per passenger mile, and suddenly a billion more people can afford air travel. Technology allows us to build a cruise ship that holds 6,300 passengers, transporting them with 30% less fuel per passenger, and there are 6,300 people eating crab cakes and surfing on artificial waves on a boat that’s too big to dock anywhere in Europe.

Bigger is greener when you’re replacing needs that were met inefficiently elsewhere. If you’re getting someone on a bus instead of in a car, or in an apartment building instead of a house, that’s greener. But if you’re creating new and exciting ways for people to over-consume efficiently or, worse, unsustainable infrastructure that will only lead to an unstable future for our world, then bigger is better for someones wallet in the short term, but bad for us all in the end.

From my perspective, they very fact that this is possible is the news here. It’s a “reading” lamp that can be powered by a phone jack. That’s right, your phone jack has a tiny amount of power that comes through along with the phone signal to power things like ringers and speakers and microphones. I imagine that the light output of this thing is pretty pathetic, honestly. I haven’t seen any in use, but just looking at the price (less than $6) and the LEDs the thing has got makes me think this isn’t going to assist all that much with reading, unless it’s very dark out and you REALLY want to find out whether Robert Langdon is really dead.

There are a couple of other advantages to the lamp. First, these phone jacks are the most standard plug in the world. While everybody has a different outlet for power, almost every country uses the same phone jack. Second, when the power is out, often, phone lines are not, meaning this could be a way to have some light during an emergency. And, finally, what could be the most appealing reason to uses this ugly, cheap, and insignificant source of light is that the power you pull from telecoms is free. They pay for it…you don’t. Now that I think of it, it’s probably against the TOS agreement you have with the phone company, but there are no meters, so they’ll never know. You can use all of the (really insignificant amount) of electricity you want to power this lamp, and you’ll never get charged for it.

Buy it Here

Dell is doing it again, this time on-site, with a series of solar trees that will not only help power it’s headquarters in Round Rock, Texas, but also serve to charge electric vehicles parked there. Of course, there aren’t currently any electric vehicles parking in the Dell lot, but hopefully that will change in the next few years.

The solar trees were put in place by Envision Solar, who’s work we’ve seen at Google Headquarters previously.The Dell installation will provide 130,000 kW/h per year and shades the parking spots of the 56 employees who get to the lot first. Everyone else gets punished for being late by having to park in the sun.

The project uses more than Envision’s technology though. The charging points are provided by Coulomb Technologies while the solar panels themselves were manufactured by BP Solar. All together, they made themselves (and Dell) a pretty sexy-looking parking lot. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of these in the future.

Via Jetson Green

I’m a conservationist. I was a conservationist before I was an EcoGeek. There is very little land on earth left in a sem-natural state, and I believe that we should keep as much of that land as natural as possible forever. Unfortunately, that belief does sometimes collide with my belief that we need to increase renewable energy production as fast as possible. The Nature Conservancy estimates that renewable energy will occupy some 73,000 square miles of land by 2030, meaning that renewable energy could be the biggest threat to land conservation in America. The only thing that comes even close is real estate development.

Renewable energy has a leg up on real estate though, because renewable energy projects can be sourced on public lands fairly easily. And these public lands are the very lands that are the only untouched areas of America we have left.

And, of course, this discussion ranges beyond individual projects. A wind power project might be built in the middle of a corn field, but in order to get the power form the corn field to a big city, transmission lines have to be built, and often built through prime wildlife habitat. It’s starting to seem like land conservation is the biggest threat to renewable energy as well as vice versa.

So where do we come down?

Well, there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the 40 year old NEPA process provides a structure for determining the environmental impact of a project on public lands, taking public comments on those projects, and determining whether the project should go forward. Despite some outcry, this process has served America surprisingly well over the last 40 years.

The bad news is that the NEPA process is not what you would call perfect. It can be an extremely long, drawn out process, and if there are significant concerns, it can be held up in court for years. Additionally, as the number of renewable energy projects increase, the staff working these environmental assessments (already strained) will start backlogging projects as we’ve already seen in many areas of the country.

Renewable energy and conservation both require vast areas of land to be effective, so they are always going to be somewhat at odds. There is no way to avoid this conflict or claim that one always needs to take precedence over the other. It’s going to be frustrating to have to watch pristine land get developed, and renewable energy projects get cancelled, but through my experiences in the environmental field, I actually believe we’re going to handle this fairly well. Let’s hope I’m right.

In the last few years, electric vehicles have gone from a dream to the next logical step for vehicles. Of course, the future of EVs is still being debated, but IBM is using its cash and influence to push for an electric vehicle battery that can carry a car 500 miles without recharging.

500 miles is a long way, longer than most gasoline engines. And while the batteries might still require a long charge at the end of those 500 miles (longer than a five-minute gasoline fill up) it would still be a tremendous advantage over the 100 mile range of today’s EVs.

There are a few paths to getting around this range problem. One is GM’s “extended range electric vehicle” idea, which puts a gasoline generator in the car to recharge the batteries when they run low. Another is Shai Agassi’s “Better Place” model, which has battery swapping stations scattered around the country for when you need a quick re-charge.

The third and most obvious option is to wait for battery technology to get good enough to satisfy the demands of drivers. IBM, sick of waiting, is pushing this direction hard. The project is called the “Battery 500 Project” and it focuses on advanced battery chemistries that will increase the “power density” of batteries. IBM’s “Big Green” project last year asked for submissions for big green ideas, and the winning submission was the “Lithium Air Battery” which is what the Battery 500 Project will be focusing on.

Conceptually, lithium air batteries use lithium as the anode and oxygen as the cathode. Because oxygen would be fed into the battery from the surrounding air, the cathode would, in effect, be weightless. And because oxygen is available on demand, the only limiting factor is how much contact the battery can make with their air. That’s where IBM’s expertise comes in, they want to take their high-tech, nano-scale semiconductor manufacturing experience and use it to dramatically increase the surface area of the anode.

IBM is estimating that it will take two years to determine whether this technology is feasible. But even if that means it’ll be five years before they hit the market, this will still be a huge breathrough for power storage technology.

Via Engadget

For those of you who don’t know, there’s a company out there that’s attracted the interest of venerable venture capitalists, established corporations, politicians, and even a few bloggers with claims that seem nearly impossible. Now, this isn’t Steorn, it’s not free energy. What they’re talking about is possible without re-writing the laws of physics. But what they say they can do would change things. A lot of things.

EEStor says that they are working on an “electrical energy storage unit” (EESU - explained in more detail here, if you’re curious) that would hold ten times the amount of power as todays most advanced batteries at the same weight. This  storage unit would be able to charge and recharge infinitely without any loss of capacity and charging time (with enough power) could be brought down to three or four minutes. The storage units can be infinitely stacked together for applications as small as watch batteries and as large as grid-level power storage. And, of course, the technology is 10 times cheaper than lithium ion batteries. In short. it all sounds too good to be true.

I wouldn’t even be wrting about this if EEStor didn’t have investments from very smart people and contracts with very large companies. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still skeptical. Smart people have been duped before. But because EEStor has been in the news an awful lot, and their strategic partner ZENN Motors says that they will be putting these devices into cars by early next year, let’s try and figure out what this would mean for the world.

1. Electric cars, of course, would become much more practical. While the EESU wouldn’t be able to charge in 5 minutes at home with a 220 volt plug, it could charge in five minutes at high-power charging stations. This infrastructure would have to be built however, and the technology isn’t cheap. Just like hydrogen or ethanol or Better Place’s battery swapping stations, EESU’s would require new infrastructure. The only electric vehicles that do not require new infrastructure are cars designed not to travel out of the city and cars with on-board, gas-powered generators like the Volt.
2. ZENN Motor company currently has exclusive rights to put EESU’s in four-wheeled vehicles that weigh less than 3,000 lbs. ZENN will likely sell those rights fairly quickly if the EESU pans out. If they don’t, we’ll be stuck with lithium ion for a while anyway.
3. However, companies working on next-generation batteries for electric vehicles, including A123, LG Chem, GM, Tesla, Toyota and many more, will find themselves with a lot of useless research on their hands. Lithium ion batteries will never hit the numbers EEStor has claimed for it’s EESU.
4. Battery swapping technology may or may not become completely obsolete. Project Better Place’s system of swapping out batteries to reduce the need for charging batteries could be used for EESU’s instead of batteries. However, it’s difficult for me to imagine that high-power quick-charging infrastructure wouldn’t be far cheaper than battery-swapping facilities.
5. Renewable energy sources would become much more viable. Currently, options for storing power generated during windy or sunny times of the day are limited and inefficient. An EEStor grid-level battery could store power for use at other times during the day at a comparatively low cost.
6. The world might actually see a significant reduction in carbon dioxide emissions because of the EESU.

Let’s remember, there are a lot of “if”s here. EEStor’s technology could be viable, but costs could rise, imperfections could be found. It’s very possible that the EESU will hit the market and lithium ion batteries will remain competitive with the new technology. Time will tell…I’m looking forward to it.