Renewable energy is still just a small part of the of our overall energy use.
While it’s growing steadily, we’re going to need alternatives if we hope to reduce our dependency on oil, and the carbon-dioxide it chugs into the atmosphere when we burn it. Luckily, brainiacs in labs around the world are finding even more efficient ways to produce energy from what’s readily available and not buried beneath megatons of earthly crust. Look at eight different ways you may be tanking up at home and on the road in the near and distant future.
1. Hydrogen
Like the new BMW TV ads say, their still-unavailable Hydrogen 7 is “ready for the world… when the world is ready.” But progress on California’s “hydrogen highway” hasn’t quite hit the numbers supporters hoped it would. Fuel-cell technology has alternately been a darling of Wall Street and Detroit for almost a decade now, but we’ve yet to see many hydrogen-powered vehicles in the wild.
The technology seems like an environmentalist’s wet dream (literally), with hydrogen bonding with oxygen to produce power and water — and no greenhouse-gas emissions to speak of. But building a new series of hydrogen power stations hasn’t been as easy as once thought, and people still think “Hindenburg” when they think “hydrogen,” although it seems to be a safe enough technology that transit authorities uses hundreds of hydrogen-powered buses to move us around urban centers. Still, hydrogen’s ultimate downfall may be battery technologies and other clean fuels that could overtake it before it has the chance to get wide adoption.
2. Biofuels
This is a fractious bunch of youngsters, with fraternal twins biodiesel and corn-based ethanol trying to keep its younger sibling — cellulosic ethanol — from hogging the family photos. Enormous amounts of capital have flowed into developing both biodiesel (Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen is funding the biggest biodiesel refinery in the country in Washington State) and corn-based ethanol (Sun Microsystems founder and venture capital Vinod Khosla has made big bets in this space). Converting vehicles and power plants to these renewable fuels that act and burn like fossil fuels has certainly made much headway. Heck, you could be burning an ethanol blend in your car right now and not even know it, and installing conversion kits for biodiesel makes putting on new spinning rims look tough.
3. Solar
Solar is probably the sexiest of the renewables, what with its black shiny arrays, tilting half-interested at Old Sol. Between tax breaks to install solar panels and new sleeker technology that makes your neighbors want to say “cool roof, man,” solar is beginning to take off. Thin-film technology — allowing you to bend the silicon components into more flexible shapes — and increases in solar-cell efficiency mean you can install solar in the Northeast more viably. And momentum is there among legislators as well. In Colorado, the state has passed a “renewable portfolio standard,” meaning that not only do utilities need to produce a great deal of renewable energy in the coming decades or face penalties, but they also have to buy a portion of that renewable energy from its customers with solar roofs.
4. Wind
Windmills have come a long way from Kansas farm country and being Don Quixote’s nemesis. Wind power first took off — as did many renewable energy sources — in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s with the last spike in the price of oil. But after that it stalled until fairly recently. With many states forcing utilities into renewable energy production, this has spurred great technological advances in wind power, and now wind projects are installed or planned in almost every state. The era of having your own windmill, and going “off the grid,” is also back, with personal household models costing under $20,000, assuming you have forgiving neighbors. And efficiencies in technology mean you don’t need a hurricane to generate a lot of power. But wind’s popularity has also created a bottleneck — estimates are that you’ll be waiting longer for a wind turbine (about 18 months) than you will for a black Prius.
5. Batteries
They’re not really a fuel, but they’re the “universal solvent” to our current rate of use of fossil fuels. Technically, we still burn more dinosaur soup making electricity for buildings than on the road, but all those cars and trucks we sit in use energy in other ways, too. They require gas stations everywhere, and that means yet more trucks to haul three grades of gas and Cinnabons to highway rest stops across the country. But new battery technology will last longer and charge more quickly, making it possible to burn the right fuel in the right place, rather than transporting the wrong fuel all over the place. So maybe as you drive from Seattle to Boston, you’ll top up your electric or hybrid car with tidal power in Seattle, wind power in Colorado, cellulosic ethanol in Nebraska, biogasoline in Illinois and biomass to carry you into Boston.
6. Tides
Think about how it feels to have someone chucking a bucket of water in your face, then multiply that by several hundred million, and you get an idea of the energy going untapped around our coastlines every day. Test facilities for harnessing tidal power in Canada’s Bay of Fundy have been around since the ‘70s, and San Francisco will be putting in a high-tech tidal plant at the Golden Gate soon.
There are certainly environmental concerns around tidal power, since these projects usually involve some kind of plant at the narrow mouth of a bay or inlet, where the water is moving fastest and most violently, meaning it’s not so great for the fish or birds nearby. But the future of ocean power is wave technology, where floating platforms and buoys, dozens of miles offshore, harvest the energy of wave motion. Think of an upside-down yo-yo, except your finger is an anchor at the bottom of the ocean, and the spinning spool floats on the surface. As each wave passes, the yo-yo gets pulled up, and pulls your finger… or a turbine.
7. Garbage
Meet the newest member of the energy family: last year’s trash. While incinerators haven’t really been widespread since the ‘60s because of pollution concerns, companies like American Combustion are working on the next generation of burning, like their PyreJet. It combines a long-range supersonic oxygen jet and focused carbon injection — essentially a jet engine — to reduce last night’s Dominos, a year’s worth of Sports Illustrateds you didn’t get a chance to read and that old blow-up doll into valuable energy for everyone. Now there’s always an answer to, “Who would want that?” when you’re at someone else’s house.
8. Nuclear Fusion
Like that kid in eighth grade who tried to be really cool but annoyed everyone, the nuclear industry has been talking a lot lately, telling everyone at recess about how their emissions “carbon-free.” True, but wind power doesn’t need to go around the lunchroom calling itself “plutonium-239-free,” so quit being a punk or I’ll be seeing you after school by the monkey bars at Three Mile Island, and don’t tell your homeroom teacher. But if the opposite of hate is love, then the opposite of fission is fusion, and while it’s not exactly around the corner, it holds out a lot of promise.
Yes, it’s the energy choice of the Sun itself, but simply put, in fusion, two lighter atomic nuclei fuse together to form a heavier nucleus. In doing so, it releases a few megatons of energy, ideally producing a waste product more benign, though not harmless, compared to its fissile brother. A European test plant managed to produce an output of 16 megawatts of electricity using fusion (about as much as a coal plant), but only for a few seconds. New test facilities are planned, so who knows? The atom may be our pal after all. (petrolplaza)
full article
Thursday 15 November 2007
Ditch the old boiler and save cash
Switching from a conventional boiler to one of the new condensing models will result in substantial savings for householders, according to Switch with Which?.
It says that replacing an old boiler with a new, energy efficient condensing model will more than pay for itself over the years.
For example, the Which? Best Buy Potterton Gold C24 HE combination condensing boiler costs £800. But compared to older models, a modern condensing boiler could cut your gas bills by between £160 and £360 per year depending on the size of your house.
Older boilers tend to lose heat through the flue, wasting nearly 40% of energy in gas.
Greenhouse gases
Not only does this lead to higher bills, it also means an increase in greenhouse gases.
Mike Stevenson, Head of Marketing at Switch with Which? added: ‘If splashing out on a new boiler before Christmas just isn't realistic, though, it doesn't cost a penny to check you're on the best deal for your heating bills, and switch to a better deal if you're not.
‘People who have switched through Switch with Which? are enjoying great average annual savings of over £200 per year on their energy bills, and switching now will let you reap the full benefits by the time you have to turn the radiators up.’
Energy tariffs
Customers using Switch with Which? can check the value of their current deal in just a couple of minutes, immediately start the switching process and within 10 minutes can have switched to another supplier
It’s the most comprehensive switching service available and provides the broadest criteria for selection of a supplier, offering customers a choice of all publicly available tariffs
full article
It says that replacing an old boiler with a new, energy efficient condensing model will more than pay for itself over the years.
For example, the Which? Best Buy Potterton Gold C24 HE combination condensing boiler costs £800. But compared to older models, a modern condensing boiler could cut your gas bills by between £160 and £360 per year depending on the size of your house.
Older boilers tend to lose heat through the flue, wasting nearly 40% of energy in gas.
Greenhouse gases
Not only does this lead to higher bills, it also means an increase in greenhouse gases.
Mike Stevenson, Head of Marketing at Switch with Which? added: ‘If splashing out on a new boiler before Christmas just isn't realistic, though, it doesn't cost a penny to check you're on the best deal for your heating bills, and switch to a better deal if you're not.
‘People who have switched through Switch with Which? are enjoying great average annual savings of over £200 per year on their energy bills, and switching now will let you reap the full benefits by the time you have to turn the radiators up.’
Energy tariffs
Customers using Switch with Which? can check the value of their current deal in just a couple of minutes, immediately start the switching process and within 10 minutes can have switched to another supplier
It’s the most comprehensive switching service available and provides the broadest criteria for selection of a supplier, offering customers a choice of all publicly available tariffs
full article
Wednesday 14 November 2007
Hydrogen brewing gets an electrical boost
A new microbe-powered device can extract up to 99% of the available hydrogen from biological compounds that have stumped previous attempts to ferment fuel from plant waste. The secret is to give the bugs a helping hand with a kick of electric charge.
Hydrogen is an attractive environmentally friendly fuel because burning it creates only water as a waste product. But finding an efficient, clean way to produce hydrogen in the first place is difficult.
Fermenting organic material using microbes is one possibility, but generally produces poor yields. Microbes reach a chemical dead end once sugar from material has been broken down into acetic acid, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. That releases at best only a third of the hydrogen in a molecule of the sugar glucose, for example.
"There is no known biological route to ferment glucose to [get] any more hydrogen than that," says Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, US, who with colleague Shaoan Cheng has demonstrated a way around that the problem.
Reversed process
Their microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) enable microbes to break down organic materials completely, to just water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. The latest design can release as much as 99% of the hydrogen in acetic acid, a common dead end to fermentation.
MECs are modified versions of microbial fuel cells, which are used to harvest electrons produced by metabolising microbes as they feed to generate electricity. The electrochemical reactions are balanced when the used electrons are combined oxygen and hydrogen ions also released by the microbes to form water.
Logan's MECs are like microbial fuel cells in reverse. Instead of charge being drawn out, it is pumped in, and the hydrogen ions combine with electrons alone to form hydrogen gas. Applying roughly 0.5 volts provides enough energy to drive thermodynamically unlikely chemical reactions that break down the dead-end products that limited previous attempts to ferment hydrogen.
MECs can also break down other by-products of fermentation that put an end to the process, such as lactic, valeric, and butyric acids, says Logan. In tests it was fed cellulose and glucose and broke them down completely without problems.
'Great news'
The researchers were able to generate up to 1.23 cubic meters of hydrogen per day for every cubic meter of hydrogen fuel cell. This rate of hydrogen production is about 275 times faster than their earlier MEC.
In tests, the system produced hydrogen that, if fed into a hydrogen fuel cell that was 50% efficient, could generate between 1.2 and 3.4 times as much electricity as was fed into the system. By comparison, hydrogen extracted from water can only pay back about 25 to 30% of the energy used to extract it.
"It is surprising that such high hydrogen yields can so readily be obtained," says Patrick Hallenbeck of the University of Montreal in Canada. "The net energy yield appears much higher than what people are getting in other biofuel production processes – bioethanol, for example," he adds.
But the process is still much too slow to be practical, Hallenbeck adds. Logan and colleagues are currently working on improving the speed. The performance of the MECs exceeded the expectations of Lars Angenent, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US, who is also interested in using microbes to make fuel. "This is great news," he says.
Mason Inman
full article
Hydrogen is an attractive environmentally friendly fuel because burning it creates only water as a waste product. But finding an efficient, clean way to produce hydrogen in the first place is difficult.
Fermenting organic material using microbes is one possibility, but generally produces poor yields. Microbes reach a chemical dead end once sugar from material has been broken down into acetic acid, carbon dioxide and hydrogen. That releases at best only a third of the hydrogen in a molecule of the sugar glucose, for example.
"There is no known biological route to ferment glucose to [get] any more hydrogen than that," says Bruce Logan of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, US, who with colleague Shaoan Cheng has demonstrated a way around that the problem.
Reversed process
Their microbial electrolysis cells (MECs) enable microbes to break down organic materials completely, to just water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen. The latest design can release as much as 99% of the hydrogen in acetic acid, a common dead end to fermentation.
MECs are modified versions of microbial fuel cells, which are used to harvest electrons produced by metabolising microbes as they feed to generate electricity. The electrochemical reactions are balanced when the used electrons are combined oxygen and hydrogen ions also released by the microbes to form water.
Logan's MECs are like microbial fuel cells in reverse. Instead of charge being drawn out, it is pumped in, and the hydrogen ions combine with electrons alone to form hydrogen gas. Applying roughly 0.5 volts provides enough energy to drive thermodynamically unlikely chemical reactions that break down the dead-end products that limited previous attempts to ferment hydrogen.
MECs can also break down other by-products of fermentation that put an end to the process, such as lactic, valeric, and butyric acids, says Logan. In tests it was fed cellulose and glucose and broke them down completely without problems.
'Great news'
The researchers were able to generate up to 1.23 cubic meters of hydrogen per day for every cubic meter of hydrogen fuel cell. This rate of hydrogen production is about 275 times faster than their earlier MEC.
In tests, the system produced hydrogen that, if fed into a hydrogen fuel cell that was 50% efficient, could generate between 1.2 and 3.4 times as much electricity as was fed into the system. By comparison, hydrogen extracted from water can only pay back about 25 to 30% of the energy used to extract it.
"It is surprising that such high hydrogen yields can so readily be obtained," says Patrick Hallenbeck of the University of Montreal in Canada. "The net energy yield appears much higher than what people are getting in other biofuel production processes – bioethanol, for example," he adds.
But the process is still much too slow to be practical, Hallenbeck adds. Logan and colleagues are currently working on improving the speed. The performance of the MECs exceeded the expectations of Lars Angenent, of Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, US, who is also interested in using microbes to make fuel. "This is great news," he says.
Mason Inman
full article
Tuesday 13 November 2007
Using dishwasher at night 'could cut bills'
Householders could benefit from reduced energy bills if they agree to run their washing machines, tumble dryers and dishwashers in the middle of the night.
The proposal is part of a £6 billion British Gas plan, backed by rival energy companies, to change the way people use their appliances and run their gas meters.
The company calculated that if people used their tumble dryers, washing machines and other energy-hungry appliances in the middle of the night, it could save 1,000 megawatts or almost two per cent of the country's total energy usage.
This is because, in effect, it takes two power stations simply to cope with the surge at peak times, such as 6pm - when people come home from work, turn on the television and oven and put on a load of washing.
British Gas and the other companies want to offer consumers a more sophisticated version of Economy Seven, a tariff pioneered in the 1980s that is still popular.
Economy Seven gives householders a discount for running their boiler in the middle of the night. Energy companies could offer similar discounts to customers for using appliances during late mornings or mid-afternoon, when most people are at work.
However, they could offer these discount schemes only if the Government approves so-called "smart meters" to replace existing gas and electricity meters.
These would allow the energy companies to more closely monitor how much energy each family is using, and scrap the need for a meter reader to call at homes.
Instead the reading would be sent electronically to the organisation's headquarters.
This should save the companies millions of pounds - enough, they say, to eventually fund the £6 billion needed to provide the meters without consumers having to pay a penny.
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is in favour of the scheme but has yet to agree with Ofgem, the industry regulator, how to make the meters available across the country at minimal cost.
As part of the plan to persuade the Government to approve the scheme, British Gas has commissioned research to show how much energy could be saved by people using their appliances at off-peak times of the day.
It estimated that smart metering could save each household £2.50 per year. Those opting for an off-peak tariff should enjoy far greater savings.
Any pricing, however, has yet to be decided as the meters are not likely to be introduced until 2010 at the earliest.
There are fears that if different companies, British Gas and Powergen, for example, installed meters in the same area, the cost of each sending an engineer to the same street could wipe out any saving to consumers.
A British Gas spokesman said: "This is our chance to really revolutionise the metering industry.
"If it is done properly, it could give the UK billions of pounds of benefits through cuts in energy use and better customer service."
By Harry Wallop
full article
The proposal is part of a £6 billion British Gas plan, backed by rival energy companies, to change the way people use their appliances and run their gas meters.
The company calculated that if people used their tumble dryers, washing machines and other energy-hungry appliances in the middle of the night, it could save 1,000 megawatts or almost two per cent of the country's total energy usage.
This is because, in effect, it takes two power stations simply to cope with the surge at peak times, such as 6pm - when people come home from work, turn on the television and oven and put on a load of washing.
British Gas and the other companies want to offer consumers a more sophisticated version of Economy Seven, a tariff pioneered in the 1980s that is still popular.
Economy Seven gives householders a discount for running their boiler in the middle of the night. Energy companies could offer similar discounts to customers for using appliances during late mornings or mid-afternoon, when most people are at work.
However, they could offer these discount schemes only if the Government approves so-called "smart meters" to replace existing gas and electricity meters.
These would allow the energy companies to more closely monitor how much energy each family is using, and scrap the need for a meter reader to call at homes.
Instead the reading would be sent electronically to the organisation's headquarters.
This should save the companies millions of pounds - enough, they say, to eventually fund the £6 billion needed to provide the meters without consumers having to pay a penny.
The Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform is in favour of the scheme but has yet to agree with Ofgem, the industry regulator, how to make the meters available across the country at minimal cost.
As part of the plan to persuade the Government to approve the scheme, British Gas has commissioned research to show how much energy could be saved by people using their appliances at off-peak times of the day.
It estimated that smart metering could save each household £2.50 per year. Those opting for an off-peak tariff should enjoy far greater savings.
Any pricing, however, has yet to be decided as the meters are not likely to be introduced until 2010 at the earliest.
There are fears that if different companies, British Gas and Powergen, for example, installed meters in the same area, the cost of each sending an engineer to the same street could wipe out any saving to consumers.
A British Gas spokesman said: "This is our chance to really revolutionise the metering industry.
"If it is done properly, it could give the UK billions of pounds of benefits through cuts in energy use and better customer service."
By Harry Wallop
full article
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