Solar Sail-- Earth Version

The Solar Sailer is a solar hybrid ferry working the Melborne Harbour. Very cool.
From their corporate bumf:

This document describes safe and efficient hybrid marine power (HMP) technology that is applicable today.
It features examples of vessels that can utilise such technology. The designs can be tailored to your specific needs. All are hybrid electric and add solar and in some cases wind to aide in propulsion.
All vessels are safe, efficient and capable of zero emissions at the wharf. They are ideal for the use of alternative fuels and as platforms for new technology such as energy storage and fuel cells.
Solar Sailor vessels are the “greenest’ vessels in the world commercially available and would
be a perfect fit with any modern, sophisticated organisation.

Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi!

I was looking at TVs this week. Most of the shelf space was taken up with LCD TVs. I was thinking, "Heck, I better give up waiting and buy one of these." Now I have a reason to hold off-- why buy a TV like a sucker, when we're well on our way to holographic broadcasts:

Wireless Electricity Nudges closer

According to Leader-Post:

The MIT design consists of two copper coils. One, attached to the power source, is the sending unit. Rather than send out electromagnetic waves, it fills the space around it with a magnetic field oscillating at a particular frequency. The second copper coil is designed to resonate with that oscillating magnetic field. A copper coil within an oscillating magnetic field generates a current, enough, in MIT's case, to power a light bulb.

Power transformers make use of something similar, called magnetic induction, to transmit power between coils over short distances. But those coils aren't designed to resonate with each other. Resonant coupling makes the transfer of energy almost a million times more efficient.

Since the magnetic field doesn't radiate, most of the power that isn't picked up by the receiving unit is bound to the originating coil, rather than being lost into the environment. That also means that this system has a limited range, and the smaller the receiver, the smaller that range is.

Hopefully the cure for cancer comes before this is perfected otherwise, we'll all be trading tumor photos. No? Why is the rise in electrification and cancer cases nearly parallel?

Go to Ground

This old Modern Mechanix piece, may have a clue to some of our energy woes:

Iceless “Ice Box” Lowered in Ground Keeps the Food Cool

A COUNTERWEIGHT on one end, and a cylindrical container on the other end of a steel rope running over two pulleys supported on a pole, makes up the major portion of an ingenious contrivance for cooling foods.

The container, shown in the accompanying photo, fits loosely into a seven-foot hole in the ground lined with a steel casing. It has three shelves, and a door closes it off from the outside. Three iron rods about four feet long run from the top of this “cooler” container to the sustaining end of the rope or cable.

At the point where these rods are connected there is a large circular cover securely fastened. As the cooler is eased downward into the casing in the ground this cover settles over the brim of the casing, and closes it off from the outside. The photograph shows the cover within a few inches of the brim, the cooler being inside the casing.

This cover and the fact that the container is suspended by it several inches above the bottom of the hole, keeps rodents, dirt, and water out of the cooler. The counterweight keeps the device stationary at any level it is moved to.

What if we mine the Earth-- the depths (like 50' down) for the ambient cool? Pump hot air down, suck cold air? Geothermal pumps are nothing new, but what if their usage is expanded?

Fablabs are Fab!

Fablabs are taking one step closer to home usage. This from the NY Times:

Bill Gross, chairman of IdeaLab, says the technology it has developed, which uses a halogen light bulb to melt nylon powder, will allow the price of the printers to fall to $1,000 in four years.

“We are Easy-Bake Ovening a 3-D model,” he said. “The really powerful thing about this idea is that the fundamental engineering allows us to make it for $300 in materials.”

Others are working on the same idea.

“In the future, everyone will have a printer like this at home,” said Hod Lipson, a professor at Cornell University, who has led a project that published a design for a 3-D printer that can be made with about $2,000 in parts. “You can imagine printing a toothbrush, a fork, a shoe. Who knows where it will go from here?”

Three-dimensional printers, often called rapid prototypers, assemble objects out of an array of specks of material, just as traditional printers create images out of dots of ink or toner. They build models in a stack of very thin layers, each created by a liquid or powdered plastic that can be hardened in small spots by precisely applied heat, light or chemicals.

Imagine something that combines the qualities of a printer, a sprayer and an easy bake oven. It's terrific. When the price falls below $600, I am so going to buy one. They won't fall that low? Laser printers have gone from $20,000 to $3,000 in the mid-1980s to the inkjet alternatives today at $60 each. I don't think these will do this low, but it is reason to think they could get a mass market edition below $1000 in the next couple of years.

What will follow that? Open Source 3-D models. About 5% of the population will use this to replace alot of their manufactured items: kitchenware, toys, trinkets. About 5% will buy one and under-utilize them. Lots of places in the middle of nowhere will use these for most of their manufacturing, beholden only their supply of patterns, electricity and raw material. This will lead to the next invention: defablab. A De-Fablab will rip down any material into basic elements. Or, the killer FabLab generation will be the one that can rip anything down and turn it into fodder.

TCEO: Disposal vs. Re-useable Cups

Ilea has a piece from a UVic researcher, Martin Hocking written back in 1994 on what I call the "TCEO" (Total Cost of Energy Ownership) for reuseable cups vs. disposable cups. Disposable cups end up in the landfill; reuseable cups need to be washed. Which uses less energy?

This classic life-cycle energy analysis was performed by University of Victoria professor of chemistry Martin B. Hocking. Hocking compared three types of reusable drinking cups (ceramic, glass and reusable plastic) to two types of disposable cups (paper and polystyrene foam).

The energy of manufacture of reusable cups is vastly larger than the energy of manufacture of disposable cups (Table 1). In order for a reusable cup to be an improvement over a disposable one on an energy basis, you have to use it multiple times, in order to "cash in" on the energy investment you made in the cup. If a cup lasts only ten uses, then each use gets "charged' for one-tenth of the manufacturing energy. If it lasts for a hundred uses, then each use gets charged for only one-hundredth of the manufacturing energy.

But in order to reuse a cup, it has to be washed. The efficiency of the dishwasher, and the efficiency of the energy system that powers it, determine how much energy is required for each wash.¹ Hocking assumed a new, commercial dishwasher running on Canadian electricity, requiring about 0.18 MJ/cup-wash.² The total amount of energy per use is this wash energy plus the appropriate fraction of manufacturing energy, depending on the cup's lifetime. Figure 1 shows how the energies per use of the three reusable cups decline, the more you use them.

The lifetime needed for the energy per use of a reusable cup to become less than for a disposable cup, is called the 'break-even point." In Table 2, the break-even matrix shows how many uses are required for each reusable cup to do better than either disposable cup.

The results are extremely sensitive to the amount of energy the dishwasher requires for cleaning each cup. Hocking's choice for the dishwasher, requiring 0.18 MJ/cup-wash, is barely less than the manufacturing energy of the foam cup, 0.19 MJ/cup. If Hocking had chosen even a slightly less energy-efficient dishwasher as his standard, then the reusable cups would never have broken even with the foam cup.

The lesson of this life-cycle energy analysis is that the choice between reusable and disposable cups doesn't matter much in its overall environmental impact. One should use one's best judgement.

Indeed, in situations where cups are likely to be lost or broken and thus have a short average lifetime, disposable cups are the preferred option.

Stay tuned for my piece: "TCEO of DVDs: Why the RIAA is wrecking our planet and only Bittorrent can save us."

Sculpture or Power Solution? QR5 Wind Generator

The quietrevolution (QR) responds to the increasing demand for wind turbines in urban settings, where wind speeds are lower and wind directions change frequently.

The elegant helical (twisted) design of QR ensures a robust performance even in turbulent winds. It is also responsible for virtually eliminating all noise and vibration.

At five metres high and three metres in diameter, it is compact and easy to integrate, and with just one moving part, maintenance can be limited to an annual inspection.

This wind turbine that generates enough electricity to power a standard U.S. home or a small office. Unlike the shape of a conventional windmill propeller, it’s a Vertical-axis wind turbine. Whew. Those spinning propellors were forever taking out pets, children and BBQ guests.

It runs at almost $50k: twice the price of traditional generators.

Houses Are Expensive. I'll Live Outside

Stupid arguments do not change reality.

I've watched housing move from costing five years of gross annual income to eight years of an annual income in just a few short years. That dramatic rise hasn't stopped people from considering life indoors-- they just realize the neccessity and commit to the expense. One reason is the amortization.

The argument against alternative energy is the expense. While traditional generation has a carbon hit, the upfront dollar costs are cheap. People don't want to spend the upfront costs. But I think the ice is thawing. I was at Costco, and they are selling portable solar arrays for $300. The massive power outtages have given people reason to doubt the constancy of their power supply. Like it or not, people are going off the grid-- either they are choosing energy alternatives or they're getting punted off of the grid when their power supplier fails them. What if there were a way to amortize your alternative energy?

Enter Citizenre. This company is going to home owners with an offer: let Citizenre install a solar array capable of supplying the home with power and let Citizenre charge you for the power coming down from the roof. The homeowner pays a small amount upfront as a deposit. Within 15 years, the cost of the equipment should have been paid off by the homeowner's payments to Citizenre. The equipment has a likely lifespan of 25 years so Citizenre can use those 10 years as their profit margin. In effect, Citizenre becomes a power supplier-- instead of threading 1000 miles of cable that bleed EM into our cells, their power runs 20 feet to a power inverter.

The people behind Citizenre, namely Rob Styler bailed out of California company, Equinox, three years before the Federal Trade Commission shut it down. So, is this like Hill-Murray and Associates for a consumer model of delivering alternative energy? Or could this be the real deal? The good side: regardless how well Citizenre does this, other players can come into the marketplace: without the need for infrastructure, there could be 50 amortized energy players in a market without threat of a market glut. Even if there is a glut, these suppliers can go overseas to Asia and Africa and electrify them one hut at a time.

Nano Technology Update : Nanogenerators

The march of nanotechnology involves building very small mechanisms. According to Sci-fi.com, scientists at the University of Edinburgh have created a motor mechanism for a nanomachine. Last year researchers at the University of Georgia developed minuscule nanogenerators to power the nano world, but this latest unimaginably small machine — about 80,000 times thinner than the thickness of a human hair — runs on its own power.

The next challenge will be to load these with logic-- with a computer or similar means of directing nanomachines. One thought: leave them dumb. Give them to ability to recieve and act on external directions then transmit directions via radio waves, lasers or similar. Then the computer sending the messages could work from a theoretical model of where the nanobots are and what they should be doing and update the actions so that many nanobots could work in tandem.

trackback: http://blog.scifi.com/cgi-bin/blogroot/mt-tb.cgi/2000

Battery Breakthrough?

I found this news from Technology Review:

A secretive Texas startup developing what some are calling a "game changing" energy-storage technology broke its silence this week. It announced that it has reached two production milestones and is on track to ship systems this year for use in electric vehicles.

EEStor's ambitious goal, according to patent documents, is to "replace the electrochemical battery" in almost every application, from hybrid-electric and pure-electric vehicles to laptop computers to utility-scale electricity storage.

The company boldly claims that its system, a kind of battery-ultracapacitor hybrid based on barium-titanate powders, will dramatically outperform the best lithium-ion batteries on the market in terms of energy density, price, charge time, and safety. Pound for pound, it will also pack 10 times the punch of lead-acid batteries at half the cost and without the need for toxic materials or chemicals, according to the company.

The implications are enormous and, for many, unbelievable. Such a breakthrough has the potential to radically transform a transportation sector already flirting with an electric renaissance, improve the performance of intermittent energy sources such as wind and sun, and increase the efficiency and stability of power grids--all while fulfilling an oil-addicted America's quest for energy security.

The breakthrough could also pose a threat to next-generation lithium-ion makers such as Watertown, MA-based A123Systems, which is working on a plug-in hybrid storage system for General Motors, and Reno, NV-based Altair Nanotechnologies, a supplier to all-electric vehicle maker Phoenix Motorcars.

"I get a little skeptical when somebody thinks they've got a silver bullet for every application, because that's just not consistent with reality," says Andrew Burke, an expert on energy systems for transportation at University of California at Davis.

That said, Burke hopes to be proved wrong. "If [the] technology turns out to be better than I think, that doesn't make me sad: it makes me happy."

Richard Weir, EEStor's cofounder and chief executive, says he would prefer to keep a low profile and let the results of his company's innovation speak for themselves. "We're well on our way to doing everything we said," Weir told Technology Review in a rare interview. He has also worked as an electrical engineer at computing giant IBM and at Michigan-based automotive-systems leader TRW.

Much like capacitors, ultracapacitors store energy in an electrical field between two closely spaced conductors, or plates. When voltage is applied, an electric charge builds up on each plate.

Ultracapacitors have many advantages over traditional electrochemical batteries. Unlike batteries, "ultracaps" can completely absorb and release a charge at high rates and in a virtually endless cycle with little degradation.

Where they're weak, however, is with energy storage. Compared with lithium-ion batteries, high-end ultracapacitors on the market today store 25 times less energy per pound.

This is why ultracapacitors, with their ability to release quick jolts of electricity and to absorb this energy just as fast, are ideal today as a complement to batteries or fuel cells in electric-drive vehicles. The power burst that ultracaps provide can assist with stop-start acceleration, and the energy is more efficiently recaptured through regenerative braking--an area in which ultracap maker Maxwell Technologies has seen significant results.

Wow. Haliburton is going to have to start a big war to prevent these batteries from making electic cars viable. What ???

if

War = High gas prices = more research into alternatives

why are we further from electric cars now than we were five years ago? Does that sound stupid? So do the last seven years.