energy
j7uy5 | May 28, 2007Sustainable
living could use more inventions like this.
href="http://www.lcsun-news.com/news/ci_5998479">Eye on
Research: Researchers develop low-cost, low-energy desalination process
Sun News Report
Article Launched: 05/27/2007 12:00:00 AM MDT
NMSU
report
A low-cost water desalination system developed by New Mexico State
University engineers can convert saltwater to pure drinking water on a
round-the-clock basis and its energy needs are so low it can
be powered by the waste heat of an air conditioning system.
A prototype built on the NMSU campus in Las Cruces can produce…
j7uy5 | May 27, 2007
Who
are these people, and what are they doing? They are
Democratic congresspersons, sheepishly "caving in". Not only
did they cave on the timeline for withdrawal of military and mercenary
forces in Iraq, they failed to heed this warning:
href="http://www.upi.com/Energy/Briefing/2007/05/24/kucinich_others_want_oil_out_of_war_funds/9281/">Kucinich,
others want oil out of war funds
Ben Lando, UPI Energy Correspondent
Published: May 24, 2007 at 9:58 PM
WASHINGTON, May 24 (UPI) -- U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich is championing a
somewhat lonely push in Congress to remove Iraq's oil from…
j7uy5 | May 12, 2007
href="http://www.southwestbioenergy.com/html/news_release__.html">Southwest
BioEnergy has announced a plan to build a
href="http://www1.eere.energy.gov/biomass/">biomasss
electrical generation facility in
href="http://www.google.com/maps?q=Vado,+NM,+USA&sa=X&oi=map&ct=title">Vado,
New Mexico. Vado is rather close to the middle of
nowhere, but it also happens to be very close to a whole lotta cattle
and cows. Said quadrupeds produce about 275 tons of
manure per day.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">
Sounds like a joke, but it is not. They think they…
j7uy5 | April 30, 2007IEEE Spectrum
(free registration required) has a nice little article about devices
that generate heat and electricity for the home. This is a
good idea, except for two problems: one, it is more efficient, and two,
it is more reliable than the current system.
Micro-CHP (combined heat and power) systems eliminate the inefficiency
that is inherent in the process of transmitting power over very long
wires. It also reduces the impact of a failure in any one
point in the power grid.
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/apr07/5010">A Power Plant for
the Home
Basement
furnaces generate…
j7uy5 | April 18, 2007
Add this to the list of environmental worries: The generation
of electricity is a highly water-intensive process. It takes
three times as much water to produce the electricity needed for a home,
than the water used in that home.
href="http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0417/p01s02-wogi.html">Trade-off
looms for arid US regions: water or power?
Water consumed by electric utilities could account for up to 60 percent
of all nonfarm water used in the US by 2030.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Albuquerque, N.M. - The
drive to build more power plants for a growing nation – as…
j7uy5 | March 15, 2007Everyone's
heard of blue lasers by now. Some people have them in their
homes. The reason they are important, is that blue light has
a shorter wavelength than the red lasers that were used in the first CD
and DVD devices. The shorter wavelength means that the laser
can see smaller dots. Smaller dots mean that more information
can be packed into the same space. That means more
information can be put on a DVD is a blue laser is used, compared to a
red laser.
A few years ago, companies started working on ultraviolet
light-emitting diodes and lasers. Because UV light has even
shorter…
ksharpe | March 14, 2007As the New York Times reports today, the British government has introduced a sweeping bill that would cut the UK's carbon emissions by 60 percent by 2050. Read the article, or watch Britain's environmental minister, David Miliband, introduce the bill on YouTube:
sarahdasher | February 16, 2007A recent report by the Asian Development Bank predicts that garbage output by Asian cities will more than double by 2025--from 760 thousand tons to 1.8 million tons per day. That amount of garbage would rapidly swamp the municipal governments charged with taking care of trash disposal.
Here in the U.S., New York and Maryland lead the nation in trash export, although they produce a less than average amount of trash per capita. On the other hand, Pennsylvania and Michigan import (by far) the most.
Let's take a look at where all this trash is coming from...
The U.S. produces 1.3 tons of…
sarahdasher | February 9, 2007Most people would rather have five dollars now than ten dollars next month. One Billion Bulbs is doing its best to retrain these hoarding instincts.
The goal of One Billion Bulbs is to convince users that switching from incandescent to compact fluorescent lightbulbs makes good environmental and economic sense. They already have some retail heavyweights on board: as Andy Rubin, Wal-Mart vice president for sustainability, told NPR's Robert Seigel, Wal-Mart currently saves $8 million dollars a year by using CFLs in its in-store fan-deliers.
One Billion Bulbs invites you to reap the benefits…
sarahdasher | February 8, 2007Researchers at Purdue University have created a portable refinery that converts food, paper and plastic trash into electricity. The prototype biorefinery generates approximately 90 percent more energy than it consumes.
Its efficiency owes to a series of steps:
1. Separate organic food material from residual trash, such as paper, plastic, Styrofoam and cardboard.
2. Ferment food waste into ethanol with industrial yeast.
3. Transfer non-food waste to a gasifier, where it is heated under low-oxygen conditions until it breaks down into low-grade propane gas and methane.
4. Combust gas (from non-…
ksharpe | February 1, 2007Over at BLDGblog, Geoff Manaugh has a long interview with Ed Mazria of the activist architectural nonprofit Architecture 2030.
Mazria is organizing an "Emergency Teach-In" for architects, student architects, and design professionals. The event, to be held at the New York Academy of Sciences in New York City on February 20th, and broadcast live on the web, is
specifically organized around the idea that "ecological literacy [must] become a central tenet of design education," and that "a major transformation of the academic design community must begin today."
Read the full story, here.
Image…
sarahdasher | January 29, 2007Anyone know how to explain this?
Story at The Economist.
Hat-tip, Evan Priestley.
sarahdasher | January 29, 2007If you were king for a day (or President for a century), could you slow the course of climate change? This Flash game from the BBC challenges you to create a carbon-neutral future, while still maintaining your coffers--and your presidency.
With international carbon-reduction treaties to contend with, and policy suggestions like, "Privatize Electricity", it takes more than a curbside recycling program to succeed in this game:
Clearly, my own leadership leaves plenty to be desired.
Hat-tip, Josh Rosenau, coturnix.
j7uy5 | January 25, 2007Remember
rel="tag">geothermal energy? It was a
popular topic back in the 1960's, particularly among those who were
stridently opposed to the massive investments in nuclear power.
Somehow, though, it was never pursued very aggressively.
Now, there is a massive report published by
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology"
rel="tag">MIT, at the behest of the US Dept. of
Energy. It is a big report, a 14MB PDF download:
href="http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf">The
Future of Geothermal Energy. It is mentioned…
revere | January 22, 2007Tomorrow we will be "treated" to the annual State of the Union lie-fest, with Liar-in-Chief George W. Bush reportedly to tell us we need a massive commitment to ethanol to break our oil addiction. Ethanol is the oil man's methadone, it seems. It doesn't sound like we'll be hearing about conservation, mass transit or other alternative energy sources (although maybe we'll hear about the oxymoron, "clean coal"). Mr. Bush is an oil man from Texas, and in Texas they know what's good for Global Warming.
They are good for global warming. As in the new 18 lane highway they are building to take the…
sarahdasher | January 19, 2007
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Bush is expected to call for increased focus on biofuels, to mitigate U.S. dependence on foreign oil. Meanwhile, in Bush's home state, Interstate I-10 through Houston is being expanded to 18 lanes.
"Texas has always been pretty far over on the side of exploiting natural resources and not worrying about the consequences," Richard Murray, a political science professor at the University of Houston, said. Pervasive drive-thru lanes and residential parking garages conspire to keep automobiles an inextricable part of Houston's culture. Image.…
sarahdasher | January 17, 2007Just ask the French: plants don't actually need soil.
This was botanist Patrick Blanc's conceit when he began growing Vertical Gardens on the indoor and outdoor walls of some of Paris' most design-forward museums and ateliers.
Unlike, for example, the temples of Angkor Wat (left), Blanc's gardens don't damage the buildings on which they grow. Instead of taking root in the walls, Blanc's gardens use a layer of thick felt as a substrate for plant growth, and are separated from structural walls by PVC, which also acts as a vapor barrier. The gardens and are watered from above by drip…
sarahdasher | January 4, 2007Calculate your CO2 emissions by plane, train, or automobile.
Here's a puzzler for the greenhouse gas enthusiasts among you:
According to this calculator, car and airplane emissions even out over progressively longer trips, despite the obvious weaknesses of an as-the-crow-flies methodology (see above; we're driving through Lake Erie). Is this trend real? Is there actually a distance at which it's less polluting to fly than drive?
Here are some sample results...
New York to Detroit:
0.236 tons CO2 from driving
0.275 tons CO2 from flying
0.206 tons CO2 from travel by rail/bus
New York to St.…
revere | December 29, 2006Gerald Ford, 38th President of the United States and the only one not to be elected as either President of Vice President, isn't even in the ground yet but some of him is being resurrected. Over at Gristmill Dave Roberts has an excellent piece on Ford's 1975 State of the Union speech (complete with a long excerpt of the relevant part) where the former President worried over the country's loss of energy independence.
In it he noted that America's surplus oil -- and its attendant ability to stabilize world oil prices and prevent the emergence of a petroleum cartel -- had vanished in 1970; we…
j7uy5 | December 12, 2006Spectrolab, Inc. has announced that they have developed a way to nearly
double the efficiency of solar cells. They've done it by
creating semiconductor Dagwood sandwiches, with over 20 layers.
The basic idea is to have different layers that respond to
different wavelengths of light. This way, a greater amount of
the total light energy is captured.
The technology requires the use of a lens, or some other means of
concentrating the light. That may limit its applicability
somewhat. Still it appearto be a major advance. It
could be the one thing we needed to make solar power competitive…