Tag Archives: green

Growing Lettuce in My Backyard

photo of lettuce in my garden

I planted lettuce in my backyard for the first time this year. I have enjoyed growing food in my backyard for the last several years. First it is very convenient. I want something to eat I can just go grab it out of the garden. Also it is healthier that many of the other things I might snack on. In addition, you can save money by growing your own food. And it is good for the environment (granted individuals don’t have much of an impact, but millions of people growing some of their own food does – reducing the amount of food transportation on the environment).

Also, I just find it cool to grow food in my yard to feed myself.

I don’t use anything to fertilize the soil or pesticides or anything. I just plant and let it grow (sometimes I water the garden). I just have a compost pile that is mainly leaves that I stir into the garden soil. It has worked fine for years now. I will grow tomatoes, berries, peppers, beans, peas and cucumbers again this year.

Solar-Powered Desalination

Saudi Arabia meets much of its drinking water needs by removing salt and other minerals from seawater. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine.
…
KACST’s main goal is to reduce the cost of desalinating water. Half of the operating cost of a desalination plant currently comes from energy use, and most current plants run on fossil fuels.
…
Reducing cost isn’t the only reason that people have dreamed of coupling renewable energy with desalination for decades, says Lisa Henthorne, a director at the International Desalination Association. “Anything we can do to lower this cost over time or reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with that power is a good thing,” Henthorne says. “This is truly a demonstration in order to work out the bugs, to see if the technologies can work well together.”
…
Saudi Arabia, the top desalinated water producer in the world, uses 1.5 million barrels of oil per day at its plants, according to Arab News.
…
In a concentrated PV system, lenses or mirrors focus sunlight on ultra-efficient solar cells that convert the light into electricity. The idea is to cut costs by using fewer semiconductor solar cell materials. But multiplying the sun’s power by hundreds of times creates a lot of heat. “If you don’t cool [the device], you end up overheating the circuits and killing them,” says Sharon Nunes, vice president of IBM Big Green Innovations. IBM’s solution is to use a highly conducting liquid metal–an indium gallium alloy–on the underside of silicon computer chips to ferry heat away. Using this liquid metal, the researchers have been able to concentrate 2,300 times the sun’s power onto a one-square-centimeter solar device. That is three times higher than what’s possible with current concentrator systems, says Nunes.

Finding good desalination solution could help many other locations (including southern California). But there is still a long way to go.

Unless We Take Decisive Action, Climate Change Will Ravage Our Planet

Lake McDonald, Glacier National Park photo by John Hunter

photo by John Hunter at Glacier National Park.

Tomorrow 56 newspapers, in 45 countries, are taking the unprecedented step of publishing the same editorial. The editorial will appear in 20 languages, as the United Nations Climate Change Conference is set to begin in Copenhagen.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years.
…
Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.
…
the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.
…
The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.
…
Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.
…
The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

Most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page. Even with the overwhelming evidence and tremendous consequences I don’t expect politicians to make the right decisions. We know full well what the choices are. We just decide to avoid the unpleasant choices. To bad so many that don’t get to choose are going to suffer. The politicians will be weak. They will play to those that pay them money. They will delay taking important steps now. We have chosen to elect non-leaders for quite some time. We can’t really expect them to act with courage, vision, wisdom and leadership given who we elect. The politicians are responsible for their failing but we are more responsible for electing them. Some politicians, even now, do possess fine qualities but not nearly enough. Maybe I will be proven wrong, but I doubt it.

Car Style Mass Transit Mag Lev System

Skytran is a very cool sounding transportation option. It promises, individual transportation modules traveling at 100 miles per hour within the city nonstop to many more points than light rail can service. The current non-solutions we have been attempting for decades of building more and more roads is not working.

The costs is estimated at much cheaper than other alternatives. It would be great if something like this could actually make it (it is much easier to dream about possibilities than to bring them into the world).

From the SkyTran web site:

It works like a taxi that picks you up and drives you to your destination. You travel only with people you choose to, in personal-sized vehicles. The electric vehicles are automatically driven at a constant speed on the main guideway. Like on a freeway, you travel non-stop until taking an exit-ramp at your destination. Also like a freeway, instead of intersections PRT has over-passes so you truly never have to stop… vehicles are lined up waiting for you at boarding stations, and after you get out, they either line up to wait for another rider, or go park themselves and wait for peak periods when they’ll be needed.

At 60 mph the electricity for SkyTran would cost less than 1 cent per mile (at current electricity costs of 11 cents per kWhr). By comparison, buying gas for a 30-MPG car at $2/gallon costs more than 7 times as much.

The site estimates the cost at$10 million per mile for one-way track and $15 million per mile for two-way track. Fundamentally, SkyTran track can be cheaply built because all of the components are very light-weight. Weight is why roads and trains cost so much… In comparison, SkyTran’s guideway only needs to support one 1000 pound (loaded) vehicle at a time… See the detailed cost evaluation page.
Continue reading →

Appropriate Technology: Solar Water in Poor Cairo Neighborhoods

Cairo Slums Get Energy Makeover

Since 2003 the nonprofit Solar CITIES project has installed 34 solar-powered hot water systems and 5 biogas reactors in Cairo’s poor Coptic Christian and Islamic neighborhoods.
…
Solar CITIES’ hot water systems are constructed from recycled materials and are uniquely tailored to the parts of a city where water and electricity availability are often sporadic. “The problem with professional solar hot water systems is that they’re made for cities with continuous water,” Culhane said. By contrast, Solar CITIES’s water heaters use a city’s water when it’s available but draw from a backup storage tank when it’s not.

The setup consists of an insulated rectangular box covered in clear glass or plastic on one side. Inside the box are copper tubes wrapped in sheets of aluminum, which are painted black. Sunlight striking the darkened aluminum is converted to heat, which is then used to warm water flowing through the pipes. The glass sheet on top of the box prevents the heat from being carried away by wind.
…
Solar CITIES also installs biogas reactors, which are based on designs Culhane saw while working in India. The reactors use microbes harvested from animal guts to break down food wastes into flammable gas that can be used for cooking and heating. If necessary, the reactors can draw hot water from the solar water heaters to maintain the warm temperatures the bacteria need to survive.

By attaching a simple plastic tube to the reactors, gas can be piped down several stories for residents to use. “In 24 hours, you’ve got 2 hours of cooking gas from yesterday’s cooking garbage,” Culhane said. The biogas reactors provide a more reliable supply of cooking gas than most residents currently have.

Awesome, I love to see people using engineering to make life better for those that can truly use help.

Battery Breakthrough

New battery could change world

Inside Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. The company calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

This may not startle you, but it should. It’s amazing. The most energy-dense batteries available today are huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec‘s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.
…
A small three-bedroom home in Provo might average, say, 18 kWh of electric consumption per day in the summer — that’s 1,000 watts for 18 hours. A much larger home, say five bedrooms in the Grandview area, might average 80 kWh, according to Provo Power.;Either way, a supplement of 20 to 40 kWh per day is substantial. If you could produce that much power in a day — for example through solar cells on the roof — your power bills would plummet.

Ceramatec’s battery breakthrough now makes that possible.

Clyde Shepherd of Alpine is floored by the prospect. He recently installed the second of two windmills on his property that are each rated at 2.4 kilowatts continuous output. He’s searching for a battery system that can capture and store some of that for later use when it’s calm outside, but he hasn’t found a good solution.

“This changes the whole scope of things and would have a major impact on what we’re trying to do,” Shepherd said. “Something that would provide 20 kilowatts would put us near 100 percent of what we would need to be completely independent. It would save literally thousands of dollars a year.”

Very interesting stuff. If they can take it from the lab to production this could be a great thing, I would like one.

Google Uses Only Outside Air to Cool Data Center in Belgium

Another example of what makes Google such a good engineering company. They do some spectacular things but as importantly they take many, many, many, many individual steps which when taken together make a big difference. Google’s Chiller-less Data Center

Rather than using chillers part-time, the company has eliminated them entirely in its data center near Saint-Ghislain, Belgium, which began operating in late 2008 and also features an on-site water purification facility that allows it to use water from a nearby industrial canal rather than a municipal water utility.

Year-Round Free Cooling
The climate in Belgium will support free cooling almost year-round, according to Google engineers, with temperatures rising above the acceptable range for free cooling about seven days per year on average. The average temperature in Brussels during summer reaches 66 to 71 degrees, while Google maintains its data centers at temperatures above 80 degrees.

So what happens if the weather gets hot? On those days, Google says it will turn off equipment as needed in Belgium and shift computing load to other data centers. This approach is made possible by the scope of the company’s global network of data centers, which provide the ability to shift an entire data center’s workload to other facilities.

Washing Machine Uses 90% Less Water

We wrote about the nearly waterless washing machine from Xeros previously, here are some additional details. The nearly waterless washing machine (which uses 90% less water) was developed by transferring known science to another application. After extensive R&D by University of Leeds scientists a nylon polymer was selected to absorb stains and dirt due to its unique property to become highly absorbent in humid conditions. Better still, it is highly resilient so can be re-used time after time without losing its strength.

The power of polymer cleaning
The nylon polymer has an inherent polarity that attracts stains. Think of how your white nylon garments can get dingy over time as dirt builds up on the surface despite constant washing. However, under humid conditions, the polymer changes and becomes absorbent. Dirt is not just attracted to the surface, it is absorbed into the center.

Such research in university settings, then transferred to products are a great source of economic growth and environmental improvement.

Paper Towels vs Electric Dryer

Sustainability Showdown: Paper Towels vs Electric Dryer

First off, let’s address one common misconception: for the most part, nobody’s cutting down trees just for paper towels. Most paper towels you find in public bathrooms are made from recycled paper, and even those that aren’t are made from industrial waste created in the manufacturing of regular paper.
…
The reason hand dryers came out ahead ended up having surprisingly little to do with the actual act of drying your hands. Most of the emissions and contributions to greenhouse gases come from decomposition of the towels in a landfill.
…
Like all life-cycle analyses, this one’s a bit messy, but no studies appear to support the use of paper towels over a hand dryer. Even in the best paper cases, hand dryers come out ahead. To top it off, if a business uses 100% clean energy, the impact and emissions from a hand dryer become a orders of magnitude better than those for paper towels.

So the next time you’re standing with drippy hands and a dilemma on the wall, you can choose the hand dryer, and let the green part of your brain breathe freely.

Algae Farm Aims to Turn Carbon Dioxide Into Fuel

Dow Chemical and Algenol Biofuels, a start-up company, are set to announce Monday that they will build a demonstration plant that, if successful, would use algae to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol as a vehicle fuel or an ingredient in plastics.
…
“We give them the oxygen, we get very pure carbon dioxide, and the output is very cheap ethanol,” said Mr. Woods, who said the target price was $1 a gallon.

Algenol grows algae in “bioreactors,” troughs covered with flexible plastic and filled with saltwater. The water is saturated with carbon dioxide, to encourage growth of the algae. “It looks like a long hot dog balloon,” Mr. Woods said.
…
The company has 40 bioreactors in Florida, and as part of the demonstration project plans 3,100 of them on a 24-acre site at Dow’s Freeport, Tex., site. Among the steps still being improved is the separation of the oxygen and water from the ethanol. The Georgia Institute of Technology will work on that process, as will Membrane Technology and Research, a company in Menlo Park, Calif. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, an Energy Department lab, will study carbon dioxide sources and their impact on the algae samples.

Algenol and its partners are planning a demonstration plant that could produce 100,000 gallons a year. The company and its partners were spending more than $50 million, said Mr. Woods, but not all of that was going into the pilot plant.

Initial proof of science was generated by Dr. John Coleman at the University of Toronto between 1989 and 1999. Since then, the process has been refined to allow algae to tolerate high heat, high salinity, and the alcohol levels present in ethanol production. This is another example of the benefit of university research and investing in science and engineering innovation.