The adoption of goals aiming for the achievement of 100% renewable energy (with regard to retail electricity) by the year 2050 could save the major economies of the world — the European Union, the United States, China — more than $500 billion a year (combined), according to a new study from the NewClimate Institute (commissioned by Climate Action Network).
As well as delivering huge savings in energy costs, the adoption of strong targets would result in the creation of millions of new jobs, according to the new work.
Also worth noting is that, according to the new work, if all countries adopted (and acted upon) such goals, then the anthropogenic temperature increase (global warming) could be limited to under the 2°C threshold that some researchers have marked as the point of no return as far as serious issues go.
(Author’s note: I’m not so convinced that the climate can be modelled to such a precise degree as to provide useful predictions in this regard. Yes, carbon dioxide and methane are greenhouse gases, yes the planet is warming, and yes people are implicated in that, but…. The climate is a very complex system, one not easily modelled or predicted to any precise degree. While it would be prudent from a ‘rational’ perspective to curtail greenhouse gas emissions (on a global level), what’s going to happen exactly is something of an open question. We’ll find out soon enough though — I expect to see significant issues arising from anthropogenic climate change within my lifetime.)
The new report comes as many countries are beginning to create their climate offers for upcoming (in December) UN climate talks — where, presumably, a new international agreement will be signed.
According to the new report, if the steps outlined for the EU, the US, and China in the new report are followed to the T, then around 3 million new jobs will be created by 2030; the deaths of two million people by air pollution related diseases will be prevented; and huge savings (of around $520 billion a year) will be afforded, owing to reduced fossil fuel imports.
For many of us, purchasing an electric vehicle is still a pie in the sky dream. But that might be changing soon, if a new peer-reviewed study is correct that the cost of electric car batteries is falling much more quickly than we assumed.
Lithium ion batteries make up anywhere between a quarter and half the cost of electric cars today. By systematically reviewing over 80 cost estimates published between 2007 and 2014, researchers at the Stockholm Environment Institute found that the cost of Li-battery packs used by leading manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan is falling by roughly 8 % per year. That’s similar to the rate that was seen with the nickel metal hydride battery technology used in hybrids like the Toyota Prius.
What’s more, it means that battery cost is rapidly approaching a threshold that could make the average Joe think seriously about trading in his gas guzzler. According to MIT Technology Review:
The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That’s lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018. Depending on the price of gas, the sticker price of an EV is expected to appeal to many more people if its battery costs between $125 and $300 per kilowatt-hour.
Of course, other factors matter when it comes to giving up gasoline, including EV ranges and the expected useful lifespan of the battery. Another recent study gives us hope on these fronts, as well: Analyzing power fade over time, scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab found that even after batteries have lost 20 percent of their originally rated energy storage capacity, they could still meet the daily travel needs for more than 85% of US citizens.
We should take all of this with a healthy dose of skepticism-energy costs projections are often wrong-but still, electric vehicles do seem to be moving mainstream fast. If Elon Musk had it his way, we’d all be getting driven around by autonomous Teslas this summer, but more realistically, ten years out doesn’t sound like too much to hope for. [ MIT Technology Review]
So you’re a conservationist, eh? Can you prove it? Can you stop washing your hands before this fish runs out of water? For his appropriately titled Poor Little Fishbowl Sink, designer Yan Lu created a very direct incentive to minimize water usage – when you turn the faucet on, the water level in the fishbowl decreases. It reminds us how precious this resource is, and how our everyday actions can affect the creatures around us. It also reminds us of our childhood pet goldfish, aww. Read on to learn more about this fish-traumatizing faucet.
In case you were worried, the water sources for the fish bowl and the faucet are separate: you wouldn’t be washing your hands in fish excrement or sending soapy water back into the bowl. The fish’s “aquarium” is simply designed to lower its water level until you stop washing your hands, although it never drains completely. Still, we can’t help but feel that this rapidly changing environment must be tough for the little guy (which, come to think of it, makes his situation pretty similar to the real world). Poor little fish indeed.
Spain is getting the vast majority of its electricity from carbon-free sources, the country’s grid operator reported on Tuesday.
CREDIT: ree.es
According to Red Electrica de Espana (REE), the Spanish peninsula got 69 percent of its electricity generation in March from technologies that produce zero carbon emissions – that is to say, renewable energy plus some of its nuclear power. Nuclear as a whole provided 23.8 percent of the country’s electricity in March, while 47 percent came solely from renewable sources.
Most of the renewable electricity being generated in Spain comes from wind, which alone provided 22.5 percent of the country’s electricity last month. Wind often competes with nuclear for the title of Spain’s top electricity generation source overall – in fact, though nuclear pulled through in March as the top source of electricity, wind has overall provided more electricity to Spain in the entirety of 2015. From January to March, according to REE, wind provided 23.7 percent of electricity generation while nuclear made up 22.7 percent.
Spain has long been a leader in renewable energy, just recently becoming the first country in the world to have relied on wind as its top energy source for an entire year. The country is attempting to use wind power to supply 40 percent of its electricity consumption by 2020, according to CleanTechnica.
At the same time, Spain is also developing other renewable sources of energy, particularly solar photovoltaic. Though it currently only accounts for about 3 percent of electricity generation, Spain’s solar industry is one of the largest in the world, according to Al Jazeera. In 2012, it reported that solar power accounted for almost 2,000 megawatts of energy. Comparatively in the United States, there were 3,313 megawatts of solar photovoltaic installations that same year.
Though the U.S. may have more solar cumulatively, Spain’s solar makes up more more of the smaller country’s electricity use as a whole. In 2013, solar accounted for about 0.2 percent of the net electricity produced in the United States, according to the Institute for Energy Research. That same year, solar accounted for 3.1 percent of Spain’s total electricity, according to REE.
Still, Spain’s renewable energy story has not been all roses. The country’s aggressive goals have been heavily subsidized by its government, and the government has fallen into economic distress as a result. Specifically, the New York Times reported in 2013 that Spain’s tariff deficit had built up a cumulative debt of about €26 billion ($35 billion). Since then, however, the country has slashed its subsidies, putting the bulk of costs back on the power utilities themselves.
The subsidy cuts happened last summer, and since then renewable energy has not significantly grown in the country as a whole. But it has grown substantially in at least one part of Spain – the tiny island of El Hierro, which is nearing its goal to be powered 100 percent by wind and water.
President Obama is scheduled to announce new initiatives to help bolster the country’s solar workforce on Friday, including a goal to add 75,000 solar workers by 2020, and a new program aimed at providing solar training to veterans.
The goal to add to the nation’s solar workforce adds to the President’s last commitment to solar training, which promised 50,000 solar workers by 2020. According to a statement released by the White House, the solar industry is adding jobs “10 times faster” than the rest of the economy, and prices for solar installations are falling, having declined 12 percent in the past year alone.
The announcement, which will be made during a visit to Utah’s Hill Air Force Base, will also lay out plans for a program aimed at providing military veterans with skills to enter the solar workforce. Dubbed “Solar Ready Vets,” the program will be a joint-venture between the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, and will take place at 10 military bases across the country.
Solar Ready Vets, the White House says, is “based on the specific needs of high-growth solar employers, is tailored to build on the technician skills that veterans have acquired through their service, and incorporates work-based learning strategies.” The program will train service members in all facets of solar installation, teaching them how to size solar panels, connect electricity to the grid, and deal with building codes.
According to the White House, the Department of Veterans Affairs will help by encouraging state agencies to make G.I. Bill funding available to veterans interested in the program. The Department of Labor will also work to make sure that veterans are aware of job opportunities within the solar industry.
The President’s announcement comes just days after the United States submitted its climate commitments to the United Nations, which promised to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 28 percent by 2025. A report issued Monday by the NewClimate Institute said that meeting carbon-reduction goals would create nearly one million “green jobs” by 2030 in the United States, China, and the European Union.
SolarCity, well-known for rooftop solar systems, is expanding to so-called microgrids, larger power systems that can be tapped by communities when the power grid goes down.
The systems, which add generators and software to manage the power to standard solar panels, will include Tesla Motors batteries to store the energy generated. While the owner can tap the solar power for daily use, the main purpose is to maintain electricity in the event of a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane.
“There has been a dramatic increase in severe weather events the last few years – climate-related, almost certainly – and its led to more grid outages,” SolarCity spokesman Jonathan Bass noted, pointing to the storm known as Sandy that hit the Northeast last year as a prominent recent example.
The company is targeting cities that are in the line of fire for such catastrophic events for the new service.
“Traditionally, microgrids have been used in campuses, medical facilities and military bases, and we will pursue some of those opportunities if they become available,” said Daidipya Patwa, who is leading SolarCity’s microgrid efforts, “but our primary target is municipalities, communities and areas with a weak grid or no grid at all.”
That focus opens up a potentially large market, said GTM Research analyst Shayle Kann.
“Any municipality in a region that is prone to some kind of natural disaster … they have a few key locations that they need to keep running in the event of an outage or a natural disaster – a community center where they’re going to house people or police stations,” the analyst said.
This will also be the first major effort overseas for SolarCity, as the company shops its microgrids to island nations with poor power grids. While Bass said the bulk of its microgrid business will focus on the United States and North America, he noted that it will be the first international work for SolarCity aside from its charitable work to provide lights at schools in the developing world.
These types of systems have the potential to make a big difference in the developing world, Kann said.
“Ultimately, it seems like this solution could be used to electrify rural areas in the developing world or to provide better reliability in places where the grid goes down a lot,” the analyst explained.
SolarCity will attempt to squeeze into a market segment with a product better than home tinkerers can build and less expensive than larger rivals.
“The approach to microgrids to date has largely been either piecing something together from some small equipment vendors or you go at the high end, to a GM or Siemens and pay upward of $10 million for a massive solution that may not be, from a budget standpoint realistic, especially for a rainy-day solution,” Bass noted.
SolarCity hopes to tap economies of scale to accomplish its goal: The San Mateo company acquired Fremont solar panel manufacturer Silevo last year and plans to build a large solar panel factory in New York, while Tesla Motors – run by SolarCity Chairman and investor Elon Musk – builds a massive “Gigafactory” for the lithium-ion batteries that the microgrid systems will use.
“(Tesla is) manufacturing advanced battery technology at a scale that’s just not seen anywhere else, and we absolutely expect that to drive the cost down over time,” Bass said.
While SolarCity seems to have a road map that will allow it to build microgrids for interested customers, the question will be whether there will be enough communities willing to take the plunge, Kann said.
“The operative question is how big this will be for SolarCity, and more broadly, how big the microgrid market will be in general,” he said.
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
ews that a Texas city is to be powered by 100-percent renewable energy sparked surprise in an oil-obsessed, Republican-dominated state where fossil fuels are king and climate change activists were described as ” the equivalent of the flat-earthers ” by U.S. Senator and GOP presidential hopeful Ted Cruz.
“I was called an Al Gore clone, a tree hugger,” says Jim Briggs, interim city manager of Georgetown, a community of about 50,000 people some 25 miles north of Austin.
Briggs, who was a key player in Georgetown’s decision to become the first city in the Lone Star State to be powered by 100-percent renewable energy, has worked for the city for 30 years. He wears a belt with shiny, silver decorations and a gold ring with a lone star motif, and is keen to point out that he is not some kind of California-style eco-warrior with a liberal agenda. In fact, he is a staunchly Texan pragmatist.
“I’m probably the furthest thing from an Al Gore clone you could find,” he says. “We didn’t do this to save the world – we did this to get a competitive rate and reduce the risk for our consumers.”
In many Texas cities, the electricity market is deregulated, meaning that customers choose from a dizzying variety of providers and plans. In Houston, for example, there are more than 70 plans that offer energy from entirely renewable sources.
That makes it easy to switch, so in a dynamic marketplace, providers tend to focus on the immediate future. This discourages the creation of renewable energy facilities, which require long-term investment to be viable. But in Georgetown, the city utility company has a monopoly.
When its staff examined their options last year, they discovered something that seemed remarkable, especially in Texas: Renewable energy was cheaper than non-renewable. And so last month, city officials finalized a deal with SunEdison, a giant multinational solar energy company. It means that by January 2017, all electricity within the city’s service area will come from wind and solar power.
In 2014, the city signed a 20-year agreement with EDF for wind power from a forthcoming project near Amarillo. Taking the renewable elements up to 100 percent, SunEdison will build plants in West Texas that will provide Georgetown with 150 megawatts of solar power in a deal running from 2016 or 2017 to 2041. With consistent and reliable production the goal, the combination takes into account that wind farms generate most of their energy in the evenings, after the sun has set.
Despite its proximity to the left-leaning Austin, Georgetown is not instinctively progressive. Its main selling point is the old-school charm of its historic core, which credibly bills itself as the Most Beautiful Town Square In Texas. It is not a natural political companion to Burlington, a similar-sized city in liberal Vermont that last year reportedly became the first city in the U.S. to use 100-percent renewable energy.
Though Georgetown is home to Southwestern University, a liberal arts college, Briggs said that more than 40 percent of residents are over 50. The area is conservative and much of the positive reaction to the announcement has come less because the citizens are desperate to help the planet than because they are getting the security of a fixed rate plan that will be similar to the current cost of about 9.6 cents per kilowatt-hour and will protect them against the impact of fluctuations in the price of fossil fuels.
Chris Foster, Georgetown’s manager of resource planning and integration, said that since the announcement he has “gotten calls from businesses as far away as California and Maryland wanting to know: What does it cost to move over here? [They say:] ‘We’re out here trying to be renewable; it’s cheaper over there to be renewable.'”
He said that for manufacturing companies conscious of their carbon footprint, basing themselves in a place that offers 100-percent wind and solar energy would be an easy way to boost their green credentials.
In a state that loves to bash Washington, what little criticism there has been, Briggs said, has stemmed from the federal tax breaks handed out to encourage renewable energy.
“Well then, we should never have mass transit and quit farming … that argument, while it’s there, is really pretty shallow,” he says.
Fearing an imminent end to the government’s generosity, private green energy companies have scrambled to build facilities. At the same time, in recent years a glut of Chinese-made panels has made solar power more cost-effective. And while West Texas is an oil driller’s paradise, it is also sunny and gusty, making it a perfect corridor for renewable energy.
The region bordering New Mexico is one of the prime solar resource sites and the wind whistles across the plains to such an extent that, as Scientific American pointed out last year, the state is America’s largest wind power producer – as well as leading the nation in the production of crude oil and the emission of greenhouse gases.
Renewable energy also uses much less water than traditional power generation – a bonus in a state where half the land and more than 9 million people are affected by drought conditions, though Briggs said that for Georgetown, water conservation was only a “side benefit.”
Greg Abbott, formerly Texas attorney general and now governor, repeatedly sued the federal government over its attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, the chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Bryan Shaw, said there is a “lack of links between greenhouse gases and the climate.” Shaw was appointed by former-Gov. Rick Perry, a notorious climate-change skeptic and a prospective Republican White House candidate for 2016.
Yet amid the rhetoric, denial and promotion of corporate interests and economic prosperity ahead of environmental concerns, over the past decade Texas lawmakers authorized the spending of $7 billion of taxpayers’ money on the Competitive Renewable Energy Zone, a vast infrastructure project to connect West Texas wind power to major urban areas.
So Texas has the weather, the infrastructure, and – certainly in small places such as Georgetown – the current market conditions to be greener. But a state report last September cast a cloud over the future of renewable energy in Texas, saying it was not reliable or extensive enough to meet peak demand. “Renewables need conventional power backup,” it said.
Fred Beach, assistant director for policy studies at the University of Texas at Austin’s Energy Institute, said that, “At the moment, unfortunately, the legislature is pretty clueless when it comes to renewables,” and is failing to get the most out of their investment.
Beach suspects that Big Oil will fret that Georgetown’s pioneering move is the start of a trend, and polluting, inefficient coal power plants will be pushed out of service by more deployment of wind and solar energy. But he believes that would likely prove good news for natural gas generators, who will be relied upon in the scorching summer months when demand is highest.
Ultimately, he said, in a practical-minded place like Texas, the best way to encourage the use of green energy is to appeal to heads rather than hearts and make a strong business case, as happened in Georgetown.
Russ Dickson, co-owner of an antiques shop on the main square, said he was delighted at the move.
“This is a pretty conservative community and to see a conservative community step up [and do this] makes me feel good about the future,” the 61-year-old said.
Outside, Jon Klopf, a barber, sat on a bench enjoying a splendidly sunny Thursday afternoon.
“They were just looking out for the cheapest deal. That’s just business,” the 50-year-old said. “I don’t really think we should be relying too much on oil, even though they have to right now. That don’t last forever.
“Sun will, though. Long as the sun comes up, the wind will blow.”
Who isn’t looking for a small peaceful urban haven at which to chill out, check email, figure out what’s next?
For an urban development project commissioned by the city of Paris, JCDecaux, inventor of the “street furniture” concept of outdoor advertising, collaborated with designer Mathieu Lehanneur to create Escale Numérique, a green roofed wifi connected corner of respite on the busy Rond Point des Champs-Elysées. Lehanneur is no stranger to eco-friendly designs-he’s the designer of the acclaimed living air filter.
“Like the Wallace fountains, which since the end of the 19 th century have offered Parisian the free drinking water circulating beneath their feet,” expained Lehanneur, “Escale Numérique allows everyone to benefit from a high-speed wifi connection by raising it from beneath the ground.” Paris offers free wifi in almost all its public parks.
Lehanneur’s protected shelter with a green roof is like “a garden placed on a few tree trunks,” designed to be as attractive when viewed from the ground as from a balcony. The hard-wearing concrete swivel seats, equipped with electrical outlets, have mini tables attached where one can rest an elbow, book, or laptop.
A large touch screen, above, provides updated information about city services: guides, news and augmented reality for tourists and visitors who are not online. The designer considers Escale Numérique “a forerunner for a new range of urban architecture where virtual reality dictates the shape of what is real in order to live with even greater fluidity.”
We’ve seen vertical farms before, but this brings urban agriculture quite literally to the next level. In the Bujama region of Lima, Peru, thousands of lettuce heads are sprouting next to a major highway thanks to a very unusual source: a billboard.
FCB Mayo Peru and University of Engineering & Technology (UTEC)-the minds behind an innovative billboard that’s sucking up Lima’s notorious pollution and another billboard that’s turning the city’s humid air into drinking water -have come up with the “Air Orchard” billboard that can generate pollution-free produce.
We all know that this isn’t just any old advertisement by the side of the road. So how does it work? The concept is actually very simple to anyone familiar with the soil-free farming method of hydroponics. Sitting behind the billboard’s panel are 10 large dehumidifiers that draw in water from the air and turn it into potable water. This water then drips down a series of PVC tubes that are coated in nutrients. The tubes are also white to reflect the sun’s rays and boost photosynthesis. Air Orchard’s system is simply an adaptation of the “nutrient film technique” of hydroponics, in which plants’ roots can constantly access a recirculating stream of fertilizer-rich water.
The billboard is located on Peru’s largest and most important highway, the Panamericana Sur, and is already in operation. According to a press release, more than 2,800 heads of lettuce are given away weekly to passersby and the local community from the Air Orchard-all for free.
“Currently, organic products are gaining significance, compared to chemically treated products. UTEC wanted to work out the most efficient way to grow a crop of 2,000 heads of lettuce using the clean water generated by the panel,” said Jessica Ruas, UTEC marketing director in a statement. “In addition to growing lettuce, the billboard still produces 96 liters of drinking water a day to provide for the surrounding community.”
This technique solves a pressing problem in the area. As the video below pointed out, water that’s used for irrigating Bujama’s fields are highly contaminated with arsenic, lead or cadmium that can seep into nearby farmland and crops. Consequently, this means the majority of the vegetables consumed in Lima are contaminated.
“UTEC is a university that was founded with the mission of developing applied research that provides practical solutions to the challenges of society and industry,” said Ignacio Montero, director of business innovation at UTEC in a statement. “These principles are proven through innovative initiatives like the ‘Air Orchard.’ We improved on our first panel that generated water from moisture in the air for human consumption and increased the production of water to grow healthy food. We have found a practical solution to a real problem, and through creativity and innovation we developed solutions to the challenges of our country and the world.”
Now imagine eating fresh vegetables from a billboard on a highway near you.
Solar has gone chic with high end fashion designer, Pauline van Dongen’s Solar Shirt from her Wearable Solar collection. The shirt, which was designed in collaboration with TNO and Holst Centre, was unveiled at a SXSW Interactive. The shirt allows you to power up your portable devices using solar cells integrated into the fabric, all while looking good doing it.
“Wearing solar cells lets us harness the sun’s potential energy and become a power source ourselves,” said van Dongen in a press release. “As a designer, I’m excited by how solar cells can add to the esthetic of a garment … We’ve taken solar fashion from the catwalk to [main] street, with an attractive yet practical garment that people could wear every day,” she says.
To charge your phone or other portable device, you need to plug your charger into a small “module” in the front of the shirt, which doubles as a pocket when you’re not using it to charge a device. The shirt can charge smartphones, MP3 players, GPS systems and other USB-compatible handheld or portable devices. It contains 120 thin-film solar cells, so “in bright sunlight, it produces one watt of electricity, enough to charge a phone in a few hours,” said Holst Centre’s Margreet de Kok in the press release. Indoors, it generates enough power to keep a battery alive.
Many clothing designers have struggled to create wearable technology with the moving body in mind and most of the clothing is not machine washable. The Solar Shirt has all of that covered. “Our technology enables extremely thin electronics that are stretchable, flexible and washable,” de Kok said. “It can be integrated into fabrics using standard high-volume techniques that are well known in the textile industry. The maturity of the technology means textile manufactures could bring functional fabrics to market in a matter of months using existing production facilities.”
By now, we’re all familiar with the mainstays of renewable energy. They’re the solar panel arrays and massive turbine systems that span great lengths, collecting energy from the sun, wind and water and churning out megawatts of energy. It’s these behemoths that we point to as bellwethers of a future where the world no longer depends on fossil fuels.
But recently, some researchers have started to tinker with more subtle ways to harvest energy. They’re mostly unconventional ideas, such as layering tiny and transparent solar cells onto a phone’s touchscreen or a sound conversion technology that allows it to recharge simply by talking into it.
Though these out-of-box approaches don’t receive nearly as much attention as some of the more elaborate industrial-scale projects, they may well turn out to be game-changers in their own right. As such, here are instances where eeking out even a modest amount of energy may make a real difference:
1. Infrastructure power
Hydroelectric power came about as a way to take advantage of the enormous flow of energy produced from reservoirs. However, the same principle can also work wherever there’s a strong and steady stream of water, whether it be dams or sewage pipes.
Catching on to this fact, the city of Portland is testing a power-generating water turbine system specially suited for municipal drainage systems. The technology, developed by local start-up LucidEnergy, is projected to contribute up to 1,100 megawatts of electricity annually, enough to power approximately 150 homes.
Roadways are also hotspots for untapped energy. In 2011, a research team were able to harvest energy from the vibrations produced by moving cars by coating a section of the road surface along a Dutch highway with energy-absorbing piezoelectric materials. During the course of three months, they found that, on average, net electrical output was sufficient to run the motion sensors on a traffic light.
2. Ambient energy
To ensure coverage over a given area, WiFi hubs blast signals in all directions. Satellite transmission is somewhat similar, scattering signals across a wide region. As a result, a lot of energy is wasted.
But there are ways to recover some of these lost signals. Researchers at Duke University have converted them into electricity. Employing a special microwave-scavenging metamaterial, they were able to build a device capable of generating up to 7.3 volts. The goal is to eventually incorporate the technology into cell phones, which in many instances can use a little extra juice.
While the idea has been kicked around for some time, the challenge has been figuring out how to implement it on a consumer level. RCA, an electronics brand, caused a bit of stir back in 2010, when representatives unveiled an early prototype of a USB dongle they claimed can give laptops a power boost by trapping stray WiFi signals and storing them as converted energy in an internal battery. However, the Airnergy charger was never released.
3. Body energy
Every person is, in some respect, a walking power plant. Even at rest, the human body generates as much energy as a 100 watt light bulb. Much of this dissipates in the form of heat, though a coat with good insulation properties can momentarily trap enough of it for us to stay comfortably warm at times when temperatures are unbearably cold.
With that line of thinking, Jernhusen, a Swedish real estate firm, had an ambitious proposal. In 2008, the group outlined a plan to construct an office building in Stockholm equipped with a unique heating system that so happened to be powered by the excess body heat of 250,000 some commuters that pass though the nearby central train station each day.
The system, in operation today, is made possible through a series of heat exchangers situated inside the train station’s ventilation system. This is where body heat is converted into hot water and piped in to warm the building. In total, costs are reduced by about 25 percent compared to regular heating systems. And closer to home, the Mall of America in Minneapolis recycles body heat from shoppers to more better regulate the indoor climate.
On a smaller scale, scientists are looking into ways to make good use of energy generated by the body’s internal machinations. Engineers in the United States and China have collaborated on a technology that uses the mechanical energy of a beating heart to pump power to pacemakers. In Boston, a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is developing a tiny chip that pulls in energy from natural processes that take place within the ear canal as a way to extend the long-term implantation of hearing aids.
4. Kinetic energy
In motion, the human body ramps up to where it’s a sort of de facto energy factory. Case-in-point is the Cadbury House gym near Bristol, England, the first in the world to be powered by nothing but the grunt and sweat of members who frequent the exercise facility.
Power is supplied by a network of treadmills, stationary bikes and step climbers custom-made and sold by Technogym, a manufacturer of high-tech training equipment. When in operation, each machine powers itself and channels surplus energy in the form of electricity. The costs for the equipment come in at about 600,000 euros ($630,000). Similar human-powered gyms can be found in Hong Kong and in the United States.
Systems designed to harvest kinetic energy can also supplement power systems anywhere people take part in activities that collectively add up to lots of high-intensity workouts. In 2007, a pair of MIT students proposed using these ” crowd farms” as a way to extract energy for such things as LED lights. More recently, the concept popped up as an ” eco-nightclub ” in London where energy is amassed using blocks made of piezoelectric material, positioned just beneath the dance floor.
5. Self-powered energy (for gadgets)
While you would be hard pressed to find anyone who isn’t pining for a bit more battery life for their mobile devices, keeping pace with the rigorous demands of day-to-day commuting is a whole different story. The “range anxiety” consumers have over a vehicle’s typical per-charge rating is often mentioned as one of their most pressing concerns.
And it’s a problem the industry seems to be looking at from every conceivable angle. For instance, earlier this month, Goodyear unveiled the BH03 concept tire, which feature a combination of piezoelectric materials and black textured thermoelectric patches to absorb energy from vibrations, light and heat. This in turn can be fed to the the battery or sensors. But drivers shouldn’t hold their breath since the company hasn’t detailed how they plan to turn the proof-of-concept into a reality or released any cost estimates.
For those getting around on foot, Pittsburgh-based startup SolePower is in the later stages of finalizing a shoe insert that charges up an external battery as the wearer walks or runs. But unlike other technologies that harvest energy from pressure-induced vibrations, the insoles don’t employ piezoelectric materials. Instead, energy is produced, converted and stored through a series of tiny “mechanical linkages and generators” in the heel, similar to how hand-cranked flashlights work, according to the company’s Web site.
With the insoles, the company claims that an hour of walk time provides about 2.5 hours of talk time on a smartphone.
Revolutions that start in the garage are nothing new. The one-car shed in which David Packard and William Hewlett launched the partnership that would grow into Hewlett-Packard Co. is known as the birthplace of Silicon Valley.
So Jason Hughes may be on to something.
In a cluttered four-car garage in suburban Deptford, New Jersey, Hughes spent the better part of last year hacking a 1,400-pound battery recovered from a wrecked Tesla Model S and reworking it into a stacked array that can store energy from his solar-power system. His battery tinkering resolves the issue of intermittency since his green power will be available whenever he needs it, night or day, rain or shine.
A day trader by profession, the 31-year-old doesn’t want to save the world. He just wants to get off the grid. He did his homework and concluded that off-the-shelf batteries just don’t yet have the heft he required to achieve that.
The mattress-sized Tesla battery did – it’s elephantine as lithium-ion batteries go – even if it cost him $20,000 and hundreds of hours of tinkering to make it work. “This is going to be my electric company,” he says.
In his battery obsession and ambition, Hughes turns out to be emblematic of something much grander. He is part of an unprecedented worldwide effort – equivalent to a kind of a tech-age version of the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb – to amp up, transform and reinvent the humble battery into an element that could profoundly change the global energy paradigm.
Consider the crash effort at the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research in suburban Chicago. Within five years, researchers want to create one or more battery types that can “store at least five times more energy than today’s batteries at one-fifth the cost,” according to George Crabtree, an agreeable silver-haired scientist who runs the U.S. Department of Energy-backed battery-research skunkworks.
Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leading-edge technology companies like Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors Inc. and scads of start-ups are getting into the act. Some are seeking to double the capacity and dramatically cut the costs of the lithium-ion battery, the standard in IPhones and electric vehicles. Others are working on mega-scale battery systems using novel chemistries that could cheaply store enough energy to help power entire cities.
Battery entrepreneurs have begun to even talk like revolutionaries. “The ability for a battery company to change the dynamics of the world is what has got us excited,” says Bill Watkins, chief executive officer of Imergy Power Systems Inc., a Fremont, California, startup working on utility-scale batteries. “We can actually make a big difference here. I call it democratizing energy.”
As the former CEO of Seagate Technology PLC, the Silicon Valley digital storage maker, Watkins can speak from experience about tectonic technology shifts. In 1980, a Seagate five-megabyte hard drive that rendered floppy disks obsolete was a $1,500 PC add-on. These days, drives holding two terabytes of data – equivalent to two million megabytes – can be had for a retail price of under $200.
What’s primarily driving the battery revolution is the phenomenal growth of rooftop and other forms of solar energy and an awakening by renewable energy advocates that storage is the lagging piece of the transformative puzzle. Solar now powers the equivalent of 3.5 million American homes and accounted for 34 percent of all newly installed electricity capacity last year. Wind supplies enough electricity for the equivalent of about 14.7 million U.S. homes, about the same as 52 coal-powered generating plants, according to the Wind Energy Foundation.
An exponential breakthrough in battery capacity and cost would bulldoze aside the limitations to adopting renewable energy on a massive scale, be a potent weapon to fight climate change by lowering carbon emissions and potentially bring billions of dollars in profits, never mind fame, to the winners. The knock on renewables is that while fossil fuels keep the power on all the time, solar fades when the sun doesn’t shine and wind power fizzles when the wind doesn’t blow – unless you have a way to store the excess for when you need it.
“What’s holding back solar and wind isn’t their availability but the fact that the technology to generate renewable energy has leapt far ahead of the capacity to store and deploy it round the clock as needed,” says Crabtree of the Joint Center project, which is run out of the federal Argonne National Laboratory.
Prophesies of energy revolutions always come with caveats, of course, and some researchers note that an exponential breakthrough in battery storage and cost has been forecast for more than a decade and still hasn’t arrived. “Of all these other battery technologies people promote, how many of them are real?” says Jeff Dahn, a professor at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia who continues to plug away at making stronger and cheaper lithium-ion batteries. “All that remains to be seen.”
And while hackers like Hughes capture the excitement around battery potential, their very existence demonstrates that cheap home batteries haven’t yet arrived at Home Depot.
That said, Tesla’s Musk in February announced the company will soon unveil a consumer battery that can be used for homes and businesses. Tesla sees the endeavor as a “multi-billion dollar per year one,” according to a job description for the company’s stationary storage unit posted on Tesla’s website.
Recall, too, that naysayers kept telling Texan George Mitchell, the father of the hydraulic fracturing revolution, that it was impossible to economically squeeze oil and gas out of tight shale formations. Fracking has upended the energy world. Remember also that people seeing the first brief-case-sized cell phones scoffed that such a thing would ever be widely adopted. Now, pretty much every second grader in America has one.
Simply doing the math on the ambitions of the Joint Center project – making batteries with five times the capacity at a fifth of the present cost – lays out the stakes and prospects. Electric vehicles would travel more than 400 miles on a charge instead of an average of 84 as a Nissan Leaf does now – better than many gasoline-powered vehicles.
Cheaper batteries also mean you could drive an EV off the lot for the same price as a bargain-basement gasoline model, making them truly mainstream. And with the option of charging them with solar power, owners will be able to motor past the local Exxon station without ever stopping – or even having to pay their utilities a dime. Who needs the grid, or the oil companies, then?
At the Geneva International Motor Show this month, no less than Aston Martin – the famed luxury British carmaker loved by James Bond – said it asked its engineers to produce what they considered “the future of luxury GT motoring.” What they introduced was an electric-powered DBX Concept car to be powered by lithium-sulfur cells, no gasoline necessary.
Similarly, as Hughes’s Tesla hack is already demonstrating, homes and businesses will be battery frontiers of their own. The rollout of inexpensive, powerful, compact battery arrays could fundamentally change consumers’ relationship with electric utilities. Homeowners and companies linking solar to batteries could self-generate round the clock and, if they choose to, do what Hughes wants to do – fire their power companies.
SolarCity Corp., the Musk-backed rooftop solar installer, has already started offering home rooftop solar systems paired with backup Tesla-made lithium-ion batteries. Solar-battery combinations are poised to become a big business, expected to grow into $1 billion a year in sales by 2018, according to GTM Research.
Forward-looking utilities could even get into the act, building vast battery arrays that would remove barriers to their harvesting of solar and wind energy, since that energy could be stored and deployed at any time. Economics aside, think of the political windfall of utilities going willingly green.
All this may be coming to a head sooner than most people realize. “Electricity markets will be turned upside down within the next 10-20 years, driven by solar and batteries,” says an August 2014 report from investment bank UBS. So might the auto industry and the oil companies.
In the case of Jason Hughes’s Tesla hack, it feels like one of those shape-shifting moments. The fossil-fuel grid has been a marvel but its time has come and technologically savvy people – rapidly becoming the majority of us – are seeking to connect to the new thing. “I’m not going to drill for oil and refine gasoline in my basement,” says Hughes, “but I can hook up solar panels and run my car.”
Hughes has a kindred spirit in Trond Arvid Rosvik, who lives almost 3,800 miles across the Atlantic from New Jersey in Oslo, Norway. They’ve never met, but Rosvik found Hughes through an Internet forum where Tesla owners swap experiences on everything from finding charging stations to do-it-yourself repairs.
That forum is where Hughes documented his tinkering in exhaustive detail, after Rosvik had finished a project of his own. Tesla employees declined to give Hughes advice on his project though they thought it was “pretty cool,” he says.
Electric car sales in Norway are brisk – representing 18 percent of all models sold in January – because the oil-rich country also has some of Europe’s highest fuel prices, the result of steep taxes. Among the biggest perks for electric vehicle owners is the right to zip along in empty bus lanes while fossil-fuel-powered cars sit in gridlock. Electric cars also avoid sales and registration taxes.
Teslas are also popular in Norway but Rosvik ended up with a power plant taken from a Nissan Leaf. It took him a weekend to hack the Leaf battery pack and connect it to a group of panels – allowing him to use solar power 24 hours a day in summer months.
He estimates the whole system, incorporating batteries scavenged from crashed and discarded Leafs, cost him less than 60,000 kronor ($7,732).
Rosvik, like Hughes, isn’t an engineer, even though he has technical training – he’s certified to repair televisions and electronics. He’s nonchalant about the challenges. “I wouldn’t say it’s sophisticated, really,” he says. “I have never worked with lithium batteries but with a little Google it wasn’t that difficult.” Tesla said it will have more information about its storage products in the next few months. Nissan didn’t want to discuss hackers tinkering with its Leaf batteries, but a spokesman said the company has looked into the potential of a second life for those batteries and, in fact, has a solar array tied to Leaf battery packs outside of its Nissan USA office in Franklin, Tennessee.
While it may not be hard, a lot of the hackers’ tinkering falls squarely into the “do not try this at home” category. As the 2013 battery overheating issues aboard Boeing 787 jetliners demonstrated, powerful lithium batteries can be unstable even in the hands of professionals. In worst-case scenarios, high temperatures can lead to a “thermal runaway,” a self-sustaining reaction that can cause violent explosions.
Back in the U.S., Hughes is undaunted. He and his fiancé, Ashley, recently moved to a 4,550-square-foot house in Hickory, North Carolina. He is in the process of installing 36 solar panels on the roof and another 66 in the backyard. With a second Tesla battery, he thinks he can move the house entirely off the grid, with enough juice on tap for a week of backup power even with very little sunlight.
In all, it’s a large-scale, grown-up version of home experiments Hughes conducted with his dad when in the fifth grade, connecting rudimentary solar panels to charge car batteries that would then power their coffee maker, microwave and Sega Genesis video game console.
While neighbors may find the setup odd, Hughes is convinced his thinking will spread as high-performance batteries get cheaper. “I don’t see how it can’t,” he says. “What I’m working on now for myself, 20 years from now is going to be pretty commonplace.”
Or as Crabtree from the Joint Center battery project describes the transformation under way, “Homeowners will begin to say, ‘hey, nothing is stopping me from putting a solar panel on the roof and a battery in the basement.’ And it will kind of get perfected and refined by doing, and it’ll be the citizen innovator that will make it happen.”
The Cental American country has achieved a major clean energy milestone, meeting 100 percent of its power demand with renewable energy for 75 straight days.
“The year 2015 has been one of electricity totally friendly to the environment for Costa Rica,” the state-owned power supplier Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) said in a press release.
The ICE says the country’s zero-emission milestone was enabled thanks to heavy rainfalls at four hydroelectric power facilities in the first quarter of 2015. These downpours have meant that, for the months of January, February and so far March, there has been no need to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity.
Instead, Costa Rica has been powered primarily by hydro power – both pumped storage and run-of-the-river plants – and a mixture of geothermal, wind, biomass and solar energy.
It’s important to remember that Costa Rica is a small nation. It has a total area of about 51,000 square kilometres, which is about half the size of the US state of Kentucky, and it has a population of only 4.8 million people. Furthermore, its primary industries are tourism and agriculture, rather than heavy, more energy-intensive industries such as mining or manufacturing.
Still, Costa Rica has done an excellent job developing it electricity sector, and supplying affordable, reliable power to its citizens.
According to the World Economic Forum’s 2014 Global Competitiveness Index, Costa Rica ranks second in Latin American countries behind only Uruguay with regards to electricty and telecommunications infrastructure.
Reporter Sophie Vorrath from RenewEconomy writes that the country is “providing a household coverage rate of 99.4 percent at some of the region’s lowest prices”.
Costa Rica’s record on renewable generation also stands out. As recently as last year, hydropower accounted for 80 percent of all electricity production, while geothermal energy was reported back in 2010 to account for upwards of 13 percent of the country’s electricity profile.
And new geothermal projects are in the pipeline to help the volcano-rich country capitalise further on this subterranean energy source.
In mid-2014, the Costa Rican government approved a US$958 million geothermal energy project. According to Jake Richardson from CleanTechnica, “the first plants are expected to generate about 55 MW and cost approximately $333 million to build”, and two other 50 MW plants will also be built nearby.
It’s good news that more geothermal will be coming on board, as there are obvious downsides of being too reliant on hydropower, especially run-of-the-river systems, which can be hindered by seasonal changes in water flow. Droughts can also severely impact power supplies. And there are also some environmental downsides to hydroelectric dams more generally, namely the impact on riparian ecosystems and passing fish.
Nevertheless, 100 percent renewable energy generation, for any extended period of time, is an enviable achievement.
MANILA, Philippines-Six months flitted like a dream for four Aeta grandmothers who traveled 4,800 kilometers to undergo free training in India and are now officially solar engineers.
Wearing shades and cheerfully recalling their experience at Barefoot College in Rajasthan, India, the four were a far cry from the group of introverts who left in September last year.
The four-Evelyn Clemente, 49; Sharon Flores, 40; Cita Diaz, 40; and Magda Salvador, 42-flew home on Monday from India via a Cathay Pacific flight.
“Time went by so quickly it feels like a dream,” Flores told the Inquirer in Filipino, recalling the kindness of strangers that gave her and her companions the opportunity to literally light up their communities.
“We know only a little English. We know how to write only our names. But it was enough,” she smiled.
First trip
A solar engineer sets up systems, including photovoltaic (“photon,” or light, and “voltage”) panels, to capture the sun’s heat and light and convert these into electrical or thermal energy for practical use. This is known as “green engineering.”
The use of solar power effectively reduces the consumption of traditional fossil fuels, such as oil, natural gas and coal. A college degree is usually required to become a solar engineer.
Flores said she and her companions did not feel lost although it was their first trip ever far away from their home provinces of Zambales and Tarlac.
“People were kind wherever we went,” she said.
Language barrier
According to Salvador, the group learned solar electrification with 32 other classmates from 11 countries.
“We hardly understood each other, speaking different languages. But somehow, we all got along well,” Salvador said.
She said the drive to learn something useful for their communities was the one factor that everyone shared.
For her part, Clemente admitted that she and her companions found the lessons difficult at first but soon got the hang of it.
“They (teachers) used color-coding to teach us so it soon became easier for us to learn,” she said, pointing out that the method effectively broke the language barrier.
Rural needs
The four women have not had any formal education until their trip to Barefoot College with the help of the Indian government and the nongovernment organizations Diwata Women in Resource Development Inc., Land Rover Club-Philippines and the Philippine Mine Safety and Environment Association.
Since 1989, Barefoot College has been focused on using solar energy to address needs in rural and remote villages worldwide.
Barefoot College, formerly the Social Works and Research Center, is an organization committed to helping the poor, neglected and marginalized sectors around the globe.
‘Change the world’
According to Indian Embassy First Secretary N. Ramakrishnan, the primary concept of Barefoot College is to “train a grandmother and change the world.”
He told the Inquirer that Barefoot College took in semiliterate, middle-aged women from far-flung areas around the world “to train them and then carry forward” what they learned.
Ramakrishnan said the Indian government sponsored the women’s education through the Indian Technical and Economic Cooperative Program of the Ministry of External Affairs.
Diwata Women president and lawyer Patricia Bunye said two of the new solar engineers already had the capability to help light up 100 households using solar energy.
Clemente and Flores live in a resettlement area in Sitio (settlement) Gala, Aningway Sacatihan, Subic, Zambales, with some 130 families. Diaz and Salvador are residents of Bamban town in Tarlac.
Bunye said her group was reaching out to possible financiers to set up solar electrification in two communities. Each community would need $56,000, or P2.5 million, she said.
Lighting up lives
Ramakrishnan said the four women’s education in solar engineering was more than symbolic.
“In lighting up their lives, they would be lighting up their villages,” Ramakrishnan said.
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Simin Qiu, a student at London’s Royal College of Art, has invented a unique water faucet that uses the laws of physics to save water.
Qiu was inspired by the many sacred spirals that exist in nature, in plants, shells and many other examples of natural spiraling phenomena. Qiu also noticed that water spiraled in nature in many circumstances, especially when in a pipeline.
Researching further, Qiu found that water actually slows down while in a spiral or pipeline, so he set out to create a water faucet that would create a spiral, and hopefully save water.
This goal led Qiu to design a water facet called “Swirl”, which sends the water from the faucet in a pipeline, and allegedly saves up to 15% on water usage! Qiu then created three different designs which will each save money on your water bill, although every faucet has a unique pattern.
Qiu’s Swirl design won an iF Design concept award in 2014, and he hopes to be able to distribute the faucet on a mass scale in the near future.
John Vibes writes for True Activist and is an author, researcher and investigative journalist who takes a special interest in the counter culture and the drug war. .
While visiting Ecuador, Valhalla learnt about a special plant called the Luffa. If taken care of properly, Luffas can turn into cleaning spongers for your skins or for your dishes in about 200 days. Just gotta make sure to keep them dry and healthy. Yes, you can grow your own natural sponge. Check out the video!
1. Infrastructure power 
