Triac is not Tesla, but it's not meant to be

Tesla may have the celebrity cachet and media spotlight, but the humble, three-wheeled Triac is clearly the more practical choice for a "Green Core" consumer looking for a $25,000, all-electric vehicle with an honest 100-mile range. In a siliconvalley.com article, Mike Ryan, president of the firm based in Salinas, CA that produces the Triac, says that the car is aimed at people who have a more environmentally conscious lifestyle.

Key among the features is a sophisticated system for predicting remaining range before a recharge is needed.

The Triac will include a Vehicle Efficiency Data Assistant -- VEDA -- interface to the battery management system as well as diagnostic and navigational data. VEDA is an electronic learning system that captures a person's driving habits and commute patterns to accurately predict miles left before recharging.

"Range anxiety is something that gives people a lot of concern," Ryan said. "Say I forgot to charge my car. I'm at lunch. I want to run an errand before I go home. Will I make it home?"

Options in the electric car market are getting more expansive. The Triac is an interesting home-grown option that favors practicality over panache—and for many buyers that's a plus.

Sahara Solar Breeder Project to turn sand to solar cells to electricity

An ambitious project sponsored by universities in Janpan and Algeria seeks to accelerate the production of energy from solar cell technology using silica and sunlight from the Sahara Desert. The objective is to first extract silica from the sand to create solar panels and then combine the panels to make solar power plants in the same geographic area. The plants would be used to power additional silica extraction and solar cell manufacturing, building exponentially on the energy potential with a target of providing 50 percent of the world's energy by 2050.

As detailed in a Gizmag.com article, the project is attempting to accomplish a number of things that haven't been done before.

Subscribing to the "give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" philosophy, another major aim of the project is to train scientists and engineers from developing countries. To that end, the project won’t just bring well-understood technology from developed countries, but will involve people from both developing and developed countries working together on R&D right from the outset.

“Because technology hasn't yet been established for making silicon from desert sand, then using it to make solar cells, our aim is to work together from the basic research stage, so we can discover and nurture talented scientists and engineers in Africa," said Koinuma.

More power to this project and a sincere hope that they meet their objectives.

Solar power creates electric grid challenges in Germany

The accelerating adoption of solar panels in Germany looks like a case of too much of a good thing. The antiquated power grid across the country is having trouble coping with the fluctuations resulting from feed-ins from photovoltaic systems and wind turbines.

As reported in this UPI.com news story:

Experts have long called for an overhaul of the European power grid to integrate the fluctuating renewable energy sources such as solar and wind power.

Experts forecast between 8 gigawatts and 10 GW of solar power capacity to be installed this year -- the equivalent of roughly 10 large coal-fired power plants. In 2009, only 4 GW were installed.

With an equally fragmented and outdated power grid, the U.S. would do well to overhaul its own infrastructure in preparation for more extensive use of renewable energy. Google's investment in the Atlantic Wind Connection is a step in the right direction.

Mini Goes Electric

Another automobile manufacturer, Mini, dips its cast aluminum toe into the electric vehicle market, but this type it's scooter prototypes that appeared at the Paris Motor Show, rather than cars, as profiled by Wired magazine.

Details are scarce. It has an electric motor. You plug it in. But, the prototypes recall classic Italian scooters and Mods versus Rockers schtick.

There are three “interpretations” of the design by Adrian van Hooydonk, senior VP of design for BMW Group. One is a two-seater done up in the same colors (matte charcoal and yellow) as the Mini-E electric prototype. The second is a single-seater Mini calls “almost purist in design.” The third draws on British ’60s pop culture, particularly “the distinctive graphics of the Mod era.”

As a Mini Cooper owner and an admirer of the technology emerging from this BMW Group, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

RMI's Reinventing Fire initiative launched

If the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico makes you want to help move the U.S. to a more sane approach to meeting energy requirements, consider the path that the Rocky Mountain Institute has devised to reshape our thinking and our national priorities on energy issues.

Post Peak Oil Two-Wheeled Fun

I'm a sucker for two-wheeled vehicles, but I've been discouraged lately from the acquisition of petroleum-powered machines by both the nature of the fuel and the CO2 generation. Bicycles are great, but in a rural area with few bike paths battling autos for a tiny sliver of space on a skinny backroad can get dicey.

The introduction of a new electric scooter, the ZEV7000, as profiled by Gizmag, looks like a healthy way to enjoy two-wheeled travel without the pollution problem.

The battery power specs for this machine, billed as the fastest electric scooter on the market, look pretty good:

Range for the ZEV7000 is similar to the Vectrix at between 55 and 70 miles between charges, which take 25 minutes for a 75 percent top-up, or around 2 hours for a full charge. You can extend the vehicle's range or choose to access higher power by using what the company calls its "electronic transmission" - a switch that lets you choose how many amps the engine is running at. Low amps means low power but extended range, higher amps will drain the battery faster but give the bike substantially more beans.

Put up a wind turbine to recharge it at night and you've got a non-petroleum mode of transport that promises to be a kick and a half to ride.

Accelerating Wind Power in the UK

While the US effectively twiddles its collective thumbs on the issue of offshore wind power (with installations such as Cape Wind Project in Nantucket Sound endlessly delayed), the UK is forging ahead with a massive investment in offshore wind farms. The British government has approved the building of wind farms in nine development zones capable of generating more than 32 gigawatts of power, as detailed in this article from the Environment News Service.

Justin Wilkes, policy director of the European Wind Energy Association, said the projects announced today, once built, "will multiply by 10 Europe's offshore wind energy capacity."

"These are European companies building a European industry and generating some 45,000 European jobs. It takes Europe closer to exploiting the power of our seas and developing a brand new European offshore wind industry," said Wilkes. "Offshore wind is Europe's largest untapped energy source. There is enough wind across Europe's seas to power Europe seven times over."

The power that will be generated by the developments announced today is part of the more than 100 GW of offshore wind power currently being planned by European utilities, developers, and governments, mostly in the North Sea.

Proposed projects in the US, as shown by this map created by OffshoreWind.net, show potential, but we lag significantly behind the European countries that have installed wind turbines offshore.

Waste Not, Want Not

One of the deeply ingrained problems of our Western culture, particularly in the U.S., is that we've been living through a period of abundance with profligate attitudes. Many of our current energy challenges could be met by simply being less wasteful.

Generating electricity from waste heat is a step in the right direction. A Waste Heat Engine designed by Cyclone Power Technologies, as profiled in this gizmag article, can generate up to 10kw, recapturing energy from heat sources such as biomass combuston, industrial ovens, and furnaces.

Journalist Paul Evans notes:

The first WHE system will be installed at Bent Glass Design in Hatboro, PA. This system will harness waste heat from the customer’s glass manufacturing furnaces, and is expected to produce enough electricity to light their 65,000 ft2 facility while providing a quick payback possibly within two or three years.

Smart technology! We need more of this kind of approach.

New Wind Energy Milestone: 4,000 megawatts in Six Months

The wind-power juggernaut continues, with a promising new milestone announced by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) and reported by Consumer Reports.

AWEA CEO Denise Bode commented:

“The numbers are in, and while they show the industry has been swimming upstream, adding some 4,000 MW over the past six months, the fact is that we could be delivering so much more,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “Our challenge now is to seize the historic opportunity before us to unleash this entrepreneurial force and build up an entire new industry here in the U.S. that will create jobs, avoid carbon, and strengthen our energy security. To achieve that, Congress and the Administration must pass a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES) with strong early targets.”

Among the states that added substantial new generating capacity are Texas (454 MW), Iowa (160 MW), and Missouri (146 MW). Manufacturing investment in the U.S., however, is not as strong as in other countries, such as China, according to Bodine.

Cooling the Planet with White Roofs

Some energy solutions are complicated. Others are amazingly simple. Among the simplest is a trend that has developed in California to use heat reflective properties of white surfaces to save energy. Homeowners and businesses are installing roof coverings made of a shiny plasticized material that can reduce air-conditioning costs by 20 percent or more during sunny weather, as reported by Felecity Barringer in a New York Times article, White Roofs Catch On as Energy Cost Cutters.

As shown in the photo (by J. Emilio Flores), a Chino, CA discount store relies on a combination of solar panels and white roof covering to minimize energy requirements.

This approach is validated by historical precedents dating back centuries.

The physics behind cool roofs is simple. Solar energy delivers both light and heat, and the heat from sunlight is readily absorbed by dark colors. (An asphalt roof in New York can rise to 180 degrees on a hot summer day.) Lighter colors, however, reflect back a sizable fraction of the radiation, helping to keep a building — and, more broadly, the city and Earth — cooler. They also re-emit some of the heat they absorb.

Unlike high-technology solutions to reducing energy use, like light-emitting diodes in lamp fixtures, white roofs have a long and humble history. Houses in hot climates have been whitewashed for centuries.

It's going to take a multitude of techniques, as well as substantial lifestyle changes, to cope with climate disruption threats, but something as simple as a white roof isn't a bad place to get started.

Zero Energy Homes Within Reach

A recurring theme in this blog is that the answers to many of our energy problems have already been solved. Making changes, however, to our building practices, transportation systems, public utility regulations, and legal infrastructure in order to implement proven energy-saving strategies is a daunting challenge at multiple levels.

A recent post on the TerraPass site by Adam Stein illustrates this point. Steins writes about the latest generation Passive Houses that rely on airtight design, sophisticated ventilation systems, and thick insulation to create a living space that consumes 90 percent less energy than a typical home. Add some supplementary power from a renewable source and you have what is essentially a Zero Energy Home.

One builder that Stein showcases, Postgreen, has applied innovative building techniques to the equation, resulting in a LEED Platinum home being built in Philadelphia with total construction costs of $100,000.

While their urban dwelling design style might not suit everyone's taste, it's clear that a zero energy home can be extremely affordable, as well as a way to dramatically lower a family's carbon footprint. These kinds of technologies should be springing up all over the country, wherever buildings--residential or commercial--are being constructed. Why they are not is more a matter of entrenched interests and a business-as-usual mindset than any practical considerations.

Algae Powers Venice

Work is underway in the City of Venice to build a 40-megawatt power plant that runs on fuel made from algae. Expected to be finished by mid-2011, the power plant will supply roughly 50 percent of the city's electricity requirements.

As reported in ecoworldly:

The algae will be cultivated in laboratories and put in plastic cylinders where water, carbon dioxide, and sunshine can trigger photosynthesis. The resulting biomass will be treated further to produce a fuel to turn turbines. The carbon dioxide produced in the process will be fed back to the algae, resulting in zero emissions from the plant. “Venice could represent the beginning of a global revolution of energy and renewable resources. Our goals are to achieve the energetic self-sufficiency for the seaport and to reduce CO2 emissions, including those one produced by the docked ships”, says the president of the seaport of Venice Authority, Paolo Costa.

Finding ways to extract energy from nuisance plants and biomass waste may be an effective means to move a few steps closer to zero emission energy production.

The Distributed Generation Approach

We've grown up in a country where when you flipped the switch on the wall to light a lamp, the electricity came from a power source dozens or maybe hundreds of miles away. This centralized model of power distribution is beginning to give way to a smarter approach: distributed generation. Small wind farms, solar installations for a building or apartment complex, co-generation systems that heat a neighborhood, geothermal deployments that heat in the winter and cool in the summer.

In this article in The Nation, Think Solar, Think Small, Craig Rosen builds a case for abandoning the grand notions of a national backbone grid in favor of small-scale, community-oriented power generation. He writes:

To be sure, the romance of a renewable national grid is classic American thinking: a big problem requires a big solution. But the distributed generation approach (DG in energy lingo) is emerging from advances in solar technology and detailed studies of alternatives to big power-line projects. Consider what happened when Minnesota regulators looked carefully last year at the CapX 2020 project, a proposed cluster of new power lines costing up to $1.7 billion. A key purpose of the lines was to link Minnesota with proposed wind farms in the Dakotas. This is just the type of project favored by Pickens and other supporters of big electric transmission. But after examination the regulators found that Minnesota could develop many small 10-40 megawatt wind farms within the state totaling 600 megawatts--equivalent to a modern power plant--without any new transmission.

"We call it the '600 megawatts for nothing' study," said Mike Michaud, an engineer and consultant who formerly worked with the state regulatory staff. "There was no denying there were twenty spots on the existing grid [where] you could put generation for no cost at all." Michaud added that there is no guarantee the $1.7 billion transmission project would be restricted to clean power--it might in some cases be used to transport power from coal-burning plants.

He mentions a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance that determined half the states in the U.S. could be energy self-sufficient by harnessing renewables within their borders, satisfying a considerable fraction of their own energy needs.

Powerful food for thought...

Energy Tips for President Obama

A few energy tips offered by some high-profile folks to the incoming President Obama (produced by the Sierra Club)...

Global Perspective on Green Stimulus Packages

The U.S. isn't the only country determined--under Barack Obama's leadership--to get its economy rolling through stimulus packages to produce alternative energy. This piece, from LinkTV, offers a concise view of what some other countries are doing in this area.

Passive Energy Design Attracts Interest

At the very top of the popularity list of e-mailed articles at the New York Times three days afters its initial posting, No Furnaces but Heat Aplenty in 'Passive Houses' is an instructive lesson in solving energy problems in a non-traditional way. Journalist Elisabeth Rosenthal describes an innovative approach to building design, focusing on the "passive house" of a German family that maintains comfortable temperatures throughout the winter even though it has no furnace. The trick? Ultrathick insulation, a unique ventilation system, and similar design advances that essentially recycle heating.

It's a technique that has been tried, but was marked by failure in the past.

Decades ago, attempts at creating sealed solar-heated homes failed, because of stagnant air and mold. But new passive houses use an ingenious central ventilation system. The warm air going out passes side by side with clean, cold air coming in, exchanging heat with 90 percent efficiency.

“The myth before was that to be warm you had to have heating. Our goal is to create a warm house without energy demand,” said Wolfgang Hasper, an engineer at the Passivhaus Institut in Darmstadt. “This is not about wearing thick pullovers, turning the thermostat down and putting up with drafts. It’s about being comfortable with less energy input, and we do this by recycling heating.”

There are now an estimated 15,000 passive houses around the world, the vast majority built in the past few years in German-speaking countries or Scandinavia.

This isn't an approach that I hear discussed often in the U.S., which is perhaps why there was such a tremendous amount of interest in the article at the New York Times. Unlike other forms of alternative energy at the residential level, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars to deploy, passive houses in Germany cost approximately 5 to 7 percent more to build than a conventional home. This technique definitely bears more investigation. Sometimes the solutions to the most vexing energy problems are right before us, but overlooked in the rush toward flashier, higher technology solutions.

Dr. Chu Proposes Clean Energy Solutions

Dr. Steven Chu, under consideration as Energy Secretary in the Obama administration, offered his thoughts on clean energy paths during a speech at the National Energy Summit in early December. He places a premium on energy efficiency and cites "existence proofs" demonstrating ways we can reduce energy use without reducing our national wealth. His keen awareness of the dire threat posed by climate change and understanding of the breakthrough technologies that offer our best bet for handling future energy requirements may lead us in a more promising direction--if he is appointed...

Consuming Less as a Way of Life

Energy use and prodigious consumption go together, as anyone living in America--in the most consumer-focused society in the history of the planet--is keenly aware (but often oblivous to the consequences). Jim Merkel, an engineer living in a small town in Vermont made the transition from (as he describes it) a jet-set military salesman who voted for Reagan to a bleeding-heart pacifist, eco-veggie-head-hooligan. Along the way, he dramatically simplified his life, shedding many of his "toys", and figured out how to live comfortably on 5,000 USD a year.

The story of Merkel's amazing transformation, which recently appeared in the Times Argus, is especially timely as many of us are trying to figure out how to cope with the current economic downturn.

Times Argus staff writer, Kevin O'Conner, effectively paints a picture of Merkel's evolution from consumer to conserver, with many examples of the motivations behind adopting a simpler lifestyle, gleaned from a number of different cultures, including the Navajos. Ultimately, the lesson is pretty simple.

So what’s Merkel’s solution?

“The easiest is simply to take less.”

He also suggests “sharing” housing and transportation (“Share with another person and halve your impact; with four people, quarter the impact”) and “caring” for what you have, be it properly maintaining household items or supporting communities by producing and purchasing goods locally.

Farm stands and mom-and-pop stores are close, but aren’t supermarket prices cheaper?

“What you don’t pay over the counter you pay in taxes, dirty air, dead animals, polluted water, clear-cut forests, sweatshops and strip-mined lands,” Merkel writes in his book. “Small-scale bioregional producers, although their products might use less energy and materials and create less waste, don’t get big tax breaks and bailouts or discounted access to resources because they wield less political influence.”

More on Merkel's vision and the details of his simplified life on his Web site: The Global Living Project.

San Francisco as the Electric Car Capital

San Francisco Skyline
Originally uploaded by m.john16

What better place than San Francisco to become a showcase for electric vehicle use and green transportation? The State of California has allocated a billion dollars to establish the infrastructure, including numerous charging stations throughout the city, to encourage the shift away from fossil fuel use.

As related in an article in The Guardian:

Officials say the plans will put California on a footing with other countries leading the attempt to switch away from dependence on oil, such as Israel, Denmark and Australia.

"What happens in San Francisco and in Oakland and in San Jose results in what happens in California - and what happens in California affects what happens in the rest of the nation," said Jared Blumenfeld, director of San Francisco's department for the environment, who has helped make the city one of the greenest in the US.

Electric cars without charging stations are about as useful as fish on bicycles, so this move bodes well for California's transportation future.

Soros Sees Alternative Energy as an Economic Engine

With the worldwide financial crisis in full swing, during an interview with Bill Moyers, financieer and philanthropist George Soros offers a way out: an immediate, energetic turn to alternative energy to combat global warming. The opportunities are there. Can we muster the political will to overcome the entrenched energy interests?