Hybrid Living

Biofuels may just be transitional solution before the cool technology comes along at an acceptable price tag, but there is still the issue of how to "green the masses" while we are waiting for affordable battery electric vehicles and fuel cell cars. A solution may be in hand.

Ricardo, an international automotive engineering design firm, have designed a technology that allows engines powered by ethanol to approach levels of efficiency hitherto only afforded to diesel engines, wiping the floor with poor gasoline engine efficiency. It’s called by it’s acronym "EBDI" or ethanol boosted direct injection. The thing about ethanol is that it has subtly different properties to gasoline, which manufacturers have been slow to exploit. For example, it is a higher octane fuel, and has a higher heat of vapourisation.

Rather than taking a "performance hit" of approximately 30% as many so-called "flex fuel" cars do, EBDI capitalises on the differences in the fuel properties. In part the technology works by using higher levels of turbocharging than would be possible in a conventional petrol engine – forcing extra air into the cylinder, creating a denser charge. It also uses the best of current gasoline engine technology – direct injection, variable valve timing and optimised ignition. The prototype engine is 3.2l V6. Whilst it’s only a temporary solution, any technologies that can help us minimise carbon emissions whilst we transition to alow carbon alternatives is a welcome development.

Biofuels may just be a transitional technology – by the time affordable battery electric vehicles and fuel cell cars come out, we may no longer need them.  But biofuels are developing, too, and as they improve, they present themselves as a better way to "green the masses".

Ricardo, an international automotive engineering design firm, has designed a technology that allows engines powered by ethanol to approach levels of efficiency hitherto only afforded to diesel engines, wiping the floor with poor gasoline engine efficiency. It’s called by it’s acronym "EBDI" or ethanol boosted direct injection. The thing about ethanol is that it has subtly different properties to gasoline, which manufacturers have been slow to exploit. For example, it is a higher octane fuel, and has a higher heat of vapourisation.

Rather than taking a "performance hit" of approximately 30% as many so-called "flex fuel" cars do, EBDI capitalises on the differences in the fuel properties. In part the technology works by using higher levels of turbocharging than would be possible in a conventional petrol engine – forcing extra air into the cylinder, creating a denser charge. It also uses the best of current gasoline engine technology – direct injection, variable valve timing and optimised ignition. The prototype engine is a 3.2L V6. Whilst it’s only a temporary solution, any technologies that can help us minimise carbon emissions whilst we transition to alow carbon alternatives is a welcome development.

It’s been a grim month for Nuclear Power, always a contentious issue for greens, power from the atom has taken two steps back as South African utility Eskom announce plans to cancel their tendering process for new nuclear plant in South Africa. It comes a week after revelations from the French economic publication Les Echos reveal that French campaign group "Sortir du nucléaire" have accused EdF of lying during a public consultation exercise which was the prelude to the decision to build a new nuclear plant at Flamanville in France.

Originally, it was announced that power from the Flamanville plant was costed at €43 / MWh, however, delays and added construction costs (a feature of every nuclear plant that has gone before Flamanville) have added to the costs and so the price of nuclear electricity from the plant is now estimated to be €55 / MWh – Les Echos stated that EdF were expected to announce this at their next meeting. The only other nuclear plant under construction is that at Olikuoto in Finland. It is of the same EPR (European Pressurised Reactor) design that is being constructed at Flamanville. The Finnsh reactor has also been plagued with problems and at one point in the construction, French contractor Bouygues were accused of using unqualified welders… quite worrying considering the specialised nature of nuclear engineering!

In an economy where finance is hard to come buy, and the governments of the world are already propping up their economies with massive debt, will massive projects which carry potentially massive liabilities such as nuclear power begin to look even less attractive, whilst smaller unit-cost renewables, with a demonstrable payback within their own life time

The recent furore surrounding biofuels and the food vs. fuel arguments, has highlighted to the world how important industrialised agriculture is to maintaining a steady food supply, and how precious our bio-productive land is. When we start diverting land to producing stuff other than food there are serious issues to be considered in terms of equity and social and environmental sustainability. When looking at the "Energy Return vs. Energy Invested" of biofuels, another serious flaw was highlighted – the carbon intensity of our industrialised agriculture systems.

In short, with ever more dire predictions about how much longer oil is going to last, there are some seriously big elephants in the room, when it comes to working out how long we can continue to feed the world’s growing population for when our agriculture is so dependent on oil to produce food.

Up until now, no one has given any really serious consideration to post-carbon agriculture, we’ve seen a few bits of ag-machinery powered by biofuels – big deal, it doesn’t take a radical leap in technology to make that work; but now we’re seeing something radically different, and really exciting.

New Holland, in partnership with Iveco, look set to debut a Fuel Cell tractor in early 2009. Dubbed the NH2, the fossil fuel dependent Diesel engine, has been replaced by a Fuel Cell, which has the potential to ween farms off their addiction to oil – soon you might be seeing ‘zero-carbon’ foodstuffs, alongside your Organics and Fairtrade.

The idea of producing Fuel Cell tractors has been kicking around for a bit, Allis Chalmers produced a Fuel Cell powered tractor back in 1959, however, after the demo of ploughing a field of Alfalfa, it ended up in the Smithsonian. What’s exciting, is that as a big noise in the tractor business, New Holland has the potential to transform agriculture completely by decarbonising one element of the food supply chain.

Via: Farmers Guardian

This might not seem like the most glamorous bit of the energy revolution, but cables are a big frikkin’ deal. And though superconductors are pretty sexy, regular old conducting cables can get pretty fancy too. Particularly when they’re under 300 to 1000 feet of salt water.

In this video Gavin Harper takes us on a little tour of how complex a wire really can be. First you have two layers of thin bundled steal cables to protect the cable from stresses. Obviously, the ocean can exert a massive amount of mechanical energy, otherwise we wouldn’t be building wave power plants at all.

The materials used to house and insulate the wires have to be changed as well. Since weight isn’t a problem, but water-proofing is, heavy rubber is used to insulate the three copper conductors. Also included in the cable are fiber optic wires for communicating with the power-generating structures, be they tidal turbines, wave generators, or offshore wind turbines.

All-together, what once seemed like a pretty simple idea gets massively complicated. But it’s just one more little step we’ve got to take toward a renewable future.

Filmed at EMEC – the European Marine Energy Centre, Orkney, UK,

The news has been abuzz the past couple of weeks with news of rotating towers, which will magically extract lots of energy from the wind, and with this abundance of energy, will be able to rotate their individual floors to face any aspect. There are some nice 3D rendered architects drawing on the internet at the moment, which seem to have captured everyone’s imagination. It’s a lovely concept in the 3D playground of the conceptual architect, and whilst I can see that the idea might take off in a virtual world such as second life…I’m not sold on the idea.

There are a number of reasons. Gazing into my green ball, I think that the engineering challenge is… not insurmountable – but impractical.

I. I’ve had the pleasure to visit a few different countries in Eastern Europe. The russians had rather a penchant for building T.V. towers in the capital cities of their satellite states. The tall buildings served as transmitters for Soviet propaganda, and by and large had some sort of observation deck at the top. Take Vilnius, Lithuania, sitting at the top of the tower, eating Cepilinai, our gastronomic feast was disturbed by the creaking of our platform as it rotated on its bearings. (I can only suppose that the reason this video has been dubbed with some music it to blur out the sound of the rotating platform creaking on its rails) It starts of as amusing – then becomes irritating by the end of the meal… so I can imagine sitting in my apartment with the rotating remote in my hand, looking at the view out of the window as the building rotates and I hear the sound of my floor creaking on its bearings.

II. Consider all the unexpected harmonics that will be set up in the central core, by a combination of rotating floors and wind turbines rotating. The Millenium Bridge in London (think Tacoma Narrows) gives us a nice illustration, of what seems like a fairly straight-forward piece of engineering, but soon turns into a nightmare. It turns out, that something as simple as the vibrations induced by people walking on the bridge (the purpose it was designed for) caused the bridge to rock uncontrollably from side to side.

III. Car lifts… The architect of one of these towers, envisages lifts in the central spine of the building, which you can drive your car into be whisked up to your respective floor, where you can park you car and get out onto your rotating room. This is a dumb idea for a number of reasons. I’ve been living in a block of flats with a car park out back with a pair of car lifts that move cars between two floors. Whilst it looks hi-tech, I am pleased that I have a ground floor parking space. I’ve had to call the fire brigade to get people out.

IV. The wind turbines. Sandwiched between two floors (which in themselves will likely induce turbulence?) how much wind energy are these turbines really likely to capture? Presumably in order to flow the wind needs to strike the building perfectly perpendicularly – the turbulence created by the adjacent floors – I am sure will disrupt any hint of laminar airflow.

It’s a pretty idea, and I’m certainly not a luddite that dislikes big thinking, but what I do object to is fundamentally unsustainable ideas being jazzed up with a bit of EcoGeekery and palmed off on the open-jawed public who look on with wonder as sustainably sound.

There are some wider questions that we need to be asking in relation to tall buildings, and a bit of green window dressing doesn’t go far enough to achieve the radical change required.

We know the hunt for better methods of removing CO2 from the atmosphere has been on for some time now. But a group from Columbia University in the U.S. believes that they have a novel device, which can grab a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air every day in a device that will fit inside a trans-modal shipping container. The technology doesn’t come at a knock down price – they estimate a unit will cost £100,000 – but we’re sure by the time the Far East has a chance to "rob-n-duplicate" it and engineer out the cost, they could become a useful tool in the fight against climate change.

The group responsible is quick to highlght that there is no such thing as a "magic bullet," but with reports from Mauna Loa that the CO2 concentration in our air has crossed 387ppm (40% higher than before the great industrial revolution, where profligate use of coal turned the wheels of industry), the need for solutions is highlighted.

The team feels they can build a protoype within two years that would successfully capture a ton of CO2 from the air per day – the equivallent of a passenger flying form New York to London. But if a Boeing 747-400 accommodating 524 passengers in a typical two class layout, is flying from New York to London with each passenger responsible for releasing a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere, it would take a whole lot of "magic machines" to off-set the flight. And let’s not forget how much CO2 is generated while waiting on the runway.

Moral: Don’t stop getting them energy saving lightbulbs…

While it’s an exciting development, we at EcoGeek won’t be giving up the day-job – climate change is far from solved; however, if this technology can be scaled up, made cheap and stamped out cookie cutter style all over the world, it could be another tool in our armory in the ‘War on Climate Change’…. did I sound like G.W.B for a minute there?

…and you can click here for the worldwide patent for the device.

Via The Guardian

Everyone likes to daintily skirt around the problem of population when talking about sustainability. It’s off limits and taboo, and the solutions are hard to get everyone to agree on. Though, we at EcoGeek have always maintained that the condom was the most signififcant environmental innovation in history.

Whilst there are plenty of ‘low tech’ solutions to stop…err…conception, there is now a preventative prophylactic apropos for an EcoGeek in the works. The remote control, implanted device will allow users to ‘press pause’ on their sperm. (although it doesn’t mention whether a ‘rewind’ function is in the works). The device has been developed by Australian scientists, and could herald a new dawn of even more convenient contraception for men, which has the potential to keep population growth under control more effectively.

A surgeon inserts a silicon chip into the vas deferens. The fob sends out RF waves, just like the key to your car. The silicon chip converts the RF into acoustic waves, which in turn induce movement in the material, allowing it to expand and seal the tube. Sending another pulse from the key fob lets the material contract allowing sperm to pass.However, to avoid ‘cross talk’ with say… your cordless phone, WiFi or bluetooth…. ultrahigh frequencies are used, combined with sophisticated coding, to make sure that no mistakes can occur.

All they need to do now, is integrate a button to turn off the lights so you can save electricity.

Via Popular Science

Nanotubes…. dontchajustlovethem? As nanotechnology advances rapidly, and appears to be an almost invaluable tool in the sustainable technologists armoury, being employed in a variety of next-gen technologies: Hydrogen storage, solar devices, more efficient semiconductors, and lightweight materials that could result in lighter composites all use nanotubes and other nanomaterials in their construction. They can even help turn CO2 into usable fuel!

However, Liz Borkowski from Grist has picked up on an article in the Journal Nature Nanotechnology, whose authors reckon that there could be a more sinister side to EcoGeek’s favourite little allotropes of carbon… and raises the spectre of ‘asbestos’ – the former wonder-material turned nasty. Previously used in more applications than you could shake a stick at, asbestos was discovered to cause particularly nasty cancers.
 
Asbestos, is long thin crystals of a natural mineral, whilst carbon nanotubes are long thin constructions of carbon atoms. There is a cautionary tale for the adoption of new technologies, lets keep our fingers crossed that nanotubes are benign. But questions remain about what effects nanotubes have in current uses. While injecting them into rats certainly causes problems, will they really kill if simply coating the faces of solar panels?

We will certainly need to watch out for applications that might shed nanotubes. And anything that would result in inhaling the stuff should be avoided at all costs. But mosts applications should be entirely benign.

Via. Grist

Could a vat of chemicals be a more effective way to harness the sun’s energy than those fancy, intricately crafted silicon wafers? We’re not sure, but  Professor Chaurasia of the University of Birmingham, UK was telling me about that possibility earlier in the month.

He’s developing a unique process in which propanol is dehydrogenated using a catalyst and clean, solar energy. The hydrogen then generates electricity – courtesy of a Proton Exchange Membrane fuel cell. The byproduct of dehydrogenated propanol – acetone, and the protons (H+) and electrons (e-) then all recombine to form more propanol, which is then ready to start the project all over again.

Very simply, it’s a way of harnessing the instability of propanol to push electrons onto the grid. It’s not a new way of creating hydrogen, it’s a new way of harnessing the sun’s power using the versatility of hydrogen, and the instability of propanol. Indeed, it’s pretty genius.

But the question of economics remains. Current solar cells are getting cheaper and more efficient every day. And though Chaurasia thinks that his chemical cells could be competitive that will depend on several factors. The propanol is cheap, PEM fuel cells and titanium catalysts are not, so we will have to wait for these "solar fuel cells" to scale up before making any real judgments.

Chaurasia’s most recent paper was published in the International Journal of Sustainble Energy.