Microbes: the future of energy

From MSNBC an overview of a few ways our tiny, tiny friends are being explored as useful tools in the drive to create clean, sustainable energy.

Microscopic organisms — archaea, bacteria and fungi — have the potential to reshape the world’s power supply. Microbes could provide a vast energy resource that is as efficient and portable as coal, oil and natural gas, said Bruce Rittmann, director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute.

Some microbial processes, such as using yeast to turn plant sugars into ethanol, already account for a few percent of the energy mix, noted Arnold Demain, a microbial biologist at Drew University in Madison, N.J. Other processes, such as using bacteria to derive electricity from fuel cells, are still in the research and development stage but show potential for deployment a few years down the road.

Of course, if you want your kids to take an interest, you can always tell them about the “Electric Fart Machine” at Pennsylvania State University that turns CO2 into methane for easy storage.

Solar cell breaks efficiency record. CNet News

From CNet

Boeing-Spectrolab has developed a solar cell that can convert almost 41 percent of the sunlight that strikes it into electricity, the latest step in trying to drop the cost of solar power.

Potentially, the solar cell could bring the cost of solar power down to around $3 a watt, after installation costs and other expenses are factored in, over the life of the panel. The new cost information comes from Boeing, whose Spectrolab unit supplies searchlights and solar simulators, and the Department of Energy, which sponsored the project. Current silicon solar cells provide electricity at about $8 a watt, before government rebates. The goal is to bring it to $1 a watt without rebates or incentives.

NY Times: Space Solar Plant is a Go!

NY Times Energy and Enviroment

California approved a utility contract with Solaren for the nation’s first space-based solar power plant last Thursday. The project is slated to be turned on in 2016.

“At the conceptual level, the advantages of space-based systems are significant,” said Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, during a hearing on Thursday. “This technology would offer around-the-clock access to clean renewable energy, and while there’s no doubt this project has many hurdles to overcome, both regulatory and technological, it’s hard to argue with the audacity of the project.”

The plan is to deploy an inflatable Mylar mirror one kilometer in diameter which will collect and concentrate sunlight on a smaller mirror. The mirror will,  in turn will focus the rays on photovoltaic modules.  The modules will convert the collected energy into radio frequency waves, which would be beamed to a station on the ground. Here the process would be reversed, transforming radio waves back into electricity.

The developers acknowledge that putting a solar power plant in space will cost a few billion dollars more than an earth based photovoltaic farm generating the equivalent amount of electricity.

Air Fueled Battery has Potential to Last Ten Times Longer

From the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)

18 May 2009

According to research funded by EPSRC, a new type of air-fueled battery could offer up to ten times the energy storage of currently available designs

This design would affect a broad ranged of electronic products, most notably laptops and cell phones. In addition, according to the press release, development of this battery could provide a major boost to the renewable energy industry.

An early demonstration model of the STAIR cell, not an electric condom

The expanded capacity is due to a component that uses oxygen, which replaces some of the chemicals currently used in batteries.  Fewer chemicals equals more energy for the same size battery.

From the press release:

The STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell should be cheaper than today’s rechargeables too. The new component is made of porous carbon, which is far less expensive than the lithium cobalt oxide it replaces.

This four-year research project, which reaches its halfway mark in July, builds on the discovery at the university that the carbon component’s interaction with air can be repeated, creating a cycle of charge and discharge. Subsequent work has more than tripled the capacity to store charge in the STAIR cell.

Professor Peter Bruce of the Chemistry Department at the University of St Andrews, reports on the progress of the project: “ Our results so far are very encouraging and have far exceeded our expectations.”,  estimating that it will be at least five years before the STAIR cell is commercially available.

The world’s first osmotic power plant (testing) opened!

From Statkraft

Using osmosis Statkraft is producing 2 to 4 watts of power with their new Osmotic Power Plant. If it is successful, it will probably expand or be used as a testing ground for improving efficiency.

The drawback is the use of large amounts of fresh water, a natural resource that is becoming more scarce.

We’ll cross our fingers on this one.

More from the Guardian

Representative Setzer phoned Mac yesterday

He took the time to inquire at the Public Utilities Commission as to why we had not been updated on our case.

According to Mr. Setzer, the engineers at the PUC were not satisfied with the information and documentation provided by Duke Energy and had returned it to Duke so they could correct the problems.

I’ll take that as a good sign on several fronts. Duke isn’t getting to pull any shenanigans…at least so far…. that get them off the hook scot-free .

Perhaps the fact that I am attempting to create some transparency is having some small effect.

And knowing that the Governor is aware of the situation can’t hurt either.

We’ll see how it goes from here.

Turning (wasted) Heat into Electricity

From the Smarties at MIT

…new research points the way to a technology that might make it possible to harvest much of that wasted heat and turn it into usable electricity.

That kind of waste-energy harvesting might, for example, lead to cellphones with double the talk time, laptop computers that can operate twice as long before needing to be plugged in, or power plants that put out more electricity for a given amount of fuel, says Peter Hagelstein, co-author of a paper on the new concept appearing this month in the Journal of Applied Physics.

Hagelstein, an associate professor of electrical engineering at MIT, says existing solid-state devices to convert heat into electricity are not very efficient. The new research, carried out with graduate student Dennis Wu as part of his doctoral thesis, aimed to find how close realistic technology could come to achieving the theoretical limits for the efficiency of such conversion.

Bev Perdue does it right.

In contrast to the letter from the clerks at the Office of the President, those working for Governor Perdue have a much more coherent system in place for dealing with communications from the public. It may be a matter of scale. The population of North Carolina vs. the population of the U.S. Again, no slap at the current administration. I would imagine that system needs to be both streamlined and updated.

Govenor Perdue’s letter was addressed to both of us as individuals and the body of the letter noted specifics included in our communication to her.

And, bonus, she sent a cc: to the NC Public Utilities Commission.

Thank you Governor Perdue and thank your staff.

I know you realize the importance of supporting sustainable technologies and systems to the future of North Carolina. Our economy is struggling and developing a job market that uses or develops sustainable technology will have to be included in any recovery plan.

We have so many natural resources: kudzu, bamboo and hopefully sometime in the future hemp, that have a low impact on the environment and yet offer a lot of raw materials that self-renew. I appreciate that you support alternative energy and renewable resources, because you have the foresight to see what they offer.

Something (finally) happened.

Well, it’s been a busy week. Or perhaps the crutches are just making it seem that way.

It seems that in addition to my broken big toe (thanks cat, really, thanks so much), Representative Setzer has been under the weather according to the email he posted to us on Wednesday.

We hope he gets to feeling much better; and sooner rather than later.

Our installer/contractor was out on Monday trying to beat the weather. While he and his crew were working I left them to run some errands. Okay, maybe run fails to describe the actual movement.

While I was out driving around, I heard an interview with an American who worked for a Japanese newspaper for a number or years. He was shilling a book about his experiences.

While he was there, he wrote articles on the Japanese mafia and obviously pissed them off quite badly. He was following leads that would reveal that one of the top crime bosses (a common thug according to the reporter) had parlayed some information on his Japanese peers to the American FBI in exchange for a temporary nullification of his blacklisting. It seems he wanted to come into the US for a liver transplant at a top hospital.

The reporter was invited to the meeting with the bosses goons by an ultimatum of do it or be dead within the week. He wisely decided to attend.

And this is the most interesting part of the interview; he took a friend from the Japanese police force along, one assumes as both a witness and as protection. In the meeting, the bosses “emissaries” threatened him and his family with death if he didn’t drop the story. But because of the nature of the language used, even the policeman would have been hard pressed to testify in court that the reporter had been threatened.

Language is a slippery thing. Taken literally, one can have a rather benign conversation. Or tell a rather interesting story. But the subtext, the body language, a simple lifting of an eyebrow or a drop in the voice’s register can relay a lot of meaning within the context of the conversation.

That said, I don’t have the capacity to be quite that clever. As I told the Orthopedic P.A., I’m both lazy and impatient. And underpinning those rather charming traits is a wide pragmatic streak. Why dance around the point and lose the potential for making your meaning clear? Because frankly, there are people in this world who are so stupid they wouldn’t “get it” if you tattooed in reverse on their forehead so they had to read it in the mirror every day.

And it comes down to the literalness of this. While I was out running around, our contractor was at our house losing money. Even though he’s been “in discussions” with Steve Smith, Duke Energy is obviously not budging on any part of the problem as presented. And according to him he has to “continue to work with these people” because he has a number of jobs pending and in process in the region. His livelihood, and hence his life, depend on the good graces of Duke Energy.

If Duke in any way admits culpability in our project (which Steve Smith did initially, but has since denied) then a precedent has been set. In their minds, it is easier (read cost effective) to sandbag each shallow pocket complaint, rather than examine the  model as it exists to find ways that it can be both accommodating and productive.

I have a strong suspicion that our delay in hearing from the PUC hinges on this point.

Since there is no ombudsperson to act as an advocate for people who have no other choice in their energy provider (but they are NOT a monopoly they are a “Public Utility”) we don’t know if there is progress, no progress, the zombie virus is running rampant through the states capital and news organizations are forced to suppress the information…you know, that kind of thing. We also don’t know how much elbow rubbing goes on between the folks at the PUC and Duke Energy. As with Green Power, which touts itself as a non-profit, “renewables” organization, the PUC doesn’t have the monetary or political clout to call shenanigans on Duke Energy out loud and in public.

It is highly likely that Steve Smith is hoping that in turning a blind eye to the work our contractor does, (which according to Duke Energy directives, he has to get their permission to implement,) they can placate us.

Buy one peasant off at another peasant’s expense and the problem will go away.

Well, if Duke Energy wants to “buy me off”, I’d like to let them know right now, I’m not a common whore.

I’m an expensive call girl.

I have a price that would allow me to sucker punch my principals to the point that I can lay down and shut up, but it is unlikely that Duke would be willing or able to meet it.

And speaking of expensive prostitutes, then there’s politics…..

We received a “letter” from President Obama on Saturday; or more correctly, several of his staff. Now don’t get me wrong. I didn’t expect a direct reply to the letter we sent to him. (or to Stephen Chu or Beth Perdue or any of the other big names on the stage) Those were sincerely meant as -You need to know what kind of muck your subjects are crawling around in, because if you want to actually implement any changes in a forward direction, understanding the muck and it’s layout are important- letters.

I am honestly and sincerely happy that several different people are gainfully employed dealing with common muck letters for the President.

I wonder how much one makes, opening letters, examining them for hidden dangers, sending the envelopes off to the reply-envelope-preparer so they can assume that the information on the address label constitutes the name of a person sending it (rather than, say….2 people), taking the time to hand address it in the name of a person that can’t possibly exist in the U.S., then sending the mislabeled envelope to the folks whose job it is to find files in their computer with the same general subject as the one in the letter, cutting and pasting the parts together with the rather insincere salutation of  “Dear Friend”, slapping a electronically scanned signature on the bottom, an embossed stamp on the top, stuffing the information heavy – content light letter in the envelope and how-do-you-do-Mary, off to the US Postal Service. Postage paid with my tax dollars. Proud American. Yes, indeed: Proud American.

No slap at the President. He inherited a huge mess and we sympathize. There was truly no expectation of a personal reply. But the rather haphazard attempts to make the appearance of being personable lean to the insulting my intelligence end of the scale. Frankly, Mac and I didn’t need to be informed on governmental initiatives for clean and renewable energy. We assumed as much based on the fact that we are somewhat marginally informed due to lived experience. Instead of a bid for attention, it’s called: Trying to do our part because it’s the right thing to do. You should try it sometime.

I realize that the Administration is trying to create jobs and reduce job loss. And having a mass of clerks gainfully employed sending tangentially related reply letters to concerned and/or disgruntled citizens, allows a lot of folks to take home a paycheck every week and makes me want to say with complete and utter restraint: thanks clerks, really, thanks so much.

Posting to Representative Mitchell Setzer

Greetings Representative Setzer,

I spoke with you over the phone in September regarding our complaint with Duke Energy and problems with our interconnection which were not being addressed.

I have included (shown below) a copy of the email I received from the Public Utilities Commission (I think. There was no identifying text making that definitively clear)

As you can see, Ms. Debnam promised a response no later than ONE MONTH AGO.

That is one more month our system has not been functional because we are afraid to reconnect to Duke’s system without the line surge problem being addressed.

I responded to Ms. Debnam’s letter at the end of October hoping for an update. As yet there has been no reply to that email either.

How do you think we should proceed in order to get someone, ANYONE, to respond to our issue?

Thank your for your assistance to this point. It has been invaluable.
I hope you are well.