Archive for June, 2008

Over the years, I’ve been exposed to many cleantech concepts that are just, well, wacky. I’ve seen articles on tethered airborne wind turbines and mile-high thermal generation towers, heard from entrepreneurs touting cold fusion devices and floating solar collectors for thermal electricity generation, and even witnessed what seemed to be a demonstration of a gizmo that purportedly harnesses the ambient magnetic flux in the universe (against the accepted laws of physics, mind you).

Last week, I was sent a link to a story on MSNBC of a Canadian gentleman who is working on man-made tornadoes for electricity generation. This one might take the cake. To quote Bob Uecker from the movie “Major League,” “Juuuuust a bit outside.” See what you think.

Most mad scientists are oblivious to the fact that just because something theoretically is doable, doesn’t mean it should be done or is economic to do.

In the end, though, I gotta give these folks their due. If it weren’t for oddballs pushing the species, humans would probably still be sitting around in caves saying “Ugh.” It’s probably going to be a couple of what are initially considered wacky ideas that produce the necessary breakthroughs to truly solve our energy and environmental dilemmas. So, for that reason, I try to be somewhat open-minded in looking at the crazy stuff that sometimes comes across my transom.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com
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Recently, both CNN and the Wall Street Journal ran stories that similarly raised the heretical question: Is the American dream of suburbanism being killed by high gas prices?  Increasingly, the answer seems to be yes.

Eastern philosophies teach that our strengths are also our weaknesses. In the case of the United States, our abundance of land led to a pervasive trend of sprawl in the last half of the 20th century. We fled cities and towns to massive homes on big tracts in subdivisions, premised on the convenience afforded by independent vehicles running on low-cost roads and gasoline.

The boon of growth has now become our bane. No longer can people rely upon cheap fuel, and as gasoline purchases fall, so too will the quality and/or affordability of the road infrastructures as departments of transportation become underfunded. In short, many Americans are now trapped living in a system of deteriorating fundamentals.

The pathway out of the conundrum may lie in the concept of New Urbanism – a smart-growth philosophy based heavily on transit-oriented development (TOD). TOD implies mixed-use clusters of green buildings and highly walkable communities nested around mass transportation nodes. TOD seems increasingly inevitable as a response to the new realities of the 21st century.

It won’t (can’t) happen quickly, but I speculate that America will slowly but surely begin to look more European: cities and towns with refocused density linked by mass transit corridors (e.g., rail), allowing the rural countryside to re-emerge in its glory between the developed areas. CleanTech innovators and entrepreneurs are well-advised to be working with this macro-trend in mind.

I have the pleasure of writing this post from one of the most beautiful places on the planet, Hawaii, where I am lucky enough to travel regularly to visit family.

In 1995, while lounging on the Big Island, I decided to shift my career away from conventional energy toward alternative energy. I saw what was then considered a big windfarm at South Point – 37 Mitsubishi 250 kw turbines. Many of the hulking machines were not turning even though the wind was consistently strong, no doubt because of mechanical difficulties. Still, I was intrigued and foresaw the need and possibilities for renewable energy – especially in places like Hawaii that rely upon imported oil for virtually all of their energy needs.

I had just been reading The Prize, Daniel Yergin’s awesome history of the oil industry, and it wasn’t hard to conclude that we as a society needed to move off of oil for a variety of environmental, economic and geopolitical reasons.

Every time I return to Hawaii, I take measure of how much renewable energy has been installed. Solar, wind and bioenergy technology and economics have improved considerably, and of course oil prices have skyrocketed. The local utility companies, owned by Hawaiian Electric Industries, have actively pursued collaborative integrated resource planning efforts to engage the public in shifting to a more diversified and cleaner energy supply.

And yet, 13 years after I first took note of the situation and opportunity, oil still dominates Hawaii energy supply, even though there have been significant additions of renewable energy. Solar panels are nowhere near ubiquitous. A few new windfarms have been installed, but considerable potential remains untapped, stymied presumably by aesthetic issues. With Hawaii’s history of sugar production, biofuels should do well here – but they aren’t much of a factor so far. Even the geothermal resources associated with the volcanic activity isn’t fully exploited.

If renewable energy can’t make massive/rapid inroads in Hawaii, where can it do so? It seems to me that the Aloha State represents an excellent laboratory for CleanTech revolutionaries to study the barriers to widescale advanced energy technology/infrastructure adoption – and more importantly, how to overcome them. At minimum, Hawaii represents a cautionary tale of how hard and slow it will be for CleanTech to change our world.

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a study titled “Energy Technology Perspectives 2008″ in which the agency estimated the shifts in the world’s energy system required to reduce CO2 emissions substantially.

In their so-called “BLUE” scenario (I haven’t figured out what “BLUE” refers to), a 50 percent CO2 reduction from 2005 levels by 2050 – what many scientists believe is about what needs to occur to stabilize the climate – is only achievable by tackling emission reductions that have a marginal cost of over $200/ton CO2. Ouch!

Even more provocatively, IEA estimates that the BLUE scenario would imply a widespread move to near-zero-carbon buildings and the deployment a billion electric/hydrogen vehicles, plus annual investments between 2010 and 2050 of 55 coal plants with carbon sequestration, 32 nuclear plants, 17,500 utility-scale wind turbines, and 215 million square meters of solar panels. By their accounts, this represents $45 trillion of investment above and beyond business as usual.

In IEA’s words, “BLUE is only possible if the whole world participates fully” in shifting to “a completely different energy system.”

Does anyone doubt the magnitude of the cleantech challenge/opportunity in the coming decades?

As posted on CleanTechBlog.com

Some elements of the Cleantech Revolution are iconic: wind turbines, solar panels, compact fluorescent lightbulbs, the Toyota Prius. Other elements are just plain invisible.

Global Traffic Technologies (GTT) clearly falls into the latter camp. As profiled in the May 5 issue of Forbes, GTT sells what are called “traffic signal preemption systems.” In other words, systems that smartly switch traffic lights from red to green (or vice versa) depending on traffic needs at that moment.

So in cities like Calgary that have adopted these systems, a full bus during rush hour can trump a red light, leading an upcoming light to turn or remain green just for the bus to pass through. This functionality also allows the bus system (and each of the bus stops) to maintain a running tally of where each bus is currently located.

Frankly, this type of system is not rocket science, involving a fairly straightforward combination of GPS, cellular telephony, and some software and switches. Not surprisingly, the cost is by no means exhorbitant: GTT’s Optimcom system costs $5,300 per intersection and $3.000 per vehicle.

Even though the technology is not radical, the benefits can be substantial. Each of Calgary’s buses with the system is saving about 2,000 gallons of fuel per year. Perhaps more importantly, these types of systems can significantly reduce travel times and thereby encourage more ridership - taking a lot of cars off the road and lowering aggregate fuel burn and emissions much more significantly than just the per-bus reductions indicated above.

So the Cleantech Revolution extends also to that least glamorous of technologies - buses.  Let’s hope that more bus systems investigate and adopt this class of solution. If buses can’t quite achieve the same level of passenger appeal as trains and subways in terms of comfort and speed, there’s no reason the timeliness of their routes can’t be dramatically improved and attract much higher ridership.