Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Congratulations are in order for Rock Port, Missouri - it just became the first town to have its complete energy supply needs met by wind power. [via Slashdot]
Granted, Missouri is a windy region, and wind power wouldn’t suit every town. Plus Rock Port has a population of just 1,300 … but it’s encouraging to see ordinary people waking up to the economic realities of alternative energy sources. [image by Michael Tyas]
So, once we’ve managed to tighten up on inefficient technologies and business practices in the transport industries, we’ll be home free on this environmental stuff, right?
Well, no. The little metal box that Futurismic lives on - doubtless in some anonymous room full of similar boxes - is doing its little bit to consume energy and, in the process, contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. So much so that projections suggest data centers will be bigger polluters than the air travel sector in little less than a decade. [image by Jemimus]
Hyperbole aside, this makes it clear how rapidly we’re expanding our use of server farms - and with the growth of cloud computing that trend is unlikely to reverse any time soon. But as is pointed out immediately on Slashdot, there’s a lot more scope for the data centres to cut down on their pollution levels than for the airlines.
At least, I hope so. The thought of bloggers becoming pariahs in the same way the SUV drivers have makes me a trifle uneasy … 
As well as a popular indie band, British Sea Power is rapidly becoming more accepted as a valid alternative to nuclear and fossil fuel energy. Whereas the nuclear proponents in the UK civil service have previously neglected the sector (as London Mayor Ken Livingstone explains to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke in this week’s Observer Magazine), a number of companies in the UK have made great advances in harnessing the power of the oceans despite the lack of enthusiasm at government level.
The water around the British Isles makes it a key resource and as the Independent explains, could account for huge percentages of the electricity demand of the country. With a feasibility study into the Severn Barrage underway and products like SeaGen and Pelamis coming into use, it seems like the tide might be turning in more ways than one. Nuclear energy will undoubtedly be a factor in the UK’s future energy use but with such a huge resource sloshing around our coastlines it would to take advantage of this clean and renewable power source.
Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. says it has developed a practical method for producing fuel and organic chemicals using only air and water as raw materials. (Via PhysOrg.)
“Green Freedom,” as they’re calling the proposal, is a process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production through a new form of electrochemical separation. The new process can be integrated with existing technology to produce fuels and organic chemicals.
Of course, the process itself takes energy. Los Alamos’s proposal envisions using nuclear power, but notes that hydroelectric, wind, or solar power could also be used to ensure the process remains carbon-neutral. As a result, they say:
The primary environmental impact of the production facility is limited to the footprint of the plant. It uses non-hazardous materials for its feed and operation and has a small waste stream volume. In addition, unlike large-scale biofuel concepts, the Green Freedom system does not add pressure to agricultural capacity or use large tracts of land or farming resources for production.
F. Jeffrey Martin of the Laboratory’s Decisions Applications Division, principal investigator on the project, will be presenting talk on the subject at the Alternative Energy NOW conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on February 20.
The full nine-page concept paper is available online here in PDF format.
It’s almost like a recycling scheme for hydrocarbons: first you burn them, then you suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, recreate the hydrocarbons, and burn them again. Very intriguing and potentially transformational idea, if it pans out.
(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)
Discover has an article on a new smart technology being employed in prototype household appliances like fridges and tumble dryers. The project, GridWise, put small chips into the appliances of 200 homes. The chips read the levels of electricity usage from the grid - when the grid is heavily in use, they turn off, saving their high energy use for when larger amounts of energy is being wasted unused across the country.
As well as helping providing blackouts, widescale adoption of such technology could enable consumers to maximise the efficiency of alternative energy sources such as wind and solar, which are not consistent in their output. The chips can also be hooked up to realtime energy prices, only turning on your thermostats and washing machines when the price is low.
[story via Discover, image by Adam Melancon]
The Bali talks about climate change are progressing reasonably well, with Australia the 37th country to agree to cut emissions. However, the elephant in the room is of course the US and Canada administrations, who have resisted negotiations. Although some US officials don’t want to join the protocol, others are starting to do something about it. This week Congress is discussing a revolutionary new Energy bill that really starts to look at a sustainable future.
It would repeal $21 Billion in oil subsidies to spend on alternative energies, increase minimum mpg for cars, include incentives for efficiency and new technology as well as pledging renewable electricity production to be 15% by 2020. This bill will inevitably be vetoed by President Bush, or filibustered by the Republican minority. All the same, the US Congress deserves recognition and support for thinking constructively about increasing efficiency and promoting solutions to this problem.
[image by Morten Mitchell Larod]
Usually, heat and electric conductivity go hand in hand. Now, thanks to the emerging nanostructure technology movement, scientists think they can separate these two.
Previously thermoelectric devices were far too inefficient to be of use. But by adding nanoscale structures a few billionths of a metre across, the heat conductivity of a material can be disrupted whilst the electricity passes through fine, ramping the efficiency up massively. Imagine a computer chip that doesn’t get heated as it works, or a solar cell that uses heat as well as light to generate electricity. Thermo electrics are already starting to get efficient enough to cool your car seat - how soon before they start to be used in the growing low energy pc market?
[via ScienceDaily, image from Amazon.com ]
Wow. Colour me impressed. Compellent Technologies produce network servers and data storage hubs. With the rise of the internet, the amount of power generated by servers and data has grown exponentially, with most internet servers needing vast quantities of power and cooling of the heat produced. Compellent have made a product that only uses power when the data is being accessed, using a load of technologies like Automated Tiered Storage, Thin Provisioning and Advanced Virtualization. This can cut the power usage of the company buying the data centres by up to a massive 93%. If every server used technology like this, a large chunk of every developed country’s electricity usage would disappear.
[via Treehugger, image via Compellent's website]
Researchers at Penn State University have produced hydrogen gas at efficiencies not found before. Tweaking an existing method that previously produced poor rates and yields, the scientists found they could produce nearly 300% the energy used to kickstart the reaction.
Electron-generating microbes produce an electric current that is run through a fuel cell containing biological matter. By adding an additional jolt of electricity at the cathode, the bacteria breaks down the organic matter into hydrogen, without releasing much in the way of greenhouse gases. Whilst this is an early result needing mass study and production, it’s a very promising discovery towards clean fuel.
[via Daily Kos, picture via Wired]
Here’s a different sort of crowdsourcing. The “Crowd Farm” is the brainchild of two MIT architecture students, and it’s a system designed to harness the physical movements of large masses of people and turn it into usable electricity - imagine contributing to the metro station’s lighting by climbing the stairs, for example. It’s a great idea - and like a lot of great ideas, a couple of people have thought of it already. Let’s hope any arguments over patents don’t get in the way of something that can reduce our collective carbon footprints, eh? [Image by yeuxrouge]
The adoption of renewable energies should really take off when we’re able to print solar panels out at home, or simply paint them onto any solid surface. [Colony Worlds]
Once you’ve indulged in a bit of schadenfreude and watched the CEO of ‘perpetual motion’ company Steorn explaining why it is that his demo failed to work, marvel at the fact that magnetism can be used to create a ready source of energy - this
little gadget is powered by small vibrations {correction} moving a bundle of tiny magnets, which creates a tiny electric current that can power an equally tiny electronic device, like a sensor. How great would it be to have a phone you could recharge with a vigorous shake?
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