Illustration for the story at Ecomagination. Artist: Travis Barteaux

Did you know that only three percent of dams in the United States create electricity? What a waste. I heard this factoid a few months ago and was curious if anyone was trying to capture all that unused power. Yesterday a story I wrote on the subject was published at Ecomagination:

The Power of the Dammed: How Small Hydro Could Rescue America’s Dumb Dams

As I follow the sustainability and clean energy beat, I am repeatedly dismayed by how wasteful our industrial economy is  — and encouraged that creative solutions are emerging to capture that waste.

In the course of reporting this story, I discovered that a new suite of businesses and technologies are coming into existence in order to capture the power of water that falls…a short distance. It is a niche that the hydropower industry has traditionally overlooked as it focused on giant, gigawatt-scale, river-blocking dams.  Collectively the field is known as small hydro or low-head hydro (to indicate the drop is not that great).

I wrote mostly about retrofitting dams, but the field of small hydro hopes to wring clean electricity from all sorts of falling water: wastewater treatment plants, viaducts, even drainage pipes. How cool is that?

For this story, I took the liberty of coining two terms that, as far as Google tells me, aren’t in circulation: Dumb dam and smart dam.

A dumb dam is one that just holds water (for navigation, irrigation, drinking water, flood control, etc.) and misses the opportunity to produce electricity.

A smart dam is a multitasker that produces power while also serving some other valuable purpose.

While almost no projects are actually producing electricity yet, hopefully many of them will come online in 2013 and 2014. Let’s hear it for smart dams.

The Power of the Dammed is a post from: The Ferris Files

So I whipped out the video camera and here are the results. Based on research and visits, I believe the five sites captured here represent the best green roofs in New York, and by “best” I mean I the most unique, diverse and beautiful. If there is a fabulous planted roof in New York that I missed, or another unforgettable spot elsewhere in the country that deserves attention, please let me know in the comments.

Video: Best Green Roofs in New York is a post from: The Ferris Files

I was obliged to draw a picture of geothermal energy for my latest Innovate column for Sierra magazine. That’s harder than it sounds. I’m a writer, not a graphic designer, and I’m more comfortable with a reporter’s notebook than a sketchbook. But in order to fulfill the column’s mission of revealing the world’s coolest and cutting-edge energy technology, I had to dig down and find my inner sketchist.

I thought it would be interesting to show you how my original, hamfisted drawing turned into the sleek, glossy infographic you see in the magazine. Here, side by side, are my original sketch and the final, professional infographic that appeared in the July/August 2011 Innovate, Geothermal in Coal Country. (Click on the images to expand.)

My original drawing.

Final graphic by artist Brian Kaas.

The idea for this column started with one factoid: A study had determined that the most promising spot on the East Coast for clean, emissions-free geothermal energy was in West Virginia. West Virginia? Like, coal-belching, mountaintop-removing West Virginia? I made a few calls and got ahold of Brian Anderson, an assistant professor at West Virginia University. Over the course of several conversations, he laid out for me his complex yet ingenious scheme for harnessing Appalachia’s subterranean heat.

You can see the details in the column, but I’ll add that I was impressed by the scope of Anderson’s plan. He has done nothing less than re-imagine West Virginia’s energy system, using geothermal heat as the key to an interlocking set of energy loops that turns the clippings from the timber industry (the state’s third largest) into biofuel, and uses the greenhouse gas emissions from the local Mount Storm coal plant to drive heat from the ground. He’ll need buy-in from big industry if he hopes to build such a mammoth and expensive project.

My challenge was to present this graphically — a far lesser challenge than Anderson’s, but difficult nonetheless. (Neither Anderson nor anyone else had ever created a drawing.) How could I depict three distinct yet interconnected energy loops operating above ground, while showing another loop circulating 2.4 miles underground? With explanatory callouts? And do this in a graphic that’s less than eight inches wide?

After tapping my pencil awhile on a blank page, it occurred to me that I could show the underground portion with a diagonal cutaway that would take up only a small part of the graphic area. Above ground, I decided to take the three above-ground systems — homes, forests, coal plant — and give them each a chunk of real estate on the page.

Here’s what I came up with (the attractive final product was created by graphic artist Brian Kaas). What do you think? What could this ink-stained scribbler have done better? Many more Innovates lay ahead, after all, and I welcome the feedback.

Visualizing the Future of Geothermal Energy is a post from: The Ferris Files

Dr. S. Gomathinayagam, CWET's director, in front of the solar panel carport.

While in South India a few months ago I had the chance to visit the charming offices of the Centre for Wind Energy Technology, the Indian government’s brain trust on wind power. The headquarters is a clean-energy oasis in the middle of a disheartening landscape of concrete-block houses and potholed roads, a gust of hope for something cleaner than the smoggy air that many Indians have to endure these days.

My guide was Dr. S. Gomathinayagam, the head of the institute. (See him on YouTube here.) From a massive desk flanked by a table that holds various awards his agency has won — some of them in the shape of wind turbines — he directs efforts to understand India’s “wind resource,” certify that turbines meet certain standards, and help to train the next generation of wind engineers.

Wind power is becoming a pretty big deal in India. The country is the world’s 5th-largest wind energy producer and is home to Suzlon, one of the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers. Of the 17 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy that India is now producing, 13 GW come from wind. (But with India’s gross production of electricity approaching 600,000 GW, wind is still a tiny player.)

India's wind power map. Source: CWET

One of CWET’s most important jobs is to figure out where the wind blows best and how much energy might be harvested from it. The agency produced this map  to guide the siting of wind turbines. To date they have identified 233 sites of which 90 percent have been built. Further developments may require moving offshore.

But the most engaging thing about a visit to CWET is the proud but ramshackle feel that is unmistakably Indian. After the security guard solemnly directed me to sign into the guest book, I was led to the main building. Towering over it were two smallish wind turbines, partners to the windmill by the street that pumps water. The turbines, along with the solar panels that shade one of the parking areas, produce about 3.5 kilowatt-hours of power at peak output –  not nearly enough to power the building, but perhaps sufficient to supply the three air conditioners that keep Dr. Gomathinayagam’s office a little too chilly.

A wind turbine spins above the headquarters of CWET in Chennai, India.

By the entrance to CWET is an educational room for groups of schoolkids that has little models of how wind turines work. In the large, empty hallway outside, a group of cleaner-women in saris assemble bunches of straw into hand brooms. By the back exit, an “acoustic wind profiler” chirps every few seconds; the sound waves that bounce back reveal how strongly the wind blows. Surrounding it is an extensive garden of corn, and papaya and banana trees, kept by and for the employees of CWET. If a sanctuary of clean energy exists in India, this little campus may be it.

The Little Wind Energy Center that Could is a post from: The Ferris Files

India from space at night. Source: nightearth.com

I just returned from India, where the country’s energy predicament hits a visitor with great clarity. India is nothing like the United States: for one thing, it’s population of nearly 1.2 billion is almost four times larger than ours, and it has 18 official languages to our one. But what if India’s energy problems existed in America? The answer might help an American understand how energy-starved India really is.

An American visitor is most likely to start out in one of India’s biggest cities, such as Mumbai, New Delhi or Kolkata, where the electricity gulf between the two countries is mostly hidden. These large Indian cities have electricity 24/7 — but even that is not abundant. Drive at night through Chennai, the country’s fifth-largest city, and you’ll notice that the street lights are sparse and that entire office buildings are blacked out to save power. The smaller cities have a “peak deficit” of 12 percent, meaning that power outages are a daily occurrence.

To put this in the American context, this would mean that only perhaps seven cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia and San Antonio — could keep a refrigerator cold for 24 hours straight. The residents of dozens of other large cities and thousands of suburbs would experience several hours a day where the kitchen lights and A/C didn’t work, food spoiled, and the computer was dead.

In India, forty percent of the population is off the grid and has no electricity at all. This is due to the fact that the country is overwhelmingly rural — 72 percent of the population, compared to just over 20 percent in the U.S. Still, what would life be like in America if 40 percent of the population were in this predicament?

This part of the thought experiment is especially hard to get one’s mind around. This 40 percent of the population’s lack of electrical juice is almost total. We’re not talking the occasional blackout; in the Indian context, we’re talking about 460 million people who have never had any electricity, ever. That’s more people than live in the U.S., Canada and Mexico combined.

The United States from space at night. Source: nightearth.com

For light, most of these megamillions rely on kerosene lanterns. While inexpensive, these lanterns produce low-quality light, lots of dirty emissions, and are a constant risk for fire and burns, especially night after night in close quarters. For heat and cooking, the fuel comes from cheap or scavenged materials like firewood or dried cow dung.

To bring our comparison back to American shores, this would be as if the population of our six most populous states — California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois and Pennsylvania — were huddled in smoky huts in the dark. Not only would these people not have power; they would never have even used an electrical bulb.

Imagine how difficult it would be to do business — not to mention your laundry — in a country like that.

If India’s Energy Woes Were America’s is a post from: The Ferris Files

Anyone? Anyone? OK, here’s the baffling answer: Vortex Induced Vibration. I ran across it while researching a column on tidal energy and learned that it isn’t a gas or electric motor that moves the pistons, but strange properties of the water itself. VIV, as it’s known, is starting to be tapped as an energy source that one day might electrify entire cities. But the phenomenon has intrigued and bedeviled engineers since Leonardo da Vinci.

In the 1500s da Vinci noted “Aeolian Tones,” the sound that wind makes when passing over a wire, and that vortices swirl beneath the pilings of bridges. What was a curiosity for him has turned out to be the bane of engineers in the mechanical age. VIV is complex reaction that occurs when vortexes in a fluid (water or air) cause a structure to oscillate back and forth, causing fatigue and sometimes startling destruction. Engineers have taken great pains to design around it in everything from fishing nets to flagpoles to nuclear cooling towers and undersea oil rigs. They remember all too well the lessons that VIV taught in 1940, when the newly-built Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington started thrashing in the wind like a beast possessed. It collapsed four months after opening, one of the marquee design failures of all time. Ever since, footage of the bridge’s collapse has been played in engineering classes like a top-ten greatest blooper.

It wasn’t until 2004 that Professor Michael Bernitsas at the University of Michigan realized that this terrific force could be brought over from the dark side and recruited to create electricity. Along with a graduate student, he placed cylinders in a water tank similar to the one in the video above. When he started the water flowing, he recalls, the result was startling:

When the impeller was turned on and water flowed through the tank…something amazing happened. The cylinders started to move up and down through the water, and then they began to move in sequence, almost as if they were part of a four-piston reciprocating engine. The motion, first up, then down, was so forceful that it was evident that the cylinders were tapping into some large supply of energy.

A traditional tidal turbine. Source: goodcleantech.com

Recent years have seen an explosion of new designs for capturing the power of flowing water that have a much lighter footprint than your traditional hydroelectric dam, which inundates valuable land and blocks the migration of fish. But most of these designs have turbines and blades resembling those of a traditional wind turbine. Some worry that they will kill fish in the same way that wind turbines threaten birds and bats.

Bernitsas’ VIVACE (Vortex Induced Vibration for Aquatic Clean Energy) generator may avoid that problem because it has no turbine. Best of all, it can operate at speeds lower than other hydroelectric turbines, which require a water flow of five or six knots. In the video above the water is moving at a lazy 2.6 knots, which is about the speed of many of the world’s large and medium-sized rivers.

VIVACE also boasts a high power density: It produces a substantial amount of power in a small amount of space. Bernitsas compares it to the Horse Hollow wind farm in Texas, which covers 190 square kilometers and is one of the world’s largest. When he adjusts for the superior density of water (830 times more dense than air), and the fact that rivers flow all the time while wind is intermittent, he claims that VIVACE’s power density is 14,600 times greater than that of a wind farm.

A vortex as photographed in Bernitsas' lab.

One concern about renewable-energy technologies like wind and solar is that they occupy vast amounts of space, eating up much of the lovely landscape that the environmentalists hoped to spare in the first place. Bernitsas says near the end of this video that a farm of his devices 100 meters square in a river moving at three knots could create a megawatt of electricity, enough to power 1000 homes, and would be capable of producing three to 10 times more power than other marine energy generators.

The science and economics of tidal and river turbines are still just coming into focus, but VIVACE is one concept worth keeping an eye on.

A Vortex that Destroys Bridges, or Powers Cities is a post from: The Ferris Files

Tidal currents in Cobscook Bay on the Gulf of Maine. Courtesy University of Maine

My latest “Innovate” column explores the mysteries of gathering electricity from the tides. Tides are in a category by themselves as a source of energy; they exert themselves in every ocean, but only in a few locales do they get moving fast enough to spin a turbine. In the U.S. some of those places are the East River in New York, Puget Sound in Washington State, the Gulf of Alaska, under the Golden Gate Bridge, and the Gulf of Maine. The pulses of the Gulf’s Cobscook Bay are shown at the left in all their beguiling glory.

Cobscook Bay. Image credit: The Nature Conservancy

I got turned on to the Gulf of Maine when I found my interview subject, Dr. Huijie Xue of the University of Maine (and creator of this graphic). A specialist in modeling of tidal currents, Xue is monitoring the very first turbines to be placed in the Gulf by the Ocean Renewable Power Company. Specifically, she’s trying to figure out if a bank of turbines on the bay floor will harm the bay’s extraordinary ocean life.

It is a breathtakingly difficult question to answer, mostly because no one has ever tried to study tides to this level of granularity. In the 20th Century only commercial reasons to measure tides were shipping and boating. Tell a fisherman when to expect the surface tide will turn and how fast, and that’s all science needed to answer. Now Xue is among a new generation of oceanographers attempting to decipher the tidal action from bay floor to the surface at locations like Cobscook Bay, with its torturously complicated shape. Then she needs to determine what effect a turbine might have on, say, the transportation of lobster larvae. Not so easy.

In the column I also look at cool designs for tidal turbines, which I will explore more deeply in my next post.

Read the New Column, “Power from Tides” is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image Credit: Talking Points Memo

RIP, Energy Bill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he didn’t have the votes to pass a climate-change bill that puts a price on greenhouse gases. With that statement one of Obama’s major campaign promises crashed to earth, along with hopes for slowing global warming or using cleantech to jump-start the U.S. economy. In place of a real energy bill is an “energy bill” that gives homeowners efficiency rebates and regulates deepwater oil drilling. But with a midterm election in the offing and more Republicans likely heading to Congress, the notion of cap-and-trade is, well, cap-and-dead.

BP Plugs the Spew in Gulf, Boardroom: Having capped its oil spill for what might be for good, BP replaced its foot-in-mouth CEO Tony Hayward with Robert Dudley, an American who says he’ll make safety his top goal. Meanwhile, while no one was paying attention, Obama became the first president to take a stab at managing the oceans.

NYC Water’s Hot, McDonald’s Not: When it comes to local sourcing, in New York City tap water we trust. McDonald’s, not so much.

LEAF is Cheaper, Volt Goes Farther. Who Wins? General Motors finally named a price for the Chevy Volt: $41,000, or about $8K more than its electric rival, the Nissan LEAF. In its defense, Chevy argues that the Volt can go 340 miles with its “extended range” gas engine, while the LEAF’s battery dies after 100 miles. Who will go the distance with buyers? Time will tell.

Image Credit: NASA

Blow, Google, Blow: The king of search officially became a utility as it arranged to mainline 114 megawatts of power from an Iowa windfarm. Also this week, the Alta Wind Energy Center in the California foothills announced it had secured the funds to grow to 1,550 gigawatts and so become the largest windfarm in the world.

Take the NASA Quiz: This week, NASA unveiled snazzy maps that reveal the answers to two not-so-trivial questions: Where are the tallest trees in the world, and where are the biggest dead zones in the ocean? Let’s tackle the second question first. The U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe have the largest dead zones, victims of too much chemical fertilizer leaking off the farms. The tallest trees (which sequester the most carbon) are in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

What Matters This Week: A Price for the Volt, but None for Carbon is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image Credit: defencetalk.com

On Wednesday I have an interview at the Pentagon with Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, who is in charge of a hugely ambitious program to green the Navy. What should I ask her?

Though I have my own questions, I’d like to know yours. Reply by either sending me an email or, even better, making a comment on this post.

I first saw Ms. Pfannenstiel (pronounced “fan-in-steel”) when she gave a presentation at a 25×25 conference last month. She spoke about the Navy’s  plans to transform its relationship to energy and fuel — especially ambitious considering the Navy’s vast size and reach. The U.S. Navy is bigger than the next 13 navies combined, and is the second-largest consumer of energy in the U.S. government.  Any organization that uses 30 million barrels of oil a year has the chance to exert enormous influence over its contractors, suppliers and competitors.

The stakes are high: 30 military installations are at risk from rising sea levels, and the Navy risks lives and spends vast resources protecting the flow of oil from volatile countries to the U.S., and to supply the military’s planes, ships and bases around the world. Also, higher-ups have realized that renewable energy and efficiency can save the Navy a boatload of money.

Pfannenstiel didn’t rise through the ranks, but won her appointment in March after a long career with Pacific Gas & Electric in California. Her boss, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, is one of the most zealous advocates in the armed forces for reducing energy use and deploying renewable energy.

The Navy's ambitious energy-reduction goals.

His marching orders for the Navy are detailed in this slide below from Pfannenstiel’s presentation. To recap, Mabus wants to have a green strike group in local operations by the end of this year and deployed by 2016; reduce use of petroleum in vehicles by 50 percent by 2015; have half of all shore-based operations powered from renewable sources by 2020, and in that same year have 50 percent of the Navy’s installations be carbon neutral.

To emphasize just how Herculean this task is, compare the Navy’s goals to those of California, where Pfannenstiel served as chair of the state Energy Commission. California’s legislature is struggling to agree on a goal for utilities to gather just 33 percent of their electricity from renewable energy by 2020.

Laughable or laudable? What more do you want to know? Hit me back.

Help Me Interview the Navy’s Energy Czar is a post from: The Ferris Files

Meanwhile, eight feet below ground, my basement is suffering the opposite problem. A deep, dank moisture greets my nostrils every time I open the basement door  — a smell somewhere between musty and moldy and if not quite evil then full of foreboding. I pick up a piece of paper on the floor and it is wet to the touch just from existing in the basement. A little leather stool in the corner is dotted with mold. The wetness creeps into everything. By August , I imagine it will rot my guitar case, rust my bike chain, and wrap its mossy tentacles around everything until the journals turn to goo and all my photos stick together.

I lament this situation to my lady Anjali. “This city is supposed to have been built on a swamp. Doesn’t grass grow in a swamp? The front lawn is dry as a pizza oven, but the air in the basement is wet as a — as a — ” I search for the right metaphor for really, really wet.

“Isn’t that what a dehumidifier is for?”  she says.

I paused. Anjali has a way of getting to the point.  “Uh…right!” I say.

I get online and buy a DeLonghi dehumidifier that is ENERGY STAR rated and plug it into the outlet in the basement. I program it to 60 percent humidity, which is an approximate 40 percent reduction from the existing basement atmosphere. Less than a day later it shuts itself off; it has already sucked up a bellyful of water.

Now the basement smells a little less Gollum-like. I carry the tank upstairs and pour it in the sink. Eighteen hours later the reservoir fills up again. I picture little water molecules levitating out of my surfing wetsuit, being free-thrown off of my old AYSO participation ribbons.

Much as I enjoy this little swamp reclamation project, something still feels off. I can’t put my finger on it. When I pour all that water down the sink, I feel a twinge of regret.

Then, as I reluctantly water the lawn one night, aiming the hose at the biggest swatches of brown, I realize what is wrong with my disposal system:

I can take the water from my basement and pour it on the lawn!

So now I regularly visit my little basement friend, pull out its collection basin and wrestle it up the stairs, through the front door and into the soupy D.C. heat. I shake all 45 pints on the deadest patches of grass. This is ridiculously satisfying.

That I can attack the source of the gnawing evil in my basement — snatch it right from the air! — and redistribute it, Robin-Hood-like, onto my starving lawn — well, it feels noble, heroic even. It is so 21st Century to be engaged in this kind of re-using. Or is it reducing?

Or — wait a minute — is it recycling … down into the earth and back into my basement?

The Swamp Reclamation Project is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Solar Impulse. Image Credit: Reuters

This is David’s summary of the week’s news for the Matter Network. To see the original, or post your comments, go here.

Solar Plane Goes All Night: A milestone in clean transportation was achieved on Thursday when pilot Andre Borschberg flew the Solar Impulse for 26 hours, setting new altitude and speed records for a solar plane and conducting the first all-night flight on battery energy stored from the sun. Next: a model due in 2011 with a pressurized cabin for transcontinental flight.

Move over, Prius: One of the biggest perks of owning a Toyota Prius or other hybrid in the state of California is access to the highway carpool lane. But — holy halos! Hybrids are set to be booted from the HOV lane in 2011 in favor of  all-electric cars.  Don’t cry, Prius owners: At least you won’t be sucking anyone’s fumes as you park in second place.

Emaciated polar bears. Image Credit: Andrew E. Derocher

In other car news, Ford discovers that soy oil makes rubber twice as stretchy, and the first volleys are fired in the Chevy Volt vs. Nissan LEAF flame war.

Safeway Fakes a Farmer’s Market: When a Safeway in Kirkland, Wash. launched a farmer’s market, there were just a couple problems: no local food, and no farmers. Instead, the supermarket planned to use its own employees to sell industrial produce in the parking lot. The brilliant plan collapsed before the first Chilean avocado was sold; the”market” violated both state and union rules. Compare this to Whole Foods’ declaration last month that it will require all its personal-care suppliers to verify the “organic” claims on their labels.

Why Are the Polar Bears So Hungry? Everyone knows that the melting of the Arctic is bad for polar bears — but will it really kill them off? An interview in Yale Environment 360 explains exactly how melting ice puts the polar bear in peril, and what the prospects are for the magnificent mascot of the North.

The AQUA2 in its native habitat. Image Credit: McGill University

Breakthroughs of the Week: A new road material promises to suck up exhaust from the tailpipe; the little AQUA2 robot conquers land and sea (and looks kinda cute); and undertakers ask for the right to dissolve human corpses and flush ‘em.

What Matters This Week: Solar Planes, Hungry Bears, Fake Farmers’ Markets is a post from: The Ferris Files

Terrafugia Flying Car

This is David’s summary of the week’s news for the Matter Network. To see the original, or post your comments, go here.

Solar’s Sugar Daddy: During his Saturday address, President Obama lavished an astonishing $2 billion in loan guarantees upon two solar companies. This upended the administration’s seedling strategy with renewables — a few million for algae research here, a few million for efficient buildings there — without choosing winners. No question, then, that Spanish firm Abengoa is a favorite horse, receiving $1.45 billion for its plans to build 250  megawatts of solar concentrators outside Phoenix, Arizona.

This Week’s Reason to Hate BP: The British oil company is falling far short of its promises in cleaning up the epic leak  in the Gulf of Mexico. Since April 20, “BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day,” the Washington Post reports.

Bulldog Bingaman: If any climate bill gets passed this year, it will probably be thanks to the tireless backroom efforts of Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) Politico reports how the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources committee has quietly gained the support of some Republicans for a proposal to place a cap on emissions from power plants, without ever stepping in front of a camera to take credit.

Recession? Don’t Tell the Propellerheads. Americans bought almost 10,000 small wind turbines last year (100 Kw or under), growing the market by 15  percent even as the recession held the country in its chilly grip. Call it retail activism, call it a clever use of subsidies, but the end result is  more than 20 megawatts of clean, domestic electricity.

Finally, a Flying Car: Terrafugia is taking orders at $10,000 a pop for its “roadable aircraft.” With fold-up wings and a top cruising speed of 115 mph (in the air), this might be the wonderbug we’ve all been waiting for.

What Matters This Week: Solar’s Sugar Daddy, Terrafugia’s Flying Car is a post from: The Ferris Files

Share/Save

Investors Love Tesla:

The Leaf Stampede: Nissan revealed that 90 percent of the U.S. presale orders for the all-electric Leaf are customers new to the Nissan brand. Perhaps there’s a lesson for other companies: Lead the way into green, and a whole new class of customers could follow.

Belkin Kills the Vampire: The company debuted a line of power strips and wall plugs that prevent ‘standby’ mode from bleeding the power bill. The Conserve Insight tells you how much electricity and CO2 a device uses, and the Smart AV power strip shuts down the cable box and DVD player when you switch off the TV.

Photo Credit: Kathleen Cavalaro

Solar Companies Buy the Farm: In Ontario, Canada, Hay Solar and Mann Engineering announced that they’ll buy a farmer a barn if he lets them cover it with solar panels.

Goldman Sachs Tracks Solar: Now really. Would the moneygrubbers at Goldman start covering solar-panel manufacturers like First Solar and SunPower if they weren’t poised to make a ton of cash?

What Matters This Week: Investors Love Tesla, Belkin Kills the Vampire is a post from: The Ferris Files

Starbucks consultant Peter Senge explains what's so complicated about a new cup.

In the world of sustainable marketing, few tales have grown as epic in scope as the redesign of the Starbucks cup. The coffee company seems to pursue its objective with the fervor of a moonshot;  an effort that started in 2008 isn’t supposed to wrap up until 2015, and the company says it’s behind schedule. What could be so complicated about refashioning a paper cylinder with a plastic lid?

At the Sustainable Brands conference in Monterey on Tuesday, attendees learned just how far-reaching and complicated the effort has become. Starbucks wants to have 100 percent of its cups recyclable or reusable by 2015, with three sub-goals: complete a recyclable cup strategy by 2012, serve 25 percent of drinks in tumblers or permanent cups, and have front-of-store recycling in all stores owned by the company.

That’s ambitious enough, but a couple of presentations by Ben Packard, the head of corporate responsibility, and consultant Peter Senge of the MIT Sloan School of Management, made clear that along the way the project has turned into something much larger. Executives admit they have more questions than answers.

And if Starbucks is to be believed, it wants to transform not just the cup, but the materials used to make it, the process by which cups and lids are manufactured and recycled, and the role that customers play in the ritual of buying coffee.

Here are some insights from the conference:

Starbucks Recycles City by City. The company seems to have learned that, like politics, all recycling is local. Waste practices, haulers and rules vary by city and state, and Starbucks is in conversations with recyclers in the biggest cities that are most amenable to change. Customers in San Francisco and Seattle now have recyclable cups, Manhattan will have them by next month, and negotiations are underway in Chicago, Atlanta and Boston.

Old Materials in New Ways. The company has learned that most heavy-duty bottles in the U.S. are non-recyclable by design. Pure polypropylene is mixed with the dyes that make up a company’s colors and logo and then baked. This bastardizes the polypropylene,  making what would otherwise by a valuable and reusable substance into something that can only be shredded and made into lawn furniture. Senge suggested that Starbucks might spearhead an industry standard that would preserve the value of the polypropylene by instead producing a plain white vessel with a thin, customized overwrap.

Putting It Back on the Customer. Starbucks wants to retrain its customers to bring their own cups to the store, as 80 percent of customers walk out the door with a cup in their hand. The obvious corollary is the durable bags that customers are now growing accustomed to bringing to the grocery store. “How do we make the cup the grocery bag?” Packard asked. “How do we make it the responsible choice?” On one day in April, Starbucks tried the “stunt” (Ben’s words) of giving a free cup of coffee to anyone who brought in their own tumbler.

First Contact Across Industries. Also in April, Starbucks held its second annual “Cup Summit” with paper manufacturers, suppliers, waste haulers and recyclers. It took Starbucks’ muscle to make it happen; Packard said that these meetings marked the first time that International Paper had ever sat down with leaders of the recycling industry to talk about the cradle-to-grave journey of any product, including a cup.

Let’s hope that the end result is a lot less waste, or perhaps none, from the world’s best-known coffee company. Too bad it will take until nearly the end of the second Obama administration for it to happen.

How Starbucks Strives for a Better Cup is a post from: The Ferris Files

Lessons from the Deep:

Forests Get Breathing Room: Indonesia’s government agreed to halt the cutting of its rainforests for two years in exchange for $1 billion in ransom. Norway made the offer because Indonesia holds hostage some of the largest remaining rainforests; what’s left around the world might keep more CO2 from the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes combined.

Deforestation = Poor U.S. Farmers? Meanwhile, a report made a persuasive argument that deforestation in the tropics leads to economic ruin for U.S. foresters and farmers. By rapidly clearing land, tropical nations flood the market and undercut Americans’ prices for soybeans, beef, timber, vegetable oil, among others.

GM Retreats from Indian Rival: General Motors pulled out of a partnership with REVA, an Indian electric car company in India, after REVA was acquired by the Indian conglomerate of Mahindra & Mahindra, a major Indian manufacturer that has set its sights on the United States.

Nissan and Zipcar Grow: Nissan broke ground on its battery factory in Smyrna, Tennessee and said it will make 200,000 electric batteries a year. Zipcar announced plans for a $75 million IPO to fuel its own growth in the car sharing, despite competition from rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise.

That’s a Lot of Plug Points: Matter Network’s own John Gartner made headlines with his estimate that in five years, the world will need 4.7 million new charge points for electric cars. A few days later a coalition announced that 4,600 would be installed in nine U.S. cities by Coulomb Technologies and bankrolled with $37 million in government funds. Too bad China provides far more stimulus than the American government does.

Tough to Be a Small Fish: As the big boys jostled, HybridCars pointed out how smaller electric-car companies like Fisker, Coda, Aptera and Tesla have no margin for error as they try to compete.

image credit: picasaweb.google.com/mikelo

Veni, Vidi, Veggie: In the New York Review of Books, Michael Pollan took a look at five books that collectively point to a tying together of what’s loosely known as the “food movement” — urban agriculture, farmland preservation, food labeling, the organic movement, to name a few — into something more than the sum of their parts.

No Free Ride for Factory Farms: The EPA announced that factory farms — exposed in Pollan’s own book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — would be identified and their animal waste’s impact on waterways measured. As a result, thousands of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, are likely to face new regulations.

Innovations of the Week: Cornell students figure out how to harness electricity from small wind; scientists grow  BPA-free plastic from the atmospheric scourge of CO2.

The Weekly: Deep Ignorance in the Deep Ocean is a post from: The Ferris Files

image credit: International Bird Rescue Research Center

The End of the World…Or the End of the World As We Know It? The Gulf oil nightmare deepened, as crude oozed deeper into Louisiana’s wetlands and British Petroleum sputtered in its attempt to “top kill” the leak. Yet as the Deepwater Horizon officially surpassed Exxon Valdez to become America’s worst oil spill, another, quieter event seemed destined to compete with it in the history books.  Craig Venter created a bacterial cell that is, as he called it, “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

The biofuels community immediately pondered what it all meant, while we hoped Venter’s computer might upgrade the Labrador retriever. No more hair on the couch? Combine this revelation with the announcement of the first fuel cell implant that could power a pacemaker, and it became clear the energy revolution has barely blinked awake.

More Oil in the Gulf… The Deepwater Horizon spill took the express toward Florida and the Atlantic states as it entered the Loop Current, and several fisheries were closed.

…And Less Oil in the Tank: Meanwhile, President Obama signed a memorandum that will for the first time require trucks to meet a minimum fuel standard by 2014. Today, America’s truck fleet consumes more than two million barrels of oil a day and averages a pathetic 6.1 miles per gallon.

Midwest: The New Hotbed of Cleantech? A burst of announcements demonstrated that other Midwestern states are starting to make like Michigan and bet the future on cleantech.  General Electric won a contract to supply five wind turbines to America’s first freshwater wind farm, slated for 2012 on the Ohio coast of Lake Erie. And that’s not all for the Buckeye State: Electric-vehicle company Coda said it would likely build a battery-assembly plant there. Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a Spanish company unveiled plans for a wind-turbine and solar-components factory, and Indiana officials planned to roll out the red carpet for a delegation from China to discuss joint ventures in electric cars, in addition to the Th!nk City factory that’s already on the books.

Silicon Valley Gets Glam: When former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reinvented himself as a cleantech venture capitalist, he overshadowed the other celebrity event of the week: the kickoff of the Green Products Innovation Institute. Funded and endorsed by heavyweights like Wal-Mart, Google, Herman Miller and Brad Pitt, the GPII aims to be a third-party registry and establish standards for a new generation of chemicals. Its goal: to end the era where “endocrine disruptor” and “baby bottle” appear in the same sentence.

Toyota Hooks Up with Tesla: Toyota became the $50 million sugar daddy for Tesla, as the sexy electric-sportscar company moves into digs that are way too big for it. At first Tesla will curl up in a smallish corner of the massive, recently shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont, California. Not that Toyota is done with sensible; it is reportedly working on a seven-seater Prius.

Popular Mechanics simulated the wonders and woes of driving an electric car in 2020, and car manufacturers announced that the electric car won’t be silent after all. It will make some sound so the deaf, blind, distracted, and earbud-wearing populace will know what hit them.

Meanwhile, Honda said it’s not so sure about the whole electric-car thing.

Buildings Beyond LEED: Yale Environment 360 wondered why building owners interested in saving money don’t seek out “building commissioning.” The practice is essentially a physical checkup for a structure’s energy-using systems, like ventilation, and often yields fixes that can save tens of thousands of dollars — even in buildings with that shiny LEED logo.

Triple Pundit took a look at Building Information Modeling, a 3-D simulation of heating, cooling, water and other systems that help construction managers avoid dumb and costly mistakes. Can’t come too soon; a Pike Research study estimates that by 2020 the world will install 53 billion square feet of green-certified space, a 900 percent increase from today.

The Week’s Best Ideas

Panera, the bread restaurant, is conducting an experiment in enlightened capitalism. In St. Louis it founded a sub-chain called Panera Cares Cafe that has day-old bread, but no cashier. Instead, you pay what you think you can afford, and if you can’t you donate your time.  No word yet on whether St. Louis has seen a spike in free lunches.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that if India made a dramatic investment in energy efficient lightbulbs, refrigerators, irrigation pumps and the like, it could wipe out its notorious electricity shortages within three years.

image credit: Thomas Bresson

The “Geobacter” project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published the results of its mind-bending research into electrofuels. Researchers established bacteria colonies that feed off electrons from a solar-powered electrode. On a diet of water and atmospheric CO2, the bacteria “exhaled” acetate, from which many fuels and chemicals can be made.

California Synaptics told GreenTech TV how it greens the business by buying used office furniture, giving discounts to employees who bring their own dishware to the cafeteria, and offering prime parking and car detailing to employees who carpool.

Finally, a book review at Off-Grid gives useful advice on how to screen calls with a microwave, or cook a salmon in your dishwasher.

The Weekly: BP, Better Buildings and Bacteria-Bots is a post from: The Ferris Files

Image credit: National Geographic

Another Bad Week, Or a Really Good One? Good news grows as slow as a tree, but bad news flows like a broken oil main. That seems to be the lesson from this week as BP, the U.S. government and an armada of ships and volunteers tried but mostly failed to contain the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Though BP had some success at slowing the spigot, oil is pooling in the wetlands of the Mississippi Delta and resides at unmeasured quantities in the deeps. There it has joined the Loop Current with a probable next stop in Florida.

Meanwhile, 1,500 miles north, an equally momentous event drew little attention: an agreement to curtail or end logging on 72 million acres of Canada’s boreal forest, an area roughly the size of France. An unlikely consortium of logging companies and Greenpeace agreed to halt the chainsaws altogether for three years in an area as big as Montana, and to develop a sustainable-forestry program for the remainder. The accord might be the forerunner to permanent protection for an area that encompasses two-thirds of Canada’s logging concessions.

The Week’s Best Green Ideas: This week, GreenTech TV took a look at how Rush University Medical Center has become one of the greenest hospitals in the country. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

At Cleantechies, Chuck Colgan told California building owners, brokers and managers how to prepare for AB 1103, a California law that asks for 12 months of energy-consumption records when a building is sold, re-leased or financed.

Triple Pundit produced a field guide to the three organizations that can help a company develop a framework for its  energy use: The Climate Registry, the US EPA Climate Leaders program, and the Carbon Disclosure Project.

Also, the U.S. Green Building Council told President Obama how his administration can make America’s buildings far more efficient without asking permission from those squirrelly congressmen.

Too Hot? Bring Your Own Water. Last month was the warmest April in recorded history, according to the United Nations. If you’d like to contemplate this alarming news from the shores of Walden Pond, carry your own hydration — the city of Concord has become the first in the country to ban plastic water bottles.

Will Nissan Leaf You Out? Pre-orders for the hit Japanese electric car reached 13,000 this week, a thousand more than Nissan planned to make. If you’d rather not crash the dealership, wait ’till next year and rent one from Hertz.

Quiet Excitement: At Infineon Raceway in California, the TTXGP race pitted electric motorcycles against each other in the first — and the quietest — race of its kind.

Price Check, Aisle Nine: At the Lightfair International convention in Las Vegas, Sylvania, Toshiba and Philips debuted their new LED bulbs for use in home lamps. Each bulb, as well as General Electric’s, will retail by early 2011 or sooner, for $40 to $60.  Also, at the National Hardware Show, Honeywell announced that its $6,500 home wind turbine would arrive at Ace Hardware stores by August.

A Tweet that Really Matters: Populations of 150 North American bird species are plummeting as their habitat is destroyed. Could one source of their salvation reside as an app on your phone?

The Weekly: Oil Spreads, Forest Are Spared, and Green Ideas Sprout is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Oil Spill’s Unlikely Victim:

More Electric Cars Roll to the Starting Line: You’ve heard that the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt are on the way, but how about the Think and the Wheego? Wheego, a maker of electric putt-putt vehicles based in Atlanta, hopes that 200 highway-ready copies of its Whip Life will roll off the assembly line by August, months ahead of the well-publicized launch of the Leaf.  Meanwhile, the Norwegian carmaker Think raised $40 million this week and plans to start assembly of the tiny Think City in Elkhart, Indiana in early 2011.

How Is an Electric Car Like an iPad? The CEO of Coda Automotive announced a novel approach to manufacturing and selling his company’s electric car — less a come-on-down dealership blitzkrieg and more like a visit to Apple’s Genius Bar. “We are looking at this not as a new-car-model introduction, but as a new-technology introduction,” CEO Kevin Czinger told a transportation conference in Ohio. But that’s just one way Coda is creating an auto company on the cheap. Models will be partially assembled at a factory in China, shipped to the U.S. as “parts” to avoid import fees, and finished near company headquarters in California. Coda will have just one dealership in Los Angeles but seven satellite stores where the curious can come for a test drive — kind of how Steve Jobs warmed people up to the iPhone and the iPad. Models are due in 2011 for $30,000 to $40,000.

Toyota Bets on Hydrogen: Toyota surprised everyone by announcing it would debut a somewhat affordable, hydrogen-powered sedan by 2015. By whittling down the use of expensive materials like platinum, the company’s engineers dropped the cost of production by a factor of ten, and said they could offer the car for $50,000 and get within striking distance of a profit after launch.

How Does Power from Nantucket Sound? Less than two weeks after winning its hard fight for approval, the Cape Wind windfarm off Nantucket Sound closed a deal to sell half of its electricity. National Grid, the utility for a chunk of the Eastern Seaboard from New York to New Hampshire, will buy power at 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour — a rate that will increase the average homeowner’s bill by about $1.59 a month. The $1 billion project is expected to start feeding power in 2013.

China: Winds of Change. U.S.: Pocket Change. The Department of Energy announced some nice grants for renewable energy projects this week. Investments include $13 million in seed money for projects that will help make industry emit less CO2, $62 million to develop concentrated solar power, and another $33 million on the way for innovations in biomass-to-fuel. That’s $108 million. Not bad!

Then China Longyuan Power Group, one of the largest wind-energy concerns in China, announced its own investment to become the world’s leader in installing wind turbines in five years. The amount? $13 billion.

Innovation Watch: Australia works on the world’s first biofuel helicopter; MIT grads invent a shock absorber that generates electricity; and Dell wonders if it could prosper without ever building another data center.

The Weekly: The Gulf Threatens a New Victim, China Throws Money Into Wind is a post from: The Ferris Files

A giant oil cap is lowered into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Are Offshore Oil Rigs a Threatened Species? Is the Deepwater Horizon spill the beginning of the end for offshore oil drilling, or just another Exxon Valdez? Today, as BP attempted to place a 100-ton cap over the broken well gushing under the Gulf of Mexico, it was uncertain if they’d be able to stanch the spreading damage at sea or in Washington, D.C.

The spill has muddied the prospects for a climate bill as one of its pillars — a new round of offshore oil drilling — founders in unstable political soil, as Mackinnon Lawrence reports. Meanwhile, environmental groups are hustling to make the case, as in this Sierra Club video, that offshore oil is dirty and unsafe.  Perhaps it’s not only brown pelicans and terns who will have trouble flying after all this is over, and the black tide might yet turn against its maker.

Efficiency Experts To America: Stop Dreamin’ and Pick Up Yer Caulkin’ Gun. At a symposium of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy — what, you missed it? — experts concluded that weatherstripping beats windfarms as the fastest way to save the US economy, and released some numbers to prove it. First, America is not as efficient as it thinks: the domestic economy is only 13 percent efficient, compared to 20 percent efficiency in Japan and some European countries. We were left pondering if it’s more efficient, percentage-wise, to order a veggie pizza from Papa John’s or gnaw on a frozen one from Trader Joe’s.

Even worse, the ACEEE noted, Americans seem to be ignoring efficiency even as they embrace the idea of electric cars, photovoltaic solar panels and Bloom Boxes as solutions to both the energy crunch and our economic revival. The US economy has tripled in size since 1970, and three-quarters of those gains have come from leaps in energy efficiency. The Council’s conclusion: The American economy will recover by caulking its cracks, not by putting giant windmills at sea, slathering our houses in solar paint, or beaming sunlight from space.

Raining on the Electric-Car Parade: Observers warned against the auto industry’s growing adoption of electric cars as the platform of the future when not a single customer has yet taken delivery of one. The German magazine Der Spiegel declared  electric cars an “e-llusion” for two reasons: they’re not zero-emissions, as all those electrons have to come from somewhere, and the industry would die in infancy without massive and expensive state subsidies. A few days later, John Mendel, an executive VP at Honda, warned against “a rush to select a winner that could lead us in the wrong direction.” And yesterday, the site Hybrid Cars said Hey! What about hybrid cars? And noted that Toyota is doubling its output of hybrid Priuses and that carmakers from Hyundai to Ford to Mercedes are planning models or entire series around the gas-electric engine.

Build Whose Dreams? In other auto news, Chinese electric carmaker BYD announced that it would stage its conquest of the United States from a new headquarters in Los Angeles. L.A. politicians applauded. BYD (“Build Your Dreams”) has an acronym in English and a logo that, um, reminds us of the symbol of a certain German automaker. What else does BYD plan to appropriate?

Sanyo Makes Giant Battery Bet: Korean conglomerate Sanyo announced it would invest $2 billion into electric-battery research in hopes of capturing 40 percent of the world market. The company’s expenditure is more than the entire U.S. government’s investment in domestic battery research.

Also Lotus says mainstream carmakers could spend just three percent more money and make their cars 38 percent lighter, if only they were more like Lotus.

Why Is Google Investing in North Dakota Wind? On Monday, Google announced it had invested almost $40 million in a NextEra windfarm in the North Dakota plains, without explaining exactly what it planned to do with the 170 MW of electricity. This isn’t one of the companies’ well-publicized seed investments in new technology. Neither will Google use the juice to power its own data centers, as more and more Silicon Valley companies are doing, as described in this illuminating article in Yale Environment 360. Rather, according to Google’s green-biz manager Rick Needham said, they “expect to earn an attractive return as well as free up capital to enable future wind projects.” Investors take note.

American Superconductor Goes to Sea: Massachusetts-based American Superconductor revealed plans to use its formidable talents in high-capacity electrical cables to make an offshore wind turbine 40 percent more powerful than any that now exist. The SeaTitan will pump out 10 megawatts, enough to power 300 to 400 homes, and is due for unveiling by the end of 2010.

Micro Power, Mega Visibility: Sam’s Club installed micro wind turbines atop the light poles in its store in Palmdale, California, producing 3-5 percent of the facility’s power but engendering 97 percent of its good media coverage. Also, 1,370 of the most heavily-viewed billboards on Florida highways will be outfitted with solar panels or small wind turbines.

Gadget Watch: This week, Pirelli works on a tire that talks to the car; Solar Aero toils on a wind turbine with no blades; and MIT researchers explore how a coating on ferns could make boats move faster.

The Weekly: Oil Rigs, Electric Cars, and Google’s Curious Investment is a post from: The Ferris Files

Two Tales of Ocean Energy:

Climate Bill Stalls: The U.S. Senate’s version of a climate bill was yanked at the last moment when Sen. Lindsey Graham, the Republican co-sponsor of the legislation, withdrew his support to protest the Democrats’ sudden crusade for immigration reform. No definite plans for a new bill have emerged.

Biofuel Ignites: After years of steady but slow progress, biofuel companies burst forth with grand plans and raked in some serious cash. Ethanol producer POET startled the industry when it claimed it will produce 3.5 billion gallons of ethanol from cellulosic ethanol by 2022, one-quarter of the U.S. government’s target for alternative biofuels. Codexis debuted on the NASDAQ and raised $78 million; just days earlier, California-based Amyris Biotechnologies issued its own IPO. Joule Biotechnologies changed its name to Joule Unlimited and announced it had successfully raised $30 million.

Also, the Navy’s first biofuel jet, an F/A-18 Super Hornet with a camelina-based fuel in the tank, broke the sound barrier.

Is China the Epicenter of Electric?: Almost 100 electric or alt-fuel vehicles appeared at the Beijing Auto Show, far more than are on display at U.S. shows, leading us to wonder: Is America already an afterthought for the next generation  of cars?

G.E. and Nissan Splice Together on Smart Charging: One month after Ford and Microsoft announced their partnership to develop home-energy management for the electric auto, General Electric and Nissan struck their own deal. The world’s largest conglomerate and Japan’s third-largest automaker will focus first on integrating charging with homes and buildings, then on how to interface cars with the larger grid.

Leaf, Megacity, Minivan: Early adopters pounced on the pre-sale of the all-electric Nissan Leaf and ordered by the thousands. BMW announced that its first electric model, the Megacity, will debut in 2013, and General Motors confirmed that it is, in fact, making a Chevy Volt minivan.

The Weekly: Offshore Wind Wins, Offshore Oil Pollutes is a post from: The Ferris Files