Workers at a Foxconn factory, China. Photographer unknown.

I almost forgot to mention an interesting story I wrote last month for Workforce.com about Apple and its recent misadventures in China.

The story, Who Makes Your Widgets? Lessons from Apple’s PR Nightmare, is  addressed to companies worried about what labor violations might lurk in the supply chain. How can a company avoid a black eye like Apple’s?

Finding out what really goes on in a factory in China, Bangladesh, Honduras, or even Los Angeles is a daunting task. I heard that over and over again from companies hired to investigate the factories and do the site visits. These visits are known as “social audits.”

The auditors and factory managers play a cat-and-mouse game that can border on the absurd. The auditor’s goal to uncover abuses, such as the hiring of underage workers, sloppy safety procedures, and the maintaining of double sets of payroll to hide unpaid overtime. The factory manager’s goal (at a bad factory) is to hide such abuses during the auditor’s visit, so the manager may get back to producing things, and making money, as quickly as possible.

I interviewed Rachelle Jackson, the senior director of sustainability practices at UL Responsible Sourcing, and received a list of episodes that the company’s auditors experienced during site visits around the world. This “adventures in auditing” list is worth reprinting in full.

UL Responsible Sourcing In the Trenches

Lockdown in Los Angeles

While auditing a factory in Koreatown for a retail client, UL Responsible Sourcing found violations of wage laws that would potentially result in “hot goods” if found by labor inspectors.  “Hot goods” mean the product cannot be shipped for interstate commerce due to wage violations, potentially allowing the Department of Labor to embargo the product.  To avoid this scenario, the client wanted to take custody of their product immediately.

A three-person audit team from UL RS, along with a security guard, were sent back to the factory to take custody of the goods.  When presented with the request to remove the goods, the factory owner pulled a gun out of his desk, put it under his belt, and refused to release the goods.  The factory owner then decided to shut down the facility and told all his employees to leave the factory before he locked it up.  One of UL RS’s auditor refused to leave and reminded the owner, “This product belongs to the client, not to you.”  The owner locked up the factory with the auditor inside and went away.  He called the police and shortly thereafter the factory owner returned to open the doors and let the auditor out.

Still, UL RS wasn’t able to take custody of the product and told the client that in all likelihood the factory owner would try to move the product out of the factory during the night.  The client agreed to have overnight surveillance conducted on the factory – watching from a safe distance using binoculars – and at 5:00 a.m. the owner showed up with a large truck and began moving everything into the truck, including the sewing machines.  UL RS called the client, who had several trucks and a team of workers on standby to come and collect their goods.  They went straight to the site, took custody of their product, and took it away on their trucks.

Bribery Backfires

Bribes are offered quite often in factories in China, especially when there are major violations observed during a social or labor assessment.  Melissa Tang and Stella Li, UL RS auditors, conducted an assessment at a printing factory in China that was particularly noteworthy because of the large amount of money offered, the manager’s insistence, and his emotional reaction to their rejection of the bribe.

After many inconsistencies were observed, the auditors asked the facility to provide more accurate payroll records for review.  Soon thereafter, the facility manager placed four red envelopes containing RMB 40,000 (almost US $ 5,900) into the auditor’s bags and claimed that the offer made was not due to the inconsistencies, but as gifts for the coming Chinese New Year.

Tang and Li returned the four envelopes with the money and adamantly refused the offer.  The facility manager kept trying to put the money back in their bags and a struggle ensued.  Li finally got her bag back, put the four envelopes on the desk, and asked the manager to think about providing the real records, which he did not.  The manager refused to have the closing meeting and stood at the door of the meeting room and locked it.  Fortunately, an employee helped UL RS persuade the manager to sign the completed audit report and to let them go.

Hazards in Haiti

When UL RS auditors Rachelle Jackson and Wendy Barahona agreed to audit a factory for a large food and beverage manufacturer in Port au Prince, Haiti in 2007, they knew that political instability in the country meant a high risk of kidnapping (for ransom) on the road from the international airport.  The client promised a security detail would stay with them at all times, but when they arrived at the airport only a driver from the factory was there to greet them.

Normally auditors wouldn’t accept transport from the factory to avoid being in a compromised situation, but Jackson and Barahona decided the factory driver was preferable to an unknown taxi driver and the threat of kidnapping.

During the audit, it became obvious that the factory had some serious issues including fork lift safety (Jackson was nearly hit by a fork lift racing around a blind curve at top speed), wage payments problems, and worker safety and hygiene (none of the toilets had worked for weeks, if not months, and were difficult to approach for inspection, must less to use).

After finishing the audit at the Port au Prince factory, Jackson and Barahona traveled to another city to audit a different part of the company’s operations.  While there, they got an urgent phone message that the director, who was not happy about their findings, wanted to see them following their return to Port au Prince.  Despite clearly informing the factory’s HR manager that they were not authorized to return to the Port au Prince factory but would be available at their hotel for any questions or concerns, the HR manager said, “Well, I am driving you back to the hotel, so we will just stop at the factory on our way back from the airport.”

Luckily, Jackson and Barahona were able to get a security detail to pick them up at the airport, so that they could not be taken back to the factory against their will.  They left Haiti the next day.

Hiding in Warehouse With Workers

Upon arrival at a factory in China, Betty Liu and her auditor partner saw dozens of employees fleeing from their workstations to a stairway.  They asked the facility contact where these employees were going and were told, “it was time for them to rest and that most of them would go to the rest rooms.”  Since 9:45 a.m. is not usually a “rest time” in factories, the auditors sensed that there was something going on.

Liu (who had dressed like a factory worker to blend in) quickly put down her bag, took her mobile phone, and went after the employees.  Together with other employees, she was guided to the downstairs warehouse.  It was noisy and everyone was confused about what was happening and why they were there.  Then, the warehouse controller shouted, “THE INSPECTION TEAM HAS COME.  BE QUIET AND STAY HERE!  BE QUIET!!”  Then the light was turned off and the door was locked.  It was dark inside the warehouse and everybody was quiet. Liu counted a total of 40 female employees – many young looking – in the room.

Liu then asked the warehouse controller to, “Turn on the light and open the door.”  The warehouse controller asked, “Who are you?” Liu replied, “I am the auditor.”  The warehouse controller seemed surprised, but opened the door.  The auditors then started asking the warehouse workers their names, age, and when they started to work for the factory.  Although many were reluctant and unwilling to talk, they got information on 17 of the employees – two who were only 15 years old – before management made them return to their workstations.  The minimum working age in China is 16 years old.

The employee information sheet that Liu locked in a room during their lunch, was mysteriously “adjusted” to add 10 years to each of the child laborers.  While management denied tampering with the information, they signed the completed audit outlining all of the violations found.

Confrontation in Cambodia

During a factory audit in Cambodia for a major U.S. retailer, auditor Rachelle Jackson was able to speak with 10 female workers during their lunch break about their working conditions, work hours, pay, and overall treatment.  One of the older women in the group was the most vocal at the beginning, answering questions and saying everything at the factory was fine.  As Jackson’s questions continued, some of the younger women in the group began to show signs of agitation.  One girl faced the elder women.  As she began to speak to them directly, her voice became strong and urgent; her face and eyes took on a determined look.  Her hands began to wave around and move in front of her almost pleadingly.

Jackson jabbed her elbow at her translator, “What is she saying? What is she saying?” He had been so transfixed by the young girl’s appeal that he nearly forgot to translate.  When he began the translation, Jackson understood the urgency in her voice. “They hit us,” the girl said.  “When we make a mistake, they throw things or slap us.  The things these women are saying are not true.  They are not telling you what is really happening here.  We are abused here.”

As the end of Jackson’s audit, she met with a dozen Chinese men who owned and ran the factory.  They sat in a board room in their dark suits with Jackson dressed in her “factory clothes.”  They understood English, but Jackson knew she had to keep it simple since there was no room for error trying to be diplomatic.  “You can’t hit the workers,” explained Jackson.  They looked at her in silence.  Some of them nodded.

Saving Jobs in Bangladesh

When UL RS auditor Rashmi Bhalla conducted an audit in Bangladesh for a major U.S. apparel buyer, factory workers shared information about their working conditions that helped the auditor understand that the factory was not in compliance with work hours and wage laws.  Having taken a risk in providing the truth to the auditor, workers asked for her contact information, just in case.  Bhalla provided them with the name of the hotel where she was staying and, later that night, received a phone call from one of the workers.  Everyone she had interviewed at the facility had been identified by the management and fired.  Even though the auditor hadn’t shared information that would implicate the workers, the factory decided to fire them anyway for contributing to their failure in the audit.

Bhalla called her U.S. client and told them what had happened.  The client was upset and called the vendor to demand that they contact the factory and require the workers be reinstated to their jobs.  After a few days of sorting things through, including a meeting with the workers at the auditor’s hotel, the workers got their jobs back.

Five Employees in an Oven

During the health and safety facility audit in Guangdong, China, auditor Fred Waelter saw a production building that appeared to be empty on the side of the facility’s complex.  Inside was a worktable where no one was working, and one employee who appeared to be by himself.  In the center of the building was an industrial oven measuring approximately 2 meters tall, 4 meters deep, and 3 meters wide, with a door on two sides that locks from the outside with a bolt that runs flat across the door.

Waelter heard voices coming from inside the oven and discovered five employees inside when he unlocked the door.  Four of these employees were from the hole-filling department, and one was a young-looking male worker that later claimed he was not directly employed by the facility but just helping out.

The auditor interviewed the employees involved in the oven incident and they all had the same story, “it was cold that day and they were too lazy to work, so they hid in the oven because it was warm there and no one would see them.”  The employee who was standing alone outside of the oven said he had closed the door from the outside because he was afraid that the employees were going to get in trouble when the auditor entered that area.

This explanation did not seem plausible to the auditor because the employees were paid piece-rate wages, meaning their failure to work would result in lower wages, so it did not seem likely that they were lazy and decided to linger in the oven because it was warm there.  Also, there was no light in the oven, so it seems unlikely that the employees were inside for a long period of time because it was completely dark when the doors were closed.

Hide-and-Seek in a Chinese Factory is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Fat cats don't much like my new blog at Forbes. Photo credit: Steve Hardy

It’s been an eventful few months here in writer-land, with stories in Forbes, Sierra and Popular Mechanics. Take a look at the latest newsletter!

If you like what you see, sign up to receive future editions in the “Sign Up for David’s Newsletter” box on the right column of this page.

Check out the Latest Newsletter is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Scientist-turned-filmmaker Randy Olson.

Ecomagination has published my interview with Randy Olson, a most unusual kind of filmmaker. If you prefer to read it as a feature, it’s available in that form here. (Note: both stories are currently offline because of some glitch. Check back for updates.)

For the first half of his career, Olson pursued the career that is the dream of many a geeky adolescent: marine biologist. By the young age of 38 he actually achieved it. He earned a tenured professorship in marine biology at the University of New Hampshire.

But upon reaching his dream he found it wasn’t quite a fit with his personality and aspirations. You see, Olson harbored another unrealistic fantasy, that of being a documentary filmmaker. He thought he could do both by working as a full-time academic and making movies on the side. But that’s before the scientific community met his plan with derision and scorn.

“Had they supported what I had in mind I would have been happy to stay as a professor,  but I could see the writing on the wall and now it’s 20-some years later and they have not supported one goddamn thing that I’ve done,” he told me.

So, in a breathtaking gamble, Olson resigned his position at the University of New Hampshire and moved across the country to resettle in Los Angeles, where he enrolled in film school at the University of Southern California. The professor was again a student, starting from zero.

He worked hard — and he partied hard –in Hollywood, and amazingly enough he made it all the way in his second dream career. Twenty-one years after his fateful decision, he is a bona-fide documentary filmmaker. But that might not be his most lasting contribution.

He also travels the country running workshops for young and mid-career scientists to teach them how to turn their research into a stories that the larger community can understand. It’s hard to overstate how important this service is.

A large cross-section of American society has been bamboozled into dismissing scientific findings that it doesn’t agree with, particularly when it comes to climate change. While much of the responsibility rests with those who fund the deception, some must be placed with the scientists themselves.

Scientists are trained from the beginning to speak to each other, not the public. They express themselves in charts, tables and dense technical prose that efficiently distributes knowledge through the scientific community. Scientists hope and assume that regular people (and politicians) will somehow catch the drift and let them alone.

But in the case of climate change, the politicians have certainly not left them alone. The reaction to this among scientists remains one of puzzlement. The researchers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has assembles a giant edifice of research that would lead any reasonable person to conclude that humanity’s burning of fossil fuels is warming the planet, and that this warming is causing our oceans to rise and our weather to freak out, with grave consequences for the future of civilization.

But they are expressing it in the language of science, and that is simply not a language that a normal person can understand.

Olson hopes that with his deep background as both a scientist and as a communicator, he can help scientists and their discoveries to be better understood by John Q. Public. However, he admits that getting scientists engaged in bettering their communication skills is a hard sell.

“One third loves it , one third thinks it’s OK, and one third just wants to lynch me they hate it so much,” he said.

Why is it that scientists have such a hard time telling their stories? I’d appreciate your theories in the comments.

The Scientist Who Went to Hollywood is a post from: The Ferris Files

In this issue, for the first time in its four years of existence, the ‘Innovate’ column has expanded from one page to two. This is a permanent change (as permanent as anything can be in publishing) and is of enormous help in helping readers make sense of clean energy.

The main complaint I get about the column is “it’s so small!” A page eight inches wide is not sufficient to show the complex machinery and processes that make up the biggest technological revolution of the 21st Century. The change to a full spread provides room for the concepts to expand into the mind of the reader. I wish I could say the switch was occasioned by my brilliant reporting, but I believe it has more to do with the shifting priorities of the Sierra Club, which publishes the magazine. The Club has been extraordinarily successful with its “Beyond Coal” campaign that focuses on shuttering greenhouse-gas-spewing coal plants. But if the Sierra Club is going to truly catalyze a sea change in America’s power supply, it ought to put some focus on the “Beyond” part.

We are also working with a new graphic designer, Kate Francis, who is a pleasure to work with and creates vivid, approachable pictures.

So I invite you to enjoy the column without the squinting. Load the full size version onto your browser (pdf). Now we

Illustration of Steve Reinford.

can turn to the anaerobic digester that is the subject of this issue’s column. Seriously, take a couple of minutes and study the remarkable ways that a digester and its associated machinery chases down every scrap of waste and recycles it into something useful.

An outstanding example comes from the farmer I profiled, Steve Reinford. This Pennsylvania dairy farmer is one of the most creative and entrepreneurial in finding ways to turn noxious waste into dollars. In addition, Reinford accepts vegetable waste from 50 nearby Walmarts and Sam’s Clubs, which doubled the output of his digester while allowing him to collecting a dumping fee.  He’s also perhaps the first to try other innovations like using the hot air exhausting from his generator shed to dry corn, and the waste heat from the generator engine to heat water that pasteurizes the milk for his calves.

Along the way Reinford managed to cancel out one of his biggest liabilities: managing thousands of tons of cow manure. The neighbors complained about the smell. Like all concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, Reinford used to keep the cow poop in a giant manure lagoon (mmmm!) until time came to spray it on the crops. Even then, this natural fertilizer was sometimes more than the plants could handle and “burned” them with an excess of nutrients. Reinford says his lagoon never leaked or overflowed. But manure often escapes from CAFOs and is a serious source of pollution in streams, where it predictably doesn’t do fish any good.

Digesters have barely made inroads into U.S. farms; only 170 of the country’s 257,000 feeding operations have them. But it is starting to make economic sense. Just this week, a new and well-funded enterprise, Tamar Energy, launched in Britain with plans to build 40 anaerobic digestion plants that are expected to generate 100 megawatts of power. It is funded with $100 million from the Rothschild family and Fajr Capital, a venture-capital firm in Dubai — hardly a bunch of treehuggers.

The best argument comes from Reinford himself.

“We haven’t bought any fuel for the last two years for the house or the barn,” Reinford says. Each month he makes up to $1,300 selling digested solids as cow bedding and another $600 to $700 on renewable-energy credits. Add the excess electricity he sells to the grid and Reinford estimates that he’s making a pretax profit of $200,000 a year.”

Not a bad return from a pile of cow poop.

Making Money from Cow Pies, and Other Big News is a post from: The Ferris Files

Salmon Smolt. Image credit: Alaska-in-Pictures.com

One little-known problem with the giant hydroelectric dams of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest is that they kill salmon, millions each year. It’s not just the adult ones going upstream to spawn, which have gotten lots of attention; it’s the young ones heading downstream. As many as 10 percent of salmon smolt perish as they try to wriggle through the whirling blades of hydroelectric turbines.

A solution is on the way, and I wrote about it in a story for Popular Mechanics that was published online yesterday. The dams of the Pacific Northwest will probably be fitted in the next decade with a new generation of fish-friendly turbines. That they are so friendly is due to a nifty gadget you’ve never heard of: the Sensor Fish.

I’ll save my breath and let you read the fascinating story here.

But I do want to add one salmon nugget that didn’t fit in the story. The Sensor Fish is not just facilitating the redesign of turbines, but shining a light into another aspect of salmon behavior — and in the process is saving even more fish.

The Sensor Fish. Image Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

The Sensor Fish’s key contribution has been to flip the science of fish mortality on its head. Observers thought that what was killing salmon in hydroelectric dams was the blunt trauma of striking the turbine blades, or maybe concrete. But the Sensor Fish and its armory of sensors discovered that the culprit was an abrupt change in pressure as a smolt falls past the blades.

The pressure drop sometimes causes a fish to “burp” from its internal air bladder so by the time it reaches the tailrace (the bottom pool of the dam) it is negatively buoyant. In other words, it sinks like a stone. In order to restore its internal equilibrium, the smolt immediately surfaces to gulp some air. And at the surface an enemy awaits.

Birds of prey have figured out that the tailrace of a dam is all all-you-can-eat salmon buffet. They swoop down on the traumatized, beleaguered fish and add to salmon mortality.

Dr. Tom Carlson, the guy who invented the Sensor Fish, told me that awareness of this phenomenon has led to an easy fix. Managers of dams in the Pacific Northwest are starting to place nets over the tailraces of dams to frustrate the birds and give salmon smolts a little breathing room.

Keep an eye out for the Sensor Fish story in the “Tech Watch” section of Popular Mechanics in the May print issue. It will be accompanied by a sweet graphic that reveals how the Sensor Fish does its magic.

The Robo-Fish that Will Save Millions of Salmon is a post from: The Ferris Files

Tim Geithner, the stressed-out Secretary of the Treasury. Photo by Saul Loeb.

The blonde surf instructor clinched the deal with an offhand comment. We stood outside her shack a few blocks from the beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico, just after New Year’s Day, as I sized up a surfboard I might rent.  “Tim Geithner rode this board just yesterday,” she said casually.

The United States Secretary of the Treasury rented this thing, seriously? The board, a nine-foot-four Greg Taylor in pale blue with lightning bolts down the rails, suddenly became an object of fascination.  The man at the reins of our creaking economy, whose signature is on every freakin’ dollar bill, had spent New Year’s…surfing?

This comes as a surprise if you know anything about surfing and have ever seen a picture of Tim Geithner. The man approaches his job with a deep, abiding and un-surfer-like sense of worry. It is written all over his face.

At his best he looks wary and at his worst he looks hunted, like a man who might at any moment turn a corridor and face an angry mob of Occupy Wall Streeters with torches and pitchforks. This is not an unreasonable fear. In 2008 President Obama tapped Geithner as the point man to pull the United States back from the lip of economic Armageddon, and things haven’t gotten much easier since.

He took hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to steer us out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression — and failed — and worst of all, did so without exhibiting Obama’s Hawaiian sense of cool. The middle-manager tension in his jaw has made it all the easier for the Left to brand him as a tool of our corporate overlords and the Right as the tax commissar of our Socialist-in-Chief. Naturally such a man would want to flee Washington for the tropics.

But as Treasury Secretary one’s options for a tropical vacation are severely circumscribed. Imagine if your choice to take a holiday in Acapulco prompted an indignant senator to declare on C-SPAN that you are exhibiting a dangerous allegiance to the peso. And so it was that over New Year’s the hunted Tim Geithner found himself vacationing in a corner of Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory where people use both Spanish and twenty-dollar bills, seeking anonymity and a brief sojourn as a surfer.

I pondered Geithner’s Yankee burden as I held his board under my arm and surveyed the waves at a serene palm-lined beach called Domes. Would the Secretary’s distress stick to me like a toxic asset, or would it dilute in the warm Caribbean water like so many shares of Citibank?

Only one way to find out.

Paddling out through frothy whitewater, I immediately encountered that bane of surfing: other surfers. Even in laid-back Puerto Rico a surf lineup bears some similarity to official Washington. A scramble for scarce resources. There is only one wave at a time and twelve guys who want ride it, just like there is only one tranche of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act at one time and two hundred lobbyists who want a piece.

We surfers waited for the next swell and eyed each other.

I played it cool, waiting to see how much skill and machismo existed out here on the reef. Took a position on the outside where I wouldn’t draw much attention. I stroked for a little wave that no one seemed to want and, to my great surprise, the Secretary’s board was stable as a barge. I popped up with ease and rode it almost all the way into the beach.

When I paddled back out to the lineup I could tell from the wordless glances of our Bermuda-shorts flotilla that this performance had promoted me from Beta to Alpha. I was welcome to park myself at the peak, where the best appointments — uh, I mean waves — were for the taking.

Not that I am some badass surfer. There was what in Washington they call a mitigating factor.

That factor is that the waves were totally sucky. Over New Year’s week the swell was small and pathetic, waist-high at best, the kind of conditions where only the rankest amateurs or desperate tourists with a departing plane ticket would bother getting wet.  The really big investors — er, I mean surfers — stayed out of the water in anticipation of a better day.

Me with the Secretary's surfboard. Photo by Anjali Kumar

Word was that the waves had been awesome a while back, and that a good swell might hit sometime soon. But right now it was almost flat. The ocean’s pulse was weak, flirting with recession, and you could pray to the sea gods or scrape together a few billion in stimulus funds, but really there was not a damn thing anyone could do.

As I bobbed out there on the blue I put my ear to the Secretary’s board and listened, listened to learn what it is like to be the Secretary of the Treasury on a surf vacation. This is what I heard:

The waves are small but you don’t really care because life has suddenly become so simple. Belly-deep in ocean and a blue horizon touched by a few clouds. No one recognizes you now that your Kennedyesque bouffant has been flattened by seawater and a layer of zinc sunscreen disguises your sharp nose. No one even seems to notice you except for that Brazilian surfer girl in a bathing suit so small that just a glance causes your interest rates to surge.

Your mind wanders, and in the next moment you’re back to fretting like you usually do. Durable-goods orders are down and that the trade balance is a friggin’ disaster, and you’re wondering what the hell you’ll say to the Chinese finance minister when you’re in Beijing next week to discuss sanctions against Iran. Before you know it, while you were preoccupied, a good wave has come through. Some grinning German with shoulders as broad as Angela Merkel’s is cruising by on a wave that should have been yours.

But, hey. Oh well. Even a bad day of surf beats a good day testifying before the House Financial Services Committee.

A swell bears down and you decide to go for it. The board picks up speed, you struggle to a standing position, and then it happens: You are surfing, riding your sky-blue board toward shore, looking down past the nose at a calm sine wave of water. It shimmers with the kind of transparency that any regulator would admire. Eventually the wave peters out and you bellyflop into the shallows with a boyish splash. You pop up to the surface and let out a whoop.

You put your belly to the board again and point your nose back toward the lineup, and realize, hey, maybe I need to hang loose, man. Maybe I’ve been a little too uptight. Maybe all the worry in the world won’t hurry up a recovery. Maybe just for today, before I return to the buzzards, I’ll enjoy a swell ride.

A Board Meeting with Tim Geithner is a post from: The Ferris Files

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

A detail area from the infographic for this issue's Innovate column.

For the current ‘Innovate’ column in Sierra magazine, I took a look at what’s being done to green the data center. The task was challenging not just because data centers themselves are complex, or because energy efficiency is hard to explain, but because creating an infographic that shows how these two interact was enough to make my brain bleed. I hope the graphic (done with graphic designer Brian Kaas) is understandable, and I welcome your comments on how it turned out.

Data centers have long been energy hogs, mainly because it takes so much air conditioning to keep thousands of servers from overheating. Meanwhile, these computing powerhouses continue to multiply and grow as more and more computing work occurs in ‘the cloud.” Now data centers are caught in two competing crosscurrents of the early 21st Century: the need for ever-greater computing power and the need to reduce our carbon footprint and energy use. How do we meet the burgeoning demand for data centers and have them collectively make less impact?

While researching this story I learned about the metric of  Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) that has become the industry standard in the last few years. You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and now that power usage can be measured, data centers are becoming dramatically more efficient. But PUE doesn’t tell the whole story.  Organizations like The Green Grid are pressing forward on creating other metrics to reduce the footprint of data centers, such as Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) and Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE).

Other efforts are afoot to make data centers work in tandem with sources of renewable energy, like solar and wind farms. A few months ago I wrote about one such research push being made by HP, AMD, and NYSERDA. But the field is young, and it will probably be years before anyone can boast that they are Googling entirely on power drawn from the sun.

Christian Belady

The profile subject for this month’s column is Christian Belady, the general manager for data center research at Microsoft. Belady is credited by many as the creator of the PUE metric and is a leader in prodding his employer toward greater computing efficiency. As a lover of camping, I was amused to hear Belady’s story about how he help start the drive toward energy-sipping data centers by shoving some servers into a tent during the Seattle winter, to show that they could operate just fine without all that wasteful air conditioning. Now that’s my kind of tough love.

New Column: The Lean, Green Data Center is a post from: The Ferris Files

Photo by Anjali Kumar

A couple of weeks ago, midway through a flight from Frankfurt to Montreal, the pilot of our Air Canada flight came on the loudspeaker and said, “Passengers on both the right and left side of the airplane may want to raise your blinds and take a look at Greenland.” We did, and collectively gasped. I have flown over Greenland before, but never with this little cloud cover or with this crystalline clarity.

An eyeful of Greenland’s coast raised in me two contradictory responses. The first was, “Holy toboggans, look at all that ice! Where are my crampons?” The second was, “Should I be worried that there isn’t more ice?”

The legendary icecap of Greenland is getting smaller, and that is a reason to worry and to take action. The culprits are the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that our cars, factories, and power plants (and yes, the plane in which I sat) spew into the air in ever greater quantities. They are trapping heat in the atmosphere and heating Greenland, the planet’s second-biggest collection of glaciers after Antarctica.

The breathtaking view from the plane made me want to visit Greenland and explore the unimaginable vastness of its ice. The great white expanse on the horizon of the photo continues for another 1,500 miles, nearly the distance from New York City to Denver.

But temperature trends point toward a lot less ice. In 2010, the melting season in Greenland lengthened by 50 days compared to the average. That’s almost the same as spring starting a month earlier and winter holding off a month longer. Meanwhile, Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, experienced the warmest spring and summer on record. Greenlanders have some reason to celebrate; their home is becoming a much greener and more pleasant place to live. For the rest of us, it’s not such good news.

If this freezer section of the Northern Hemisphere were to thaw out completely, it is estimated that ocean levels would rise 23 feet, in the process drowning most of our coastal cities. With leading Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry convinced that man-made global warming is a hoax and with the climate debate producing mostly hot air, there’s little standing in the way of the Big Melt. The view from 30,000 feet says that Greenland’s gleaming whiteness is something worth saving.

Inspired, and Worried, by a Flyover of Greenland is a post from: The Ferris Files

So far, the movie has had three screenings: Once in March at the DC Environmental Film Festival, once as part of the “Green Screen” series put on by the Washington Film Institute,  and yesterday’s well-attended showing. Each took place at the Goethe Institut.

Since that first showing there has been significant interest in showing at in other, non-German venues, according to Robert Robinson, an activist with DC Sun, which sponsored yesterday’s showing.  (The film has English subtitles.) He said the Carbon War Room, the German Embassy, and the Solar Energy Industries Association have all wanted to screen it and spread the word. But so far the German producers have said nein.

Why the reluctance to put a film in front of such influential people? I sent an email to the production company that made the film, Fechner Media, but have not yet received a response. I’ll do an update if I get any other information.

In the meantime, enjoy the trailer.

The Inspiring Energy Film that Washingtonians Can’t See is a post from: The Ferris Files

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The love affair started with a Mac much like this one.

When Steve Jobs announced last week that he is leaving Apple, I felt a stab of grief. Part of it is the sadness we all feel, losing the visionary who pulled marvelous rabbits out of the drab beige box of computing, and part of it is personal. My relationship with Steve and his creations goes all the way back to high school.

Steve Jobs and his co-founder at Apple, Steve Wozniak, both attended Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. Fifteen years later, so did I. Their names were first mentioned in the newsroom of The Epitaph, our school paper, because the two entrepreneurs had given us a computer. It sat in a closet and at first no one touched it. After all, we were busy assembling the paper by hand — cutting out the headlines, bylines, and text of stories with X-Acto knives, arranging them on boards of plywood with rulers, and affixing everything in place with wax rollers. Who had time for a computer?

But this nerdy guy on staff, Eric Ly, hunched over the glowing screen playing around with a program called PageMaker. After a little practice, he could complete a page in a fraction of the time that we could, and by the end of the year every page was being assembled by Eric and churned out on our snazzy new laser printer. Steve Jobs had shanghaied us into doing some of the world’s first desktop publishing.

Steve's first appearance on the cover of Time. Source: mac-history.net

About the same time my family replaced its electric typewriter with a Mac Plus. (Imagine, one computing device for a whole family.) We got our mouths around terms like “font” and “dropdown menu.” We learned that a “mouse” signified something other than a rodent and an “icon” something other than a person. One night I was finishing a big term paper for English class when I was visited by the dreaded “bomb” icon. The computer crashed and I had to suffer through an all-nighter to rewrite the paper. I’ve almost forgiven you for that, Steve.

When I went away to college I brought along a Mac II and covered it with In-n-Out and “Dukakis for President” stickers. I loved that machine. Many years later, after floppy disks had long since flopped, I reluctantly brought it to a computer recycling center in San Rafael. The recycling guy, a tower of junked electronics piled up behind him, turned my Mac in his hands and regarded it affectionately. “Aw, it’s so cute,” he said. “Are you sure you want to get rid of it?”

I put it back in the car. He was right, it was too cute to get rid of.

Then came the onslaught of the “i” products: iMac, iTunes, iPod, iTouch, iPhone, iPad, each more sleek and impressive than the last. Steve had cracked the code and made computing fun for the masses. Steve himself became the icon, donning the jeans and mock black turtleneck that made him as spare and instantly recognizable as his gadgets. The hits were wondrous indeed — but at the same time they elicited in me just the tiniest of shrugs.

They felt like candy, these new toys. We the Mac faithful had learned the beauty of Apple’s devices in the 1980s and clung on through the dark 1990s, during Steve’s exile from Apple and during those years when the PC crowd was seized by a puzzling excitement about Windows. And now the world was clamoring for the Steve aesthetic and the new converts lined up outside the Apple stores like children, children who needed to be entreated with something small and shiny.

Steve's latest appearance on the cover of Time. Credit: mac-history.net

But I should get off my high horse because I am as seduced by an iPhone as anyone else. I cradle its smooth shell in my palm like a toy. There are many machines and gadgets I use every day, but none of them emerge from a singular vision like those from Apple. None have the staying power, or have created a fraction of the enjoyment, as the machines that Steve has been dreaming up for thirty years now. Thank you for all you’ve created for us, Steve. You may have graduated, but we hope you’ll come to visit for many years to come.

Steve Jobs, a Tribute 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

Photo Credit: New York Times

On Friday, the Huffington Post published my story about DC Biofuels and its plan to create the first urban biodiesel plant on the East Coast. In short, DC Biofuels wants to take the used cooking oil from Washington, D.C.’s restaurants and make it into something truly valuable: biodiesel to fuel trucks and buses. I learned about it last week at a brown-bag lunch hosted by the DC Environmental Network, and left wondering if smelly old grease is on its way to becoming a valuable commodity.

Used vegetable oil is a messy material that restaurants long haven’t known what to do with; if poured down the drain it gums up the sewer, and traditionally the restaurant has paid to haul it away. Restaurants that make greasy fare, like fast-food restaurants and Chinese joints, can produce dozens of gallons of it a week.

These days, a proliferating number of enterprises will take a restaurant’s greasy leavings for free and try to make some money off it. In the D.C. area, the suitors include Greenlight Biofuels, Smarter Fuel and the American Renewable Fuel Institute. Another operator is Valley Proteins, which mostly converts old oil into animal feed. (If readers know of others, please mention them in the comments.)

Participants in the DC Environmental Network event groused that Valley Proteins isn’t a worthy recipient of played-out cooking oil because the company is using it for something other than fuel.

None of these enterprises have to pay for the leftover grease — yet. But as they get more established, how long will it be before the restaurants realize they could make a few bucks by selling it?

That would truly be a sign of our resource-constrained times.

Note: Thanks to reader feedback, this post has been modified from its original version.

The Coming Turf Battle for D.C.’s Grease 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

A little background: ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy) is a new federal agency created by the Obama administration and originally funded with money from the 2009 stimulus package. It is the Energy Department’s answer to DARPA, the military’s extraordinarily successful research program that formed the basis for the stealth fighter, GPS and the Internet.  ARPA-E is funding environmentally-friendly solutions like smart buildings, carbon capture from coal plants, electrofuels and improved solar and wind power.

1. Printable LED Lights: Nth Degree Technologies

At the summit, Nth Degree Technologies made the debut of what it calls Printed Illuminated Paper. The company embeds paper with thousands of tiny LEDs, each the size of a white blood cell, to make sheets of light that can be cut to any shape or size.

The company had two kinds of demos on hand:  One was two light bulbs, or rather pieces of illuminated paper cut into the shape of light bulbs. (See the video.) However, Mark Lowenthal, the company’s vice president, told me that these were just attention-grabbers and that the final product will be based on a different technology and will bear more resemblance to the piece of paper in the photograph to the right. This light was far brighter and used 8 watts of electricity.  The next generation of illuminated paper, Lowenthal said, will consume a quarter the wattage and be 50 to 100 times brighter.

2. Trapping the Ocean’s Power: Atmocean, Inc.

The idea behind the Atmocean WEST (Wave Energy

Seawater Transmission) is to deploy an array of oceanborne devices that capture wave energy and store it for later use, all while creating better fishing grounds. How is such a trifecta possible?

WEST creates its power from a sort of tug-of-war. A series of buoys (the yellow items in the graphic) float on the surface. Underwater, each buoy has a tail equipped with a series of toggles that creates a huge amount of drag. Between the buoy and the tail is a pump that is activated with each passing swell. That pump sends seawater through a hose to a central floating platform, where it operates an air compressor. That compressor, in turn, routes through a hose  to the ocean floor, where the air is stored in bladders.

Those bladders are the invention of an ARPA-E awardee, Bright Energy Storage Technologies. (Atmocean isn’t an awardee, by the way, but was one of several companies whose presence on the show floor was a tacit endorsement by ARPA-E.) Bright Energy has realized that air, trapped in the pressurized environment of deep water, is an efficient way to store energy. A pneumatic tube connects the bladder to shore, where the air expands in volume and can be released to spin a turbine whenever the energy is needed.

Now about that fishing thing: Atmocean’s CEO, Philip Kithil, told me that his initial tests have shown that the toggle-and-buoy system creates an upwelling of cold water, which if it were borne out would make the area around the buoys into a nutrient-rich ground for fish.

3.  Refrigeration Anywhere: Xergy Inc.

Xergy uses the principles of a fuel cell to create cooling in a much smaller space than a traditional air conditioner, while consuming a fraction of the power and without using refrigeration fluids that are harmful to the atmosphere. “We are using hydrogen as a working fluid and pumping it across a membrane using electricity,” says Bahmad Bahar, the company’s president and an Iranian engineer who grew up in the family’s refrigeration business.

The company was a finalist in ARPA-E’s BEETIT (Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices) category and is a finalist in GE’s Ecoimagination contest.

With no moving parts and a simple design, Bahar thinks Xergy’s air conditioners could be scaled to cool an environment of almost any size, from a computer’s CPU to a full-size building.  And since it takes up less space, a unit could be inserted where air conditioners have never gone before, like the wall of a building or the door panel of a car.

4. Storing Sun and Wind Energy: General Compression

One of the biggest problems with renewable energies like wind and solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. General Compression is one of several companies funded by ARPA-E that is figuring out how to take these intermittent sources and make them into something that can provide “baseload power” that is available 24/7.

When the wind blows or the sun shines, a renewable-energy plant often produces more electricity than the grid can presently use. General Compression takes that extra power and uses it to make compressed air, which is stored in a salt cavern underground. Then, when night falls or the wind dies, the air can be released to spin turbines and create electricity.

There’s just one problem. When that stored air is released, or un-compressed, it becomes so cold that it’s difficult to handle. Other companies contend with this problem by burning some fossil fuels to heat the air.  General Compression’s answer is to trim the cold temperatures (and also the heat from the initial compression) by venting it to a pool of water on the surface.

4 Intriguing Inventions from the ARPA-E Innovation Summit is a post from: The Ferris Files

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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

Stephen Chu

America is at a “Sputnik moment,” Energy Secretary Stephen Chu said today, and the government’s next moves will determine whether the country leads the global clean-tech race or loses it to China.

“This is the threat that I see,” Chu said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. “The U.S. still has the opportunity to lead in a new industrial revolution. It is a way to secure our future prosperity, but I believe our time is running out.”

I attended Chu’s presentation and feel I witnessed a historic moment: Many in the cleantech field have been waiting for the Obama administration to invoke the space race as an analogy for the cleantech race. The two races share a sense of mission, aspiration and patriotism. The words really ought to have come from the lips of Obama himself in an Oval Office address, but I gather that the budget crisis and all those victorious Republicans are making the president a little shy in his proclamations.

The timing of the speech was no accident. It came as new global climate talks got underway in Mexico and as President Obama prepares to sit down for talks with the new Republican leadership in the House of Representatives.

When the U.S.S.R. launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, it shook the American industrial and military establishment; few knew the Russians were capable of such a feat. Eleven days afterward, President Dwight Eisenhower announced a new commitment to scientific R&D that led to decades of American technological dominance.

That today’s announcement was made by a cabinet secretary and not Obama just begins to state the differences between 1957 and 2010. Eisenhower faced a clear enemy at an emphatic historical moment. He wasn’t saddled with a $13.7 trillion national debt or an opposing political party whose top priority was denying him another term in office.

To fend off likely Republican opposition, Chu steered away from divisive issues like climate change and instead turned his attention to the threat from China. He cited figures from a report about China’s rising scientific prowess, designed to scare even the most angry and penny-pinching Tea Party congressman.

In the last 15 years, Chu said, China has gone from 15th place to 5th in international patents and from 14th place to 2nd place in published research articles. Of fifty or so nuclear reactors under construction around the world, thirty are in China. China just surpassed the U.S. with the world’s fastest supercomputer, has a 220-mph rail line that is the fastest in the world, and has broken ground on a rail network almost four times larger than the next most developed rail country, France. The U.S. is just sketching out its plan for high-speed rail.

Furthermore, Chu cited figures that eight of the ten global companies with the largest R&D budgets have set up research facilities in China and/or India. And then there’s the fact that U.S. tech giant Applied Materials has built the world’s largest private research facility — in China.

Chu remained upbeat that the U.S. could win the energy race by building on investments the Obama adminstration has made so far, notably through the Energy Department’s ARPA-E program that gives seed funding to promising energy technologies. ARPA-E has set ambitious targets, like a car battery that can go 500 miles on a single charge, synthesizing fuels from sunlight, and reducing the cost of photovoltaic solar by a factor of four, so it can compete with coal.

“Let’s seize this opportunity,” Chu said. “We can’t afford not to.”

Chu: Will America Miss Its “Sputnik Moment” on Energy? is a post from: The Ferris Files