Innovate 
Innovate: A Magazine Column that’s Half Man and Half Machine
Innovate is a cyborg of a column I write for Sierra magazine. Each issue I explore the boundaries of renewable energy — the ragged edges where entrepreneurs are figuring out how to run our industrial economy much more efficiently and with sources of energy that you may never have thought of. Solar blimps, energy-harvesting windows, 650-foot-long mechanical snakes that make electricity from ocean waves. They may seem strange, but they are the leading edge of our next industrial revolution. One day they may be as commonplace as coal plants and gas stations.
Where does the cyborg come in? Well, this is a revolution of both machines and men (and women). The first half of the column is an infographic that illustrates the technology in pictures, produced in concert with a graphic designer. The second part is a profile of one of the visionaries who is creating our low-impact future, often with meager resources and at tremendous risk. That’s Innovate. A strange combo, I know, but compelling enough to win a MAGGIE Award in 2010.
Enjoy exploring. I welcome your comments through the Facebook chat at the bottom of each column on Sierra‘s website, or through my Contact page.
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Infographic: When a train rushes into a station accompanied by a hair-flopping breeze and a squeal of brakes, some engineers think, “What a lot of wasted energy.” Train system managers are starting to agree. Here are the creative ways in which technology can collect extra power from hurtling tons of steel. |
| Profile: Andrew Gillespie, Chief Power Engineer, Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority: Andrew Gillespie’s love for electric trains is a complicated thing. As the chief power engineer for SEPTA, he yearns for those gleaming bullet trains found in Japan and Germany. But he’s in Philadelphia, where the electric rail lines are a century old and the system is perpetually short of money. |
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| Infographic: Hidden behind every Google search and Facebook update is an energy-guzzling data center. As the globe’s computing migrates to “the cloud,” the electricity-powered facilities that do all that number crunching will generate more and more heat. Now, some sharp minds are trying to make the centers smaller, cooler, more efficient, and able to “friend” cleaner power sources like solar and wind. |
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Profile: Christian Belady, General Manager for Data Center Research, Microsoft: Frustration over escalating energy bills made Christian Belady toss some computer servers into a tent in 2007 to tough out the Seattle winter. Belady, a data center expert at Microsoft, knew that servers are hardy machines. But the industry engineers who set air-conditioning standards had decreed that data centers operate best between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit—a cautious edict that caused hundreds of megawatts to be wasted on unnecessary cooling all year round. Belady had grown up camping in national parks, and figured that data centers could benefit from fresh air too… |
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Infographic: Around the world, thousands of square miles of “industrial water”—cooling ponds, reservoirs, irrigation channels, and aqueducts—lose precious acre-feet as they evaporate in the hot sun. Why not slow the evaporation and create electricity by launching a flotilla of solar panels? |
| Profile: Phil Connor, Co-Founder, Sunengy: Phil Connor first realized the power of solar panels in 1963 at the age of 13. He found a little five-inch solar wafer at military-surplus store in Sydney, hooked it to his transistor radio, and listened to a new band called the Beatles. |
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| Infographic: Deep under West Virginia, below the infamous coal seams, is a mass of hot rock that could help power the state for millennia. But getting to it is no easy feat. If engineers can find a way to affordably reach into West Virginia’s geothermal pocket, then the trick can be repeated almost anywhere on the planet. |
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Profile: Brian Anderson, Assistant Professor, West Virginia University: Anderson could have gone almost anywhere after earning a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he returned to Appalachian coal country. It just made sense to a guy who’d grown up among oil pumps and coalfields. |
| Infographic: Pick a cloud on the horizon and try to guess whether it will eventually cover the sun. Then guess exactly when the cloud will pass overhead and how long it will be before the sun comes out again. This game becomes a profit-sapping frustration if you’re the manager of a solar farm, when a partly cloudy day could lose you precious megawatts. |
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Profile: Dr. Carlos Coimbra, Associate Professor, University of California, Merced: Carlos Coimbra does his most dangerous solar forecasting off the job, while astride his motorcycle. Crossing the Nevada desert on Interstate 15, he watches the thunderclouds on the horizon and wonders whether he should seek cover or risk playing slip-and-slide with the semis in the rain. |
| Infographic: Skyscrapers have to work hard to protect themselves from the sun. Their vast glassy surfaces absorb so much heat that the air-conditioning pumps all day, sometimes even in winter. One solution may be an integrated, concentrating solar facade—an array of miniature generators that follow the sun like a field of transparent sunflowers. |
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Profile: Peter Stark, Technical Director, HeliOptix: Bracing for disappointment, Peter Stark headed into a meeting with another one of those starry-eyed solar people. In the room was architect Anna Dyson, who had an idea for a window system that could harvest 80 percent of the sun’s energy—a number some considered theoretically impossible. “Give me an hour,” Dyson pleaded. |
| Infographic: The swift, powerful tides that can make oodles of electricity are surprisingly rare. In the United States, only a few places—including the Gulf of Maine, Washington’s Puget Sound, Manhattan’s East River, and the waters under the Golden Gate Bridge—create a muscular flow near cities with sizable power needs. |
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Profile: Dr. Huijie Xue, Professor of Oceanography, University of Maine: Huijie Xue grew up in Ruian, a town on China’s coast where life moved with the rhythm of the tides… |
| Infographic: A shadow falls from above, and you glance up to see what looks like a giant marshmallow lifting off of the roof of a skyscraper, loaded with a shipment of solar panels. This is the future that “helium heads” envision: lumbering but graceful airships taking some of the load off trucks, trains, freighters, and even jets while expending little or no fuel. |
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Profile: Mark Summers, Founder, Helios Airships: When Mark Summers released his 15-foot-long homemade blimp into the Utah sky one Sunday morning in 2009, it seemed nothing could go wrong… |
| Infographic: When it comes to sunny, no place on Earth compares to space. The National Security Space Office estimates that a one-kilometer-wide belt of space around Earth receives in one year an amount of solar energy equal to the world’s oil reserves. A space-based solar station could stream power day and night, in any weather, to any latitude, in an amount that would dwarf the output of terrestrial solar and wind farms. |
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Profile: Gary Spirnak, Founder, Solaren: Early in his career, Gary Spirnak decided he’d rather build a spaceship than ride in one. “I worked around a lot of astronauts, and it didn’t seem that glamorous,” he says of the days in the 1980s and ’90s when he coordinated space shuttle flights for the U.S. Air Force. |
| Infographic: Waves are a vast and inexhaustible source of power, but just try making them run a Roomba. |
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Profile: Brent Dehlsen, CEO, Ecomerit Technologies:Brent Dehlsen grew up sailing a 48-foot Cheoy Lee ketch with his father off the coast of Santa Barbara, California. But if the conversation turns to the energy of ocean waves, don’t expect him to get all misty-eyed. |
| Infographic: We live at the start of an energy era when virtually any wind turbine has a halo of virtue. But evidence is gathering that one day we’ll look at the whirling Popsicle sticks on our hillsides as awkward first tries. |
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Profile: Eddie O’Connor, Founder, Mainstream Renewable Power: “I found out I was Ireland’s leading polluter,” O’Connor recalled, “and I had to ask myself what I was going to do about it.” |
| Infographic: Inexpensive devices that harness the sun and wind can supply small amounts of power, come from local materials, and create local jobs. The developing world’s population is expected to grow by 2.5 billion over the next 40 years, so these innovative energy savers can’t come soon enough. |
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Profile: John Barrie, Founder, Appropriate Technology Collaborative: “There are 200,000 people in the world designing cell phones, and 20 people in the world designing things for the 2 billion poor people on the planet,” Barrie says. “I have a lot of clients.” |
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Energy & Environment David Ferris is managing editor of the Matter Network. As journalist and columnist, he explores the role of business and technology in making our world more sustainable. Learn more. |
