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: 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

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

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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

I explored alternative designs in wind power for my latest “Innovate” column in Sierra magazine, and can report that 31 flavors of turbines are poised to engulf the plain ol’ vanilla version we know so well. It isn’t that anything’s so wrong with Old Reliable; it’s more that there’s categories of wind that a giant whirligig just can’t use.

Vertical-axis turbine. Image Credit: jetsongreen.typepad.com

On the roof of Adobe Systems in San Jose there’s a gang of vertical-axis turbines, spinning in breaths of wind that would leave your traditional turbine inert. Go even smaller and you find the Windbelt, suitable for installation by the hundreds on bridges or porch railings.

Sky Windpower turbine. Image Credit: skywindpower.com

Then there’s Earth’s atmosphere, where winds blow with even more power than they do on the Dakota prairies. A propeller on a steel post could only dream of catching the breezes harnessed by an out-there generation of kites. Tethered to the ground with a power line, these models describe endless circles in the sky 1,200 feet up, outfitted with two small propellers like a cross between a barnstormer and a Predator drone. Or the Sky Windpower turbine, which is essentially a helicopter the size of an airliner held to the ground by the world’s longest extension cord. It would fly itself five miles up into the Jet Stream, and if it needed maintenance or if the weather got too rough, it would maneuver itself back to the ground.

FloDesign generator. Image Credit: Sierra magazine

Back on Earth, the contraption that might kill the garden-variety windcatcher is the FloDesign turbine, currently undergoing testing in Massachusetts. Designed by aerospace engineers, it might do to the standard Vestas or General Electric turbine what the jet engine did to the prop plane. FloDesign is optimized to suck in air so its rotor spins like a crazed dervish. Its compact design means turbines might be able to be placed closer together than today’s spidery creatures, and quite possibly generate more power. Less space, more power; hasta la vista, vanilla turbine.

Aerogenerator turbine. Image Credit: Sierra magazine

Finally, I am waiting for the ambitious mayor of some oceanside city to unveil plans for an Aerogenerator. Standing 450 feet off the water, this behemoth would produce enough power for 2,700 homes, but even more importantly it would become an icon admired for its sheer industrial size, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. Unlike other monumental architecture, though, it would move, making three ponderous rotations a minute for the tourists’ cameras.

Maybe the plain ol’ wind turbine won’t disappear. Maybe it just will lose its category-defining status, the way that the term “computer” has come to mean more than just a big beige box sitting on your desk. The wind industry will have its laptops, Google Androids and iPads, each with its own size blades — or perhaps no blades at all.

All this reflection on the wind turbine has me wondering when we will become familiar enough with turbines that we begin to experiment with something other than their shape and style. Henry Ford famously said that “People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.” How long until the wind industry breaks out of its own beige box and turn out a windcatcher in dashing red, or shimmering gold?

What Wind Turbine 2.0 Will Look Like 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

Hear Ye, O Haters of Styrofoam:

Us vs. the Volcano: Boxes and people lurched back into the troposphere this week as the Eyjafjoell volcano stopped spewing and gave planes the chance to fly again from European airports. Eyjafjoell issued 150,000 to 30,000 tons of CO2 per day — as much as a small European country — but its carbon footprint was offset by all those canceled flights. Anxious eyes remained on the skies for another eruption, or perhaps an interruption of another kind. After all, the U.S. military fears massive oil shortages by 2015.

Solar on the Go: Seiko unveiled a series of wristwatches powered by photovoltaic panels built into the face. After getting a full suntan the timepiece will keep on ticking for about six months, at a price of $215 to $283. This summer, Samsonite will roll out a line of luggage embedded with solar panels that transmit enough juice to power mobile devices.

This Time We Mean It: Energy Star, the international standard for energy-efficient appliances, has been stung suckered of late by manufacturers that lied about their specs. As of 2011, makers of fridges, washers and water heaters will need to submit to independent testing in order to win the coveted EnergyStar label.

Hypermiling with the Kids: Meld a hybrid with a minivan, and you get sippy-cup stains that no baking soda will remove. No, wait! You get the Toyota Prius minivan, which reports say will go on sale in Japan in 2011 (no word yet on offerings in the U.S.) . Chevy might not be too far behind, with rumors that it will announce a hybrid Volt minivan in Beijing next week.

In Other Car News: On Tuesday, Nissan began taking reservations for the all-electric Leaf, which goes on sale in December.

In a survey, 78 percent of people said they expect that cars of the future will be plug-ins or hybrids. Over half said they expect to own one in their lifetimes.  That’s good news for Smart, the teeny-tiny little child of Daimler, which said that it will roll out diesel, hybrid and electric versions in the next few years.

Ford announced plans for a driver interface that gives real-time fuel-economy coaching and opened a developer network, a la the iPhone. Fisker assigned itself the role of ambassador to the heartland, arranging a tour of its $87,000 plug-in Karma sportster to places that rarely think outside the gas tank, like Neena, Wisconsin and Plano, Texas.

The Moneymaking Roof: Recurrent Energy of San Francisco and partner BlueWatt will install 50 megawatts of rooftop solar on commercial and industrial roofs all over France. Meanwhile, SunPower Corp and Empire Power Systems are collaborating to make the largest rooftop solar system ever in Arizona, an 850,000-square-foot building in Phoenix that houses vast refrigerators and freezers.

In other news, Molycorp Minerals filed for a $350,000 IPO to fund the reopening of a California mine and a restart for the U.S. rare-earth mining industry. Underneath Mountain Pass, Calif., are elements like neodymium that are crucial to wind turbines and electric-car batteries, supplies of which are dominated by China.

Gadget Watch: An Italian designer creates a 3-D printer that could make buildings out of sand; the Navy crafts a microbe that would enable a submersible powered by mud; and while we’re at it, the military wants an all-terrain hybrid flying car.

The Weekly: UPS Hates Styrofoam, Prius Plans a Minivan is a post from: The Ferris Files

This week, G.E. unveiled an eco-equivalent to the 40-watt incandescent bulb — a 9-watt LED that will go on sale late this year or early next. Days later, Philips announced its own entry, a 12-watt LED meant to replace the plain ol’ 60-watt bulb.  Both will sell for $40 or $50 and could last 17 years — long enough that your mattress will give out before your bulbs do.

Not Exactly Glacial: Usually global warming occurs at pace that’s hard to detect, but that changed on Sunday for the people of Carhuaz, Peru. A massive block of the Hualcan glacier broke off and tumbled into a lake, creating a 75-foot-tall tsunami that killed three.

Signals from a Hurting Planet: In Canada, the 895-square-mile ice cap on Devon Island in Baffin Bay is shrinking and calving glaciers. One in six species of mangrove faces the threat of extinction as shorelines are developed and fished, especially in Central America. And NASA released satellite photos of that reveal that Semiara Island in the Philippines is being steadily destroyed by a coal-mining operation.

Pinch Us, We Must Be Dreaming: A few years ago, could you imagine reading any of the following news items, much less in the space of one week? Sony commits to zero carbon and zero waste by 2050; Verizon adds 1,600 alternative-fuel cars to its fleet and plans a generation of eco-friendly set-top boxes; Korean conglomerate LG invests $18 billion to cut its emissions by 40 percent and develop energy-efficient businesses; and PepsiCo devotes $18 million to buy biomass boilers and solar panels to power the making of Tostitos and Dr. Pepper.

Cleantech Biz Update: Strong performance by solar and energy-efficiency companies helped push the Dow over 11,000 for the first time since the economic collapse of 2008, the New York Times reported. But with public subsidies coming to an end, the cleantech rally might not last. In other news, Cereplast, the creator of bio-based plastics, got listed on the NASDAQ.

Critical Mass-achusetts: The state of Massachusetts tapped smart-grid company EnerNOC to bring sophisticated energy tools to 17 million square feet of government real estate, including offices, hospitals, colleges and prisons. Savings might amount to $10 million a year. Meanwhile, the state’s own FloDesign Wind Turbine Corp. won a series of state loans and investments and will set up a new R&D facility.

Not Your Grandfather’s Hindenburg: Why not ship our goods on giant solar blimps?

Corn-as-Fuel Loses Its Luster: America’s love affair with ethanol from Midwestern corn took another blow this week with a report warning that dedicating much of America’s breadbasket to fuel might be disastrous in the event of a food shortage. Meanwhile, alternative fuels like cellulosic ethanol and algae gained traction.

Brazil Woos Your Gas Tank: Brazil waged a U.S. public-relations blitz to persuade the United States to lower tariffs that lock out ethanol made from Brazilian sugarcane. Sugarcane ethanol is widespread in Brazil, with a lower carbon footprint than our own corn ethanol and achieving affordable prices without much government support.

Gadget Watch: Researchers at Stanford figured out how to draw electrical current from a single cell of algae; marine scientists created a perpetual-motion robot powered by changes in the ocean’s temperature; and the round-the-world solar plane clocked its longest flight ever at 87 minutes. Next up: a night flight.

The Weekly: Light Bulbs that Last Forever, Glaciers that Don’t, Solar Planes that Try is a post from: The Ferris Files

Top News:

On Saturday, Apple’s long-awaited iPad emerged to great fanfare, and with it some schwag and a initial smattering of green apps.

Wising Up to the Smart Grid: After years of talk and speculation, several big U.S. companies revealed that the smart grid lies at the center of their business plans. At the New York Auto Show, Ford and Microsoft announced energy-management software designed for the thousands of people who will plug in their electric cars or hybrids at home.  Connecticut Light & Power applied for permission to scrap its flat-rate price structure in favor of one that penalizes customers for overloading the grid. Under the proposal, Connecticut electricity would be ten times cheaper at night than it would be in the middle of the day, when the A/C units are cranking.

Also, Google spearheaded a lobbying effort, joined by Hewlett-Packard, General Electric, Comcast and other firms poised to make a mint from the smart grid. In a letter to President Obama, they asked for the government to “democratize access to energy” by tilting regulations in favor of energy networking.

Do the Right Thing: Starbucks, in an effort to make all of its cups recyclable or reusable by 2015, asked coffee-drinkers everywhere to crowdsource the solution. Target announced it would place recycling centers at the entrances to each of its 1,740 stores, and the board at Intel voted to make “corporate responsibility and sustainability performance” part of its corporate charter.

Meanwhile, the foodmaking giant ConAgra, maker of Chef Boyardee and Orville Redenbacher and a longtime laggard in acknowledging global warming, promised to make big cuts to its carbon emissions, water use, solid waste and packaging by 2015.

Traffic Jam in the Luxury Lane: So many carmakers are preparing high-end hybrids that dealerships in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor might get a little crowded. Hyundai said it would produce a six-speed, powerful Sonata Hybrid Bluedrive in 2011. Nissan’s luxe brand, Infiniti, announced the M35 Hybrid, while Mercedes hinted that its entire S class line of large sedans may go hybrid. Auto dealers reacted with dismay, worried that their customers would rather drive fast than save a few bucks on gas.

Troubled Waters: China’s neighbors questioned if China’s dam-building binge might be contributing to the biggest drop in water levels on the Mekong River in decades. In the U.S., researchers discovered that waterways from the Colorado River to the Potomac are steadily getting warmer, especially near cities, with unknown impacts on river health.

The Latest Inspiring Inventions: The National Renewable Energy Laboratory created an LED with a green tint — not the ethic, but the actual color — and opened up whole new uses for the brave little bulb. Marine scientists got a better look at tiny sea life with high-definition audio, and the propellerheads at MIT made a leap forward in lithium-air batteries.

The Weekly: Obama Drills, the Grid Lobby Powers Up, ConAgra Sees the Light is a post from: The Ferris Files

Muppandal pumps out 540 megawatts of electricity because of the strong, consistent winds that blow off the Arabian Sea and funnel through the Western Ghats (the lumpy, Dr. Suessian peaks in the background of the photo).

The turbines look strangely at home amid the coconut and banana groves, as if they were merely the region’s oversized new crop. The chaotic hodgepodge of turbines appears in batches over dozens of miles. Any one vista might encompass several different designs. India solicited models from all over the world, from the Netherlands’ blocky Vestas to Germany’s Enercon, with its distinctive teardrop-shaped nose.

A businessman I met explained that turbines in India are individually sponsored, which explains why corporate names and logos are painted on so many of the towers. A company “buys” the turbine, and in exchange the company gets a credit on its power bill equal to the turbine’s output.

Muppandal bears little resemblance to the wind farms I know in the U.S., with their tidy rows of identical turbines. But India seems to find its own way.

A Visit to India’s Largest Wind Plantation is a post from: The Ferris Files

In India, every power outlet is governed by its own switch, and those switches are monitored with a careful eye. I was sternly instructed to turn switches off when I was done with them. If I vacated the bedroom without turning off the switch to the overhead light and the ceiling fan, I would get an immediate reprimand from the family cook. When I visited the aunt’s place across the hall and wanted to use the Internet, I had to start up the computer from dead because it had been switched to “Off” at the wall. No standby appliances vampiring electricity here.

This thrift extended even to the apartment gym, where I arrived with water bottle and towel to find the lights off and every cardio machine dark. To work out on the treadmill I switched its outlet on. When I finished I turned it off, as the sign next to the the machine instructed.

To contend with Chennai’s broiling heat, it isn’t as simple as pushing a thermostat button and pumping an entire big room or building full of cold air. Instead I turned on the A/C unit by the treadmill, and when I was done with the treadmill I switched it off. Then I headed to the dumbbell area and activated its resident A/C unit. None of this felt like any sort of imposition.

Somehow Indians have an instinct toward electricity conservation. Maybe it has to do with the country’s roots: Like many Indians, Anjali’s family is just three generations removed from its ancestral village, where one tended to the rice paddies and the bullock. Life was too hard to let anything go to waste.

Whatever the reason, it was refreshing to take a break from America’s thoughtless, wasteful use of power and to know that, halfway around the world, a billion people have found another way.

How India Puts Itself on a Power Diet is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Makani Power generator made a rare appearance at the ARPA-E conference this week.

The most surprising thing about the inaugural ARPA-E summit, held this week outside Washington D.C., is that the conference hall was full of losers. They were inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs who had applied for funding from the U.S. government’s exciting new energy-research organization but had been shot down.  The Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy received 3,500 proposals, but only accepted 37. That leaves room for some compelling also-rans.

As a consolation prize, some of the most credible finalists got booth space in the exhibit hall. The most visible were those with ambitious plans for “kite power” — harnessing the powerful and consistent winds that blow high off the Earth’s deck.

Kite energy is way out there, both physically and in the public mindset, and it can be a hard sell, even to an agency like ARPA-E that funds risky projects. Who wants to put their money on the line for a four-rotor helicopter the size of a 747 that’s suspended several kilometers in the air?

“We want a funding category and we want air space, so we can all play together,” said Len Shepard, CEO of Sky Windpower, creator of the giant helicopter-turbine.

Here’s a rundown of the models I saw:

Joby Energy. A Joby wind installation would look like a giant white ladder turning circles in the sky.

At each rung of the ladder are two small propellers that generate power as the ladder tugs against the wind at 400 meters up.

Tethering the device is a cable that serves two power functions: sending generated electricity to the ground, and if the wind goes slack, returning power to the props to help the device make a safe, helicopter-style landing.

The Joby Energy design.

The Joby team, made up of former students from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology and Stanford, are now assembling a 100 kilowatt (KW) model and are hoping to create a 300 KW one soon.

Makani Power. Early on, Makani got the ultimate imprimatur of approval: $10 million in seed money from Google, followed by another $5 million since. But their design has been a mystery. That cleared up a bit this week as Makani displayed a giant red fiberglass prototype at its booth at the ARPA-E conference.

Makani’s kitewing will zoom though the sky in circles with propellers attached, much like Joby’s design. Founder Corwin Hardham said the company plans to develop a 100 Kw model in the next year and a half, and a one-megawatt model the year after that.

An illustration of Sky Windpower's entry.

Sky Windpower. Unlike Joby or Makani, Sky Windpower’s approach is to launch a larger generator far higher in the sky — 6,000 to 27,000 feet up, said Shepard. Buffeted by winds of  up to 300 miles an hour, it would stay in one place, more or less, governed by its tether and four rotors. Such high winds means the generator could be as large as a jet plane and could pump out 1 to 1.6 MW per unit.

Three Ideas in Wind Power That Might Actually Fly is a post from: The Ferris Files

There are many reasons, but one has to do with maintenance. A solar panel requires almost none: Install it and leave it alone for years. But a wind turbine is a finicky device with many moving parts, and the servicing makes a small turbine hardly worth the expense. I’ve always wondered whether we would ever learn to harvest wind on a smaller, simpler scale. Turns out we can.

The WindBelt was dreamed up by 28-year-old Bay Area inventor Shawn Frayne during a trip to Haiti as he tried to figure out how to deliver power to the energy-starved developing world. Frayne dispensed of the turbine altogether and explored a different aerodynamic phenomenon known as aeroelastic flutter. The marquee example of the principle is the so-funny-it’s-tragic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, aka “Galloping Gertie”:

Frayne asked himself: What if I induce those same forces, but on a small scale, and use that flutter to move small magnets and produce electricity? The result is wind power on a modest, rooftop scale. This video demonstrates it best:

The company Frayne created to improve and market the technology, Humdinger Energy, is marketing three sizes of Windbelts to serve different needs. Deploy a regiment of Windbelts in a windy area, and they could supply power equivalent to a large wind turbine, but without the noise or the rotors that kill birds.

The Wind Turbine’s Tiny Cousin is a post from: The Ferris Files

A solution has appeared in the form of the treadle pump, a sort of Stairmaster that pumps water. The device takes water-carrying work away from a polluting machine and puts in the hands (or rather under the feet) of the farmer.

Invented by in 1981 by an aid worker, the treadle pump has sold more than 1.4 million units in Bangladesh, according to IDE (PDF file), with many more in use in India and Africa. They range in price from $20 to $100 and may be made of metal or bamboo.

Twenty hours a week on the water treadmill will irrigate a quarter-hectare field – enough to empower a farmer to grow an extra crop cycle each year, to make each crop more robust, and bring home more money for the family.

The Treadle Pump: An Exercise in Productivity is a post from: The Ferris Files

The solar refrigerator. The purple box at bottom is the cooler, the solar panel and activated carbon bed are on top, and the condenser is at center. Image courtesy Michigan State University.

The very idea of a solar refrigerator is a contradiction: Use the hot sun to keep things cold. How could such an oxymoron possibly work?

It would seem impossible if a team of undergraduates from Michigan State University hadn’t already built a prototype, out of cheap materials, in Guatemala.

The potential uses for a solar refrigerator are endless, from air-conditioning buildings to keeping a case of Sam Adams cold on a hot Fourth of July day. But its most immediate purpose is keeping vaccines viable for medical clinics in areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America that aren’t served by an electrical grid. The perfection of a solar fridge could significantly reduce disease in the rural developing world.

The Michigan State undergraduates who built one of the world's first solar fridges.

To get a solar fridge going, one needs a material that remains freezing cold even at room temperature. The Michigan State team chose ethanol, though methanol works too. Vacuum-sealed in pipes to low pressure, ethanol’s molecules slow and its temperature drops to about 35˚ F. The ethanol resides in the “evaporator,” a coil of copper tubes just inside the cooler. (Why is it called an “evaporator”? You’ll see in a minute).

By the end of the night, the cooler is 39˚ F, cold enough to keep its contents chilly even through a tropical day. As the ethanol has worked its cooling magic, it’s been doing something else: boiling at a furious rate. Ethanol in low pressure boils and turns into gas, just like that foggy liquid nitrogen you might have played with in science class.

Pipes direct that gaseous ethanol to the top of the box, where it drifts through a sandbox-like bed of powder at the top of the machine. The sand is activated carbon, aka charcoal. (John Barrie guesses that even charcoal from burnt coconut shells could serve this function.) The activated carbon traps the ethanol and holds it tight.

A solar refrigerator in action in Guatemala.

Then the hot sun rises. Sun rays strike the solar panel atop the machine. Directly beneath, the bed of activated carbon begins to heat up, and as it does, the ethanol vaporizes again. Only this time, the expanding gas raises the pressure in the pipes so the ethanol can turn back into liquid form. The ethanol gas fills the condenser, the matrix of pipes in the center of the drawing. The condenser has a large surface area that dissipates the sun’s heat and cools the ethanol back into liquid. As the day wears on, the ethanol trickles back down into the evaporator. By the time night falls, all the ethanol is pooled down in the evaporator, and the cycle can start again.

What if it’s cloudy? MSU professor Craig Somerton, who led the solar-fridge team, says that a fire set under the unit would keep it working.

While the sun-powered chiller is still a long way from reality, its promise is substantial. A well-calibrated solar refrigerator could go for years without maintenance, and most importantly, without ever being plugged into an electrical outlet. Click here to learn more and to find design drawings of the solar refrigerator.

A Refrigerator Powered by the Sun is a post from: The Ferris Files

In short: The thermoacoustic engine uses heat to create sound, and sound to create electricity.

How’s that again? For the statement above to make sense, one has to understand the intimate relationship between sound and heat.

Imagine an impatient driver honking as you amble across the street. As the purple-faced motorist presses his horn, your innocent ears perceive the honk as a sound wave. What is a sound wave? Though we perceive it as sound, in reality it’s a wave of pressure. The crest of the wave compresses air molecules as it travels, while the trough of the wave is a little decompressed. That pressure wave enters your ear and strikes the tympanic membrane like a drumstick on a drum, making you turn and glance at the driver.

Now here’s where the heat comes in. The high and low-pressure parts of a sound wave actually have different temperatures, like the difference in mood between the angry driver and your cool self. The high-pressure part is hotter and the low pressure part is cooler. It’s this gap between hot and cold that makes a thermoacoustic engine work.

A typical thermoacoustic engine is a cylinder with a heat source warming up its middle. (Any of several heat sources will work: flame, an engine’s  waste heat, or solar energy.) As the middle gets hot, the ends stay cool. Observe the flame at mid-cylinder in this video:

Pressure waves of heat and cold begin to bounce back and forth between the center and the ends. If the pipe is the right length and if the heat source is adequate, these chaotic waves fall into a steady rhythm known as a standing wave. Crucial to the engine is the “stack,” a perforated stopper that stands between the hot and cold parts like a cork with tiny holes in it. The stack serves two purposes. It’s an accelerator, causing air molecules to speed up as they move through the small openings. It also serves as insulator, to keep the hot side hot and the cool side cool.

At one end of the cylinder, the pressure waves create motion. Many thermoacoustic engines, also known as lamina flow engines, use the pressure waves to move a piston. That’s the design in this video:

Barrie’s design instead employs a magnet moving on a spring (like a drumstick on a drum). The magnet moves next to a copper coil, and the magnetic field between them creates electricity.

But wait – where does the sound come in? The sound is part and parcel of those pressure waves, though it doesn’t serve a useful purpose. In the same way that heat is a waste product of an internal-combustion engine, sound is a waste product of the thermoacoustic engine. Controlling that sound is part of the design challenge.

An engine could issue a whine of 135 to 180 decibels, which is louder than cozying up to a jackhammer. But if encased in a steel tube, it presents as a low hum, like the sound of a refrigerator running.

The Thermoacoustic Engine, Explained is a post from: The Ferris Files

The University of Arizona's Water Wall

Near the Smithsonian building in Washington, D.C. stands a house with a wall of Coke-bottle plastic. Sandwiched between two layers of plastic is water. The wall’s surface conserves heat and also plays tricks with the light, so you can’t help but reach out and touch it.

On the deck of this house, a black kettle hangs twelve feet in the air. On sunny days it is filled with corn kernels. Below, two reflective circles bounce the sun’s rays onto the kettle. When the kettle gets hot enough the kernels pop and send popcorn tumbling down a tube and into a bowl, where they’re served to the crowds at the Solar Decathlon.

When I visited the University of Arizona’s decathlon project today, there was no sun. Clouds and drizzle filled the sky and temperatures hovered in the 40s. Only the feeblest solar energy fed the solar panels, as well as the sightseers, who despite being bundled in thick jackets and hats still stood in lines for half an hour or more to get a glimpse of the homes.

The Solar Decathlon brings 20 universities from around the U.S. and world to build mini-houses on the National Mall. They compete for the title of most energy-efficient house on the basis of ten criteria, including architecture, engineering, comfort and market viability. To win, a project needs to suck as much energy from the sun as possible – the design equivalent of lying on the beach in a bikini slathered in No. 2 Coppertone.

Students met this challenge in many ways. Team Spain embedded solar squares in glass walls and topped itself with a roof-size panel that rotated to face the sun’s rays. Team Germany sheathed its entire building in solar panels, all the way down to the window louvers.

Plants climb the walls at Rice University's Zerow House.

Other projects put water coils under the floor and solar water heaters on the roof and rain-collection systems below the gutters. By investigating these ideas, one starts to look at walls, roof, floors and windows in a new way. They begin to look like a road crew lounging on their shovels. Get to work, you want to say.

One’s roof could be covered with solar panels, or skylights or grass or water tanks. The walls could be made of water or honeysuckle. The windows could open to let cool air in, or served by outdoor louvers to keep the heat out (and then covered with solar film, which worked beautifully for the Germans; they won the contest).

This is how people will look at their home surfaces in the future. The roof and walls will be crowded with energy-saving features, the way a TV remote is covered with buttons or a microchip is covered with circuits. You’ll look for ways to draw just a few more watts out of the sucker.

The Germans' winning design.

Energy Crowds the House is a post from: The Ferris Files

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