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

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

CO2 is removed in the plant's two tall silvery columns (top).

Today, as part of the Society of Environmental Journalists annual meeting, I hopped a bus and toured three of Wisconsin’s leading renewable-energy projects. Heartened as I was to see innovation in action, I could also tell we’re still in Mile One of a long marathon away from fossil fuels.

Just one percent of the plant

First we visited a Wisconsin Energy coal-fired power plant outside of Milwaukee called Pleasant Prairie. There, engineers built a four-story plant that diverts a slice of the coal’s smoke and vapor and extracts the CO2 by sprinkling it with chilled ammonia. This is one approach to “carbon capture,” as its known. On one hand, scrubbers like this could help erase coal’s giant black mark as an agent of global warming. On the other, the very notion of “clean coal” was viewed with suspicion by the well-informed journalists on the bus, who have seen lies billow from the energy industry much like the smoke billowed from Pleasant Prairie’s stack.

At a press conference, the bigwigs at Wisconsin Energy and its affiliates boasted that their new annex pulled two tons of CO2 an hour from the plant’s waste stream. That’s not much really, considering the project treated just one percent of the exhaust gas, and then re-emitted what it captured. But it’s only a pilot project. One of Pleasant Prairie’s sponsors is Alstom, the global power-generation and rail giant. Alstom has now built another and much larger test plant in West Virginia that might remove 110,000 tons of CO2 each year and pump it into the ground. By 2015, Alstom hopes to be selling carbon-capture facilities to  coal plants around the world.

When asked whether energy producers will be able to afford the technology or fit a scrubber the size of an apartment building onto their existing facilities, the executives had no ready answer.

The prototype of the all-electric Ford Escape sat in Johnson Control's plug-in bay.

Next we visited SC Johnson, the manufacturer of such home-care items as Windex and Ziploc bags. All of the plant’s electricity comes from a generator powered by methane from a local landfill. Laudable as the project is, there wasn’t much to see; we put on safety glasses and earplugs and toured the (very hot) generator room, where the methane-powered beast hummed and rattled behind steel plates.

Finally, our bus pulled up to the gleaming headquarters of Johnson Controls (no relationship to SC Johnson), one of the world’s top producers of car batteries, including those for hybrid cars. Nothing loud or dirty here. We toured the manufacturing rooms and saw a prototype of one of Johnson’s most high-profile projects, the battery for the 2012 plug-in electric Ford Escape. I saw the room where the innards of a nickel-metal hydride battery are pressed together and spun in a spool. The Ford Escape, however, uses the even newer lithium-ion battery.

Watching these projects I got the sense of being on the cusp, of technologies ready to spring out of the test lab and into every coal plant and automobile trunk across the land. If Congress gets climate legislation right, that leap might help trim a few degrees Fahrenheit off the Earth’s rising temperatures, and create a safer world.

Wisconsin Badgers Toward Cleaner Energy is a post from: The Ferris Files

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