Image Credit: Talking Points Memo

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

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

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

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

Image Credit: NASA

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

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

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

Image Credit: defencetalk.com

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

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

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

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

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

The Navy's ambitious energy-reduction goals.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lessons from the Deep:

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

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

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

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

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

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

image credit: picasaweb.google.com/mikelo

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

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

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

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

Image credit: 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Tales of Ocean Energy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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