Using Solar and Nuclear Energy Won't Cut Our Oil Bill

A few days ago I heard a radio talk-show host say we should cut our dependence on foreign oil by using more wind, solar and nuclear power. While this is a popular notion, increasing our use of these sources will do extremely little to reduce our oil consumption.

Reason: Oil-fueled power plants generate less than 1% of U.S. electricity. Most of our power is produced from domestic fossil fuels like coal and natural gas.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, in the 12 months ending March 2010, about 45% of our electricity came from coal, 23% from natural gas, 20% from nuclear plants, and 7% from hydroelectric sources.

Renewable sources like wind, solar, biomass and others contributed nearly 4% of our power.

So where does the oil we drill or import go?

Once again, the EIA to the rescue. In March 2010, finished gasoline accounted for 46% of our oil usage. The rest is used in the manufacture of diesel oil, jet fuel, heating fuel, asphalt, plastics, etc., etc.

Which means if we want to reduce our dependence on oil, we need to severely curtail our use of gasoline-powered cars.

Fuel cells, anyone?

Earth Hour at 8:30 pm Local Time Today

Earth Hour returns at 8:30 pm (2030 hours) local time today.

Last year, nearly 1 billion people in 4,100 cities in 87 countries on 7 continents celebrated Earth Hour. Landmarks that went dark for an hour included:

• Empire State Building
• Brooklyn Bridge
• Broadway Theater Marquees
• Las Vegas Strip
• United Nations Headquarters
• Golden Gate Bridge
• Seattle’s Space Needle
• Church of Latter-Day Saints Temple
• Gateway Arch in St. Louis
• Great Pyramids of Giza
• Acropolis and Parthenon in Athens
• Christ the Redeemer Statue in Rio de Janeiro
• St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City
• Big Ben and Houses of Parliament in London
• Elysee Palace and Eiffel Tower in Paris
• Beijing’s Birds Nest and Water Cube
• Symphony of Lights in Hong Kong
• Sydney’s Opera House

The Earth Hour website has some cool videos. Here's a slideshow of Earth Hour 2009:

Internet's Power Usage Could Be Reduced 99.9%

Smarter data coding could cut the energy used by the world's data networks 99.9% by 2015.

The New Scientist reports that Bell Labs has launched a coalition of information and communications industry experts called Green Touch. The consortium has the vision of "significantly reducing the carbon footprint of ICT [information and communications technology] devices, platforms and networks."

Smarter Coding Cuts Through Noise

Green Touch members have identified many approaches to cutting energy use by data communications networks:

• Today's networks use high levels of power to rise above the noise inherent in communications channels. Bell Labs plans to develop low-power networks by implementing a code that detects low-power signals and ignores the noise.
  
  
• An MIT engineer is looking at ways to bundle data traveling over similar routes, which will reduce traffic on trunk routes that consume large amounts of power.
  
  
• A professor at the University of Melbourne, Australia, will consider "ways to make modems and phones go into a sleep mode when not in use — but from which they can wake up quickly."
  
  
• Other efforts will focus on power savings in memory and displays, and on changing user behavior.

Generating the power for our telephone, internet and cell phone networks releases 300 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air every year, says the head of research for Bell Labs. That's equal to the emissions from 50 million cars, or one of every 5 cars registered in the U.S.

Imagine the reduction in air pollution if 99.9% of those cars — or 49.95 million cars — were taken off the road.

Easier Than Ever to Be Green

A guest post today, from my friend Marc Halpert. Marc's company, Your Best Interest, LLC, helps businesses and non-profits get paid electronically. No messing with paper, no waiting for checks -- getting paid electronically speeds up your cash flow and helps the environment.

Here's Marc's post:

It’s Easier Than Ever to Be Green

Poor Kermit the Frog. He thought it wasn't easy being green. Now we all strive to be "greener" by saving gasoline or adjusting our thermostats to run less heat and air conditioning, especially at peak demand times.

Have you thought how to make your business or nonprofit greener by using new payment technologies?

Here are a few observations:

1) stop snailmailing invoices. It takes gasoline and electricity to process the mail and it takes days (sometimes a week) for delivery; use electronic invoice presentation with a link to your web page to accept the payment far faster.

2) start accepting credit card and/or checks by phone, by fax or on your website; easy to implement in your office and makes your staff far more efficient. No more running to the bank (eats gas) by 2pm to make a deposit.

3) if you must process checks, do so electronically by feeding them through a specialized check reader and converting them to a data file. Then let your computer send them to a processor for clearing. It's called Remote Deposit Capture. No more adding machine tapes, deposit slips or trips to the bank, saving electricity and gas as well.

Ask us, we love a challenge.

Marc W. Halpert
Your Best Interest LLC and e-giving
PO Box 320048
Fairfield, CT 06825-0048
203.373.0875
efax 203.549.0406
www.linkedin.com/in/marchalpert

Carbon Emissions Expected to 9% Decline Since 2007

The Guardian's Grist website reported this week that carbon emissions in the U.S. had dropped 9% since 2007.

While part of this drop is due to the recession, Grist says part of it is from "efficiency gains and from replacing coal with natural gas, wind, solar, and geothermal energy."

The "efficiency gains" claim sounded too good to be true. As I reported in a previous post, America's energy-efficiency improvement from 2007 to 2008 was less than 0.1 percentage point.

So I did some digging.

This month, the Energy Information Administration released a report (pdf) titled "Understanding the Decline in Carbon Dioxide Emissions in 2009." In it, the EIA said it expected CO₂ emissions from fossil fuels in 2009 to be 5.9% below the 2008 level.

70% of the decline in emissions was from:

• Lower energy consumption by the industrial, commercial and residential sectors because of the poor economy
• Utilities switching from coal to natural gas to take advantage of lower natural gas prices -- which had dropped because of the weak economy
• Increased electricity production by non-CO₂-emitting sources like hydropower and wind (these two sources accounted for only 8.3% of electricity generation in 2009)

The other 30% of the drop in CO₂ releases came from declines in petroleum consumption for jet fuel and distillate fuel oil (which includes diesel fuel oil and heating oil). The EIA attributed over two-thirds of this contraction to "economy-related reductions in consumption."

Regarding fuel efficiency, this is what the EIA had to say (emphasis mine):

The data are not yet available to reliably allocate consumption to end-use sectors or the decline in jet fuel, distillate fuel, and other transportation fuel consumption between economy-related declines in demand for transportation services and increases in fuel efficiency, which may be permanent due to technology-related improvements in equipment or transitory because of higher load factors.

In other words, it's too early to declare victory in the drive to fuel efficiency.

New DOT and EPA Program Criticized by Environmental Groups

Remember that proposed fuel economy program from the DOT and the EPA? Remember how it promised to curb greenhouse gas emissions and put a dent in our foreign-oil purchases?

Well, according to Time magazine, some environmentalists aren't too happy about loopholes in the program that weren't publicized in the press release.

Loopholes like:

• Electric car makers will get credits that apply to their overall pollution targets. But the electricity that powers the car comes from power plants that emit carbon dioxide, and this CO₂ is not factored into greenhouse gas calculations for such vehicles.
  
  
• The flex-fuel credit still stands, allowing carmakers to build gas guzzlers provided the guzzlers can run on E85 (a mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline). This credit reduces the corporate average fuel economy target for manufacturers of these cars by 1.2 mpg.
  
  What makes this credit pointless, says Time magazine, is that only 1% of the gas stations in the country sell E85, and that number isn't expected to go up soon.
  
  
• Carmakers will get carbon credits for selling their most fuel-efficient vehicles in California and other states that had adopted separate standards before the program was proposed. If a manufacturer had already been prepared to sell in California even without the credit, it now stands to earn a credit just for doing so.
  
  There's something inherently wrong with that. Not because the carmakers will benefit from fortunate timing, but because California's standard should be the nation's standard. Meeting it shouldn't earn anyone an extra gold star.
  
  
• Manufacturers that sell less than 400,000 vehicles a year will have to live up to a lower EPA standard.

More loopholes -- and benefits -- will surely emerge as the plan gets closer to implementation.

Refrigerator Needs 100 Watt-Hours of Electricity a Day

Chest refrigerator. Photo © Tom Chalko.

If you've ever wondered how all the ice cream and french fries in supermarket freezers remain frozen even though the freezers don't have lids, well, it's because cold air is heavy and settles at the bottom.

Tom Chalko, an Australian scientist and inventor, used this property of air and some electronic apparatus to lower the energy usage of a chest freezer to just 100 watt-hours a day (pdf).

Which is the same amount of electricity a 100-watt bulb burns in an hour.

As if that weren't enough, he used the freezer as a fridge, setting it at between 4° and 7° C (39° and 45° F). Freezers typically run at 0° to -25° C (32° to -13° F).

Here's how Chalko did it.

He bought a 239-liter (8.4-cubic-foot) Vestfrost SE255 chest freezer and a battery-powered thermostat that had a digital temperature display and an internal latching relay. He took the thermostat apart and rigged it up so he could hang it on the wall and still have it cut power to the compressor when the appliance reached a certain temperature.

And then he sat back and watched his new chest refrigerator exceed his expectations. In the first 24 hours, the fridge used up 103 Wh. The compressor worked for only 90 seconds an hour.

100 Wh a day is 36.5 kWh per year. A fridge of similar size sold in the U.S.A. typically consumes about 317 kWh per year. Which makes Chalko's fridge about 9 times more efficient than an average appliance-store fridge.

Sure, it's a chest fridge, which is somewhat inconvenient, what with all the bending to retrieve food from lower shelves. There's a good reason why no manufacturer makes chest refrigerators.

But if you were set on saving energy with a chest fridge, you could put in movable shelves. Or not use the lower part of the fridge at all.

If you were paying for just 100 Wh of power a day, you could afford to use only half your fridge!

Synthetic Tree Could Collect 90,000 Tons of Carbon a Year

There's synthetic oil ... synthetic diamonds ... so why not synthetic trees?

Klaus Lackner, a professor at Columbia University in New York City, is developing a synthetic tree that soaks up carbon dioxide about 1,000 times faster than an actual tree.

The synthetic tree's plastic leaves trap CO₂ in a chamber. The CO₂ is then liquefied and "could be used to create fuel for jet engines and cars," or to enhance vegetable production. You could get up to 90,000 tons of carbon per year from one of the trees.

Unlike their natural counterparts, synthetic trees don't need sunlight to snare CO₂. Also unlike their natural counterparts, each synthetic tree costs about as much as a car (no word on which car). But then, those are not fair comparisons. Synthetic trees don't look anything like their natural counterparts.

Charging a Cell Phone Without Electricity

Cell phone chargers suck electricity even in standby mode, adding to the "vampire energy" that goes to waste in so many households. Nokia, for one, is doing something about it.

It's doing away with chargers altogether.

A prototype charging system at the Nokia Research Centre in Cambridge, U.K., keeps cell phones juiced up with nothing more than the electromagnetic waves that envelop us constantly. All the stray waves from radios, cell phones, TVs and RFID chips that bounce around unseen -- they'll be put to good use by Nokia's charger.

Goodbye, electricity. Hello, electromagnetic waves.

Nokia claims it can grab the energy from radio waves miles away. If they're really pulling this off, it's pretty amazing. Electromagnetic waves follow the inverse-square law, which means their power (or intensity) is inversely proportional to the square of the distance the waves have traveled from their source. By the time a radio wave has trekked a few miles, its strength has waned considerably (kind of like some humans).

5 milliwatts is all Nokia researchers have been able to draw from the air so far. But they're hopeful of raising that to 20 mW and eventually 50 mW. That would be enough to charge today's cell phones.

The charger-less phone may hit stores in about 3 years. It would be a welcome step toward conquering vampire energy.

New Building Energy Label Hopes to Nudge Industry Toward "Net Zero"

The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) will this fall introduce a new energy rating system that will rank buildings from A+ to F.

A+ will be reserved for buildings that are "net zero" -- those that produce as much energy onsite as they consume. At the other end of the scale, F will be applied to "unsatisfactory" facilities.

The system is called Building Energy Quotient, or Building EQ. According to ASHRAE, Building EQ will expand upon the information available from the EPA's Energy Star program. Energy Star gives buildings a single pass or fail rating.

Building EQ focuses more on energy than does the Green Building Council's LEED rating system, which looks at a building's entire environmental profile. This includes "energy savings, water efficiency, CO₂ emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts."

Building EQ will be voluntary. ASHRAE admits it is an aggressive standard, with the lofty goal of pushing the building industry toward net zero.

Plants Save Water by Telling Farmers When to Irrigate

Ever receive a cell phone call from a plant? Next year, some people may.

AgriHouse, an agri-biotechnology company in Colorado, will start marketing sensors that attach to leaves, measure their turgidity, figure out how much moisture they hold and place cellular calls to farmers when the leaves need water.

The sensors bring scientific precision to bear on answering the age-old questions: Is it time to water the crops? And how much should I douse them with?

Farmers tend to water their fields on a set schedule that they arrive at through measurement and experience. Lacking exact moisture readings at the leaf level, they end up over-watering the soil rather than risk letting the plants dry up.

AgriHouse's sensors tell them when and how much to irrigate. About 129 billion liters (34 million gallons) of fresh water are used daily in commercial agriculture the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A savings of just 10% would be dramatic, says the president of AgriHouse.

And it's not only water that's saved, but also the energy used to pump the water.

We know that talking to plants can be good for them. It turns out that plants can talk back -- and what they say can be good for us and the environment.

New Jersey Ranks 2nd Among States With Solar Power

Here's one for the "Who'd a thunk it?" category: New Jersey ranks 2nd among states with grid-connected solar power. Right after California.

That's right, New Jersey. Not Nevada, not Arizona, not New Mexico. Not the Sunshine State, which doesn't even rank in the top 10.

But tiny, cloudy New Jersey, up here in the gray Northeast. It generates 9% of the nation's grid-connected solar power. Some 4,000 photovoltaic installations are pumping out more than 85 MW of electricity.

How did the state do it?

As this article explains, by a combination of goal-setting, smart policies and investment. Here's a summary of what New Jersey did:

1. Set up new standards for 2-way metering and interconnections between meters and the grid.

2. Did away with rebates funded by the state and instead introduced free-market-based Solar Renewable Energy Credits (SREC). Utilities that didn't want to invest in solar power generation could buy SRECs from installers and operators of solar facilities.

3. Invested $3 million to set up the 1st SREC tracking and trading system in the country.

4. Added Master Plan goals to reduce energy use 20% by 2020 and generate 30% of all electricity from renewable sources by 2020, including 2.12% (about 3.1 GW) from solar power.

5. Invested $260 million between 2002 and 2008 to stimulate the solar power industry.

They learned from their experiences and fine-tuned their programs over the years, and now solar installations are growing like bamboo shoots all over New Jersey.

Goats Keep Grass Short in Maryland

Some 40 goats are munching on about 8 acres of grass at a road construction site near Hempstead, Md.

The State Highway Administration put them there because cutting the grass with mowers would have harmed the habitats of the bog turtles who live there. Bog turtles are an endangered species.

Cost of the goats: $10,000 for two years.

Gasoline consumption: zero.

Oil consumption: zero. (Unless you count the fuel used by the vehicles that transport the goats to and from the site.)

Emissions: natural fertilizer; methane (but only about 13% of a cow's emission of the gas, which is 80-110 kg per year).

I'm all for the goats.

Paint Roofs White, Obama Administration Urges

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said the Obama administration wanted to paint roofs white to cut down on heat absorption by buildings and reduce the need for air conditioning.

He was talking about flat roofs, not the gray-shingled gabled roofs common on U.S. houses. He also revealed a startling fact: making roofs and roads paler would have the same effect on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as taking every car in the world off the road for 11 years.

Painting cars a lighter color would also deliver energy savings, he said. American car buyers prefer white cars anyway, according to DuPont's annual survey of new car colors (pdf). So it's not like he's asking us to radically change our tastes.

Using cooler colors on surfaces that face the sun may not seem a game-changing move. But every little step helps, if enough people take them.

"Greenest Office Building in the World" Coming Up

When completed, it will be the "greenest office building in the world."

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's 218,000-square-foot Research Support Facility, being built in Golden, Colorado, will be a LEED Platinum certified building when it is finished in 2010.

Platinum is the highest LEED (Leadership in Environmental Energy and Design) certification offered by the U.S. Green Building Council. The other categories are Certified, Silver and Gold.

According to NREL, the building will exceed Platinum requirements by sending power to the grid. The building will include a rooftop photovoltaic system, daylighting, natural ventilation and other energy-efficiency features.

NREL's annual energy goal for the building is 25,000 Btu per square foot. It promises the facility will be "a showcase for energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies."

(Photo: Computer rendering from the Research Support Facility concept design.)

Green choices have gray areas

Going green involves trade-offs. Energy saved in one area often transfers the consumption to some other place.

This story in the Chicago Tribune summarizes the gray areas of going green that consumers face in their everyday lives: choosing paper vs. plastic, organic vs. conventionally-grown food, cloth vs. disposable diapers, and so on.

The writer makes sensible recommendations, and I agree with all of them. But I would like to add a point to the paper-vs.-plastic debate.

It's plastic bags that clog storm drains, not paper. It's plastic bags that get caught in trees, not paper. It's plastic bags that suffocate fish in the ocean, not paper.

So if you use plastic bags, please dispose of them properly.

P.S.: Aficionados of organic molecules, take heart: biodegradable plastic bags may soon be here.

8 Non-carbon energy sources

Two ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants:

1. Use existing technologies and better carbon-management practices to cut CO2 releases. Scientific American magazine calls this Plan A.
2. Generate energy through new technologies that bring emissions down to zero -- Plan B.

The Scientific American story linked above is a recent repost of September 2006 story that focuses on Plan B. It describes 8 potential energy sources that discharge no CO2.

Some of the technologies the story mentions have advanced somewhat, while other new ones have emerged. It's an interesting analysis of what's out there. I found myself generally agreeing with the author's predictions.

The 8 energy sources are:

1. Nuclear fusion. Considerable progress has been made in this field since the Scientific American story ran.
2. High-altitude wind. Some serious winds blow at 33,000 feet, where, at certain latitudes, they pack 5,000 to 10,000 watts of power per square meter.
3. Sci-fi solutions, such as cold fusion, bubble fusion, and matter-antimatter reactions. Unrealistic, says the story's author.
4. Space-based solar power. In space, the sun never sets.
5. Nanotech solar cells. Because it's going to be a long time before silicon-based solar cells can compete with grid power on price.
6. A global supergrid. A worldwide network of supercooled, superconducting wires. Not so much a source of energy as a means of efficiently distributing it.
7. Waves and tides. These sources are already being tapped in several places around the world. A proposed project in the UK's Severn River will be the world's largest.
8. Designer microbes. Bespoke cells that could, for example, convert cellulose to fuel, or turn the carbon dioxide from a smokestack into natural gas.

(Photo: Carbon dioxide crystals. Credit: USDA Beltsville Agricultural Research Center.)

7 simple products that cut your energy usage

Saving is a loaded word. It usually involves sacrifice of time, money, or style.

But if you can save without giving up any of these, then saving becomes an agreeable activity.

Yahoo! has published an agreeable list of 7 simple products that save energy -- hence money -- but don't require you to alter your lifestyle in any major way. Not even for the indoor clothes drying racks (#2), which you might think would look odd in your laundry room. You'll get used to them in no time.

The 7 products are:

1. Power strip, which you can turn off so your devices don't consume vampire energy
2. Indoor clothes drying rack, to give your dryer a rest from guzzling all that power
3. Efficient showerheads and faucets, which drench you just as much and as fast as conventional ones
4. Compact fluorescent light bulbs, which will serve you well if you buy and use them as recommended by the Environmental Defense Fund
5. Programmable thermostat, so you can turn the heat on before you wake up in the morning
6. Water heater blanket, because without it, you're just heating your utility closet
7. Sealant for those tiny leaks around the house, because just like you don't want to heat the utility closet, you don't want to heat the outdoors.