Nano Tech and Green Energy

Nano-technology will play a major role in alternative energy trechnology with many new applications:

RCS publishing reports:

"These include advanced thermal insulation materials for buildings and industrial processes, waste heat conversion into electrical power using thermoelectrics, and technologies such as solid-state lighting based on light-emitting diodes. In the mid-term (5-10 years), hydrogen fuel and devices such as fuel cells will reach the point of becoming competitive in the energy market, especially for transport. The long-term (>10 years) future will rely on solar fuels as truly sustainable energy carriers. These would, with solar energy, use only renewable feedstocks, such as water and carbon dioxide, to produce synthetic liquid fuels.

Nanotechnology research will play a critical part in these developments and will make the systems more efficient and cost effective." See full article.

Electricity From a Hot Parking Lot

Get out of a car in a parking lot on a hot summer day and you will really feel the heat. A new approach to capturing this heat and turning it into power is showing promise.

PopSci.com reports:

"Rajib Mallick, an engineer at Worcester Polytechnic Institute who studies the effect of solar radiation on cities..... has devised a way to harness heat from baking blacktop and turn it into electricity. His system pumps water -- an excellent heat conductor -- through a network of copper pipes embedded in asphalt. As the water circulates, it pulls heat from the scorching surface and produces steam to drive a turbine that cranks out electricity. Mallick is partnering with the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and the optics firm Novotech to install a full-scale system beneath a 10,000-square-foot parking lot near Worcester, Massachusetts. See full article.

Vertical-Axis Wind Power Could Cut Offshore Installation Costs

The use of horizontal-axis wind power mills is easier on land than at sea due to their large average size. A new, smaller and easier, 10 megwatt design may help.

New Energy Focus.com reports:

"British company VertAx Wind Ltd has appointed marine engineering specialists SeaRoc to devise a safe way to install the machines, as the technology enters its second phase of development. Wind turbines used in offshore wind farms are currently based on horizontal axis designs, but making them bigger to make maximum use of the high winds out to sea is physically difficult. VertAx believes its vertical axis design offers a much easier way to scale up wind generation machines - and will also see them requiring less maintenance, another key issue for wind farms installed in the open ocean." See full article.

Better Than Switchgrass Biofuel?-- Miscanthus Is Looking Good

Researchers at the University of Illinois are hoping they have found a higher yeild grass for biofuel production.

PopSci.com reports:

"Move over, switchgrass. There's a new miracle crop on the horizon. Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign indicates that a perennial grass named Miscanthus x giganteus can produce about two and a half times more ethanol per acre than either corn or switchgrass. Switchgrass has previously been heralded as a promising feedstock for making ethanol because it's a perennial plant, whereas corn must be replanted every year. But when researchers led by Stephen P. Long grew all three crops in field trials across Illinois, they found that Miscanthus leafed out earlier in the spring than corn or switchgrass, and stayed green well into the autumn. What's more, Miscanthus grew well in poor soils" See full article.

Two-Way "Tide Power" Generator Design

There are a number of emerging designs for slow-moving turbines that will capture the flow of tides on rivers and estuaries. A new, two-way, design may solve a a knotty design and operations challenge.

Science Daily.com reports:

"Most current tidal stream generators are essentially wind turbines turned upside down and made to work underwater. They often include complex gearboxes and move the entire assembly to face the flow of the water..... The Southampton design does not need to turn around because the design of its turbine blades means that they turn equally well, regardless of which way the water flows past them. The blades are also placed in a specially shaped housing that helps channel the water smoothly through the turbine.

Another beauty of the Southampton design is that everything is wrapped in a single package that can be prefabricated so there will be few on-site construction costs. “Just drop it into flowing water and it will start generating electricity." See full article.

See-through Solar Cells for Windows

Remember those large solar panels on people's roofs? New technology is evolving that will make the roofs themselves and the windows of the home into no-carbon energy generators.

CNet News reports that:

"Solar company Konarka has developed a transparent solar cell that it hopes will be built onto electricity-generating windows. Under its Arch Active Solar Glass development, the company has built prototypes of windows with the solar cells between two panes of glass. The photovoltaic cells can be tinted different colors.

"It is energy-efficient and transparent with superior vertical performance and a subtle red, blue or green aesthetic. With these features, BIPV (building-integrated photovoltaics) will no longer need to be confined to spandrel or overhead applications," says CEO Leon Silverstein" See full article.

Energy From Ocean Waves

The action of waves in the ocean can help drive sea-going turbines. Very preliminary indications are this method can be more efficient than wind energy.

Discovery Magazine reports:

"A new prototype of a wave power generator has been unveiled in England, and its inventors followed the creed espoused by Leonardo da Vinci: “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” The new wave power device, known as Anaconda, is a basic tube made from rubber and fabric and filled with water. It is still in trial phase, but its creators, optimistic about its potential as a source of mass power, are confident it will be cheaper than a wind farm generating the equivalent amount of power and less controversial in terms of public protest since the devices will be below the sea [Telegraph].

The Anaconda rides waves in the ocean, which create bulges along the tubing that travel along its length gathering energy. At the end of the tube, the surge of energy drives a turbine and generates electricity." See full article:

The "Heat Pump and Gravel" Answer to Energy Storage

Storing energy is a huge challenge in the fight to reverse global warming. A couple of UK engineers are working on part of the solution using gravel.

Reuters Reports:

"Some energy storage technologies for the power grid are expensive but can be deployed anywhere, like advanced batteries, while others are cheap but can only be built in certain locations, like pumping water up and down hilly terrain (known as “pumped hydro”). But a group of English engineers have built an advanced heat pump and connected it to an energy storage system using two silos full of plain old gravel that they say is as cheap as pumped hydro, as location-agnostic as a battery — and is super efficient. The startup they founded two years ago called Isentropic, named after a reversible process in thermodynamics, is now looking for a Series B round of $5 million and will be showing off its technology at the Energy Storage Association conference." See full article.

Wind Power: The Emerging "Smart" Turbine Blade

Some existng technologies will need to get better and better to make a large enough dent in the vast challnge of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. Wind energy shows great promise.

Physorg.com reports on a smarter mousetrap .. err .. windmill blade:

This research is to improve the efficiency of turbines and prevent damage to blades from high winds. The researchers, from Purdue and Sandia National Laboratories, have developed a technique that uses sensors and computational software to constantly monitor forces exerted on wind turbine blades. Such sensors could be instrumental in future turbine blades that have control surfaces and flaps like those on an airplane's wings to change the aerodynamic characteristics of the blades for better control.

"The ultimate goal is to feed information from sensors into an active control system that precisely adjusts components to optimize efficiency," said Purdue doctoral student Jonathan White, who is leading the research with Douglas Adams, a professor of mechanical engineering and director of Purdue's Center for Systems Integrity. See full article

Climate-saving Bacteria

Sometimes a look at "technology" means a closer looks at biology. In this case it means the properties of bacteria.

Science Daily reports:

"An international team of scientists has determined the structure of the chlorophyll molecules in green bacteria that are responsible for harvesting light energy"

"We found that the orientation of the chlorophyll molecules make green bacteria extremely efficient at harvesting light," said Donald Bryant, Ernest C. Pollard Professor of Biotechnology at Penn State and one of the team's leaders. According to Bryant, green bacteria are a group of organisms that generally live in extremely low-light environments, such as in light-deprived regions of hot springs and at depths of 100 meters in the Black Sea. The bacteria contain structures called chlorosomes, which contain up to 250,000 chlorophylls. "The ability to capture light energy and rapidly deliver it to where it needs to go is essential to these bacteria, some of which see only a few photons of light per chlorophyll per day." See full article

What Role Climate Technology?

Many people hope there might be a quick cure for the global warming problem. Not likely or even possible. No matter what, solving the global climate crisis will require a combination of measures starting with using less energy and changing many long-held, wasteful habits.

But keeping tabs on those climate techno-dreams out there can be fun. There are some wild ideas being tossed around such as putting mirrors into orbit around the planet, floating windmills out at sea, vacuuming CO2 from the air and more.

Here we will report on some of the most sensible global warming techno-fixes being developed (and someof the wackiest) and discuss their pros and cons.

Stay tuned.