Smart grid round-up

Stimulus funds, consumer backlash, and intelligent thermostats

Adam Stein | November 17, 2009

Lotsa smart grid news these days: Barack Obama announced $3.4 billion in stimulus funding for smart grid projects. A good chunk of that goes to smart meter deployment and demand response programs. Another huge chunk goes to grid modernization. $3.4 billion isn’t that much in the scheme of things, but cash-for-clunkers haters can feel good that real money is being steered toward energy efficiency. Meanwhile, smart meters have been provoking a backlash in California. The...

Is your backyard ready for wind energy?

Yes, there’s an app for that too.

Hanh Ho | November 16, 2009

Do you ever look out your window, watch the branches swaying in the wind and wonder whether you could be generating your own wind power? Well iPhone users, you can now download the app you never knew you needed… it will tell you whether you it’s windy enough for your own personal turbine. Mariah Power. Windspire Me uses the phone’s microphone to capture wind noise and convert this into a decibel rating that in turn...

Solar power gets thirsty

Even renewable energy can be resource intensive

Peter Freed | November 10, 2009

I’d love to believe that all renewable energy projects are a great way to generate power without putting a strain on our resources and the planet. Unfortunately, many projects present uncomfortable tradeoffs. The New York Times’ greeninc blog reported recently that utility-scale solar power projects can be incredibly water intensive. Solar power projects are all about concentrating the energy of the sun, which is, well, hot. The problem is most machinery doesn’t have a limitless...

Google Maps add bike routes and walking paths

Tricycles + laser range finders = your daily wow

Adam Stein | October 23, 2009

I remember being amazed when Mapquest came out in, what, 1997? How could it possibly know where my house was? How was it able to instantly come up with a route between Anchorage and Miami? The data seemed too vast and too messy to yield to computation, sort of like the internet itself. Since then Google has redefined web-based maps, and the company continues to innovate. If you don’t live in a town with public...

Net zero water

Designing water-neutral homes

Adam Stein | October 12, 2009

Water and climate change are inextricably linked. As the planet warms, weather patterns will shift, exacerbating drought in some areas and delivering more rainfall to others. Water itself requires energy to deliver, so excess use compounds our energy problems. And many renewable sources of power, such as solar, require massive amounts of water as an input, creating further pressure on limited resources. Net zero water is an analogous concept to net zero energy. Through a...

The Earth’s limits

New study attempts to define thresholds for man’s impact on planetary processes

Adam Stein | October 11, 2009

Surely the scariest aspect of climate change is the concept of tipping points: sudden and potentially irreversible changes in the earth’s natural processes that render the planet much less hospitable for humankind. The melting of the polar ice caps is perhaps the best-known tipping point, but planetary systems are under pressure from more than just the accumulation of greenhouse gases. A recent article in Nature attempts to define nine planetary boundary conditions that, if transgressed,...

Compact fluorescents: a debacle?

L Prize competition tries to sidestep early mistakes in quest for better light

Adam Stein | October 5, 2009

Philips may claim the “L Prize,” a $10 million award from the Department of Energy for any light that can reproduce the color and intensity of a 60-watt bulb using only 1/6 the power. Further, the winning entry must last at least 25 times as long as a standard incandescent. The L Prize was established, in part, to prevent a recurrence of the problems with CFLs: The department considers the introduction of compact fluorescents, today’s...

Beyond the bulb

Thin, flexible OLEDs may be the future of lighting

Adam Stein | September 19, 2009

Old-school incandescent light bulbs are going the way of the dodo — already illegal in Europe and soon enough in the United States as well. Mostly CFLs will replace them in the near term, but as the price of LEDs drop, many expect them to become the bulb of choice. What comes after that? Perhaps we’ll ditch the bulbs altogether, and start using OLEDs: Because OLED panels are just 0.07 of an inch thick and...

Amusing ourselves to death

California proposes television efficiency standards, but most gadgets go unregulated

Adam Stein | September 19, 2009

Gadgets, those little energy vampires that remain almost constantly plugged in, are sucking our energy system dry: Worldwide, consumer electronics now represent 15 percent of household power demand, and that is expected to triple over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency, making it more difficult to tackle the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for global warming. To satisfy the demand from gadgets will require building the equivalent of 560 coal-fired power plants,...

The secret to preventing fishery decline: stop fishing so much

We have a range of tools to restore fisheries, but all require good government

Tim Varga | September 15, 2009

The concept of restoring ecosystems damaged by human exploitation has always interested me, so the recent edition of Science featuring Restoration Ecology sent my heart into a pitter-patter. There are a number of good news stories and perspectives in it, but the primary research article on “Rebuilding Global Fisheries” in particular deserves a few words. Global fish stocks have been declining precipitously since the industrialization of the fishing fleet, especially since the 1950s when technology,...

Cadillac Desert

A century of damming and diverting threatens to leave the West high and dry

Nicole Schuetz | September 10, 2009

I just finished reading the environmental classic Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner. The book tells the story of water policy in the Western United States from the mid-1800s (the time of John Wesley Powell’s exploration of the region) to the early 1990s. The strategy of damming and diverting the region’s rivers over the past 150 years to encourage settlement has led to a self-reinforcing cycle: cheap water spurs farming and urban development in areas otherwise...

Space-based solar energy

California and Japan pursue projects to beam energy from satellites

Adam Stein | September 8, 2009

Generating solar energy in space stations and beaming it down to earth is a wacky idea, but it’s also an interesting one, and not just for the obvious reasons (outer space, energy beams, etc). To explain why, I need to make a digression into some energy facts and figures. Solar energy enthusiasts are fond of pointing out that enough energy from the sun hits the earth every hour to fill humanity’s needs for a full...

Digital books: greener than real books

Study claims the devices pay themselves back in a year

Adam Stein | August 31, 2009

Last week brought the unsurprising news that mp3s are more environmentally friendly than physical CDs. I wondered at the time whether the same might be true for digital books: It’s not clear to me, though, which way the scales tip. Book are not, of course, completely benign. Energy goes into their manufacture, transport, and disposal. Beyond that — and here I speak as a Kindle owner — electronic readers do result in at least some...

McKinsey finds $700 billion lying on the ground

Energy efficiency shows vast potential for environmental and economic benefits

Adam Stein | August 25, 2009

I had hoped to have time by now to actually read the splashy new McKinsey report on the potential for energy efficiency measures to slash the national carbon footprint. But I haven’t, so I’m just going to quote from the report’s main finding: Energy efficiency offers a vast, low-cost energy resource for the U.S. economy - but only if the nation can craft a comprehensive and innovative approach to unlock it. Significant and persistent barriers...

Automated pizza ovens and horse-drawn hybrids

Some less-than-worldchanging ideas for a more energy efficient future

Adam Stein | August 25, 2009

An Iranian engineer has come up with an unlikely breakthrough in gasoline-free transportation by creating a hybrid automobile that connects an electric drive train — to a horse. In a design that owes more to the Volt than the Prius, the sporty two-seat Naturmobile uses a pony on a treadmill to recharge a bank of batteries. The only existing prototype has achieved speeds up to 28 miles per hour. No word yet on the vehicle’s...

What does it mean for a car to get 230 miles per gallon?

Not much, but don’t blame GM. Rating the fuel efficiency of plug-ins is hard.

Adam Stein | August 17, 2009

GM has created a bit of buzz around its claim that the Chevy Volt gets 230 miles to the gallon in city driving. From the internet a great chorus has replied: “This number doesn’t make any sense!” And it doesn’t. The trouble is, it’s not clear what better metric exists for measuring the efficiency of all-electric or plug-in hybrid cars. GM isn’t the only company to make such claims. Tesla has long stated that its...

How to have a million-dollar car accident

Wind turbines are awkward to ship, so manufacturers are getting creative

Adam Stein | August 7, 2009

A wind turbine blade passed me going the other direction on the highway the other day, followed by another one. If you’ve never seen these things in real life, you’re missing out. Hundreds of feet long, the blades are sculpted and architectural and really make you feel like you’re looking at The Future. As it turns out, they’re also extremely hard to move around. According to the Times, each turbine can cost upwards of $150,000...

Create your own bike lane, for real

Bikes + lasers = awesome

Adam Stein | August 6, 2009

This past winter, we (meaning I) wrote about LightLane, a concept design for a lighting system that paints a virtual path around your bike at night to encourage cars to keep a safe distance. The idea caught the internet’s imagination, so much so that it’s soon going to be a real product: The video is kind of cool, and I tend to think something like this actually could work. If I were a driver, I’d...

I drink your milkshake!

Climate change shakes up ecosystems in ways difficult to predict

Tim Varga | August 3, 2009

Perhaps the thing about climate change that worries me the most are “unknown unknowns” — those feedback loops and unpredictable shifts in the way the biological and physical worlds function together that could potentially doom an entire ecosystem. The analogy of a plane has been used to describe biodiversity loss, for example, where each species represents a rivet in the plane. The loss of one probably won’t affect the system, but once enough rivets have...

Desert dust helps lower ocean temps

But as climate change kicks in, seas could end up in nasty feedback loop

Tim Varga | July 27, 2009

Sea levels continue to rise, and not just because of melting ice caps, but also because warmer global temperatures cause thermal expansion. The rise in temperature would be even greater if not for dust and aerosols in the atmosphere that deflect some of the sun’s heat. Scientists don’t have a great understanding of exactly how important this dust effect is. A new paper suggests that it’s actually very important — and that’s bad news. A...

Can Twitter help us to save energy at home?

Does a display of information help us to save energy? Or will it take something more?

Pete Davies | July 21, 2009

There’s a house that tweets all of it’s energy usage. And that’s really just the beginning of the information it dumps onto Twitter every day. Even the mousetraps are wired into the matrix… Residential energy use accounts for a little over 20% of US energy consumption and therefore represents a great opportunity for savings and efficiency. It’s no wonder then that huge companies like Google, Microsoft and GE, together with an ever-growing list of start-ups...

Efficient incandescent light bulbs: available now

On sale at Amazon. Have you used them? Do they work?

Adam Stein | July 7, 2009

Just a few weeks ago I wrote about the technological advances being made with regular old incandescent light bulbs. What do you know, they’re already on the market. Head over to Amazon.com to stock up on Philips Halogena Energy Saver light bulbs in a variety of wattages and configurations. Some caveats: the bulbs are about 30% more efficient than incandescents — the 70-Watt Halogena is equivalent to a 100-Watt standard bulb — but still not...

Detroit Electric is reborn. Just not in Detroit.

For the future of the car, look west to Silicon Valley. And then further west, to China.

Adam Stein | July 7, 2009

Are you a fan of cheap symbolism? Well then, feast on this: a popular and successful electric car used to be produced in the United States under the name Detroit Electric. Competition with conventional gasoline-powered cars finally shuttered the line — in 1939. Now the Detroit Electric brand is being revived by a British entrepreneur as a Netherlands-based company backed with Chinese money, marketing modern electric cars built by a Malaysian manufacturing company. This is...

Windbelts: wind power without the turbine

Invention captures the energy in fluttering fabric

Adam Stein | July 3, 2009

We’ve covered micro-wind a number of times here, but I think this may be the coolest innovation I’ve seen in a while: inventor Shawn Frayne has come up with a device that harnesses the power of wind without any rotating parts. Instead, his company’s Windbelts capture energy using fluttering fabric. You can best understand the process by watching this short video, but basically as moving air passes over a taut membrane, it induces a vibration,...

Unleash your inner Edison

Contest could put your green product idea on store shelves

TerraPass | June 23, 2009

Yahoo! Green is running a contest for would-be inventors: submit your idea for a green product, and vie for the chance to see your creation on store shelves. The contest is open for one week more, and for the final week Yahoo! is waiving all submission fees. The winner will receive $2,500, plus a share of the sales for 20 years. You might also be featured in an episode of the PBS show Everyday Edisons....

The 100K House project gets passive

Developer builds super-efficient houses on the cheap

Adam Stein | June 13, 2009

A few months ago I wrote about the 100K House, a project to build a LEED-platinum certified home for $100,000 in construction costs. The developers, a company called Postgreen, are continuing in their quest for world domination, and their next batch of urban homes will be built to the even more exacting Passive House standard. Passive Houses, you may recall, are constructed with an airtight envelope and ultrathick insulation. They use mechanical ventilators to draw...

Natural gas to the rescue?

A low-carbon fossil fuel may hold the key to weaning ourselves from coal

Adam Stein | June 5, 2009

The development of potentially enormous new natural gas deposits in the U.S. has revived an old idea for cleaning up America’s power sector: using natural gas a low-carbon bridge from dirty coal to clean renewable power. What makes the idea enticing is that we don’t need to build much new infrastructure to significantly reduce carbon emissions. According to Geoffrey Styles, we already have an enormous amount of gas-powered generation capacity just lying around unused: Capitalizing...

Incandescent lights may mount a comeback

As technology races forward, is it time for an I-told-you-so on the “bulb ban”?

Adam Stein | June 1, 2009

Reports of the death of incandescent lights may be exaggerated. Although the current generation of bulbs will effectively be banned under the lighting efficiency standard passed, we learn via the New York Times that a research team has roughly doubled the efficiency of regular light bulbs by blasting the filaments with a laser: The key to creating the super-filament is an ultra-brief, ultra-intense beam of light called a femtosecond laser pulse. The laser burst lasts...

Beat summer heat with…ice

Innovative system shifts air conditioning demand to the middle of the night

Erik Blachford | May 29, 2009

As the temperature across the country begins to climb into prime air conditioning territory, building managers are preparing to crank up their commercial HVAC units. Because daily temperature peaks tend to coincide with daily electricity usage peaks, air conditioners put an especially heavy strain on the electrical grid. The folks at Ice Energy have a clever way to shift power needs to off-peak hours, using nothing but water and ingenuity. The basic idea is simple...

The sixth extinction

The fossil record reveals five previous die-offs. Our present one is manmade.

Adam Stein | May 25, 2009

Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest New Yorker article on the present era of mass extinction reads like a detective novel with a healthy dash of gothic horror thrown in. Unfortunately, it’s behind the pay wall, so I’m going to have to do my best to summarize a long and intricate story. The cause and nature of extinction has been hotly debated since at least the time Charles Darwin put to rest the notion that species are fixed...

High-tech greenhouses

Is the vertical farm concept ready for a comeback?

Adam Stein | May 19, 2009

Because I’ve been frequently critical of the half-baked notion of vertical farms, it seems only fair that I link to this article about high tech greenhouses that, at first blush, have a somewhat vertical farm-y feel to them. Vertical farms, you may recall, represent the extreme of the local food movement: massive edifices sited in urban environments that use a combination of technologies, from water recycling to artificial sunlight, to feed a city’s population in...

In the future, we’ll all be energy traders?

Smart meters generate a lot of data. Maybe too much.

Adam Stein | May 19, 2009

Journalists tend to focus a lot of attention on smart meters, simply because these are the piece of the smart grid puzzle what will be most directly visible to consumers. And as with any nascent technology, we’re treated to a lot of highly speculative “world of tomorrow” descriptions of the changes just around the corner. In the future, consumers will receive and react to a constant stream of energy price information. We’ll get text messages...

A tale of two transportation systems

A train cleans up its act in Europe, and a tiny car looms large in India

Adam Stein | May 8, 2009

Two recent news items offer up in pleasingly compact form parables about the choices we face as a society and the trends, both good and bad, that will shape our built and natural environments for decades to come. First, a high-speed rail line in Europe achieved an ambitious emissions reduction target — three years ahead of schedule. Eurostar announced in 2007 that it would aim to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions by 25 percent per passenger journey...

Solar, solar everywhere

Innovations galore! Solar gets bigger and thinner and see-through and cylindrical

Mark Frey | May 4, 2009

As a native Californian I think solar power is an obvious choice for favorite renewable energy source. Even though solar power is a small part of the world’s renewable portfolio right now, smart policy decisions paired with technological advances will help bring solar forward as an integral part of the green economic recovery. The following are a few highlights of solar technology that I’ve come across recently, and please feel free to add your own...

Get smart

Embedded sensors and wireless networks will bring needed efficiency to our infrastructure

Adam Stein | May 3, 2009

One of the big emerging trends over the next few decades will be the marriage of information technology and infrastructure. We’re going to start seeing a lot more “smart” everything — smart grids, smart roads, smart factories, smart trains, smart cities, etc. The increasing use of sensors, lightweight communications networks, and sophisticated computer models to anticipate and react to changing circumstances should enable far greater resource efficiency than we can achieve today. The Times pulls...

The electric Exxon

Better Place wants to charge you to drive — and you’ll thank them for it

Adam Stein | April 21, 2009

There’s nothing hugely new in this week’s New York Times Magazine profile of Shai Agassi and his quest to kill the internal combustion engine, but some aspects of his scheme clicked a bit better for me on this reading. Agassi helms Better Place, a start-up that has raised gobs of money and signed tons of partnership deals to set up networks of electric car-charging stations and automated battery-swapping stations. Better Place’s innovation is to remove...

Black carbon emerges as climate villain

Wood and dung fired cookstoves could be a major source of global warming

Adam Stein | April 20, 2009

Last week, a $6 solar cooker took top prize in a contest for best climate change innovation. It seems the award couldn’t have come at a better time. This week brought an increasing amount of scrutiny to the climate chaos wreaked by “black carbon.” Black carbon, better known as soot, is produced in large quantities by the cookstoves traditionally used by the world’s poor. Some of these cookstoves burn wood, others burn dung, but all...

Miniature TVs as light bulbs, giant Segways as cars

Some left-field innovations in lighting and mobility

Adam Stein | April 14, 2009

Everyone loves consumer tech. So here’s a post about consumer tech. Don’t say we never did anything for you. First up, light bulbs. Incandescents are on the way out, but their replacements so far suffer from notable flaws. LEDs are expensive and underpowered. CFLs work pretty well, but they also contain mercury and have quality problems that undercut some of their supposed benefits. Both LEDs and CFLs will get better over time, but Vu1 (“view...

More ways to cut car emissions: reflective glass and paint

California’s “cool car” initiative fights global warming

Adam Stern | April 14, 2009

Most of the effort to reduce greenhouse gases from cars has focused on improved fuel efficiency, low-carbon fuels, and alternative engine types like hybrids and plug-in vehicles. These approaches will be critical to meeting GHG targets established in California’s landmark global warming solutions law, as well as similar goals proposed in federal legislation. California is taking this work a step further with a little known initiative called Cool Cars. The program is studying subtle ways...

Solar cooker wins $75,000 prize

Creator hopes carbon credits will make technology available for free

Adam Stein | April 13, 2009

The votes are in, and the Kyoto Box solar cooker has claimed the $75,000 prize in the FInancial Times Climate Change Challenge. The Kyoto Box uses the greenhouse effect to boil and bake. It consists of two boxes, one inside the other, with an acrylic cover, which lets the sun’s power in and traps it. Black paint on the inner box and silver foil on the outer help concentrate the heat, while a layer of...

Kerplunk!

We can misfire satellites just like North Korea

Tim Varga | April 13, 2009

A couple weeks back, NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) failed to achieve orbit and crashed into the ocean, having measured…absolutely nothing. The nose cone somehow failed to disengage from the satellite, and the whole thing was too heavy to actually enter orbit. Ugh. I’d have snarkier things to say if I weren’t so disappointed by the news. The satellite system was intended to measure CO2 sources and sinks, and to fill an egregious gap in...

Is it getting hot in here?

New research suggests extreme temperatures threaten the tropics

Tim Varga | March 31, 2009

I know that we’re trying to be positive and future-focused here, what with posts about clean energy and green technology and air-powered cars — but global warming is freaking scary. A recent study by two researchers showcases just how dangerous unchecked warming could be (in the interest of disclosure, I took a class from one of these researchers, Dr. Rosamond Naylor, in college). Using the “middle of the road” estimate of CO2 increases in the...

Securing carbon in our soil

Better farming practices can improve crop yield and lock up greenhouse gases

Nicole Schuetz | March 31, 2009

Everybody knows plants store carbon. But soils do too. That’s the idea behind organic no-till farming, a cultivation technique that could dramatically increase soil carbon storage across the globe. Research has shown organic farming methods sequester more carbon per acre than fossil fuel-based conventional methods. While scientists are still fleshing out the reasons for this, one likely cause is the increased level of mycorrhizal fungi in organically managed plots. These microscopic fungi literally help “glue”...

Vote for your favorite low-carbon innovation

The winner gets $75,000 to develop their idea

Adam Stein | March 23, 2009

The Forum for the Future is asking you to vote for the top low-carbon innovation. The winner will receive $75,000 to help bring their product to market. Choose from among five contenders: Kyoto Box – a $7, solar-powered cardboard stove for use in rural Africa. It can halve firewood use and reduce exposure to dangerous air pollutants. (Kyoto Energy Ltd, Kenya) Carbonscape – a giant industrial microwave which ‘fixes’ the carbon sucked out of the...

Beware the atmospheric brown cloud

Burning forests match cars in their contribution to smog

Tim Varga | March 9, 2009

Maybe cars aren’t so bad after all. OK, OK — they are still a huge source of pollution, but a recent study adds to the debate on the importance of cars relative to forest fire pollution in Southeast Asia. Every winter over Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, an enormous atmospheric brown cloud (ABC) tiptoes in on little cat feet. The ABC is caused by aerosols in the lower atmosphere, and has generally been attributed...

Where is the missing carbon?

Research suggests that a lot of it may wind up inside fish

Tim Varga | February 17, 2009

A giant hole in the global carbon budget may be plugged by an unlikely source: fish guts. A large proportion of manmade CO2 emissions drain back out of the atmosphere into various carbon sinks. Scientists have long known that approximately half the CO2 flux from the atmosphere goes to land-based sinks and half to the ocean. The problem is that the math hasn’t quite added up. Terrestrial sinks like forests and savannas, in addition to...

Cutting edge green gadgets

A green design competition turns up some great new ideas

Pete Davies | February 10, 2009

I love gadgets, and I’m obsessed with things that help to increase energy efficiency. So when the two come together, I’m a very happy camper. This will explain why I’m so excited about the second Greener Gadgets Design Competition that is currently running online. You can view the shortlist and vote for your favorites to make the shortlist that will appear for live judging at the Greener Gadgets Conference later this month. My favorites: The...

Global warming is bad news for U.S. trees

It’s great to be young and thin. Unless you’re a forest.

Tim Varga | February 6, 2009

Western forests are not doing so well. The temperate, evergreen forests that stretch from the Pacific Northwest to the high deserts of the Southwest are changing quickly, and it appears global warming is the cause. The forests of western North America have recently been struck by a series of blows to the trunk. First, pests like the Western Pine Beetle attacked trees. Then an increase in catastrophic fires linked (ironically) to fire prevention efforts ravaged...

Paper or plastic?

Some new answers to the eternal question

Mark Frey | February 3, 2009

Not only has the paper vs. plastic argument been flipped upside down since when I was a kid (wasn’t I saving trees by asking for plastic?), new alternatives are available these days, too. Well, sort of… In recent years I’ve seen several examples of novel packaging in the marketplace, ranging from degradable plastic bags to starch-based packing peanuts to Amazon’s “frustration-free” packaging. These are all steps in the right direction, but there are some important...

Wind makes like a cell phone, gets small and cheap

Recycled turbines and ultra-cheap rooftop systems could bring wind to the masses

Adam Stein | February 3, 2009

Enormous, utility scale wind turbines have the most sex appeal, but costs are falling for wind generation at all scales. The day may come when your rooftop windmill costs less than your TV. In some cases, costs are dropping not as a result of technological innovation but as consequence of smart reuse. As the early wind farms created decades ago become decommissioned and replaced by much bigger installations, an industry has sprung up to salvage...

Smart grid, part 2: the technology

Our future grid will pull together a complex and far-flung set of technologies

Adam Stein | January 30, 2009

The trouble with writing about the smart grid is that the news is moving so fast. Witness: Obama just announced plans to modernize 3,000 miles of transmission lines and install smart meters in 40 million homes. Cisco just launched EnergyWise, a software suite that brings internet-like capabilities to energy management services. A few weeks ago, the Department of Energy snuck out a detailed report on the dismal state of our current grid and the opportunities...

Clean car round-up

Hypercars, electric car networks, and car-sharing services. Oh my.

Adam Stein | January 27, 2009

Developments continue to pour in on the clean car front. First up: the Aptera hypercar will be rolling off the factory floor in fall of 2009. The car has gone through a few design modifications. It’s now all-electric, rather than hybrid diesel. It’s also, inevitably, a bit more expensive than originally forecast, likely to be priced somewhere between $25,000 and $45,000. But it maintains its space-y two-seater design. And it can go from 0 to...

Kenya to get massive wind farm

Single project represents 20% of country’s electrical capacity

Adam Stein | January 26, 2009

A Kenyan firm is planning a 300 MW wind farm which, when operational in 2012, will represent roughly 20% of the electrical capacity of the country. The 20% figure is a bit deceptive though. Wind farms don’t produce electricity at anything near the nameplate capacity, so the farm will probably represent something more like 10% of Kenya’s output. Still, this is a big jump forward from a single project, and demonstrates the potential of leapfrogging...

Batteries not included

How will we store the surplus energy generated by inconsistent renewables?

Peter Freed | January 20, 2009

Almost a hundred million dollars of new investment in battery technology has been announced in the few days: first, Boston Power announced that it had received $55M in a fourth round of funding for their Sonata lithium-ion battery. The Sonata is advertised to have a very long lifetime, a quick charging cycle and makes a variety of environmentally friendly claims. Next, GM announced that it will spend $30M on an assembly plant for the batteries...

Create your own bike lane

With lasers! Concept system paints a virtual lane wherever you travel

Adam Stein | January 19, 2009

This product doesn’t actually exist, but based the internet enthusiasm for it, somebody ought to get it into production real quick like: Traditional blinkers might alert drivers to a cyclist’s presence, but they don’t do a very good job establishing a zone of safety around the bike. By “painting” a visible marker onto the pavement, LightLane establishes a boundary that could keep riders safer. Beyond any utility the device might have as a safety device,...

Smart grid, part 1: the need

Our aging power lines weren’t built for clean energy

Adam Stein | January 13, 2009

Two smart grid articles recently appeared and disappeared in the holiday shuffle. Both are too good to let slip, and because I know almost no one actually clicks the links, I’ll use them as the basis for a few backgrounder posts on a technology that will be affecting all of us quite a bit over the next few decades. First installment: why do we need a smart grid? As this article from Tyler Hamilton makes...

Passive Houses in the U.S.

The Director of the Passive House Institute US offers some more info

Adam Stein | January 12, 2009

Can you stand one more post about energy efficiency in houses? Our earlier post about the Passivhaus standard in Germany attracted a comment from Katrin Klingenberg, Director of the Passive House Institute US, that merits wider circulation. A version of her comment appears below. Also, check out the organization’s web site, which, helpfully, is in English and covers a lot of the frequently asked questions about Passive Houses. On a related note, here’s a fun...

The first Energy Star clothes dryer?

Save time and energy the hydronic way

Adam Stein | January 12, 2009

The Department of Energy doesn’t even bother to rate clothes dryer under its ENERGY STAR program because the models on the market differ little in their energy use. That could change soon. The DryerMiser system uses hot fluid and a heat exchanger to warm the dryer, rather than natural gas or an electric heating element. According to Hydromatic Technologies Corporation, the inventor of the technology, DrierMiser cuts drying time by 41% and energy consumption by...

Jatropha jet fuel

Inedible weed may power flights of the future

Adam Stern | January 3, 2009

As 2009 gets underway, it’s encouraging to see the world’s airlines competing for environmental credentials. I wrote last month about Emirates’ claim to have launched the longest green flight, SFO to Dubai. Now Air New Zealand reports that it powered one of the engines of a Boeing 747-400 with oil from jatropha plants. Continental Airlines has a special flight planned for Jan. 7 running partly on jatropha and algae-derived fuel. Virgin Atlantic, United, and Japan...

“Passive houses” yield aggressive carbon cuts

Super-efficient homes require little heating or cooling.

Adam Stein | December 30, 2008

I’m a little late to this party, but so-called “passive houses” have been lighting up in the blogosphere in the wake of this New York Times article: Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat...

Necessity is the mother of the smart grid

Prius battery spares ice-bound family from certain death mild discomfort

Adam Stein | December 30, 2008

A recent ice storm left tiny Harvard, Massachusetts without power for four days. The holiday miracle that ensued will amaze and inspire you: John Sweeney, a member of the town’s conservation-minded Heat Advisory Committee, took a characteristically green approach to powering his home during the storm… Sweeney ran his refrigerator, freezer, TV, woodstove fan, and several lights through his Prius, for three days, on roughly five gallons of gas. “When it looked like we were...

China delivers first commercially available plug-in hybrid

Like a Chevy Volt, but available now and at half the price

Adam Stein | December 21, 2008

The Chinese firm BYD (Build Your Dream) has leapt dramatically into the electric car market with the introduction of the F3DM, a commercially available plug-in hybrid that can travel for 60 miles without using its gasoline engine. The car retails for about $22,000 in China, well below the projected price of the Chevy Volt, which it closely resembles. Of course, the F3DM isn’t available yet outside China yet, and both Toyota and Chevrolet may beat...

Longest green flight in the world

Emirates shows how to save fuel and cut carbon

Adam Stern | December 16, 2008

Emirates Airline flight # 225 landed at San Francisco International yesterday afternoon having completed a remarkable nonstop trip from Dubai. The journey aboard a Boeing 777 200-LR (for long-range) covered 8,085 miles and was billed as the longest green flight in the world. Emirates spent three months planning this flight to maximize fuel savings and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Before leaving Dubai, the airline practiced new fuel-saving measures, including: Washing the plane to reduce air...

Austin gets smart

City announces plan to develop next-generation electricity grid.

Adam Stein | December 8, 2008

The city of Austin, TX recently announced a smart grid project. Smart grids, you may recall, are one of the core elements of the Grand Climate Plan. Although the Austin project isn’t the first such effort in the country, officials hope that the city will be able to move faster than others, because Austin actually owns the local power provider. Right now you may be wondering: what’s a smart grid? Glad you asked. The term...

Cool technology harnesses energy from hot gas

Is low-temperature waste heat the next big thing?

Peter Freed | December 2, 2008

I am well acquainted with hot air. Jokes about my fellow bloggers aside, I’ve spent much time in small, hot engine rooms while visiting TerraPass projects. Even clean energy generates copious amounts of waste heat. In the future, that lost energy might be put to productive use if efforts to harness low-temperature waste heat are successful. A new “near frictionless” system from Ener-G-Rotors can supposedly generate electricity from gas that’s as cool as 65° C....

Wind turbines get fancy

Electronics, biomimicry, and design advances improve an already mature technology.

Adam Stein | December 1, 2008

Solar energy sucks up a lot of research attention, partly because solar energy systems still have so much room for improvement. Wind turbines, on the other hand, have been around for over 1,000 years, and although the modern versions are vastly larger and more efficient than their ancient counterparts, the basic concept hasn’t changed much. But the standard blades-on-a-horizontal-axle version of wind energy systems (as opposed to more exotic flavors like kites or blimps) may...

What makes a building “green”?

One giant conference dedicated to greening up our built world

Mira Rubin Karp | November 25, 2008

Last week I had the pleasure of attending Greenbuild 08, a conference and expo dedicated to (quite obviously) green building. The sheer size of this event forced me to pause. The architecture, construction and design industries — and everyone who supplies to them — are certainly committed to reducing their environmental impacts. As well they should be. In North America alone, buildings are responsible for more than 2,200 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions annually....

Better living through lasers

Wind-sensing light beams could boost windmill output by 10%.

Adam Stein | November 10, 2008

This is cool: A new fiber-optic laser system can measure wind speed and direction up to 1000 meters in front of a wind turbine, giving the massive machines enough precious seconds to proactively adapt to gusts and sudden changes in wind direction. The device…could improve the efficiency of wind turbines and keep them from breaking down. The idea is pretty simple. The current generation of wind turbines measure wind speed and direction via anemometers...

Under pressure to cut fuel use? Try a hydraulic hybrid

A decidedly low-tech hybrid variant can slash truck emissions.

Adam Stein | October 31, 2008

Those of you who weren’t impressed by the air-powered car might be more excited by the latest pressure-powered vehicle: the hydraulic hybrid truck. Hydraulic hybrids pair a standard internal combustion engine with a series of tanks holding compressed fluid. The tanks capture energy during braking and deliver it back to the wheels during acceleration. A pressurized tank can’t hold a large amount of energy, but it does offer some compensating advantages: One is that it...

Surf’s up!

New form of clean energy offers limitless source of headline puns.

Adam Stein | October 28, 2008

A new tide. A coming wave of clean energy. An ocean of opportunity. Forget the sun and wind — tidal energy open up an exciting new trove of headline puns for aspiring clean tech writers. The past week has seen an, ahem, boatload of news regarding wave energy. Most excitingly, the world’s first commercial wave farm went live off the coast of Portugal. The installation has a capacity of 2.25 megawatts and plans to expand...

Carbon pricing works! Doesn’t! Does!

Sometimes the issue with a particular technology is the technology itself.

Adam Stein | October 27, 2008

In arguing for efficiency mandates, Joe Romm notes the failings of carbon pricing as a solution to climate change: That means a price of $400 a metric ton of carbon (whether achieved through a tax or a cap & trade system) would increase the price of gasoline a mere $1 a gallon. How much efficiency would that drive? Not bloody much! Joe Romm more recently comments on the future of the electric car: If hybrids...

Tesla takes a hit

Layoffs and delays for electric sedan, but bright prospects for industry.

Adam Stein | October 21, 2008

Tesla Motors, poster child of the clean car revolution that is always just around the corner, recently removed its CEO, announced a round of layoffs, and pushed the delivery date of its all-electric sedan back to 2011. In one sense, this is sad news. A lot of people (myself included) are caught up in Tesla’s story, a kind of david-and-goliath tale of Silicon Valley ingenuity vs. Old Detroit intransigence (never mind that Tesla is backed...

New wind blowing

Offshore wind’s moment may soon arrive.

Adam Stein | October 12, 2008

Offshore wind is poised to explode: Earlier this year, Delaware became the first state to approve an offshore wind project, a 200-megawatt installation that beat out proposals for coal- and natural gas-fired plants. Rhode Island was next up, with plans for a facility that will supply 15% of the state’s electricity. New Jersey recently followed suit, granting rights for what could be a 346-megawatt facility. Texas, already tops in the U.S. for land-based wind energy,...

Paris Motor Show reveals industry’s electric obsession

Batteries will eventually end the era of the internal combustion engine.

Adam Stein | October 7, 2008

The recently concluded Paris Motor Show showcased the industry’s newfound obsession with all-electric and electric hybrid vehicles. I am neither a) a car guy, nor b) particularly turned on by Jetsons-inspired concept cars, so I can only offer the most outsider-y thoughts: Thought 1: this is real Electrics are no longer being touted as some sort of green window dressing. And the driving factor isn’t gasoline prices. It’s batteries. “We have just in the past...

Hot idea: recycling wasted energy

Computers and cacti go together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Adam Stein | September 30, 2008

Bill McKibben once lamented the unsexiness of waste heat recovery, an energy efficiency technique that languishes in obscurity despite its potentially huge environmental benefits. Perhaps this story will capture the public imagination: in a move that will save money and cut carbon emissions, the University of Notre Dame in Indiana has begun housing some of its computer servers in the nearby “Arizona Desert Dome,” a conservatory for cacti and other desert plants. Computer servers create...

Making good on a resolution

My new solar water heater provides low-carbon hot showers.

Erin Craig | September 21, 2008

We had a very exciting evening at my house yesterday. At about 6:30 pm, my husband interrupted my post-run shower to tell me that the our hot water heater’s inlet pipe — the one that fills the water heater from the City’s supply lines — was hot. “You actually put your hand on it?” I said, a bit incredulously. “No, no, on the insulation,” he assured me. “The insulation is just warm, I’m sure...

Does the air-powered car really work?

Yes, but it only runs on unicorn brea— no wait, it really does work.

Adam Stein | September 16, 2008

Zero Pollution Motors is drumming up press again, with claims that an improved version of its “air-powered car” can travel 848 miles on a single tank of compressed air. The comments in response to the New York Times article run to the skeptical side (“I bet it can fly too”), which seems a little bit ironic, because — unlike the water-powered car — the air-powered car is a perfectly respectable piece of technology. As air...

Hybrids a rare bright spot for the auto industry

As vehicle sales plummet, drivers still snap up hybrids. What made you buy?

Erik Blachford | September 4, 2008

I was struck by the August U.S. car sales reports, and couldn’t help making a quick comparison to the same reports for hybrids. The bottom line: overall car sales through the end of August are tanking in the U.S., down 11.2% from the first 8 months of 2007. Light trucks are the heaviest anchor here, down a phenomenal 22.1% from the same period last year. Hybrids, on the other hand, are a bright spot for...

Plug in and drive

Shai Agassi says his electric cars can save the world. People are listening.

Adam Stein | August 26, 2008

There’s a lot to chew over in Wired’s profile of Shai Agassi, the entrepreneur engaged in an audacious experiment to electrify an entire nation’s transportation system, and in the process rewrite the automotive industry’s business model. The nation in question is Israel, with Denmark and Hawaii possibly to follow. Agassi’s idea is that electric cars should be sold on a subscription model, like cell phones, with fees used to underwrite a network of intelligent electric...

Clean energy on the move

More solar, more geothermal: Renewable energy is a small but booming part of the energy mix.

Adam Stein | August 19, 2008

Lots of renewable energy in the news lately: One: California is building two massive solar photovoltaic power plants, together big enough to generate 800 megawatts of power. To get a sense of the scale, consider that the current biggest PV installation in the U.S. has a capacity of 14 megawatts, and the biggest one in the world is a 23-megawatt Spanish installation. The new plant will roughly double the amount of solar PV in the...

The future of flight

Looking to engineers to save our climate — and our vacations.

Adam Stein | August 5, 2008

We don’t devote a ton of ink here to environmental technofixes, but there is one area where technofixes are urgently needed: airline travel. Plane flight is both hard on the environment and also really wonderful for people, so let’s hope some of the futuristic fuel-efficient designs featured in National Geographic pan out: Image by Georgia Tech/Courtesy NASA The proposed planes come with whizzy features like retractable propellers and electric drive trains for runway taxiing that...

Old homes get smart

Smart meters and some simple technology can help make any house green.

Adam Stein | July 29, 2008

Smart metering is coming. Within a decade, you’ll know exactly how much every flip of a switch or turn of a knob costs in monthly utility charges. The Times profiles two British seaside towns on the forefront of the low-tech energy efficiency revolution. Take, for example, Hove residents Brenda and Jeffrey Marchant, owners of a typical Victorian house. The Marchants were always energy-thrifty, but instant feedback is a uniquely motivating force. Turn on a computer...

Corn on the 8th floor, turnips on level 23…

“Pie in the sky” takes on new meaning in a half-baked concept for urban farms.

Adam Stein | July 22, 2008

Image: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The Times has a slideshow of artists’ conceptions of possible designs for “vertical farms,” stacked, self-contained urban biosystems capable of producing food for tens of thousands of city residents. Amazingly, this futuristic concept, born of academia, seems to be getting at least a little bit of traction in the real world. Let’s not pull any punches here: how is this not the dumbest idea ever? Image: Eric Ellingsen...

When volcanoes attack

Some nice pics reveal the dynamism of forces at play in the earth’s atmosphere.

Adam Stein | July 18, 2008

Surely by now you’ve seen The Big Picture, The Boston Globe’s large-format photo blog. Pretty much every entry is worth a peek. Here’s one on recent volcanic activity. Photo by Cyrus Read/AVO/USGS What does this have to do with climate change? Hm. Well, volcanoes release a lot of CO2, although the amounts are insignificant in comparison to human activities. Or how about this: the climate system and atmosphere have been memorably described as a “great...

San Francisco goes wireless and real-time to reduce traffic

Check your smartphone to find a parking meter.

Adam Stein | July 15, 2008

When I last wrote about San Francisco’s innovative plan to reduce congestion through market-based pricing of parking spots, I assumed some of the more futuristic features of the system were still a long way off. Well, turns out I was wrong. The city is already installing a network of wireless sensors in the asphalt based on the “smart dust” technology to come out of UC Berkeley. Once in place, battery-operated “bumps” will not only relay...

Does the “water-powered car” really work?

Yes, but the water has to come from unicorn tears.

Adam Stein | July 8, 2008

Unsurprisingly, inevitably, rising gas prices have brought increased interest in the water-powered car. Is there really a simple technology that can dramatically boost the efficiency of conventional cars or, better yet, allow you to run your car entirely on tap water? No. No, there is not. I don’t want to belabor this topic,1 and as it happens, the available information about various water-powered car schemes is scant enough that they’re generally hard to debunk fully....

Honda debuts mass produced hydrogen car. So what?

Fuel cells still seem like a long shot, but the the market will decide the winner.

Adam Stein | June 26, 2008

In comments to the post on the Chevy Volt, someone talked up the Honda Clarity, the world’s first mass-produced hydrogren fuel cell car (or maybe just mass-produceable — they’re only making a few hundred of them). Other commenters correctly pointed out that mass-produced hydrogen fuel cell cars still appear to be no closer to reality than jetpacks or time travel. For the full case against the Clarity, check out Joe Romm’s lengthy take-down. Short version:...

GM’s big bet: the Chevy Volt

GM hopes to shoot the moon with a car that many industry watchers say just isn’t possible.

Adam Stein | June 24, 2008

The Atlantic has a fun piece on GM’s ambitious plan to bring the Volt to market by 2010. I generally don’t go in for overripe tales of corporate heroism, and I definitely don’t go in for economic nationalism, but hell if the story didn’t make me want to hoist up an American flag and blast the Mellencamp from the transistor radio in my ‘68 Chevelle: Because it will have both an electric and a gasoline...

Put a pig in your tank

Wacky scientists find yet another use for pig poo: turning it into petroleum

Peter Freed | June 24, 2008

Over here on the carbon team we get pretty darn excited to see new and ingenious ways to handle animal waste, so it was with great enthusiasm that we learned about scientists who had successfully (or at least semi-successfully) turned pig poo into crude oil. As with most biofuels (and any other other fuel for that matter), there are positives and negatives to pig fuel. On the plus side, farmers might see a financial return...

Parking meters get smart

Dynamic curbside pricing is a step toward less congested cities.

Adam Stein | June 15, 2008

Congestion pricing failed to gain approval in New York, but other cities are quietly pushing forward with their own experiments in smart pricing. In particular, San Francisco will soon attack an equally important piece of the transportation puzzle: parking. Parking spots, like roads, are an odd sort of good: their supply is fixed but the demand fluctuates greatly by day and by hour. For most goods, pricing matches supply with demand. But the price for...

Aussies cultivate ‘burpless’ grass

Moving beyond cleaner cars, researchers look for a cleaner cow.

Peter Freed | May 20, 2008

Researchers in Australia have received funding to develop more digestible feeds for cattle — “burpless” grass, in industry parlance — that result in less methane being produced as they are broken down in cows’ stomach(s). As a recent returnee to the world of eating meat, I cringe when thinking about the impact raising that meat has on the environment. Here on the TerraPass carbon project team we spend quite a bit of time thinking about...

What is the right global temperature?

The “global warming will be great!” crowd makes an encore appearance.

Adam Stein | May 15, 2008

Tim Haab says George Will raises an interesting question in a recent Washington Post column: The housing perhaps-not-entirely-a-crisis resembles, in one particular, the curious consensus about the global warming “crisis,” concerning which, the assumption is: Although Earth’s temperature has risen and fallen through many millennia, the temperature was exactly right when, in the 1960s, Al Gore became interested in the subject. This strikes me as the opposite of an interesting question. It strikes me as...

Do-it-yourself clean energy

Chinese farmer assembles solar water heater from hoses, used beer bottles.

Adam Stein | May 14, 2008

Here’s a story that combines three of my favorite things: clean energy, technology for developing countries, and beer. The beer bottles lie on a board in rows, all connected by hoses which allow cold water to flow through them and be heated by the sun. “I invented this for my mother. I wanted her to shower at any time more comfortably,” says Ma Yanjun, a carpenter, of Qiqiao village, Shaanxi Province. If you want to...

Measuring emissions now federal policy

A small measure to create a federal emissions registry sneaks into the omnibus spending bill.

Tom Arnold | January 30, 2008

One of the more useful things that got tacked on to the recent omnibus federal spending bill was the requirement for the EPA to develop a federal registry to track industrial CO2 emissions. Parsing out just how industrial emissions are measured is one of the stepping stones to implementing a cap and trade system. The EPA has 9 months to figure out a plan. Sutherland, Asbill, and Brennan have the gory details (pdf). They...

$10m for a 100mpg car

Is 100mpg realistic for the mass-market within the next two years?

Pete Davies | January 15, 2008

At this week’s North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) there has been news of a hybrid truck, a hybrid Jeep, and even a hybrid sports car, but none of them comes close to 100mpg. Not yet. The new Dodge Ram (introduced alongside 120 steer, which were marched through Detroit city center) was accompanied by the news that a hybrid version of the truck will be available in 2010. Chrysler’s VP Jim Press told NPR that...

Carbon pricing is the fastest path to clean energy development

Bigger carrots will yield bigger innovations.

Adam Stein | January 12, 2008

As the global warming debate shifts from the basic science to the more pressing question of what to actually do about the problem, a rising chorus of voices are suggesting that a government-funded R&D program should be the main or the only thing. The voices represent a disparate set of viewpoints. Nordhaus and Shellenberger feel that today’s technology simply isn’t up to the task of displacing fossil fuel use. Short of a breakthrough, they say,...

Will video kill the business trip?

No, just maim it. As tech improves and costs drop, “telepresence” will become a source of carbon savings.

Adam Stein | January 12, 2008

Emissions from air travel is thought to be one of the toughest nuts to cracks. Planes burn a lot of fuel, and airline travel is only becoming more popular as it becomes cheaper. So it was nice to see this analysis from John Quiggin suggesting that a 75% reduction in airline emissions is not only possible, but not overly burdensome. It is certainly possible to argue with Quiggin’s assumptions — the comment thread is...

Learning to love your compact fluorescent

“O.K. for a tattoo parlor” may not be good enough for your living room. Tips for effective and efficient lighting.

Adam Stein | January 12, 2008

Now that new efficiency standards for light bulbs have been signed into law, we can expect two things to happen: compact fluorescents will become a lot more prevalent, and the technology will improve markedly in the next few years. We’ll also see the lighting industry in general shake up quite a bit, as the venerable incandescent dies a rapid death. Future improvements are small solace, though, to the people who hate compact fluorescents today....

Visiting Italy? Get your shots

Global warming makes life more comfortable for mosquitoes — and the diseases they carry

Adam Stein | January 12, 2008

This past summer, Italy was hit with an outbreak of chikungunya, a tropical disease related to dengue fever and spread by tiger mosquitoes, an insect newly at home in a waming Europe. Aided by global warming and globalization, Castiglione di Cervia has the dubious distinction of playing host to the first outbreak in modern Europe of a disease that had previously been seen only in the tropics. “By the time we got back the...

Low-carbon resolutions

Promises you can keep: reducing your carbon footprint — through conservation and offsets — is easy.

Adam Stein | December 30, 2007

When you pop the cork on your locally produced champagne this year, be sure to make at least one low-carbon resolution. Pick one simple change that will lower your carbon footprint, and put it into action. Want to take this a step further? Calculate your total carbon footprint using the tools on our web site, and pledge to knock it down by 5% (or more, if you’re feeling ambitious). Further still? On top of...

Green food fight

Adam Stein | September 21, 2007

A firestorm erupted on Grist recently over the perennially fraught topic of diet and the environment. In response biodiversivist asks a question I’ve long wondered over as well: what’s so bad about “partial vegetarianism”? I recognize that people have diverse reasons for making their dietary choices, and many view vegetarianism or veganism as first and foremost an animal welfare issue. For these people, I grant, partial vegetarianism might not be a coherent ethical choice....

Climate grab bag: a few steps forward, one step back

Adam Stein | September 18, 2007

A federal judge has dismissed the California suit against automakers for the role of vehicle emissions in global warming. Just last week, automakers lost a similar suit in Vermont. Harvard is building a new science center, and the university has agreed to keep emissions from energy use in the new buildings at 50% below national standards. By itself this isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it alerted me to some of the aggressive...

California: inflate those tires, and no more party string

Tom Arnold | September 10, 2007

11-year-olds must make sacrifice for climate change — no more silly string! California is here to help pave the way. NASA scientist James Hansen is fond of saying that there are no silver bullet solutions to climate change, but rather silver buckshot — lots of little solutions that add up to the change necessary to avoid catastrophe. California has explored this path, with a structured survey to examine what types of small policy changes...

Science corner: why carbon sequestration isn’t any better than avoided emissions

Adam Stein | August 30, 2007

Update: This post has engendered a fair amount of confusion, for which I am mostly to blame. So let me provide some necessary context. Tree-planting projects are a popular type of carbon offset, but they unfortunately suffer from a large number of quality problems and do not in fact make for very good offsets. However, one recurring argument made in favor of tree-planting projects is that they perform carbon sequestration rather than preventing new...

Dick Cheney has a point

Adam Stein | August 28, 2007

Nicholas Kristof writes about reducing greenhouse gas emissions: Dick Cheney once scoffed that energy conservation can be a “personal virtue” but is no basis for an energy policy. Growing evidence suggests he had it exactly wrongâ€¦the low-hanging fruit on the energy front is curbing demand — meaning more energy conservation. And it’s appalling that our government isn’t leading us on that.” Grist agrees, calling this premise “the baseline understanding that separates those with a...

More fuel on the food miles fire

Adam Stein | August 7, 2007

Some more studies are emerging that are sure to cause much gnashing of teeth among proponents of eating locally, but stick with me here. I think the bigger picture is less dismaying than it might first appear. The first study, performed by the researchers at Lincoln University in New Zealand, suggests that shipping New Zealand lamb around the world by boat may be significantly better for the environment than buying it from the farm...

Coal to liquid continues to be the worst idea ever

Adam Stein | June 12, 2007

Democrats in Congress continue to push forward with proposals to heavily subsidize plants for converting coal to liquid fuel, which we previously noted is the worst idea in the universe. The surprisingly varied response to our earlier post demonstrated that we didn’t do enough work to show why coal-to-liquid technology is such a misguided notion. So here it is again, with a bit more analytical heft. One fact that sometimes goes unappreciated is that it...

Science corner: the natural carbon cycle vs. fossil fuels

Adam Stein | April 6, 2007

We get a steady stream of questions that hinge on a basic confusion over the difference between the natural carbon cycle — the continual uptake and release of carbon dioxide by biological organisms — and the burning of fossil fuels. This post is an attempt to set the record straight. We hope that it achieves the worldwide acclaim of our post on how to turn 6 pounds of carbon into 20 pounds of CO2. I...

Austin pushes plug-ins

Adam Stein | March 27, 2007

Austin is pushing its reputation for both environmentalism and eccentricity* in intriguing directions with a proposal from the mayor’s office for using a fleet of plug-in hybrid vehicles as a daytime power source for the city (subscription required). Plug-ins are a cousin of the hybrid that have much larger batteries and run primarily on an electrical charge from the grid. In the envisioned system, residents will charge their plug-ins at home nightly and park them...

The lazy man’s guide to the home energy diet

Adam Stein | October 5, 2006

I have mixed feelings about the article the Times is running today about how to put your home on an energy diet without lifting a finger. The angle is simple: the author intends to knock 1,000 lbs of CO2 off his annual home energy usage without sacrificing anything or even putting in any real effort. On the one hand, the tone of the article couldn’t be more offputting. There’s only so much of the “environmentalists...

More on technology leapfrogging: using LEDs to light up the developing world

Adam Stein | October 2, 2006

The MightyLight is waterproof, portable, and solar-powered. Just after writing my previous post on the Indian wind turbine manufacturer Suzlon, I noticed that the Economist also recently ran a series of articles on the topic of technology leapfrogging (subscription required) that touch on the consumption, rather than the production, side of the energy equation. Leapfrogging describes the sudden progress of a developing country that skips over several generations of a technology to jump straight...

Can you afford not to install geothermal power for your home?

Adam Stein | August 16, 2006

Some people were surprised by the expense — about $20,000 — to install geothermal heating in their homes. I have a slightly different take. For $20,000, can you afford not to tap into geothermal energy? Says one commenter: For 15k - 30k it sure seems like there would be higher-impact things you could do to reduce your footprint. Find a friend who drives 20 miles to work every day in an SUV and buy them...

Geothermal power for your home

Adam Stein | August 15, 2006

Malcolm Gladwell tells us that geothermal energy isn’t as exotic as we think. His own father recently started using geothermal energy to heat and cool his home. The conversion allowed him to throw away his old oil-fueled furnace — despite living in chilly Ontario. Like Gladwell, I had assumed that geothermal was useful only in unusual circumstances. Say, if you happened to live in a volcanically active region, or near a body of water with...

Overcooked myths: microwave ovens and home energy use

Pete Davies | August 7, 2006

The roving finger of home energy blame finds another target in today’s New York Times. The microwave oven is portrayed as the biggest guzzler of home energy in a confusing table of bar charts and percentages. It’s true that newer technologies with always-on or standby functions are increasing the demand for home electricity, but we must remember that these aren’t all simply adding to the demand — sometimes they’re replacing it. The microwave is a...

Please stand by while we destroy the planet

Pete Davies | August 3, 2006

While we’re on the subjects of the British and television, let us draw attention to an energy review for the British Government which last month took aim at one of those great convenience innovations of the late 20th century: the TV standby mode. Imagine the scene. You get back from a long hard day (fish and chips in hand, presumably), fix yourself a cup of tea, flop down onto the couch, push the red button...

Public health alert: watching TV can lead to blackouts

Adam Stein | August 1, 2006

The cause of the blackouts that swept America during the recent heatwave seems obvious. Demand for electricity soars when roasting residents crank their air conditioners, stretching the grid beyond capacity. But at least in Los Angeles, residents can also blame their TVs. Keep in mind that heatwaves aren’t entirely unpredictable events. Utilities know they’re going to get hit with a surge in demand at some point during the summer, and they try to plan accordingly....

Tesla electric roadster launches

Tom Arnold | July 25, 2006

SONY Pictures may now have to plan a sequel to this summer’s movie Who Killed the Electric Car? (see previous review). Tesla Motors launched their electric roadster in Santa Monica this week. The Roadster tops out at 130 mph and beats the pants of most sports cars by reaching 0-60mph in about 4 seconds. The cool kids at AutoBlogGreen have the full story, including tons of pics and a test ride review....

The bicycling paradox revisited

Adam Stein | July 23, 2006

Last week we reported on some research from UPenn professor Karl Ulrich, who also happens to the founder of TerraPass, that came to the contrarian conclusion that bicycles offer little benefit to the environment. The nub of the argument is that bicycle riders are healthier than non-cyclists, and their increased longevity places a drain on energy resources that largely cancels out the gas savings from cycling. The post sent little ripples through the blogosphere,* jumping...

Running our cars on coal: it seemed like a good idea at the time

Adam Stein | July 11, 2006

Concerned that your car isn’t spewing enough heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Here’s an idea: power your commute with coal. The coal in the ground in Illinois alone has more energy than all the oil in Saudi Arabia. The technology to turn that coal into fuel for cars, homes and factories is proven. And at current prices, that process could be at the vanguard of a big, new industry. Such promise has attracted entrepreneurs...

Al Gore at TED: How to live a carbon neutral life

Tom Arnold | June 27, 2006

For those of you that were still searching for a pen at the end of An Inconvenient Truth, the nice folks at TED have posted Al Gore’s post-slideshow talk. There are some good tips in here, including the mantra we like which is “reduce what you can, offset the rest” as well as a perspective for business leaders. Alternatively, you can see Al and Bender from Futurama hamming it up in a hilarious spot...

Audi Diesel wins LeMans, changes perceptions?

Tom Arnold | June 19, 2006

Why are diesels currently less than 1% of the vehicles sold in the US and about 40% of the vehicles sold in the EU? One oft-cited reason is the horrible memories we all have of choking as the neighborhood diesel noisily and slowly clanked by. All that may be changing. This weekend, the Audi A10 became the first diesel powered car to win the 24hr LeMans race. With a particulate filter installed, mind you. Events...

How will China meet its energy goal?

Adam Stein | May 26, 2006

A group of Stanford students spent their recent spring break in China, examining the issues of economic growth and energy demand. The students used TerraPass to offset the emissions from their trip. In this guest post, Kathleen Livelli provides impressions and photos from the trip. China’s goal is to quadruple GDP by 2020 while only doubling energy use. This is an ambitious leap in efficiency, but how will China get there? And is it enough?...

Coming soon: the end of the world as we know it

Adam Stein | May 19, 2006

We turn our attention briefly away from the CEI controversy to a more pleasant topic: the imminent destruction of civilization. Columnist Dan Neil jumps into the peak oil story with a set of hair-rising predictions from James Howard Kunstler, author of “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century.” According to Niel, Kunstler makes Al Gore look like a “candy-assed optimist” on issues related to fossil fuel usage. Kunstler isn’t worried so...

Conservation tip: power your lawnmower with milk and bananas

Adam Stein | May 15, 2006

One of the lovable cranks who writes to TerraPass recently suggested that perhaps we should be paying him, because his thriving lawn is pulling so much carbon out of the air. We gently explained the difference between the natural carbon cycle and manmade emissions from fossil fuels. But perhaps we should have been more blunt: American lawns are an environmental disaster. Nearly 50,000 square miles of America is covered in lawn. Perhaps an even larger...

Measuring the effect of citizen action on climate change

Tom Arnold | May 3, 2006

Every reporter seems to hit us with the following question: “How can one person’s action really make a difference on climate change”. Usually we refer to recycling and the vision that if as many people were as concientous about their carbon emissions as their soda cans, our greenhouse gas emissions would look a lot different. To prove our point, we took a stab at the math behind a recent Yahoo! earth day promotion. The promotion...

Greenpeace founder goes nuclear

Adam Stein | April 16, 2006

Patrick Moore, who as a co-founder of Greenpeace began his environmental career protesting nuclear energy, now feels that nuclear power is the key to fighting climate change: Wind and solar power have their place, but because they are intermittent and unpredictable they simply can’t replace big baseload plants such as coal, nuclear and hydroelectric. Natural gas, a fossil fuel, is too expensive already, and its price is too volatile to risk building big baseload plants....

Demand Response 101: Efficiency Pools of Power

Tom Arnold | April 5, 2006

Above you’ll see a fairly typical demand curve for electricity over the course of a day, in this case for a room in a Japanese building. What drives utility planners nuts is the fact that energy production is very hard to change quickly, but energy demand fluctuates wildly during the day. The result is overbuilding and overconsumption of resources in order to support the peaks, along with the greater pollution that comes with such...

Is sustainability at a tipping point?

Adam Stein | April 4, 2006

We noted earlier that the tides seem to be finally turning against the so-called energy realists who envision an oil-soaked future for America. Looking at the bigger picture, will 2005 be viewed as the tipping point for clean energy? Several commentators think so. Over at GreenBiz, Gil Friend surveys some anecdotal evidence that suggests sustainability is reaching the mainstream. Among the factors he cites are public efforts by corporations such as Starbucks, Whole Foods,...

“Energy is the albatross of U.S. national security”

Adam Stein | April 3, 2006

Though not always a huge fan of Thomas Friedman, I’m buying what he’s selling when it comes to U.S. energy policy. Recently he ripped into the so-called energy realists, those who maintain that dependence on imported oil is the closest thing our economy has to a natural law. Alternative energy may someday be able to supplant fossil fuels, the realists concede, probably around the same time that we colonize Mars. Fortunately, some cracks are...

Stop the volcanoes before they destroy us all

Adam Stein | March 25, 2006

A reader chimes in with a question regarding the CO2 output of volcanoes. Normally we discourage our readers from asking questions, but we will indulge you just this once, because the answer was (to us) a little surprising. Turns out volcanoes release quite a bit of CO2, although the numbers are small in comparison the amount created each year by human activities. One conservative estimate puts the amount of CO2 released every year by...

How to turn 6 pounds of gasoline into 20 pounds of carbon dioxide

The secret is in the air. Get ready to dust off your high school chemistry.

Adam Stein | March 21, 2006

The curious (or suspicious-minded) among you have occasionally wondered about our claim that one gallon of gas turns into about twenty pounds of carbon dioxide exhaust. Your high school chemistry teacher would be very disappointed with you for even thinking the question, but there’s no judging here at TerraBlog. Let’s walk through the math. Short answer: When you burn something, it might feel like you’re turning it into lightness, air, nothingness. But what you’re really...

US wind energy boom

Bret Sarnquist | March 7, 2006

Good news about alternative energy development is always welcome, and I was happy to read that 2005 was a banner year for wind power. The US installed more new wind energy generating capacity than any other country (2400 megawatts, or enough for up to 3.5 million homes annually), and, while we still trail in our total capacity, we’re quickly catching up. Wind energy is one of the main types of projects supported by your TerraPass....

Conservation tip: remove your roof rack

Bret Sarnquist | March 1, 2006

Improve your gas mileage by 10% instantly, without modifying your car or driving habits! If I saw that in the subject line of an email, it’d get deposited, unread, in my junk folder along with the impotence-related drug ads and mortgage plugs that take up a sizable fraction of my inbox. It just so happens, however, that the claim above is true, and the result of one of the easiest things you can do to...

Conservation tip: Idle engines are the devil’s tools

Bret Sarnquist | February 21, 2006

Should we all be turning off our engines at stoplights? Driving up to Lake Tahoe last weekend, I pulled off for gas in Auburn. I turned off my engine at the stoplight, which earned me a curious glance from my passenger and the comment “Don’t you know that turning your engine off at lights causes more pollution and engine damage than just letting it idle?” Not only did I not know that, I suspected he...

Fighting climate change with cold cathode compact fluorescents

Tom Arnold | February 15, 2006

Our trusted advisors Karl and George both have off-grid cabins, where every watt they can eke out of their solar panels makes the difference between reading by headlamp and being a bit more civilized. So, naturally the weekend email thread was on the latest and greatest compact fluorescent (CF) technology, so-called cold-cathode bulbs. George was particularly excited about the bulb pictured here, a 5W 300 lumens (about 40W equivalent), available for a cool $10 each....

Conservation Tip: Change your car’s air filter

Tom Arnold | February 1, 2006

A few of you wrote in to also suggest another gas and pollution saving tip — changing your car’s air filter. Perhaps you’ve seen the accordion-like thing that the Jiffy Lube mechanic always shows to you when you are getting the oil changed. Well, more often than not he is right. A blocked air filter can reduce mileage by 10%! (source:EPA) And every TerraPass member knows that a gallon of gas saved is 20 lbs...

Peak oil: no silver bullet?

Adam Stein | January 27, 2006

Back to peak oil. Recall that the world is heading toward a peak in the amount of oil it can pump out of the ground on a daily basis. This peak is the seemingly inevitable consequence of the geology of oil fields, and after it arrives we can expect a fairly rude transition to the post-peak world. In the midst of this handwringing over peak oil, a reasonable question to ask is: haven’t we heard...

Conservation tip: Kill your screensaver

Adam Stein | January 18, 2006

Business school geeks (like us) know Nicholas Carr as the author of the controversial “IT Doesn’t Matter” article in the Harvard Business Review. In his excellent blog, he sometimes touches on the mostly-unnoticed environmental impact of computer technology. For example, he entertainingly dissects corporations’ Dilbert-like attempts to instill “corporate values” via bloated screensaver apps. What effect these screensavers have on corporate values is unclear, but Carr can put some hard numbers around the environmental consequences....

Eco-smackdown: GreenPeace and RFK, Jr. tussle over wind farm

Adam Stein | January 18, 2006

Here’s something you don’t see very often. Greenpeace (see campaign) pulls up in a zodiac next to Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s sailing ship to protest his opposition to the Cape Wind project. Their banner reads: “Bobby, you’re on the wrong boat. Say yes to Cape Wind” Planned as the second largest offshore wind farm in the world, the 130 turbine farm will be placed just 6 miles off the shallow Nantucket sound. Location is RFK’s main...

Peak oil: the economics behind the problem

Adam Stein | December 28, 2005

Let’s get back to peak oil. Previously I defined the peak oil phenomenon and discussed some of the science underlying the issue. In this post, I’m going to talk about the economics behind peak oil, the dynamics that underlie worldwide consumption and production of oil. To review where we are so far: at some point in the relatively near future, natural limits to the rate of oil production will cause the daily supply of oil...

Peak oil: the science behind the problem

Adam Stein | November 29, 2005

Let’s return to the issue of peak oil. In the first post, I explained that fairly soon the world will reach a peak in the amount of oil it can pump out of the ground on a daily basis. Regardless of how much total oil remains in the earth, natural limits exist to how fast we can get the oil out of the ground. Why? Common sense would seem to dictate that, if the oil...

Peak oil and other things to keep you up at night

Adam Stein | November 15, 2005

At TerraPass, we’re always going on about carbon this and global warming that. But environmental concerns are just part of the case for alternative energy. So today I’m going to kick off a series of posts that more closely examine the issue of peak oil. First, a definition: peak oil refers to the notion that at some point in the future we will reach a peak in the rate at which we can pump oil...

International Energy Agency: No more Weeknight Drinking!

Tom Arnold | November 9, 2005

Headlines abounded Tuesday with the call that the normally conservative International Energy Agency had shifted its tone to cautionary about the supply of oil, the impact of CO2 pollution, and the likelihood that high oil prices are here to stay (see articles from WSJ, CNN etc). Full Report is available here for purchase, or you can read the exec sum for free here) At TerraPass, we hear that many customers buy their TerraPass to support...

Hybrids in the HOV Lane?

Tom Arnold | August 5, 2005

You’ve got to love the feeling. Cruising in a carful of people in the HOV lane and zipping along at 70 (ahem) past a parking lot of single drivers. Several proposals around the nation could change this situation dramatically, by allowing tens of thousands of high-mileage hybrid’s into the HOV lane. Nowhere could this be a more contentious issue than in California, where 30% of hybrids are registered (stat via Green Car Congress). In fact...

The power of the bicycle

Tom Arnold | July 11, 2005

This weekend, I completed the Death Ride for the second year in a row. For the uninitiated, the Death Ride is a grueling 129 mile bicycle tour through the high-sierra landscape of Alpine County, complete with 16,000 ft of climbing. For Lance, this is a normal training day, but for the rest of us mortals, this is a big ride. On the 11.5 hours it took to complete the ride, I spent a little time...

Science & Technology

Stimulus funds, consumer backlash, and intelligent thermostats

Yes, there’s an app for that too.

Even renewable energy can be resource intensive

Tricycles + laser range finders = your daily wow

Designing water-neutral homes

New study attempts to define thresholds for man’s impact on planetary processes

L Prize competition tries to sidestep early mistakes in quest for better light

Thin, flexible OLEDs may be the future of lighting

California proposes television efficiency standards, but most gadgets go unregulated

We have a range of tools to restore fisheries, but all require good government

A century of damming and diverting threatens to leave the West high and dry

California and Japan pursue projects to beam energy from satellites

Study claims the devices pay themselves back in a year

Energy efficiency shows vast potential for environmental and economic benefits

Some less-than-worldchanging ideas for a more energy efficient future

Not much, but don’t blame GM. Rating the fuel efficiency of plug-ins is hard.

Wind turbines are awkward to ship, so manufacturers are getting creative

Bikes + lasers = awesome

Climate change shakes up ecosystems in ways difficult to predict

But as climate change kicks in, seas could end up in nasty feedback loop

Does a display of information help us to save energy? Or will it take something more?

On sale at Amazon. Have you used them? Do they work?

For the future of the car, look west to Silicon Valley. And then further west, to China.

Invention captures the energy in fluttering fabric

Contest could put your green product idea on store shelves

Developer builds super-efficient houses on the cheap

A low-carbon fossil fuel may hold the key to weaning ourselves from coal

As technology races forward, is it time for an I-told-you-so on the “bulb ban”?

Innovative system shifts air conditioning demand to the middle of the night

The fossil record reveals five previous die-offs. Our present one is manmade.

Is the vertical farm concept ready for a comeback?

Smart meters generate a lot of data. Maybe too much.

A train cleans up its act in Europe, and a tiny car looms large in India

Innovations galore! Solar gets bigger and thinner and see-through and cylindrical

Embedded sensors and wireless networks will bring needed efficiency to our infrastructure

Better Place wants to charge you to drive — and you’ll thank them for it

Wood and dung fired cookstoves could be a major source of global warming

Some left-field innovations in lighting and mobility

California’s “cool car” initiative fights global warming

Creator hopes carbon credits will make technology available for free

We can misfire satellites just like North Korea

New research suggests extreme temperatures threaten the tropics

Better farming practices can improve crop yield and lock up greenhouse gases

The winner gets $75,000 to develop their idea

Burning forests match cars in their contribution to smog

Research suggests that a lot of it may wind up inside fish

A green design competition turns up some great new ideas

It’s great to be young and thin. Unless you’re a forest.

Some new answers to the eternal question

Recycled turbines and ultra-cheap rooftop systems could bring wind to the masses

Our future grid will pull together a complex and far-flung set of technologies

Hypercars, electric car networks, and car-sharing services. Oh my.

Single project represents 20% of country’s electrical capacity

How will we store the surplus energy generated by inconsistent renewables?

With lasers! Concept system paints a virtual lane wherever you travel

Our aging power lines weren’t built for clean energy

The Director of the Passive House Institute US offers some more info

Save time and energy the hydronic way

Inedible weed may power flights of the future

Super-efficient homes require little heating or cooling.

Prius battery spares ice-bound family from certain death mild discomfort

Like a Chevy Volt, but available now and at half the price

Emirates shows how to save fuel and cut carbon

City announces plan to develop next-generation electricity grid.

Is low-temperature waste heat the next big thing?

Electronics, biomimicry, and design advances improve an already mature technology.

One giant conference dedicated to greening up our built world

Wind-sensing light beams could boost windmill output by 10%.

A decidedly low-tech hybrid variant can slash truck emissions.

New form of clean energy offers limitless source of headline puns.

Sometimes the issue with a particular technology is the technology itself.

Layoffs and delays for electric sedan, but bright prospects for industry.

Offshore wind’s moment may soon arrive.

Batteries will eventually end the era of the internal combustion engine.