The Motion of the Ocean

What is electricity? Sure, there are plenty of ways to define this force in terms of charge or current or the interaction of particles, but unless you’ve got a solid background in physics, it’s hard to really get a handle on exactly what that means.

So here’s an interesting way to think of electricity: it’s a way to harness, store, transport and use the energy originally created by something in motion. That’s what generators do -- they turn kinetic energy into electricity. Everything starts with motion.

This is easy to see with hydroelectric power, which uses the motion of water flowing through a dam to turn a rotor; when the rotor spins inside a magnetic field, electricity is produced. But most people don’t realize that the same concept is at work in other power plants. Coal, wind and portable generators all work the same way. A lot of people don’t understand that nuclear plants are just fancy steam engines; they think it uses some kind of advanced super-scientific principle to get juice flowing directly out atoms, but in fact it uses a controlled fission reaction to release heat, which boils water. The resulting steam is used to drive a rotating turbine, which produces electricity.

So where can we find a nearly limitless source of motion? The ocean, of course. In the past week, I’ve seen two great ideas for transforming the kinetic energy of the tides and waves into electricity.

The first uses power buoys, tethered to the ocean floor. Inside the buoy, a coil of metal is attached to the tether, so it cannot rise or fall with the waves. This is surrounded by a sheath of magnets that is not tied down, and does move up and down around the coil with the tides. This motion creates electricity.

The government has approved at least four proposals to test the concept, all in Oregon.

The second idea is even more out there. It uses something called a “dielectric elastomer,” which is a fancy way of saying a high-tech, stretchy piece of plastic. Scientists know that some elastomers contract when power runs through them. Well, it turns out the process can work in reverse. Stretch out an elastomer, and it will kick out electricity.

Researchers are trying to turn this concept into a commercial power reality, using waves and tides to stretch out the elastomer. Just tie one end to the sea floor and the other to a floating buoy, and the waves will move them around all day long.

Neither idea is close to reality; one of the problems is that wind and salt water don’t mix well with power generators. Another, like offshore wind farms, is NIMBY politics. Still, this is such an elegant idea that I can’t help but hope that somebody will make it work.

A Sight to Behold

Growing up in San Francisco, it’s hard to avoid making the dreary drive between the Bay Area and Los Angeles at least several times.

There are two basic routes. First, the stunning road along the coast, a twisty, winding trip with sheer cliffs falling into the mighty Pacific for much of the 10-hour trip. Just about everybody says they prefer this road simply for its sheer natural beauty, but most people end up going the other way because it takes about half as long, a tedious shot down straight-as-a-ruler Highway 5 through the Central Valley. It’s about as boring a drive as I’ve ever made. The most striking part of the trip is probably the massive feedlot in Coalinga; even at 85 mph, the smell of acres and acres of cows standing ankle-deep in their own poop lingers for a good half-hour. I’ve driven up and down the state more times than I can count, and I have yet to take the coastal road.

For me, the highlight of the trip has always been crossing over the Altamont Pass (yes, that Altamont), where the Bay Area ends and drivers enter I-5, and where the windswept hillsides are dotted with thousands of windmills. There are big ones and even bigger ones, two-blade models, three-blade models and (always my favorite) a few that look like the DNA double-helix spinning around and around. As a kid, I loved to watch them all spinning ‘round and ‘round, and when I started making the trip as an adult, I always made sure to point them out to my own kids.

Maybe that’s why I find it so cool that the Bluegrass Ridge Farm, Missouri’s first commercial wind farm, in the tiny town of King City, Mo., has become the farming community’s top (only?) tourist attraction, according to the Kansas City Star.

The site was formally dedicated in September, with 27 turbines spread over 6,000 acres, some as tall as 262 feet. Since then, tourists have been flocking to the site, bringing much-needed tourism dollars, and farmers receive $3,000 every year for each turbine on their land. The city of just 1,000 people is even mulling a $250,000 visitors center, including a viewing area and theater.

“It sure is a novelty, seeing those big ol’ windmills out there turning,” said King City’s mayor Jim Gillespie. “We’ve embraced it.”

The best part of the article: a handy diagram comparing the size of the windmills to other well-known tourist attractions, including the Statue of Liberty (305 feet) and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (630 feet).

Can't Win For Trying

This one’s just a big biofuel bummer.

A new report concludes that the industrial farming methods needed to produce biofuel plants in volume also product greenhouse gases. A LOT of greenhouse gases.

Turns out that the fertilizers used to grow these crops generates three to five times more greenhouse gases than previously thought, especially nitrous oxide (yes, the same stuff you get at the dentist or Grateful Dead concerts), which can be as much as 300 times more effective an atmospheric insulator that carbon dioxide.

And this report doesn’t come from any kind of quack organization; it was written by Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel prize winner in chemistry.

Using biofuels produced from rapeseed, a popular source crop in Europe, can generate up to 70 percent more greenhouse gas than just using standard, petroleum-based diesel. Corn, one of the main crops in the United States, is a bit better; depending on how it’s produced it can cut greenhouse gas product by 10 percent, or increase it by up to 50 percent. And sugarcane, widely used in South America, can cut emissions by 10 percent to 50 percent.

Worse, none of these numbers even considered the emissions produced during the process of refining crops into fuel.

“The nitrous oxide emission on its own can cancel out the overall benefit” of switching to biofuels, said Crutzen’s co-author Keith Smith.

However, they report did not look at all potential biofuel crops, and there are some contenders that may not require much, or any, fertilizer (algae, anyone?).

I guess the hunt continues.

Good Advice

This may seem too obvious to even mention, but it’s a good idea to build wind farms in places that actually, you know, get a decent amount of wind.
But amazingly, it seems that many of the wind farms in the U.K. don’t get enough wind to make them a reliable source of energy.
The wind industry rates locations by their average annual wind speeds, which is called a “load factor.” The recommended load factor for a wind farm is at least 30 percent.
Though there are plenty of windy spots in the U.K. – some wind farms in Scotland and Wales come in at about 45 percent – there are many more that fall far short. One, in Cumbria, for example, rates at only 20 to 21 percent, and of the 25 wind farms in Eastern England only five (5!) have load factors that meet the 30 percent threshold.
Wow. That just seems amazingly short-sighted.
How could this happen? Some energy consultants blame government pressure to produce green energy. The U.K. wants 15 percent of its energy to come from renewable sources by 2014, and power companies are rushing to put up wind farms.
Certainly, I’m not privy to what went into the decisions to build the under-performing sites, but I can’t help but think that the subsidies that the government used to offer for building wind farms played a role.
Those subsidies are no longer available; now the government sets targets that power suppliers must meet, selling a certain percentage of green electricity each year, and imposing fines on those that don’t make their numbers.
Hopefully, these penalties may make some power companies realize that the windless wind farms are bringing their averages down.

Off Hiatus

Wow, take on a few side projects, get out of town for a vacation, and pretty soon it’s been almost two months since my last post.
I’ll try to update the site a bit more regularly now, especially since alternative energy seems to be in the spotlight more than ever these days.
Here’s an item I thought was especially… tasty.
Remember the Tyson Foods plan to convert the byproducts of its meat-packing operations into biofuel? Well, think for a minute about what those “byproducts” actually are.
OK, don’t think too hard, because it’s not a pretty mental image. Yes, we’re talking about slop and slime and fat and guts. Blech.
Turns out that there’s already a company testing the production of biofuel from animal byproducts, Renewable Energy Solutions, of Carthage, Mo., which went live in May 2004, which turns turkey waste from several nearby packing plants into fuel.
Unfortunately, the plant has its own unpleasant byproduct, a serious smell problem, and some local residents are raising a stink about the stink.
The governor ordered the plant shut down in December 2005, but it reopened three months later, after the company invested about $3 million in industrial grade odor eaters.
But that doesn’t seem to have done the trick, and one local resident has filed a lawsuit against RES.
I have to admit, the meatpacking plant/biofuel plant combination seems great on paper, but sometimes real-world complications don’t show up on paper.
While this is an example of NIMBY politics with which I can sympathize, there are plenty of other examples of alt-energy projects that have been stalled for other reasons that I think are just lame.
But we’ll cover Cape Wind another day.

Reality Check

Solar energy is hot. It seems like I read about a new commercial project almost every time I scan my favorite econews sites, and there’s a lot of research money pouring into finding more efficient ways to harness the sun than the venerable photovoltaic cell.

So, you’d think that solar power would eventually be generating a significant chunk of our power, right? Well, apparently not.

The New York Times, in its usual comprehensive fashion, reports that solar energy is barely noticeable as a source of power today, and that’s not likely to change. According to a story today, solar power was used to create just 0.1% of all power used in 2005, and by the year 2030 it will still be 0.1% (though the total amount generated will increase from 900 million kilowatt-hours to 7 billion kilowatt-hours over the same period). That’s hardly even noticeable.

And a quick look at the government’s energy investments show that solar is clearly not a priority. R&D on solar technology in fiscal 2007 will be $159 million. Nuclear gets $303 million , and coal (?!) will merit $427 million. Biofuels are currently considered the darling of the alternative energy movement in Washington (though I’m sure that the huge farm lobby was a factor there).

There are two other interesting details in this chart. First, check out the huge surge in coal power. Worldwide, a new coal-burning power plant is coming on line every week.

Second, notice that petroleum is the only source of power that declines. Who says that the peak oil theory is a myth? Seems like a good reason to invest more in alternative energy.

Fuel from Garbage

I really did a double-take when I first heard that the massive meat-packing company Tyson Foods was jumping into the biofuels market, but the more I thought about it, the more I had to give them credit for creative thinking.

Meat and diesel – where’s the connection? Easy. One of the byproducts of butchering thousands of beasts every day is a huge amount of animal fats. And all that natural goop, that horrible-smelling, greasy, slimy fatty slop, can be converted into biodiesel.

Tyson is forming a joint venture operation called Dynamic Fuels, with Syntroleum, a company that specializes in producing fuel from a variety of organic materials, including animal fat. The beauty of this partnership is that it allows the chicken company to get rid of its waste material, stuff that often collects in huge ponds outside meat-packing plants. In other words, it turns garbage into gas, and allows the company to make money from its waste instead of paying someone to take it away. Oh, let’s not forget the potentially significant benefits to anyone who has to live within smelling range of the plant.

Tyson, which already has a well-established network of trucks and trains, will also handle transportation. Even better, Tyson wants to get other meat packers to provide their waste products as well. I’m not sure if Tyson will pay for it, or just offer to take it off their hands for a really attractive rate, but the economics of this arrangement are hard to ignore.

The two companies are expected to kick in $75 million each, and hope to start construction on a new refinery next year. They hope to produce 75 million gallons of fuel per year, starting in 2010.

The Solar Map

How much do you think you’ll cut from your monthly power bill with that fancy home solar system you’re planning to install?

It’s pretty hard to tell. Sure, the manufacturers can tell you how much power the solar cells are capable of putting out, but we know that’s always a best-case scenario, and life rarely follows the best-case script.

That’s why the San Francisco Solar Map is such a great idea. This interactive Web site has a map of the city, with dozens of color-coded dots representing residential and municipal solar projects. Click on a dot to open a window showing the size of the project, the company that installed it, and in many cases, the actual output and annual cost savings.

This is particularly useful in San Francisco, aka Fogtown, where the oh-so-moody fog can really cut into the efficiency of solar energy systems. If you live in the fogbelt of the city’s north-west corner (where I spent a large chunk of my youth – shout out to the Richmond and Sunset districts!), there’s probably a big difference between what a system is capable of putting out, and what it really does.

Well, according to this map, the 7 kW system at 36th Ave. and Geary, puts out 14,400 kilowatt hours per year, saving the owner $4,800. And the 2.3 kW project down the road at 23rd Ave. and California generates 1,900 kilowatt hours per year. The owner of that one includes the helpful note that “Every kW generated locally is one less kW produced by fossil fuels.”

Someone who is casually considering a home solar system could easily be put off by the up-front costs, which can easily reach $20,000 or more. But when the guy down the street says he’s saving close to $5,000 a year, it can make the expense seem much less daunting. Now that’s news you can use!

Pond Scum Power

Here’s another entry vying to be the next big source-crop for biofuels: algae.

Yes, green pond scum can be cultivated, harvested, and converted into fuel,
and a company called Solix Biofuels, is trying to commercialize the idea. In an
article in Popular Science, the company point out several advantages that algae has over crops such as soy, corn or canola, which make it great for growing in high-volume.

For starters, algae grows in water rather than dirt, which means it can be cultivated just about anywhere, not just on a farm. Solix plans to grow algae in long, tubular, plastic bags filled with water. They are clear, so sunlight can shine on the “crop” from every direction.

Perhaps more importantly, algae doesn’t require much in the way of nutrients. Water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide are pretty much all an algae farm needs, and the crop grows quickly. As a result, Solix says that algae can produce more fuel in less space than other plants.

The company estimates that it would take 140 billion gallons of biodiesel to satisfy the United State’s total need for petroleum-based fuel for a year, and that it would take about 3 billion acres of soybeans to produce that much gas. Canola is much more efficient, requiring just 1 billion acres. Unfortunately, there are only about 425 million acres of arable land in the county (and don’t forget we need a lot of that to grow food).

But algae only needs 95 million acres, and it doesn’t have to be 95 million acres of farmland. In fact, the best place to put an algae-growing operation is next to a power plant, where the green stuff can live on carbon-dioxide emissions. Hmmm, it uses space that nobody really wants to use for anything, and sucks up greenhouse gas emissions? What’s not to like here?

The Cellulose Ratio

My last post made me wonder about the various crops that people are touting as the next big thing for biofuels. Though ethanol is certainly the best-known alternative to petroleum-based gas, and the one most widely used, I was pretty surprised to discover that it doesn’t really offer much of an improvement over regular gas.

According to an article I found in Plenty, the green magazine, the ratio of energy produced compared to the amount of fossil-fuel energy needed to make ethanol is just a whisker above that of gasoline. Gas comes in at about 1:1, while ethanol is about 1.5:1.

But biofuel produced from cellulose plant material, that is the fibers found in trees or various grasses, blows them away; it comes in at 10:1.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Ethanol, which gets its energy from the starch in corn or soy, is easier to make than fuel derived from cellulose because the starch breaks down easily. Cellulose is a bit more hardy, and requires additional processing steps. Still, it seems pretty obvious to me that perhaps if we’re hunting for next major fuel source, the best place to look would be the crops where we can find the most energy.

Carbon Farms

Ever heard of miscanthus x giganteus?

I hadn’t either, until I read this articlein the San Francisco Chronicle. A bunch of alternative-energy researchers are betting that this Asian superweed will be the next big thing in biofuels.

Turns out that miscanthus is an incredible sources of cellulose, a form of carbon found in organic materials that can be converted into fuel. The tropical reeds can grow as tall as 12 feet, live for two decades or more, require little water or fertilizer, and are easy for farmers to cultivate. All of that makes it almost ideal as a potential biofuel crop.

For years, ethanol was such niche product that nobody really paid much attention to the economics of producing millions of gallons of the stuff. Indeed, the U.S. produces so much corn and soy, the two main sources of ethanol, that turning it into fuel was seen not as an energy strategy but a way of disposing of excess crops.

But now that biofuels are getting so much attention, people are starting to put some thought into what it will take to convert potentially millions of acres of farmland into, as the Chronicle put it, “carbon farms.” Think about it for a second. The U.S. has about 425 million acres of arable land, but if we start converting huge swathes of farmland to growing miscanthus, that means less produce for your table, which could drive up the price of food, which is probably one of the few things that would be even more unpopular than spiking gasoline prices.

That’s why it makes sense to start looking for the plants that will produce the best juice, that is, the ones the produce the most organic material per acre, with the least impact on the environment, and that can be refined into the most powerful form of fuel. Remember, we didn’t start making ethanol out of soy and corn because some scientist determined that they make the best gas – we just had too much of the stuff laying around. Maybe cellulose will turn out to be a more efficient source of power than the sugars in corn that are used to produce ethanol.

In fact, you can make biofuel out of almost anything. I wrote a story last year for Wiredabout a guy who had some fat liposuctioned out of his butt and converted into biodiesel, but animal fats, algae, even used restaurant grease, will all do, as long as it will explode inside the cylinder of an engine. That reaction converts the stored energy in a fuel into the mechanical energy needed to move a piston. Petroleum happens to be an efficient way to store this energy, and, until the latter part of the last century, we thought we had plenty of that laying around too.

Green Pioneer: Wal-Mart (really)

Yes, I know their labor practices are truly awful and their business model makes them the poster-child for all that is evil and exploitive about globalization, but I have to give some credit to Wal-Mart for their green strategy. (And yes, I have seen the terrifying documentary Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price.)

The retailer has two experimental stores, one in McKinney, Texas, and one in Aurora, Colo., that are just packed with alternative energy technology. They clearly put a lot of effort into making these buildings environmentally friendly, from the ground up.

To name just a few of the green projects: The parking lot is paved with a porous material, so rainstorm runoff won’t mix with oil and wash pollutants into the sewers. The roof is covered with solar cells, and there’s a wind turbine in the parking lot. The floors have pipes built into them that carry hot water, which helps heat the store. Used cooking oil from the deli is dumped into a furnace, which also helps heat the building. Even the smallest details have been thought through, from low-energy light bulbs to new designs on the freezer cases to hold in cold. I was impressed.

But I wasn’t totally convinced. Let’s get real; Wal-Mart is not exactly known for being touchy-feely, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire purpose of this project is nothing more than making the company look good.

But it’s also possible that they are on the right track. Wal-Mart is famous for paying scrupulous attention to its costs. That’s how it’s managed to become the behemoth it is, by trying to shave even fractions of a cent off of anything and everything. And, unlike many U.S. companies, they think long-term; Wal-Mart will spend millions now to save a few pennies tomorrow, as long as they can keep saving those pennies for years to come.

And that’s exactly the kind of thinking that we need when it comes to alternative energy.

The ding factor on green power has always been the cost. Yes, the systems are expensive, and yes, almost all the costs must be paid upfront, which scares off a lot of people.

But the benefits – lower energy costs, less consumption – start from day-one. Green power has to be seen as a long-term play, with long-term benefits.

So I dropped Wal-Mart a note to find out more about their energy strategy.

A spokeswoman wrote back, with some details, though not a lot (I’ve covered Wal-Mart before; it’s a very tough company to deal with, and being forthcoming with the press is not very high on their list of priorities). She wouldn’t say how much the company had spent on the projects, but she did say that the stores were definitely spending less on energy costs, about 8 percent less at the Colorado store compared to standard sites in the same area, and that the savings were expected to be even higher in the winter.

She said that the company sees these stores as labs, to see which alternative energy ideas offered the most savings, in terms of both power and cost, and that Wal-Mart eventually hopes to use that information to develop a new prototype store by 2010 that will be 25 to 30 percent more efficient, and produce 30 percent less greenhouse gas emissions, than standard stores.

In other words, the company does indeed seem to be planning for a green future, a model that other companies might do well to emulate. Now that’s the kind of everyday savings that I can really get behind.

Power Mash-Up

I read a great article in The New York Times Magazine recently about a guy who built a completely energy-independent house, using solar cells, water and cans of hydrogen.

The basic idea goes like this: Mike Strizki, of New Jersey, covered the roof of a storage shed with solar panels, enough to put out about 10 kilowatts. That’s more than he needs for his home – for most of the year, the array kicks out as much as 60 percent more than he needs.

A lot of people with solar-powered homes manage to feed their excess juice back into their local utility’s energy grid, though I don’t think anyone makes very much money off this arrangement.

Here’s the really cool part of Strizki’s setup. Instead of selling his unused power to the electric company, which has a monopoly on the local market and therefore can control the rates it pays, he runs the power through something called an electrolyzer, which combines electricity and water to create hydrogen and oxygen -- basically, the electricity powers a reaction to split water into its two elements.

Strizki stores the hydrogen in a bunch of old propane tanks in his shed, and months later, when the days are shorter and his system isn’t keeping up with his home’s power needs, he simply runs the system in reverse. That is, he runs the hydrogen and air back through the electrolyzer to create water and… more electricity. In effect, he’s using hydrogen as a battery to store power for as long as he needs. It’s simple, and brilliant.

Before crowning Strizki as the energy-visionary of the century, however, I should point out that he’s not exactly breaking new ground here. Photovoltaic solar cells, of course, have bee around since the 1950s, and the electrolyzer concept dates back to the 19th century. In other words, he simply took a few great ideas that were already around and bolted them together to create a very efficient home energy system. It’s an alternative energy mash-up!

And that’s exactly the point; alternative energy is not a new concept. The basics have been around for centuries, and even many of the latest-and-greatest ideas have been available for years.

What has been missing, until very recently, has been the will to put the ideas into practice, to actually get up and use these very amazing technologies.

One of the big barriers, of course, is cost. And even Strizki concedes that his home was not much of a deal. He spent about $500,000 to develop and install. Ouch. And considering that the average homeowner pays roughly $1,800 per year on energy, that means he dropped enough on up-front costs to power his house for almost 300 years. Looks like he may have overspent a bit, there.

Well, maybe not. Consider it an R&D investment. Strizki says he can build another system just like his for about $100,000. OK, that’s still not much of a bargain. But, if he can find enough people willing to buy these systems, the price would surely drop.

How many buyers would it take to bring the price into the range of reason? And what is the price that would make the average person willing to consider getting one? I don’t know.

But I do know that a few people have to be willing to go first, and we already have one. So, who’s willing to be next? Lets see some hands. Anybody?

(“The Zero Energy Solution,” by Mark Svenvold. The New York Times Magazine, May 20, 2007)