Government aims to crowdsource cleantech innovation

With solar, wind, PHEVs, geothermal, biofuels and most other green technologies still out of reach for most people, the U.S. Department of Energy wants to try crowdsourcing our way to affordable clean energy.

The DOE recently launched an open-source wiki called Open Energy Information (OpenIE.org) as a community platform for collectively solving our energy challenges. What Wikipedia did for socializing world knowledge, OpenIE.org can do for clean technology innovation, the thinking goes.
“The true potential of this tool will grow with the public’s participation — as they add new data and share their expertise — to ensure that all communities have access to the information they need to broadly deploy the clean energy resources of the future,” said Secretary of Energy Steven Chu in the Agency’s press release.

OpenIE.org bills itself as a linked open data platform, trying to create synapses between all the world’s energy information “to provide improved analyses, unique visualizations, and real-time access to data.” Anyone can post and edit information, upload additional data to the site and download information in easy-to-use formats.

The site currently houses more than 60 clean energy resources and data sets, including maps of worldwide solar and wind potential, information on climate zones, and best practices. To give it even more social cred, OpenIE.org links to the DOE’s Virtual Information Bridge to Energy (VIBE), a browseable collection of widgets that provide up-to-date industry information and unique visualizations of clean energy data.

It’s a compelling idea. Most cleantech science is forged within silos, isolated in commercial and academic research labs. A global hive mind of expertise could bring a Red Bull jolt of collective creativity to unstick long-stuck science problems.
But will the labs be willing to play ball on an open source field if meant opening up their IP to competitors?

Real Christmas trees are okay

The verdict is in: It’s okay to have a real Christmas tree – yes, the kind you cut down.

That’s according to the National Christmas Tree Association and my informal Yammer, Facebook and Twitter poll on tree choice. The breakdown:

Real tree: 74 percent
Fake: 15 percent
No tree: 11 percent

Although the poll was about respondents’ outright choice, many commented on the sustainability considerations. Lest you think the survey too lightweight, know that some heavy hitters took part.

A prominent New England horticulturalist:

“Buying locally grown trees help keep farms/crops alive. I like to make ornaments that the birds can enjoy and put the tree outside my window after the holidays to extend its life.”

A forester for the U.S. government:

“If you buy from a local grower, you are helping to preserve open space – the loss of which is arguably one of our most pressing environmental concerns in the Northeast. The grower is making a modest profit (compared to growing condos).”

The NCTA asserts that artificial trees contain dangerous chemicals, are imported all the way from China, and consume natural resources of their own in their manufacture.

The joy of real

In addition to the green benefits, many poll respondents prize the tradition, the scent, and the sheer joy (especially for kids) of having a real Christmas tree. Several mentioned felling it themselves and recycling it afterwards. Approximately 25-30 million real Christmas trees are sold in the U.S. every year, according to the National Christmas Tree Association (more stats).

Four of the 27 respondents to my poll prefer manufactured trees, yet only one does it for environmental reasons.

“We don’t like cutting a fresh tree every year. We figure one batch of plastic re-used for 20 years beats 20 trees on the environmental scale.”

The American Christmas Tree Association, not to be confused with the aforementioned National Christmas Tree Association, agrees with this position, saying that over a 10-year span, the carbon footprint of one artificial tree is smaller than consuming 10 real ones. Moreover, it says, the PVC in artificial trees is safe enough for water pipes and plastic wrap.

For real-tree advocates, however, the Tannenbaum is the soul of Christmas, and it shouldn’t come from Wal-Mart. It’s one of the last vestiges of real in a holiday dominated by electronics, licensed characters, parking lot wars, Manheim Steamroller and pathological consumption. For them, a real tree promises a real Christmas. So it’s good to hear that real trees are at least green enough for people wanting to do right by the environment.

What kind of tree are you getting? Post a comment explaining why.

Solar in a bottle is the practical alternative for wind and sun poor states

Did you ever expect to find cutting-edge renewable energy technology in your grammar school lunch box? Right there, next to your PB&J and a slightly bruised apple most likely sat a thermos bottle of milk or soup. That bottle worked on the same basic principle as solar thermal technology, the most practical renewable energy source for regions without the right weather to support today’s marquee renewables – wind power and solar photovoltaic. Which would be much of the continental U.S.

Unlike photovoltaic and wind systems, solar thermal systems can store energy for use at night or on cloudy, windless days. Photo thermal systems are like huge thermos bottles that use sunlight to super-heat highly concentrated salt solutions. Insulated “bottles” trap the heat. When the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine, the trapped heat can generate steam to produce electricity or heat water to warm homes and businesses. Spain is starting work on a large-scale solar thermal plant for its Seville province in 2010.

Regions like New England, the Mid Atlantic and the Pacific Northwest could go Spain one better by combining solar thermal, wind and photovoltaic in one super-renewable energy system. We here in New England get wind, but not the steady, predicable wind that makes the Great Plains states ideal for wind power. We get sun, but not enough for large-scale solar, like the Southwest. So here’s an idea for the renewable-poor states. Build wind turbine farms for when the wind blows. Build photovoltaic arrays for when the sun shines. But don’t hook them up directly to the grid, use them to generate and store heat in solar thermal systems to match energy production with energy demand. What do you think? Practical, or a crackpot idea?

Arches National Park meets the dark side of man

I had no idea Moab, Utah was atomic. Dummy me, I just thought it was a famous place to enjoy the outdoors.

This little town of 4,800 people in the Colorado plateau just south of the Colorado River is a mecca for outdoor enthusiasts. They flock there by the thousands to ride mountain bikes on the famous Slickrock trail, ride off-road in the annual Jeep Safari and visit two nearby National parks.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was filmed here, as were scenes from Thelma & Louse, City Slickers, Mission Impossible and a bunch of other movies.

There’s a real naturist vibe within this little town nestled among striking red rock canyon walls. People get up early, play hard and relax even harder at places like the Moab Brewery.

Being there today, it’s hard to believe Moab was – not very long ago – the uranium capital of the world. In the 1950’s, it boomed to nearly twice its population, boasting restaurants like the Atomic Grill and Uranium Cafe.

This alignment began changing once the cold war ended, but as recently as 2002 the town petitioned President Bush to change the name of its “Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (M.O.A.B.). This 21,000 pound non-nuclear “mother of all bombs,” (still called MOAB as recently as 2007) didn’t help the town’s outdoor adventurist branding.

While this atomic history has faded away, it came to life eerily as I drove the four miles from Moab to Arches National Park a few weeks ago. Almost literally across the street from the entrance to one of America’s most famous parks, you see trucks hauling dirt on a giant pile along the banks of the Colorado River. To the un-expecting tourist who hasn’t done his research (me), it looks like some kind of massive strip-mining operation.

My immediate reaction was “what the heck is going on here and why on earth is this happening right across from a National Park?”

Turns out this eye-opener is one of the biggest winners of federal environmental cleanup contracts under President Barack Obama’s stimulus program. The “pile” – nearly 130 acres – is made up of mill tailings and contaminated tailings materials left over from the uranium-ore processing between 1956-1984 by the Atlas Minerals Corporation.

The tailings were sending a radioactive plume of groundwater seepage also polluted with ammonia toward the river.

Now owned by the DOE, the clean-up site has created 121 jobs for people shipping the radioactive waste away to a specially designed location 30 miles north. About 6,000 tons are being hauled away each day by train.

I suppose this remediation project is going okay, but every once in a while something happens to make me wonder. The FAQ on www.moabtailings.org says “a tiny fraction of the dust originating from the site does inevitably contain low-level radioactive particles; however, the level of radioactivity in the dust is indistinguishable from background concentrations in the dust and is, therefore, also below the DOE limits for release of radio-particulates from the site.”

Uh, sounds like spin to me, but I hope it’s not.

I didn’t feel better reading that site operations are shut down at sustained wind speeds of 25 miles per hour or greater. The day I visited Arches it was very windy but the trucks were still doing their thing. Maybe they were only 21 mph winds.

I also wasn’t thrilled to hear that a truck carrying uranium mill tailings tipped over and spilled some of its radioactive dirt in October.

What a case study for the beauty of nature vs. the dark side of man. I hope the former wins out.

Meet the new NIMBYs

All good people support renewable energy, right?

It depends.

As the country gets serious about solar, wind and other renewables, and the government steps in with subsidies, parties that traditionally fell in line on eco issues are increasingly squaring off.

The Nature Conservancy, for example, describes how a 7,900-acre wind farm in Kansas brought in 20 miles of roads, 100 towers, transmission lines and a substation, threatening habitats for endangered birds and devouring a big chunk of the country’s disappearing prairie. The organization warns that new energy development will occupy nearly 80,000 square miles of land by 2030 – larger than Minnesota. One state director’s job is seen as mostly “reforming wind power.”

Rural Nevada got a shocker when it learned that two large solar farms, in addition to creating hundreds of jobs, would need 1.3 billion gallons of water per year, or about 20 percent of the desert valley’s supply (via New York Times).

Water plays a huge, underpublicized role in solar and many other forms of energy production, prompting one analyst to introduce an ominous new eco buzzword: “water footprint.”

Water plays a different role in Cape Wind off Massachusetts, potentially the country’s first offshore wind farm, which last week was threatened by a move to place Nantucket Sound on the National Register of Historic Places. “The identity and culture of the indigenous Wampanoag (Native Americans) are inextricably linked to Nantucket Sound,” according to a Massachusetts Historical Commission opinion.

CNET sums it all up perfectly, saying, a “new breed of NIMBY (not in my backyard) is emerging: opponents of wind or solar installations who generally support renewable energy, just as long as they are built somewhere else.”

Cash for Clunkers or ‘Pimp My Pickup’?

The most common trade under the $3 billion Cash for Clunkers program involved Ford F150 pickup truck owners trading for, well, new Ford F150s, netting an improvement of just 1 to 3 mpg, the Associated Press is reporting. That trade happened 8,200 times. Thousands of other pickup owners used our tax dollars their clunker cash on new Chevy Silverados and Dodge Rams.

Worse, more than half a million dollars in rebates somehow went for autos that got equal or lesser mileage. The government is investigating.

The federal program was billed from the start as good news for our economy, the environment and consumers’ pocketbooks. Overall, it netted a 60 percent improvement in fuel economy between the trade-in and new cars purchased, according to the Transportation Department, which called the program “enormously successful.”

If you got $3,500 to $4,500 for your new rig, you probably don’t disagree.

New Orleans sustainable development must also include survivability

Great things can come from rebuilding after a disaster. Rebuilding downtown Chicago after the 1871 fire started the era of high-rise construction. The great urban spaces of Boston, San Francisco, and even Cleanspeak’s hometown of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, arose from fires and earthquakes. They ushered in innovations like brick construction and firewalls to keep blazes from spreading, new sanitation systems, parks and squares.

Today’s sustainable development advocates view post-Katrina New Orleans as the Chicago or San Francisco of large-scale sustainable development. New Orleans is a unique laboratory for developing technologies, construction methods, business practices and government policies for re-building communities sustainably, goes the green thinking. It’s like what happened in Greenburg, Kansas, which rebuilt itself sustainably after a 2007 tornado destroyed the town, but on a larger scale. A forum in New Orleans, next week, “The Green Rebuilding of New Orleans Conference,” is one of many attempts over the last four years to chart a sustainable course for the city’s future. Organizations like The Holy Cross Project have already begun building sustainable housing in damaged areas.

I want to jump on the advocates’ side because I’m a sustainable building freak, not to mention an architecture nerd. I’m just not sure that New Orleans and sustainable development are synonymous.

Even if every newly constructed building in New Orleans is LEED certified, built from recovered materials and blessed by Pope Al Gore himself, it won’t be sustainable development because of the larger realities about New Orleans. Can it be sustainable to rebuild vast areas of a city that lies mostly below sea level when scientists say the seas are rising and weather patterns are growing more extreme? A city in a bowl bracketed by a large lake and the mouth of the Mississippi River? A city that has flooded disastrously twice in the last 100 years? A city that needs 148 pumps working continuously to keep it from filing up with water?

Let’s face it, if anyone proposed building a city in a spot like New Orleans today, they’d be tasered and put under guardianship for their own safety. The Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico  are a levee break or a pump failure from reclaiming the city. How much effort and how many resources are wasted when new construction is wiped out by the next catastrophic storm?

So if sustainability was the only consideration in re-developing the damaged parts of New Orleans, then it would be hard to argue the pro-redevelopment position. There are, however, cultural, moral and social justice issues that weigh in redevelopment decisions. The hardest hit sections of the city were largely low income. Is it morally acceptable for governments to withhold reconstruction aid in those areas because the long-term prospects are uncertain? Flooding destroyed several government low-income housing developments. Is the government morally obligated to rebuild them? Can private lenders be compelled to approve mortgages for new homes in flood-damaged areas when Katrina showed how vulnerable they can be?

The reality is that owing to political and social factors, the damaged Lower Ninth Ward, Lakeview and New Orleans East sections of the city will most likely be at least partly rebuilt through a combination of public and private aid. So it might as well be done sustainably, but under a broader definition of sustainability than has been applied so far. Sustainable construction usually means energy efficiency, non-toxic materials, recovered materials, etc. In the New Orleans context, sustainable also means surviving the next natural disaster. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright created new construction techniques when he designed the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo because earthquakes were a constant threat. It survived a devastating earthquake in 1923 because Wright designed it with: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel

  • a reflecting pool that provided a source of water for fire-fighting, saving the building from the post-earthquake firestorm;
  • cantilevered floors and balconies that provided extra support for the floors;
  • seismic separation joints, located about every 20 meters along the building;
  • tapered walls, thicker on lower floors, increasing their strength; and
  • suspended piping and wiring, instead of being encased in concrete, as well as smooth curves, making them more resistant to fracture.

The engineers and architects who rebuild New Orleans have to apply that kind of thinking to the city’s realities. Maybe New Orleanians will ride out the next flood in homes that can float on the floodwaters, then settle back into their foundations when the waters recede. Who knows. The point is that sustainability, in this case, must also include survivability.

There’s no doubt New Orleans offers a unique opportunity to develop sustainable building designs and methods. Attention to surviving the city’s unique, if not hazardous water-bracketed topography will help ensure what rises in New Orleans to replace what Katrina destroyed will be a fitting living monument to the lives lost there, and a testament to American’s talent for wringing progress from disaster.

Geothermal heat gets real

I love renewable energy stories. We know that if we can reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, we can reduce global warming, our utility bills and, one hopes, our military presence in the Middle East.

But renewable energy stories frequently disappoint. What starts out like a success story turns out to be merely a hint at renewable energy’s potential. Too often, the project isn’t quite there yet. It’s merely proposed, or it’s in the demonstration stage, or it’s underwritten by a one-of-a-kind grant, or it’s only a tiny improvement on traditional methods.

That’s why I’m delighted to hear that a local developer has invested in geothermal to heat and cool a four-unit residential condominium now on the market. According to the local paper, the holes have been dug, the pipes have been laid, and the condos are more than 90 percent complete. It looks like a rare marriage of renewable energy and the free market: private money going into a private project (with any tax credits going to the eventual homeowners).

So while the success story isn’t complete, it’s real. Explaining his rationale for the project, developer Steve Kelm said the owners will never have to worry about rate shock of fluctuating heating oil prices: “I’d rather be ahead of the curve.”

The payback on a project like this is about five years, estimates Andy Livingston, chairman and CEO of American Ecothermal Inc., also of Portsmouth, which installed the geothermal “wells.”

How does geothermal heating and cooling work?
Geothermal uses heat from the earth’s core and sun-baked surface to heat homes in the winter and cool them in the summer. You need a geothermal heat pump (GHP), which circulates a carrier fluid through underground pipes. In the winter, the heat pump uses electricity to extract heat from the ground-warmed fluid, sending re-chilled fluid back through the ground to pick up more heat. And the cycle continues. The principle is similar to an air conditioner or refrigerator. This approach is 48 percent more efficient than the best gas furnaces and more than 75 percent more efficient than oil furnaces, according to the EPA.

To cool a home in the summer months, switch the direction of the heat flow, and the same system can extract heat from the air, thereby cooling it.

What are the benefits?
Geothermal heating and cooling offer a potential large reduction in energy use, peak demand and utility bills. Aggressive deployment of GHPs could nearly halve the need for net new electricity capacity needed by 2030, according to a U.S. Department of Energy study. It could reduce electricity bills by as much as $38 billion.

More stats from the Geothermal Heat Pump Consortium, the non-profit trade association for the GHP industry:

  • Operating 100,000 geothermal heat pump units over 20 years would be the greenhouse gas/carbon reduction equivalent of taking 58,700 cars off the road or planting 120,000 acres of trees.
  • Owners can expect savings of 30 to 70 percent in heating mode and 20 to 50 percent in cooling mode compared with conventional systems.
  • GHPs reduce energy consumption and corresponding emissions by 40 to 70 percent over traditional heating methods (e.g., furnaces).

And there are concrete tax incentives. The IRS is offering tax credits for 30 percent of the spending on geothermal heat pump equipment, including labor. Installing a $12,000 geothermal heat pump system would give you a $3,600 credit.

Geothermal in the works
We’re just getting started with geothermal heating and cooling. The United states has more than 600,000 GHP units, the largest installed base in the world, but many European companies are ahead on a per capita basis, according to the DOE.

A Reno casino, the Peppermill Resort Spa, has tapped an underground aquifer holding 170-degree water to heat a 17-story hotel tower, including restaurants, 1,600 rooms, and the water for the sinks and showers. Owners are predicting $1 million in a year in savings with an eight-year payback.

An Iowa town is using part of a $1 million community development grant to create a shared geothermal heating and cooling system for the downtown.

Some homeowners are designing homes that combine geothermal with passive solar and knock $1,000 off their utility bills. This geothermal/solar design involves solid wood walls, an airflow envelope just inside the walls, and lots of windows on the southern exposure.

Meanwhile, there’s an entire separate industry using geothermal to produce electricity. That’s for another post, but one exciting possibility is in oil production. Oil extraction is accompanied by non-petroleum hot fluids that can help power field equipment. “With an estimated 10 barrels of hot water produced along with each barrel of oil in the United states, there is significant resource potential for this technology,” says the US DOE.

Bring it on. It’s time for more success stories.

Maibach says climate change is about you & me, not plants & polar bears

Ed Maibach had an epiphany while mountain hiking in 2006. Walking with Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber – Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research – he realized that while climate change is the ultimate threat to the public’s health and well-being, the vast majority of us don’t realize it.

This inspired him to refocus his work on prevention and adaptation, joining George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication in 2007.

Ed Maibach – Center for Climate Change Communication“Climate change is associated with all kinds of things, from alarmists to demonstrators to extremists to it being a ‘Democratic issue.’ Fundamentally, it’s been framed as an environmental issue, but it should be a human, public health issue,” Maibach told me in a recent get together.

But how do we get people to understand climate change is fundamental to the survival of human civilization – to you and me? Maibach’s working on a few very interesting communications initiatives involving people who are innately trusted by the general public. Two examples he cited (there are many other possibilities) are local TV weather forecasters and pediatricians.

“People like this are right here in our local community. We see them or hear from them often. We rely on their judgment and have a relationship with them. They could become a trusted conduit to educate people about the human impact of climate change.”

So let’s say you bring your child to the pediatrician and the subject of an extreme weather event comes up in a passing conversation. This moment can become an opportunity for the pediatrician to very casually connect this with global warming and the impact on your child. No dissertation, slide show and long discussion; just a simple, quick comment connecting effect with cause. It’s subtle, real-time and authentic.

Maibach said he’s securing funding from the National Science Foundation and will be testing this local trust concept with a CBS TV affiliate weathercaster in Columbia, South Carolina. If it goes well, the idea may scale nationally.

“People can’t grasp climate change. We need them to understand that global warming is (A) real and (B) bad for people.”

By subtly educating people through trusted connections, Maibach says, “We’re finding a way to fly this topic under the perceptual radar screen. If we can get your local pediatrician to explain what’s going on, then we’re letting what they say into our heads and hearts.”

Wind power and one African boy’s astonishing story

I’ll keep this wind energy post as short as my last one was long. I’m speechless and inspired by the story I just read of a self-educated African boy from Malawi who in 2002 cobbled together bike parts, gum tree wood, an old shock absorber and other junk to bring the first sparks of electric power to his village. Fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba of Masitala had spent so much time tinkering and dump-picking in preparing his wind turbine that his neighbors thought he was smoking pot. But when he scaled the rickety 16-foot tower and sparked up a car light bulb, he became a village sensation. He has since created the village’s first water supply and irrigation system. Read the BBC article. There’s a video, too. And a book.