THIN FILM SOLAR PANELS

Archive for March, 2011

This post is made possible by energy-efficiency specialists WellHome and their Home Weatherization Giveaway Sweepstakes. Take a quick visual quizof your home’s energy use to see your potential yearly savings. Hurry! For your shot at a grand prize of $2500 in energy efficiency upgrades, enter by March 20!

Wiser Home Control display

The post I wrote last weekend on 3 cool green gadgets for saving energy was quite popular. And while looking around for the coolest, most effective green gadgets I could find, I saw a number of gadgets I almost included. So, as a follow-up to that first post, here are a few more green gadgets to consider purchasing.

Small Devices

USBCELL: Tired of throwing away batteries (and polluting the environment in the process)? But not a fan of those large, clunky battery chargers (or always forget to bring yours somewhere you need it)? USBCELL is a battery that can be recharged by plugging it into a USB port on any computer. Cool idea. (Cost: $10-20 for 2 AA Battery Cell Packs on Amazon — other options also available)

Surge for iPhone and iPhone 3GS: Very simply, Surge keeps your iPhone (3G or 3GS) or iPod Touch going for hours longer without needing to suck energy from the electric grid. It is basically a carry case with a small solar panel on the back. Charge it up wherever the sun is. (~$70 on Amazon.) Similar items, for charging mobile phones, iPods/Mp3 players, PDAs, GPS units, and digital cameras: K3 Wind and Solar Mobile Charger: (~$90 on Amazon); Solio Universal Hybrid Solar Charger (~$90 on Amazon); Freeloader (£16 to £27 on Amazon).

Water Pebble: Probably created by a Catholic, the Water Pebble ‘encourages’ you to use less water by giving you a little guilt trip. It measures how much water you use in your first shower with it in place. Then, in each subsequent shower, lights “flashing gently from green through to red” indicate when you should turn the shower off to save a little more water each time. Of course, by saving water, you are using less energy to heat the water. (Cost: $10 on UncommonGoods)

Eco Kettle 2 (Only UK?): Use a kettle to heat water? If you do, you could probably save a ton of energy by switching to the Eco Kettle 2. It uses 31% less energy than other kettles, on average, and also reduces boiling time by about 90 seconds (no complaint on that). I’m not sure if it’s available in the U.S. — available on many websites, but all using British Pounds. (Cost: £30 to £40)

Intellipanel (Only UK?): Have devices like speakers, monitors, printers, external hard drives, etc that are connected to your TV or computer that you always forget or are too lazy to turn off and unplug when you turn off your TV or computer? These handy adapters will automatically do so for you. (Cost: £8.50 to £21)

Bye Bye Standby Saver: Plug any of your electrical devices into the Bye Bye Standby Adapter and when they are not in use and on standby, you can easily cut power to them with a remote control. The kit includes two wall adapters and a remote control. (Cost: $40 on Amazon)

Similar Product: Standby Buster (Only UK?): Plug this little electrical socket into a normal electrical socket and then plug any electrical devices into it. Whenever those devices are not in use, you can make sure they are using no energy at all (not on standby) via remote control. Again, I only see this for sale in Europe. Reportedly, “Standby Buster is the only consumer electronics mains switch to be recommended by the Energy Saving Trust.” (Cost: £19 on Amazon)

Large devices for saving energy on page 2 –>>

This post is made possible by energy-efficiency specialists WellHome and their Home Weatherization Giveaway Sweepstakes. Take a quick visual quiz of your home’s energy use to see your potential yearly savings. Hurry! For your shot at a grand prize of $2500 in energy efficiency upgrades, enter by March 20!

The unfolding disaster in Japan has spurred the long-brewing debate over the role nuclear power can or should play in a sustainable energy future. For the here and now, though, even if we decide that the role should be zero, replacing all of our nuclear power plants with less risky forms of energy will be a generations-long endeavor…or will it? The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new free energy conservation software points the way to a more rapid transition.

Buildings and Energy Conservation

Together, residential and commercial buildings account for about 40 percent of energy used in the U.S. That’s the half-empty glass. The half-full glass is that improving energy conservation in buildings is akin to finding a gigantic new source of energy. President Obama’s new Better Buildings Initiative is aimed at encouraging businesses and research institutions to come up with new, innovative technologies that take energy conservation to the next level. That’s where NREL’s new software comes in.

NREL’s OpenStudio Energy Modeling Software

The idea behind energy modeling is that it gives you a picture of a building’s energy use while it’s still in the design phase.  The Department of Energy already has a free energy use simulator called EnergyPlus, and the free OpenStudio software adds more user-friendly applications. The original OpenStudio was released in 2008. The new version is even friendlier, including a plug-in for Google SketchUp, a simple model-editing tool, and a graphic format for viewing results from EnergyPlus.

More Free Energy-Saving Software

Meanwhile, the U.S. Forestry Service has just released a new version of its urban tree valuation software. The latest version, i-Tree v. 4, enables urban planners, organizations and individuals to put a dollar value on urban trees in terms of environmental benefits and other impacts including public health and safety, and economic activity. Tree canopies can be an important energy saving factor for buildings by reducing summer heat, so it will be interesting to see how EnergyPlus, OpenStudio and i-Tree interact.

Image: OpenStudio sample graphic courtesy of NREL, by Roger Hedrick, Architectural Energy Corporation and David Goldwasser of NREL.

We are at a point in history when innovations are needed rivaling those of the information technology industry in speed of change – for the development of farm machinery for growing and harvesting new crops that produce energy.

Machinery suitable for growing and harvesting traditional crops have been developed, and refined, and ultimately, mechanized, over centuries. Now we have to find a way to grow biofuels, on land that’s not needed to grow food, and in a way that is economical, and massively replicable.

Currently only a handful of companies are working on the novel problem, among them, according to Craig Patterson, Manager of Commercial Operations there, Repreve Renewables.

Here’s an example of an issue they are trying to solve. Miscanthus holds great promise as a non-food, non-valuable-land biofuel, as it is a virtually a weed in the Midwest and Southeast, and can produce up to 20 tons an acre, far more than switchgrass.

The problem with it is that it can be hard to establish on a commercial basis. Although it is a weed that sews its own expansion, it does it haphazardly.

If you want to “farm” it in a way that lends itself to efficient energy crop production, you need to reproduce it from actual pieces of the underground plant system (from cuttings called rhizomes) that must be dug up and replanted, at the rate of around 5,000 rhizomes to the acre.

The speed and cost of planting, it turns out, is a real bottleneck in viability of this crop as a successful feedstock. Current planting technology can plant, at best, 20 acres per day.

A typical biorefinery needs at least 3,000 acres of crop to run efficiently, he says, but that 3,000 acres would take 150 days to plant, this way. By the time planting was done, the planting season would be long over.

“Putting five pieces of equipment on site reduces the planting to 30 days,” says Patterson.”But imagine that the planting is going on in five different states, on 15 different farms.  Suddenly you need 75 teams planting all at once, across several states. In this scenario, 45,000 acres – a drop in the bucket of what is required – would require millions of dollars of equipment and labor to achieve. And that is a bottleneck”.

That’s where inventive farm machinery comes in. Repreve Renewables is one of just a handfull of companies developing machinery for the task.

Strange times. After 10,000 years of agriculture, with generations of inventors devising ways to battle weeds, in the 21st century we need to invent machinery to do a more efficient job of harvesting them.

Image: Newswise
Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Related articles

• “Coffee Roaster” Technology Could Speed the Decline of Coal
• U.S. Department of Energy Announces New Biofuel to Replace Gasoline
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The House Energy and Commerce Committee is considering legislation to block the EPA from reducing greenhouse gas pollution, and given the current state of affairs it’s no surprise that yesterday every member of the majority party on the committee – all 31 of them – voted down three amendments that would have at least acknowledged the scientific experts on climate change. The reality of climate change is also affirmed by the Department of Defense, but apparently what the DoD thinks is not important any more, either. So just who are these committee guys listening to?

Climate Change and See-Saws

Together, the three amendments would have asserted that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is linked to an increase in certain pollutants, and that the increase is due to human activity. Yes, we all know that termites make their contribution, too, but the key factor is the human-related increase. It doesn’t have to be an impressive-looking increase, just enough to disrupt the balance. If you have two elephants equally balanced on a see-saw, you don’t need a whole other elephant to throw things out of whack. Any kid in a playground could tell you that, but I guess it’s been a long time since certain members of Congress have hung around in playgrounds – and besides, it’s pretty hard to find a see-saw in a playground any more.

What Ray Mabus Said

Fortunately, you don’t have to consult a kid about climate change, you can just listen to Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus, who has been shepherding the Navy toward alternative energy. Mabus has emerged as an eloquent Department of Defense spokesperson on energy, climate change, and the national security implications of a continued reliance on fossil fuels, whether foreign or domestic.

From Whose Mouth to Congress’s Ear?

If certain members of Congress are not inclined to consider the opinion of science and national defense experts, it’s fair to ask where they are getting the information that enables them to craft a reasoned, thoughtful opinion on serious legislative matters of long term national significance. That’s easy enough to find out. The House of Representatives has an easy online contact-your-congressperson tool, and you don’t even have to know who your representative is. Just plug in your zip code and it tells you, then look them up on the Energy and Commerce Committee website. Hey, there’s my guy…

Image: Monkey on by changehali on flickr.com.

As we exit the age of oil, utilities have investigated the various ways that electric vehicles might help stabilize the smart grid.

In the last several years, utilities like PG&E have researched using spent batteries from electric cars for grid storage – once they are too worn out for recharging cars any more.

They have also checked into seeing how feasible it might be to use EVs as sort of on-demand rolling battery backups, swapping power back and forth, while the battery is still in use. A payment arrangement would be worked out so that if an EV owner wished to sell some backup power, his fully charged EV might let some electricity flow back into the grid.

Now, a new idea is being tested, with $700,000 in funding from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

EV batteries typically still have 70 to 80 percent of their capacity when they can no longer be used in cars, which demand a very high level of power. But that leaves a lot of life for a lower power use, like balancing the grid. A 25 KW distributed energy storage unit made up of the recycled batteries could help balance power use among five to ten homes, by providing load shifting and a little reserve as we add more intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.

Writing at Energy Prospects, Leora Vestel says that the California Center for Sustainable Energy, is working with San Diego Gas & Electric, UC Berkeley’s Transportation Sustainability Research Center, AeroVironment and Flux Power on the concept.

To test how well the idea works, a CES device comprised of four repurposed PEV battery packs will be collocated with a solar system at UC San Diego, which operates on a microgrid. Power stored in the CES will be accessed when solar generation suddenly dips because of cloud cover, or to meet peak demand.

California makes sense as the state to test the idea in, as it offers a $5,000 incentive for EVs, that together with the $7,500 nationwide tax credit, brings the price of the first of the new EV technology down to affordable levels under $20,000. It is likely to be one of the largest early adopter markets for EVs, with sales expected to grow from 14,400 in 2011 to 366,000 by 2018.

If it works, we may one day have our own in-home CES – or HES – Household Energy Storage. The UCDavis Plug-in Hybrid Research Center has provided $900,000 for the team to also research and build and test a home-energy-storage appliance that would do the same thing, but shifting loads even at the household level.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Related articles at Cleantechnica

• FERC Wants Smaller, Faster, Distributed Storage to Speed Renewables
• 1 GW Green Energy Storage Facility in Mexico Could Open Power Trading Opportunities with US
• When Cars Eat Each Other: Old EV Batteries Will Power Ford Factory
• Hard Smoke Could Play Key Role in Sustainable Energy Storage