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Archive for March, 2011

As their name suggests, lithium-air batteries are much lighter than their lithium-ion counterparts, giving them vast potential for use in electric vehicles and portable devices. There’s a big catch, though. Commercial development of rechargeable lithium-air batteries has stalled partly over the presence of moisture in air, which reacts violently with lithium. Now a team of scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Japan has come up with a solution, in which an ordinary graphite pencil plays a key role.

Pencils and Lithium-Air Batteries

As described by Harriet Brewerton of the Royal Chemistry Society, the team layered an organic electrolyte around the lithium, then capped it with a ceramic seal that keeps moisture out while doubling as a solid-state electrolyte. A two-dimensional cathode can then be drawn on the ceramic with a graphite pencil. The desired reaction occurs when lithium ions in the  electrolyte solution pass through the ceramic. They combine with oxygen in the air, within the area covered by graphite from the pencil. The cathode can be removed and redrawn multiple times.

More Hurdles for Lithium-Air Batteries

In addition to the moisture problem, lithium-air technology still has to overcome efficiency and longevity problems. Last year, researchers at MIT took a big step toward resolving one issue by developing a new high efficiency catalyst for a lithium-air battery, made of a gold-silver alloy.  According to writer Kevin Bullis, the magic number is 85 to 90 percent efficiency for commercial batteries. The MIT team improved on the previous high of 70 percent, reaching  77 percent. There’s still a long way to go, but a good two years ago IBM began looking into lithium-air technology for stationary grid use as well as in electric vehicles, which is one indicator that technical obstacles to a commercial grade lithium air-battery can be overcome sooner rather than later.

Image: Pencils by fde comite on flickr.com.

A proposed US military test that we covered two years ago, of a completely novel biofuel made from Camelina by SustainableOils, is a success.

Yesterday at Edwards Air Force Base, an F-22 just flew on a jet fuel blend containing 50% renewable biofuel derived from Camelina, a weed that grows easily on marginal land without water or nitrogen, is affected neither by drought nor cold, and has 80% lower carbon emissions than conventional fuel.

Edwards Air Force Base News is reporting the success of the flight.

“The overall test objective was to evaluate biofuel fuel blend suitability in the F-22 weapon system. Testing consisted of air starts, operability, and performance at different speeds and altitude throughout the flight envelope. The F-22 Raptor performed several maneuvers including a supercruise at 40,000 ft. reaching speeds of 1.5 Mach. Supercruise is supersonic flight without using the engine’s afterburner.

“The F-22 flew on Friday, March 18 and performed flawlessly on the biofuel blend citing no noticeable differences from traditional JP-8,” said Jeff Braun, director of the Alternative Fuels Certification Division, part of the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio.

The overall flight was a success and another milestone completed for the Alternative Fuels Certification Division in support the Air Force’s 2016 acquisition goal to cost-competitively acquire 50 percent of the domestic aviation fuel requirement via alternative fuel blends in which the component is derived from domestic sources produced in a manner that is ‘greener’ than fuels produced from conventional petroleum.”

The advantages to Camelina were that if it could work, blended with conventional jet fuel, it would be relatively easy to scale up to demand, and it would not compete with food crops because it can be grown easily throughout the Northern states that have such poor soil and climate that they will never be “farm states”.

Because it is more cold-resistant than the average biodiesel feedstock, it is ideal for jet fuels that must perform in the cold, high above the warm blanketing warmth of lower altitudes.

The military, like all Federal Agencies has been under Executive Order by the Obama administration to cut greenhouse gases 30% by 2020. It’s yielding results.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Related articles

• U.S. Department of Energy Announces New Biofuel to Replace Gasoline
• Red Seaweed Could Be the Next Biofuel Super-Crop
• US Navy is building a green fleet
• Biofuel Crops Could Help Fight Climate Change…But It’s Not What You Think
• C-17 is First Air Force Jet to Cleared to Fly on Biofuel (defensetech.org)
• Navy Drives Biofuel Production With Goal to Buy 336M Gallons a Year by 2020, Enhancing San Diego’s Role as Center for Algae Biofuels (xconomy.com)

Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates hasn’t done much for the environment, for a billionaire who’s put real money behind other urgent global problems. But that just changed. Microsoft has just essentially given back to the world about 13 terawatt hours (TWh) of electric power that has been wasted every year – on spam!

Switched.com is reporting that Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, working with federal law enforcement agents, has just brought down the world’s largest spam network, Rustock.

“At its peak, it was a botnet of around 2 million spam-sending zombies capable of sending out 30 billion spam email per day. Microsoft’s wholesale slaughter of Rustock could reduce worldwide spam output by up to 39%.

Rustock was taken down, piece by piece, in a similar way to the Mega-D botnet. First the master controllers, the machines that send out commands to enslaved zombies, were identified. Microsoft quickly seized some of these machines located in the U.S. for further analysis, and worked with police in the Netherlands to disable some of the command structure outside of the U.S”.

More lurid details for geeks at switched.com.

Spam is not only a big waste of your time, but it is a much bigger waste of a simply staggering amount of global electricity supplies. Transmitting, processing and filtering spam has been estimated by McAfee at taking an astonishing 33 billion kilowatt hours – that’s 33 terawatt hours (TWh) – of the global energy supply, every year!

Enough power, according to McAfee, in their “The Carbon Footprint of Spam” study, to “power 2.4 million homes” – in the first world.

In the third world – where Bill Gates does humanitarian work -  that would go much further, and likely be enough to at least power some lighting for the last 2 billion people in the world that currently do not even have any electricity all.

Or the world could shutter quite a few dirty coal plants.

Cutting 33 terawatt hours of wasted energy worldwide by 39% is very, very, very huge. That’s been one hefty carbon footprint.

So thanks go to Bill Gates: unlikely climate hero!

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Related articles

• Microsoft shuts down spam behemoth Rustock, reduces worldwide spam by 39% (downloadsquad.switched.com)
• Microsoft, Federal Agencies Take Down Rustock Botnet (circleid.com)
• Death of a Spam Network (truthdig.com)
• Rustock Botnet: Dead, or Just Dazed? (pcworld.com)

The fast-growing poplar tree is starting to build up its cred as an all-around resource for the sustainable future, and its latest contribution is in the area of new cool roof technology. A research team in China has developed a waterproof coating that mimics the leaf’s highly efficient reflective properties, which could lead to a new generation of roof-cooling materials.

Poplar Leaves and Cool Roofs

“Cool roof” refers to the reflective properties of a roof that prevent it from absorbing excess heat. It also refers to the material’s level of emittance — its ability to release heat that it does absorb.  As recounted by Holly Sheahan for the Royal Society of Chemists, the research team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences observed that when the sun is strong, the poplar leaf turns itself over to expose its highly reflective, silvery underside.  The team developed long, hollow polymer fibers that mimic the properties of the leaf hairs, and the fibers were spun into a reflective film. So far, lab tests have been promising and the next step is to build more durability into the material.

Poplars and Sustainability

Partly because of their rapid growth pattern, poplars have become trees of interest in several different areas of sustainability research. Among these are green remediation, which includes the use of plants to extract pollutants from water. The poplar is also on the verge of breaking through as a biofuel crop, which also has the potential to double as a nature conservation or recreation area with appropriate forestry management. And then of course there’s the low-tech solution of using poplars as shade trees for buildings.

Chair Jon Wellinghoff’s clever new Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has just ruled that “negawatts” not generated (using demand response ) are to be paid as much money per megawatt reduced as generated electricity is, per megawatt, on the nation’s electricity markets, according to Jeff St John at Giga Om.

Demand response is a smart grid option used by utilities to manage on less power. Instead of building a new power station, just to cover a high peak a few days a year in a heat wave, utilities can arrange with some of their biggest electricity users to reduce consumption of electricity in response to supply conditions. This can make a big difference as these large commercial users hog almost half the grid: 17 million commercial customers use 40% of all electricity generated in the US.

So large resorts for example, can make a deal with their utility – and have big deductions in their electric bills in return – by agreeing to turn their electricity off for a few minutes, on demand, in order to shave peak demand on the grid, when it is neccessary.

Until now, negawatts received only part of the value of each megawatt of power reduced, which in a sense, was fair, because utilities currently are able to pocket the profits of not having to invest in more power generation, by using demand response. So FERC has made a controversial decision, but it is also a courageous one.

Like their recent ruling: FERC Wants Smaller, Faster, Distributed Storage to Speed Renewables this is a clever piece of policy to clean up our grid.

The equal pay plan is well thought out from a climate and clean energy point of view, because the bonus negawatt pay provides a real incentive for the dirtiest utilities to work with their big customers to reduce demand. (Currently those plants have the opposite incentive, to encourage more energy use).

Currently, already relatively clean energy electric utilities like PG&E tend to be the ones that utilize demand response, in response to progressive legislation at the state level.

But these are not the utilities that will clean up the most as the rule goes into effect. It is the black smoke-belching coal plants of Indiana, Kentucky and West Virginia that stand to “do best by doing good”.

Not building more (dirty) power stations than we absolutely must is in the public interest – but most especially in the dirty power states. FERC’s new Chair Wellinghoff believes that we may not need any new nuclear or coal plants ever.

Great policy like this can help us realize that goal.

Susan Kraemer@Twitter

Related articles

• FERC Ruling a Major Milestone for Demand Response (prnewswire.com)
• FERC Rejects PJM Challenge, Upholds EnerNOC’s View (nytimes.com)
• Despite Hot Summer, Electricity Consumption Unexpectedly Cools (dailyfinance.com)
• EnerNoc CEO: Demand Response Is Not Free (greentechmedia.com)