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Posts Tagged ‘green tech’

Unprecedented private-sector development

But the idea here isn’t to create a town stripped to the bare minimum energy usage. Rather, by building the “Fujisawa Sustainable Smart Town”--Fujisawa City in Kanagawa Prefecture being the larger urban area here--with next-gen power-generating and power-saving infrastructure from the ground up, the companies plan to show just how green a town can be when various technologies are stacked together and work in unison.

As such, Fujisawa SST won’t necessarily be home to never-before-seen, cutting-edge technologies, but to a variety of common green tech staples that, despite their availability, are expensive to retrofit into older buildings and towns.

For instance, every roof structure will be embedded with modern solar panel technology that both powers the house and banks unused energy in a home-based storage battery. Transportation infrastructure will be designed with electric vehicles in mind. Networked sensors all over town will control things like public lighting, ensuring wattage doesn’t go to waste via a local smart grid.

Basically, Fujisawa SST is envisioned as a bottom-up approach to energy efficiency--a green village built from scratch with modern green technologies rather than less-efficient older tech. Panasonic wants to use it as a template for other larger communities in Japan and elsewhere. If all goes as planned, Fujisawa SST will start receiving residents in March of 2014 and finish filling up its houses by 2018.

[Panasonic]

This is the fusion company that PopSci said might save the world

PopSci wrote about General Fusion back in late 2008, when the company was just getting underway in its efforts to completely upend the global energy paradigm in an office park British Colombia. At the time the company said it could provide data that would prove that fusion is indeed possible within three to four years. We haven’t seen that (publicly) yet, but whatever Bezos has seen apparently impressed him.

General Fusion is pursuing what is called Magnetized Target Fusion. In a few words, this technique essentially uses a magnetic field and plasma to break lithium down into helium and tritium, which is then separated and mixed with deuterium, which then fuses into helium (that’s a wild oversimplification, in case you were wondering).

That fusion of tritium and deuterium--both forms of hydrogen--into helium releases a huge burst of energy, which can be harvested into electricity. So where you’ve basically started with cheap and plentiful lithium, you end up with a massive amount of energy and harmless gas as a byproduct--no radioactive mess to clean up (or ceaselessly worry about).

We’re nowhere close to being able to do this. But whoever gets there first is pretty much a lock for a Nobel Prize and a massive return on investment. So maybe Jeff Bezos the venture capitalist is taking a gamble on a far-fetched idea. Or maybe he sees a short-term potential that others don’t. Whatever the impetus, this second round of funding is aimed at producing a demonstration of General Fusion’s technology rather than some kind of finished product, so don’t expect your local utility to start fusing isotopes any time soon.

[Greentech Media]

The researcher say the’ve essentially found a way to make an “optical battery” by extracting a very strong magnetic field from light, which generally exhibits weak magnetic effects. Those effects are generally so weak that until now scientists ignored them altogether. But the Michigan team found that by running light through a non-conductive material at the right intensity, the light field can generate magnetic effects 100 million times stronger than previously thought.

That’s more than a few orders of magnitude, and plenty to make those once-negligible magnetic effects quite interesting from an energy standpoint. By focusing this magnetic field on a material, it can be used to separate the positive and negative charges within the material, setting up a voltage. The discovery could lead to a new kind of solar cell that dispenses with semiconductors, instead relying on cheap and abundant glass for most of the components.

The technique is not perfect. To work, the sunlight must be focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter. That’s pretty intense--way more intense than natural sunlight--but the researchers are looking for other materials that could work at lower intensities. With better materials--and the researchers think they are out there--the technique could achieve 10 percent efficiency: on par with today’s commercial semiconductor cells, minus the costly semiconductors.

[University of Michigan]

Meanwhile, jet contrails found to be a worse climate-change culprit than carbon

The Green Flight Challenge seeks a demo aircraft that can fly 200 miles in less than two hours on the energy equivalent of less than one gallon of fuel per person. Elektra One didn’t push the envelope that far just yet--the maiden flight hit a ceiling just above 1600 feet and lasted just 30 minutes, burning just half the 6 kWh stored up in its batteries. But the fact that the lightweight aircraft was able to comfortably circle the airfield for half an hour-- more or less silently, we might add--is nothing short of impressive.

And the timing for such a flight couldn’t be better. A study released Tuesday claims that airplane contrails--those long, white condensation trails jets leave in the sky--may warm the planet more on the average day than all of the carbon emissions spewed from airplanes in the history of modern aviation.

The carbon lingers longer of course--the contrails and any heat-trapping cirrus clouds they cause dissipate in hours or days, while the carbon remains for decades--but still, that’s a lot heat being trapped on any given day. Electric planes, as you may have surmised, wouldn’t contribute to warming on either front. See Elektra One take flight in the video below.

[Treehugger, Reuters]

From harvesting energy to building networks, nature has been solving problems for billions of years longer than humans have

Click to launch the photo gallery

To see how a leaf works its magic, look no further than Dr. Daniel Nocera’s lab at MIT. Yesterday, Nocera’s team announced that it has created the first practical "artificial leaf", a synthetic silicon device that splits water into oxygen and hydrogen for fuel cells using sunlight just as a natural leaf does. Nocera’s leaf isn’t a perfect mimic of photosynthesis--for instance, it requires materials like nickel and cobalt that must be extracted from the earth, and catalysts that spur reactions that otherwise wouldn’t happen on their own. But it’s indicative of a growing shift in how humans solve big problems by looking to nature for elegant solutions rather than bending the natural world to their wills.

With its 4.5-billion-year head start on mankind, the natural world has developed some clever mechanisms for solving big problems, and that natural cleverness isn’t just informing new ways to generate energy. It’s slowly but surely informing everything from the the way emergency rooms are designed to how data networks communicate. It asks that electricity grids act like bees and businesses manage resources like coral reefs manage calories. Seriously.

“Biomimicry is a beautiful way of framing the design process to be cognizant of how nature does things,” says Dr. John Warner of the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry. “I think that over the centuries humans have become a little egotistical in trying to bend materials and things to our will.”

Warner and his colleagues are on the science side of biomimicry’s collaboration between biology and design. As a green chemist, he and his lab develop new environmentally benign materials often borrowing from natural processes along the way. In Warner’s world, gone are the heat, high pressures, and toxic additives native to much man-made chemistry, replaced with processes that hew more closely to the way nature creates materials.

On the other side of that equation are the engineers looking for new and better materials with which to design. And increasingly there’s a stronger dialogue between the two, driven partially by an increased environmental consciousness but moreso by a pressing imperative to solve big, overarching problems at the macro scale.

Take Nocera’s leaf for instance: in light of an always-looming global energy (and environmental) crisis, a means to generate electricity from plentiful (and renewable) water and sunlight could solve a number of huge problems, both natural and man made. The answer is right there in the leaf, and has been for millennia--unlock that natural mechanism in a feasible, economically viable manner and you’ve got a beautiful solution to problems ranging from the environmental to the humanitarian to the geopolitical.

“When you think about the natural world, nature outperforms us in its diversity, in its complexity, but does so at ambient temperature, at low pressures, using water for the most part as a solvent.” Warner says. By helping humans to think more like a leaf (or an ant hill, or a 1,200-year-old oak, or a bacterial colony), biomimicry is tapping that multi-billion-year head start to bring the same kind of complexity and diversity to human invention.

Click through to the gallery to see six ways bio-inspired solutions are reshaping the world in the 21st century.

Expect to hear about clean energy, sci/tech education, and more

So what should the sci/tech-conscious citizen be looking for from President Obama in tonight’s speech?

An Emphasis on Technology It’s lost on no one these days, least of all President Obama, that America’s manufacturing sector is shrinking and the future economy relies on science and technology. The problem is, research and development aren’t exactly growing like gangbusters, either. To emphasize her husband’s visions for a technologically driven future, the First Lady has invited four young innovators—high school and community college students that have been recognized for their achievements in science—that will sit with her during the address. Expect Obama to also mention GE CEO Jeff Immelt, whom the President recently signed on to lead the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (in this case, “competitiveness” equals “technology”). Which brings us to our next point:

(Another) Commitment To a Clean Energy Jobs and Technology Green jobs and a clean tech economy were the bulwarks of Obama’s 2008 campaign, but thus far his supporters haven’t seen much of that talk bearing fruit (or jobs, for that matter). In 2008 he promised $150 billion over ten years for clean energy initiatives, and seeing as how tonight marks the informal beginning of Obama’s 2012 incumbent run for the White House, expect him to talk at some length about investing in our green energy future once again.

Cutting Defense There’s no doubt that if Obama and company are serious about cutting spending, defense has to be on the table. That means trimming waste, sure, but it also means some of those outlandish, blue-sky technology programs that defense wonks so love might get the axe as well. Naturally, Obama won’t talk specific programs tonight, but he is expected to push for a two year extension of the three-year partial freeze in spending on domestic programs, and will ask for a further $78 billion to be carved out military budgets. Sorry to say, but that could slow delivery of your flying car.

That Doesn’t Really Bode Well for Space (or Florida) Legislators from the Space Coast want the President to take a firm stand behind America’s space ambitions, but they likely won’t get it tonight. Obama may make some passing references to the space program as it pertains to his commitment to science and technology, but (and perhaps this is contradictory) he likely won’t make any financial commitments to the program or produce something akin to John F. Kennedy’s 1962 inaugural address (in which we resolved to go to the moon).

So what’s the good news in this year’s SotU address? We should get a renewed commitment to science and technology in education and research and development in our economy. Help stimulate the economy by picking up a good American six-pack, sitting down and tuning in. Call it your patriotic duty.

The SotU can be watched on TV, or you can catch an "enhanced" version, accompanied by various charts and figures, on Whitehouse.gov.