Time for regulations in the consumer market?
By Sarah Boll
November 30, 2007 – 3:56 pm
There have been to two reports in the news recently that indicate it might be time for some governmental regulations in the area of energy efficiency in order to mitigate climate change risks in the U.S.
The first was the 4th and final report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007, released on 17 November, which summarized and integrated the most significant findings of three sections of a climate-science review that were released between January and April. Because the data had not previously been reviewed as a whole, scientists said the synthesized report was more explicit, creating new emphasis and alarm (especially about the rate and scope of sea-level rise). This report elicited a response from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon calling specifically on China and the US to step up their game, as the 2 largest GHG emitters, in the area of emissions reductions.The second, from McKinsey & Company and created for DTE Energy (the parent company of Detroit Edison), Environmental Defense, Honeywell, National Grid, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Pacific Gas & Electric and Shell, states that the United States could shave as much as 28 % off the amount of greenhouse gases it emits at fairly modest cost and with only small technology innovations. It focuses on more energy efficient homes and consumer products, such as computers, where currenlty, the supplier sees no competitive advantage to supplying low energy products which in turn leaves the average consumer with no choice but to purchase the energy inefficient house or computer. Hence the need for mandatory regulations to force the system to correct these deficiencies.
Now is the time to turn the tide. Suppliers have not historically spent the extra money on more expensive energy efficient products, not willing to take the risk that they will be in demand by consumers, which in turn does leave most consumers with no choices. If the only way to get suppliers to start creating these options for the average consumer (ie not the folks in the highest tax bracket) is to make it mandatory then perhaps that is the next step that should be put into play, and the sooner the better. As far as the consumers go, having to incur higher up-front costs for a more energy efficient product may take some getting used to, but shouldn’t be that hard to stomach when compared to a larger savings over the life-time of the product. The craziest thing of all is that producers will still be making profits and consumers will be saving money, these are the side effects of cutting out the 28% of carbon emissions mentioned in the McKinsey & Company report. Why is this such a hard sell?
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By Sarah Boll
November 29, 2007 – 1:24 pm
Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott (picture) states in the company’s CSR “We have found that there is no conflict between our business model of everyday low costs and everyday low prices and being a more sustainable business.” And we were surprised when Rupert Murdoch said NewsCorp was going to blaze new paths in how mass media can fight climate change!
With more than 68,000 supplier partnerships, 1.5 million empowered associates, and the buying power of more than 100 million customers a week, Wal-Mart has the opportunity to make real strides in the area of sustainable consumerism that they see as a competitive advantage over their competitors, of course! And the company is getting down to business with a myriad of sustainable practices either in action or under development that include:
- Improved the efficiency of its transportationfleet by 15%
- Sold 100 million compact fluorescent light bulbs
- Recycling - previously mentioned by Lois
- Is designing a store that will use 30% less energy and produce 30% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than their 2005 design within the next 3 years
- Is working with suppliers to reduce packaging by 5% by 2013 - an effort equal to removing 213,000 trucks from the road.
- Developing common-sense ‘Green’ scorecards for customers that encourage making informed choices about environmentally preferable products.
- Offers a number of sustainable products from seafood to laptops.
It is good to see a company with so much sway in the consumer goods market taking positive and effective action to offer sustainable products, even if they are doing it to try and drive any remaining competitors out of business, what they learn along the way can help industry all over the world find sustainability solutions. Even with these innovations Wal-Mart’s CO2 emissions increased over-all last year due to company expansion, hopefully they will also strike a good balance between growth and sustainability
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Have woodchips, will travel.
By Sarah Boll
November 27, 2007 – 9:33 am
The Port Talbot Renewable Energy Plant to be built by Prenergy Power in South Wales will use wood chips from sustainable forests located in the U.S., Canada, Eastern Europe, and South America.
The folks from Prenergy feel that harvesting the biomass from sustainable forests will offset the bad green mojo from having it transported by ship from all over the world. On the plus side the plant will displace 3.5 million tonnes of CO2 that would have been spewed out by the older power plants in the area. The $829 million project will also meet 70% of the Welsh renewable energy target for 2010.
In other traveling biomass news, Renegy Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ: RNGY) announced today that it has executed and closed a definitive Asset Purchase Agreement with a leading forest products and timber company for the acquisition of an idle biomass power plant for $1.3 million that can power as many as 13,000 homes. But in this case, instead of relocating the biomass Renegy is considering relocated the entire plant from its current site in Susanville, California to a more suitable location. The current location would probably have been suitable if all the available biomass in Cali wasn’t getting shipped to Wales.
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Moving ahead with long-distance quantum communication
By Sarah Boll
November 25, 2007 – 8:18 pm
Teleportation is already happening. In fact in an article in New Scientist, Dr Michio Kaku points out that teleporting photons and atoms across laboratories is a routine practice. This makes the possibility of long distance quantum communications feasible in the near future.
The idea is based off of refining the understanding of quantum entanglement which allows two particles to behave as one, regardless of how far apart they are. Photons can be entangled so that if one is vertically polarized, for instance, then the other photon in the pair is always horizontally polarized. A recent breakthrough was achieved by a team at the University of Vienna that managed to teleport photons without destroying them.
If teleportation at a quantum level gets perfected it could quickly make communications faster, more reliable, easier to set-up (due to no need for a cable infrastructure) and then lead to the teleportation of non-organic itens and living tissue. In a world where we spend a lot of time and energy transporting ourselves and our stuff around the world, even being able to teleport say holiday gifts would save time, hopefully money, and definitely green house gas emissions. But even without visions of fighting crime in far off galaxies, long-distance quantum communication has big potential to make this a more efficient world.
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By Sarah Boll
November 20, 2007 – 12:17 pm
The South Gare Lighthouse on the mouth of the River Tees, located in south east England is now powered by a fuel cell. Visible for 25 miles, the change from grid power to a fuel cell has eliminated the problem of power outages that used to occur when power cables were damaged by severe coastal weather.
The new power source is the first fuel cell built to withstand a harsh coastal environment and also employs a specially designed water-based cooling system. It comes from CPI (Center for Process Innovation) in Wilton on Teesside, also the home of The Flexible Electronics Substrate Facility which has transformed the way that electronic products are manufactured, enabling manufacturers to reduce the production cost, thickness and weight of display screens, solar cells and electronic circuits.
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Perfect for urban gardeners
By Sarah Boll
November 18, 2007 – 5:31 pm
The Naturemill composter can eat through 4 pounds of organic waste per day, is the size of a small garbage pail and makes a nice batch of high-nitrogen compost every 2 weeks. The enclosed design pumps fresh air into a basket containing the waste while automatically rotating it at pre-set intervals and maintaining a temperature of 140 degrees resulting in odor-free composting happening right under the kitchen sink.
President of Naturemill, Russ Cohn, says in an interview that due to the natural microorganisms already in most foods the Naturemill doesn’t require activators but you will have to change the filter on the air filtration system roughly once per year, depending on actual usage. This will cost around $1 dollars if you are willing to change the carbon in the filters yourself or you can by replacement filters from Naturemill. Other than that, operating the composter requires emptying the catch basin of water if you are putting in really wet waste and taking out your natural fertilizer when the indicator light indicates there is a finished batch. It costs between $300 - $400 and you can buy it online.
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Post #6 for the 2007 Green Blogathon
By Sarah Boll
November 16, 2007 – 10:01 pm
QinetiQ has completed the first flight trials of Zephyr - a High-Altitude, Long-Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (HALE UAV) that has a 59-foot wingspan but weighs just 27 kilograms. Zephyr is less expensive than the platforms that are normally proposed for high altitude flight and the tests proved that a low-cost UAV can provide persistent operations at high altitudes having stayed alight for 54 hours in July (Popular Science, Dec 2007)
The ultra-light aircraft is solar-electric powered, autonomous and is designed to fly at altitudes in excess of 50,000 feet, above normal commercial air-lanes and most weather. The combination of solar panels on the upper wing surface and high-capacity lithium-sulfur rechargeable batteries allows Zephyr to be flown for durations of many weeks and even months.
Expect use of the Zephyr to be announced as part of a multi-tiered plan the CIA is developing to reduce the ecological foot-print of the spying community, hoping to beat out competing agencies such as the NSA for the coveted Sustainable Surveillance Award.
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By Sarah Boll
November 14, 2007 – 10:00 am
Apparently if you microwave plastic at the correct frequency it breaks down into carbon black (an ash-like raw material) and hydrocarbon gases, which can be burned (natural gas) or condensed into liquid fuel (oil). Sadly if you’re hard-up for some petrol you can’t just throw your ice cube trays into the micro-wave, there are over 10 million micro-wave frequencies and you need to hit just the right one for any given material for this little miracle to happen.
Frank Pringle and Hawk Hogan, of Global Resource Corp, have narrowed down the frequencies to a useful 1,200 that can transform auto waste (tires, plastic, vinyl) into natural gas. Popular Science reports that the first commercial version of the GRC Hawk 10 Recycler, scheduled to start operating in Long Island in February, will turn 10 tons of auto waste into 17 million BTUs of energy every hour in the form of natural gas. On top of producing 18 times more energy than it creates (it will is 956,000 of the 17 million to run), the Hawk Recycler is said to produce zero emissions. Except it is producing micro-waves and fossil fuels to burn, but I guess it is better than all that stuff sitting in a landfill.
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By Sarah Boll
November 12, 2007 – 9:45 am
If there is one thing we are good at right now, it is creating thermal energy. Besides the obvious sources like energy plants and ovens, think about the hood of your car after a drive, your laptop after a half an hour, or carefully picking clean, but very hot dishes, out of a dishwasher. Sadly, most of this heat, which is a form of energy, is wasted. And not due to lack of technology. In fact, really there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for wasting most of it.
Cogeneration plants are starting to get more popular. MIT’s successful installation of a Cogen plant (waste heat from a gas turbine is used to generate steam, used to generate electricity) in 2000 has provided useful information on the positive attributes of such a set up:
- It is 18% more efficient than the previous generation plant.
- It reduced the plants emissions by 45%.
This is great info, and good press for other facilities to start planning their own Cogen plants, it is still a little bit of mystery why these set-ups are not more prevalent. For some perspective, the US Navy has been using Cogen plants (waste heat from gas turbines is used to power boilers that provide the ships potable water) on their ships for decades.
A recent article in Orion brings up the issue that every smoke stack across the US could have a steam generator attached to it, thereby producing more required services with the same amount of energy (and reducing emissions at the same time). Perhaps more importantly the article points out that this should be getting done along with the development of wind and solar resources and can only become a reality if some of the regulations surrounding electrical generation are re-worked to allow excess electricity that will no doubt arise from these facilities to be added into the power grid.
Beyond these obvious opportunities to capture wasted energy, new technology coming out of the University of Utah is looking at how waste heat can be converted into electricity by first turning it into an acoustic waves (American Scientist, Nov/Dec 2007). The process starts by pushing the heat through metal tubes which causes the acoustic wave which is then applied to a piezoelectric ceramic crystal. These crystals in a normal state are electrically neutral, when hit by a sound wave they change shape, causing the positive and negative domains of the compound to re-act and emit electricity. The advantages of this is that the devices are small (the first test array will be 3 cm), have no moving parts and require little to no maintenance. Researcher at Washington State University are working at increasing the crystals current 10 - 25 % efficiency rating. The devices have potential as personal portable power sources and for using the heat that builds up in solar panels thereby increasing their energy conversion rate.
Even has we hopefully move away from using fossil fuels, power generation will continue to create heat as a by-product. It only makes sense to capture and use this heat to more efficiently meet energy demands and decrease atmospheric emissions.
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By Sarah Boll
November 8, 2007 – 7:33 pm
Have you ever thought about what it would be like to live without toilets? Right now around 2.6 billion people live with out them. Not only is this hard to comprehend but in those areas sans le toilet it can cause serious health issues. One of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals is providing lavatory access for everyone in the world by 2025. The World Toilet Summit presents an opportunity to showcase cheaper and more efficient toilet technologies. Sulabh International Social Service Organisation (SISSO) presented attendees of the summit with a souvenir ball of dried human feces made by one of the NGO’s toilets, undeniable evidence of their ability to render the matter bacteria-free. From the article:
The organisation’s toilets, which include 6,500 public facilities, are based on two simple innovations. By setting the bowl—of a shallow Asian variety—at a downward slope of 22 degrees, the toilet can be washed clean with two litres of water (a flush toilet uses 10 litres). The toilet empties into one of two cess-pits, which are rotated every three or four years. That is long enough for the contents of a full cess-pit to turn into a harmless fertiliser, or paperweight.
In addition, much of the methane—a gas that contributes to global warming— that is emitted by the waste will be harmlessly absorbed by the surrounding soil.
As an alternative way of disposing of the gas, 175 of SISSO’s public loos have been rigged with bio-gas digesters. These are underground tanks which create the right conditions for methane to be produced and stored. It can then be burned for heating or cooking, or used to generate electricity.
In another innovation, the organisation has linked waste-water treatment to pisciculture. This involves purifying domestic waste-water, from bathrooms and toilets, by growing duckweed in it—then fattening up fish on the weed. The purified water remains rich in potassium, phosphate and nitrogen, and a useful fertiliser.
As its contribution to battling global warming, SISSO calculates that each year its 1.2m toilets conserve 87.6m cubic metres of gas that would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere.
On top of what sounds like the coolest toilets ever made, SISSO also boasts a museum of toilets section on their webpage. It makes some good bathroom reading.
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