Ed Ring

If you are designing an all electric car, in-wheel electric motors could replace any on-chassis motors, and having four of them independently coordinating whether they function as generator or motor allows sophisticated power management - improving efficiencies.  In-wheel motors also allow more payload space on the main chassis. According to Mitsubishi's 2005 Annual Report, page two, in May 2005 they announced in-wheel motor technology ready to deploy.  In-wheel motors eliminate the need for a transmission or power train and overall they are far less expensive to maintain.  They represent a huge leap forward in automotive technology. Another significant innovation coming soon, also less expensive to maintain, is the Serial Hybrid Car, where a diesel engine turns a generator to charge a battery-pack and power an all-electric drivetrain.  These cars were waiting for two things - ultra-clean 40%...

Assume global warming is real, caused by humans, and can be averted through immediate collective action on the part of all humanity.  How then might we analyse what to do about global warming, based on everything we know? The return on investment, in terms of time required, cost to implement, and immediate impact to cool the planet, is very good when invested in increasing (nontoxic) aerosol emissions, reforesting the tropics, or cooling the urban heat islands with billions of canopy trees.  The return on investment in reducing carbon emissions, even if completely successful, is more problematic. Why not emit non-toxic aerosols over the Arctic? Photo: NASA More...

If photovoltaics show promise to totally replace coal as a clean source of electricity, how would they perform to provide fresh water from seawater? Photo: water-technology.net Desalinating seawater is not cheap.  Based on costs for a state of the art desalinization facility in Ashkelon, Israel, as reported in WaterTechnology.net, it costs about US $2.0 billion to build a plant with capacity to desalinate 1.0 cubic kilometer per year of seawater.  In reality, that size plant has not yet been built.  The one in Ashelon is the largest of its kind on earth, and its output at 320,000 cubic meters per day, only equates to about .117 cubic kilometers of fresh water per year. But the costs are what is most...

We have attempted to estimate the contribution of photovoltaics to global energy production.  Currently the installed base of photovoltaics worldwide has an output of about 5.0 gigawatts.  Since the sun doesn't shine 24 hours per day, the actual yield is probably about one-third that amount, call it 2.0 gigawatt-years in 2005.  While this installed base is probably set to double every two years, and this amazing pace may be a conservative estimate, it is accurate to say photovoltaics do not currently contribute to global energy production in any meaningful way. We are moving to an electricity future - and since 33 gigawatt-years equals one quadrillion BTUs, and since global energy production in 2005 was about 400 quadrillion BTUs, today we are only getting about one-6,000th, or 1.7 hundredths of one percent of our energy from photovoltaics. What about wind power? ...

We've been trying for some time to find a good prediction of how quickly worldwide photovoltaic manufacturing is going to increase.  We know in 2005 the entire world production of photovoltaic cells was about 1.6 gigawatts.  How much will we add in 2006?  Where will we be by 2010? Photo: Sandia National Labs Because of the revolution in thin film photovoltaic technology, along with the predicted end to the bottleneck in polysilicon production which has limited manufacturing of crystaline photovoltaics, exponential growth in production is possible, if not likely.  Huge figures are being kicked around.  Just some of the high profile thin-film photovoltaic manufacturers, Miasole, Nanosolar, First Solar, Daystar Technologies...

In our previous post, "Earthly Heating," we noted that because we want to limit CO2 emissions, carbon neutral biofuel plantations crowd out food crops, and in the inner recesses of mega-cities of earth's equatorial regions, food costs more, and the poor starve.  This is an over-simplification. It is true that biofuel crops may raise the price of food, since at a commodity level, whenever a biofuel crop replaces a food crop, there is a lesser supply of food and this will increase the price of food.  But increasing the price of food may allow small landowners to profitably grow food again to make a decent living, and biofuel as a cash crop will bring currency and wealth into equatorial countries. Biofuel has the potential to disperse somewhat the currencies that flow today only to nations with oil.  Biofuel can enrich economies throughout the tropics, and elsewhere, and this rising...

Got your attention?  Probably not.  Earthly heating is an unlikely search phrase.  Actually, of course, this post regards global warming.  And to-date, for the most part, we have posted information about specific aspects of global warming, or in-depth treatments of the subject, always including links galore to help the reader.  But as a topic on the internet, Global Warming has got more posts and more links than we can count.  Choose among the many on EcoWorld, or go to Google.  Have fun. Might anyone note that the major international oil companies abandoned their objections to global warming theories rather early, back in 2002 or even before that?  Maybe there's no downside to agreeing with global warming theories, and no upside to being a skeptic!  After all, the number of global warming skeptics left in the world today is limited to a handful of libertarian think tanks, and an...

We may stand guilty of downplaying the future of crystaline photovoltaics.  After all, exponential growth is necessary for alternative energy to take over the world, and after all, it is no simple matter to manufacture crystaline photovoltaics.  But as amply documented in our post "The Coming Boom in Photovoltaics," the only thing thing that stops crystaline photovoltaics from experiencing exponential growth is the supply of polysilicon.  And the only raw material inputs required to manufacture polysilicon is silicon, one of the most abundant materials on earth, and electricity, which photovoltaics produce in abundance. Photo: SunPower Along with crystaline photovoltaic cells, which are made from slices...

Concentrating people into high-density living arrangements is a central premise of the "smart growth" movement.  But the nature of these high density communities is what separates the truly smart developments from the merely smart. Green buildings are designed, essentially, to require no more energy and water inputs than they are able to generate using on-site systems.  A green building is also designed, of course, to use non-toxic, sustainable materials, and to recycle or 100% treat all of its waste.  But green buildings may also be awe-inspiring feats of architecture, and fantastic spaces for humans to work, live, and congregate. Image: Montana State Univ. A mesmerizing example...

In our last post, "Dams & Greenhouse Gas," we took the International Rivers Network to task for putting out a study that claimed dams are a "significant global source of greenhouse gasses."  Because if you dug into the underlying facts, the estimated contribution greenhouse gasses make to total anthropogenic CO2 emissions are a whopping .7% (seven-tenths of one percent). There are many problems with dams, and greenhouse gas emissions (itself a topic not beyond debate) are not one of them.  For a serious discussion of the problems with dams, we turn to the Property and Environment Research Center, who recently published an essay by James Workman entitled "Deadbeat Dams."  Workman is succinct and comprehensive in his descriptions of why dams have outlived their usefulness:  "antiquated dams have a lot going against them: seismic shifts shake them from below; compound water pressures scour them from behind; sediment fills reservoirs; evaporation drinks more than people; and...