Ed Ring

With spectacular Pacific coastline, Sierra alpine peaks, the best music, movies, food and wine in the world, with ongoing world high-tech leadership and trend-setting culture, California is the Athens of the 21st century.  But California has allowed a gaping hole to be rent into the fabric of its democracy, through the enactment of term limits for California's state legislators.  This unhealthy condition here in California not only causes grievous harm to our great state, it spreads ripples around the planet. Every member of every powerful special interest influencing California's government has an unlimited term.  Every corporate chief, every union boss, and every agency bureaucrat has a job that can last for decades, but the elected leaders who are supposed to balance these special interests are automatically and routinely terminated, often well before their time, by term limit...

We've always enjoyed growing cottonwood trees.  They can grow about ten feet per year, and can eventually tower over 100 feet in height.  If you want a quick forest, look no further. As a feedstock for bioethanol, trees and crop forage display far greater potental via their cellulosic fibers than the yield from their food crops - sugar cane, cassava, corn - ever could.  As we point out in our post, "Ethanol From Cellulose," the problem is that this process is much more technologically challenging.  Simple extraction of oils and sugars from the food crops, as opposed to the forage, is much more viable today.  But that may change. In a report just released entitled "The First Tree Genome is Published," the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Joint Genome Institute claims "the analysis of the first complete DNA sequence of a tree, the black cottonwood or Populus trichocarpa, lays the groundwork that may lead to the development of trees as an ideal "feedstock" for...

We're going to turn into a battery blog if this keeps up.  But the next generation of electrical storage devices is what will enable two very clean, transformative technologies to change the world - photovoltaic cells and electric cars.  In the race between batteries, ultra-capacitors, and hydrogen fuel cell systems, my money is on the batteries. On our recent post covering the Tango T600 Battery Powered Car, the 18th commenter pointed us towards vanadium batteries.  The first thing you think about when you learn of these batteries, only patented in 1986 and based on concepts only about 30 years old, is "of course!" These are batteries that can be recharged the way you might fill your gasoline tank - that is, the electrolytic material which carries the electrical charge is a liquid that, once discharged, can be quickly removed from the battery and replaced with liquid that has been recharged.  This means that stationary...

The race to devise a next generation electrical storage system is heating up, with batteries competing with ultra-capacitors and hydrogen fuel cell technologies.  In all three of these technologies, nanotechnology is held out as the key to breakthrough products.  Our money is on batteries to extend their lead as the most practical overall solution out there. A few days ago, Altair Nanotechnologies announced in a press release the long life specifications for its advanced lithium ion battery.  This follows two earlier press releases, one regarding safety aspects, and one regarding fast charge features.  Altair intends to release a fourth backgrounder on their new battery power capacity.  Since most lithium ion batteries pack a usable 200+ watts per kilogram (some claim energy densities up to and over 300 watts per kilogram), we might expect no surprises there, but who knows? In all of their press releases so far on this topic...

We have just published a new in-depth feature article "Nuclear Power in India" by Avilash Roul, who is based in New Delhi.  We welcome readers of that story who wish to comment here.  While editing this story we found interesting data from the World Nuclear Association.  As is nearly always the case, we also got very good information from Wikipedia's entry on nuclear power. What was surprising to learn is the relatively small role nuclear power plays in the sum energy consumption in the world.  As a share of electrical generation, nuclear power is significant, generating about 16% of the world's electricity.  But as a share of all energy from all sources worldwide, nuclear power is only good for about 2%. Another surprising detail we learned is that in Germany, where there is a strong anti-nuclear movement, nearly 30% of their electrical energy comes from nuclear power.  At over 20 gigawatts, Germany has the fourth largest...

Here's another.  It seems every time you look there's another company making an electric car.  This is definitely a revolution, very similar to the first automotive revolution in the 1920's when scores of companies rolled out gasoline powered cars. This time it's battery powered cars, and Hybrid Technologies, based in Las Vegas, Nevada, is a publicly traded development company with lithium ion battery technology.  They also have several electric cars that are either in the prototype or development phase, which they are offering for sale on their website. These are interesting cars; they use existing shells, converted to run on battery-electric drive trains.  Here's the specs on a few of...

If you believe too much CO2 is going to cause catastrophic climate change, then you'll love this - we can use CO2 to increase the rate of plant growth; biofuel plants in particular. How this will work in practice isn't exactly clear.  As we have noted, it will be a tragedy if we scrub CO2 out of our industrial emissions to stop possible global warming, while leaving unacceptable amounts of other airborne pollutants lower on the priority list.  If you're going to regulate CO2, while you're at it, at least make sure you eliminate the carbon monoxide, lead, ozone, particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide, and sulpher dioxide, because we know they're bad.  Where I live in California, the summertime air is filthy, and it isn't CO2. In any case, one company that seems to have some good ideas as to how to use CO2 to grow biofuel is GS-CleanTech (the GS stands for "Green Shift").  On the page...

The next generation of electric cars have been in gestation for several years, as evidenced by Commuter Cars Corporation's Tango T600.  This is probably the most unique battery-powered car design yet seen.  This car is 39" wide, 8'5" long, and 60" tall.  It is designed to seat two, with the passenger behind the driver.  Because it's narrow, and because it's so small, it can split lanes like a motorcycle, and it can park perpendicular to the curb in spots only motorcycles would ordinarily fit. These specifications, applied to a car with four wheels, give the Tango an unusual appearance, and nothing that might automatically be associated with high performance.  But the Tango is designed for speed.  Its battery pack puts out...

Much has been made of Greenland's ice cap melting faster lately.  And the math is indisputable, if the entire ice cap melted, the earth's oceans would rise a lot.  Estimates vary, but we estimate 45 feet, which is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum of estimates.  You can check our calculations for Greenland in paragraph three of our recent post Antarctic Ice. So how much are current higher levels of ice melt in Greenland contributing to rising sea levels?  According to Science Magazine's article "Greenland Ice Sheet: High-Elevation Balance and Peripheral Thinning," studies indicate "a net loss of about 51 cubic kilometers of ice per year from the entire ice sheet, sufficient to raise sea level by 0.13 millimeter per year--approximately 7% of the...

In the September 4th edition of South Africa's Mining Weekly, in a report entitled  "SA mulls cost and benefits of mega solar project," South Africa's Eskom power utility is about to build a 100 MW solar thermal electric generating plant, using the "power tower" design (see our post "Solar Thermal Power" which describes design options).  In the report, Eskom's resources and strategy division renewable-energy corporate specialist Dr Louis van Heerden explained that "central-receiver technology ... concentrates the sun's energy through multiple large mirrors, using the concentrated thermal energy to produce steam to drive a conventional steam turbine for electricity generation. The energy concentration is achieved by a field of large sun-tracking mirrors (called heliostats), which reflect the sunlight to a receiver, mounted on a central tower in the middle of the mirror field. A heat-transfer medium (molten salt) is pumped through the receiver...