The Washington Post reported on a recent talk by Energy Secretary Steven Chu that white rooftops may help slow global warming by reflecting sunlight instead of absorbing it. Perhaps even better, white roofs cut energy consumption for cooling by an almost equal percentage.

Climate scientists say the reflective properties of white are so much greater than gray, black, green or any other color, that simply by putting white roofs on enough buildings and houses we could buy the time we need to make other necessary changes to combat global warming. In fact, the energy savings alone on air conditioning caused the state of California to begin requiring that most new flat-roofed buildings have reflective roofs, and retail giant Walmart has installed them on 75% of its stores in the United States. Even Washington, D.C. has gone so far as to require than new flat roofs be covered either in vegetation or have reflective roofs for the energy savings alone.

The Environmental Protection Agency offers good information and cost analysis for reflective roofing products on its Energy Star website with multiple links to manufacturers, resources and data.

Secretary Chu emphasized in his speech that the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory conducted research demonstrating that if just 63% of the roofs in 100 large cities and tropical/temperate areas worldwide were white, the effect would provide the same climate benefits as taking all the cars in the world off the road for a full decade. That’s considerable, and definitely worth the effort.

As the economy slips ever farther down the black hole of imaginary values and criminal greed, the looming necessity for using this crossroads of history to re-make our energy future has moved the issues up on the To-Do list. America’s automakers are lining up, hats in hand, to obtain enough funding to keep their (union) workers employed, and the funds they want may come attached to serious strings that require more gas-efficient cars, hybrids, flex-fuel and even new lines of plug-in electric cars to help get us off our addiction to other nations’ oil.

Which then begs questions about what sources of electrical energy we need to develop that do not spew greenhouse gases into the air, leave us with millions of tons of toxic or radioactive industrial waste, and cause serious detrimental health effects (and death) to the population. Following on the issue of our choices for future development is the antiquated state of our electrical grid, which is both inefficient and dangerously likely to fail altogether without much trouble.

Fact is, energy use conservation could make a more serious dent in our consumption without doing anything at all. This is what happened this past summer when gasoline prices climbed to around $5 per gallon, and diesel prices became inverted. Millions of people limited their driving, pooled for shopping excursions, and stayed home instead of driving long distances for vacation. Petroleum usage plummeted, which informs us that we don’t really have to use as much as we do. Changing light bulbs and turning off lights and appliances and turning down the thermostat can save quite a bit of our generation capacity too, but that will of course jump when we have to charge our cars at night.

But the inefficiency of the grid system itself wastes ~30% of what we already do generate. In order to diversify our sources, we are going to need to modernize the grid to lose less of the available ‘trons between the wind or wave farm and our refrigerators. The Obama transition team is already looking into a possible massive CCC-type project to modernize the grid, and with a genuine scientist at the head of the Department of Energy (Steven Chu), we might expect more forward-looking options for how to do that than the old-timers in the outgoing administration could ever have offered.

Meanwhile, many states and industrial concerns are planning for the alternative energy sources that the new grid will rely upon for generation capacity. Since there’s no such thing as “Clean Coal,” many planners would dearly love to get away from coal and nuclear plants (that take decades to bring on-line and are increasingly expensive). Wind, wave, geothermal, hydroelectric, there are many possibilities to be developed that not only don’t emit greenhouse gases, but also don’t emit waste heat into the environment like boiler and heat transfer systems do.

The Industrial Wind Action Group understands the grid issue better than many, as the siting of industrial-strength wind farms in regions of the country that enjoy steady winds enough to achieve peak performance is going to need transmission accessibility from parts of the country that managed to get electrified mostly as an afterthought. There are even some fairly radical ideas out there about concentrating wind farms in the midwest by swapping-out government-owned land in the far west for a huge reserve in the heartland. Even the investor class is getting in on the action, as Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin from the Common Sense Investor demonstrates.

We’ll keep up with developments in all areas of alternative power research and development as well as initiatives to modernize the grid. Stay tuned!

Links:

US Electric grid needs modernization
A Vision for a Modernized Electric Grid: Clean Infrastructure for a 21st Century Economy
Industrial Wind Action Group
Great Ideas: Where the Buffalo Roam… Turbines Spin
What is an Intelligent Grid?

It would be great to see some of these questions come up in the debates, so that follow-ups to the positions could be explored.

Please go to the ScienceDebate 2008 website, take a hard look at Obama’s answers for our future, and don’t forget to drop the crew a dime (or ten) on your way out. These folks have been hard at it since November of last year, and have gathered some very impressive institutional support. The future is important to all of us – and our children – and the future needs the very best science we can possibly field to meet it head-on.

University of Illinois crop sciences researchers released results of the largest-ever field trial of its kind in the US for growing a giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus, reporting that this crop could significantly reduce the acreage necessary to meet government biofuels production goals.

Rather than re-dedicating a full 25% of US cropland to biofuels – something that would put a serious dent in food production and increase the price of everything grown – Miscanthus would require re-dedication of just 9.3% of current agricultural acreage. The findings were reported in the August issue of the journal Global Change Biology.

Researchers were judging raw amount of biomass generated each year from this perennial (meaning it regrows itself every season from roots without reseeding), and you can see from the accompanying photo that this grass takes up some vertical room. Even better, Miscanthus requires fewer chemical and mechanical inputs than corn, which is a consideration for water quality and soil fertility. Moreover, in many parts of the country farmers could reap two or more ‘crops’ a year (by mowing, as with hay). Highest productivity, in fact, came from the south in the poorest of agricultural soils. Thus Miscanthus may be a very good crop for marginal land and land not even used for crop production at present, which would lower its demand on food producing cropland further.

Miscanthus also serves as a ‘carbon sink’, accumulating and binding carbon in the soil at greater efficiency than any annual crops, such as the great biomass annual industrial hemp. Which is also a good biomass crop for fuels, fiber, oil and land conservation.

Perhaps some combination of alternatives may yet allow independence from fossil fuels, and that comes with improvements in global warming, general civilizational peace and prosperity, etc. If we were to plan ways to power our homes, churches, community buildings and businesses while at the same time developing biofuels for transportation and shipping, we might find the world economy and standards of living rising quickly instead of falling fast.

It would seem that we do still have some useful scientific creativity and inventiveness to offer the world in these trying times. All we need to do now is see to it that Big Oil doesn’t shove it all under the rug, and that we get the necessary government investments in these technologies.

Links:

Giant Grass Miscanthus Can Meet US Biofuels Goal Using Less Land
Hemp: Our Original Industrial Crop
MIT Scientist Offers Solar Revolution

photo: Donna Coveney

MIT and Science [July 31] announce that Scientists mimic essence of plant’s energy storage system in a breakthrough that promises to make rooftop solar power a reliable mainstream energy source, even for when the sun isn’t shining.

Nocera and postdoctoral fellow Matthew Kanan have developed a process of artificial photosynthesis that will use solar energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and using the gases to power a fuel cell that will provide electricity at night and on cloudy days. A leader in the study of photosynthesis James Barber said of the work, “The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production, thus reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem.”

The inexpensive catalyst Nocera and Kanan developed can split the molecules in a glass of water at room temperature, a process that until now has been expensive because suitable catalysts were too expensive or made of rare materials. The discovery is an outgrowth of research into artificial photosynthesis (the process plants use to split water for energy) by many chemical research groups.

“This discovery is simply groundbreaking,” said Karsten Meyer, professor of chemistry at a German university. In the development of solar energy, Meyer said, “this is probably the most important single discovery of the century.”

Nocera predicts the technology can be developed quickly and readily available within ten years to address the world’s energy needs. Technical details of the discovery and process are sketched out in the MIT release, and examined in more depth in Technology Review in their article Solar-Power Breakthrough.

Great news this week on ScienceDaily, picked up by Nanotechnology News and other outlets that researchers from Swansea University has developed a paint coating for steel buildings that will generate electricity even in low light situations.

Check it out at Wise Living Journal.

This is a photograph of 1,301 florescent light tubes arrayed in a field beneath standard high power electrical lines. The energy causing them to glow is the magnetic field produced by those high power electrical lines.

No, it’s not there to demonstrate that the fields do in fact have real effects (despite what the government and electrical power lobby tells you). It’s a very interesting art project by artist Richard Box.

You can purchase a DVD of the entire project, or just peruse the gallery of photographs at Richard Box’s project page.

Researchers Jianguo “Jack” Liu and Eunice Yu at Michigan State University have published data in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science demonstrating that getting divorced isn’t a ‘Green’ thing to do.

Soaring global divorce rates – even in places with strict religious policies against it – are driving urban sprawl and increasing consumption of resources like water and fuel for electricity.

Liu and Yu started with the obvious – when a couple divorces they require two housing units instead of one, even if the children share time at each. These require resources to construct and they take up space. They require fuel to heat and cool. The story in Science Daily, A Really Inconvenient Truth, notes that a refrigerator uses roughly the same amount of energy whether it belongs to one person or to a family. Among the findings when they started digging deeper:

• In the US in 2005 divorced households used 73 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 627 billion gallons of water that could have been saved if the households were still combined by marriage. 38 million extra rooms came with additional costs in heating and lighting.

• Averaging 12 countries’ (including the US) divorces between 1998 and 2002, a total of 7.4 million ‘new’ households were established that would not have been established if those couples had remained married.

• The number of divorced households in the US in 2000 was almost 16 million.

To measure what happens when divorced people remarried, the study compared remarried households with stable marriage households, finding that the environmental footprint of remarried couples goes back to that of stable marriage households.

So. The statistical remedy for people who want to do their part against global warming but can’t manage to stay married? Fall back in love. Even serial monogamy saves resources!

Links:

A Really Inconvenient Truth: Divorce Is Not Green

PNAS: Environmental impacts of divorce

Michigan State University