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?

In J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the boy wizard inherited an invisibility cloak from his father. He could use it to sneak around undetected through the stony halls of Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, to escape the confines of the same place, and to spy on the plots and plans and deeds of other characters in the story. If you’re 8 years old, the thought of your own personal invisibility cloak is highly entertaining.

Enter scientists – presumably older than 8 – at the University of California at Berkeley, who announced this week that they have engineered some nifty “metamaterials” that can bend light rays around an object to render them effectively invisible. The entertaining dream just became reality, but will likely be reserved mostly for spies and other, more lethal tools of military stealth. Alas, we probably won’t be able to buy our own invisibility cloaks at WalMart any time soon.

Research published in Science describes a metamaterial composed of silver nanowires grown inside a porous aluminum oxide. The result is a structure about 10 times thinner than a sheet of paper that can refract light ‘backwards’ to render a cloaked object invisible to human eyes, radar, and near-infrared wavelengths as short as 660 nanometers. Nature looks at a ‘fishnet’ metamaterial and its possibilities.

We should probably not let the Romulans know about this development. Let them invent their own cloaking device!

ScienceNews reported last week that research on mice suggests these new fullerene-based wonder-fibers may be as dangerous as asbestos in the environment. The study showed that multi-walled (rigid) nanotube fibers longer than 15 micrometers cannot be removed from sensitive organic tissues by microphages, and that this causes inflammation that could lead to asbestos-like diseases including mesothelioma, a fatal form of cancer.

The study was published in the May 20 online edition of Nature Nanotechnology, and according to the Washington Post serves as a preliminary warning that there may be serious issues with the technology that warrant very careful planning to protect industrial workers, the public and the environment as nanotube fibers become more common in consumer and industrial products.

Companies around the world produce thousands of tons of nanomaterials a year, not all of them in the form that poses the threat identified by these researchers. Nanotubes alone are expected to become a multi-billion dollar industry within the next few years. While the government pumps about $1.5 billion a year into R&D for nanotechnology, only about 5 percent of that goes into health and safety concerns.

It would be quite refreshing if, for a change, we incorporated the lessons of history as we develop this promising new technology to forestall issues related to health, safety and environmental pollution before they become just more grim statistics attached to greed over due caution. And for this reason the situation bears watching to see if identified areas of concern are simply denied and swept under a profit rug, or rationally dealt with as if humans could accept responsibility – and minimize risks – per the less than hopeful side-effects of our intelligent designs.

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.

In this era of “peak oil” and ever more environmentally damaging methods of extracting (and using) coal, innovative R&D on alternatives and renewables have been moving forward with vigor even without massive subsidies or continued contributions to global warming.

We already know that our planet receives more energy from the sun every day than all the life forms (and human industries) could ever use, but humans haven’t yet figured out how to harvest those electrons efficiently enough to even begin to compete with green plants and their direct conversion via photosynthesis. We also know that the sun powers our atmospheric wind patterns, and have developed means of extracting electricity from that source as well. Though again, not enough.

There’s another source of power that nature provides to our planet, and which entrepreneurs and engineers have developed and are still developing. This is the immense power of gravity, and it manifests itself in regular cycles in all the oceans and seas that cover the majority of our planet. These are the tides. Tidal generators are located beneath the surface of the water, and have to deal with both the corrosive effects of salt and other minerals in the water as well as various other contaminates, including forms of sea life. Still, the French have been generating about 600 million kilowatt hours of tidal power annually at Rance for more than 30 years. So far the moon hasn’t stopped exerting its gravitational energy on the earth!

Even as those issues are being addressed with ever more clever designs, there’s yet another ocean-born form of energy to be tapped for generating electricity – waves. Energy COOL: Swell Electricity from the Sea talks about how inventors are harnessing the waves in ways that could represent world-changing applications.

These wave-power inventions – some are generating electricity as we speak – are starting to get mainstream press attention. The Washington Post reported on a technology called AquaBuOY from Finavera Renewables in September, quoting its CEO as saying:

Finavera’s chief executive, Jason Bak, believes he knows how. The equipment his company designed, called AquaBuOY, aims to generate electricity from the vertical motion of waves. The buoy, anchored in an array two to three miles offshore, will convert the waves’ motion into pressurized water using large, reinforced-rubber hose pumps. As the buoy goes up the peak of a wave and down into its trough, it forces a piston in the bottom of the buoy to stretch and contract the hose pumps, pushing water through. This drives a turbine that powers a generator producing electricity, which would be shipped to shore through an undersea transmission line.

“This is the new source of power,” Bak said. “It’s the highest-energy-density renewable out there. Wind is like light crude oil, and water is like gasoline.”

Perhaps that’s a little overboard, but Finavera’s not the only development company out there…

• Pelamis Wave Power has a snake-like device moving from test-level to commercial production of the Iberian Peninsula and in the UK.
• Verdant Power is testing its systems off coast of Manhattan. There are some new-technology problems, but they’re being addressed.
• Ocean Power Technologies has another buoy power system design. They are testing projects in Hawaii, Spain and New Jersey.
• Swell Fuel has the ‘Ocean Energy Converter’ float device that generates electricity from the swell flow in any direction, and is setting up test projects off El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Belize.

Check out some of the links below to get the latest on what’s what with various forms of renewable power sources and developing technologies to tap them.

Links:

Energy Cool

Energize America

Energy Smart