Archive for Green

RB | July 26, 2011
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Alternate Energy for Tech

CleantechA couple of recent articles about greener alternative energy sources for tech caught my eye as I sat in my Bach Seat. First

TES NewEnergy, based in Osaka Japan has come up with a new way to charge your mobile phone by heating a pot of water over a campfire according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Pan ChargerThe Hatsuden-Nabe thermo-electric cookpot turns heat from boiling water into electricity The pot features strips of ceramic thermoelectric material that generate electricity through temperature differentials between the 550 degrees Celsius at the bottom of the pot and the water boiling inside at 100 degrees. The pot feeds the electricity via a USB port into digital devices such as Apple (AAPL) iPhones, iPods and Garmin GPS‘s.

Chief executive Kazuhiro Fujita said the invention was inspired by Japan’s March 11 earthquake and tsunami, “When I saw the TV footage of the quake victims making a fire to keep themselves warm, I came up with the idea of helping them to charge their mobile phones at the same time,” Mr. Fujita said.

“Unlike a solar power generator, our pot can be used regardless of time of day and weather while its small size allows people to easily carry it in a bag in case of evacuation,” said director and co-developer Ryoji Funahashi.

The company says the device takes three to five hours to charge an  iPhone and can heat up your lunch at the same time.

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The thermo-electic cockpot sells for 24,150 yen ($305) which seems sort of expensive to charge an iPhone when the towers are also put of power and down. TES NewEnergy also plans to market it later in developing countries with unreliable power grids. Their best bet is probably REI for all the extreme suburbanites.

The second greener – alternative energy idea come from Australia.

According to PCAuthority.com Aussie scientists have developed a way to power electronics by harnessing the energy of the keyboard. Using piezoelectrics, which converts pressure into an electric current, and a thin-film technology found in microchips, researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne believe laptops could become self-powered just by its users typing.

Tying womenThe new energy source needs more work before it’s practical for low-cost laptop integration, but Dr Mandu Bhaskaran, co-author of the research, believes the development is a step in the right direction. “With the drive for alternative energy solutions, we need to find more efficient ways to power microchips,” said Bhaskaran.

TechEye correctly identifies the biggest challenge to this alternative energy source will be to get the power demands of computer chips down to be able to use the technology. Despite the best efforts of chipmakers like Intel (INTC) and AMD (AMD), the power drain for chips is still too high for this sort of technology.

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Maybe the Aussies want to bring back WordPerfect and DOS so you have to type all the time otherwise your laptop will run out of power. Image the rush to buy these devices as the green police get credits for taking more computer off the grid.

Finally the most promising alternate energy source …..

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a self-powered, wireless paper-based device that runs on scavenged ambient energy from the environment. The GATech system collects electromagnetic energy transmitted by television transmitters, mobile phone networks and satellite communications systems. Manos Tentzeris, a professor in the GATech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering told Gizmag the new technology can be used to power small electronic devices such as networks of wireless sensors, microprocessors and communications chips.

The GATech team has been able to build the system by combining sensors, antennas and energy scavenging capabilities on paper by using inkjet printing technology According to the article, the energy scavenging technology can take advantage of frequencies from FM radio to radar. So far the team has been able to generate hundreds of milliwatts by harnessing the energy from TV bands. Gizmag reports that multi-band systems would generate over one milliwatt, which is enough to run small electronic devices, including microprocessors. The Professor explains that multi-band systems can exploit a range of electromagnetic bands to capture more energy.

ContraptionThe Gizmag article says the system works. The researchers have successfully operated a temperature sensor using electromagnetic energy captured from a television station more than half a kilometer away. They are now preparing another demonstration where a microprocessor-based microcontroller would be activated by holding it in the air.

The researchers say the technology could be used with other electricity generating technologies like solar. Scavenged energy could help a solar element charge a battery during the day while at night, scavenged energy would continue to charge the battery.

The Georgia Tech team believe that self-powered, wireless paper-based sensors will soon be widely available at very low-cost. Gizmag says the autonomous, inexpensive sensors would be attractive for a range of applications, such as chemical, biological, heat and stress sensing, RFID and monitoring for the military, manufacturing, shipping, communications and smart grid applications.

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I wrote about something similar here. It is important to realize that this new alternate energy source has so far been wasted.

What do you think?

Which alternate energy source fro tech looks most promising to you?

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RB | May 10, 2011
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Wireless Electric Vehicle Charging Technology Coming

Green Car Thomas Lee at Xconomy reports that Delphi and WiTricity of Watertown, MA demo’d a wireless charging system for cars at the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) annual World conference in Detroit. The demo was the result of  a seven month partnership between the firms to use WiTricity’s technology to wirelessly transmit electricity via magnetic waves to charge electric vehicles.

DelphiThe charging system developed by Delphi and WiTricity would enable cars powered with electricity to reboot without having to plug into a power source via a cord according to Xconomy. It would only need cars to park over a wireless energy source on the floor of a garage or embedded in a paved parking spot, which would then transfer the power to the vehicle’s battery charger.

WiTricityWiTricity, founded by MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic in 2007, has designed a transmission coil that connects to a small electronics module and converts the traditional electric current found in a home or office to a higher frequency and voltage, to create an oscillating magnetic field around the coil. The article says if a separate coil designed to resonate to the same frequency is close enough to the source, power is transferred between the two coils.

The article quotes Mr. Sumner who says the prototype generates about 95 percent efficiency, meaning only five percent of the power being generated gets lost in transmission. Delphi hopes all cars equipped with the technology will get at least 90 percent. The pad powering the Chevy prototype was transmitting about 2.6 kw, or 16 amps, of electricity, about the equivalent of Delphi’s current Level 2 wired chargers.

Randy Sumner Delphi’s director of global hybrid vehicle business development says WiTricity’s technology enabled Delphi to design much smaller coils and achieve greater distance between the bottom of the car and the charging pad. In theory, this could allow bigger trucks and vehicles to also use the technology. In an interview, Andrew Brown, Delphi’s executive director and chief technologist, says wireless charging will go a long way to boosting the popularity of electric cars. Wireless charging pads could be installed in home garages, parking lots, offices, shopping centers, he says.

“It will eliminate this range anxiety,” says Mr. Brown, referring to consumers who worry they will run out of juice before finding the next charging station. Also, he says, “The average consumer is not accustomed to electric cars. [They worry] ‘Am I going to get dirty?’ or “Will I get electrocuted?’” Wireless charging helps with both those issues. All consumers have to do is “park and charge,” Mr. Sumner says in the article.

The author notes that Delphi still faces a long road from lab prototype to mass production. The company needs to work with OEMs to figure out how to best integrate WiTricity’s technology into cars. Delphi envisions a car that can be charged both by wired and wireless charging stations. The company also needs to find ways to shrink the electronics and reduce overall cost. Delphi officials estimate the first cars using it will roll of the assembly lines in 2014 or 2015. “This is real,” Mr. Sumner says. “This works.”

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The idea of wireless electricity is not new. I have followed wireless electricity since 2008, here and here. Look Ma! No wires!

What do you think?

Can a car be wirelessly charged like an iPod?

Does this make you feel better about not getting stranded when your electric car runs out of juice?

 

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RB | April 20, 2011
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GM Saves Energy Through Smart IT

Andrew Winston at the Harvard Business Review writes that opportunities for improving energy efficiency and saving real money are everywhere. The proverbial low-hanging fruit are actually, in the words of energy guru Amory Lovins, fruit on the ground. GM (GM) recently announced a new way to find easy pickings, a shockingly straightforward change in how it runs its manufacturing plants. The Detroit based auto giant is saving $3 million annually in energy costs across 10 plants by shutting down equipment when it’s not needed.

General MotorsMr. Winston says the man in-charge of the program is Mike Durak, the Global Program Manager, IT. According to the article,  GM is using General Electric (GE) Proficy Software to automate the shutdown and restart of its equipment. It started simply enough, GM set the lighting in one plant to synch up with the conveyor. When the manufacturing line stopped, for breaks or between shifts, the lighting would shut off . Seeing the quick payback, the managers added all energy-using systems to this automated network, from heating and cooling systems to pumps and compressed air units. The investment in connecting an entire plant is paying back through energy savings alone in just 6 months.

General ElectricHBR says that previously GM shutdowns equipment multiple times a day with a combination of manual shutdowns and unconnected, or “dumb”, automation. Basically, energy use would gradually ramp down after production stopped as equipment was shut off, and then it would ramp back up before the next shift. “Energy use was in a ‘V-shape’,” Mr. Durak said, “and now it’s more like a U.” (The author says, the difference between a V-shape and a U-shape is what’s saved).

Mr. Winston calls these sudden wins “headslappers” because they’re so obvious…in retrospect. The reasons we miss these easy wins are varied — from inertia to not being incentivized to find them to the classic problem of always addressing what’s urgent (something broken or a new process) over what’s important (getting leaner). Or perhaps a simple, cheap technological fix was not available until recently. In GM’s case, the big change is economically networking a whole range of equipment that wasn’t connected before. So with the new systems in place, managers can use the GE software to monitor and control the plant to a much finer degree.

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Maybe GM is getting smarter; they are figuring out what a “smarter” factory looks like. the Chevy Volt seems to be a “smarter” car.

What do you think?

Is GM getting smarter?

What is your organization doing to get smarter?

 

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RB | April 11, 2011
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Earth Worth $4,800 Trillion

Planet EarthIf you believe some people, everything in this world has a price. Now the world has a price as well.  Our planet is worth $4,800 trillion according to University of California-Santa Cruz Astrophysicist Greg Laughlin.  Professor Laughlin developed the value for NASA.   He came up with the figure by calculating the sum of the planet’s age, size, temperature, mass and other vital statistics.

Professor Laughlin told the UK’s Daily Mail , “I’ve just always thought that the concept of an ‘Earth-like planet in the habitable zone’ was pretty vaguely defined, and I wanted a metric that I could plug a planet into to see whether its value was high enough to warrant media hype.” The professor’s equation essentially shows whether planets are worth studying, stating that anything worth less than $97 million just isn’t worth the hassle.

MoneyThere are about 1,235 other planets in the universe, most of which weren’t given a high price tag because of their inhospitable climates. According to the Daily Mail, Mars is worth only $16,361 and Venus is worth less than a penny. Prior to Dr. Laughlin’s work, most Earth-like world known to scientists, was the exoplanet Gilese 581 c but the professor’s equationsaid it was worth just $160. The next Earth-ly object, KOI 326.01 is worth $223,099.93 (KOI stands for “Kepler Object of Interest”). “This is just a way for me to be able to quantify how excited I should be about any particular planet,” he told TechEye.

The Astrophysicist told the Daily Mail, ‘The formula makes you realize just how precious Earth is and I hope it will help us as a society safeguard what we have.

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I wonder if the professor discounted the value of planet Earth as damaged goods as British Petroleum destroys the Gulf of Mexico and nuclear reactors melt-down in Japan, etc..

What do you think?

How do you value planet Earth?

 

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RB | December 27, 2010
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GM Recycles BP Gulf Oil Spill Waste Into Volt

General Motors (NYSE : GM) has intercepted 100 miles of used oil control booms from the BP Gulf of Mexico mega oil spill, (which I wrote about here, here, here and here) preventing them from going into landfills. Instead, TheDetroitBureau.com reports that oil-soaked booms are transformed into plastic parts for the Chevy Volt.

Mike Robinson, GM vice president of Environment, Energy and Safety policy explained to TheDetroitBureau that the automaker has been able to recycle the polypropylene plastics used in the oil booms set out to contain and capture the oil spilled by a runaway British Petroleum (NYSE :BP) well.  GM and its suppliers are turning the re-cycled material into plastic parts used in the Volt, such as a shroud for the radiator according to GM. “Creative recycling is one extension of GM’s overall strategy to reduce its environmental impact,” Mr. Robinson said, the Detroit based auto maker already finds ways to cut landfilling at 76 of its facilities. The recycling of Gulf oil booms, he added, “is a good example of using this expertise and applying it to a greater magnitude.”

In the article Chris Miller vice president of sales and market for GDC Inc. says the old booms are mixed with other recycled material, including used tires, and processed to yield a plastic resin which can be shaped into a variety of plastic parts. “The recycled resin is a lot less expensive than virgin resin,” he said. In fact, GM’s Robinson described the overall process as “cost-neutral,” meaning the final parts and components cost it the same as those produced by more conventional processes. “Recycling the booms will result in the production of more than 100,000 pounds of plastic resin for the vehicle components,” said John Bradburn, manager of GM’s waste-reduction efforts, eliminating an equal amount of waste that would otherwise have been incinerated or sent to landfills. “This was purely a matter of helping out,”  Mr. Bradburn told TheDetroitBureau. “If sent to a landfill, these materials would have taken hundreds of years to begin to break down, and we didn’t want to see the spill further impact the environment. We knew we could identify a beneficial reuse of this material given our experience,” Mr. Bradburn added.

Photo by Brian Merchant

GM’s Bradburn says the project demonstrates the booms, which are also widely used around construction projects and limited spills, don’t have to buried or burned but can be recycled. He also noted it should encourage the manufacturers of the booms to make them easier to recycle. TheDetroitBureau says besides GDC, GM worked with several partners throughout the recovery and development processes. Heritage Environmental managed the collection of boom materials along the Louisiana coast. Mobile Fluid Recovery stepped in next, using a massive high-speed drum that spun the booms until dry and eliminated all the absorbed oil and wastewater. Lucent Polymers used its process to then manipulate the material into the physical state necessary for plastic die-mold production.

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Hmm- something must be changing at GM, when I worked at a GM tech center in the 1990′s there was not many green efforts. Even if this is a marketing ploy to beef up the Volt’s green-cred’s, it is a good step. Lets hope they keep up the imaginative thinking.

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