April 2009 Archives

Way back in May 2007, the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) Act was created to promote outside-of-the-box thinking for energy and climate related research. The excitement quickly died, though, as the Bush administration lost focus and never funded the project (there was never even real office space created).

Now, though, ARPA-E is back on track. Funding in the amount of $400 million was explicitly set aside in the recent stimulus bill (the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act), and on April 27, President Obama annuonced at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.:

My administration will pursue, as well, comprehensive legislation to place a market-based cap on carbon emissions. We will make renewable energy the profitable kind of energy.  We will put in place the resources so that scientists can focus on this critical area.  And I am confident that we will find a wellspring of creativity just waiting to be tapped by researchers in this room and entrepreneurs across our country.  We can solve this problem.

In addition to funding new research, the President promised to further science education: "...my administration has set a goal that will greatly enhance our ability to compete for the high-wage, high-tech jobs of the future... we've provided tax credits and grants to make a college education more affordable." He also announced that the new budget triples the number of National Science Foundation graduate research fellowships.

As Obama has done so in the past, he ended with an allusion to the Apollo Project for which John F. Kennedy spurred funding and motivated a generation to strive for; quoting Kennedy: "The challenge, in short, may be our salvation."

Click here for a full transcript of President Obama's NAS speech.

Shai Agassi is going to revolutionize the electric car infrastructure.

His two year old clean-energy company, Better Place, seeks contracts with various renewable energy sites (solar power arrays in Israel, wind farms in Denmark) and connects these to a global network of battery charging spots, the electric equivalent of a gas station.

Despite their advantage of little or no CO₂ production, electric cars have suffered from an issue of refueling. The longest-driving electric car on the market, the Tesla Roadster, can run for 250 miles before needing to recharge. Unfortunately, to recharge this battery, it takes about two hours. Not many people are going to want a vehicle that has 2 hours downtime for every 100 miles driven (it's preferable to recharge before you run out of fuel entirely). Agassi's revolutionary step was to remove the battery from the car altogether.

Why should a battery be a permanent component of a car? Shai Agassi believes that electric cars should be as cheap and as easy to use as their gasoline-powered peers. Agassi's Better Place infrastructure enables people to drive up to a charging station where a robot would slip the battery out from below the car and replace it with a fully charged one. Payment works in much the same ways as a cell phone plan - you pay for the miles (the charge) that you use. Drivers can be in and out of the charge station in less than two minutes. The down time, waiting for the robot to switch out the batteries, is 45 seconds. It's just as fast, if not faster than topping up a tank of gas.

Better Place already has charge stations throughout Israel, the first nation to adopt this infrastructure. The US could see them appearing as soon as 2012 in the Bay Area, with Hawaii shortly after. It's an exciting concept: affordable, practical electric cars. Renault has put 1.5 billion dollars into building 9 different types of electric cars that will coordinate with the Better Place charge stations and swap sites.

Agassi's talk at the 2009 TED conference gives a fantastic treatment of the numbers for refueling occurrences. If you have charge stations everywhere and if you have swap stations everywhere, if turns out that you would swap your battery fewer times than you would stop at a gas station. According to Agassi, electric cars will be on the roads soon, greatly lessening our dependence on oil and driving a market for sustainable energy.

MRS meetings attract researchers from a broad range of fields—bringing with them their unique perspectives into one place. There is always a significant interest in materials related to sustainable energy, though, and this year's Spring meeting was no exception.

Everybody wanted to know more about the journal—even researchers not working in the related fields have an interest in this area. Energy is suddenly on everyone's mind. It seems to be on department heads' minds as well, as many people were interested in learning about the journal because they're either in—or planning on being in—a department that has a research group in renewable energy. As a bonus, JRSE's co-editors, John Turner and P. Craig Taylor, were at the booth to talk directly to potential authors, reviewers, and future editors.

In addition to the business of science, there was some fun: a bamboo bike (or a "Bambucicleta") and a local caricature artist in the exhibit hall.

The exhibit hall entrance (left) and a quiet moment at the JRSE booth.

In addition to the crowds of researchers stopping by, JRSE also had a few mentions on the web. Check out the MRS blog for a very positive review of the journal and a flattering shoutout to our editors. Also in the social networking world, don't forget to fan the JRSE and MRS facebook pages, and keep your eyes open for tweets about JRSE from AIP's twitter feed (hash tag: #AIP_JRSE).

As of March 2008, Japan has increased their wind energy output 80 times from the level of output 10 years ago, pumping out nearly 1,700,000 kilowatts of energy from wind power alone. And just last year, Japan pledged to cut its own emissions by 60-80% from current levels by 2050. On top of that, in 2008, then prime minister Yasuo Fukuda presented a plan to cut global emission by 50%. A surprising, but welcome initiative. How did Japan do it?

Like many other European countries, Japan has increased government subsidies given to power companies and other retailers that encourage them to switch to a more efficient form of energy production. The wind energy target for the next two years is to expand the output to 3 million kilowatts—calling for a virtual doubling of the over 1,400 wind turbines already in place.

Think about how Japan has changed their outlook since the "Lost Decade" of the 90s—they have consistently shown world leadership in promoting renewable energy, which has, so far, brought further good fortune to their economy.

Surprisingly, not all of these turbines are run by regional governments or corporations. In September 2001, Hokkaido Green Fund (HGF), a nonprofit organization (NPO) in Hokkaido, northern Japan, built Japan's first citizen-funded wind power plant: Sapporo Station, nicknamed "Hamakaze-chan" or "beach wind."

Other interesting and productive wind farms around Japan:

• Panoramic view of Seto Wind Hill Park in Ikata. and some high resolution images.
• The Nunobiki plateau Wind Farm, which generates enough electricity to power 35,000 homes.
• The Hibikinada Wind Farm is a15,000 kilowatt facility on the coast of Hibikinada, Japan. It supplies power to Kyushu Electric Power Co. using ten 1,500 kW wind turbines from GE Wind Energy. The turbines are expected to generate 35 million kWh annually, enough to supply 10,000 average Japanese homes.

The Japan National Tourism Organization seems just as excited about wind energy as its government—offering up the following summaries for tourists about wind farms across the country:

• Cape Soya Wind Farm in Wakkanai City: Located in the far northern part of Hokkaido with a view of Sakhalin, are 57 wind turbines, some reaching as high as 40 m. Total output is 57,000 kW—equivalent to approx. 60% of the consumption of Wakkanai City.
• In Horonobe Town: Otonrui Wind Power Station comprised of 28 wind turbines, some as high as 99 m, lined up over a distance of 3 km.
• In Tomamae: 3 wind power stations facing the Japan Sea: Yuhigaoka Power Plant, Tomamae Green Hill Wind Park Power Plant and Tomamae Winvilla Power Plant—all contributing to an output of more than 20,000 kW.
• The northern Japanese town of Hokkaido, which is the first offshore wind-for-power system outside of Europe, has been harnessing the ocean wind since 2003. It has two 600-kilowatt turbines located inside a breakwater less than one kilometer off the coast, which is enough to power an average of 1,000 homes per year.

On March 10th, the National Ignition Facility exceeded the 1 MJ barrier, confirming the NIF system as the most powerful fusion facility on record. 192 pulse-shaped lasers delivered the power equivalent of 10,000 100-Watt light bulbs to its target in less than one second. According the the NIF director, Edward Moses, this achievement exceeds the output of any other laser system by more than 25 times. Impressive as it is, the question still remains: Are we on the edge of controlled, sustainable fusion or are we still falling short of the goal?

If the NIF fusion project succeeds, it will be a phenomenal breakthrough in sustainable energy research. Fusion's allure is in its ability to convert seawater into clean energy, with no greenhouse emissions. The kind of energy produced can couple easily to the current energy grid, adding to the attractiveness of the project.

But even with the grid in place and ready for more energy, there are still many pragmatic issues to address. At the moment, the NIF can only fire full-strength on a weekly basis, to avoid burning the optics. A self-sustaining reactor, however, would need to fire ten times per second. No optics currently exist that can withstand that kind of energy. The gold targets, of which several hundred are needed per year, would need to be made more affordable, and the space constraints of such a facility (three football fields across and 10 stories high) severely restrict the number of feasible locations.

Still, the press releases from NIF remain optimistic. Moses sketches a timeline of 2020 for the first prototype fusion-fission reactor and 2030 for the first commercial one: he sees the current limitations as surmountable. From the sidelines, it is hard to know whether this current system will be the one of groundbreaking successes and many records or whether sustainable fusion reactions are still on the edge of the burn.