Recently in Research Category

At times, when I think of renewable energy I become a little disheartened.

It seems like there are so many obstacles to have these alternative sources of fuel make a dent in our usage—many aren’t cheap enough to use on larger scales, many are still in the research phase, there’s not enough funding, etc… But recently, I saw two maps on Grist that provided a visual of the progress we’ve made over the years.

The first map shows the number of non-hydro renewable energy projects installed or underway in 1970, while the second map shows the number of operational and planned non-hydro projects today.

The difference is promising.

Whereas, there was very little going on just 40 or so years ago, today, almost every state has some kind of renewable energy venture going on. And with technology continually advancing, we could only go forward.

Images from Grist.com

Some rights reserved by Timothy Valentine, http://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/159597623/

Recently, I saw an article in an online magazine on Kamworks, a solar energy company with the initiative to provide solar-powered lanterns for Cambodians off the power grid. The product for this initiative is called MoonLight, and according to the company's site it's designed to replace kerosene lighting in rural areas. MoonLight was developed in conjunction with rural Cambodians and is currently produced in the country—providing not just lighting but creating a job market within the local community. So far, these lanterns are serving more than 70 percent of Cambodians who have no access to a power grid.

MoonLight replaces kerosene lamps typically used at night and are much safer than the highly flammable alternative. Each unit could be rented for about $0.08 per day, which costs about the same as it does to run a kerosene lamp.

According to their website, "Kamworks hopes that solar power can be a 'leap technology,' bringing the benefits of power to the 25% of humanity that, according to the UN, have no current access to it."

It's nice to see companies investing in such initiatives. Hopefully, more ideas like this pop up, creating jobs for the local economy and serving the basic needs of many.

The absence of debate about energy policy in the Republican primaries, a Quadrennial Technology Review that sparked little conversation, and the ongoing Solyndra drama may give some the impression that the U.S. has gotten out of the solar power game. In fact, U.S. companies and the U.S. government are in the midst of building a number of large-scale solar projects, it’s just that they’re building all of them outside of the United States.

In Namibia, a group of U.S. energy investment companies have begun building the largest solar plant in the Southern Hemisphere. The plant will cost between $1.5 and $2 billion to construct, take two years to finish, and turn out 500 megawatts of power.

Meanwhile, in Thailand, OPIC, the U.S. government’s foreign investment arm, recently approved $250 million for 51 solar plants in Thailand. Ranging in size from one megawatt to 50 megawatts, these plants would generate a total of 520 megawatts.

Also near the Equator, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency has put out a call for vendors to build a 20 megawatt hybrid wind/solar park in Columbia. While not nearly as large as the Namibia plant or as comprehensive as the Thailand plan, the Columbian park would almost double the renewable energy in the country, which currently only reaps 28 megawatts of power from non-hydropower renewable sources.

The message is clear: The U.S. government has fully and monetarily supports the expansion of solar power, just so long as that expansion occurs outside America’s borders.

In any future that runs on alternative energy, battery technology must play an important role. Batteries have to replace the gas tanks in cars, store the power from intermittent energy sources like wind and solar, and become increasingly efficient to deal with new generations of more powerful electronic devices. That's a lot of weight for the humble copper top to bear, but researchers are well on their way to tackling the problem.

At MIT, researchers have redesigned the lithium-oxygen battery to a point where it can compete in size and efficiency with the more popular lithium ion battery. The redesigned battery uses a carpet of carbon nanofibers to store lithium oxide molecules at a much greater density than in the solid electrode found in lithium ion batteries. The overall setup uses less material, weighs less, but retains more energy, making for better rechargeable batteries.

That isn't the only case where carbon nanoparticles could give batteries a boost. Scientists from the Chinese company Wuhe have found that the addition of porous carbon nanoparticles to conventional lithium ion batteries doubles the storage capacity and reduces the cost. Like MIT's nanofiber carpet, the carbon nanoparticles in the Wuhe batteries for a matrix that provides additional surface area for trapping and storing errant lithium ions.

And at Sandia National Labs, the Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory will undergo a $4.2 million renovation that will allow the facility to test the robustness of the larger batteries used in electric vehicles. Considering that this lab does a good deal of testing for private companies, this expansion could give a shot in the arm to stateside battery development by generating the data needed to make car batteries tough enough for the road.

Finding alternatives to fossil fuels remains an important goal of energy technology, but advances like these provide a good reminder that it is equally vital to figure out how to store that energy once cleaner production ramps up.

Image of AEP, New Haven WV, taken from Google Street View

On the West Virginia side of the Ohio River, close to where I grew up, is American Electric Power, who recently decided to pull the plug on their carbon capture experiment. The blame, apparently, lies with Congress's inability to create legislation that would give incentives for such climate-change helpful projects. The project in New Haven would've been the biggest carbon sequestration project to date, and would've buried CO2 as it was burned off from the adjacent coal-fired plant.

The cutting of the 668 million dollars that had been allocated to this plant is one example of how the government can be a bit overzealous when it comes to spending cuts. Not only would this have help meet our ambitious clean air goals (President Obama announced in 2009 a goal of an 80 percent reduction in climate-altering emissions by 2050), it also would've created new jobs.

It hits close to home for me, because it is literally so close to my home. I know unemployed from the area and it strikes me as sad and deflating that so little attention is being paid to where things are cut.

Obama was right when he said in 2008 that renewable energy will create a whole new sector for jobs—it just seems that maybe our Congress has forgotten about it for now, which is a shame.

Writing for the the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers, Joseph Paradiso, a professor at the MIT Media Lab, and two students Matthew Aldrich and Nan Zhao, detail how such a system would work using off the shelf technology.

"Our research aims at minimizing the energy spent lighting while simultaneously maximizing the light source's usefulness," the paper reads.

By dimming the lights when the sun's rays come pouring into the office, this system can save money and energy. And since lighting consumes 22 percent of all electricity use in the U.S., that's a lot of energy and money saved.

From an aesthetic point, the system can also modulate by color, letting the artificial light from the office blend seamlessly with the natural light from the sun. For cubicle bound office workers, this might be as close as they get to working outside.

Obviously, at night, for much of the winter, and in office areas far away from windows, this system has limited effectiveness. However, since the system will ensure that an office isn't wastefully lit by an overabundance of artificial lights, it can make an office more efficient even without the help of the sun.

In many poor, rural communities, a severe imbalance in petroleum products degrades the economy and the environment. They have too much plastic waste and too little oil for cooking and heating. The Blest Company provides a possible solution to both problems: the Blest Machine.

Designed by Japanese engineer Akinori Ito, the Blest Machine converts plastic waste into oil, using a chemical-free heating process. At full speed, the Blest Machine can convert 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of plastic bottles into about 1 liter (4.2 cups) of oil at the expense of 1 kW of energy (which costs about 20 cents U.S.). The machine is about the size of a small trash can, and costs $9,500.

The machine doesn't release carbon dioxide during the conversion process, but burning the resultant oil for fuel will release CO₂. However, Ito believes that producing fuel locally shortens the supply chain enough to offset any carbon emissions from the fuel itself.

The process is not perfect, since the machine has no built-in way to deal with the chemical residue left from coloring and other additives in the plastic. But in the developing world, where economically enriching recycling programs are few and far between, a good solution like the Blest Machine today is better than the perfect solution tomorrow.

While most of her fellow students spent the summer in career-advancing internships or in jobs that allowed for the most partying, Angela Hojnaki went to Sao Paolo, Brazil, to help collect cooking grease. That grease, when run through a special converter, will power the diesel engines of garbage trucks responsible for cleaning up the city's worst slums.

Hojnaki is part of a student collective called Green Grease at MIT, which is dedicated to finding environmentally sound ways to help Brazil's impoverished garbage collectors, known as catadores.

In August 2010, Hojnaki and her fellow students ran a workshop for the catadores, teaching them how to convert their engines to run on the very discarded cooking oil they spend all day collecting.

"They were hesitant at first," Hojnaki said. "But once they started burning it, they love it. They said it smelled like cooking."

Hojnaki presented the results of the Green Grease project on September 22nd, at a USAID/Scientists Without Borders sponsored forum at the United Nations. She said that the catadores spend 20 percent of their own money to pay for fuel, and that this project will help save them money and will simultaneously recycle vast amounts of waste.

Obviously, running a garbage truck on cooking oil is neither renewable nor sustainable. But every mile driven with cooking oil as the fuel represents fossil fuels that aren't being burnt. Moreover, it represents a practical and profitable way to start environmentally sound behavior. And in the developing world, any green initiative will be measured first by how well it helps alleviate poverty.

Sometimes a blog entry writes itself. I mean, potato power? Spud lights? How much fun can we have?

Anyway, here's the story: Proffessor Haim Rabinowitch and his colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have reported a ten-times increase in the amount of power output from a potato in this article published in the current issue of JRSE¹

If you're not familiar with the basica concept of potato power, I suggest you read this informative article and then watch this silly demonstration.

Now that we're all caught up on the science... here's the neat stuff and the new research: the authors boiled (or electroporated) the potatoes, thus creating a method energy production that is 50 times cheaper than common AA batteries. The authors even calculate that by using the spuds to power energy-efficient LEDs, they can produce light more cheaply than a kerosene lamp.

As a sidenote, the authors used the Dutch bred potato (Solanum tuberosum) cv. "Desiree," which is apparently the world's most popular red skinned yellow flesh main crop potato, according to the 2009 European Cultivated Potato Database. Ok, aside from the cool research here, how fun is it to find something like a Potato Database? I'll answer for you: pretty darn fun.

Thomson Reuters indexes journals in their databases each year according to a strict set of standards*. Accordingly, Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy (JRSE) has been indexed in the following databases:

• Science Citation Index Expanded (Including the Web of Science)
• Current Contents—Engineering, Computing & Technology

The change includes all published content back to our first issue, which premiered in January 2009.

This means that JRSE now will be included in future Journal Citation Reports. Here at AIP, we are proud of the journal we've created and we know that this inclusion will expand our audience and increase the influence of this important journal.

In other exciting indexing news, AIP applied physics journals top the Thomson Reuters rankings again in 2009.

*From Thomson Reuters: Thomson Reuters' editors use a number of tools for assessing the scholarly merit of a journal being evaluated for coverage. Among the criteria they have established are timeliness of publication, adherence to international editorial conventions, and the use of peer review and English language bibliographic information. They also examine the journal's editorial content and the international diversity of its authors and editors.