Snippets from the Interwebs 5

Everything you need to know about the Real Bread campaign

http://www.sustainweb.org/realbread/

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Monsanto’s Roundup Ready crops may be encouraging the proliferation of a new pathogen – a viral sized microfungus. If so, then they should be outlawed. Click for a letter from the (emeritus) professor who discovered the pathogen to the US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack warning about the new problem.

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An article from “The Green Economy Post” - Wind Solar Water Alone Could Power the World by 2030 New Study Claims

Here’s a link to the paper that the article was based on

And here’s another similar claim

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=a-path-to-sustainable-energy-by-2030

and a brand new article on Skepticalscience.com (which is mostly the best source on the Internet for skewering denialist disinformation) – A plan for 100% renewable energy by 2050

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I remember the cost of the US space programme being compared to how much the US consumer spent on cosmetics or toothpaste or some such a long time ago. This was because there were people then claiming that spending on NASA was starving funds from those who would do good works for the poor and hungry etc.

Here is an interesting graphic (source : Wellhome) which truly puts into perspective how much US government spending is being invested in renewable energy compared with how much the US consumer spends on such vital expenditure as that on the weight loss, plastic surgery and tanning industries.

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Oil from algae is a technology that has been mentioned for years. A lot of work was done in the Jimmy Carter years but was almost abandoned when the Reagan/Bush years happened. There are plenty of “algoil” start ups around nowadays and one of the most promising is Origin oil who are near commercialisation.

Link to Businesswire article about Origin Oil

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Pepsi recently announced (March 15 - click for link to story) it has developed the world's first PET plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources, enabling the company to manufacture a beverage container with a significantly reduced carbon footprint. This  steals a march on Coca Cola’s Plantbottle which so has 30% plant based material in it.

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Agave, the cactus that Tequila and Mezcal is made from, looks like it could have real potential as a biofuel. Link to paper. It is being investigated for use in Australia where its low rainfall requirement would be ideal.Reported dry biomass yields of various Agave species, when annualized, range from <1 to 34 Mg ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹ without irrigation, depending on species and location. A. salmiana and A. mapisaga can have high nocturnal net CO₂ uptake rates and high productivities averaging 40 tonnes dry weight ha⁻¹ yr⁻¹.

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Build your own biogas system using 3 IDB tote tanks. These are widely used and available second hand Click for detailed instructions

 

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Join the Cloud Appreciation Society! Have another look at my two recent posts featuring clouds - “Both sides now” and “Flytec 2010” - then head over to cloudappreciationsociety.org and celebrate finding that there are others who are a little deeper than those who only indulge in blue sky thinking.

 

Deep Green revisited

Back in February 2010 I did a blog post (click for link) about new developments in wind and underwater power generation technologies. They both used the tethered hang glider/paraglider concept to generate more wind power than conventional wind or tidal turbine systems by “flying” in a figure of eight pattern that increases the effect speed of the water or wind plus greatly increases the area (and thus the available harvestable energy) that can be covered by each generating unit.

Here’s an article in the Guardian online that revisits the Minesto technology. Briefly, their first sea trial will be held in Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland this summer (where engineers are already testing other other conventional tidal technology.

Snippets from the Interwebs 2 - the sequel

Yikes! This snippet is scary. I mean really scary. If you don’t think it sounds scary, then you don’t understand the world we live in. The amount of phytoplankton - tiny marine plants - in the top layers of the oceans has declined markedly over the last century, research suggests.
Writing in the journal Nature, scientists say the decline appears to be linked to rising water temperatures. The decline - about 1% per year – 40% over the last 60 years - could be ecologically significant as plankton sit at the base of the marine food chain. An additional cause could be ocean acidification or, in actuality, reduction of ocean alkalinity (to shut up the deceivers and nit pickers). Obviously CO2 dissolves into the top layers of the ocean, which is where the phytoplankton hang out. Land plants are very sensitive to the ph (hydrogen ion concentration, aka acidity) of soil. As any good gardener knows, changing the ph of your soil can have dramatic effects on how well or badly various plants grow. It doesn't take much to upset the plankton balance and good old Homo Sapiens has recklessly stepped up to the plate again and done it. And is carrying on doing it.

Worse, phytoplankton sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide, particularly species such as the coccolithophores so this could be a positive feedback loop in action. N.B. some coccolithophores actually grow better in water with increased CO2 so, as always, things are more complicated than they, at first, appear. Read this blog about the plunge in phytoplankton.
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ANCHORAGE, Alaska— A new federal report out very recently finds there’s a 40-percent chance that the Pacific walrus, a species imperilled by loss of sea ice due to global warming, will be on a pathway to extinction by the end of the century. Scientists with the Center for Biological Diversity say even that estimate is far too optimistic because the U.S. Geological Survey relied on modeling that underestimates the effects of climate change.
story follows here:
pacific-walrus-09-10-2010
Also a hair raising picture (from last years ice melt) of the mass “shore invasion” of walruses (walri?) which re-emphasises the current accelerating loss of multi-year ice in the Arctic. The walruses are suffering from the reduction in sea ice which they would normally be on or around.


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An ice island four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland

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Lloyds of London, the insurance market makers have warned of "catastrophic consequences" for businesses that fail to prepare for a world of increasing oil scarcity and a lower carbon economy. Their report repeats warnings from Professor Paul Stevens, a former economist from Dundee University, at an earlier Chatham House conference that lack of oil by 2013 could force the price of crude above $200 (£130) a barrel. Peak oil featured on Newsweek with Paxman a few weeks ago so reality is seeping into the public arena.
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A new study by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) argues that Europe and North Africa can achieve complete independence from fossil fuels by 2050, and that all the technologies necessary for such a transformation are already in place.
renewable-energy-europe-2050
The 100 percent goal could be reached even without nuclear energy or carbon-capture and storage technology, two controversial elements of the renewable energy debate, according to the report.
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Portugal will get 45% of their electricity from renewable sources this year NY times - renewable Portugal
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Germany could get all of its electricity from renewables by 2050 the country's Federal Environment Agency said very recently
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China has probably surpassed the US in installed renewable energy or, if not, they will have by the end of the year.
greening China surpasses America
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News from the Desertec plan to build large solar concentrating (mirrors) power plant in the Sahara desert. In June, European Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger announced that Europe will start importing solar energy from the Sahara within the next five years.
solar energy from Sahara will be imported to Europe within 5 years
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In 2009, Earth Overshoot Day was reached on September 25.
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This New Scientist article is about a microbe that converts CO2 into methane using electricity. Well, what’s the use of that you might ask - apart from the coolness of the discovery?
Using some renewable energy for supplying the grid is not as reliable as, say, coal fired stations because sometimes the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. Any grid system with a significant proportion of the load supplied by renewables would work much better with the ability to store energy for short periods and this is where this microbe may come in. At times of high availability of renewable energy (strong winds and sunny days) the surplus energy, if this research pans out, can convert CO2 into methane, at an efficiency of around 80%, which can be injected straight into extant natural gas pipelines or stored locally. Methane, of course, is a very useful source to supply domestic level fuel cells which can act as distributed microgeneration.
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Bike Powered Cell Phone Chargers in Kenya

Half of Kenya’s inhabitants own a cellphone but many lack access to the necessary electrical infrastructure to charge their phones, forcing them to travel great distances and pay steep prices to juice up their phones at charging stations (around $2 a charge). Here’s news of a bike dynamo powered phone charger
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Here’s a Newsy collection of items about global examples of zero waste aspirations to generate no non-recyclable or compostable waste.



Newsy.com is a good place to see the same story from multiple media viewpoints and various countries as they present snippets gathered from many sources.
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Environmental action documentary/movie The Cove. Flipper meets The Bourne Identity. An elite team of activists, filmmakers and freedivers embark on a covert mission to penetrate a remote and hidden cove in Taiji, Japan, shining a light on a dark and deadly secret.
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Superweeds and super bugs. Monsanto invented the GM crops that had resistance to glyphosate (Roundup). Nature fought back. The RoundupReady gene is present in approximately 90% of the soy and 70% of the corn and cotton grown in the U.S. Now it’s in the weeds too. The “superweed” problem is bad and getting worse: according the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds, there are now 348 different herbicide-resistant weed biotypes, 19 of which are specifically impervious to glyphosate. Arkansas Association of Conservation Districts President Andrew Wargo, III told the New York Times that superweeds are the “single largest threat to production agriculture we’ve ever seen”
Here’s an ABC news video about superweeds
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Kitegen/Deep Green wind and tidal power

A while back I did a post entitled Power kites, Kitegen and oodles of green energy (click this link for post).This was about the astonishingly large amounts of wind energy that can be captured using power kites flown by computer in a figure of eight pattern. These appeal to me because they bridge two of my great loves – flying wings (hang gliders/paragliders) and environmentalism. This “8” flight path is, of course, familiar to anyone who kitesurfs - they won’t be surprised at all about the amazing forces that these airfoils harness, having experienced them first hand.  Kilowatts of power are available from these devices.

They are better than conventional wind turbines because, for their size, they “sweep” a much larger area of the sky and also they “sweep” at a higher altitude than a wind turbine of similar size.

A power kite can access the faster moving winds aloft – a 100 square foot kite (which would fold up into a suitcase) can operate in the same, or better, regime of wind flow as a 100 metre tall wind turbine – even better, the conventional horizontal axis wind turbine’s blades obviously spend  half of their time in the lower speed winds nearer the ground which induce powerful engineering stresses on the structure that the kite simply does not have.

Here’s a link to Kitegen

 http://www.kitegen.com/en/products/stem/

Here’s a Youtube video that combines animation with live field tests – these things work! Smaller versions could conceivably power individual houses without having to have a big tower for the turbine to sit on. There are other videos of a 100 sq ft kite generating 10 kw!

From their website: “Kite Gen’s vision is a new type of electric generation plant, based on a renewable source, suitable for any territory, at costs lower than fossil fuel generation plants, in direct competition with today’s conventional production (coal, oil or nuclear), in the GigaWatt class.”

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As if that wasn’t revolutionary enough, here is effectively the same idea but in water instead. Minesto.com is a Swedish company, originally an offshoot of Saab, that has developed a concept called “Deep Green”.

It consists of a tethered “wing” which is “flown” underwater in a figure of eight pattern. Unlike the Kitegen concept, which generates power as the kite is pulled out from the base station where the generators are, the Deep Green hydro plane actually incorporates a generator within the “flying” bit itself.

Here’s a promotional video from Minesto showing the concept in an experimental tank.

Because of the power kite like action, the Deep Green generators are moving through the water flow so fast that they do not need gearboxes, as conventionally designed tidal mills do. That cuts down on the cost, weight and maintenance required and the increased flow means that the power obtainable from the Deep Green is much greater - moving water contains far more energy than wind of the same speed as it is around 800 times denser than air.

Even our Jersey States has a special group looking at exploiting the tidal stream resources off our Channel Islands, but what they are looking at is conventional “propellers on the sea bed” type generators. Tidal stream energy is of course reliable and totally predictable. This Deep Green concept is still at the experimental water tank stage but it’s almost entirely a matter of engineering the devices and scaling them up, not a matter of any further invention.

The most significant thing about this idea is that it can operate in much slower or deeper tidal streams than conventional  tidal stream generators.  There are only relatively few areas around the British Isles which have sufficiently fast tidal flows to render ordinarily designed tidal mills worthwhile – however, even so, the amount of energy in these limited areas is colossal. One of the best of these is around Alderney and this is where investigations are taking place for a commercial company to install generators in the next year or so.

The “Deep Green” concept promises to allow much bigger areas of tidal flow around the British Isles, and also many other places around the world, to be used to harvest reliable abundant renewable energy. Here’s a pic of some of the better areas.

Following a successful demonstration, development of the technology is continuing to the next stage - deployment of a prototype off the coast of Northern Ireland in 2011.

Animation of Deep Green concept

Ideas like this remove one irritating objection that anti-sustainability nit-pickers bring up about most renewables –that they are intermittent and unpredictable.