Raser Technologies developed this for HummerH3 but it may go onChevy Trailblazer pickup and Ford F-150 pickup.
The gas economy is by replacing the truck's power plant with a four -cylinder engine that does nothing but powers a monster 260HP engine , outboard generator that can pull a train. The motor's 100KW output can run seven households all day
Monday, May 4, 2009
Sunday, May 3, 2009
The "smart grid" - saving money and resources by using electricity when it is sheap -Pt.1
Currently there is experimentation in the “smart grid” — a suite of technologies intended to even out demand for electricity, cut expenses and make the electric system more stable.
Experts have talked about a smart electric system for two decades, with many false starts, but cheaper communications and computing — and federal stimulus money — could soon make the idea a reality. “The rewards are massive, and it’s highly transformational and has amazingly powerful environmental consequences,” said Roger W. Gale, a former Energy Department official and now a consultant to utilities.
Start-up companies, as well as giants like I.B.M., Honeywell and Cisco, working in the United States and around the world, are offering smart meters or products that allow digital control of the demand for electricity. Other devices monitor transmission lines, transformers and switches more closely, to warn early of blackouts.
The first “dumb” thing to go may be flat pricing. Today, a kilowatt-hour of electricity, enough to burn a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours, costs the same to most customers at all times, whether it is a sweltering summer afternoon or a balmy spring night. But the cost to the utility swings wildly, and the company may have to spend much more money to supply extra energy at peak times than during slack periods. None of this can be inferred from the bill, even though it eventually turns up there.
“What customers have paid for 75 years or more in this industry is an averaged rate,” said Anne Pramaggiore, executive vice president for customer operations at Commonwealth Edison, which is experimenting with rates that depend on when electricity is used.
Flat pricing may not be helping customers either, said Frederick F. Butler, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
“It’s like if you walked into the supermarket and everything was priced the same, and you could take as much or as little as you wanted, swipe a card at the cashier, walk out, and six weeks later they’d send you a bill,” said Mr. Butler, who is also commissioner of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. “It gives you no data on how much things cost, how much you’re using and how you can switch from one thing to another.”
A smart grid, according to advocates, would let consumers take control.
Smart meters cost $200 or so, compared with well under $100 for the conventional kind, and the new technology, like many kinds of electronics, could become obsolete in a few years. Standard mechanical meters can survive for 20 years or more, one reason public service commissions have been reluctant to let the utilities they regulate install the new ones at customer expense.
But a smart grid serves other purposes. Either through a smart meter or directly, the system can also give operators an important tool for balancing supply and demand, especially as supply becomes less predictable.
Wind turbines provide little of the grid’s electricity today, so if a turbine farm or two are becalmed the grid will barely notice. But if wind provided, for example, 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, some grid operators would need a quick way to shed some load, or at least defer it, to cope with calm conditions. With solar power there is an even greater potential need for flexibility: clouds could knock out hundreds of megawatts of supply in a few seconds.
Some utilities learned 30 years ago how to shed load without blacking out whole neighborhoods. For example, some have convinced thousands of customers, in exchange for a discounted price on energy, to let the utility put a radio-controlled kill switch on a water heater or a pool pump — the idea being that most customers would not notice if these devices were shut off for two or three hours. Other utilities take control of central air-conditioners and turn them off for about 15 minutes at a time.
But a full-scale smart grid would multiply the possibilities. The messages might go to a person by e-mail, or more likely to a household thermostat or appliance or industrial equipment. The message might be the equivalent of, “Are you sure you want to run the dishwasher now? You can save money by waiting till tonight.”
The meter could become a participant in the utility’s auction, agreeing to turn off certain equipment at the right price. The customer, either by watching that price or programming the appliances, could decide how much to buy, sometimes forgoing a purchase and sometimes delaying it to an hour when energy would probably be cheaper.
Such a system would require that appliances and other equipment be outfitted with new circuitry — which might not add much to the cost, but won’t happen until there are industry standards. Right now, smart meters being considered or installed by utilities differ in technical details and capabilities.
The “conversation” would give most consumers their first inside view of the electricity world, with its extreme fluctuations in price. Prices are estimated for each hour of the day, but the actual charge is not always what was estimated, and in off-peak hours in mild weather, prices can be negative — that is, the utility will pay the customer for using power. (Some power plants are hard to shut down, and their owners would prefer to run them during periods of low demand.)
Not everyone is confident that the smart grid will work well. “I think it makes sense, if we can do it economically,” said Gregory P. Kunkel, vice president for environmental affairs at Tenaska, an Omaha-based energy company. “But these things are often a lot easier to describe in some theoretical way than to actually implement.” Getting into tens of millions of houses to evaluate energy efficiency and install equipment is “just not so easy,” he said.
At the Electric Power Research Institute , a utility consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif., Revis James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center, said a smart grid could trim peak loads and avoid the need for expensive new “peaker” plants, which generate power only at times of high demand. But, he added, “We don’t know for sure how much you can buy through smart grid improvements.”
Mr. Butler, the utility regulator, said smart meters could lead to a revolution in how electricity was provided in the United States, unless they started a revolt among ratepayers first. “Smart meters are expensive — right now we’re talking about approximately $150 to $200 per meter — so we must be very careful in forcing anyone to upgrade if they are not willing,” he said in testimony to the Senate energy committee in March. “A pilot program must be structured in such a way that creates a buzz and excitement, not a ratepayer revolt,” he said.
In one such program, in Boulder, Colo., Xcel Energy and its partners have started converting some of the city’s roughly 50,000 electric meters to smart meters. The companies plan to convert about half of the meters, and make other changes, at a cost of about $100 million.
Dennis L. Arfmann, a lawyer at the Boulder office of Hogan & Hartson who specializes in environmental law, said he had no idea how much electricity he and his wife, Dr. Julie Brown, had used before he filled his roof with solar panels producing 4.5 kilowatts of power. During the day he sells power to Xcel and at night he buys it back; his goal is to cut his use so his net sales rise. He also helped arrange for a smart meter for his office.
At home, a smart meter installed by GridPoint, one of the Xcel partners, tells him how much electricity he uses in each 15-minute period, and an e-mail every Sunday tells him how much he used in the preceding week. He bought a meter he could use on individual appliances to tell how much each is using.
Xcel does not have time-of-day pricing, but it tells customers that nighttime power is often cheaper for customers over all, and better for the environment. Mr. Arfmann and Dr. Brown do a substantial amount of laundry; she bikes to her dental practice and then changes into the clothes she works in. But they have not shifted their clothes drying to off-peak periods because they have already unplugged the dryer and switched to a clothesline, as part of Mr. Arfmann’s campaign to cut his use to below 4,000 kilowatt-hours a year.
“I got into negotiating with my wife for the clothes dryer and the freezer,” he said. They unplugged the 35-year-old freezer, and now she washes the clothes and he hangs them, he said. “It’s worked out really, really well,” he said.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009 and Matthew Wald
Experts have talked about a smart electric system for two decades, with many false starts, but cheaper communications and computing — and federal stimulus money — could soon make the idea a reality. “The rewards are massive, and it’s highly transformational and has amazingly powerful environmental consequences,” said Roger W. Gale, a former Energy Department official and now a consultant to utilities.
Start-up companies, as well as giants like I.B.M., Honeywell and Cisco, working in the United States and around the world, are offering smart meters or products that allow digital control of the demand for electricity. Other devices monitor transmission lines, transformers and switches more closely, to warn early of blackouts.
The first “dumb” thing to go may be flat pricing. Today, a kilowatt-hour of electricity, enough to burn a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours, costs the same to most customers at all times, whether it is a sweltering summer afternoon or a balmy spring night. But the cost to the utility swings wildly, and the company may have to spend much more money to supply extra energy at peak times than during slack periods. None of this can be inferred from the bill, even though it eventually turns up there.
“What customers have paid for 75 years or more in this industry is an averaged rate,” said Anne Pramaggiore, executive vice president for customer operations at Commonwealth Edison, which is experimenting with rates that depend on when electricity is used.
Flat pricing may not be helping customers either, said Frederick F. Butler, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners.
“It’s like if you walked into the supermarket and everything was priced the same, and you could take as much or as little as you wanted, swipe a card at the cashier, walk out, and six weeks later they’d send you a bill,” said Mr. Butler, who is also commissioner of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. “It gives you no data on how much things cost, how much you’re using and how you can switch from one thing to another.”
A smart grid, according to advocates, would let consumers take control.
Smart meters cost $200 or so, compared with well under $100 for the conventional kind, and the new technology, like many kinds of electronics, could become obsolete in a few years. Standard mechanical meters can survive for 20 years or more, one reason public service commissions have been reluctant to let the utilities they regulate install the new ones at customer expense.
But a smart grid serves other purposes. Either through a smart meter or directly, the system can also give operators an important tool for balancing supply and demand, especially as supply becomes less predictable.
Wind turbines provide little of the grid’s electricity today, so if a turbine farm or two are becalmed the grid will barely notice. But if wind provided, for example, 20 percent of the nation’s electricity, some grid operators would need a quick way to shed some load, or at least defer it, to cope with calm conditions. With solar power there is an even greater potential need for flexibility: clouds could knock out hundreds of megawatts of supply in a few seconds.
Some utilities learned 30 years ago how to shed load without blacking out whole neighborhoods. For example, some have convinced thousands of customers, in exchange for a discounted price on energy, to let the utility put a radio-controlled kill switch on a water heater or a pool pump — the idea being that most customers would not notice if these devices were shut off for two or three hours. Other utilities take control of central air-conditioners and turn them off for about 15 minutes at a time.
But a full-scale smart grid would multiply the possibilities. The messages might go to a person by e-mail, or more likely to a household thermostat or appliance or industrial equipment. The message might be the equivalent of, “Are you sure you want to run the dishwasher now? You can save money by waiting till tonight.”
The meter could become a participant in the utility’s auction, agreeing to turn off certain equipment at the right price. The customer, either by watching that price or programming the appliances, could decide how much to buy, sometimes forgoing a purchase and sometimes delaying it to an hour when energy would probably be cheaper.
Such a system would require that appliances and other equipment be outfitted with new circuitry — which might not add much to the cost, but won’t happen until there are industry standards. Right now, smart meters being considered or installed by utilities differ in technical details and capabilities.
The “conversation” would give most consumers their first inside view of the electricity world, with its extreme fluctuations in price. Prices are estimated for each hour of the day, but the actual charge is not always what was estimated, and in off-peak hours in mild weather, prices can be negative — that is, the utility will pay the customer for using power. (Some power plants are hard to shut down, and their owners would prefer to run them during periods of low demand.)
Not everyone is confident that the smart grid will work well. “I think it makes sense, if we can do it economically,” said Gregory P. Kunkel, vice president for environmental affairs at Tenaska, an Omaha-based energy company. “But these things are often a lot easier to describe in some theoretical way than to actually implement.” Getting into tens of millions of houses to evaluate energy efficiency and install equipment is “just not so easy,” he said.
At the Electric Power Research Institute , a utility consortium based in Palo Alto, Calif., Revis James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center, said a smart grid could trim peak loads and avoid the need for expensive new “peaker” plants, which generate power only at times of high demand. But, he added, “We don’t know for sure how much you can buy through smart grid improvements.”
Mr. Butler, the utility regulator, said smart meters could lead to a revolution in how electricity was provided in the United States, unless they started a revolt among ratepayers first. “Smart meters are expensive — right now we’re talking about approximately $150 to $200 per meter — so we must be very careful in forcing anyone to upgrade if they are not willing,” he said in testimony to the Senate energy committee in March. “A pilot program must be structured in such a way that creates a buzz and excitement, not a ratepayer revolt,” he said.
In one such program, in Boulder, Colo., Xcel Energy and its partners have started converting some of the city’s roughly 50,000 electric meters to smart meters. The companies plan to convert about half of the meters, and make other changes, at a cost of about $100 million.
Dennis L. Arfmann, a lawyer at the Boulder office of Hogan & Hartson who specializes in environmental law, said he had no idea how much electricity he and his wife, Dr. Julie Brown, had used before he filled his roof with solar panels producing 4.5 kilowatts of power. During the day he sells power to Xcel and at night he buys it back; his goal is to cut his use so his net sales rise. He also helped arrange for a smart meter for his office.
At home, a smart meter installed by GridPoint, one of the Xcel partners, tells him how much electricity he uses in each 15-minute period, and an e-mail every Sunday tells him how much he used in the preceding week. He bought a meter he could use on individual appliances to tell how much each is using.
Xcel does not have time-of-day pricing, but it tells customers that nighttime power is often cheaper for customers over all, and better for the environment. Mr. Arfmann and Dr. Brown do a substantial amount of laundry; she bikes to her dental practice and then changes into the clothes she works in. But they have not shifted their clothes drying to off-peak periods because they have already unplugged the dryer and switched to a clothesline, as part of Mr. Arfmann’s campaign to cut his use to below 4,000 kilowatt-hours a year.
“I got into negotiating with my wife for the clothes dryer and the freezer,” he said. They unplugged the 35-year-old freezer, and now she washes the clothes and he hangs them, he said. “It’s worked out really, really well,” he said.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009 and Matthew Wald
New jobs in solar energy help recession and environment
An emphasis on solar (photovoltaic) energy is environmentally sound and will helpemploymen, President Obama to note. There is no question that the panels will work in homes. But are the national electric grids equipped to accept solar sources, as more and more homs equip themselves with panels and produce excess energy? Or more importantly,as panels become a narional or at least state-wide source?
The generation of panels for hme use is expanding, although in today's economic environment these $25,000 installations are not growing as much as in pat carefree years.
In Hillsboro, OR Solar World AG from Bonn is starting a panels factory (500 jobs, easily, goal 1,000)making 1,700 cells/day. They are rewamping a CA facility bought from Shell Group, and exploring Al, NM, GA sites.
Even as SolarWorld charges ahead, adding new equipment and breaking ground for its factory expansion, there are daily reminders of the challenges ahead. The company’s share price has declined more than 30 percent in two years, to 21.05 euros ($27.80), largely because of slowing demand and a growing number of manufacturers.
Asia has also become a manufacturing hub for solar power, and many panels from China have entered the market, although the recession has forced some companies to cut back. Suntech Power, a leading Chinese manufacturer, is now using just 55 percent of its factories’ capacity, though it, too, is looking for factory space in the United States for the long term.
Like the rest of the industry, SolarWorld is also trying to adjust to the decline in panel prices, which are likely to keep falling into the summer, given the oversupply and the continuing credit crisis.
Boris Klebensberger, CEO of US SolarWorld tries to put a positive spin on this, noting that the first quarter — whose results are due in a few weeks — is always relatively weak because Europeans avoid installing panels during the winter.
For all of last year, the company’s sales grew at a heady 31 percent. But the pace of growth in the fourth quarter slowed considerably.
Industrywide installations in the first quarter in California, the largest market in the United States, remain robust. Installers there are wary, however. They say demand dried up in the last six months because companies lack financing and homeowners are more worried about their mortgages than sinking $25,000 or more into making electricity on their roof.
Analysts say the first-quarter figures in California may have had a boost from projects that were already in the pipeline and that future numbers may be less robust. A year ago, installers say, they were calling manufacturers to ask for panels; now the situation is reversed, with manufacturers making sales calls.
In the meantime, the competition among manufacturers is likely to intensify. Even as some of the weaker solar companies resort to layoffs, a number of big names — including Schott, First Solar, SunPower and Sharp — are building, expanding or looking to build manufacturing plants in the United States. Sanyo, the Japanese electronics company, is building a solar wafer factory in Salem, Oregon’s capital, that is to begin production this fall.
Mr. Klebensberger relishes the competition and the potential boost it can give the American economy. Solar energy can provide jobs and energy security, he says, “so it’s a way out of the crisis.”
Dr. Paranoia thanks NYTimes (5/3/09) for info.
The generation of panels for hme use is expanding, although in today's economic environment these $25,000 installations are not growing as much as in pat carefree years.
In Hillsboro, OR Solar World AG from Bonn is starting a panels factory (500 jobs, easily, goal 1,000)making 1,700 cells/day. They are rewamping a CA facility bought from Shell Group, and exploring Al, NM, GA sites.
Even as SolarWorld charges ahead, adding new equipment and breaking ground for its factory expansion, there are daily reminders of the challenges ahead. The company’s share price has declined more than 30 percent in two years, to 21.05 euros ($27.80), largely because of slowing demand and a growing number of manufacturers.
Asia has also become a manufacturing hub for solar power, and many panels from China have entered the market, although the recession has forced some companies to cut back. Suntech Power, a leading Chinese manufacturer, is now using just 55 percent of its factories’ capacity, though it, too, is looking for factory space in the United States for the long term.
Like the rest of the industry, SolarWorld is also trying to adjust to the decline in panel prices, which are likely to keep falling into the summer, given the oversupply and the continuing credit crisis.
Boris Klebensberger, CEO of US SolarWorld tries to put a positive spin on this, noting that the first quarter — whose results are due in a few weeks — is always relatively weak because Europeans avoid installing panels during the winter.
For all of last year, the company’s sales grew at a heady 31 percent. But the pace of growth in the fourth quarter slowed considerably.
Industrywide installations in the first quarter in California, the largest market in the United States, remain robust. Installers there are wary, however. They say demand dried up in the last six months because companies lack financing and homeowners are more worried about their mortgages than sinking $25,000 or more into making electricity on their roof.
Analysts say the first-quarter figures in California may have had a boost from projects that were already in the pipeline and that future numbers may be less robust. A year ago, installers say, they were calling manufacturers to ask for panels; now the situation is reversed, with manufacturers making sales calls.
In the meantime, the competition among manufacturers is likely to intensify. Even as some of the weaker solar companies resort to layoffs, a number of big names — including Schott, First Solar, SunPower and Sharp — are building, expanding or looking to build manufacturing plants in the United States. Sanyo, the Japanese electronics company, is building a solar wafer factory in Salem, Oregon’s capital, that is to begin production this fall.
Mr. Klebensberger relishes the competition and the potential boost it can give the American economy. Solar energy can provide jobs and energy security, he says, “so it’s a way out of the crisis.”
Dr. Paranoia thanks NYTimes (5/3/09) for info.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
convert carbon from smokestacks into fuel
IF the government regulates carbon dioxide emissions, power plants and other factories will probably start removing CO2 from their smokestacks and will have to pay to get rid of it. The conventional wisdom is that it will be sequestered underground.
ut one audacious concept is to recycle the carbon by turning it into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
Chemical plants, in this vision, could generate liquid hydrocarbons by taking hydrogen from natural gas or even water and combining it with CO2 to make fuels that would cut the demand for crude oil. In effect, each carbon atom would be used twice: the first time in a coal-fired power plant and the second in a car engine.
For the United States, such a system would also have a strategic benefit, substituting chemical processing here for oil imports from abroad. Its financial viability would depend on the cost of making new fuel from carbon, and on how much a company with surplus carbon would be willing to pay to get rid of it.
A crucial consideration, though, is how much energy it would take to recombine carbon with hydrogen to produce a fuel that could substitute for gasoline. Energy costs money, but it also comes with a cost in carbon emissions that could reduce or eliminate any environmental benefit to the process.
As unlikely as the concept may seem, chemists have been working on it for decades. Chemistry journal articles in the 1990s reported various approaches to the problem, with the target product often being methanol, which can be used as a vehicle fuel or as an intermediate product.
But it took so much energy that “the juice was not worth the squeeze,” said Byron H. Elton, president and chief operating officer of Carbon Sciences, a company in Santa Barbara, Calif., that believes it has what it calls a biocatalyst that will combine the hydrogen in water with the carbon dioxide, without the usual large expenditure of energy required to break the chemical bond between water’s hydrogen and oxygen.
The company has one patent and is applying for several more. It declined to provide details, except to say that a pilot plant produces methanol a few ounces at a time. Scaling up will be a challenge, Mr. Elton said.
“It’s drip, drip, drip, not gush, gush, gush,” he said.
A different group of scientists, at the University of Southern California, made a deal at the end of 2007 with Honeywell, which has a large chemical business, to work on making methanol from carbon dioxide.
The methanol is not so much a fuel as a carrier that incorporates energy from different sources, some of them clean, like wind. Electricity made from wind can be used to separate hydrogen, which can then be combined with the carbon dioxide to make liquid hydrocarbons like methanol.
“Earth does not have an energy problem; we have an energy carrier and distribution problem,” said G. K. Surya Prakash, one of the U.S.C. scientists, at a conference on the subject last year. “We have plenty of alternative energies.”
Dr. Prakash and two U.S.C. colleagues, George Olah, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and Alain Goeppert, wrote a book called “Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy,” which foresees a system built on turning carbon dioxide back into fuel.
Methanol has only about half the energy content of gasoline, per gallon, and like ethanol, it eats away at the seals and gaskets in cars and service station fueling systems. But it can run well in engines designed for it, and oil refineries already have experience in converting it into synthetic gasoline.
It can also be used directly in a fuel cell and converted to electricity, although fuel cells are today far too expensive to be practical for cars.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009
ut one audacious concept is to recycle the carbon by turning it into liquid hydrocarbon fuels.
Chemical plants, in this vision, could generate liquid hydrocarbons by taking hydrogen from natural gas or even water and combining it with CO2 to make fuels that would cut the demand for crude oil. In effect, each carbon atom would be used twice: the first time in a coal-fired power plant and the second in a car engine.
For the United States, such a system would also have a strategic benefit, substituting chemical processing here for oil imports from abroad. Its financial viability would depend on the cost of making new fuel from carbon, and on how much a company with surplus carbon would be willing to pay to get rid of it.
A crucial consideration, though, is how much energy it would take to recombine carbon with hydrogen to produce a fuel that could substitute for gasoline. Energy costs money, but it also comes with a cost in carbon emissions that could reduce or eliminate any environmental benefit to the process.
As unlikely as the concept may seem, chemists have been working on it for decades. Chemistry journal articles in the 1990s reported various approaches to the problem, with the target product often being methanol, which can be used as a vehicle fuel or as an intermediate product.
But it took so much energy that “the juice was not worth the squeeze,” said Byron H. Elton, president and chief operating officer of Carbon Sciences, a company in Santa Barbara, Calif., that believes it has what it calls a biocatalyst that will combine the hydrogen in water with the carbon dioxide, without the usual large expenditure of energy required to break the chemical bond between water’s hydrogen and oxygen.
The company has one patent and is applying for several more. It declined to provide details, except to say that a pilot plant produces methanol a few ounces at a time. Scaling up will be a challenge, Mr. Elton said.
“It’s drip, drip, drip, not gush, gush, gush,” he said.
A different group of scientists, at the University of Southern California, made a deal at the end of 2007 with Honeywell, which has a large chemical business, to work on making methanol from carbon dioxide.
The methanol is not so much a fuel as a carrier that incorporates energy from different sources, some of them clean, like wind. Electricity made from wind can be used to separate hydrogen, which can then be combined with the carbon dioxide to make liquid hydrocarbons like methanol.
“Earth does not have an energy problem; we have an energy carrier and distribution problem,” said G. K. Surya Prakash, one of the U.S.C. scientists, at a conference on the subject last year. “We have plenty of alternative energies.”
Dr. Prakash and two U.S.C. colleagues, George Olah, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, and Alain Goeppert, wrote a book called “Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy,” which foresees a system built on turning carbon dioxide back into fuel.
Methanol has only about half the energy content of gasoline, per gallon, and like ethanol, it eats away at the seals and gaskets in cars and service station fueling systems. But it can run well in engines designed for it, and oil refineries already have experience in converting it into synthetic gasoline.
It can also be used directly in a fuel cell and converted to electricity, although fuel cells are today far too expensive to be practical for cars.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009
Friday, May 1, 2009
IBM brings "smarter tools" for road, rail, water & food infrastructure
Years of steady progress in developing more powerful and less expensive computers, Web software and faster communications links finally came together in the mid-1990s, when cvomputer technologies joined hands.
A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure — more efficient and environmentally friendlier systems for managing, among other things, commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. This time, the crucial technological ingredients include low-cost sensors and clever software for analytics and visualization, as well as computing firepower.
Wireless sensors can now collect and transmit information from almost any object — for instance, roads, food crates, utility lines and water pipes. And the improved software helps interpret the huge flow of information, so raw data becomes useful knowledge to monitor and optimize transport and other complex systems. The efficiency payoff, experts say, should translate into big reductions in energy used, greenhouse gases emitted and natural resources consumed.
Smart infrastructure is a new horizon for computer technology. Computers have proven themselves powerful tools for calculation and communication. The next step, experts say, is for computers to become intelligent instruments of control, linking them to data-generating sensors throughout the planet’s infrastructure. “We are entering a new phase of computing, in which computers will be interacting with the physical world as never before,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
Computer-enhanced infrastructure promises to be a lucrative market. And the outlook has seemingly improved in the economic downturn, as governments around the world embrace stimulus spending that relies heavily on public works projects, both high-tech and low.
A handful of big technology corporations, including I.B.M., Cisco and General Electric, have major initiatives under way — I.B.M. has even branded its campaign, “Smarter Planet.” Yet many other companies, both large and small, are also pursuing opportunities.
Just how large the market will be and how quickly it will develop remain uncertain. The early smart-infrastructure ventures often seem like applied science projects, encouraging but small scale. It is not clear whether they will work outside the laboratory, where they must turn a profit or justify higher taxes or user fees. Much of the early Internet investment, after all, came to grief.
The smart infrastructure wave, analysts warn, could bring a similar cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment. Yet, like the Internet, they say, the technology will prevail in the long run.
“There will be a lot of hype and a lot of things that don’t pan out,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. “But the direction is absolutely right. We’ve barely scratched the surface of how information technology can help control and conserve energy use.”
I.B.M., with its large research labs and technology services business, has the most experience in the widest range of digital infrastructure projects. Many of its most advanced projects are in Europe, where energy costs are higher than in the United States. But while Europe remains a few years ahead, there is growing interest and investment in America, said Sharon Nunes, a scientist who heads I.B.M.’s environmental innovations group.
In the utility sector, I.B.M. has “smart grid” programs under way with several governments and companies, using sensors, software and computerized household meters to maintain power lines and reduce energy consumption. A Department of Energy demonstration project in Washington State, using I.B.M. technology, concluded that peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by 15 percent. Nationally, such a reduction over a 20-year period would eliminate the need for the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants.
In the field of distribution, I.B.M. is working with food producers and retailers to begin reducing the $48 billion of food that is thrown away in the United States each year. In Norway, it has a project with the nation’s largest food supplier that uses radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags and tracking software over the Internet to optimize shipments from the farm to supermarket shelves, reducing spoilage.
In China, I.B.M. worked with the China Ocean Shipping Company, a big international shipper, using optimization and simulation models to consolidate 100 distribution centers into 40. The re-engineering of its distribution network cut the Chinese company’s operating costs by 23 percent and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent, I.B.M. said.
In water management, I.B.M. is collaborating with the Nature Conservancy on its Water for Tomorrow project, which is monitoring and creating computer modeling for large river basins in Brazil, China and the United States, to help guide land use and water policies.The company used its computer chip factory in Burlington, Vt., as a test bed for improving the efficiency of industrial water use. Using sensors to calibrate water flows and temperatures, analytics software and optimizing models, I.B.M. reduced its water consumption at the plant by 27 percent, or 20 million gallons a year, even as manufacturing output increased 30 percent.
The plant saves $3 million a year, partly from reduced costs for water and treatment, I.B.M. said, and energy savings — less pumping, cooling and heating the water — account for 60 percent of the cost reduction.
“It started out as a water-saving program and then we really saw the energy savings,” Ms. Nunes said. “And that’s true in industrial, agricultural and household use, this incredible interplay between energy and water.”
Today, I.B.M. is building smart traffic systems in cities including London and Brisbane, Australia, but its standout success has been in Stockholm.
In 2006, Stockholm experimented with congestion pricing, charging cars up to $4 to enter the downtown area, depending on the time of day. The cars were monitored with RFID cards and webcams that photographed license plate numbers. Drivers had to pay within two weeks or faced penalties, but I.B.M. linked the driver data to 400 convenience stores in the city to make payment easier.
Within a few weeks, the impact in Stockholm was evident, and it has proved permanent. Car traffic in downtown Stockholm has been reduced by 20 percent, carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 12 percent, and the city’s public transport system has added 40,000 daily riders, I.B.M. said. The webcams accurately read license plates, even on snowy days, more than 95 percent of the time. So the RFID tags are no longer in use. After expenses, the smart traffic system generates $80 million a year for the city.
Stockholm is a city in a Scandinavian country with a long environmental tradition, in a socially democratic nation. Yet even in Stockholm, there were complaints initially. The city also took the risk of installing the entire system, calling it a trial, and then having residents vote on it seven months later, after the benefits were apparent.
“These systems can be pretty hard to implement politically,” observed Naveen Lamba, a transportation expert in I.B.M.’s global services unit.
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg learned that lesson last year, when state legislators brushed off his plan for a smart traffic system in Manhattan. Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal to charge drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone south of 60th Street during peak hours was supported by civic, labor and environmental groups as a way to ease traffic and to finance improvements in mass transit. But many New Yorkers, especially those outside Manhattan, viewed the mayor’s plan as a tax on their ability to move around their own city.
In Amsterdam, which hopes to cut its carbon footprint 40 percent by 2025, the city is trying a different approach, by persuading commuters to stay put instead of taxing them when they come.
As part of a “smart city” project, Amsterdam is working with Cisco and other companies to set up remote, high-tech work centers. A pilot smart work center opened in September in Almere, whose residents routinely commute to Amsterdam. The center is equipped with high-speed, Internet-linked computer work stations, high-definition video conferencing and even child day care. The Dutch experiment, Cisco says, is being closely followed by dozens of cities.
In San Francisco, Cisco has experimented with enticing commuters to try public transportation by offering a bus that has wireless Internet access for passengers and on-board touch screens that are fed constantly updated information on connections and wait times. Reliable journey times, surveys show, are what commuters most value.
The hybrid-fuel bus — a pilot project that ended earlier this year — also had a “green gauge” feature that allowed passengers to calculate the carbon-emission savings on their trips. “Visibility is crucial,” said Rick Hutley, a Cisco consultant. “When people see the environmental impact and can measure it, they jump on board and participate.”
Even railroads, a 19th-century technology, are getting more high-tech intelligence. In a trial with one of the nation’s largest railroads, G.E. is using sensors on tracks, sidings and locomotives; sophisticated computer models; and optimization software to fine-tune the flow of traffic across the railway network.
As a result, trains wait less and travel at higher speeds, an increase of 2 miles per hour on average. That may seem small, but each mile per hour improvement translates into $100 million in efficiency gains including energy savings, G.E. said. And new locomotives amount to computers on rails, wirelessly downloading information on trips, traffic, terrain and loads, and making adjustments. Such automated cruise control delivers energy savings of up to 13 percent.
“Both the trains and the tracks are evolving and getting smarter and smarter,” said Christopher Johnson, an expert in computing and decision science at G.E.’s research labs.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009
A similar pattern is emerging today, experts say, for what is being called smart infrastructure — more efficient and environmentally friendlier systems for managing, among other things, commuter traffic, food distribution, electric grids and waterways. This time, the crucial technological ingredients include low-cost sensors and clever software for analytics and visualization, as well as computing firepower.
Wireless sensors can now collect and transmit information from almost any object — for instance, roads, food crates, utility lines and water pipes. And the improved software helps interpret the huge flow of information, so raw data becomes useful knowledge to monitor and optimize transport and other complex systems. The efficiency payoff, experts say, should translate into big reductions in energy used, greenhouse gases emitted and natural resources consumed.
Smart infrastructure is a new horizon for computer technology. Computers have proven themselves powerful tools for calculation and communication. The next step, experts say, is for computers to become intelligent instruments of control, linking them to data-generating sensors throughout the planet’s infrastructure. “We are entering a new phase of computing, in which computers will be interacting with the physical world as never before,” said Edward Lazowska, a professor of computer science at the University of Washington.
Computer-enhanced infrastructure promises to be a lucrative market. And the outlook has seemingly improved in the economic downturn, as governments around the world embrace stimulus spending that relies heavily on public works projects, both high-tech and low.
A handful of big technology corporations, including I.B.M., Cisco and General Electric, have major initiatives under way — I.B.M. has even branded its campaign, “Smarter Planet.” Yet many other companies, both large and small, are also pursuing opportunities.
Just how large the market will be and how quickly it will develop remain uncertain. The early smart-infrastructure ventures often seem like applied science projects, encouraging but small scale. It is not clear whether they will work outside the laboratory, where they must turn a profit or justify higher taxes or user fees. Much of the early Internet investment, after all, came to grief.
The smart infrastructure wave, analysts warn, could bring a similar cycle of enthusiasm and disappointment. Yet, like the Internet, they say, the technology will prevail in the long run.
“There will be a lot of hype and a lot of things that don’t pan out,” said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School. “But the direction is absolutely right. We’ve barely scratched the surface of how information technology can help control and conserve energy use.”
I.B.M., with its large research labs and technology services business, has the most experience in the widest range of digital infrastructure projects. Many of its most advanced projects are in Europe, where energy costs are higher than in the United States. But while Europe remains a few years ahead, there is growing interest and investment in America, said Sharon Nunes, a scientist who heads I.B.M.’s environmental innovations group.
In the utility sector, I.B.M. has “smart grid” programs under way with several governments and companies, using sensors, software and computerized household meters to maintain power lines and reduce energy consumption. A Department of Energy demonstration project in Washington State, using I.B.M. technology, concluded that peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by 15 percent. Nationally, such a reduction over a 20-year period would eliminate the need for the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants.
In the field of distribution, I.B.M. is working with food producers and retailers to begin reducing the $48 billion of food that is thrown away in the United States each year. In Norway, it has a project with the nation’s largest food supplier that uses radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags and tracking software over the Internet to optimize shipments from the farm to supermarket shelves, reducing spoilage.
In China, I.B.M. worked with the China Ocean Shipping Company, a big international shipper, using optimization and simulation models to consolidate 100 distribution centers into 40. The re-engineering of its distribution network cut the Chinese company’s operating costs by 23 percent and reduced carbon dioxide emissions by 15 percent, I.B.M. said.
In water management, I.B.M. is collaborating with the Nature Conservancy on its Water for Tomorrow project, which is monitoring and creating computer modeling for large river basins in Brazil, China and the United States, to help guide land use and water policies.The company used its computer chip factory in Burlington, Vt., as a test bed for improving the efficiency of industrial water use. Using sensors to calibrate water flows and temperatures, analytics software and optimizing models, I.B.M. reduced its water consumption at the plant by 27 percent, or 20 million gallons a year, even as manufacturing output increased 30 percent.
The plant saves $3 million a year, partly from reduced costs for water and treatment, I.B.M. said, and energy savings — less pumping, cooling and heating the water — account for 60 percent of the cost reduction.
“It started out as a water-saving program and then we really saw the energy savings,” Ms. Nunes said. “And that’s true in industrial, agricultural and household use, this incredible interplay between energy and water.”
Today, I.B.M. is building smart traffic systems in cities including London and Brisbane, Australia, but its standout success has been in Stockholm.
In 2006, Stockholm experimented with congestion pricing, charging cars up to $4 to enter the downtown area, depending on the time of day. The cars were monitored with RFID cards and webcams that photographed license plate numbers. Drivers had to pay within two weeks or faced penalties, but I.B.M. linked the driver data to 400 convenience stores in the city to make payment easier.
Within a few weeks, the impact in Stockholm was evident, and it has proved permanent. Car traffic in downtown Stockholm has been reduced by 20 percent, carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 12 percent, and the city’s public transport system has added 40,000 daily riders, I.B.M. said. The webcams accurately read license plates, even on snowy days, more than 95 percent of the time. So the RFID tags are no longer in use. After expenses, the smart traffic system generates $80 million a year for the city.
Stockholm is a city in a Scandinavian country with a long environmental tradition, in a socially democratic nation. Yet even in Stockholm, there were complaints initially. The city also took the risk of installing the entire system, calling it a trial, and then having residents vote on it seven months later, after the benefits were apparent.
“These systems can be pretty hard to implement politically,” observed Naveen Lamba, a transportation expert in I.B.M.’s global services unit.
In New York, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg learned that lesson last year, when state legislators brushed off his plan for a smart traffic system in Manhattan. Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal to charge drivers $8 to enter a congestion zone south of 60th Street during peak hours was supported by civic, labor and environmental groups as a way to ease traffic and to finance improvements in mass transit. But many New Yorkers, especially those outside Manhattan, viewed the mayor’s plan as a tax on their ability to move around their own city.
In Amsterdam, which hopes to cut its carbon footprint 40 percent by 2025, the city is trying a different approach, by persuading commuters to stay put instead of taxing them when they come.
As part of a “smart city” project, Amsterdam is working with Cisco and other companies to set up remote, high-tech work centers. A pilot smart work center opened in September in Almere, whose residents routinely commute to Amsterdam. The center is equipped with high-speed, Internet-linked computer work stations, high-definition video conferencing and even child day care. The Dutch experiment, Cisco says, is being closely followed by dozens of cities.
In San Francisco, Cisco has experimented with enticing commuters to try public transportation by offering a bus that has wireless Internet access for passengers and on-board touch screens that are fed constantly updated information on connections and wait times. Reliable journey times, surveys show, are what commuters most value.
The hybrid-fuel bus — a pilot project that ended earlier this year — also had a “green gauge” feature that allowed passengers to calculate the carbon-emission savings on their trips. “Visibility is crucial,” said Rick Hutley, a Cisco consultant. “When people see the environmental impact and can measure it, they jump on board and participate.”
Even railroads, a 19th-century technology, are getting more high-tech intelligence. In a trial with one of the nation’s largest railroads, G.E. is using sensors on tracks, sidings and locomotives; sophisticated computer models; and optimization software to fine-tune the flow of traffic across the railway network.
As a result, trains wait less and travel at higher speeds, an increase of 2 miles per hour on average. That may seem small, but each mile per hour improvement translates into $100 million in efficiency gains including energy savings, G.E. said. And new locomotives amount to computers on rails, wirelessly downloading information on trips, traffic, terrain and loads, and making adjustments. Such automated cruise control delivers energy savings of up to 13 percent.
“Both the trains and the tracks are evolving and getting smarter and smarter,” said Christopher Johnson, an expert in computing and decision science at G.E.’s research labs.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009
Energy from atomic fusion, clean and expensive
China, the United States, Japan and the European Union have committed billions of dollars to construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, in a heavily forested corner of Provence called Cadarache that is a center for atomic research.
The goal is to prove that energy can be generated through nuclear fusion — a process akin to how light and heat are produced by the sun. The promise is virtually unlimited amounts of energy from abundantly available sources.
Fusion creates no greenhouse gases and produces far less hazardous waste than fission, the current nuclear process, although fusion reactors do become radioactive and waste would still require special disposal.
If successful, the concept is not expected to be commercially viable until midcentury. There has already been a two-year delay because of difficulties setting up an international organization for the project.
Rising costs for equipment could further complicate relations among the participants, which include South Korea, India and Russia.
Even so, scientists say an international approach is critical.
“No one nation can develop fusion alone,” said Pascal Garin, the project leader at the International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility in Japan, which is helping to develop materials for the reactor. “The technical and economic challenges are enormous compared with other low-emissions technologies like solar power or conventional nuclear power.” The original budget, set in 2001, was about $10 billion, to be spent over 30 years. About half that amount was to be spent by participating governments on national projects to build components for the reactor.
That budget is being revised because prices of crucial commodities like steel and copper have soared, and because features are being added to the original design to help to ensure that the experiment works.
The seven parties are expected to decide on a new amount, which could be significantly higher, and on how to share the burden of paying for it, at meetings in June and November, said Neil Calder, a spokesman for the ITER Organization.
The parties are also expected to decide this year whether Kazakhstan, which offers nuclear expertise, and mineral and oil wealth, will join the organization, Mr. Calder said.
While adding another country could help defray the costs borne by each member, it also could make the project even more complicated.
The United States has already spent about $27 million to finance the ITER Organization, which is responsible for the construction and safe operation of the reactor, according to the Department of Energy. The country’s total contribution to the project will be $1.45 billion to $2.2 billion over the next decade, the department said.
The European Commission, which is the union’s executive body here in Brussels, said the 27 member nations and Switzerland had committed to spend about 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) on ITER over the next five years, but that sum could rise sharply.
Over all, the European Union is supposed to contribute most of the costs, or more than 45 percent of the total, in exchange for locating the project in France. The agreement consists of funds contributed by the union and Japan totaling about 700 million euros.
So far, experimental fusion reactors have required more energy to operate than they have produced. ITER and the project in Japan are supposed to prove that fusion could be much more than a drain on the grid.
Nuclear plants now generate power through fission, splitting heavy uranium atoms. Fusion involves heating very lightweight hydrogen atoms to about 100 million degrees Celsius — or about 10 times the temperature of the sun.
This process creates a so-called plasma gas in which normally repelling particles combine and yield vast amounts of additional energy. By confining the hot plasma with the use of powerful magnets, the scientists aim to keep the process going in much the same way that the sun, confined by gravity, continues to burn.
Scientists say the heat from fusion could be used to drive electrical turbines with steam.
Scientists already know how to make a reactor like ITER work, but they say they need to conduct about 15 years of experiments once the machine is built to learn how to keep it running and to test materials under extreme conditions.
Keeping the financing going over that period could be a challenge as governments and priorities change. Experts also warn that nations like China, keen on developing their own fusion industries, could eventually split from the group.
The project is a vast undertaking. In March, the authorities at Cadarache finished clearing and flattening a forested area the size of 70 football fields where the reactor will be built. The foundation will be laid in September and shortly after construction should begin on dozens of other buildings where huge components like magnets, each weighing several tons, will be assembled.
By 2018, the machine should be ready.
Scientists then would spend the next decade or so trying to create bursts of power of up to 500 megawatts for several minutes at a time, and experimenting with the plasma gas.
Critics say that if the primary purpose of the ITER venture is to create large supplies of emissions-free electricity to mitigate climate change, then the money would be better invested in existing technologies like wind and solar power, which have been proven and are ready for deployment.
But defenders of the project say the total that will be spent on ITER and its associated projects is small when compared with what some companies would spend on research and development for consumer goods, like new car models, over the same time frame.
Defenders also liken the project to the NASA space program, which yielded spinoff technologies that benefit other industries.
European Union officials said that work on the reactor could lead to a host of breakthroughs, including the development of new coatings that perform well under very high temperatures, as well as new designs for microchips.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009
The goal is to prove that energy can be generated through nuclear fusion — a process akin to how light and heat are produced by the sun. The promise is virtually unlimited amounts of energy from abundantly available sources.
Fusion creates no greenhouse gases and produces far less hazardous waste than fission, the current nuclear process, although fusion reactors do become radioactive and waste would still require special disposal.
If successful, the concept is not expected to be commercially viable until midcentury. There has already been a two-year delay because of difficulties setting up an international organization for the project.
Rising costs for equipment could further complicate relations among the participants, which include South Korea, India and Russia.
Even so, scientists say an international approach is critical.
“No one nation can develop fusion alone,” said Pascal Garin, the project leader at the International Fusion Material Irradiation Facility in Japan, which is helping to develop materials for the reactor. “The technical and economic challenges are enormous compared with other low-emissions technologies like solar power or conventional nuclear power.” The original budget, set in 2001, was about $10 billion, to be spent over 30 years. About half that amount was to be spent by participating governments on national projects to build components for the reactor.
That budget is being revised because prices of crucial commodities like steel and copper have soared, and because features are being added to the original design to help to ensure that the experiment works.
The seven parties are expected to decide on a new amount, which could be significantly higher, and on how to share the burden of paying for it, at meetings in June and November, said Neil Calder, a spokesman for the ITER Organization.
The parties are also expected to decide this year whether Kazakhstan, which offers nuclear expertise, and mineral and oil wealth, will join the organization, Mr. Calder said.
While adding another country could help defray the costs borne by each member, it also could make the project even more complicated.
The United States has already spent about $27 million to finance the ITER Organization, which is responsible for the construction and safe operation of the reactor, according to the Department of Energy. The country’s total contribution to the project will be $1.45 billion to $2.2 billion over the next decade, the department said.
The European Commission, which is the union’s executive body here in Brussels, said the 27 member nations and Switzerland had committed to spend about 2 billion euros ($2.6 billion) on ITER over the next five years, but that sum could rise sharply.
Over all, the European Union is supposed to contribute most of the costs, or more than 45 percent of the total, in exchange for locating the project in France. The agreement consists of funds contributed by the union and Japan totaling about 700 million euros.
So far, experimental fusion reactors have required more energy to operate than they have produced. ITER and the project in Japan are supposed to prove that fusion could be much more than a drain on the grid.
Nuclear plants now generate power through fission, splitting heavy uranium atoms. Fusion involves heating very lightweight hydrogen atoms to about 100 million degrees Celsius — or about 10 times the temperature of the sun.
This process creates a so-called plasma gas in which normally repelling particles combine and yield vast amounts of additional energy. By confining the hot plasma with the use of powerful magnets, the scientists aim to keep the process going in much the same way that the sun, confined by gravity, continues to burn.
Scientists say the heat from fusion could be used to drive electrical turbines with steam.
Scientists already know how to make a reactor like ITER work, but they say they need to conduct about 15 years of experiments once the machine is built to learn how to keep it running and to test materials under extreme conditions.
Keeping the financing going over that period could be a challenge as governments and priorities change. Experts also warn that nations like China, keen on developing their own fusion industries, could eventually split from the group.
The project is a vast undertaking. In March, the authorities at Cadarache finished clearing and flattening a forested area the size of 70 football fields where the reactor will be built. The foundation will be laid in September and shortly after construction should begin on dozens of other buildings where huge components like magnets, each weighing several tons, will be assembled.
By 2018, the machine should be ready.
Scientists then would spend the next decade or so trying to create bursts of power of up to 500 megawatts for several minutes at a time, and experimenting with the plasma gas.
Critics say that if the primary purpose of the ITER venture is to create large supplies of emissions-free electricity to mitigate climate change, then the money would be better invested in existing technologies like wind and solar power, which have been proven and are ready for deployment.
But defenders of the project say the total that will be spent on ITER and its associated projects is small when compared with what some companies would spend on research and development for consumer goods, like new car models, over the same time frame.
Defenders also liken the project to the NASA space program, which yielded spinoff technologies that benefit other industries.
European Union officials said that work on the reactor could lead to a host of breakthroughs, including the development of new coatings that perform well under very high temperatures, as well as new designs for microchips.
Thanks to NYTimes 4/30/2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Earth Day 2009 reminds you to be Green
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
We have gone a long way forward since the first Earth Day which this family seems to remember attending in Union Square Park, with masses of cheerful people. Expectations for future were high. History states that it was initiated in April 22, 1970 as a teach-in, by environmentalist US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, as a part of a Zero Population Growth movement. Although Earth Day observation dates vary, the concept has picked up momentum world-wide, and green concepts such as global warming became the main thrust around 2000. Wikipedia claims that it is observed by 500M people and 175 national governments.
Actually, whether we like it or not, New Yorkers are some of the greenest people on the earth, particularly Manhattanites. Where else are people living so close together, sharing heat through apartment walls in the winter and sunshine as well, through use of strategically distributed vertical density (highrisers, in common parlance) . We use our bipedal structure to perambulate rather than hop in cars to buy fresh bagels, and take common carriers – buses (oh well, sloppy diesel consuming rather than hydrogen, as in parts of Canada) and subways - for longer distances. There is some thought on part of the Mayor to place solar panels on public buildings and bridges, and make car use below 86th Street super-prohibitive.
It is therefore particularly pleasing to see commercial enterprises, such as the ShopRite supermarkets, embracing Earth Day 2009, April 22, the 39th anniversary of the modern environmental movement, to make public their participation. They were following the example of the three Piscataway NJ middle schools, where with an investment of $1.2M the school district installed 800 solar panels on the roofs of the schools, supplying 20% of their energy requirement and saving $67K in annual costs, more importantly preventing 45 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere annually, equivalent of planting 13.5 acres of trees or not driving 125,000 miles a year. The ShopRite people at Wharton, NJ have installed 1,600 solar panels, apparently larger, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 280 tons a year, ditto in Marlton, NJ, a store certified with the Energy Star designation since 2007, using 35% less energy than similar locations. Reduce, reuse and recycle is their slogan at Meriden, CT, where the recycle program has saved 50% of their trash removal work. This is where green Manhattan fails – while apartment buildings using city Sanitation Department program can recycle, commercial buildings, supermarkets and offices using commercial trash removal services are not motivated enough to apply the three Rs. Currently a startup project is investigating the possibility of employees in late working offices where they order takeout food -- law firms, brokers, IT shops - to reuse the plastic dishes, but that is just a research effort, as of now.
Reusing plastic is important. While plastic beverage bottles and food dishes can be made of tree and plant-byproduct sources, most of them come from oil based materials, isolated in refineries., as a polymer, polyethylene terephthalate (PET, labeled 1 on the bottles – you will find most plastics are numbered 1-6). Plastic pellets are preformed into tubes and expanded into thin lightweight bottles, a favorite material for cheap shipping. Recycling them is important for humanity (seriously), PET is not a renewable material. Consumers to note.
Some further ways to reduce energy use in tight Manhattan, consider changing your incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB), which will reduce your energy use by one third, and save $30 per bulb in their lifetime. The incandescent light bulb, which has not changed much since Thomas Edison invented it I 1879, a thin wire in a globe, is heated with electricity to 4000 degrees Fahrenheit until it glows. But 90% of the electricity is wasted in heat. A CFL borrows the light principle from fireflies that use chemicals in their bodies to glow without creating heat. The CFL is a fluorescent tube swirled into a corkscrew shape, with electrodes at each end that send tiny particles through a gas that fills the tube. The inside of the tube is coated with phosphors that release white visible light. Note that there is a small amount of mercury, 4mg per tube, so in case of breakage everything must be carefully cleaned up and disposed properly, as you do with paint, batteries and thermostats. The CFLs last 10 times longer than ordinary light bulbs, so you need not worry too frequently about disposing of burnt out ones.
Watch the media for NYC Earth Day activities and events in cleaning up and refreshing our environment. This article tries to concentrate on activities we can engage in every day, painlessly. Turn off your lights when not in use. Stop your car engine if you are about to wait for more than 30 seconds. Turn off your electronics – computers, televisions, stereos and chargers. The cost of such standby power adds up to $4B for the US, not much when you consider the astronomic figures for Washington’s bailouts and initiatives, but we are also talking about protecting the environment for our families, which is invaluable.
We have gone a long way forward since the first Earth Day which this family seems to remember attending in Union Square Park, with masses of cheerful people. Expectations for future were high. History states that it was initiated in April 22, 1970 as a teach-in, by environmentalist US Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, as a part of a Zero Population Growth movement. Although Earth Day observation dates vary, the concept has picked up momentum world-wide, and green concepts such as global warming became the main thrust around 2000. Wikipedia claims that it is observed by 500M people and 175 national governments.
Actually, whether we like it or not, New Yorkers are some of the greenest people on the earth, particularly Manhattanites. Where else are people living so close together, sharing heat through apartment walls in the winter and sunshine as well, through use of strategically distributed vertical density (highrisers, in common parlance) . We use our bipedal structure to perambulate rather than hop in cars to buy fresh bagels, and take common carriers – buses (oh well, sloppy diesel consuming rather than hydrogen, as in parts of Canada) and subways - for longer distances. There is some thought on part of the Mayor to place solar panels on public buildings and bridges, and make car use below 86th Street super-prohibitive.
It is therefore particularly pleasing to see commercial enterprises, such as the ShopRite supermarkets, embracing Earth Day 2009, April 22, the 39th anniversary of the modern environmental movement, to make public their participation. They were following the example of the three Piscataway NJ middle schools, where with an investment of $1.2M the school district installed 800 solar panels on the roofs of the schools, supplying 20% of their energy requirement and saving $67K in annual costs, more importantly preventing 45 tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere annually, equivalent of planting 13.5 acres of trees or not driving 125,000 miles a year. The ShopRite people at Wharton, NJ have installed 1,600 solar panels, apparently larger, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 280 tons a year, ditto in Marlton, NJ, a store certified with the Energy Star designation since 2007, using 35% less energy than similar locations. Reduce, reuse and recycle is their slogan at Meriden, CT, where the recycle program has saved 50% of their trash removal work. This is where green Manhattan fails – while apartment buildings using city Sanitation Department program can recycle, commercial buildings, supermarkets and offices using commercial trash removal services are not motivated enough to apply the three Rs. Currently a startup project is investigating the possibility of employees in late working offices where they order takeout food -- law firms, brokers, IT shops - to reuse the plastic dishes, but that is just a research effort, as of now.
Reusing plastic is important. While plastic beverage bottles and food dishes can be made of tree and plant-byproduct sources, most of them come from oil based materials, isolated in refineries., as a polymer, polyethylene terephthalate (PET, labeled 1 on the bottles – you will find most plastics are numbered 1-6). Plastic pellets are preformed into tubes and expanded into thin lightweight bottles, a favorite material for cheap shipping. Recycling them is important for humanity (seriously), PET is not a renewable material. Consumers to note.
Some further ways to reduce energy use in tight Manhattan, consider changing your incandescent light bulbs to compact fluorescent bulbs (CFB), which will reduce your energy use by one third, and save $30 per bulb in their lifetime. The incandescent light bulb, which has not changed much since Thomas Edison invented it I 1879, a thin wire in a globe, is heated with electricity to 4000 degrees Fahrenheit until it glows. But 90% of the electricity is wasted in heat. A CFL borrows the light principle from fireflies that use chemicals in their bodies to glow without creating heat. The CFL is a fluorescent tube swirled into a corkscrew shape, with electrodes at each end that send tiny particles through a gas that fills the tube. The inside of the tube is coated with phosphors that release white visible light. Note that there is a small amount of mercury, 4mg per tube, so in case of breakage everything must be carefully cleaned up and disposed properly, as you do with paint, batteries and thermostats. The CFLs last 10 times longer than ordinary light bulbs, so you need not worry too frequently about disposing of burnt out ones.
Watch the media for NYC Earth Day activities and events in cleaning up and refreshing our environment. This article tries to concentrate on activities we can engage in every day, painlessly. Turn off your lights when not in use. Stop your car engine if you are about to wait for more than 30 seconds. Turn off your electronics – computers, televisions, stereos and chargers. The cost of such standby power adds up to $4B for the US, not much when you consider the astronomic figures for Washington’s bailouts and initiatives, but we are also talking about protecting the environment for our families, which is invaluable.
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