Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘energy’

Solar Road Supplies Power to Homes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 8, 2014| Leave a Comment »

And while we’re on the subject of the energy-saving bike trails in the Netherlands, we note a brief report in the NY Times to the effect that those clever Dutch also have a road that powers houses.

SolaRoad, according to its website, “is a pioneering innovation in the field of energy harvesting. It … converts sunlight on the road surface into electricity: the road network works as an inexhaustible source of green power.”

Adds the Times, “Sten de Wit of the engineering firm TNO said … that each square meter of road generated 50 to 70 kilowatt-hours of energy per year, or enough for the initial strip to supply power to one or two Dutch households. The test is scheduled to run three years and will cost 3 million euros ($3.7 million). Mr De Wit said despite the high costs of developing the first SolaRoad, successor projects may be more profitable as solar cells grow cheaper and more efficient.”

Check out the SolaRoad website, here.

Read Full Post »

Starry Night Bike Lane

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2014| 2 Comments »

Liz Stinson writes at Wired magazine about a bike lane in the Netherlands created to evoke Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night.

“If you happen to be near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, you can walk or bike down a glowing path modeled after Van Gogh’s masterpiece. The one kilometer lane is the work of Daan Roosegaarde …

“The Van Gogh-Rooosegaarde bike path (located near where Van Gogh himself lived from 1883-1885) uses a luminescent material that charges during the day and glows at night. These glowing bits look like little pebbles, but they’re actually not rocks at all. Using the smart coating material developed with Dutch infrastructure company Heijmans, Roosegaarde was able to create 50,000 fluorescent ‘rocks’ that he then embedded into wet concrete in a swirling, pointillism pattern reminiscent of Starry Night. …

“The big goal is to make the coating as dynamic as possible—shifting colors, markings or appearing and disappearing altogether—to account for our ever-changing urban spaces. …

“The designer suspects the path’s real draw will change from person to person. ‘Some people will come because they’re interested in safety and energy-friendly landscapes, others will come because they want to experience art and science,’ he says.”

More here.

Photo: Studio Roosegaarde
Daan Roosegaarde created a glowing bike path in the Netherlands based on Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night.

Read Full Post »

Heat That Follows You

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 21, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I saved up this one until it was cool enough outside to talk about heating systems.

Liz Stinson writes at Wired, “Commercial buildings account for 20 percent of the national energy consumption—a big number on its own, but stunning when you consider that often, those buildings are half empty.

“A new project from MIT’s Senseable City Lab is looking to decrease the amount of wasted energy by creating hyper-localized beams of heat. Called Local Warming, the prototype system uses LED bulbs to beam direct rays of infrared light onto people. This is in direct contrast to HVAC systems, which blanket entire spaces with hot or cool air, regardless of how many people are present.

“MIT’s system is rigged to the ceiling, like highly-efficient track lighting. Using a WiFi-enabled tracking system, the lights can sense when a human is present and will beam infrared heat down like a spotlight. ‘It’s almost like having a your personal sun,’ says Carlo Ratti, a professor in the Senseable City Lab.

“The current prototype is on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale until November. It features a large infrared bulb surrounded by rotating mirrors that can direct the light in a focused beam. It’s bulky—hardly the type of thing you’d like in your home—but Ratti envisions future prototypes will use smaller LEDs for a more compact aesthetic.”

Read more at Wired. 

Read Full Post »

Roman Concrete Is Better for the Planet

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on June 27, 2013| 3 Comments »

The concrete that the ancient Romans created is so durable that it may hold lessons for those who want to reduce carbon emissions.

Paul Preuss, from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, explains.

“The chemical secrets of a concrete Roman breakwater that has spent the last 2,000 years submerged in the Mediterranean Sea have been uncovered by an international team of researchers led by Paulo Monteiro of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Analysis of samples provided by team member Marie Jackson pinpointed why the best Roman concrete was superior to most modern concrete in durability, why its manufacture was less environmentally damaging – and how these improvements could be adopted in the modern world.

“ ‘It’s not that modern concrete isn’t good – it’s so good we use 19 billion tons of it a year,’ says Monteiro. ‘The problem is that manufacturing Portland cement accounts for seven percent of the carbon dioxide that industry puts into the air.’ …

“The Romans made concrete by mixing lime and volcanic rock. For underwater structures, lime and volcanic ash were mixed to form mortar, and this mortar and volcanic tuff were packed into wooden forms. The seawater instantly triggered a hot chemical reaction. The lime was hydrated – incorporating water molecules into its structure – and reacted with the ash to cement the whole mixture together.”

Apparently the key ingredients are found all over the world, enough to make a big difference in construction — and carbon emissions.

There’s more at the Berkeley Lab site for readers who can follow a technical explanation.

Photo: Berkeley Lab

Read Full Post »

Solar Technology Powers Poor Schools

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Global Envision is part of an effort at the nonprofit Mercy Corps “to foster a richer conversation about global poverty.”

Last fall, Global Envision’s Erin Butler set off to investigate technologies that help schools in impoverished parts of of the world.

“For some students, hopping on the school bus is hopping into the classroom. Four communities are using solar-powered mobile classrooms to overcome inaccessibility to the power grid.

“Last week,” writes Butler, “we looked at a bus in Chitradurga, India, that brought modern computer technology to students in energy-poor rural schools through solar power. SELCO, a private energy company, engineered the bus with 400 watts of solar modules, 10 laptops, fans, and lights.

“Circumventing the area’s erratic power supply with its solar panels, this bus provides much-needed modern computer education and exposure to the advantages of solar energy. Motoring through rural villages in Chitradurga since January 2012, the bus has reached ’60 schools and 2,081 children,’ the New Indian Express reported in early September. …

“Where there’s more water than land, boats replace buses, and with rising sea levels, low-income Bangladeshi students have difficulty getting to school altogether.

“Pushed to inaccessible riverside settlements that lack basic infrastructure, students often can’t get to school due to monsoon flooding. Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a nonprofit organization started by Mohammed Rezwan, rides the rising tides with his solar-powered floating schools.

“Trained as an architect and personally experienced with soggy school disruptions in Bangladesh, Rezwan rode a brainwave that led him to floating schools. Combining the best of traditional boat design and modern sustainable practices, the organization’s 54 boats have been operating since 2002 and have served over 90,000 families.”

Read about the other solar-powered schools here.

Photograph: Jayanta Shaw/Reuters/File
Students in Kolkata, India, check out their solar sunglasses as they prepare to watch the transit of Venus across the sun. The sun is being harnessed in India and Africa to power mobile solar classrooms for students.

Read Full Post »

Sweden Runs out of Garbage

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 15, 2012| 3 Comments »

I just got a great lead from Erik. It seems that Sweden has run out of garbage for running its waste-to-energy program. Fortunately, Norway has garbage it can spare. (I wonder if Erik’s buddy Svein knows that.)

Check out Matt Hickman at Mother Nature Network:

“Sweden, birthplace of the Smörgåsbord, Eric Northman, and the world’s preferred solar-powered purveyor of flat-pack home furnishings, is in a bit of a pickle: the squeaky clean Scandinavian nation of more than 9.5 million has run out of garbage. The landfills have been tapped dry; the rubbish reserves depleted. And although this may seem like a positive — even enviable — predicament for a country to be facing, Sweden has been forced to import trash from neighboring countries, namely Norway. Yep, Sweden is so trash-strapped that officials are shipping it in — 80,000 tons of refuse annually, to be exact — from elsewhere.

“You see, Swedes are big on recycling. So big in fact that only 4 percent of all waste generated in the country is landfilled.

“Good for them! However, the population’s remarkably pertinacious recycling habits are also a bit of a problem given that the country relies on waste to heat and to provide electricity to hundreds of thousands of homes through a longstanding waste-to-energy incineration program. So with citizens simply not generating enough burnable waste to power the incinerators, the country has been forced to look elsewhere for fuel. Says Catarina Ostlund, a senior advisor for the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency: ‘We have more capacity than the production of waste in Sweden and that is usable for incineration.

“Public Radio International has the whole story (hat tip to Ariel Schwartz at Co.Exist), a story that may seem implausible in a country like garbage-bloated America where overflowing landfills are anything but scarce.” Read more.

Photograph: Smath/Flickr

Read Full Post »

Festival on the Prairie

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on October 4, 2012| Leave a Comment »

In a recent article in the NY Times, Kathryn Shattuck described a festival that took place on “600 acres of pasture and test plots at the Land Institute on the outskirts of Salina, Kansas. …

“Each autumn for 34 years, during its annual Prairie Festival, this nonprofit research organization has become a Mecca of sorts for those whose passions run to sustainability, farming and feeding the world.

“For two days, Friday evening through Sunday afternoon, lectures and walking tours, interspersed with art installations and musical performances, focused on climate change, agricultural practices and what the institute’s president, Wes Jackson, called ‘getting over the hump’ in the use of carbon-based energy sources. …

“Jackson, a plant geneticist who co-founded the institute in 1976, calls the festival ‘an intellectual hootenanny,’ where ideas collide with music, art, food like bison chili, and bread and beer made from Kernza, the institute’s trademarked perennial wheatgrass.

“But the democratic casualness of the environment — listeners sprawled on hay bales, children frolicking on the hillside — belied the seriousness of purpose as college hipsters and wizened hippies shared space with revered scientists and conservationists like David Orr, an environmental studies professor at Oberlin; Fred Kirschenmann, a distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University who is also the president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.; and Douglas Tompkins, who has preserved more than two million acres of wilderness in Chile and Argentina.”

Read all about it here.

Photograph: Steve Hebert for the New York Times
Sleeping under the stars at the Prairie Festival 

600 acres of pasture and test plots at the Land Institute on the outskirts of Salina, Kansas

Read Full Post »

Converting Sewage to Energy

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on August 20, 2012| 2 Comments »

Conrad Wilson recently posted an intriguing story at National Public Radio. It’s about a a practical approach to sustainability: converting sewage to energy.

“It turns out,” writes Wilson, “a sewer — the place where a city’s hot showers, dishwashing water and organic matter end up — is a pretty warm place. That heat can generate energy — meaning a city’s sewer system can hold tremendous potential for heating and cooling.

“It’s just that unexpected energy source that Brainerd [Minn.] hopes to exploit.

“Scott Sjolund, technology supervisor for Brainerd Public Utilities, is standing on the corner of 6th Avenue and College Drive in Brainerd, as sewage rushes unseen through underground pipes.

” ‘Everybody heats water up … and all that gets drained down the sewer, and that’s potential energy that could be extracted. That’s part of the equation,’ Sjolund says.

” ‘Actually extracting it in an economical fashion,’ Sjolund says, is the equation’s critical second part.

“The idea for this project comes from Brainerd-based company Hidden Fuels. In 2009, the business partnered with the city and the school district and received a $45,000 grant from the federal stimulus package.

“Hidden Fuels’ Peter Nelson says the first phase of the project involved installing sensors in the city’s sewers. For more than a year, the company and the city measured the temperature and amount of sewage running through the system to create a thermal energy map.

” ‘It shows that there’s a significant amount of energy — literally enough to heat hundreds of homes — within the streets of the city of Brainerd,’ Nelson says.

“Earl Wolleat, director for buildings and grounds with the Brainerd School District, says there’s enough energy running in just one of the sewer pipes to heat the entire high school. That could save tens of thousands of dollars every winter.”

Read more.

Public Utilities’ Scott Sjolund at a sewer site. Photograph: Conrad Wilson

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts