BioFuels: Culprit or Scapegoat?
Monday, April 28th, 2008
The global trend toward biofuels came under attack last week at the International Energy Forum in Rome. Blamed by industry insiders for the nascent food crisis, alternative fuels made from cash crops - particularly grains - have been subject to growing criticism as it becomes evident that they aren’t the much-touted panacea for global warming many had imagined. Though these comments aren’t especially surprising coming from a bunch of oil CEOs and government policy wonks, they shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed. More and more studies are indicating that biofuels such as ethanol use at least as much energy as they are purported to save, and that the reallocation of farm land for fuel crops is putting a strain on global food markets.
So biofuels apparently aren’t all they were cracked up to be. We shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss biofuels, however. While they make a convenient scapegoat for the current crisis and are clearly deserving of skepticism, they may not be entirely to blame, despite what the energy moguls claim. Biofuels will probably never live up to their original hype, but with continued technological progress and more intelligent legislation, they may still find their niche on a smaller, more sustainable scale. First, while most attempts to produce biofuels utilize processes and raw materials that are inefficient, some alternative methods offer hope. The International Energy Agency (IEA) supports the use of second-generation biofuels, which use non-food crops to produce the fuel. Other methods focus on genetically engineering certain tree species to reduce lignin levels, which prevent researchers from accessing the cellulose needed for ethanol production. Given their high levels of cellulosity, trees are otherwise perfect candidates for biofuels. Such methods are not without their own controversies, however; critics of bioengineering have raised concerns over compromising the structural integrity of these experimental trees, not to mention the threat of cross-fertilization with wild strains. Second, most current subsidy policies do little but promote such inefficiency. Corn-based ethanol - the bulk of biofuel produced in the U.S. - is especially inefficient given corn’s low cellulose content compared to other potential sources. Yet Congress continues to pass bills in favor of greater corn subsidies and cornthanol production. (Click here and here to read our past posts.) At the conference, recently ousted Italian prime minister Romano Prodi astutely commented that “We have to examine very closely subsidy policies so as to avoid distortions in the allocation of resources”. Such a prudent approach may prove better in the long run than the outright dismissal of biofuels, despite the significant limitations born out by recent events.
“Tortillanomics”, a slideshow on Frontline’s website, also explores the effects of biofuel production on corn prices in Mexico. Click here.
Posted in Biofuel, Energy Efficiency, Food, Legislation, Politics, Sustainability | Permalink
Passenger Trains Still Having Success
Monday, April 14th, 2008
Taiwan is celebrating the 23rd millionth passenger on their extremely successful bullet train line that connects the capital Taipei to the south of the island. A large project which, as always, created controversy, the response to its completion has been such that in a little more than a year the amount of trains on the line has been tripled to accommodate demand.
Previously, a trip to Kaohsiung would have taken over four hours. Now the whole route takes only 90 minutes. The train has had such an impact that the air-routes now serviced by the train have made significant cutbacks.
Because trains are much more energy-efficient people movers than all other forms, this is a welcome milestone.
Posted in Energy Efficiency, Transportation | Permalink
The Green Design Lab Final Project Presentation
Thursday, April 10th, 2008| April 18, 2008 | ||
| 5:00 pm | to | 6:30 pm |
Join students from Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School as they present the final projects from a class called the Green Design Lab. The projects investigate how to green their school building through sustainable design techniques. A brief presentation, poster series and 3D models of these sustainability strategies will be shown throughout the evening. Open to community members, family and friends, this reception is meant to stimulate a dialogue about how to green NYC’s public schools through innovative green design and student involvement.
The Green Design Lab, a joint project between Solar One: Green Energy, Arts and Education Center and Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School was initiated fall 2007 to explore issues of sustainability through the lens of design, architecture and sustainable technology.
For more information, go to www.solar1.org/education.
Friday, April 18th | 5 - 6:30pm
The Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place, New York, NY
Refreshments will be served!
Posted in Education, Energy Efficiency, Green Building, New York City, Solar One, Solar One Events | Permalink
13 Best Energy Ideas
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 Yes magazine shares 13 ideas, energy policies and technologies that can get us on the path toward a sustainable future (plus a few that won’t).
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Politics, Renewables | Permalink
Acciona Unveils New CSP Power Plant
Friday, March 21st, 2008
Las Vegas is known for many things, but cutting-edge solar technology has never been one of them. Until recently, that is. Just a few miles outside of Las Vegas sits a prototype 64MW power plant called “Nevada Solar One“. Though its official opening was held on February 22, the plant has been up and running since last June and can generate enough energy to power more than 14,000 homes. In effect, Nevada Solar One uses a combination of solar and steam to operate; this technology, known as “concentrating solar power” (CSP), generates electricity by using the sun’s rays to boil water and the resulting steam to power turbines. If successful, CSP could revolutionize the energy industry.
The brainchild of Acciona SA, a Spanish conglomerate that specializes in civil engineering, construction and infrastructures, Nevada Solar One uses parabolic mirrors to focus sunlight on a tube of fluid above them. Other CSP plants, including an 11MW facility that opened in Spain last year, utilize different designs. The plant in Spain uses a dense array of smaller mirrors to focus light on a water tower at its center. Other variations use long, flat mirrors or devices that look like satellite dishes. Some even continue to provide power after the sun sets by storing energy in molten salt. CSP is also more cost-effective than traditional solar installation, in that it doesn’t rely on pricey and energy-intensive silicon panels.
CSP’s future clearly seems sunny. According to the SEIA, another 11,000MW worth of CSP plants are supposedly in the pipeline thanks to generous federal tax breaks that offset up to 45% of initial costs. If all goes according to plan, viable solar power may be right around the corner.
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Global Warming, Renewables, Technology | Permalink
Energy Audit at Manhattan Comprehensive H.S.
Monday, March 10th, 2008
On Friday, March 7th, Solar One and the Community Environmental Center (CEC) teamed up to provide Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day School with an energy audit of their school building. Students followed auditors around the school as they performed their analysis, learning how to quantify the energy use throughout the building.
Posted in Education, Energy, Energy Efficiency, Green Building, Solar One | Permalink
American solar company claims that its technology can power 90% of U.S. grid and cars
Friday, March 7th, 2008
According to WIRED Magazine’s online technology blog:
“The solar power plant company, Ausra, has released a paper claiming that solar thermal electric technology can provide 90% of US grid electricity, with enough left over to power a fleet of plug-in hybrids. The company estimates that change over would eliminate 40% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions with a land footprint of 9600 square miles . . .
The key to the scenario, however, is developing the ability to store energy for 16 hours to create a stable power source through cloudy periods and the night, a feat which has so-far eluded engineers.”
To read the full article on wired.com, click here.
To Read Ausra’s paper, click here.
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Photovoltaics | Permalink
The Solar Factory in Your Garden
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
These days the efficiency of solar technology is improving at a dizzying rate; newspapers and websites are filled with daily reports about novel approaches and applications that are helping to make solar power a practical large-scale energy source. One new approach gets its inspiration from the plant kingdom.
The majority of plants utilize photosynthesis to convert sunlight into energy, and do so at nearly 100% efficiency. New research sheds a fascinating light on the process by which this is accomplished.
Conventional wisdom has long held that light-collecting chromophores absorb and then transfer energy in a linear manner, passing energy from molecule to molecule, sort of like a biochemical assembly line. New studies, however, reveal a radically different process, with potentially seismic implications for solar technology. Instead, energy flow appears to adopt a wave-like motion along all paths at once, arriving at its destination almost instantaneously and ensuring that this energy takes the most efficient route. Researchers are not yet sure how plants accomplish this, but greater understanding of this quantum-like effect could be applied to improvements in the process by which photovoltaics gather and distribute energy, especially regarding issues about the feasibility of solar over a large-scale network.
Scientists at the University of Chicago are investigating this process by zapping green sulfur bacteria with ultrashort laser pulses to track the energy flow through the plant’s internal system. I anticipate that future steps of this investigation will look at the same process in more complex plants.
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Renewables, Sustainability, Technology | Permalink
Solar Coming Soon(er)?
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Our solar-powered future may arrive sooner than anticipated, according to recent comments by solar pioneer and visionary Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil, as part of a panel convened by the National Association of Engineers to address 14 “grand challenges of the 21st century”, believes that solar power will be cost-competitive with fossil fuels within 20 years, much sooner than pundits and industry insiders anticipate. It will also become efficient and feasible enough to fulfill nearly all of our energy needs within that time, if not sooner. “We also see an exponential progression in the use of solar power,” reported Kurzweil. “It is doubling now every two years… At that rate, we’ll meet 100 percent of our energy needs in twenty years.” He adds that, due to revolutionary new processes and materials such as nano-engineered fuel cells and solar concentrators constructed from parabolic mirrors, the panel is “confident that we are not that far away from a tipping point where energy from solar will be competitive with fossil fuels,” possibly within the next five years.
For more information about the panel and their list of the grand challenges facing us in the near future, please click here. See also the summary of the panel’s findings on solar on the National Association of Engineer’s website.
Posted in Energy, Energy Efficiency, Photovoltaics, Technology | Permalink
Two Strikes Against Corn
Monday, February 11th, 2008
Few agricultural markets in the U.S. are currently more robust than the corn market; even with prices at their highest point in a decade (reaching $4 a bushel in 2007), already generous federal subsidies to corn farmers are set to increase to $10.5 billion over the next five years, thanks to a bill recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. Another bill passed by the Senate would double the federal mandate for corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel source, also music to corn farmers’ ears.
But don’t go investing in corn futures just yet. Two recent news articles report findings that may limit the market’s long-term viability. One article combines the results of two reports that suggest that corn-based ethanol may increase rather than lower greenhouse gas emissions. While previous reports had reached a similar conclusion concerning corn’s efficiency when converted into biofuel, these new studies focus on other by-products of this latest corn craze — the replacement of soy fields with corn in the U.S. is leading to higher food prices and the clearing of Amazonian rain forests to plant more soy. This land conversion is creating an even greater carbon debt than that produced by standard fossil fuel consumption. According to one study, “Corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20-percent savings [in greenhouse gas emissions], nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years… We can’t get to a result with corn ethanol where we can generate greenhouse gas benefits.”
The other by-product of this increase in the production of ethanol created from food crops such as corn — a decline in global food supply and a subsequent increase in food prices — adversely affects millions of people in developing countries. According to ecologist David Tilman, coauthor of one of the studies, “We are converting their food into fuel. The typical driver of an SUV spends as much on fuel in a month as the poorer third of the world spend on food.”
In an unrelated development, France has just announced that it will halt the use of genetically-modified corn while it awaits the EU’s decision regarding a full ban. While this decision is most certainly intended to address concerns about the long-term effects of the consumption of bioengineered crops, not to mention the possibility of cross-fertilization with wild crop strains, it will no doubt affect the price and supply of corn as a cheap (albeit inefficient) fuel substitute, especially when one considers that most industry experts believe that genetic engineering may be the best way to increase the fuel conversion efficiency of corn and other low-cellulose crops.
One thing that seems all too clear is that, unless an informed public takes action, pork-barrel politics may regrettably get in the way of even such a seemingly progressive step as the development of efficient biofuels.
Posted in Biofuel, Energy, Energy Efficiency, Food, Global Warming, Legislation, Sustainability, Technology | Permalink
