MetaFilter posts tagged with energy

the future of fuel?

kliuless — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 08:42:22 -0800

Using photosynthesis to power hydrogen production
Researchers have found that if they insert platinum nanoclusters into the photosynthetic machinery of bacteria, one acre could produce an amount of hydrogen equivalent to 79 gallons of gas per day. of course, "there's still the challenge of delivery," but if you're worried about how we'll fuel the planet, "further modification of the basic approach may make the hydrogen economy look relatively practical."

Want to change the world? There's nothing to it.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:15:08 -0800

This YouTube video seems to break my browser. Does it play alright for anyone else?

How Dry I Am

Xurando — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 06:01:15 -0800

Your humble clothes dryer is under attack. "Dryers are said to use 10-15% of domestic energy output in the US." "Only 4% of the homes in Italy have dryers." Can't give up the convenience? Consider a condenser dryer. As usual, Doonesbury was way ahead of the curve.

2009 Solar Decathalon

thewalrus — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 17:20:07 -0800

For the second time in two years a team from Germany has won the US Department of Energy's Solar Decathalon. This year's entry was a cube shaped house entirely covered in 300W and 70W solar panels generating a peak of 11.1kW. The DoE has published a complete product directory of all the subsystems and components used to build each house. Another notable design is the Canadian Team North house designed for optimal solar+insulation performance in high latitude climates.

A PATH TO SUSTAINABLE ENERGY BY 2030

kliuless — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:41:37 -0800

Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world's energy, eliminating all fossil fuels. HERE'S HOW (via) BONUS -Earthships - "what the world needs now is 1 billion of these immediately" (previously) -A safe operating space for humanity -Reasons to be optimistic? -Everything is OK

Life under a giant plastic bowl

daniel_charms — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 13:42:22 -0800

In the bright and shiny future, we all live in cities under giant domes, green and warm all the year round - a sort of Logan’s Run, but without the forced euthanasia. It almost happened in, of all places, in Winooski, an old mill town in northern Vermont. In 1979, at the height of the oil crisis, someone proposed during a meeting called by the town fathers to discuss energy needs that the town should be covered with a dome to reduce the escape of heat. The idea quickly took off. Some heralded it as 'the ultimate in Yankee ingenuity'. Not everyone was as enthusiastic, though, and Winooski's requests for federal funds were turned down. Soon, the enthusiasm faded. The legend of the dome, however, still lives on as a giant umbrella covering the town.

Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller

kliuless — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 11:33:11 -0800

Post-(cheap)oil: will the end of globalisation be the beginning of re-localisation? BONUS -The Grand Energy Transition -Energy Needs, Energy Efficiency and the Cost of Saving Us -The Homely Costs of Energy Conservation -Life after Peak Oil -Peak Water -Desalination Technology Increases Naval Capabilities -Better cheap than good: renewable power for developing world

Politics 101: Don't Brag About Your Sexploits in Public

zarq — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 13:35:08 -0800

Conservative Republican California State Assemblyman Michael Duvall (Orange County) didn't realize his mic was live, moments before the start of a legislative hearing this past July. So when the 54-year-old married father of two began describing his ongoing affairs with two different women in very graphic detail for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, he had no idea that he was being recorded. The story was picked up by KCAL, who cited unnamed sources that said Duvall was describing affairs with two married lobbyists. The problem: The KCAL report also tentatively identified one as a utility company representative. (The OC Weekly story says she works for Sempra Energy.) Duvall is the vice chairman of the California State Assembly Committee on Utilities and Commerce. Duvall "announced his immediate resignation from the Assembly this afternoon."

Energy Independence and Peak Oil

bystander — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 14:57:40 -0800

A Saudi Prince tells America to give up futile dreams of energy independence. Op-Ed in the NYT says Peak Oil is a waste of energy and an illusion. Meanwhile, the OECD's energy advisors, the IEA are saying cheap oil will run out in ten years, a decade sooner than estimates made as recently as 2007.

Yesterday's Energy of Tomorrow...and more

Miko — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 10:05:33 -0800

Peak Oil, 1925. In 2000, 20% of new buildings will be solar equipped. By the late 1990s, 90% of the world's energy will be nuclear-generated. These and other erroneous projections are being collected as part of the Forecast Project on the website Inventing Green: The Lost History of Alternative Energy in America.

3D Mapping

netbros — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 17:44:55 -0800

Durango Bill's Home Page. With topics that include: 3D end-to-end tour of the Grand Canyon, the origin and formation of the Colorado River, and examples of river systems that cut through mountain ranges instead of taking easier routes around them in Ancestral Rivers of the World. But if geology and 3D mapping isn't your thing, Bill also entertains and informs with his evaluations of creationism and religious cultists, an energy/oil analysis, gaming probability analysis, graph and number theories and applied mathematics. Durango Bill is a busy dude.

Expensive gasoline is good for you

acb — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 03:58:36 -0800

The author of a new book on how rising oil prices will change America makes the claims that higher gasoline prices will make the country healthier and safer. Christopher Steiner asserts that, for every $1 that gasoline prices rise, obesity rates drop by 10% (as people walk more and eat out less). As for "safer", that comes in when high gasoline prices force police out of their cruisers and onto bicycles and foot patrols, where they can interact more closely with their communities. And here is a summary of claims Steiner makes in his book about other consequences of high oil prices. Some are things that have been discussed before (inner cities becoming affluent and suburbs becoming slums, for example, fewer plastic knick-knacks and a renaissance in rail transportation), while others (such as mass migration to the south as heating homes in the north becomes prohibitively expensive) are less so. All in all, Steiner's assessment, whilst heralding radical changes, seems upbeat and entirely non-apocalyptic.

A sea of green

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:33:49 -0800

"Algae is the ultimate biological system using sunlight to capture and convert carbon dioxide into fuel... I came up with a notion to trick algae into pumping more [fuel] out." Craig Venter's Synthetic Genomics partners with ExxonMobil in a $600M project to harvest biofuels from genetically engineered algae. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry." [previously] "Over the next 20 years, synthetic genomics is going to become the standard for making anything. The chemical industry will depend on it. Hopefully, a large part of the energy industry will depend on it. We really need to find an alternative to taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere. That is the single biggest contribution I could make."

Ten new wind turbine designs

Slithy_Tove — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 19:25:38 -0800

Ten new wind turbine designs. Curious, grotesque, sculptural, beautiful, utilitarian.

The Wealth of Nature

symbollocks — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 10:15:01 -0800

Recently, John Michael Greer has been exploring a little known idea of the deceased economist E.F. Schumacher (a student of the oft-discussed Keynes). "Schumacher drew a hard distinction between primary goods and secondary goods. The latter of these includes everything dealt with by conventional economics: the goods and services produced by human labor and exchanged among human beings. The former includes all those things necessary for human life and economic activity that are produced not by human beings, but by nature. Schumacher pointed out that primary goods, as the phrase implies, need to come first in any economic analysis because they supply the preconditions for the production of secondary goods. Renewable resources, he proposed, form the equivalent of income in the primary economy, while nonrenewable resources are the equivalent of capital; to insist that an economic system is sound when it is burning through nonrenewable resources at a rate that will lead to rapid depletion is thus as silly as claiming that a business is breaking even if it’s covering up huge losses by drawing down its bank accounts." The series of essays so far: Survival Isn't Cost-Effective - (In which he tears apart one of the most proposed solutions for peak oil - ecovillages and lifeboat communities.) "The unstated assumption seems to be that as soon as the intrepid residents of such a community move into their solar-heated cohousing units, start up the wind turbines and the methane generators, and get to work harvesting tree crops from the permacultured landscaping all around, industrial civilization will disappear in a puff of smoke and take its taxes, debts, and miscellaneous expenses with it. Pleasant though the prospect might seem, I am sorry to say that this isn’t going to happen." The Thermodynamic Economy - (In which he tackles tackles the problem of stagflation.) "He [Schumacher] pointed out that for a modern industrial society, energy resources are not simply one set of commodities among many others. They are the ur-commodities, the fundamental resources that make economic activity possible at all, and the rules that govern the behavior of other commodities cannot be applied to energy resources in a simplistic fashion. Commented Schumacher in Small is Beautiful: 'I have already alluded to the energy problem in some of the other chapters. It is impossible to get away from it. It is impossible to overemphasize its centrality. [...] As long as there is enough primary energy – at tolerable prices – there is no reason to believe that bottlenecks in any other primary materials cannot be either broken or circumvented. On the other hand, a shortage of primary energy would mean that the demand for most other primary products would be so curtailed that a question of shortage with regard to them would be unlikely to arise' (p. 123)." Where Economics Fails - (Where he explores the misapplication of the idea of supply and demand.) "the theoretical relationship between supply and demand functions only when supply is not constrained by factors outside the economic sphere. The constraints in question can be physical: no matter how much money you’re willing to pay for a perpetual motion machine, for instance, you can’t have one, because the laws of thermodynamics don’t take bribes. They may be political: Nazi Germany had a large demand for oil from 1943 to 1945, for example, and the Allies had plenty of oil to sell, but anyone who assumed on that basis that a deal would be cut was in for a big disappointment. They may be technical: no matter how much you spend on health care, for instance, sooner or later it’s going to fail, because nobody’s yet been able to develop an effective treatment for death." The Wealth of Nature - (In which he explains why Adam Smith was wrong to say "The annual labor of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life.") "Thus Adam Smith’s dictum cited earlier badly needs reformulation. The product of the natural environment of every nation is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessities and conveniences of life; the annual human labor is simply the energy input required to turn some of that product into forms useful for human beings. The wealth of nations, it turns out, is ultimately the wealth of nature, and the sooner the value of natural cycles and primary goods is taken into account, the better chance our descendants will have of avoiding the self-defeating habits that are pushing modern industrial system down the long road to collapse."

Man-made earthquakes

445supermag — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 08:23:06 -0800

There are worries that a new geothermal project in California may cause earthquakes (nice animation from NYT and here's the full article). These worries are not just theoretical, its happened before... Enhanced Geothermal Systems (dry rock geothermal) are blamed for increased seismicity: "The HDR project in Basel, Switzerland was suspended after it caused an earthquake. On 8 December 2006, only 8 days after water injection started, an event occurred measuring 3.4 on the Richter Scale with the focus at the bottom of the HDR borehole. The eventprompted concern from local residents. Water injection was immediately stopped, but minor events continued. Further tremors were recorded on 6 January (measuring 3.1) and 16 January 2007 (3.2)." Short (12min) video segment from the California PBS science show Quest on geothermal in California (lots of details on EGS and California geothermal).

Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation

symbollocks — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 06:32:05 -0800

In a talk titled Definancialisation, Deglobalisation, Relocalisation given at The New Emergency Conference, Peak Oil activist and writer Dmitry Orlov (previously 1 2 3) shows how he has come to the conclusion that the oil price spike of summer 2008 was the trigger for the financial collapse that occurred later on in the fall. He goes on to summarize (from his point of view) pretty much everything that has been happening in the past year or so, and what he thinks is coming up next. This is a long one, so here are some quotes: "Now that the reality of Peak Oil has started to sink in, one commonly hears that "The age of cheap oil is over". But does that mean that the age of expensive oil is upon us? Not necessarily. We now know (or should have learnt by now) that once oil rises to over 25% of global GDP, the world's industrial economy stalls out, and as soon as that happens, oil ceases to be particularly valuable, so much so that investment in maintaining oil production is curtailed. The next time industry tries to stage a comeback (if it ever does) it hits the wall much sooner and stalls again. I doubt that it would take more than just a couple of cycles of this market whiplash for all the participants to have two realisations: that they cannot get enough oil no matter how much they pay for it, and that nobody wants to take their money even for the oil they do have." "One person I would like to have a close encounter with the brick wall is this fellow, Myron Scholes, the Nobel Prise-winning co-author of the Black-Scholes method of pricing derivatives, the man behind the crash of Long Term Capital Management. He is the inspiration behind much of the current financial debacle. Recently, he has been quoted as saying the following: "Most of the time, your risk management works. With a systemic event such as the recent shocks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers, obviously the risk-management system of any one bank appears, after the fact, to be incomplete." Now, imagine a structural engineer saying something along those lines: "Most of the time our structural analysis works, but if there is a strong gust of wind, then, for any given structure, it is incomplete." Or a nuclear engineer: "Our calculations of the strength of nuclear reactor containment vessels work quite well much of the time. Of course, if there is an earthquake, then any given containment vessel might fail." In these other disciplines, if you just don't know the answer, then you just don't bother showing up for work, because what would be the point?"

Star light, star bright, how many stars can I see tonight?

filthy light thief — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 23:51:10 -0800

"The arc of the Milky Way seen from a truly dark location is part of our planet's natural heritage," said Connie Walker, and astronomer from the U.S. National Optical Astronomy Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. Yet "more than one fifth of the world population, two thirds of the U.S. population and one half of the European Union population have already lost naked eye visibility of the Milky Way." In these areas, people are effectively living in perennial moonlight. They rarely realize it because they still experience the sky to be brighter under a full moon than under new moon conditions. "Reducing the number of lights on at night could help conserve energy, protect wildlife and benefit human health," astronomer Malcolm Smith of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. One study found an increased risk of breast cancer for women living in areas with the most light pollution (abstract). Some communities are embracing their dark skies, such as the New Zealand community of Tekapo, possibly home to first "Starlight Reserve," waiting on UNESCO's official approval. Not sure where to look in the vast night sky? Follow some guidelines, or check the view in Chile, Queensland, Australia, or Texas.

If it's got to be clean [energy] , it's got to be Tide

dersins — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:12:49 -0800

The Wave Motors of California. "Still embedded somewhere in the shores of California, buried by more than a century of sand, are lost hydroelectric machines." Further reading.

Shine on, friend. Goodnight.

hifiparasol — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 12:12:28 -0800

The Big Picture has photos taken during Earth Hour 2009. Click the photos to go from "lit" to "unlit." (Earth Hour home, wiki, previously)

For all your infrastructure news needs

Horace Rumpole — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 10:34:20 -0800

Infrastructurist. Although the blog is only a few days old, they've already debunked some of the myths of 24, interviewed Michael Dukakis, and grappled with Amtrak economics.

British jobs for British workers?

Grrlscout — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 03:32:55 -0800

British jobs for British workers? Workers at a Total refinery in north Lincolnshire walked out in protest over an Italian firm importing Italian and Portuguese workers to complete an expansion. Since Wednesday, the walk out at the Lindsey refinery has snowballed into a mass industrial action across the UK. The majority of the strikes and protests have been by energy workers, though some in other sectors (steel) hit by closures and vulnerable to job offshoring have joined the action in solidarity. Brown's government is trying to respond, without much success.

succinct

plexi — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:42:59 -0800

If you're feeling guilty about that long flight from San Francisco to Berlin you can use EcoFonts (which is created by omitting parts of the letter) to assuage your carbon-heavy guilt.

Two Google searches use as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea

nthdegx — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:39:25 -0800

Revealed: the environmental impact of Google searches - "Physicist Alex Wissner-Gross says that performing two Google searches uses up as much energy as boiling the kettle for a cup of tea."

Russia stops all gas supply to Europe via Ukraine

b. — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 20:13:11 -0800

Newsfilter: It's that time of the year again, though now it seems to be more serious. Russia stopped all gas supply to Europe via Ukraine on Wednesday, January 7, 2009. The EU depends on Russia for about a quarter of its total gas supplies, some 80% of which is pumped through Ukraine. At least seventeen countries are affected, many of them severely as Russia is their primary or only source of gas. While similar disputes between Russia and Ukraine already happened before, this is the first time it starts to directly affect people in other countries. In Bulgaria central heating shuts down in several towns, many schools are closed. Some factories had to stop production in Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia. Bulgaria and Slovakia are considering restarting their old nuclear power plants to get the extra energy. EU has called in the heads of the Russian and Ukrainian gas companies for emergency talks in Brussels.