Tag: energy

Games without frontiers

ClimCity.jpg

Jeux sans frontières realised in Clim’ City, an interesting learning game with obvious antecedents from Bordeaux’s Cap Sciences centre: reorganise the energy sources and economy of this French city and its surroundings – from ski field to beach resort – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions without crippling the economy. According to the Technology Review story, it’s not easy to “win”, but if you don’t speak at least a little French it’s impossible… 😉

I hope one of the English-speaking science centres does a translation: I can see this being a great teaching tool. Now, do I create an association des citoyennes or go straight to shifting the centrale thermique to burning biomass, but that means expanding the forestry sector, and perhaps I should make sure that the forests are protected against forest fires, what with the warming in the pipeline…

[Peter Gabriel]

Coppiced willow farming here

This column appeared in the Waikato Times in August 2008.  I have altered some of the wording to update it for this Hot Topic post.

The change to renewable energy sources can seem daunting. Those with stakes in fossil fuels are often negative, claiming change will be too expensive, too difficult, or not yet necessary. Cries of economic doom have greeted even the modest emissions trading scheme which may or may not be carried forward by the new government.

It was encouraging therefore to read a few months ago of the plans of renewable energy company Pure Power to launch a variety of shrubby willow as a biofuel crop in New Zealand. Biofuels which use food crops or destroy rainforests have had a justifiably bad press. But not all biofuel crops are equal. Coppiced woody plants like the willow Pure Power plans to use have a very good ratio of energy output to the energy put into converting them; they can be grown on poorer soils not used for food production; they require little fertiliser or irrigation; using new technologies they will produce not only biofuel but also a range of products for making paints, resins, adhesives and bioplastics.  Pure Power will have nursery stock ready for planting this year and hopes for a rapid expansion of planting in subsequent years.

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Down on the farm

20040612-CRW_0583.jpg An Italian olive grove and vineyard is on its way to becoming the world’s first carbon neutral farm (they claim). According to the BBC, the Castello Monte Vibiano Vecchio estate in Umbria is converting to electric vehicles (and biofuelled mini-tractors) and has installed a “solar filling station” designed by Austrian company Cellstrom, based on an array of solar panels feeding a “flow battery” – a new battery technology that allows greatly increased energy storage.

Depending on the amount of usage, the battery centre can store solar-sourced electricity for up to three days. They are working to extend that to 10 days and more, enabling the farm to continue operating through foggy days when the sun does not shine. It means that golf carts and electric bikes will become the key means of transport for farm workers and that they can all charge up at the battery centre.

Cellstrom estimates the farm can save 4,500 litres of petrol every year and reduce CO2 emissions by 10 tons.

According to Lorenzo Fasola Bologna, Monte Vibiano’s chief executive, it will take about five years to recoup the initial investment.

Flow batteries store negative and positive electrolyte solutions (based on vanadium salts) in tanks, and pump them through a reaction cell to charge and discharge. Energy storage is therefore linked to storage tank size, not the number of cells in the system. This makes them ideal as backup storage for wind and solar energy generation, making the energy available even when the sun’s not shining or the wind’s not blowing. New Scientist has a good backgrounder here (behind a paywall, sadly), and there’s also information on the Cellstrom site. Another company in the field is VRB Power Systems of Canada, who have been working with Australian-developed technology.

Back in Umbria, the Italians are covering all their carbon-neutral bases by planting 10,000 trees to mop up any excess emissions.

By the end of next year they hope to be the first farm, anywhere, to reduce their inherent net carbon footprint to zero – ie without using off-site offsetting projects. “It will be great,” says Lorenzo, “to pass on this great, green enterprise to my children and their children.”

Chez Hot Topic we have a vineyard and an olive grove, and I’m already planting trees to offset at least some of our emissions. I wonder if there’s a flow battery in an off-grid future down on our farm?

[Title reference]

Pleasant (Silicon) Valley Sunday

flodesign.jpg I sometimes describe my self as a techno-optimist, something of an ecogeek. I like the idea that there are technologies which can help us to deal with climate change – new and interesting stuff that can make decarbonising the global economy a reality. To illustrate what I mean, there’s an excellent (and long) article by Jon Gertner in the New York Times, discussing the activities of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the powerful venture capital firm with substantial “greentech” interests. Gertner was given an inside look at some of the more visible of KPCB’s investments (FloDesign – that’s their wind turbine above, Ausra, & Bloom Energy amongst others), but I found the following section particularly interesting. Gertner interviews Al Gore, and discover’s he’s become more optimistic about our ability to deal with climate change:

“My previous optimism involved an act of will that occasionally was hard to reconcile with the worsening reality,” he told me. His optimism had recently grown considerably, partly because of the prospect of new policies on carbon emissions, and partly because of innovations he’d seen at Kleiner. Some of these were green-tech companies, Gore said, that were in “deep, deep stealth”; they were known to no one except for a few V.C.’s and the entrepreneurs themselves. I heard a similar point elsewhere. John Doerr’s speech last spring at M.I.T., for instance, was notably more upbeat than the emotional one he gave at the 2007 technology conference, where he said, “I don’t think we’re going to make it.” I recently asked Doerr how he felt now. “I’m more optimistic about the innovation that will occur,” he replied. “I’m more humbled by the scale of what has to be done. Or more sober. And I’m particularly concerned about the speed.” The green-energy technologies Kleiner was investing in, Doerr continued, “won’t impact the problem at scale in the next five years, just because they have long development times associated with them. In the 5-to-15-year period of time, I think they’ll demonstrate, and clearly point the path to, lower costs than we would have otherwise imagined possible.”

That has to be good news. Technology is not the only answer to the problem, as Lomborg might insist, but it is a key part of the response we have to make. There’s a race on – climate change against human ingenuity. We’re smart enough to win, but we’re greedy enough to make the job difficult. And we need to be lucky…

[Title reference]

Catch a (micro)wave

carbonscape.jpgThere are some amazing people in NZ. Just when I’m tearing (what’s left of) my hair out at the idiocy of some politicians, along comes a news story to gladden the heart of anyone living in the real world. Yesterday, Blenheim-based start-up Carbonscape reported that it has just begun batch production of charcoal in a microwave oven the size of a double garage. Wood waste goes in at one end, the oven heats it up and it turns into charcoal – giving off syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The charcoal can be added to soil (as biochar, aka terra preta), fixing the carbon away from the atmosphere and improving soil fertility, while the syngas can be burned to create energy to drive the process – known as pyrolysis.

Carbonscape call their oven the Black Phantom, Stuff reports:

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