tingilinde

mirrors without the smoke

A nice forth of July demonstration that eSolar can point each mirror in this concentrating solar power plant in California.

CSP has some nice characteristics and power can be offered for hours after sunset (the number of hours depends on plant design).  There are issues with cooling water for the heat engines, but air cooled designs are emerging which make them more practical in arid locations.

pedal pushing

An announcement from Colleen

She is all leg and arm and  happens to be too tall* for a normal bike, so Trek has agreed to  design and fabricate  something that will be a perfect match for her frame and needs. 

Getting a bike that fits your frame and your transportation needs is important.  This one will haul her stuff including a few volleyballs or a carrier for her rat terriers Daisy-Mae and Zula.

This is great for her as there is nothing like a practical bike that actually fits.  It will be great for Trek as she gets a lot of attention and will be promoting their products and the idea of getting fitted for the right bike.  It is neat seeing someone other than a bike racer promoting bikes as a practical way of getting around.

If you are looking into a new bike remember to get something optimized for your needs - a multi-thousand dollar racer probably doesn't make sense if you are riding to the store and commuting to work.  Once you have figured out what type of bike you need you should visit a competent bicycle shop to be fitted.  

Two people of the same height can have very different requirements in frame size and type and seat and handlebar types and positions - for starters.  If you walk into Target or WalMart you can find a bike that sort of fits, but getting a good fit may be difficult.

We've dealt with Trek's fitting process and were impressed.

It is very unlikely you will require a custom design like Colleen, but watching the project unfold in her blog will be interesting.  

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* The  Coney Island clown's finger is at forty six inches in this photo.  At over six feet six inches tall, she turns out to be tall enough for all of their rides.

maximum oil yields for algae based biofuels and pathways to the future

There are a lot of guesstimates for amount of oil that can be extracted from solar based algae production.  One of the reasons for going to algae is the photosynthetic efficiencies can be much higher than the plants that are used to make ethanol or biodiesel today.

Kristina M. Weyer, Daniel R. Bush, Al Darzins and Bryan D. Willson of Colorado State have published Theoretical Maximum Algal Oil Production - a very conservative theoretical upper limit to production.  Any realistic scheme is likely to be only a fraction of this estimate, but it gives a nice look into the components of the calculation and a means for back of the envelope comparisons to other schemes.

Their limit is 38,000 gallons of unrefined oil per acre per year.  Soybeans are in the neighborhood of 70 gallons per acre per year and algae schemes are generally quoted in the low thousands of gallons per year, although these are mostly experimental and the numbers vary by huge amounts.

Back of the envelope calculations show a well sited concentrating solar power plant can currently produce several times times the energy of the theoretical maximum for algal biofuels.  Of course oil is extremely useful as its energy density is much higher than the best theoretical batteries. Biofuels are probably well suited for aviation and some types of long range ground transportation as we consider powering the whole fleet of vehicles.  

The long term transportation future is probably some mix of algae biofuels and solar and wind produced electricity (unless nuclear power suddenly becomes extremely inexpensive - also wind energy arguably is solar energy).

In the short and medium term adding biofuels to displace coal, petroleum and natural gas makes sense where the carbon costs for producing the biofuels is low enough.

A great deal of work needs to be done optimizing the transportation system and making it more efficient.  This means minimizing travel where large amounts of green house gases are emitted per passenger-mile. A lot of this can be done now at no cost (car pooling, trip combining, shifting to walking or biking for short trips) and it can be encouraged at low cost with minimal investment - making human powered transport more practical.  Waiting to buy the "right" car and not changing behavior is unacceptable.

Colleen and I were recently talking about road trips.  She is very good at minimizing short range car use and hopes to make next year's road trip in a low gram CO₂/mile vehicle.  Further out in time she will probably be using an electric/algal-biodiesel hybrid for medium and long term trips and her feet and bike for anything less than ten miles.  Combine this with her energy conservation at home and she is on a great path.  Follow her lead and start your own soon.

"organic" traffic control

Any analysis of automobile driving cycles and efficiency show that traffic control is very important - you want to minimize starts and stops and you want to keep reasonably constant speeds.

Here is a new traffic light control scheme.  

snip

Currently, traffic lights either have fixed timer controls or a centralized, control system. The widely used Split, Cycle and Offset Optimization Technique (SCOOT) is popular with those responsible for traffic control. It computes a single cycle time for all intersections, splits this cycle time into green times for each intersection and then adjusts offset times in order to minimize waiting times. SCOOT’s primary aim is keep traffic flowing smoothly and pedestrians safe. Modern traffic-responsive Urban Control (TUC) additionally takes public transport into account.

However, although these systems have been developed over many years, they do have several technical shortcomings and traffic jams do occur more frequently than drivers would like because problems with flow control. Fixed timers are obviously flawed as they do not respond to traffic itself and even centralized systems cannot respond optimally to the changes in traffic movements out on the roads. This leads to jams and waste drivers’ time, vehicle fuel, and to higher levels of localized pollution in towns and cities than might otherwise be present.

Prothmann and his colleagues used the organic computing approach to develop a decentralized traffic control system and compared its impact on traffic flow with a conventional system. The organic approach is based on industry-standard traffic light controllers. These have been adapted to have an observer/controller architecture that allows the traffic light to respond to traffic flow and to pass on information to the other traffic lights on neighboring roads.

Tests at busy junctions in Hamburg demonstrated that the average number of vehicle stops can be cut significantly, delays avoided, and journey times reduced, all of which has benefits for drivers, pedestrians and city dwellers, and, in terms of fuel use and pollution, the environment.

quite a change when a govt listens to the science

A slide deck from the government's US Global Change Research Program site:

GlobalChange.Gov--US Impacts Summary

View more OpenOffice presentations from GlobalChange.gov.

Pretty much the message from the science community, but a message the past administration tried to crush

steve chu at caltech

Steve Chu gave the commencement address at Caltech  - some comments on energy policy along with an ode to nerds (about 10:15 into the clip which, oddly enough, is realplayer - it has probably been a year since I've used that )

aviation biofuels

In the long run a path to the greening of ground transportation has emerged.  Electrifying vehicles and generating electric power cleanly.  This may be combined with pressures from high liquid fuel costs to make vehicles in general more efficient and perhaps partly redefine what commuting means.

Aviation is more difficult.  Electric airliners would require batteries with at least fifty times the energy density of the best lithium ion batteries available now - not exactly likely.  That leaves clean biofuels or hydrogen.

Hydrogen has a good energy density by mass, but the problem is you need to liquify or compress it to get reasonable energy densities by volume.  Liquified hydrogen only as a third the volumetric energy density of JP8 and compressed hydrogen gas at 700 bar only about a sixth.  There is also the issue of how the hydrogen is produced as it is more a storage substance than a fuel.

Finding a good biofuel with a high energy density (ethanol's is too low), that doesn't become viscous at normal operating temperatures seen at cruising altitudes, that don't displace food production, that are inexpensive and that whose production doesn't generate greenhouse gases is not an easy task.

There has been progress.  A primer (from an industry group) is available here (pdf) and a good piece recently appeared in Yale's environment360.

In quantity a cheap aviation biofuel would work well for ground transportation and might be a good transitional fuel as the fleet becomes more electrified.

small gas turbine range extended electrics

Small gas turbines might be a good engine for use in range extended electrics.  They can be very efficient if run at a single speed, which is just fine for the generator.  Capstone put together a testbed with one of their 30 kw gas turbines.  Potentially neat.

the press release :

CHATSWORTH, Calif., Jun 11, 2009 (GlobeNewswire via COMTEX) -- Capstone Turbine Corporation (www.capstoneturbine.com) (Nasdaq:CPST), the world's leading clean technology manufacturer of microturbine energy systems, today announced that its C30 liquid fueled microturbine has been successfully integrated into a Ford S-Max people carrier in the United Kingdom

To see a promotional video of the "Whisper" please click on the following link: http://www.capstoneturbine.com/news/video/whisper.asp

Langford Performance Engineering (www.lpengines.com), headquartered in Wellingborough England, designed and modified the Ford S-Max seven seat crossover vehicle into a series hybrid plug in vehicle with a C30 under the hood as an electric range extender. Langford reports that the "Whisper Eco-Logic" car gets up to 80 mpg in early stage demonstration testing.

"The Ford modified by Langford is an extremely practical solution and one that Langford has been working on for over two years," said Jim Crouse, Capstone's Executive Vice President, Sales and Marketing. "The design characteristics of Capstone's turbine permits ultra low emissions, high fuel economy, multi fuel capability, no coolants or lubricating oil, and little to no maintenance in an automotive application," added Crouse.

"Our Whisper Eco-Logic vehicle is a plug in electric car with an on board turbine generator to keep the batteries charged and extend the range of the car beyond that of a typical electric vehicle," said Dick Langford, Langford's Founder and Managing Director. "This sets it apart from the hybrids now available such as the Lexus and Toyota which use conventional 4 stroke engines to provide both vehicle drive and battery charging. In early demonstration testing the car is getting up to 80 miles per gallon and travels 40 miles on electric power before the Capstone turbine generator starts up and charges the lithium ion batteries," added Langford.

"Capstone was founded on the concept of a C30 powering hybrid vehicles so it is extremely gratifying to see the Langford Ford with a C30 under the hood," stated Darren Jamison, Capstone's President and Chief Executive Officer. "Langford did an exceptional job integrating the turbine, power electronics and batteries into the vehicle without impacting any of the seven seats or increasing the overall vehicle weight," added Jamison.

Langford Engineering will be marketing and demonstrating the plug in hybrid vehicle in hopes of further developing this concept with a suitable automotive partner who could commercialize the product for U.S. use and capitalize on a portion of the Obama administration's $2.4 billion outlined in the stimulus fund to get more electric vehicles on U.S. roads.

About Capstone Turbine Corporation

Capstone Turbine Corporation (www.capstoneturbine.com) (Nasdaq:CPST) is the world's leading producer of low-emission microturbine systems, and was the first to market commercially viable microturbine energy products. Capstone Turbine has shipped over 4,000 Capstone MicroTurbine(R) systems to customers worldwide. These award-winning systems have logged millions of documented runtime operating hours. Capstone Turbine is a member of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Combined Heat and Power Partnership, which is committed to improving the efficiency of the nation's energy infrastructure and reducing emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases. A UL-Certified ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001:2004 certified company; Capstone is headquartered in the Los Angeles area with sales and/or service centers in the New York metro area, Mexico City, Nottingham, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo.

This press release contains "forward-looking statements," as that term is used in the federal securities laws, about the economic and environmental advantages of Capstone Turbine's products. Forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as "expects," "objective," "intend," "targeted," "plan" and similar phrases. These forward-looking statements are subject to numerous assumptions, risks and uncertainties described in Capstone's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission that may cause Capstone's actual results to be materially different from any future results expressed or implied in such statements. Capstone cautions readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. Capstone undertakes no obligation, and specifically disclaims any obligation, to release any revisions to any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

"Capstone Turbine Corporation" and "Capstone MicroTurbine" are registered trademarks of Capstone Turbine Corporation. All other trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

The photo is also available at Newscom, www.newscom.com, and via AP PhotoExpress.

This news release was distributed by GlobeNewswire, www.globenewswire.com

SOURCE: Capstone Turbine Corporation

Capstone Turbine Corp.
Investor and investment media inquiries:
818-407-3628
ir@capstoneturbine.com

when do phevs make sense?

Several groups have been doing drive cycle analyses on various flavors of hybrids, phevs and evs.  Green Car Congress notes a study by Argonne National Laboratory.  The bottom line is similar to CMU's results - it is difficult to justify these things if you only worry about current gas prices and the nature of your average driving cycle is very important.

Of course most people don't buy cars based on logic - Madison Avenue and perceived needs have a lot to do with our "choice."  

the work of steve k.

BP's 2009 Statistical Review of World Energy is out. 

The best such guide out there - highly recommended.  Folklore is that Steve Koonin made this great when he became BP's chief scientist.