tingilinde

modular parking garage for bikes

A bike is, in theory, a great way to commute to work if you are within ten miles.  In reality there are a large number of obstacles ranging from a safe route to dealing with parking and sweat when you arrive at work.

Some enlightened companies offer showers and bike parking for employees, but that is rare.  

From Australia comes the Green Pod - a modular bike garage that holds ten bikes, ten lockers as well as a change room and shower.  It probably isn't cheap, but is probably much less expensive than providing a parking garage for ten cars.

Of course in the US we pursue "green" parking garages for cars - something of an oxymoron.

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.

the polymath in the garden

a news release from The British Society for the History of Science:

Let’s hear it for head gardeners
29 June 2009 British Society for the History of Science

The head gardener has achieved far more than just a pretty garden. In fact, through advances in plant physiology, pathology and breeding, head gardeners have left an indelible stamp on today’s horticultural science. It’s time to celebrate the scientific contributions of these often overlooked individuals, says Toby Musgrave, a leading authority on garden history and the author of The Head Gardeners (Aurum Press Ltd, 2009). Musgrave will be championing the head gardener in a talk at the annual meeting of the British Society for the History of Science.

It was in Victorian and Edwardian Britain that the head gardeners’ star reached its zenith. But these polymath servants, a creation of their time and masters of an array of interdisciplinary sciences and arts, did more than create and maintain vast and diverse gardens. “They also rapidly and comprehensively advanced horticulture,” says Musgrave. “Today, however, these invisible artisans and their diverse, influential works are largely overlooked.”

Musgrave will shine light on these forgotten heroes at the BSHS’ annual meeting in Leicester, UK on 3 July. He will reveal how Sir Joseph Paxton’s glasshouse designs turned the wealthy classes onto conservatories, which in turn stimulated plant hunting expeditions to jungles all over the world to collect new hothouse plants such as orchids.

Head gardeners like John Caie, John Gibson and John Fleming rose to the challenge of presenting tender summer annuals in bedding displays, a form of planting that came to epitomise the Victorian garden and which remains fashionable today.

And, says Musgrave, head gardeners are also responsible for breeding many of our favourite garden plants and edible crops. For example, Anthony Parsons' passion was “the improvement of various florists’ flowers” and his pioneering work his work on dahlias, pansies, verbenas, petunias, hollyhocks and achimenes resulted in dozens of new hybrids, the forefathers of many we grow today.

“The head gardeners’ advances and discoveries made in the sciences of horticulture, botany, plant physiology plant pathology, and plant breeding, as well as engineering and architecture shaped the emergence of modern horticultural science and popular gardening,” concludes Musgrave.  “Understanding the head gardeners’ role in developing new garden styles is central to understanding the conditions of their making, the evolution of the garden art form, and the continued influence these forgotten heroes exert on garden styles today.”

weaning people from the plastic bottle

Branded tap water (via the NY Times)

"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.

greenwashing

Can a company claim to be "green" in its promotion when it is sponsoring Nascar and F1 racing - probably spending much more on those sponsorships than their green initiatives?

Companies need to be called out on these mixed messages.

It might be OK if the sponsors forced Nascar and F1 into a type of race that focused on energy efficiency, but that seems unlikely.  Even KERS isn't all that impressive in the scheme of things - motor racing is not directly advancing greenhouse gas emission reductions in the cars the rest of us buy.  Maybe if rules defined a small amount of fuel that could be used (say two liters of gasoline per 100 km of racing), but most feel that would dilute the sport.

I don't have any trouble with companies supporting green causes and I don't have any problems with the support of activities like auto-racing.  I do wonder about companies who spend millions on racing and also try to present themselves as "green"  But then most companies are probably into greenwashing more than actually doing something.

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.