Archive for March, 2008

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Solar Sunday

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.

Solar Paint

The Swansea Solar Paint project is led by Dave Worsley, who, together with his team, were researching ways to make make steel last longer. By chance that they started to focus on the degradation of paints in steel surfaces, when they realized that their research could lead them to develop a new way of getting energy from the sun.

The idea is to coat every piece of steel cladding with a solar cell paint. As steel is passed through the rollers multiple coatings of of the solar cell system are applied to it. Based on the preliminary research, the materials that are being applied are suited to capturing low level solar radiation, which means that they should work just as well in areas where the sun doesn’t directly shine on them.

Invest in Algae

Earth2Tech has a roundup of biofuel startups that are working on turning algae into fuel. We can’t yet know what will happen; Some of these companies might become huge in the next few years, or they might be left in the dust by new developments (solar energy below $1/watt and advances in battery or hypercapacitor technology, for example). Only the future will tell, but in the meantime, they are worth keeping an eye on.

The companies are: GreenFuel Technologies, Solazyme, Blue Marble Energy, Inventure Chemical, Solena, Live Fuels, Solix Biofuels, Aurora Biofuels, Aquaflow Binomics, Petro Sun, Bionavitas, Mighty Algae Biofuels, Bodega Algae, Seambiotic and Cellena.

SoCal goes Solar

Edison International plans to launch a roof top photovoltaic solar project. The process requires no fuel or a transmission station to operate. The plans include an initial phase to be up and running by Summer, 2008.

In an exclusive interview with John Bryson, Chairman and CEO of Edison International by CNBC reporter, Dylan Ratigan explained a new direct method of delivering solar energy. The process is called Photovoltaic technology,which means it converts sun energy directly into power within the solar cell. The unique aspect of this project, as explained by John Bryon involves leasing about 2 ½ miles of rooftops in the hotter regions of Southern California.

The roof tops will be fitted with thin-film solar cells and have the ability to literally dump electricity into the surrounding community. The communities have been preselected to include areas where Southern California Edison has a growing customer base. The advantage of the photovoltaic technology is that it does not require a separate transmission station or added fuel costs. The thin-cell solar manufacturers has not been determined at this time.

According to Mr. Bryson, the Photovoltaic Roof Top Project is planning to be up and running in its initial phase by this Summer. The process when it begins can almost immediately begin to produce electricity to relieve the additional burden of air conditioning and the like during the hot season.

Investing in Forests

It is either a visionary piece of capitalism or throwing money into the wind. A venture capitalist today made a huge environmental bet – that one day the environment services that sustainable forests provide will be worth big money.

The Iwokrama reserve in Guyana is a 371,000 hectare chunk of tropical forest – roughly the size of Majorca – and is a successful experiment in sustainable forest management.

Hylton Murray-Philipson, director of the UK-based financiers Canopy Capital, has signed a deal with Iwokrama guaranteeing a “meaningful” contribution to their running costs for five years, a deal which may be renewed.

In return for these funds, Canopy Capital is given “ownership” of the forest’s ecosystems services and a claim on any profits that might one day be made from them.

Solar soon to be cheaper than coal

Researchers from MIT have improved commercial solar cells that will soon be significantly cheaper and more efficient than those available today. Ely Sachs, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, predicts that by 2012 such solar cells will be comparable in price with coal, which is about $1 per watt.

Sachs and his colleagues have started a company called 1366 Technologies. With the help of a recent $12.4 million grant, the team is building a pilot-scale manufacturing plant to fabricate their first batch of solar cells. The cells currently have an efficiency of 19.5%, and cost about $1.65 per watt. That´s a 27% improvement in efficiency over similar commercial solar cells of today, which have about 15% efficiency and cost about $2.10 per watt.

Carbon Neutral Power

The company that generates the largest proportion of New Zealand’s electricity has been certified carbon neutral for more than a year.

Meridian Energy generates around a third of New Zealand’s total energy demand (approx 12,000 GWh) exclusively from wind and hydro sources. The company has a history of advocating a carbon credit marketplace.

Clothing goes Solar

A year ago Bonnie modelled a solar powered bikini for us, but it was just a prototype. Now, the Guardian tells us that flexible solar cells will be woven right into our clothing, to charge our iPods and phones.

Dave Pritchard at Fujitsu, told David Smith of the Guardian: ‘Within a year it will be possible to design clothing with solar cells on the back or arms, so you can recharge wearable devices.’ He said the clothing would be useful on the ski slopes, outdoor holidays and for the emergency services. It would also appeal to the environmentally conscious as a means of reducing power consumption.

Sustainable Add-ons

daekwonpark1

Old is New

Step right in ladies and gentlemen, and gaze at the marvels of modern technology! Allow us to show you the most amazing car of the century: The magnificent Detroit Electric, the car of summer luxury! This 100 year-old antique electric car will be available in early 2009 from ZAP and China Youngman Automotive Group, proving once and for all that there is no such thing as a new idea. The Detroit Electric is considered to be the most popular electric car in history — and was produced by the Anderson Electric Car Company in 1907 (production ran from 1907 to 1939). This cute little EV could go fo 130 miles on one charge, and had a top speed of about 32km/h. Famous Detroit Electric owners included Thomas Edison, Charles Proteus Steinmetz and John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

So why is this relevant? Well, Zap, who is creating the Zap Alias, in partnership with the China Youngman Automotive Group, decided to resurrect the Detroit Electric as a promotional vehicle and are planning to produce a small number to market. The joint venture is also set to release an array of cars, buses and trucks under the Detroit Electric brand — all electrically powered, of course.

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key 23

Friday, March 28th, 2008

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Solar Cycle 23, how can we miss you if you won’t go away? Barely three months after forecasters announced the beginning of new Solar Cycle 24, old Solar Cycle 23 has returned. Actually, it never left.

“This week, three big sunspots appeared and they are all old cycle spots,” says NASA solar physicist David Hathaway. “We know this because of their magnetic polarity.”

Earlier today, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) made a magnetic map of the sun.

It shows the north and south magnetic poles of the three sunspots. All are oriented according to the patterns of Solar Cycle 23. Cycle 24 spots would be reversed.

What’s going on? Hathaway explains: “We have two solar cycles in progress at the same time. Solar Cycle 24 has begun (the first new-cycle spot appeared in January 2008), but Solar Cycle 23 has not ended.”

Strange as it sounds, this is perfectly normal. Around the time of solar minimum–i.e., now–old-cycle spots and new-cycle spots frequently intermingle. Eventually Cycle 23 will fade to zero, giving way in full to Solar Cycle 24, but not yet.

Meanwhile, on March 25th, sunspot 989, the smallest of the three sunspots, unleashed an M2-class solar flare. Flares are measured on a “Richter scale” ranging from A-class (puny) to X-class (powerful). M-class flares are of medium intensity. This one hurled a coronal mass ejection or “CME” into space, but the billion-ton cloud missed Earth.

[Snip]

The real significance of these spots is what they say about the solar cycle, says Hathaway. “Solar Cycle 24 has begun, but we won’t be through solar minimum until the number of Cycle 24 spots rises above the declining number of Cycle 23 spots.” Based on this latest spate of “old” activity, he thinks the next Solar Max probably won’t arrive until 2012.

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Open Source Religion

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

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Spiritual expression, and the religious organizational formats in which context it will take place, is always embedded in a social structure. For example, we could say that the tribal forms of religion, such as animism and shamanism, do not have elaborate hierarchical structures as they arose in societal structures that had fairly egalitarian kinship based relations. But the great organized religions, which arose in hierarchically-based societies, have intricate hierarchical structures, monological conceptions of truth, and expectations of obedience from its members. The Protestant Reformation and its offshoots took on the many democratic aspects which corresponded to the rise of a new urban class under merchant and industrial capitalism, and the many offshoots of the new age movements have clearly adopted contemporary capitalist practices of paid workshops, trainings, etc … (i.e. taking the form of spiritual experience as a consumable commodity).

In this essay, we will claim that contemporary society is evolving towards a dominance of distributed networks, with peer to peer based social relations, and that this will affect spiritual expression in fundamental ways.

[SNIP]

An open and free approach to spirituality would not likely accept proprietary approaches to spiritual knowledge. It would expect that the code and texts are freely approachable, even modifiable. It will not accept the copyright protections of spiritual texts, nor their unavailability. The pathways to spiritual experiencing would not be hidden from sight, but publicly available. The methodologies would be available for trial and experimentation.

A participatory approach would mean that everyone would be invited to participate in the spiritual search, without a priori selection, and that the threshold of such participation would be kept as low as possible. Appropriate methodologies would be available for different levels of experience.

[SNIP]

Equipotentiality suggests that we should not judge a person according to one purported essence, say, as a spiritual master or an enlightened being, but as a wide mixture of different skills and abilities, none of which by itself elevates that person to a higher human status. Rather, the skill of any social system is to draw out the best out of each individual, so that he can engage his skills and passion to a task of his own choosing. One of the possible interpretations of this principle is that enlightenment or spiritual mastery is just one particular skill, a particular technique of consciousness. It is important, it deserves respect, others can learn from it.

However, just as a great sportsperson or great artist is not necessarily overall a better human being, neither is a spiritual master, as the history of the last view decades has elaborately shown. Furthermore, guidance from such a master must be specific, an invitation for practice and experience, a witnessing on his part, but not in any way a fixed authority on the lives of any followers. Individuals are free to explore this guidance, but the individual, and the communities, are still in charge of building collective spiritual freedom, without a priori fixed path. The corollary of self-selection and communal validation are also clear. No spiritual path can be imposed, the individual freely chooses the particular injunctions he wants to follow or experiment with. Nor are individuals or communities bound to any particular tradition, though they can still choose to work with such a particular framework.

[SNIP]

In this way, a new collective body of spiritual experiences is created, which is continuously co-created by the inquiring spiritual communities and individuals. The outcome of that process will be a co-created reality that is unpredictable and will create new, as yet unpredictable spiritual formats. But one thing is sure: it will be an open, participatory, approach leading to a commons of spiritual knowledge, from which all humanity can draw from.

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Freedom of Information, Act

Wednesday, March 26th, 2008

It has been a while since I have written anything here. Lots of posting but mostly other people’s words. The main reason for this has been a personal shift in how I spend my free time. While blogging has for several years now been my primary hobby, that has shifted in recent months. I have been relearning a skill/instrument that I gave up a number of years ago, the turntable.

Last weekend I played my first set in public. It was quite well received. A mix of ambient/minimal techno and classical. The electronic music I played was all composed to be freely distributed. Licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial distribution license, the music was made to be free.

The idea of truly free information, in my opinion the foundation to a truly free society, is slowly gaining ground. In music and software circles, the model of the mega-corporations are seen for the inherent failure they represent. The technology has evolved beyond the capacity for an institution to control its distribution. Fighting a war against consumers is a losing battle.

There are free software alternatives for every major commercial piece of software from word processing to image manipulation to web browsing to operating systems and more.

The group I was playing for has been producing all night music and dance events for over 12 years on an open source model. Planning procedures are maintained on a wiki, the entire organization is run by volunteers and everything from food, to music, to entrance to the event is given freely. Donations are asked for but in no way required.

In the theatre an open source model is still very much in its infancy. Charles Mee is one of, if not the first playwright to truly embrace open source ethics and aesthetics in his works.

As he says

Sometimes playwrights steal stories and conversations and dreams and intimate revelations from their friends and lovers and call this original.

And sometimes some of us write about our own innermost lives, believing that, then, we have written something truly original and unique. But, of course, the culture writes us first, and then we write our stories. When we look at a painting of the virgin and child by Botticelli, we recognize at once that it is a Renaissance painting—that is it a product of its time and place. We may not know or recognize at once that it was painted by Botticelli, but we do see that it is a Renaissance painting. We see that it has been derived from, and authored by, the culture that produced it.

And yet we recognize, too, that this painting of the virgin and child is not identical to one by Raphael or Ghirlandaio or Leonardo. So, clearly, while the culture creates much of Botticelli, it is also true that Botticelli creates the culture—that he took the culture into himself and transformed it in his own unique way.

And so, whether we mean to or not, the work we do is both received and created, both an adaptation and an original, at the same time. We re-make things as we go.

Another aspect of Free Theatre appears to be opening up as well. While many companies do pay-what-you-can nights, a theater in Ohio is trying that theory out for the whole run of its current production.

Available Light is opening Sheila Callaghan’s Dead City here in Columbus in about 2 weeks. This show is a really big deal for us. Aside from being a beautiful play that we’re all really excited about, it’s also our first show to receive significant public funding, it has the largest cast we’ve put on stage, and it’s in a space that’s costing us about 3 times what we usually pay. (Frequent readers of this blog will remember that I am very ambivalent about that particular fact.)

However, instead responding by playing it safe on other fronts to compensate for the big risks we’re taking, we’ve decided to try another big experiment. We’re making all tickets to all shows for everyone all the time “Pay What You Want”. That’s right, just like Radiohead,Trent Reznor, Saul Williams, Paste Magazine, and a small crop of restaurants.

Free culture is on the rise. It is being written into the very fabric of our larger culture. Much like free(read renewable) energy will replace finite resources like oil and coal, so too will free (read open) culture replace finite and “owned” culture.

its just a matter of time.

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Solar Sunday

Sunday, March 23rd, 2008

Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.

Wind Mile Stone

This week, I’d like to mention new research that Earth Policy Institute just released on wind power. My colleague Jonathan Dorn, who wrote the report Global Wind Power Capacity Reaches 100,000 Megawatts , notes that global installed wind power capacity could top 100,000 megawatts this month.

Last year was a record year with wind power capacity increasing by 20,000 megawatts, bringing the world total to 94,100 megawatts. As Jonathan writes, that is “enough to satisfy the residential electricity needs of 150 million people. Driven by concerns regarding climate change and energy security, one in every three countries now generates a portion of its electricity from wind, with 13 countries each exceeding 1,000 megawatts of installed wind electricity-generating capacity.” Wind power is key to achieving the Plan B goal of reducing carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020.

The rise and fall of renewable energy

If there’s one thing we can depend on it’s the rising and falling of the tides. Up until very recently, tidal power has been a severely underutilized renewable energy source, but this won’t be the case much longer with the announcement of the world’s largest tidal power project in South Korea. A collaboration between Lunar Energy and Korean Midland Power Co (KOMIPO), and would create a colossal 300-turbine field in the Wando Hoenggan Water Way off the South Korean coast by 2015, providing 300MW of renewable energy, enough to power 200,000 homes!

Renewable is the future of computers

While they still only account for a minute fraction of total yearly emissions, the carbon emissions produced by computers have been on the rise – buffeted by the likes of Google and other computing-heavy firms – and are set to increase dramatically over the coming decades. However, because computing power need not be centrally located to achieve its functions, server farms could potentially be moved to areas where renewable energy – in the form of wind or solar – is plentiful to mitigate their carbon footprint.

Solar Cells – The next generation

Researchers in the United States and Austria report an advance toward the next generation of plastic solar cells, which are widely heralded as a low cost, environmentally-friendly alternative to inorganic solar cells for meeting rising energy demands. Their study is scheduled for the March 19 issue of ACS’ Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Local Energy

How dumb is this? Use coal to boil water. Use steam to spin turbines and run generators to make electricity then transported long distances to connect to a coil at the bottom of a tank- to make hot water.

Solar hot water panels are dumb simple too, often just a box with a glass lid with black pipes in it; you can even build them yourself. Others, like evacuated tube collectors are more efficient if more expensive.

A solar water heater could save $ 450 a year and keep almost a ton of CO2 emissions out of the air; multiply that by 80 million houses in the USA. The technology has been around forever. Chinese manufacturers are cranking them out by the millions. So why doesn’t every house have them?

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War Heros?

Wednesday, March 19th, 2008

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A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime ‘kills’ was his favourite author.

Messerschmidt pilot Horst Rippert, 88, said he would have held his fire if he had known the man flying the Lightning fighter was renowned French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

The fliers clashed in the skies over southern France in July 1944.

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Solar Sunday

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.

Print your power

If you like the idea of solar power, but aren’t convinced by expensive, clunky solar panels just yet, here’s a more manageable option: print your own on an inkjet! Konarka Technologies has just debuted a printable solar panel film that uses a common inkjet printing process to manufacture paper-thin photovoltaic solar cells. Using the existing and very simple technologies of your office inkjet printer, Konarka has essentially replaced ink with the solar cell material, and paper with a thin flexible sheet of plastic.

Now for something completely different

The news media and the government are fixated on the fact that the U.S. economy may be headed into a recession — defined as two or more successive quarters of declining gross domestic product.

The situation is actually much worse. By some measures of economic performance, the United States has been in a recession since 1975 — a recession in quality of life, or well-being.

How can this be? One first needs to understand what GDP measures to see why it is not an appropriate gauge of our national well-being.

LED’s light up Africa

We love our LEDs for lamps and Christmas lights, but there’s a global application for LEDs that could bring inexpensive and efficient light to the 75% of Africa that lacks dependable access to clean, safe electrical lighting. (In Sub-Saharan Africa over 500 million people presently lack modern energy, and rural electricity access rates is only 2%.) A $13 million World Bank Group Initiative called Lighting Africa was launched in September 2007 to develop and distribute a highly efficient and rugged LED light bulb for the electricity-deprived in Africa.

Organic growth in the LED market

The global Organic Light-Emitting Diode (OLED) display industry is anticipated to experience stupendous growth in the coming five years according to a new report by Global Industry Analysts, Inc.

Major OLED manufacturers are upgrading their production techniques to offer quality products, so as to stay ahead in the highly intense competitive environment.

The Active-Matrix OLED displays represent the burgeoning segment in the total OLED display market. Revenues from this segment are expected to overtake passive-matrix segment, and dominate the global market by garnering a share of about 84% of the total OLED market value by 2010.

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Happy Birthday Jean Rosenthal

Sunday, March 16th, 2008

Jean Rossenthal was an American lighting designer who pioneered radical changes in dance lighting primarily and other genres of performance as well. She was principal lighting designer for Martha Graham as well as ABT and other major companies.

Her work and writings still influence designers and students to this day. Her book The Magic of Light is considered a classic among lighting design texts.

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Quote for Today

Monday, March 10th, 2008

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
~ Antoine De Saint-Exupery

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Madness Review

Monday, March 10th, 2008

Martin Denton wrote a very nice review for Madness of Day. This show is certainly not everyones cup of tea, but for those who like this sort of thing, it really is quite a wonderful show.

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