One of the first home improvements Rachel and I made when we purchased our condo here in Cambridge this spring was a solar hot water installation on our rooftop.
The system we had put in uses vacuum tubes, a newer, more efficient type of solar collector than the black box flat panels of old. As a writer covering energy and the environment in Cambridge and China, I'd spent the past three years tracing this new and exotic technology back to the factories and cities in China where they are surprisingly commonplace.
I first read about the tubes three years ago in a story in the Boston Globe. A family in Newbury, MA was using a massive installation to provide hot water and heat for their giant barn of a house. A photo that went with the story showed their installation covered in frost on a cold winter day. Somehow, despite the cold, the tubes were still kicking out 120 to 160 degree water.
If you had $150 million to spend on boundary-busting energy research, where would you put the cash? The US Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has committed that amount with one lofty aim: to transform the planet's energy future: But which technologies are its best bets?
To find the answers, check out a story I wrote this week in New Scientist.
This was an interesting story to write in that the Department of Energy had just dolled out millions of dollars for projects so risky that most were expected to fail, yet even if a few succeeded, they could have a transformative effect on the planet's energy future.
What made the story more interesting is the vast majority of recipients, from industry giants to little known start up companies, had such a strong financial interest in keeping their projects under wraps that few would divulge what they were working on, even after they received secured funding.
Gore took the stage to a standing ovation before a capacity crowd at the First Parrish Church Meetinghouse in Harvard Square on 7 November to discuss his compilation of "all of the most effective solutions that are available now and that together will solve this crisis".
Check out the story I wrote for New Scientist this week on what Chinese paleontologists believe to be a 110,000 yr old human jaw bone (see photo on right).
If their claims about the fossil they found in China's southern Guangxi province prove true, it would raise some interesting questions about human origins.
Specifically it could challenge the widely held belief that modern humans are the direct descendents of Homo sapiens that migrated out of Africa around 100,000 years ago.
Check out the story I wrote and filmed for New Scientist of President Obama's address at MIT on Friday.
Prior to his clean energy speech, the cynics had already written it off as a token "official" event to justify private funderaisers he would attend later in the day for Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd.
While there may be some truth to their claims, his arrival inside MIT's Kresge Auditorium created a buzz that was nothing short of flipping the switch on Alcator C-Mod, the University's nuclear fusion reactor.
I recently co-authored the following feature for New Scientist profiling some of the hottest new technologies for a cleaner, less energy intensive world.
It was a fun project to work on and one that got me scouring the planet for the best in Clean-Tech.
Not every new development that I proposed made the cut, but, one in particular that deserves honorable mention is EcoRock; a new type of drywall (or sheet rock) that requires 80 percent less energy to manufacture than the conventional stuff.
The second attempt at a federal bailout for the Big 3 US automakers fell apart early this morning when their union refused to trim their workers' rather cushy benefits packages.
I say good riddance. Let the dinosaurs die. It's time for auto industry version 2.0.
One alternative getting a lot of attention recently is Better Place, a Silicon Valley start-up with a business model that could quickly turn the automotive industry on its head.
Basically, it's a refueling system for all-electric vehicles that, if successful, would lead to a complete gutting of the internal combustion engine.
Better Place doesn't sell cars; rather, it sets up a national grid of refueling stations, ideally powered by renewable energy. Drivers swap out their drained batteries for fresh ones at their stations in a matter of minutes and pay Better Place by the mile, like buying minutes for a cell phone.
Tom Friedman plugged this new model earlier this week - and dissed what was then a likely bailout for the Big 3 - in an editorial for the New York Times saying:
"Our bailout of Detroit will be remembered as the equivalent of pouring billions of dollars of taxpayer money into the mail-order-catalogue business on the eve of the birth of eBay... into the CD music business on the eve of the birth of the iPod and iTunes... into a book-store chain on the eve of the birth of Amazon.com and the Kindle... into improving typewriters on the eve of the birth of the PC and the Internet."
The Better Place model may be a part of the solution, but until heavy, steel-body autos go on a serious diet, battery-driven cars are going to be prohibitively expensive.
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute gave a great talk at Harvard last week on Hypercars or ultralight vehicles made of advanced composites (that is, carbon fibre instead of steel) that, by virtue of their light weight, are 3-5 times more fuel-efficient.
Advanced composite car ideas have been batted around for years: GM did a one-off concept car back in 1992, but it seems no one has been able to get the economics right for mass production. Until, perhaps, now.
Last week I proposed giving the Big 3 whatever they asked for so long as the money was tied to significant CAFE standard increases. Now, I'm taking it back. The automotive industry is changing too quickly and GM, Ford, and Chrysler are too far behind.
I say if the US is going to compete in a new, fuel-efficient world, it will be with scrappy start-ups that aren't tied to 20th-century pensions. What do you think? (image: Wikimedia Commons)
The eco-blogosphere is caught in an orgiastic frenzy over the pending announcement of Nobel laureate and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab director Steven Chu as US energy secretary.
So what's all the excitement about?
First, Chu would be the first person with a Nobel Prize in science to ever serve in the cabinet of a US president. The only other Nobel laureate in such a position was US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973.
But what makes Chu "hardcore" is the full-on assault he's launched against climate change since taking the helm of Lawrence Berkeley in 2004.
His homepage says he is on a "mission" to make the national lab "the world leader in alternative and renewable energy research, particularly the development of carbon-neutral sources of energy".
In the past four years, he's formed some cutting-edge energy science centres, including the Joint BioEnergy Institute and the Energy Biosciences Institute. One of them, Helios, will draw on synthetic biology, a discipline that aims to rewrite the basic operating instructions of living cells, to produce new sources of clean energy.
In 2007, Chu co-authored "Rising Above the Gathering Storm", a report put out by the National Academy of Sciences that called for an energy agency similar to the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) as a way to fund developments in renewable energy.
The same year, he co-chaired a report commissioned by the governments of China and Brazil outlining steps they could take toward a sustainable energy future. With Chu, who is a Chinese-American researcher and a foreign member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, heading the DOE, I wouldn't be surprised to see further collaborations on this front in the coming years.
The only possible blemish in Chu's eco-career was sealing the deal on a $500 million biofuel development handout from oil giant BP for the national lab, UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois that some felt would compromise the institutions' academic integrity.
[The following is a story I wrote on Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion [OTEC] for NewScientist.com]
OTEC only makes sense where the temp. dif. between surface and deep water exceeds 20℃
FOR a company whose business is rocket science Lockheed Martin has been paying unusual attention to plumbing of late. The aerospace giant has kept its engineers occupied for the past 12 months poring over designs for what amounts to a very long fibreglass pipe.
It is, of course, no ordinary pipe but an integral part of the technology behind Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC), a clean, renewable energy source that has the potential to free many economies from their dependence on oil.
"This has the potential to become the biggest source of renewable energy in the world," says Robert Cohen, who headed the US federal ocean thermal energy programme in the early 1970s...
[Get the full story here.Copyright Newscientist.com (Image:www.xenesys.com) ]
STORY BEHIND THE STORY It's been fun writing about these once-orphaned renewable energy schemes that got a lot of RnD $ back in the day and are now getting a serious second look. I wrote one a couple years back on algae biofuel that feeds on CO2 exhaust that now looks like it might become a reality. In both cases, retired DOE guys who headed up the research in the 70s are suddenly in hot demand as they are the only ones with any hands on experience. After this story on OTEC went to press, I heard that Taiwan is going in with Lockheed on their 10MW pilot plant off Hawaii.
I am freelance environmental writer based in the People's Republics of Cambridge, MA and China.
I'm a correspondent for New Scientist magazine and have written for the New York Times, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Technology Review, Audubon, and National Wildlife magazine.
I completed my masters in science writing at MIT in 2006 where I was a John S. Hennessy Environmental Studies Fellow. In 2007-08, I was a Middlebury Environmental Journalism Fellow.
One of the first home improvements Rachel and I made when we purchased our condo here in Cambridge this spring was a solar hot water installation on our rooftop.
