Green Options

Electric Vehicles International is returning to its home in California from Mexico and later this month will have a state tour to celebrate; from their new home in Stockton to the state capitol, Sacramento. Along the way, they are offering test drives for any interested Californians. So if you’ve ever wanted to test-drive a 13 ton full electric delivery truck that goes 60 miles an hour on the freeway; now is the time.

To spur the switch to electric cars the Obama administration is proposing a “build one, get one free” rule for makers of electric cars. For each full electric vehicle they build, it could be used to count as two zero emissions vehicles towards the new low carbon emissions rules they have set.

In may, the Obama administration moved the deadline for low carbon cars closer to 2016. Under this proposed new rule each electric car would count two times when figuring the average fuel efficiency of a new-vehicle fleet, making the average easier to meet—if the automaker adds electric cars to its fleet.

But an environmental policy group in Washington would prefer to see regular old-fashioned gasoline vehicles built to be more fuel efficient.

US Secretary of Energy, Dr. Steven Chu

Arizona State University professor Cody Friesen thinks he can make a metal-air battery with up to 11 times the energy density of lithium batteries at potentially half the cost. Now the US Department of Energy’s advanced research incubator ARPA-E has just given his spin-off company, Fluidic Energy, a $5.13 million research grant to try and do just that.

Here’s just the car for those of us who are parking-challenged—A car will park itself. You don’t have to even stay inside it while it does the trick:

An inter-agency work group headed by the White House Office of Management and Budget is trying to find the real cost of a ton of carbon emitted. It turns out to be a hard number to agree on.

Would our grandchildren really miss Florida if it was under water? How about no more fruit or nuts from California? What about the loss of our breadbasket? Would the end of corn and soy from the Midwest really bother the grandchildren of our children? How much?

Cost/benefit analysis. Economists do it all the time. So, just what is the cost to society of a ton of carbon?  The Institute for Policy Integrity consulted 144 top economists and released the result: (pdf) Economists and Climate Change: Consensus and Open Questions. By sensibly limiting the sample to economists with the most expertise on climate change, the survey was able to avoid the ignorance of economists who have not studied climate change.

84 percent agreed that the environmental effects of greenhouse gas emissions, as described by leading scientific experts, create significant risks to important sectors of the United States and global economies. A near unanimous 98 percent agreed that putting a price on carbon through a tax or cap-and-trade will increase incentives for efficiency and innovation. 55% preferred a tax, and 35% preferred cap-and‐trade.

But they came up with very widely divergent numbers for both the costs and the benefits. The cost estimates ranged from $10 a to $10 million a ton, with a median of $50 a ton. The benefits of prevention also ranged between $383 billion and $5.5 trillion over the next five decades.

Renewable Funding’s PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) solar funding, begun by Cisco DeVries with Berkeley First was a breakthrough in making solar affordable. Now VC high-flyers Draper Fisher Jurvetson, New Cycle Capital, and RWE Ventures have just invested $12.2 million in a first round of financing to make this sober and sensible solar funding available to more homeowners.

Renewable Funding is a business in the Common Good. And it could be big too. There’s potentially a gigaton of greenhouse gas reductions to be made, at no cost to local, state, or federal governments from a $280 billion potential market in PACE solar funding in the US, acording to a UC Berkeley study published in Environment Magazine.

SolarReserve; a California start-up spin-out from United Technologies’ Rocketdyne has filed an application with the CPUC to build a 150-megawatt heliostat solar farm with seven hours of after-sunset energy stored in molten salt. These are the rocket scientists responsible for our solar-powered space exploration.

Theirs would be the first heliostat type of solar array to produce grid power in California. Abengoa has several in Spain, and plans one in Arizona. United Technologies has licensed the original technology to the new company SolarReserve and its wholly owned subsidiary Rice Solar Energy, LLC, (RSE).

We are actually the second planet-altering species. Three billion years ago, Cyanobacteria were the first. They totally changed this planet to one that is safe for oxygen breathers. That was a big change for species at the time, and most species didn’t make it. Nearly all of them went extinct.

If we’re lucky, we won’t change our environment as much as Cyanobacteria did.  That’s the goal of the US Department of Energy ARPA-E. Inspired by the success of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; ARPA-E will fund high-risk, high-reward advances with the potential to completely change the way our species generates and consumes energy.

Arizona State’s Wim Vermass was of the 37 recipients of the DOE ARPA-E funding. He is teaching the ancient species to make our future fuel and to custom-make it just the way our species wants it.

The simplest ideas are best at harnessing underwater wave energy. You don’t want lots of parts in the harsh marine environment (for machine parts) under the ocean. Here’s an idea from a diver from Finland who was almost hit in the head by a shipwreck door that inspired this invention: the WaveRoller.

Now the EU is funding the diver; Rauno Koivusaari, with $4.4 million for his company AW-Energy to build the first full scale demo of his invention.

Each one at full size weighs 20 tons and produces 300 KW.

Nano carbon Graphene is already being produced in decidedly non-nano quantities by Ohio-based Angstron. Yet the atom-thick nano-material was discovered so recently that researchers are still in the process of discovering what to use it for.

Graphene is an extremely low density material, almost an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. It has been the focus of much research because of its exceptional electrical, mechanical and optical properties. It holds great promise in renewable energies.

Among the so far underutilized advantages Graphene offers are that it is fifty times stronger than steel, and it has five times the conductivity of copper, with only one quarter of the density.