Green Options

Total, a French oil company, recently agreed to give the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) $4 million for a 5-year research project to develop stationary batteries that can more efficiently store solar energy.

More efficient energy storage has been a difficult issue for scientists to crack. It is a major issue preventing more widespread use of renewable energy, and solar energy in particular.

Is this project, one funded by a true oil giant, the one that will make it happen?

They say that nothing is free, but I may have come across the exception. In West Texas and Illinois, electric customers are being paid to use electricity. With the growth of wind energy in areas like Texas, Iowa and Minnesota, electric companies are occasionally producing more energy—especially during off-peak hours—than they can use. Why not store it you ask? Because there are not yet any good ways to store energy; a quest since electricity was created.

According to expert Terry Boston, who is the CEO of PJM, a company that manages the electricity grid in 13 mid-Atlantic states and Washington, the oversupply of electricity has forced prices into the negative range. The result: some customers are paid to use electricity.

Many of you have heard of Ricardo, a company that has a rich history in Motorsports. However, most of you probably haven’t heard of Recaptured Energy Technologies (RET), until now. The company has just announced a partnership with Ricardo to develop and produce “Green Solutions” to the fuel and emissions problems that plague fleet, commercial and transit vehicle operators.

RET’s basic technology is this: they have a retrofitable hydraulic propulsion system for large vehicles that stores energy in hydraulic cylinders with compressed gas. The vehicle, such as a city bus, then uses that stored energy to give it a boost when starting up. The technology is known as RPS, or Retrofitable Propulsion System, and reduces fuel use by 25 percent and emissions by 25 percent. But before you finish mumbling about how improved fuel economy doesn’t eliminate our dependence on fossil-fuel based energy, this system can improve the fuel and emissions of vehicles using all forms of fuel including ethanol, biodiesel, compressed natural gas, propane and more.

“We like to say that the vehicle is indifferent and fuel agnostic,” said Sam Jones, President of Recaptured Energy Technologies.

A Florida school district was way ahead of the clean energy curve in the ’80’s. The Hillsborough School District contracted with the first companies pioneering the use of cheap excess off-peak night time power to freeze water at night which would then provide simple cooling by day for air conditioning. Some of those companies had not yet ironed out the kinks in the brand new technology, and recently the district had to find a replacement for these coolers.

A more timid school district might have run from off-peak energy storage altogether. But not Hillsborough. They are taking what they learned and applying their school of hard knocks expertise in selecting from the many companies that now provide second generation night cooling technology to power air conditioning systems.

What’s changed since the eighties is the addition of more wind power to the grid, and the likelihood of more to come with RPS legislation requiring the purchase of more renewable power in many states.

Typically most wind power comes ongrid at night; much more than can be used.

New research at the University of Florida (UF) has just brought to light a new method in the capturing and guiding of energy that may lead to cheaper and more efficient solar cells.

Setting its sights on the burgeoning US market for car batteries, cutting-edge Swiss zinc-air battery company, ReVolt, has decided to take advantage of Oregon’s generous business tax credits for development of next generation car technologies.

In a surprising find, scientists have discovered a microbe that can efficiently convert direct electrical current into methane.

That may be good news for wind and solar power enthusiasts, who have long been faced with the dilemma of how to store energy when the wind isn’t blowing and the sun isn’t shining. This discovery opens the door for generating methane from those renewable power sources; the energy could then be stored as fuel for later use.

But is storing renewable energy in the form of a greenhouse gas like methane a solution, or just another problem?

Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have discovered a solution to the problem of reliable storage for alternative energy: a bacteria that can convert electricity to methane when combined with CO2.

Any surplus power from wind, solar, or tidal sources is fed into the bacteria and combined with CO2 from the atmosphere to create methane for storage. Methane is a clean-burning gas and 80% of energy fed into the process was retained at the end.

Wilmington, Mass.-based fuel-cell company Lilliputian Systems, which announced it raised $28 million this week, wants to set the record straight.

In October, The Wall Street Journal wrote that the company would be shipping its matchbook-sized fuel cells late this year. But now, the company — which is developing the cells for a range of consumer electronics, including cell phones and laptops — isn’t saying when its products will be commercially available, only that it plans to announce the timing this summer. Does that mean we can expect a delay?

Mouli Ramani, vice president for business development, tells me that’s not the case. When he spoke with the Journal, he was referring to a test-market launch with its partners, not a commercial launch that would make the fuel cells available to the general public, he says. In other words, don’t expect to be able to buy Lilliputian fuel cells at Best Buy this year.

Back in the fall, I told you about the finalists in the X-Prize “What’s Your Crazy Green Idea?” contest, and urged you to go vote for one of the three finalists who were competing for the $25,000 prize. The X-Prize Foundation has announced the winners. They are Bryan Le and Kyle Good from Irvine, CA.

Their “Crazy Green Idea” to develop a new storage medium, an “ultra-capacitor,” generated the highest number of votes to be crowned

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A Massachusetts man - faced with no power in the recent ice storm, powered up the family Prius to create enough electricity to run the essentials; the fridge, the lights, the TV, the wood-stove fan to manage during the power outage, creating 17 Kilowatt hours of energy for three days.