Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

Today’s post is by Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the forthcoming blog The Green Grok. This is the second post in a 2-part series on biofuels.

Last week’s topic was why corn ethanol is an environmental loser.

But are all biofuels losers? No. Some can be winners. One of those is called cellulosic ethanol.

What Is Cellulosic Ethanol?

All ethanol — whether it is corn or cellulosic — is the same chemical compound: C2H5OH. You might recall from elementary chemistry courses that the “OH” group at the end of the formula indicates that the compound is an “alcohol.” Alcohols can have varying numbers of carbon atoms. Alcohol with two carbon atoms is called “ethanol.” The other alcohols are generally too toxic to be ingested, and thus ethanol has been the libation of choice down through the ages. (Ethanol used as fuel is rendered nonpotable.)

So corn ethanol and cellulosic ethanol don’t signify different types of ethanol, but rather the different material (or feedstocks) used to produce them.

Author’s note: The following article on home heating is the second in an eight-part series.

What is Heat Exactly?
If we’re going to talk about better ways to heat a home, we’d better have some idea of what heat is. What you experience as heat is just the energization of the molecules in your body. Heat is the energy that gives those molecules kinetic (vibratory) energy.

Obviously, your body produces its own heat through the metabolic process (burning calories); the important thing is that your environment neither inundates you with excess energy (when it’s too warm), or draws too much energy away from you (when it’s too cold). This begs the question, how does your environment give or take energy from you?

Agency permanently extends comment period for alt. energy leases

In the fall of 2001, Jim Gordon of Energy Management Inc. (EMI) announced his intentions to build a 420 megawatt wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts - the nation’s first. Now, the long permitting process that was made even longer by powerful opposition groups, is nearing resolution…finally.

More than 40,000 individuals and organizations have submitted comments on an environmental review of the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound, according to an article in the Cape Cod Times.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Rodney Cluck, Cape Wind project manager for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the lead federal agency to review Cape Wind Associates’ plan to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Massachusetts. Originally, the comments were set to be released last Friday, but officials at the Minerals Management Service postponed the release to give agency staffers more time to organize the overwhelming public response to the proposed wind farm.

As a result of the scoping process’ popularity, the MMS announced that they would be preemptively extending the comment period for all of the remaining “Alternative Energy Leases” from 30 to 60 days.

Clean Burning Natural Gas Vehicles (NGVs) are hot commodities in some parts of the country, where fuel can sell for as low as $0.63 per gallon.

Unlike the world’s most fuel efficient car (VW’s 285 MPG bullet), the Honda Civic GX looks like a standard passenger vehicle. What makes it special is what you don’t see: tailpipe emissions that are often cleaner than ambient air.

The Civic GX is powered by compressed natural gas—methane—the simplest and cleanest-burning hydrocarbon available. With an economical 113-hp, 1.8-Liter engine, the EPA has called the Civic the “world’s cleanest internal-combustion vehicle” with 90% cleaner emissions than the average gasoline-powered car on the road in 2004.

And get this: in Utah, natural gas can be purchased for $0.63 per gallon.

I usually don’t watch the Sunday morning talk shows like Meet the Press or This Week. I’m not sure why. I think this is because I have a deeply ingrained aversion to them dating back to my childhood. You see, we really only had a handful of channels in those pre-cable days, and on Sunday mornings, before the cartoons really got going, three of those channels were running these incredibly boring talk shows - when they should have been running, at least from my point of view, cartoons. It was completely beyond me why they were running these shows at all, and not just doubling up on Superfriends or Scooby Doo! It seems I knew, even at that young age, that there were some things are just better off left till Monday.

What I’m getting at, is that I did not see Hillary Clinton on This Week with George Stephanopolous, on Sunday morning. But since we have a 24-hour media matrix covering every breath and every word in this presidential campaign, I was told all about it by all of my regular news outlets as soon as I got up. I was most struck by Senator Clinton’s reply to Stephanopolous’ question about the pushback her proposed summertime gas-tax holiday has received.

Author’s note: the following article on home heating is the first in an eight-part series. The series specifically targets climate found in the San Francisco Bay Area, but has applicability elsewhere.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, heating and cooling amounts to 46% of all energy consumed by our homes. Water heating uses another 14%. In coastal California, where extreme heat is rare and winters are mild, a properly sited, well designed passive solar home can generate its own heat and hot water, and do without air conditioning.

Historically, few homes are so well sited or built. Since our area has more heating days than cooling days, most homeowners need a heating system. What few know is that many indoor air quality problems can be by-products of forced air heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems installed in their homes.

In many ways, Shinhyocheon is just a typical suburb. It’s in Nam-gu, on the southern outskirts of Gwangju, one of South Korea’s biggest cities. In fact, if you don’t look closely, the Shinhyocheon solar village is easy to miss. Of the 1.4 million people living in Gwangju, most have never heard of it. Local taxi drivers wrinkle their brows and shrug; even the tourist information center in downtown Gwangju has trouble finding it on the map.

But for those who know it, Shinhyocheon deserves a place in energy history. In 2004, it became South Korea’s first solar village – a neighborhood of 64 solar powered houses where residents enjoy cheap, clean energy. The solar panels in this neighborhood generate over 115 MW of energy in a year. For each resident, that translates into an annual savings of around $589 USD, or a total of $37,700 for all 64 houses combined.

Inspired by Shinhyocheon’s success, the local government is planning to expand the number of solar houses in Nam-gu by adding 340 new sun-powered residential buildings.

I cover a lot of upcoming or future technology, but it’s time to step into the present and aim for the past. Today we’re going to look at a technology available right now that can make some wanton energy waste history. It’s a surge protector that stakes the hearts of vampire electronics without hassling you, the sleeping victim.

Vampire appliances are pretty much anything you can plug in that still sucks energy when it’s supposedly turned off. Some are pretty obvious - the clocks on your microwave or VCR/DVD player burn all day, everyday. We know they’re not “off” because we cans see their LEDs glow. But other electronics, from your television to your cell phone charger also draw power when they’re plugged in but not in use. Check out a handy graph from Good Magazine. Some gadgets are notorious, like your plasma TV. Estimates claim that 5% or more of U.S. energy usage is insidiously wasted by “stand-by mode” or certain misleading “off” buttons. A whopping 5% may not sound like much, but it adds up to about $1 Billion dollars per year - and energy prices will probably continue to rise.

Be honest - how many times would you go around the house unplugging everything before it got old? Smart greenies have been switching off their surge protectors, but it’s easy to forget while watching your favorite late-night TV show or blogging at 4am. So what can we do about these metal-toothed Nosferatu in our midst? How about a surge protector that turns off all your appliances for you?

Tesla Would Be Proud

A few years back, Marin Soljačić was driven from bed by the insistent beeping of his mobile phone. But it wasn’t beeping for him to answer it, it was beeping for him to plug it in. Since that night, the assistant professor of physics at MIT, has been thinking about ways to start his phone charging as soon as he enters his home - without the need for plugs or wires.

Jennifer Chu at Technology Review writes that Soljačić considered using radio waves, but found that most of their energy would be lost in transmission. Targeted methods like lasers require a clear line-of-sight and could be dangerous for anything in their way. According to Chu, he eventually settled on a phenomenon called magnetic resonance coupling, in which two objects tuned to the same frequency exchange energy strongly but interact only weakly with other objects.

Did you know that over the course of a year, a microwave operating in standby mode will use about the same amount of electricity as it would if it ran on HIGH for 24 hours? Frightening, isn’t it? In fact, the average American home has 20-40 appliances plugged in at any given time, and in a year those appliances will together use what is equivalent to one month of electricity for the entire household - just sitting there. This great […]

As I mentioned in my KBIS Report, I was struck by the sizes of bathtubs on display at this year’s kitchen and bath trade show. Though green was king thoughout most of the convention, companies that pitch themselves as catering to a luxury market seem to be sending the message that if you have enough money to waste water in giant bathtubs, then they’d be happy to sell you some, as if money absolves you of any kind of environmental responsibility.

It’s a hard statistic to nail down, but a person uses between fifty and seventy gallons of water each time he or she takes a bath. This number includes water wasted waiting for the desired temperature as well as hot water used to return the cooling water to the desired temperature. Compare that number to a five minute shower, which uses around twenty five gallons of water, possibly half that if the shower uses a flow restrictor. Clearly, if water conservation is the main goal, a quick shower is the answer, but let’s not throw out the bathtub with the bathwater just yet.