Green Options

With a theoretical storage capacity more than 10 times higher than today’s best lithium-ion batteries, it’s no wonder lithium-air batteries are being touted as one of the types of batteries that could make electric cars truly mainstream.

Now, as part of a US Department of Energy program to provide large amounts of supercomputer time to advance cutting edge, real world research, IBM scientists are partnering with government scientists from both Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories to model and develop the materials needed to make lithium-air batteries a reality.

The award provides up to 24 million hours of computer time on two of the world’s fastest supercomputers–which, you guessed it, are housed at the two national labs. To give you some perspective, this only represents about 1.5% of the total time available on both computers, but considering how many other scientists use these computers, the fact that one project got 1.5% of the total time is pretty amazing.

Sven Holthusen runs the EDISON project at Siemens’ Energy Sector in the Denmark branch of the international engineering giant. The EDISON project is working on raising charging power to as much as 300 kW so that batteries can be recharged on the go, in as little as six minutes.

The idea is to replicate the familiar: filling up at a gas station in 6 minutes or so, not in order to replace long slow overnight charges in home garages but to have an alternative to meet the needs of those apartment-dwellers who don’t have garages (and those who do, but who don’t sleep at least 6 hours at night) by making on-the-go-charges as available and as quick as filling up at a gas station.

Sustainability is the great new green buzz word in our society - but what does it really mean? Does it mean that a business can use sustainable materials, treat employees well, but not turn a profit? Or does it mean that a business can make all the right noises, recycle products, give to high profile organizations and yet treat its employees like expendable commodities? Most definitely not!

Where is the grid going, big or small?

IBM, which has been promoting the virtues of its smart grid and smart traffic technologies, today announced it’s jumping into “smart water,” too. The technology and services giant introduced a new suite of services and products aimed at better using water resources.

At the top of the list, a new membrane that filters toxins more efficiently than current methods, IBM says. The membrane uses a unique chemistry in what IBM calls a  “water super-highway.”"  The rate at which the water super-highway removes arsenic from contaminated water doubles as the pH increases. When contaminated water is forced through the membrane salts and a number of toxins are filtered out  and what’s left is pure drinking water.

President Obama’s stated desire to invest in smart-grid and broadband infrastructure syncs nicely with Google’s desire to improve the nation’s broadband infrastructure and build a smarter grid.

PG&E may be installing millions of smart meters in Northern California, but the nation of Malta (pop. 400,000) is about to become the world’s first smart grid island. IBM is building the island’s national smart grid network, which will consist of 250,000 smart meters placed in homes around the country.

I have to admit, this news makes me drool a little bit. The US government agreed today to buy two supercomputers from IBM— including one that will scale to 20 petaflops. That’s 10 times the performance of today’s most powerful systems. The Sequoia system will be 15 times faster than BlueGene/P, but will have the same carbon footprint and only a small increase in power consumption.

Argonne National Laboratory’s new Blue Gene/P high-performance computer runs at an awe-inspiring 557 teraflops (557 trillion calculations per second) and can wow the green crowd with its energy efficiency. The computer uses only 1 MW of power— about a third as much electricity as a conventionally built supercomputer of comparable size.

2008 - what a year! As we get ready to draw the curtains on one of the most unsettling economic years in history, we the writers of the Inspired Economist are still wondering… was this year one that has left our battered economy begging for inspiration? Or have the sustainable events of 2008 spearheaded the initiation of what we believe is truly an Inspired Economy?

2008 was about the $700 billion bailout. Foreclosures. The plummeting stock market. As the year came [...]

The business case for reducing corporations’ water footprints was explored at last week’s Corporate Water Footprinting conference held in San Francisco.

“Water is the new carbon,” said Gil Friend, President and CEO of Natural Logic, during his moderation of a session on “The Outlook for Water Supply Shortages.”

The conference, held December 2 and 3 and organized by Green Power Conferences, engaged corporations to discuss how to become more proactively involved in the water management of their facilities. Companies such as The Coca-Cola Company, PepsiCo International, Nestle Waters, MillerCoors, and Cadbury were represented. Professors, water experts and consultants from a variety of firms, including Business for Social Responsibility and Natural Logic, also participated in panels.