Solar cooking many updated links

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/solarovens-ubuilt-or-bought/conversations/topics/1368;_ylc=X3oDMTJyczE4YTltBF9TAzk3MzU5NzE1BGdycElkAzE4MzI1MjI3BGdycHNwSWQDMTcwNzc0NDIyMwRtc2dJZAMxMzY4BHNlYwNkbXNnBHNsawN2bXNnBHN0aW1lAzE0NDkwNDc5NTg-

Comparing Hydrogen fuel cells and lithium batteries

While hydrogen is abundant, it still has to be obtained from somewhere, produced. Theoretically, it could be obtained by splitting water via electricity generated from solar or wind power. However, commercially, that’s not how we get it. Financially, it makes much more sense to get hydrogen via natural gas reformation. In other words: “let’s stick with fossil fuels.”

The overall effect is that hydrogen fuel cell cars aren’t even as efficient or environmentally friendly as conventional hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Again, see how they compare in this chart (also below). Also note that battery-electric vehicles, even plug-in hybrids, are much “greener” even on today’s grid, and the electricity grid is getting greener and greener every day. “The hydrogen car is more like one third as efficient as the EV,” Dr Joe Romm (who used to oversee and promote hydrogen funding in the US Department of Energy) writes. “Put in more basic terms, the plug-in or EV ‘should be able to travel three to four times farther on a kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity than a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle could’!”
If you care about efficiency, clean air & water, or a livable climate, that chart shows pretty clearly what type of car you should buy or lease. And that’s the key reason why I’m a huge fan of battery-electric cars and started this website.

But if you want another source, here’s a chart from the Advanced Power and Energy Program at UC Irvine:

http://evobsession.com/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-fail-in-depth/

Hydrogen vehicles face seven barriers , the biggest one being dependance on fossil fuel and creating more Co2 than ICV's!

As an aside, FCV advocates have often responded by saying, well, EVs may be better for cars, but FCVs are better for bigger vehicles like minivans, SUVs and light trucks. That is essentially the point both Honda and Toyota made in their response to several serious questions about hydrogen cars posed last fall by “Green Car Reports.” The point is entirely moot until FCVs actually solve all seven problems they face, some of which get bigger for bigger vehicles. It also bears noting that Toyota’s first FCV is a sedan!

In any case, after looking into hydrogen cars for the umpteenth time in my career, I seriously doubt they hold any prospect for either marketplace success — or contributing to the climate solution — for decades (if ever). They simply have too many barriers to success as a mass-market alternative fuel vehicle car. Indeed, they have every barrier there is!

I was first briefed on advances in transportation fuel cells within days of my arrival at the Department of Energy in mid-1993. One of DOE’s national labs, Los Alamos, had recently figured out how to reduce the amount of platinum in the best fuel cells for vehicles, proton exchange membrane (PEM) fuel cells (as had researchers elsewhere). This did not make them affordable in cars — we are still a long way from that — but a time when they might be had become imaginable. I (and others at DOE) quickly began pushing for increases in the budget for both hydrogen research and fuel cell research. Then, in the mid-1990s, when I helped oversee the hydrogen and fuel cell and alternative vehicle programs at DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, I worked to keep the budgets up even as the Gingrich Congress tried to slash all of DOE’s clean tech funding.

With that funding — and partnerships with the big U.S. automakers — advances were made, slowly. But the FCV research did not pan out as expected — some key technologies proved impractical and others remained stubbornly expensive.

Even so, in 2003 President George W. Bush announced in the State of the Union that he was calling on the nation’s scientists and engineers to work on FCVs “so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution free.” That set off another massive increase of spending by the federal government and investments by private companies in hydrogen and fuel cells.

I began researching what was to be a hydrogen primer. But as I read the literature, talked to the experts in and out of government, and did my own analysis, my views on both the green-ness of hydrogen cars and their practicality changed. It became increasingly clear that hydrogen cars were a very difficult proposition. My 2004 book, “The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate” came out in 2004, just as the National Academy of Sciences came out with a study that was also sobering (as did the American Physical Society).

My conclusion in 2004 was that “hydrogen vehicles are unlikely to achieve even a 5% market penetration by 2030.” And that in turn meant hydrogen fuel cell cars were not going to be a major contributor to addressing climate change for a very long time.

What has changed since then? Less than Toyota and other FCV advocates would have you believe. A 2013 study by independent research and advisory firm Lux Research concluded even more pessimistically that despite billions in research and development spent in the past decade, “The dream of a hydrogen economy envisioned for decades by politicians, economists, and environmentalists is no nearer, with hydrogen fuel cells turning a modest $3 billion market of about 5.9 GW in 2030.” The lead author explains, “High capital costs and the low costs of incumbents provide a nearly insurmountable barrier to adoption, except in niche applications.”

To understand why this is true, you need to understand why, until very recently, alternative fuel vehicles (AFVs) of all kinds haven’t had much success. A significant literature emerged to explain that lack of success by AFVs — as I discussed in my book and a 2005 journal article, “The car and fuel of the future”

There have historically been seven major (interrelated) barriers to AFV success in the U.S. market:

1. High first cost for vehicle: Can the AFV be built at an affordable price for consumers? Can that affordable AFV be built profitably?

2. On-board fuel storage issues (i.e. limited range): Can enough alternative fuel be stored onboard to give the car the kind of range consumers expect — without compromising passenger or cargo space? Can the AFV be refueled fast enough to satisfy consumer expectations?

3. Safety and liability concerns: Is the alternative fuel safe, something typical users can easily handle with special training?

4. High fueling cost (compared to gasoline): Is the alternative fuel’s cost (per mile) similar to (or cheaper than) gasoline? If not, how much more expensive is it to use?

5. Limited fuel stations (the chicken and egg problem): On the one hand, who will build and buy the AFVs in large quantity if a broad fueling infrastructure is not in place to service them? On the other, who will build that fueling infrastructure — taking the risk of a massive stranded investment — before a large quantity of AFVs are built and bought, that is, before these particular AFVs have been proven to be winners in the marketplace?

6. Improvements in the competition: If the AFV still needs years of improvement to be a viable car, are the competitors — including fuel-efficient gasoline cars — likely to improve as much or more during this time? In short, is it likely competitors will still be superior vehicles in 2020 or 2030?

7. Problems delivering cost-effective emissions reductions: Is the low-emission or emission-free version of the alternative fuel affordable? Are fueling stations for that version of the fuel affordable and practical?

Every AFV introduced in the past three decades has suffered from at least three of those problems. Besides the tough competition (like the Prius), EVs have suffered most from #1 (high first cost) and #2 (limited range and slow speed of recharging). But major progress is being made in both areas.

FCVs suffer from all of them — and still do! It is very safe to say that FCVs are the most difficult and expensive kind of alternative fuel vehicle imaginable. While R&D into FCVs remains worthwhile, massive investment for near-term deployment makes no sense until multiple R&D breakthroughs have occurred. They are literally the last alternative fuel vehicle you would make such investments in — and only after all the others failed.

As an aside, if you think FCVs have solved #2, the onboard storage issue, they have not — even though this is considered their big advantage over electric vehicles. In fact, they are probably a breakthrough away from doing so, as Ford Motor Company has acknowledged. Infrastructure (#5) remains the most intractable barrier for FCVs. It is far less of a problem for EVs (as I noted here).

For governments and climate hawks, problem #7 may be the most important. As of today, it remains entirely possible that hydrogen fuel cell cars will never solve the problem of delivering cost-effective emissions reductions in the transportation sector — a problem EVs do not have. I discussed that in Part 1 and Part 2.

But the United States, Japan, and other countries — and many automakers — continue to misallocate funds toward near-term deployment of deeply flawed hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Because of that, and because after 25 years of dawdling on climate action we lack the time to keep making such multi-billion dollar mistakes, I will discuss the 7 barriers FCVs still face today in more detail in subsequent posts. I will also discuss how EVs have been tearing down the few remaining barriers to their marketplace success.

NOTE: Nothing I write here should be taken as a recommendation for or against investing in Tesla (or Toyota or any company, for that matter).
Read the whole story here:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/04/08/3643876/tesla-toyota-hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars/

Better lithium battery tech available right now!

Fast forward to 2015, and with the consumer energy storage market accelerating into high gear, the two companies adopted the SimpliPhi Power brand together, still using the non-cobalt LFP platform.
Epic Energy Storage Battle

That’s where the Tesla challenge comes in. As with its electric vehicle batteries, the Tesla lithium-ion energy storage platform incorporates cobalt. That sparked this comment from Von Burg in SimpliPhi’s press announcement earlier today:

Our products do not generate heat or require ventilation or cooling and do not pose the risk of thermal runaway characteristic of lithium cobalt based batteries, and this creates significant efficiencies and savings for any given installation.

For backup, SimpliPhi cites its experience with energy storage deployment for the US military, among others. The company has continued its partnership with ZeroBase and has added relationships with the leading solar company Lotus Energy (not to be confused with Lotus Energy Group) and a familiar name in energy management systems, Schneider Electric.

Here’s the rundown from the SimpliPhi website:

Operate at 98% efficiency for 5,000+ cycles for the OES [Optimized Energy Storage] line of stationary batteries and 2,500-5,000 cycles for the portable LibertyPak plug-and-play products, many times the cycle life of lithium cobalt-based batteries

Allow daily cycles over 10-year warranty period (compared to one cycle per week for other lithium-based batteries)

Product life expectancy of 15-20 years

1/5th the operating cost per kWh over warranty period vs. other lithium-based systems

SimpliPhi also offers a detailed cost comparison:
read more here;
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/09/09/un-stealthy-energy-storage-company-leaps-stealth-mode-challenge-tesla-powerwall/

EV efficiency: comparing Hydrogen fuel cells vs battery electric

interesting charts but no real mention about the big issue of liquifaction, which requires a huge amount of energy, there are ways around it with low pressure storage, but now the volume becomes a problem, wheras with high pressure the weight becomes an issue..
there are more links at the bottom for more detail!
http://evobsession.com/hydrogen-fuel-cell-cars-fail-in-depth/

Dr. Steven Greer - THERE´S A MAN WHO IS SMARTER THAN EINSTEIN AND TESLA

Dirk and Cara's Dutch Bike Tour

As I Stare at My Smoke-Clouded Sky, a Thought or Two About Tipping Points

Arctic sea ice is vanishing and quite rapidly to boot. The ice cover that once reflected solar radiation, heat, back into space has walked off the job. No brilliant white ice means dark green ocean that is a heat sink. That warming Arctic ocean warms the atmosphere that causes the tundra to dry out and catch fire. As the tundra burns it creates black soot that winds up turning the Greenland Ice Sheet a dirty colour and that accelerates the melting of the ice sheet and sea level rise.

The thawing, burning tundra also exposes the permafrost underneath that, as it thaws, releases massive amounts of once safely sequestered, formerly frozen methane, a very powerful greenhouse gas. As the Arctic ocean warms it also triggers the thawing of ancient, frozen seabed methane clathrates - methane ice if you like - that bubbles to the surface and then onward to the atmosphere.

From rampaging wildfires to tundra fires to ice caps covered in black soot to the release of ancient stores of methane from the permafrost and seabed clathrates these are all the feedback mechanisms your mother those scientists warned you about. They're happening now, not forty years from now, not even twenty years from now.

Have we passed the point of no return. The good news is that's a conversation we're not really having right now. We're still proceeding - although not very quickly and not very well - with talks that assume we're not there yet and can, if we just try hard enough dammit, avoid the worst - maybe.

Today we're at just 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. We're not at the 1.5C mark yet because that persistent atmospheric greenhouse gas needs time to work its magic. It will and as it does our children and grandchildren will experience the changes in creates.

There are two things that we must understand, and that includes you.

First off. That 1.5C is something we've already bequeathed our kids and theirs. What we need to realize is that emissions are cumulative which means our greenhouse gas emissions from today onward add to that 1.5C. Every tonne of CO2 we emit goes on top of that 1.5C pile. We're experiencing the impacts of barely 0.8C of warming (and it's a real bitch). As today's warming keeps getting hotter, those who follow us will endure a variety of impacts that are even greater, more dangerous, and demanding of new adaptation responses.

Second. These numbers don't include the natural feedback mechanisms we already seem to have triggered. The greenhouse gas emissions they create - CO2 from forest fires, methane released from the permafrost and seabed clathrates - also go atop that 1.5C we have already locked in.
http://the-mound-of-sound.blogspot.ca/2015/07/as-i-stare-at-my-smoke-clouded-sky.html

Evolving Tesla Electric Drivetrains

Electric drivetrains are much simpler, much lighter and much less costly than internal combustion drivetrains of similar power. Tesla's drive units consist of just an inverter, induction motor and single-speed reduction gearbox with differential. The Model S drive unit, for instance, is so compact that it fits entirely within the rear suspension assembly.

In mechanical terms, Tesla's drive unit is what one would get if the starter motor of an ICE drivetrain were mated with the differential, and everything else - the engine, transmission, drive shaft - were thrown away.

The complicated part is the inverter which changes the DC voltage of the battery into AC voltage of varying amplitude and frequency that operates the motor. Much like a mechanical transmission adjusts the ratio between speed and torque, the inverter adjusts the ratio of voltage to current. Low voltage and high current produce high motor torque at low speeds while higher voltage and lower current result in lower motor torque and higher speeds.
The cost, size, performance and efficiency of the inverter depends largely on the power switching transistors, and these are improving at a semiconductor pace. New silicon carbide and gallium nitride power transistors switch faster and operate at higher temperatures than silicon transistors. Faster switching reduces the size of filtering components and supports higher motor speeds, that in turn allow smaller, lighter motors. High temperature operation allows simpler mechanical design for cooling within the inverter. The result is that electric drivetrains are getting smaller, lighter and cheaper, quickly.

An indication of the weight and cost of electric drive systems can be found in this DOE presentation. Note (slide 5, bottom) that a 2010 development program at GM achieved the projected 2015 weight target, suggesting that the technology was even then 5 years ahead of DOE's optimistic expectations. Our cost and weight estimates for Model 3 drivetrains is based on this DOE data, extrapolated forward to 2017. Cost estimates for the high performance drivetrain versions used in the 366PD car include a substantial premium for "high spec" electronic components, high performance magnetic materials in the motor and presumably low production rates.

via
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3258855-will-teslas-model-3-compete

Useful chart comparing bang for the buck of various battery technologies

The other day, some other curious people and I ran numbers comparing the per-kWh price of the Tesla Powerwall & Powerpacks (the utility-scale battery options described on the bottom of this page) with top competitors on the market. Admittedly, that was too simplistic a comparison. The kWh rating provided for all of these products is simply the maximum amount of electricity they can store at one point in time. So, in the case of the Powerwall, 7 kWh means that the battery can hold up to 7 kWh of electricity at one time, similar to how a 5-gallon jug of water can hold up to 5 gallons of water.

You have to multiply that capacity rating by # of cycles (# of times the battery will be filled up and then emptied), depth of discharge (whether the battery can be fully emptied during each cycle or needs to be only 80% emptied, 70% emptied, etc), and efficiency (how much electricity is actually transmitted, not lost, in each cycle), and then divide by price to determine a per-kWh price for all of the kilowatt-hours your system is expected to produce… before degrading to 80% of its rated capacity, that is (at which point it’s actually still useful, but that’s apparently the global standard for “end of product life”).

As you can see, there are a number of assumptions you have to make to perform these calculations, and even if all of your assumptions are correct, it’s not like the products are completely dead at the end of the studied time period. This also leaves out operational costs (which we’ll assume to be $0 in the calculations below).

Anyhow, this is the best method I’ve found for comparing Tesla’s Powerwall and Powerpacks to top products on the market. More importantly, on the residential side, the numbers should help a consumer to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of getting a Powerwall (should you get commercial access to one) — that’s the main aim in the next section of this article. Note that I’ve actually left out “competing” lithium-ion and lead-acid batteries in the residential section. Basically, even at a glance, it’s clear that they don’t compete with the Powerwall, so I didn’t bother finding all of the specs and doing the calculations. If you want to do so for any particular battery, I’m happy to add the info in, but I’ll need links or company spec sheets indicating cycle life, expected DoD, efficiency, and price in order to do so.

With a ridiculous amount of help from three wonderful CleanTechnica readers, below are the assumptions and results, split into a “residential” section and a “utility-scale” section.
Residential Battery Storage — Tesla Powerwall x 4 vs Aquion Energy x 2 vs Iron Edison x 1

Subheading have you confused? I ran the numbers for 4 Powerwall purchase scenarios, 2 Aquion Energy products, and 1 Iron Edison product. Since the intro above was too long already, I’ll jump into the table first and list some of the takeaways and the assumptions underneath it:
http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/09/tesla-powerwall-powerblocks-per-kwh-lifetime-prices-vs-aquion-energy-eos-energy-imergy/

The End Of The Lithium-Ion Era?

Lithium-ion technology is still the gold standard for energy storage as demonstrated by the popularity of the new Powerwall battery, Tesla Energy’s much-publicized foray into Li-ion energy storage for homes and businesses. However, some new technologies are sneaking up behind. In the latest development, lithium-sulfur batteries could benefit from a new “designer carbon” engineered by a team of researchers at Stanford University.


Li-S energy storage has important advantages over Li-ion in terms of cost, energy density, and toxicity, but until recently, some major drawbacks have stymied the development of Li-S batteries.

One solution crossed our radar back in 2013, when researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a sulfur-enriched cathode (our sister site Gas2.org also took note).

In other developments, the University of Arizona has also been developing a method for converting waste sulfur to a lightweight plastic that could be used in EV batteries. Last December, researchers at Cambridge University came up with a graphene-based solution, and earlier this year, Drexel University announced that it has been leveraging its experience with MAX phase ceramics to push the Li-S envelope.

The new Stanford findings add more fuel to the energy storage findings. The team tested its new designer carbon material under real-world conditions in lithium-sulfur batteries and supercapacitors (supercapacitors are energy storage devices that charge and discharge rapidly).

For supercapacitors, the results were “dramatic,” with a threefold increase in conductivity compared to electrodes made with conventional activated carbon. Power delivery and stability also improved.

More to the point, the results showed a promising pathway to improving Li-S battery performance, as the designer carbon was able to trap lithium polysulfides, an undesirable byproduct from the interaction of lithium and sulfur.

The new material’s relatively low cost and easy fabrication method are added pluses. You can get all the details from the published study in ACS Central Science under the title “Ultrahigh Surface Area Three-Dimensional Porous Graphitic Carbon from Conjugated Polymeric Molecular Framework.”

You might not see much in the way of competition for Li-ion market share yet, but stay tuned.

Why Natural Is Not Better, Energy Storage Edition

The new designer carbon material could have a variety of applications, but the Stanford University team has zeroed in on the energy storage potential, particularly in respect to lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries.

The new material is actually a synthetic form of bio-based activated carbon. For those of you new to the topic, activated carbon is a common material that shows up in water filters and deodorizers, among many other things — but not energy storage devices, at least not yet.

Inexpensive forms of activated carbon are typically made from coconut shells, which involves a lot of high-temperature processing and chemical finishing. The result is a material rich in nanoscale pores, which gives it a high surface area ideal for storing electrical charges.

However, this “natural” form of activated carbon falls flat in terms of transporting a charge, partly because there is little connectivity between the pores. Here’s lead researcher Zhenan Bao describing the problem:

With activated carbon, there’s no way to control pore connectivity. Also, lots of impurities from the coconut shells and other raw starting materials get carried into the carbon. As a refrigerator deodorant, conventional activated carbon is fine, but it doesn’t provide high enough performance for electronic devices and energy-storage applications.

As a workaround, the Stanford team created its own synthetic sheets of carbon from a hydrogel polymer (hydrogel is fancyspeak for a class of super-absorbing “smart” materials). To activate the material, they added potassium hydroxide, which also increased its surface area.

The result is a carbon material with characteristics that can be controlled in two ways: by using different polymers and organic linkers, and by changing the temperature of the fabrication process.

Here are a couple of snippets from the new study:

For example, raising the processing temperature from 750 degrees Fahrenheit (400 degrees Celsius) to 1,650 F (900 C) resulted in a 10-fold increase in pore volume.

Subsequent processing produced carbon material with a record-high surface area of 4,073 square meters per gram – the equivalent of three American football fields packed into an ounce of carbon. The maximum surface area achieved with conventional activated carbon is about 3,000 square meters per gram.
The End Of The Lithium-Ion Era

Li-S energy storage has important advantages over Li-ion in terms of cost, energy density, and toxicity, but until recently, some major drawbacks have stymied the development of Li-S batteries.

One solution crossed our radar back in 2013, when researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a sulfur-enriched cathode (our sister site Gas2.org also took note).

In other developments, the University of Arizona has also been developing a method for converting waste sulfur to a lightweight plastic that could be used in EV batteries. Last December, researchers at Cambridge University came up with a graphene-based solution, and earlier this year, Drexel University announced that it has been leveraging its experience with MAX phase ceramics to push the Li-S envelope.

The new Stanford findings add more fuel to the energy storage findings. The team tested its new designer carbon material under real-world conditions in lithium-sulfur batteries and supercapacitors (supercapacitors are energy storage devices that charge and discharge rapidly).

For supercapacitors, the results were “dramatic,” with a threefold increase in conductivity compared to electrodes made with conventional activated carbon. Power delivery and stability also improved.

More to the point, the results showed a promising pathway to improving Li-S battery performance, as the designer carbon was able to trap lithium polysulfides, an undesirable byproduct from the interaction of lithium and sulfur.

The new material’s relatively low cost and easy fabrication method are added pluses. You can get all the details from the published study in ACS Central Science under the title “Ultrahigh Surface Area Three-Dimensional Porous Graphitic Carbon from Conjugated Polymeric Molecular Framework.”

You might not see much in the way of competition for Li-ion market share yet, but stay tuned.

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/05/31/new-designer-energy-storage-breakthrough-packs-3-football-fields-1-ounce-carbon/

Highest efficiency in solar electric power generation with advanced Stirling!

Independent tests by IT Power in the UK confirm that a single Ripasso dish can generate 75 to 85 megawatt hours of electricity a year - enough to power 24 typical UK homes. To make the same amount of electricity by burning coal would mean releasing roughly 81 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

Paul Gauche, director of the Solar Thermal Energy Research Group at the University of Stellenbosch has visited the test site many times. “The technology looks good to me. I’ve seen it working and I believe it meets the efficiency goals. The technology is proven with years of performance in the navy.”

He points out that it will be crucial to keep costs low enough to compete with photovoltaics, a significant challenge as their price falls every year. The system is also limited in that it is only useful in areas with consistent bright sunshine.

The technology works by using the mirrors as giant lenses that focus the sun’s energy to a tiny hot point, which in turn drives a zero-emission Stirling engine.

The Stirling engine was developed by Reverend Robert Stirling in Edinburgh in 1816 as an alternative to the steam engine. It uses alternate heating and cooling of an enclosed gas to drive pistons, which turn a flywheel. Because of the material limitations at the time, the advanced stirling engine that Ripasso uses was not commercially developed until 1988, when Swedish defence contractor Kokums started making them for submarines.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/13/could-this-be-the-worlds-most-efficient-solar-electricity-system

Greenhouse gas can be absorbed in soil, with organic soil management

What if there were a risk-free way of helping to mitigate climate change while simultaneously addressing food and water security?

A new report from the Center for Food Safety's Cool Foods Campaign says that such an opportunity is possible, and it's right below our feet.

Soil & Carbon: Soil Solutions to Climate Problems outlines how it is possible to take atmospheric CO2, which is fueling climate change, and plug it into the soil. Far from moving the problem from one place to another, this shift can reduce ocean acidification because the oceans are no longer the sink for vast amounts of CO2, and can regenerate degraded soils by providing needed carbon.

The report lays out the problem in this way:

Humans are altering the chemistry of where carbon is stored, and climate change is a manifestation of that alteration.

Another way of looking at the problem is that too much of the carbon that was once in a solid phase in the soil is now a gas. As a result, there is too much carbon in the atmosphere, too much in the ocean, but not enough stable carbon where it once was, in the soil.

The report adds that "cultivated soils globally have lost 50-70 percent of their original carbon content." Multiple factors have contributed to the problem, the report states: paving over land; converting grasslands to cropland; and agricultural practices that involve tillage and chemical inputs, which not only deprive soil of organic matter and rob it of the ability to store carbon but also contribute to flooding and erosion.

Regenerative practices like this help build healthy soil. (Photo: London Permaculture/flickr/cc)Healthy soils, in contrast, fed through organic agriculture practices, like polycultures, cover crops, and compost, give soil microbes the ability to store more CO2. Not only that, the report states, healthy soil can better weather both drought and floods because its structure allows it to act like a sponge. And healthy soil means better crop yields.

Just how much CO2 can be stored in soils is unclear, with one estimate cited in the report being 75-100 parts per million of CO.

But the bottom line, the report states, is that healthy soils will help communities have resilience in the face of climate change impacts.

The report concludes: "Unlike geoengineering, rebuilding soil carbon is a zero-risk, low-cost proposition. It has universal application, and we already know how to do it. All that stands in our way is a greater awareness of the opportunity and the political will to make it happen."

This story was originally published on Common Dreams.

Another strategy is to incorporate terra preta, charcoal, that remains active in the soil for thousands of years, and has been discovered in brazil in the amazon area, after all that time it still is active, absorbing carbon into the soil, and adding fertility all that time!

Natural cooling explained with great examples from India, middle east

In fact, cultural acceptance of air conditioning varies widely. They’re very rare in French homes and not that common in Spanish ones either, says Lloyd Alter, an adjunct professor at Canada’s Ryerson University School of Interior Design. “In France, they think air conditioners make you sick,” he explains. “In Spain, their culture revolves around being outside and taking advantage of it: ‘We go out and eat our dinner at 10 o’clock at night, and we take it easy mid-day.’”

Looking to the Future
Zaelke sees a future in which governments play a stronger role in setting manufacturing standards, as the Japanese are with their Top Runner program; tax credits to stimulate innovative technology; and comprehensive labeling programs, somewhat like the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) ratings system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council, to address elements of air conditioning beyond the energy efficiency covered by federal Energy Star ratings. He also thinks part of the answer is returning to a design mindset that was prevalent before the advent of air conditioning. “Before cheap energy, we used to do a better job designing our buildings,” he says. “For example, we used to know how to situate a building so you had deciduous trees providing shade during the summer and evergreens providing shelter from the wind.”


The Torrent Research Centre of Ahmedabad, India, uses wind-catching intake towers to pull in air and cool it by diverting it through a fine mist. The cooled air descends through an open central corridor and is drawn into work spaces on each level. Exhaust towers around the perimeter of the complex vent hot air at night.
Abhikram

Pearce asserts that air conditioning has made architects lazy. “Air conditioning has allowed them to design buildings based on formal concepts without any response to the natural environment,” he says. “Architects should design buildings whose form is shaped by a scientific understanding of natural processes at the building’s location and not by some purely whimsical sculptural shape.”

LaRoche believes it’s imperative for people in his profession to pursue minimal environmental impacts when designing structures and strive to incorporate alternative ways to cool them. He says HEED (Home Energy Efficient Design)—free software developed at the University of California, Los Angeles—is a good example of a residential energy design tool that can be used by anybody.31 “Tools such as this one help any homeowner or designer produce low-energy buildings,” he says.

Ultimately, LaRoche says, architectural education is key to change: “If the new architects aren’t trained in the design of low-carbon, low-energy buildings, nothing will happen. New students must be trained with new software and tools that we did not have just a couple of years ago.” He adds, “Whenever we do passive cooling in a building instead of mechanical cooling, we’re helping our planet. It’s also good for our pockets, and our buildings are more culturally responsive to the environment around them.”

Alternatives to traditional air conditioning can reduce power demand

Calling on Traditional Technologies
Although air-conditioning use will certainly continue to increase globally with no serious regulatory frameworks in sight, some observers believe awareness of its environmental impact is beginning to change the ways in which architects and engineers, at least, are approaching the challenge of keeping people cool. In fact, many planned and existing buildings employ a variety of technologies—new and old—to achieve comfortable indoor temperatures without resorting to the use of air conditioners.

Pablo LaRoche, a professor of architecture at California State Polytechnic University Pomona who also practices in the Los Angeles firm HMC Architects, believes the true solution for temperature management is passive cooling systems. Such a system transfers heat from a building to any combination of exterior heat sinks—such as the air, water, and earth—through special design details in the building itself. By providing pathways to carry heat from the interior of the building to the outdoors, he explains, the building itself becomes the air conditioner, using little or no energy at all.19

LaRoche points out that different types of passive cooling systems work better in different climates. For example, he says evaporative cooling20 (which adds moisture to the air) works best when the air is dryer, whereas night flushing21 (using cold night air to ventilate a building and cool its thermal mass) is preferable for places where there is a greater temperature difference between daytime and nighttime temperatures.

Passive downdraft evaporative cooling (PDEC) employs the spraying of microscopic water droplets into the air, a concept borrowed from traditional architecture in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, according to Kamal. These traditional buildings were topped by wind-catching hoods (malqafs) that pulled air down chimneys and cooled it by directing it across a source of moisture: a pool, a fountain, or porous pots that seeped water. Contemporary PDEC buildings also employ wind catchers but replace the water pots with wet cellulose pads or similar devices. Kamal cites the Torrent Research Centre in Ahmedabad, India, as an excellent example of contemporary use of PDEC. The center was completed in 1999 and has reportedly provided comfortable conditions for occupants while also recording extremely low energy consumption.22

Another example of a hot-climate structure using water and traditional design for cooling is Pearl Academy in Jaipur, India. The building includes a sunken courtyard pool, which architect Manit Rastogi explains functions similarly to a basement, staying cooler than the aboveground air in the summer and warmer in the winter; breezes flowing under the raised building create evaporative cooling currents that push air up through atria and open stairwells.

The building also features an exterior latticed screen ( jaali ) enveloping the building, a traditional feature of Rajasthani architecture that provides a thermal buffer for buildings (however, this is not considered true passive cooling, but rather a strategy to avoid overheating). Despite the fact that the building is located in a hot desert climate, Rastogi says it maintains interior temperatures of 80–85°F even when it’s 110°F outside, using minimal mechanical air conditioning just two months of the year.23

One of the most unusual and innovative examples of a structure utilizing traditional technology might be architect Mick Pearce’s Eastgate Centre, a shopping center in Harare, Zimbabwe, that was inspired by a 1992 BBC television program on termites, hosted by naturalist David Attenborough.24 Pearce was struck by the termites’ use of the thermal capacity of the ground and the mound, and their labyrinths of ventilation tunnels. “The termite mound which we see above ground is a breathing and air-conditioning system like the human lung,” he says.

Eastgate Centre relies on night flushing: Cool night air is driven through a multitude of air passages within the building’s heavy concrete and masonry structure, cooling the concrete vaulted ceiling, which absorbs heat during the day. The accumulated heat from each day is vented at night through these same passages, partly by fans and partly by convection forces in 48 huge stacks that run through the center of the building.

Pearce says it took about three years to optimize the timing of the daytime and nighttime fans to align with diurnal differences in temperature. “It was like tuning an organ built into a church, where the building resonance is important,” he says. “Another factor was the occupation of the building, where—like the termitary—the occupants’ heat [output] is crucial to the cycles.” According to Pearce, Eastgate uses 10% of the energy of comparably sized air-conditioned buildings in Harare.

Still another scheme for alternative cooling has been in place in Toronto for eight years: a “deep water source cooling” system in which cool water is pumped from a five-kilometer depth in Lake Ontario to participating office buildings and through metal coils.25 Fans blow the cool air from the coils into the buildings’ climate-control systems, reducing their energy demands. Although mostly used in cooler climates, it is also being explored in warmer areas. A project using this technology is about to break ground in Honolulu and will use seawater.26

Small-Scale Fixes
Apart from these large-scale demonstrations that mechanical air conditioning can be eliminated or reduced, experts say there are many smaller ways that workplaces and homes can be made comfortable during hot weather without air conditioning.
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/121-a18/

Low energy cooling with PDEC

Passive downdraft evaporative cooling (PDEC) employs the spraying of microscopic water droplets into the air, a concept borrowed from traditional architecture in Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, and Egypt, according to Kamal. These traditional buildings were topped by wind-catching hoods (malqafs) that pulled air down chimneys and cooled it by directing it across a source of moisture: a pool, a fountain, or porous pots that seeped water. Contemporary PDEC buildings also employ wind catchers but replace the water pots with wet cellulose pads or similar devices. Kamal cites the Torrent Research Centre in Ahmedabad, India, as an excellent example of contemporary use of PDEC. The center was completed in 1999 and has reportedly provided comfortable conditions for occupants while also recording extremely low energy consumption.
Another example of a hot-climate structure using water and traditional design for cooling is Pearl Academy in Jaipur, India. The building includes a sunken courtyard pool, which architect Manit Rastogi explains functions similarly to a basement, staying cooler than the aboveground air in the summer and warmer in the winter; breezes flowing under the raised building create evaporative cooling currents that push air up through atria and open stairwells.
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(7) Solar Energy - Quora
0 14 April, 2015 Source: quora.com
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Oh Canada Movie - Our Bought And Sold Out Land - Full

First utility scale battery storage system combines several technologies, working together.

The typical situation now, as Philip Alexander Hiersemenzel of Younicos points out, is that coal or natural gas must fill in, and it must continuously be running in order to do so when needed, so Germany must essentially “import grid stability” and export excess coal power.

That’s where Younicos steps in.

One Younicos battery system with 100 MW** of capacity can replace 1 coal-fired power plant used for spinning reserve. 2 GW of Younicos batteries, providing ~1 hour of backup capacity, could replace all thermal power plants in Germany that are used for frequency regulation, resulting in 60% renewables and taking out about 25 conventional power plants.
The Younicos system uses Samsung lithium-ion batteries, sodium-sulfur batteries, and vanadium redox flow batteries. But the special sauce that Younicos brings to this hybrid battery system is the software. Developed over the course of 8 years, this is no simple software. Philip noted that Younicos has tested dozens of different lithium-ion batteries to choose the best for its needs (we saw a case full of maybe two dozen different lithium-ion batteries they had tested) but that each of them is complicated and getting them to function very well and last long as frequency regulators is a very challenging matter. Philip noted that as different as the various lithium-ion batteries looked, they were that different on the inside. They looked very different.

Younicos has ~50 software engineers on staff as well as numerous chemical engineers and mechanical engineers. In total, it currently employs ~120 people full time.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/01/younicos/

New Graphene Compound Could “Revolutionise” Clean Tech

The beauty of GraphExeter is the combination of the new and exotic — graphene — with a widely used, commercially available material. Also called iron chloride, ferric chloride is a common industrial material used for copper etching, sewage treatment, and water purification among other things.

The Next Step For Clean Tech, Via Graphene

So, here’s where things get interesting. It’s been two years since the development of GraphExeter was announced, and the folks over at Exeter haven’t been cooling their heels since then.

Apparently the team was not initially aware that GraphExeter was particularly durable, partly because ferric chloride has a tendency to melt at room temperature. Also it dissolves easily in water, which is a problem.

In other words, you can’t use ferric chloride all by itself, because it falls apart when exposed to air and weather.

When the team started putting GraphExeter through some stress tests, they found that graphene provides the stability that ferric chloride lacks. The results showed that their new graphene compound could even beat out indium tin oxide (ITO), which is commonly used as a conductive material in solar cells, LEDs, and other clean tech applications.

Specifically, they found that GraphExeter could hold up under high humidity, to the tune of 100 percent at room temperature, for 25 days.

They also found that it could withstand temperatures of up to 150 degrees Celsius (that’s 302 degrees Fahrenheit for those of you in the US).

In a vacuum, GraphExeter showed even better results, performing at up to 620 degrees Celsius (1,148 degrees Fahrenheit).

The figure below shows the results of subjecting a GraphExeter sample to heat at room temperature and up. The white scale bar corresponds to five nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter):

graphene cousin GraphExeter
Results of GraphExeter stress test (courtesy of University of Exeter).
Here’s lead researcher Dr. Monica Craciun enthusing over the results:

By demonstrating its stability to being exposed to both high temperatures and humidity, we have shown that it is a practical and realistic alternative to ITO. This is particularly exciting for the solar panel industry, where the ability to withstand all weathers is crucial.

New Used For Graphene-Enhanced Materials

Did we mention that GraphExeter is transparent? We didn’t? We must have skipped that part in the press materials, but we looked up the study online and we finally put two and two together.

ITO (indium tin oxide) is a transparent material, which makes it ideal for solar cells, LEDs, “smart” windows, and display electronics, but it has a couple of limitations, one major one being its brittleness.

If you can find something to sub in for ITO that’s flexible as well as transparent, and can at least equal ITO in efficiency and cost, then you’re talking transformation.

If you’re interested, the results of the study have just been published at Nature, in the journal Scientific Reports, under the title “Unforeseen high temperature and humidity stability of FeCl3 intercalated few layer graphene.”

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/01/08/new-graphene-compound-could-revolutionise-clean-tech/

A visual tour of the world's CO2 emissions

An “affordable” flow battery technology

An “affordable” flow battery technology is currently under development by researchers at Ann Arbor–based Vinazene Inc, in partnership with Grand Valley State University’s Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center and its Chemistry Department.

The new project — which is funded by a DOE Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant — is based around the use of proprietary, high-capacity organic electrolytes. The use of these organic electrolytes, rather than relatively expensive metals like vanadium, is what will reportedly allow for greater “affordability” — to date, the barrier to wide-scale use of flow battery technologies has been their relatively high costs.vAnother purported advantage of the use of these proprietary organic electrolytes is the ability to specifically tailor the compounds used for higher solubility (amongst other traits). The Vinazene battery will reportedly have a higher energy density than the more well known vanadium-based systems, owing to this higher solubility.

Based on Vinazene’s website, the researchers involved seem pretty bullish on the technology — but then they often do, don’t they? Still, it sounds like there’s potential there. Perhaps something will come of it.

The researchers mention possible uses in remote military. surveillance, and/or telecommunication sites. Other potential uses include those in greenhouse farming and various types of industrial production facilities.
full story here:
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/12/31/affordable-flow-battery-technology-reportedly-developed-vinazene/