An Alternative Vehicles Bill during Lame Duck?

On Meet the Press last week White House energy advisor Carol Browner said the Obama administration had not given up hope on passing energy legislation by the end of the year. According to EENEws at least one energy measure will see congressional action this week, an alternative vehicles bill will receive a procedural vote, although efforts to pass it could be stifled by politics. Lawmakers will also keep pushing other energy measures including a renewable electricity mandate, an oil-spill response bill and an extension of expiring tax credits, although an already-crowded lame-duck calendar could leave little time to approve them.

Flow Batteries Coming to Your Home

Sacramento--Flow batteries soon won't be just for utilities and cell phone carriers anymore if Premium Power is right.

The North Reading, Mass.-based company is currently working on a device called the HomeFlow, a scaled-down version of the zinc bromide flow batteries it currently sells to industrial customers. The HomeFlow will store approximately 30 kilowatt-hours of energy, have a 10-kilowatt rating, and cost around $7,500, said Doug Alderton, director of government sales at the company during a session at the Emerging Technologies Summit earlier this week in Sacramento.

The price includes an inverter, so if you are linking it up to a solar system, your costs will be lower.

The ambitious company seems to want to become the Dell Computers of flow batteries. It plans on bringing out a variety of flow batteries -- ranging from the HomeFlow to a 6 megawatt-hour/2-megawatt behemoth that would function like a power plant -- based around a basic building block made from 54 cells. (Dell, in its heyday, mastered the art of designing a few basic SKUs and tweaking them to produce a complete product line.)

Just above the HomeFlow in the product line is the ZincFlow, a 45-kilowatt-hour/15 kilowatt machine. The LocalFlow is next in the line at 100 kilowatt hours/30 kilowatts. The TransFlow 2000, which can hold 2.8 megawatt-hours of energy, has a 500 kilowatt rating, and is 53 feet long. The company is in the process of installing five near Syracuse and Sacramento to help curb peak power in those two regions. (Editor's note: Premium rates its batteries by both kilowatt hours and kilowatts.)

If successful, the batteries will help delay grid upgrades. Other applications exist as well. Lee Burrows of VantagePoint Venture Partners in an earlier interview suggested that flow batteriescould be used to recharge electric cars instead of high-speed charging stations.

And, like Dell, the company wants to make them cheap. Most of Premium's flow batteries cost $250 to $300 a kilowatt hour or $250 to $350 a kilowatt. That's incredibly cheap. Rival Deeya Energy last year came out with flow batteries that cost $4,000 a kilowatt. A123 Systems, which makes lithium ion batteries, makes battery packs that are close to $1,000 a kilowatt hour, said company exec Charliee Vartanian at the same conference.

The company's batteries last 30 years and take up 1/15th of the space of conventional batteries, he added.

Whether and when Premium Power can achieve its goals remains to be seen, but the potential is intriguing. At these rates, storage could be added fairly easily to wind farms and solar arrays. Government officials and developers in Africa have been regularly calling the company to see if Premium's batteries could power microgrids.

Flow batteries pretty much act like their name suggests. A charged electrolyte infused with zinc and bromide ions flows from one tank to another. The trick is in coming up with a battery design that allows the zinc to continually be recycled. After zinc bromide is broken up into its separate elements (a key part of the process for harvesting electrons), the zinc adheres to plates inside the battery. That plate has to be polished before the recharging process can begin again.

Zinc bromide, he added, is a byproduct of shellfish. In other words, there's a lot of it.

Better Place Brings Electric Taxis to San Francisco

Better Place to Bring Electric Taxi Program to the San Francisco Bay Area

Palo Alto, Calif.- Better Place, with support from the U.S. Department of Transportation via the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, today announced a commitment to bring a switchable battery, electric taxi program to the Bay Area in partnership with the cities of San Francisco and San Jose to further cement the region’s position as the “EV Capital of the U.S.”

Taxis are a high-mileage, high-visibility segment that can serve as the on-ramp for technology transfer to the mass-market. Over the next three years, the program will deploy and operate four battery switch stations in the San Francisco to San Jose corridor that supports a fleet of zero-emission, switchable taxis. This fleet will offer many thousands of Bay Area residents and visitors their first EV experience. The program also has the potential to help California and the Bay Area meet their aggressive energy and climate policy goals when scaled to the entire region.

Electric taxis are the gateway to clean cities. While gas-powered taxis are fewer in number than personal cars, these high-mileage vehicles are disproportionally responsible for harmful greenhouse gas (GHG) and other tailpipe emissions, so electrification of this fleet is essential to making a real impact on air quality and oil consumption. Since taxis drive nearly continuously, they require instant charge of their battery to maintain quality of service and continue serving the public. Given the taxi business, waiting three to four hours for standard charge is not an option. Battery switch is the only option that allows the driver to recharge in less time than it takes to refuel, the means of range extension for today’s gas-powered taxis.

First Energy-Efficient Tree House Community

Energy-efficient communities are popping up around the world; from Masdar, the first carbon-neutral city, near Abu Dhabi, U.A.E., to an off-the-grid treehouse enclave in the Costa Rican Jungle.

There, just off the Pan-American Highway, a rocky path leads from the windy road up a mountain, winding into the rainforest.

"You can literally see the line where the rainforest begins, and that's when you get to the community of Finca Bellavista, an Eden of sorts," Matt Hogan says, driving a beat-up truck.

Hogan, a former motocross racer, is co-founder of Finca Bellavista, the solar-powered tree house community he built from scratch with wife Erica after moving from Colorado and joining an environmental movement toward taking communities off strained electrical grids.

"It's a win-win; we're protecting the environment and creating 'green' jobs building the infrastructure," Hogan says of what's billed as the world's first modern, planned, sustainable tree house community.

It consists of about two dozen sky-high structures, with more than 40 other properties sold and planned for development. All told, there are about 80 two-acre lots, which have been selling fast, the founders say.

The first stage of "pre-infrastructure" lots is sold out, they say, and there are six more in Phase Two, starting at $55,000 for a lot.

Success Stories In The Green Economy

Developing Countries Have Had Success in the Green Economy..can the US?

This economic analysis in the Green Economy Report builds in part on the encouraging signs and results of many initiatives around the world. A number of these come from developing countries, including emerging economies, and illustrate the positive benefits from specific green investments and policies, that if scaled up and integrated into a comprehensive strategy, could offer an alternative development path, one that is pro-growth, pro-jobs and pro-poor. Eight of these examples, a limited selection from a growing range of experiences in different sectors, are summarized below, highlighting their economic, social and environmental benefits. While some represent established broad-based policies and investment programmes, others are newly initiated pilot projects. In this sense the collection underlines that a green economy strategy has established and proven examples on which to build. At the same time, some recent developments also illustrate the growing interest in seizing opportunities to move to a green economy.

The Man Who Said Sorry to BP..Wants Top Energy Job In Congress

Texas Rep. Barton goes all out to win House energy panel chairmanship

WASHINGTON — Texas Rep. Joe Barton has taken a scorched earth approach to getting a waiver to become chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the next Congress.

Barton, term-limited by GOP rules to six years as the top Republican on a committee, Thursday sent out letters to the incoming 60-and-counting Republican freshmen asking them for support. The House Energy and Commerce Committee minority press staff took the unusual step of publicizing the move by distributing a sample copy of the letter.

Coral Reefs Die off Took Some Scientists By Surprise

If you watch Ted, you know some scientists weren't surprised. But, according to the NY Times, it was shocking.

Charles Fisher, a marine biologist from Penn State who is the chief scientist on the gulf expedition, told me he had expected to see some subtle effects from the oil. Instead, he found an ecosystem in collapse.

“I have seen many individual dead coral colonies over the years, but I’ve never seen a site full of dead and dying coral colonies,” he said.

Roughly 90 percent of corals at one site he surveyed were dead or dying and covered in a brown substance that he suspects was not oil but “gooey, rotting coral tissue.”

Further testing is necessary to determine exactly what killed the coral, but Dr. Fisher said the circumstantial evidence linking the die-off to the oil spill was overwhelming and represented “a smoking gun.”

“The proximity of the site to the disaster, the depth of the site, the clear evidence of recent impact and the uniqueness of the observations all suggest that the impact we have found is linked to the exposure of this community to either oil, dispersant, extremely depleted oxygen, or some combination of these or other water-borne effects resulting from the spill,” Dr. Fisher wrote in a statement released Friday afternoon by Penn State.

Whether more damaged coral exists near BP’s now-capped well remains to be seen. According to Dr. Fisher, he and a fellow scientist have identified a series of 25 sites within 15 miles of the wellhead that may host undiscovered coral communities. The site of the coral die-off discovered this week was the first of the 25 sites surveyed.

Another research cruise is planned for December to examine more of these target sites.

BP's Alaska

The extensive pipeline system that moves oil, gas and waste throughout BP's operations in Alaska is plagued by severe corrosion, according to an internal maintenance report generated four weeks ago. As of Oct. 1, at least 148 BP pipelines on Alaska's North Slope received an "F-rank'' from the company. According to BP oil workers, that means inspections have determined that more than 80 percent of the pipe wall is corroded and could rupture.

Learning about QR Codes. I hear they are the rage in Japan.

So I hear QR codes are the rage in Japan, which might be helpful to know if you are a Democrat and you just found out about 2010 election result. People use QR codes to purchase things, and find out information about anything people put these on. This code has been embedded with the link to the website, so when you take a photo of it with a smartphone, it gives you the web address.