News Blog

An injection of graphite foam is giving new life to the venerable lead acid battery, according to Firefly Energy.

The Peoria, Ill.-based company has come up with a way to coat the membrane, a fan-like lead lattice that allows the battery to generate electrons, with graphite foam. This change results in a more efficient battery that can extract more electricity from the electrolyte, release more electricity per charge, and endure more charging cycles. The battery also will last longer. The foam gives the membrane a larger surface area for reactions.

Firefly's Oasis batteries are designed for long-haul trucks. Truckers typically run their diesel rigs all night, mostly to keep the air conditioning or heating going in their sleeping units, not to mention the TV. Next year, California will impose regulations that only allow truckers to run their rigs in idle for five minutes every hour. The new regulations are designed to cut down on diesel fumes and greenhouse gases. That leaves truckers the option of broiling (or freezing) or waking up every hour.

Firefly's batteries are designed to provide enough power to run the electronics in the sleeping cabin the entire night without depleting the batteries.

The company will come out with samples of so-called Group 31 batteries for long-haul trucks in the first quarter of next year and begin full production in the fourth quarter of 2008. Negotiations with large customers are already under way, according to Firefly executives.

Lead acid batteries were invented more than 100 years ago, but there haven't been many major architectural changes since manufacturers figured out a way to produce batteries that didn't need to be refilled with a hose a few decades ago, Firefly co-founder Mil Ovan said in an interview. Lead acid batteries, though, have a lot of advantages over nickel-metal hydride batteries (which are more expensive) and lithium-ion batteries (which can blow up.)

Firefly's basic technology comes from Caterpillar.

Initially, the membranes in the batteries Firefly will make will contain lead. The foam essentially covers it. But over time, it will try to remove the lead.

The Cleantech Forum that took place in Toronto this week had an interesting guest--Rand Waddoups, senior director of corporate strategy and sustainability at Wal-Mart, who regaled the audience with a pretty interesting array of facts and figures on the retailer's green push, according to Cleantech's news site.

Wal-Mart started to revamp its practices and become more green two years ago. The campaign revolves around good public relations, but also cutting costs. When you managed millions of square feet of retail space, small changes add up.

Some of the results:

The company is saving $1 million a year on energy costs by removing light bulbs from employee coke machines.

Another $10 million a year got saved by more aggressively recycling cardboard and plastic. Overall, Wal-Mart thinks it can turn the 100 million tons of solid waste it produces a year into a profit center.

Another $2.6 million gets saved by putting low-lead LEDs in freezers instead of florescent bulbs. That swap alone cuts down 35 million pounds of carbon dioxide.

Fuel efficiency is up 15 percent in its 6,500 fleet of cars.

More on the link above.

"Without carbon capture and sequestration, we are all toast."

Jiang Lin, a scientist with the China Sustainable Energy Program with Lawrence Berkeley Lab, issued that gloomy proclamation earlier this week, and it's a fitting description of the current world situation when it comes to global warming. To make it worse, I asked Lin about how the world is responding to the challenge. Not well.

"We haven't invested in deep research or spent much money in testing out the scenarios," he said. "There are a lot of uncertainties."

Still, it's not over yet, and the University of Texas this week announced it has received a $38 million grant to study the feasibility of injecting carbon dioxide into brine-filled underground wells over a 10-year period.

The project is part of the Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership (SECARB), funded by the National Energy Technology Laboratory of the Department of Energy. SECARB's goal is to study carbon-dioxide injection and storage capacity of the Tuscaloosa-Woodbine geologic system that stretches from Texas to Florida. The region has the potential to store more than 200 billion tons of the gas, which the department says it equal to about 33 years of emissions.

Beginning in the fall, SECARB scientists will start to inject a million tons of carbon dioxide a year into a brine reservoir near Natchez, Mississippi. The brine is up to 10,000 feet below the surface.

In some ways, the U.S. is the Saudi Arabia of gaping holes. The U.S. has produced more oil than anywhere else in the world, historically speaking--250 billion gallons have been sucked out of the ground here--there is lots of empty space underground, according to Chevron's CTO Don Paul, who spoke this week at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference.

Sequestration, though, poses logistical and financial challenges, Paul said. Just to capture the carbon dioxide coming out of power plants, factories and other "stationary" carbon-dioxide emitters, it would take an infrastructure the same size as the natural gas infrastructure.

"That's a lot of pipe," Paul said. Paul also issued some interesting facts on peak oil.

REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--How much conventional oil is there left in the ground? Close to 2 trillion barrels, according to Don Paul, Chevron's chief technology officer.

The "geological endowment" of conventional oil--that is, the amount of oil in the Earth--once totaled about 3 trillion barrels, he said during a presentation at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference here. We've used about 1.1 trillion. Oil companies with current technologies can't get it all out of the ground, so maybe there is a trillion barrels left for human consumption.

And we're consuming a lot of fuel: about 3 billion gallons a day worldwide, or roughly a half-gallon for every person on the planet. By 2012, the human race will have consumed 1.5 trillion barrels, Paul said in a hallway conversation.

Thus, peak oil--the theory that we're about to get into declining numbers on conventional oil--is probably real. However, Paul said, "I don't think it has to be the catastrophe that other people have predicted because there are other ways to make fuel."

The alternatives include shale oil and oil sands. There might be a trillion barrels of oil in shale. One problem is that producing oil from shale or oil sands generates significant amounts of carbon dioxide--but a lot of that carbon dioxide comes from producing the hydrogen needed to process the raw materials. "It is this production of hydrogen that is creating the CO2," Paul said.

Some French companies, he said, have proposed building nuclear plants in Canada near the oil sands deposits to generate steam--that is, water vapor.

Biofuels will also contribute, but biofuels are small right now. Roughly 20,000 gallons of biofuels get made a day, and that needs to be increased by 10 or 20 times, Paul said.

Electric will also come, but batteries need work. "Even the best batteries have 1/10th of the energy density of gasoline," he said. (Others, such as Nobel-winning chemist Richard Smalley, have pointed out how there's no easy alternative when it comes to energy density.)

Liquid fuel makers will also have to develop carbon capture and sequestration sites. Chevron is kicking off a large sequestration project in Australia. Sequestration is a technological challenge, but the bigger problem is financing and planning the infrastructure. These are huge construction projects after all. Just to capture the carbon dioxide coming out of power plants, factories and other "stationary" CO2 emitters, it would take an infrastructure the same size as the natural gas infrastructure.

"That's a lot of pipe," Paul said.

Expect to see sequestration projects in the U.S. Given that the U.S. has produced more oil than anywhere else in the world, historically speaking--250 billion gallons have been sucked out of the ground here--there is lots of empty space underground.

If you run the dryer in the daytime and live in California, expect to pay for the privilege in the future.

Peter Darbee, CEO Pacific Gas & Electric, said the utility is currently running a smart meter trial at 25,000 homes and one of the goals is to figure out how to price peak power. Electricity demand is highest in the afternoon and PG&E is trying to figure out much the utility will have to charge for the power to curb demand. By curbing demand, PG&E can cut back on greenhouse gas emissions and, possibly, cut back on power plant construction.

So far, the early data indicates that the answer is high.

"It will require a significant amount of price premium for peak power to shake that behavior," he told an audience at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations Conference taking place in Redwood City this week.

To this end, the utility is applying to the state's public utility commission for permission to impose a price hike for peak power. Darbee further added that he is confident that the PUC will "approve a rate delta that is pretty sharp."

Texas and other states are experimenting with ways to curb peak power. In Texas, Centerpoint, a utility, is offering customers discounts if homeowners allow the utility to install sensors that will prevent energy-gobbling appliances like dryers from working during the daytime.

PG&E and others are also installing interfaces to household gas and electricity meters so that homeowners can analyze how much power they are consuming. PG&E's current meters can give homeowners a snapshot of energy use every 15 minutes. That may be sped up to a real time snapshot, Darbee added.

Some consumers may object to these plans, claiming that it involves government intrusion into the market, but look at it another way. PG&E is just trying to analyze what the market will bear. (This is my opinion. Darbee didn't say that, by the way.)

Other gems from Darbee:

Wind can only probably account for 15 percent of California's electricity, and 20 percent at the theoretical best. Wind tends to die down during the hottest part of the day here, so there's an imbalance. The utility will spend $14 million on an experiment to see if wind power generated in British Columbia can be transferred here. If it works, the amount of wind power could increase significantly.

PG&E likes solar thermal power too. It has already signed a contract for 550 megawatts of solar thermal power with Solel, an Israeli company that is increasing the size of its solar thermal fields in the Mojave Desert. (Solel has been out there for two decades.). The utility will announce new contracts with new companies in the very near future, he added. Many expect some of that new business to go to Ausra or Brightsource Energy.

Solar thermal energy now costs about 10 to 12 cents a kilowatt hour, Darbee said, and will likely drop to 10 cents or less. Electricity from a gas-fired plant goes for around 8 cents. "We're coming into the range of conventional generation," he said.

Don't expect a cap-and-trade system for carbon to be installed in the U.S. for at least 18 to24 months. You need a new president first, probably, he said. Even if a cap system is installed in two years, we won't see the effect for five years from now, he added.

You can make solar panels with impure silicon, claims Roy Johnson. You just have to know how to isolate the undesirables.

CaliSolar, a solar start-up that derives from research originally conducted at UC Berkeley, has come up with a way to make solar cells out of upgraded metallurgical silicon, which is less pure and less costly than the industry standard electrical grade silicon, according to Johnson, the company's CEO, at a meeting at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference taking place this week.

Electrical grade silicon is 99.99999 plus percent pure, but it costs $150 to $250 a kilogram, he said. Even before the worldwide shortage of silicon the stuff costs $50 or more a kilo because of the ornate processing procedures. Only around 70,000 tons are manufactured worldwide.

By contrast, upgraded metallurgical silicon is only 99 percent or so and goes for $20 to $50 a kilo. Approximately 1.2 million tons get made a year.

While the purity differences may not sound big to you, to a solar panel it's usually a deal breaker. Photovoltaic solar panels generate electricity by separating negative charges from positive charges contained in the sunlight that strikes them. The negative charges (electrons) are then captured, converted to AC power, and then used to power things in your house. Pure silicon is usually needed because impurities prevent electron capture.

CaliSolar gets around this by isolating the impurities during manufacturing. The impurities can be channeled into the borders between crystals, Johnson said, which don't generate electricity anyway. The impurities can also be coaxed, through chemical and physical forces, to "float" to the top of a wafer, where they can be etched off. In other words, it nullifies the effect of the impurities by coming up with ways to ensure that the impurities aren't uniformly distributed.

The solar cells coming out of CaliSolar's labs are already roughly competitive with standard silicon solar cells in terms of efficiency, said Johnson, a former networking executive. If CaliSolar can mass manufacture solar cells with a 14 percent efficiency rating--which means that they will convert 14 percent of the sunlight that strikes them into electricity--these solar cells will cost far less than the 16 percent efficiency cells that are common on the market today.

"We are already making market-competitive solar cells" in CaliSolar's labs, he said.

CaliSolar, however, isn't selling its cells yet. It has delivered samples to potential customers and hopes to have a prototype plant built in the first quarter of 2008. Following that, it will build a mass production plant. (To get that bigger plant, however, it will also have to obtain about $30 million to $50 million in funding, which isn't as tough as it sounds these days.) The company conducts its silicon research in Berlin, but will likely build its mass-production solar plant in California, which will likely become the largest solar market in the world, Johnson said.

Silicon panels weigh a lot, so manufacturers want to build them near the customer base. CaliSolar will make silicon ingots, which get turned into wafers, and solar cells, but it does not plan to make solar panels. Instead, it will sell its solar cells to panel makers.

The technique of using impure silicon was invented by Eicke Weber, a former UC professor now at Germany's Frauhofer Institute.

German auto giants Volkswagen and Daimler have taken minority shares in renewable-energy specialist Choren Industries, which has developed a process for turning leftover agricultural products and other biomass into liquid fuel.

Choren is currently building a beta plant in Freiberg, Germany, that will produce about 15,000 metric tons of fuel a year. That's enough to provide fuel for 15,000 drivers for an entire year. It then hopes to follow up with a production plant that can crank out 200,000 metric tons of fuel. Ten to fifteen of these plants, Choren estimates, could cut up to 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide by 2020.

The companies said that Choren's fuel is compatible with diesel engines. However, it is not your standard biodiesel production. In biodiesel, vegetable oil or animal fat are cooked to remove the gummy glycerin. The resulting oil is then consumed as fuel.

Choren cooks biomass and turns it into a carbon- and hydrogen-heavy synthetic gas. This synthetic gas is then converted into a liquid via the Fischer-Tropsch process, which was invented several decades ago to convert coal into liquid fuel. South Africa used the coal-to-liquid process extensively because of trade bans during the apartheid era. So did Germany during World War II. With the process, Choren is looking beyond diesel to create other types of synthetic fuels.

Forget biodiesel. To put a dent in global warming, we are going to have to stop using coal, said Ed Mazria, founder of Architecture 2030 at the West Coast Green conference taking place in San Francisco this week.

"The only fossil fuel that can fuel global warming is coal. If you stop coal, you stop global warming. End of story," he said. Architecture 2030 is a non-profit that encourages builders, suppliers and architects to move toward making carbon neutral buildings by 2030.

The problem with coal is two fold: it spews a lot of carbon dioxide, among other materials into the air, and the world has a lot of it, making it tempting to use. In the U.S. alone, there are 151 coal plants in the planning and construction phase.

The emissions from a single coal-fired power plant for one month will negate the efforts Wal-Mart is putting forth to curb its emissions. Wal-Mart wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent in seven years, he said.

Home Depot has announced it will plant 300,000 trees to offset is carbon dioxide. Unfortunately, those 300,000 trees will have to live 100 years before they offset the fumes from ten days from a coal-fired plant, he said. Replace every incandescent bulb in America with compact fluorescents? The benefits are eradicated by the carbon dioxide from two coal-fired plants over a year, he said.

"The silver bullet is no more coal," he said.

The coal question is the big question in the green industry. Coal plants do put a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, but getting rid of them rapidly, say many, is economically unfeasible. Some have begun to advocate erecting more nuclear power plants to offset coal use. Several companies have also put forward ideas for cleaning up coal.

Of course, that won't be easy, but there are technologies and ideas that can help right now, said Mazria. Designing buildings to take advantage of passive cooling and natural lighting will cut energy use. Solar panels will reduce fossil fuels, he said. Architecture 2030's goal is to make the building sector carbon neutral by that year. According to stats from Oak Ridge National Laboratories, buildings consume approximately 48 percent of the energy in the U.S. (43 percent goes to operations, 8 percent goes to construction) and account for 43 percent of the greenhouse gases. 76 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. goes to operating buildings.

And the U.S. has conserved before. Energy use between 1973 and 1983 stayed relatively flat, according to stats from the Energy Information Agency, he said. But in that time period, 35 million new cars got on the road.

Mazria also showed off some very scary simulations of what will happen if sea levels rise to a meter or more. A lot of coastal Florida will vanish at 1 meter. Galveston, Texas goes under at 1.5 meters.

Climate change may become irreversible if the atmosphere hits 450 parts per million of carbon dioxide, he said, citing studies. Right now, the earth is at 385 parts per million and the figure is currently rising at 2.2 parts every year. Without changes, we will hit the 450 level by 2035, he asserted.

SEATTLE--Carbon offsets, energy efficiency credits, renewable energy certificates. The lexicon of the new, niche business world of brokering in greenhouse gases was spoken at the Discover Brilliant conference Monday. (It felt like being in Charlie Brown's classroom.)

Carbon markets have begun to boom over the past year, offering corporations options for offsetting their emissions by trading them with cleaner companies. Many proponents of carbon trading want laws to force businesses to clean up their act.

"As long as companies can dump carbon without paying, they will," said K.C. Golden, policy director of Climate Solutions, a nonprofit that advises businesses on renewable energy strategies.

Under Europe's mandatory carbon cap and trade system that took effect this year, companies are allowed to emit a certain amount of greenhouse gases. To make up for exceeding that level, businesses buy expensive credits from companies that release fewer carbons. Europe borrowed the idea from the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1990, which set up caps and trading for sulfur dioxide, which causes smog.

Carbon markets are set to take off here in 2009 once a cap-and-trade program comes into effect in 11 Northeastern states. California establishes its own system in 2011, and is setting up emissions trading with Oregon, Washington state and British Columbia.

Attempts to offset carbons spewed into the atmosphere are attractive for companies seeking to wash their hands of causing climate change. The trading might be lucrative where mandatory, especially for businesses that already emit few carbons.

"If you're a large emitter, emitting tens of millions of tons of carbon and each one of those tons is a $10 cost, there's a noticeable impact on your balance sheet--or it can be a noticeable plus if you can sell it," said Gordon Smith, EcoLands Director of the nonprofit Environmental Resources Trust.

PepsiCo bought in April the largest chunk of renewable energy certificates yet--500,000 terawatt hours worth--through the for-profit Sterling Planet, which also supplies green pricing programs to 43 utilities companies.

Critics, however, contend that carbon trading is a distracting shell game that lets companies dump some carbon in one place while supposedly removing it elsewhere--kind of like throwing trash out your car window on the way to volunteer at a beach clean-up.

Determining the effectiveness of these new markets is sure to get harder as they grow. The very concept of carbon trading is an abstraction upon an abstraction, sort of the way a hedge fund is. It's hard to visualize carbon in the air, unlike other environmental hazards, such as banned aerosol from hairsprays that would hiss in your face, or cigarette smoke.

Even the seemingly more concrete efforts to reduce carbons are hard to measure. Environmental Resources Trust, which creates a registry of emissions rather than a market for trading them, specializes in forestry credits. The goal is to get more trees in the ground to suck up carbon dioxide. Trees look lovely and may be easier to count than abstract emissions certificates, but measuring their effectiveness is not.