Michio Kaku on Hydrogen Power

At the 2015 Consumer Electronics Shown in Las Vegas, Michio Kaku, Physicist, author, and well TV science  personality, introduced Toyota's newest fuel cell powered car. The fuel it uses is hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. Hydrogen is inexhaustible in supply, non-toxic, and pollution free. When used to power a car, the only exhaust byproduct is water.

I started making videos about renewable energy and hydrogen in the early nineties.  For the last decade,  all of the clean energy thunder has been sucked by a range of battery technologies. There is definitely an important place in our energy future for batteries, but they are not a panacea. 

In 2015, Toyota, Honda, and Hyundai will have production fuel cell cars available in showrooms in California.  The big limiting factor on these vehicles is the lack of a fueling infrastructure.  In the US, only Southern California currently has hydrogen available at public fueling stations.  Let's hope the political will with our elected officials is there to rapidly expand the hydrogen fueling infrastructure across the nation. 

I wrote a book called The Hydrogen Age was published in 2007. It is gratifying to see the kind of future I wrote about in that book coming to pass.

Here is Michio Kaku introducing Toyota's first production fuel cell car. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvy6QxlPso

Solar Freakin' Roadways

This is such an amazing idea. Think of all the landmass around the world that is dedicated for use of of one kind of transport vehicle or another - roadways, parking lots, airport runways.  What if those paved places were resurfaced with tiles that produce solar energy.  It's a fantastic idea. 

Check out this video produced by a group that has a plan to make it happen... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU





 

Hydrogen Cars Arrive in 2014

Hyundai and Toyota have both announced that they will be introducing hydrogen fuel cell cars into the marketplace in the latter part of 2014.  In the U.S., it will begin in California, where the various car manufacturers have been testing fuel cell prototypes for years.  In the U.S., California has been a leader in clean, automotive technology. A number of hydrogen fueling stations are already in place and more are coming.   Europe has put much more effort into building infrastructure for hydrogen vehicles. Most likely, these clean running machines will gain a foothold in the European Union first, simply because European energy policy aggressively encourages  the adoption of hydrogen and other clean energy technologies.

Toyota Fuel Cell Car

The fossil fuel industry has long used its wealth and political influence to undermine the credibility of hydrogen as a clean energy alternative.  Despite the naysayers, hydrogen continues to emerge, because it works. It is nature's elegantly simple answer: clean, non-toxic, cost effective, and safe when properly managed.  I suspect by 2020, the transition into the hydrogen age will be well underway.

Here is a very engaging video from Toyota showcasing their new fuel cell car... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7xCbmkWKkw


Here is a link to the website for the California Fuel Cell Partnership... http://cafcp.org/

Hyundai's Hydrogen Fuel Cell Farm

Hyundai Motor Company is on the leading edge of fuel cell technology for automobiles.  They are the first to put FC cars into production on an assembly line.

Hyundai Fuel Cell SUV

This week, Hyundai is opening an exhibit in London, U.K. called the Hyundai Fuel Cell Farm.

The Europeans will be the first to put hydrogen powered vehicles on the road in large numbers, and Hyundai is one of the companies that is leading the way.

Here is a link to Hyundai's  Fuel Cell Farm website... http://www.hyundai.co.uk/about-us/environment/hydrogen-fuel-cell?goback=%2Egde_137901_member_5797067451594190851#fuel_cell_farm





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Vindskip

Lade A S, a Norwegian ship design firm, has come up with a refinement on the sailing ship concept. Like the tall ships the plied the seas before the 20th century, vindskip is propelled primarily by the wind, using a hull design that works like a rigid sail. 

Lade A S Vindskip

Using this design, a vindskip can achieve a 60% reduction in fuel consumption and an 80% reduction in exhaust pollution.  That sounds pretty compelling to me.

Here is a link to a promotional video on the vindskip design...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZo33MQeFN4

Vestenskov - World's First Hydrogen Community

There is a village on the island of Lolland in Denmark called Vestenskov. It is poised to become the world's  first hydrogen powered and heated community.

Vestenskov

I have invested a lot of my own time and sweat equity into encouraging a pollution-free energy future that employs hydrogen as a clean, non-toxic storage medium for the wind, sun, and other renewable sources.  In Denmark there is a small community that will soon be a model for how that can work.  It's an example of how the European Union is moving aggressively toward clean renewables as a response to climate change.

There are many renewable hydrogen demonstration projects around the world. Vestenskov is the first that shows hydrogen at work on a community level.

In Vestenskov,  electricity from wind turbines located close by will be converted to storable hydrogen for use on demand in the community's residences and businesses.    Europe intends to replace coal and oil with clean energy systems that will not harm the environment.    We should be doing the same thing here in North America.   That makes a lot more sense than extracting dirty oil from Canadian tar sands.

Here is a link to a website that reports on the renewable hydrogen vision for Vestenskov. .    http://www.dac.dk/en/dac-cities/sustainable-cities/all-cases/energy/vestenskov-the-worlds-first-hydrogen-community/?bbredirect=true#!

Creative Energy

Some of the greatest examples of creative energy come out of the world of product advertising.  

Here are two video commercials produced by Honda Motor Company that are remarkably clever and engaging. You can't help but smile when you see this kind of ingenuity at work.  I have to wonder how much the world could benefit if the people behind these two examples of advertising art were to turn their talents to subjects like global climate change, reproductive choice, or equal rights and opportunity.

This video from Honda went viral on You Tube.   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFko-_pVKwg

Here is Honda's version of a Rube Golkdberg classic...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tiQ7Auo-Q6s

Upcycle - Living Like Dersu

The sub-title for Upcycle, the new book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, is Beyond Sustainability, Designing for Abundance.  McDonough is a celebrated, American architect/designer. Braungart is a German born design chemist. In this book, they tell the story of Dersu, hero of a Japanese movie, Dersu Uzala.  In this movie, Dersu is a woodsman who becomes guide to explorers passing through his remote forested region.  When a storm comes up, he leads them to shelter in a long disused cabin deep in the wilderness.  There they find dry firewood stacked inside, waiting to be used to warm the place.  After the storm,  Dersu is shocked when the explorers prepare to leave without replenishing the firewood for the next visitors. This is a wonderful metaphor for the way the society we know exploits the earth's resources relentlessly, without regard to the impact on those that will come after.

McDonough and Braungart believe that we humans must go beyond just lightening our footprints on the earth we are totally dependent on. We can, indeed we must, actually leave things better off when we depart than they were before we arrived.  It's a wonderful. idealisitic paradigm for living. 

Upcycle is not the first book from McDonough and Braungart.  A decade ago, they published Cradle to Cradle.  It offered their first reflections on learning to live with the biosphere instead of cravenly exploiting it and leaving it exhausted for future generations.   We have been mindlessly exploiting our planet's land, water, air, and biological resources for a very long time.  That is clearly no longer a viable approach to living. 

In their latest book, the authors seem almost giddy as they present case after case of upcycle thinking that showcase design processes that actually leave things better off than they were before the processes were initiated.  Improving what we were gifted with by generations that came before seems like a very worthy paradigm for humans to embrace.

The ideas showcased in Upcycle are not entirely new.  Urban farming in high rise structures or even below ground, using cost effective, artificial light sources has been around for awhile and has been demonstrated in various settings.  The Dutch model of growing food in greenhouses is especially compelling. What is new is the focus on designing processes and products that make the resources used in those processes and products readily available for recycling at the end of useful life. 

Here's an example from the book. Michael Braungart analyzed a TV set to see how many chemicals went into its production. The answer was 4,360. Most TV sets these days still end up in landfills. They are simply not designed to be reduced to reusable resource form at end of life.  Michael Braungart participated in a program with Phillips Electronics that resulted in the Econova TV, which was designed to be easily disassembled at end of life. It is also PVC-free and its cables are halogen-free.  This is a big leap forward.  All products and processes should be designed this way.  

Here is a lovely quote from the book...

The goal of the Upcycle is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy, and just world, with clean air, water, soil, and power - economically, equitably, ecologically, and elegantly enjoyed.

I find this to be an incredibly noble sentiment and a motivation entirely worthy of we humans as a species.

I give this book my highest recommendation. I also include William McDonough and Michael Braungart on my list of most admired people. 

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Actually, there are two garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean, each a slow swirling vortex of plastic trash the size of Texas. All of the world's oceans have these trash gyres. They exist naturally as a consequence of ocean circulation patterns. Of course, having them loaded up with tons of waste plastic is not natural. It's only there because of us humans. About ten percent of all plastic waste ends up in our oceans.  That amounts to about 7.25 million tons, which in volume is a whole lot...imagine a soup made of plastic bags and styrofoam packing peanuts. Needless to say, that stuff is not good for the health of the fish and other marine animals.

 

Some have suggested it would take 80,000 years to clean up these monster pelagic blossoms of garbage.  Fortunately, a 19 year old engineering student named Boyan Slat has been thinking a lot about this problem. He believes he knows how to fix it. In fact, young Mr. Slat claims the cleanup can be done in five years and that money can be made in the process.  While Boyan Slat's idea is more conceptual than real at the moment, a serious effort is underway to determine the feasibility of his  vision, which features a series of floating capture stations anchored to the ocean bottom, all connected by specialized booms.that trap the plastic waste.

Want to know more? Go to Boyan Slat's website   http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/

Here is a link to the TED presentation with Boyan Slat reflecting on his bold solution for the ocean garbage patches... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROW9F-c0kIQ

Amazing Glass

A friend sent me the link to these two videos.   This is where the world is headed according to Corning Glass.  It's amazing; mind-blowing...

Here are the links  

Part One     http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&vq=medium

Part Two    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0&feature=youtu.be

MeCam

A group called Always Innovating  has just announced a new micro UAV device that they expect to retail for about $49. It's a tiny, video camera  equpped quadracopter  that responds to voice commands and will follow its minder around like a camera toting Twitty Bird. 

This device is an amazing reflection of the lightning pace of innovative change.  My first awareness of this kind of  micro-copter technology came less than a year ago, and I 'm generally more aware of innovations like this than a lot of folks.  For less than fifty bucks, you can have your own flying video camera that can stream video to your smartphone or tablet.   Imagine the kind of impact this technology could have. Search and rescue and routine environmental monitoring will surely be enhanced.  On the other hand, privacy is going to be further eroded.  Any zit faced teenager with one of these flying video cameras will be able to conduct every knd of unwanted, anonymous survielance at will.  Worse case, one of these carrying a small amount of explosive material would be a cheap and very lethal weapon.

Here is a link to a video about the MeCam...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-2hgsdeYyo&feature=player_embedded

Video Tour - International Space Station

This is a very engaging tour of the International Space Station by the current commander, American astronaur Sunita Williams.

International Space Station

What makes this version so interesting is that astronaut Williams  takes the viewer through the entire orbiting station.

Astronaut Sunita Williams

Here is the link...  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRzakuMjd5Y

Boeing 787 Build Video

The 787 is Boeing's newest commercial jet.  What makes it unique is that it is constructed almost entirely of strong, lightweight carbon fiber material. It is the most fuel efficient airliner ever built. In an age of high fuel costs, that is a big deal.

Here is a link to the video that shows how the 787 is constructed.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f07HpUAuWgk

Invelox Wind Techology

Lester Brown from the Earth Policy Institute sees wind technology as the foundation for the world's emerging clean energy future.  What comes to mind when most folks think about wind turbines are tall towers with gigantic three bladed, vertically mounted sweep turbines. 

There are so many more ways to capture wind energy.

A new innovation I just became aware of was developed by a company called Sheerwind. They call their new design Invelox.  The diagram below comes from the Sheerwind webpage.  The Invelox design takes advantage of a physical principle called the Venturi Effect. 

Simply stated, if the wind is moving at 10 mph entering an ivelox machine; by the time it passes through the rotating internal turbines that wind is moving at 40 mph. Those spinning turbines are attached to a generator that turns the wind into mechanical energy.

Invelox Wind Turbine Prototype

Here's a comparison between a traditional sweep turbine and a Invelox.

 

 

 

The Invelox technology is scale able over a broad range from 5 Kw up to 7 Mw. Sheerwind expects to began deliveries in 2013.  The company claims their turbines will be able to deliver energy at 4 cents/KWh,  comparable to the most efficient fossil fuel power plants.

 

There is a huge market for clean, cost effective renewable energy technologies. If Sheerwind delivers as promised, the future should be very bright for their Invelox turbines.

 

Here is a link to Sheerwind's webpage...   http://sheerwind.com/

 

 

 

 

 

 



Cradle to Cradle

That's the title of a book published in 2002. One of the most interesting things about this book by architects William McDonough and Michael Braungart is that it was printed on biodegradable plastic.

The subtitle of Cradle to Cradle is 'Remaking the Way We Make Things'.  

Here is a diagram that presents the Cradle to Cradle principles.

Cradle to Cradle is a design philosophy that boils down to 'waste equals food',  In essence, it's a repudiation of our throw away society in which billions of tons of  materials that could be reused end up discarded in landfills around the world.  McDonough and Braugart see a future in which everything is recycleable and almost nothing is thrown away. It's a beautiful concept, and a lot has happened since the book came out that reflects its life affirming ideals.  These days when old buildings come down, the brick, steel, concrete, wiring, and mechanical systems are now recycled more often than not.  Moreover, new buildings are being designed purposefully with end-of-life recycling and reuse in mind.

Waste is literally becoming a dirty word. That is a very good thing.

 



 

"What your people call your natural resources, our people call our relatives."

                                                   Oren Lyons - Faith Keeper on the Onondaga

Here is a link to William McDonough's website...
http://www.mcdonough.com/

Liquid Piston

This post is about a new type of air-fuel engine that combines the best traits of the standard internal combustion (IC), the diesel, and the wankel rotary engines.  Developed by Dr. Alexander Shkolnik and his father Nikolai, this engine operates at something like 75% efficiency, and because it burns its fuel so thoroughly, it spews very little pollution and in fact does not require the usual array of  abatement measures that are currently standard for the auto industry.

Liquid Piston Engine

The liquid pistion engine is compact, quiet, and very efficient. It also has only thirteen moving parts, making it much less complicated than an IC engine. That makes it very intriguing as a complement.to the hybrid, battery electric technology that is slowly emerging as an automotive alternative. As the price of gasoline inevitably goes up, so will the demand for auto options that use dramatically less hydrocarbon fuel. 

Diesel engine and Liquid Piston Engine

Ultimately,  I see the world going to fuel cells running on hydrogen as the best complement to batteries in automotive vehicles,  but the liquid piston engine could well be a worthwhile interim technology on the road to fuel cells.

Here is a link to a Popular Mechanics story on the liquid piston engine.http://www.liquidpiston.com/newsdesc/nid/27.html

Here is a link to the Liquid Piston website   http://www.liquidpiston.com/default.html

Biomimicry

Biomimcry seems like a concept that should be easily assimilated.  In a nutshell, it is about finding answers to our human scale challenges by looking thoughtfully at nature's model.

Janine Benyus wrote a book some years ago titled, Biomimcry. She is responsible for popularizing the term. She is founder of The Biomimicry Institute

Jeannine Benyus

Here is a list I lifted from Janine's book, Biomimcry, that applies profoundly to the task of creating a sustainable future for the biospshere we all depend on.

Nature runs on sunlight

Nature uses only the energy it needs

Nature fits form to function

Nature recycles everything

Nature rewards cooperation

Nature banks on diversity

Nature demands local expertise

Nature curbs excesses within

Nature taps the power of limits

Embracing these ideas offers a path forward worthy of our species...


Here is a link to Janine's personal webpage   http://janinebenyus.com/

Here is a link to Janine Benyus talking about Biomimcry...

http://www.ted.com/talks/janine_benyus_shares_nature_s_designs.html

The Hydrogen Age

In 2007, I was the lead author on a non-fiction book titled, The Hydrogen Age.  At that point, I had invested about fifteen years of my life in efforts to expand public awareness of hydrogen as a critical part of any transition to clean, renewably produced energy.

The book was a critical success, especially with people in the clean energy business.  

 Technically, hydrogen is not a source of renewable energy, but instead is an energy carrier.  By taking electricity generated from wind turbines, solar panels, tidal and wave action, river currents, and geothermal steam and running it through an electrolyser, you can split water molecules into their constituent elements, hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen can then by stored for use on demand. It can be used to power internal combustion engines likes those in most cars or turbines like those in jet aircraft.  It can also be used in a device called a fuel cell to produce useful electrical energy.

The transition to a 'Hydrogen Economy' is moving ahead, particularly on the other side of the Atlantic, where the European Union and Germany in particular, are directing billions of Euros in a transition away from fossil fuel dependence to a sustainable economy, whose foundation is clean, renewably produced energy with hydrogen as its principle storage medium.[more on the European transition in my earlier blog entry - The Third Industrial Revolution]

In the US,  the move to clean, renewably produced energy is proceeding, but at a much slower pace. This is almost entirely because energy policy in the US is controlled by 'big oil' and other entrenched energy lobbies.  

By the year 2015, many of the world's leading automakers are expected to offer their first hydrogen fueled vehicles for sale in their retail showrooms. Things appear on very much on track for that to happen in Europe and Japan, and perhaps China, where efforts are underway to put the fueling infrastructure in place to support hydrogen powered vehicles.  Unfortunately, public policy in the US is badly corrupted. It favors old school energy interests over the common good. I very much hiope that will change.