A Waste of Energy

Solution to the global energy crisis is right under our noses

Lee Teschler — Tue, 08 May 2012 19:49:53 +0000

Well, now we can all go home. A Brazilian scientist has come up with a solution to the global energy crisis. Thanks to Charles Stevens for forwarding this link:

http://thoriumforum.com/brazilian-scientist-finds-solution-global-energy-crisis

When it comes to energy efficiency, internal combustion engines aren’t done yet

Lee Teschler — Thu, 03 May 2012 20:24:42 +0000

You can say one thing for how the higher MPG quest has affected the auto industry: At the recently concluded Society of Automotive Engineers World Congress in Detroit, there were a lot of odd-ball internal combustion engine designs on display, most from inventors who are out of Detroit’s mainstream. In years past, automakers wouldn’t have given these contraptions a second look. Today, they don’t seem to be as dismissive of technology that is out of the mainstream, probably because they are open for any new ideas for boosting MPGs. One observation: A lot of these engines split the combustion cycle, using one cylinder for intake and a second cylinder for the power stroke.
In Detroit, we stopped by the Scuderi Group and looked at their split cycle engine:
Not all the novel ideas were ICEs. Protean was also there with its electric wheel hub induction motors put in a Mercedes:
Also displaying at SAE was a genuine backyard inventor with an interesting rotary engine:
Monty Cleeves showed off his super-efficient split cycle design:
Then there was the two-stroke Grail engine:

11 government agencies, 94 green building programs

Lee Teschler — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:58:04 +0000

Now here’s something interesting. The Washington Post recently reproduced a diagram compiled by the GAO showing the programs promoting green buildings and the federal agencies that sponsor them. It turns out that over 11 federal agencies, there are 94 different programs. Problem is, many of the programs overlap the goals of other programs handled by other agencies. There is no central oversight over any of these programs.
The problem came to light during a Senate hearing on legislation to streamline the federal government.
Quoting from the Post article: To demonstrate how confusing government duplication can be, the top Republican on the committee, Sen. Susan M. Collins (Maine), displayed a bewildering chart, based on Government Accountability Office data, showing 11 agencies and their 94 green building initiatives.
“Improving the energy efficiency of buildings is a worthwhile goal, but surely, overlapping and duplicative programs are not the best way to achieve that goal,” she said. “There is no consistent oversight, there is no accountability, and it is a virtual certainty that there are millions and millions of dollars wasted.”
The whole Post article can be found here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/rw/WashingtonPost/Content/Epaper/2012-03-22/Bx4.pdf

Finally a grownup weighs in on the wind production tax credit

Lee Teschler — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 15:06:11 +0000

Readers may recall the flak U.S. automakers have taken over the years about miles-per-gallon CAFE standards. Basically, the perception has been that U.S. automakers have fought standards that would make cars more fuel-efficient. But critics have pointed out that automakers shot themselves in the foot by adopting this stance. The smarter strategy would have been to embrace miles-per-gallon standards and get out in front of their critics. The history of Detroit automakers would likely have been quite different over the past 20 years, had they adopted this enlightened approach.

Fast forward to today, and an analogous scenario is playing out, this time in wind power and the production tax credit (PTC) that is set to expire at the end of the year. The PTC is a corporate tax credit for wind which credits 2.2₡ per kWh for electricity produced by wind power. It has been credited with being a major reason for the wind boom.

Like automakers predicting dire consequences from the enactment of CAFE standards, wind suppliers have been predicting armageddon-like conditions for their industry if the PTC is not extended. Critics counter that the industry must eventually produce power that is cost competitive with mainstream energy sources. The wind industry’s answer has largely been along the lines of a their-subsidy-is-bigger-than-our-subsidy type argument.

Recently there has been a voice of reason in the PTC question. Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., recently gave an interview with Bloomberg in which he suggested the wind industry might be better served by a multiyear gradual phase-out of the PTC.
“The industry needs a little boost, but that boost can’t last forever,” he said. “The more the industry can figure out a way to proceed by cutting back, phasing out, the better it’d probably be.”

To which we might add, and the better the wind industry would be able to answer criticism from its detractors.

Wind should embrace the idea of phasing out the PTC. To do so sounds more like a position of leadership than does continual whining about a government policy which, at least to some, begins to sound a lot like stuck-in-the-past automakers and CAFE.

The N.A. Windpower Association ran an item on the Baucus interview which you can read here: http://www.nawindpower.com/e107_plugins/content/content.php?content.9609

EV news: Europeans cool to EVs, China’s EV pollution problem

Lee Teschler — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:07:48 +0000

A few recent news items on EVs:

University of Tennessee, Knoxville, researchers found that electric cars in China can result in pollution more harmful to health than gasoline vehicles. Chris Cherry, assistant professor in civil and environmental engineering, and graduate student Shuguang Ji, analyzed the emissions and environmental health impacts of five vehicle technologies in 34 major Chinese cities, focusing on dangerous fine particles. Cherry and his team found electric cars cause much more overall harmful particulate matter pollution than gasoline cars.

Here’s the link: http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/585717/?sc=swtr&xy=5017520

And from our sister publication Ward’s auto come these two items:

Wards reports that sales of electric vehicles in Europe are making little if any headway toward fulfilling their supporters’ optimistic forecasts. According to U.K.-based Auto Industry Data, 11,563 electric passenger cars were registered throughout Western Europe in 2011, representing just 0.09% of the 12.8 million cars sold.
Here is the link:

http://wardsauto.com/vehicles-amp-technology/evs-not-sparking-european-buyers-interest

Wards editors also took a test drive of the BMW EV but found the range estimates the car made on-the-fly to be ambiguous. One problem was that the BMW would estimate remaining range based on the existing weather. So if you started driving in sunny weather, you might find yourself running out of juice if it suddenly started raining, forcing you to engage systems such as the wipers or windshield defoggers:

http://wardsauto.com/vehicle-test-drives/even-bmw-ev-can-t-solve-range-anxiety

College campuses with energy departments

Lee Teschler — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 13:09:49 +0000

Here is an interesting idea from Michael E. Webber and Sheril R. Kirshenbaum, both of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy. They advocate creating a cross-disciplinary curriculum on energy in universities through the creation of energy departments on college campuses.
The problem, they say in a piece on the Chronicle of Higher Education Web site, is that there are a lot of people positing on energy who don’t understand all the facets of it. Energy involves engineering, politics, social trends, and several other disciplines. Often people in decision making roles are familiar with one of these areas but almost totally ignorant of the others, hence the need for energy as a discipline. (I ran into this myself last year on a trip to an energy research facility with a group of other journalists. It soon became evident that one of the other journalists in the group — a widely read energy policy analyst — had no concept of what ac current was. Yet this was a guy who many in the energy industry read religiously.)
Basically, the two researchers claim that current situation is just too specialized to do students much good. “Undergraduates are being ushered through an outdated and compartmentalized system in which the education has not kept up with scientific advances. Energy is poorly defined at institutions of higher education, appearing to be an ambiguous professional pursuit or a subset of umbrella departments such as petroleum engineering or geosciences, which tackle only a single slice of the energy pie,” they say.
They say there is progress in this area through certificate programs some universities now offer in energy, but there is still a ways to go.
The whole post can be found here:
http://chronicle.com/article/Its-Time-to-Shine-the/130408/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The 14,000 abandoned wind turbine story

Lee Teschler — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 19:23:43 +0000

There’s a story making the rounds in the Internet these days about the 14,000 wind turbines that sit abandoned, mainly in California.

The reports seem to be based on a story that ran in the American Thinker more than a year ago: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
The wind turbines it refers to are those residing in California’s Altamont Pass, Tehachapi, and San Gorgonio areas. These kilowatt-scale units were put there in the 1980s during the first alternative energy boom. They were installed not because their economics were compelling but, apparently, at least in part because the government subsidies of the time were lucrative. When the subsidies ran out, the wind turbines were abandoned.

The author cites this information as a cautionary tale pertaining to the situation today, where subsidies of any sort get intense scrutiny, and where wind power is again trendy. There is something to be said for the planning of a wind farm’s the end-of-life. The operational life of a wind turbine is generally pegged at 20 years, and many wind farm operators today have been operating for much less than 20 years; who knows what entity will be in charge of things when today’s turbines are ready to be scrapped.

Finally, the original piece makes the point that subsidies are intended to help new technology during its “ramp up” period before it has matured, when its economics cannot compete with established methods. But the original wind subsidies were in the early 1980s, some 30 years ago. That being the case, there are some asking, justifiable, just when the “ramp up” period for wind will come to an end.

The 115-year-old EV that gets the same mileage as a Volt

Lee Teschler — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:23:14 +0000

Here is a cute item from Geek.com. The 1896 Roberts EV gets 40 miles to a charge, the same as the Volt. Of course, it doesn’t have quite the same complement of ammenities.

Also interesting are the comments at the end from people who are teasing Volt owners, and from people who think the teasers are seriously suggesting the 1896 Roberts is an equal to the Volt:

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1BMrhn/www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/115-year-old-electric-car-gets-same-mileage-as-chevy-volt-20111020/

A video update on smart grid technology

Lee Teschler — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:06:41 +0000

At the recent NI Week event hosted by LabView software creator National Instruments, there were a couple of interesting demonstrations of what’s going on in smart grid infrastructure. I teamed up with EngineeringTV.com to do two short videos on the subject with NI’s Brian MacCreery. The first is an explanation of a smart switch devised by Siemens Energy which takes the place of an electromechanical switching device called a recloser, but with enough smarts to do some diagnostics.

The second video illustrates what happens on a smart grid with a fault hits one of the power lines. Ordinarily, this would black out a whole neighborhood. With a smart grid, the problem is much more localized and affects fewer households.

Cheap light

Lee Teschler — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 13:55:00 +0000

It is interesting to note how much light you can pay for with one hour of work and how this figure has changed through the ages. The science journalist Matt Ridley made this calculation in his book The Rational Optimist. One hour of work at the average wage in the year 1750 BC earned 24 lumen-hours, he says. Those lumens would have come from sesame oil lamps. At the time these were so expensive that they were generally only found in temples.

But an hour of work brought 186 lumen-hours in the year 1800, which would have come from a tallow candle. By 1880 the figure was 4,400 lumen-hours which would have come from a kerosene lamp.

In the 20th century the figures get more interesting. In 1950 531,000 lumen-hours came from an hour of work when you flipped on an incandescent bulb. With a modern CFL you get 8.4 million lumen-hours which, Ridley points out, is equivalent to saying you get 300 days’ worth of reading light from an hour of work, whereas an hour of work in 1800 earned you ten minutes of reading light.

He also turns the figures around to point out that today it takes about a half-second of work to earn the light of an 18-W CFL for an hour. People in the year 1950 had to work about eight seconds to get the same amount of light. Babylonians in 1750 BC would have put in more than 50 hours to get as much.

And of course, once LEDs get super cheap, we could find ourselves laboring for time spans most appropriately measured in milliseconds for an hour of light.