Five Percent: Conserve Energy

I am willing to cut Ford a lot of slack these days, and even my cynical view leads me to conclude that today’s announcement of scaling back of emphasis on hybrid vehicles in favor of multi-fuel vehicles that can run on E85 is a reasonable and appropriate action on their part. (more…)

All crops need fertilizers to grow. And what “fertilizer” really means is nitrogen that plants can use. Hell, air is 80% nitrogen, but it’s not in a form plants can use. But plants need nitrates (chemically NO₃) which is oxygen bound to nitrogen in a particular way. This occurs in nature in two ways: lightening creates NO₃, and bacteria eating organic materials (a.k.a. “compost”) make NO₃. All good. What if you need more NO₃? Well, in 1903, two German guys got the Nobel prize for figuring out how: the Haber-Bosch process creates ammonia, which is the basis for synthetic nitrates, and fertilizers.

And guess what you need to make ammonia? Natural gas accounts for about 3/4 the cost (more…)

From an article in today’s Business section of the New York Times:

The U.S. futures industry regulator said Wednesday that a U.S. unit of BP Plc. tried to manipulate U.S. propane prices by cornering the market in February 2004.

Don’t know what to make of it, but Enron may not have been the only one out there playing with the market…

A lot of talk, especially a few years ago, planted the notion that fuel cells, and the “Hydrogen Economy” were the panacea for our energy and global warming woes. Perhaps President Bush is helping us remember these feelings in his famous “addicted to oil” comment from the State of the Union Address:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology. Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10 billion to develop cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable alternative energy sources — and we are on the threshold of incredible advances.

Which incredible advances, and how wide a threshold is left to the imagination. But one important point: hydrogen fuel cells are not a source of energy, they are a means to store energy for use on demand, just like batteries. Very good batteries, very cool technology, and a very, very important key to how we transition away from oil, to be sure. But oil, gas and coal can be pumped or dug up relatively inexpensively, converted a little and be in a form to have it’s energy released. And while hydrogen as part of a compound, like water, is plentiful, hydrogen as a free-standing molecule (which is what we need) is almost non-existent. You need energy to make it.

In order to make the clean burning fuel whose only by-product is water, we first need to separate the hydrogen from it’s normal resting place. And the easiest and most obvious resting place is … water. It’s easy to do with electrolysis — I did it in my 7th grade science class. Only one problem: you need to add electricity to get the H’s unstuck from those O’s. And, almost all of our electricity (in the US) comes from coal, natural gas, nuclear, some (about 10%) from oil, and the paltry rest from wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and hamsters.

It will still take years to build up the huge infrastructure needed to support manufacture, storage, distribution supply chains for hydrogen, and to build practical vehicles that use it. Predictions of 10 to 20 years are the norm, now, and even if realistic, we have some more immediate issues to deal with in the relatively short term.

But now that I have slammed hydrogen, there are some really important points to make, because there are some valid reasons that people think fuel cells are destined to be a key to our next primary energy platform. (more…)

It’s over 90 degrees here in Boston today. Air conditioners are humming all around, but our house is quiet and cool. OK, this is partly because I have not yet installed the window air conditioners we use when it gets really hot. But it’s mostly because of a few, simple, obvious things we do. (more…)

Environmental Defense has the slogan “Finding the Ways that Work” which is exactly what we’re trying to do. They have a campaign going asking a simple thing: pledge to change a light bulb to a Compact Fluorescent (CF). It’s simple and think hard: isn’t there one light you could replace?

Our experience with CF has been great. We now have them in (more…)

Think small!

If only we could hook up all of the hamster wheels to our power grid, think of the power we could generate. According to the American Pet Products Manufacturer’s Association, 5.7 million American homes have small animals (gerbils, hamsters, etc.) as pets. Assuming each one has a wheel and uses the wheel for 20 minutes per day with 10 seconds per rotation (6/minute), that’s 180 rotations per day times 5.7M small animals. So we have slightly over 1 Billion rotations per day. Now assume each rotation could generate 1/1000th of a watt. Well, there you have it, we are losing 1 Million Watts per day. Now, think of treadmills (more…)

In their radio show May 28th, the “Car Talk” hosts let me down. I felt compelled to write them this letter:

Boys (if I may address you formally),

I nearly lost control resulting from my hands being off the steering wheel as I listened to your show last week. You were counseling a woman on buying a car for her husband, and systematically ruled out a hybrid, in particular the Prius because it’s highway mileage was not as good as city. How can you look at yourselves in the mirror? (more…)

We went to the shopping mall today. Apparently, I need an SUV, since it’s quite clear that everyone else in Newton has one. As we drove through the parking garage, we started counting as we drove past parked vehicles. SUV, SUV, car, SUV, car, car, SUV, SUV, minivan, SUV. There were more non-cars than cars. Yes, more than half. What I want to know is (more…)

Thank god for the liberal, East Cost, elite media.

If you haven’t yet seen the Stephen Colbert speech at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner, stop what you’re doing, get ready, and then watch it. It’s uncomfortable. It’s shocking. In some places it’s really not funny at all. But it’s very, very real. And it demonstrates that sometimes, as in Shakespeare, only the fools speak the truth to the King.

And also, thank god for Thomas Friedman, whom I believe we should nominate for President of the World. I have read his current book The World is Flat, which is stunning in it’s equanimity and (what used to be) conservative positions. This man says globalization is … good. And that we should … embrace it. And that it is an … engine of economic opportunity. And that (those silly liberals who support) protectionist measures are bad. And he’s right. As I read the book, I wondered if he really was the same columnist I knew from the New York Times. Isn’t the Times, um, kinda liberal? And no, he’s not the token conservative Op Ed guy, either.

Well, all is right in the world now that (more…)