Hydrogen injection being used by long-haul truckers

Hydrogen isn't just for fuel cells any more. It can be injected into regular internal combustion engines (ICE) and help the ICE use the fuel more efficiently and produce less poisin into the atmosphere.

Truckers Choose Hydrogen Power (By Stephen Leahy, Wired News, 02:00 AM Nov. 15, 2005 PT)

The idea is to have an on-board electrolysis unit that takes existing power generated on board from the alternator, electrolyzes water, extracts the hydrogen, injecting the hydrogen into the ICE as it burns the fuel.

These truckers aren't just do-gooders. They like Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Injection, or HFI, system because it lets them save fuel, get more horsepower and, as a bonus, cause less pollution.

"We're saving $700 a month per truck on fuel," said Sherwin Fast, president of Great Plains Trucking in Salinas, Kansas. The company tried the HFI system on four trucks and has ordered 25 more.

"Drivers like the increased power and noticed there is a lot less black smoke coming out of the stacks," said Fast.

HFI is a bolt-on, aftermarket part that injects small amounts of hydrogen into the engine air intake, said Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Steve Gilchrist. Fuel efficiency and horsepower are improved because hydrogen burns faster and hotter than diesel, dramatically boosting combustion efficiency.

This is better than carrying hydrogen tanks because hydrogen refeuling isn't widely available. And it's interesting this contributes to better performance, pollution and efficiency characteristics.

Towards the end of the article is a rant, that I agree with, about the push for fuel cells as the solution. The way I see it, fuel cells are merely a way of pushing the supposed solution further out into the future so the car companies don't have to make any significant changes today. They don't want to solve the problem, they want to keep their cash cow going, which means nurturing the duopoly relationship with the oil companies.

On the other hand, this is available now, works now, apparently is simple to install, etc.

Resources:

Canadian Hydrogen Energy's Hydrogen Fuel Injection: This is the unit discussed in the article.

Protium Energy Technologies: seems to be a cunsultancy advising corporations on hydrogen power investments.

Canada's Environmental Technology Verification Program: Provides an analysis and verification service studying claims of environmentally sound products or services.

U.S. National Hydrogen Energy Association

"Green" buildings as a productivity enhancement?

The "Green" building idea has been long in development. The ideal is to make the buildings in a way that they're less damaging in multiple ways. For example, not built from materials that cause the occupants sickness. Or built with passive solar heating and/or cooling features. Or installed with toilet plumbing that uses less water.

Selling green buildings with people power (By Martin LaMonica, Staff Writer, CNET News.com, Published: October 28, 2005, 4:00 AM PDT)

The idea here is that what will drive the adoption of "green buildings" is employee productivity gains. The article cites a few sources claiming productivity gains. Which makes me wonder where they might be coming from, and the article doesn't really point to the source of the productivity gains.

Clearly if a building is built so it doesn't impede the health of its occupants, then they'll be sick less often and you might spin that as a productivity gain. But how does installing solar panels on a building make the occupants more productive?

Not that I'm resisting installation of solar panels. I'd be excited to have more businesses doing so. And there can be an effect on business bottom line, because once the solar panels are paid off the company has free electricity (minus a few administrative and maintenance costs). While that affects the health of the business, how can it affect employee health?

Clean Tech Venture Forum (cleantech.com): Hosted a "venture forum" from which this article seems to have been derived.

The Cleantech Venture Network is a unique opportunity for investors and others to profitably facilitate the growth of young companies with the potential for delivering major economic, environmental and social benefits. Cleantech organizes Venture Forums, provides deal flow, publishes its Venture Monitors and offers related services to investors and entrepreneurs. In doing so, the Network will accelerate the development of the next and necessary wave of ventures.

U.S. Green Building Council (usgbc.org): A council of leaders in the building industry that promote green buildings.

Green Building Expo (http://www.greenbuildexpo.org/)

LEED building rating system

Developed by the USGBC membership, the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is a national consensus-based, market-driven building rating system designed to accelerate the development and implementation of green building practices. In short, it is a leading-edge system for designing, constructing and certifying the world’s greenest and best buildings. The full program offers training workshops, professional accreditation, resource support and third-party certification of building performance. LEED for New Construction and Major Renovations (LEED-NC), was launched in March 2000 following review by the entire USGBC membership and a national pilot testing program. LEED-NC is designed for rating new and existing commercial and institutional buildings; however, active member committees are developing criteria addressing other project types.

Liberty Property Trust (http://www.libertyproperty.com/): Is a real estate investment trust (REIT) corporation who is said in the CNET article to have committed to building and operating only green buildings. REIT's own and administer real estate for rental, so for a REIT to operate only green buildings means that decision has affected dozens or hundreds of companies. However it seems from the article this is only a pledge, as they are said to be seeking LEED certification. On Liberty Property's web site they don't discuss green buildings.

Building Investment Decision Support (http://cbpd.arc.cmu.edu/bids/) is a program developed at Carnegie Mellon University that helps someone make decisions around green building features. WARNING: The dumbasses made this specifically for Internet Exploiter.

Carnegie Mellon’s BIDS, Building Investment Decision Support, is a case-based decision-making tool that calculates the economic value added of investing in high performance building systems based on the findings of building owners and researchers around the world. The framework of multiple life-cycle variables to cost justify key design innovations within a rich data base of international case studies, and the EVA/NPV calculator that incorporates a range of financial assumptions linked to international organizations, is fully patented by U.S and Pennsylvania law as well as legally adopted by all ABSIC members.

But ... it's not all roses: LEEDing Us Astray? Top green-building system is in desperate need of repair (By Auden Schendler and Randy Udall, 26 Oct 2005, gristmagazine.com)

Global warming evidence in remote northern lakes

Lake algae confirm global warming link (29 October 2005)

ALGAL growth in remote Arctic lakes is confirming what ecologists suspected all along - that entire freshwater ecosystems are altering in response to climate change.

Neal Michelutti and his colleagues at the University of Alberta in Edmonton collected 30-centimetre core samples from the bottom of six lakes on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. From levels of chlorophyll a in the sediment, which they measured using a technique called reflectance spectroscopy, they deduced that plant life in the lakes began to increase 150 years ago and is now growing almost exponentially year by year.

The most likely reason for the change is climate warming, Michelutti says. Cycles of plant and alga growth in the lakes last only a few weeks, and lengthening that period by even a few days would be noticeable in the sediment, he says.

Past experiments have failed to show a convincing link, either because they covered too short a geological period or because they were conducted in areas where human activity could have affected the results. The core samples of Michelutti's experiment contain 5000 years' worth of data from an area almost untouched by human activity.

"These are pristine lakes that mankind hasn't directly affected," he says. "But there has definitely been an indirect effect."
From issue 2523 of New Scientist magazine, 29 October 2005, page 19

Low power computers and being "green"

Remember a few years ago there were power blackouts in California? They were a big problem, the governor (a Democrat) trying to get the federal power agency to step in to do something but they refused. Conveniently this issue was a hook later used in the recall campaign won by that third rate actor from Austria allowing the Republicans to gain some control over California. And those same power blackouts were later found to be caused by highly illegal "gaming" of the power distribution by Enron and others (Enron conveniently being highly friendly to President Bush, as in Bush used Enron's corporate jet during his presidential campaign).

Cronyism aside, there was a technical issue at play. The .COM boom was well underway, which led to a massive increase in "server farm" construction. A "server farm" is a room jampacked with "server" computers, the kind that run web sites. It's seen to be most efficient to jam as many server computers into as small a space as you can, because real estate has a cost proportional to square footage of the rooms it occupies. The less square footage, the lower cost, generally.

But what that meant was you suddenly had a greater density of power demand than the power companies had planned for. A single building housing a server farm might have a power usage level equivalent to a small town.

See, there are several costs in running a server farm. In addition to the square footage, you have to provide electricity, backup generators, air conditioning, lighting, and staff. The more computers you have in a room, the higher the electric bill, the larger the required backup generators, the huger the air conditioning system, and the more people you must have onhand to handle the required work.

But, that makes an assumption that each server takes the same power requirements as all other servers. Fortunately that's not true. Just as you can buy light bulbs that produce the brightness but using less power (e.g. compact flourescents use 1/3rd the power to make the same number of lumens), you can find server computers that handle the same compute load for less power.

For example, Sun Microsystems is lately talking loudly about new Opteron based server computers that use greatly less power than competitors (video and feature article), and a few years ago RLX Computing tried to make headway selling server computers using the Transmeta CPU which was designed for lower-power-consumption and meant for portable computers.

When a computer uses less electricity to perform the same work, you see a decrease in electricity consumption, air conditioning, and backup generator requirements. The decrease in AC needs itself decreases electricity consumption. And all that in turn decreases the environmental impact.

See: DEC veterans prepare chip challenge for Intel, AMD, IBM and Sun (By Ashlee Vance in Mountain View, Published Monday 24th October 2005 21:23 GMT)

Wind power isn't a panacea?

In California's Altamont Pass there's a long-running experiment in alternative energy resources. There are hundreds of wind generators that collectively generate around 5 megawatts of electricity. I live nearby and regularly drive through the pass, so they are a familiar sight in my life.

It is such a beautiful idea. The wind blows, spins a machine, and the machine makes electricity. No muss, no fuss, and you can still use the ground for other purposes such as the cattle grazing on those same hillsides. Cleanly produced electricity that can be made anywhere.

The problem are the bird-kills at the site. The level of bird-kills in the Altamont Pass site has tarnished wind energy in general with a meme of the towers being unsafe to birds.

Unexpected Downside of Wind Power (Will Wade, Wired News, 02:00 AM Oct. 14, 2005 PT)

This article covers a plan to study the bird-kills in a new way. The situation in the Altamont Pass site has already been studied carefully, learning several useful things about the siting and design of towers. Newer towers don't have the problems the very old towers at Altamont have, plus there is a lot of knowledge now about where to place the towers so they aren't near birds to begin with.

In this new study they plan to shut down portions of the wind farm. Assumably as each set of towers are shut down, they're going to compare bird-kills and learn some more about which tower design is worse or better.

Altamont isn't the only scene of a showdown. Environmental groups have already blocked a proposed wind-power facility in the Mojave Desert, and opponents of another project, in Nantucket Sound, have cited wildlife concerns in their lobbying efforts. A recent government report found that sites in other regions could pose a threat to bats.

Clearly wind energy is turning out to be a mixed blessing to environmentalists. On the one hand it offers such cleanly generated electricity, how could any environmentalist complain? Well, we can't lose sight of the big picture, and often a solution to one problem creates problems elsewhere. That's what is happening, the environmentalists are perhaps saying "wait a minute, let's not create more problems here, let's study and see how to solve both problems". Though, in the case of the Nantucket project, the opponents strike me as being more worried about their property values (supposedly the wind towers are ugly) and not the birds.

e.g.: Miller stressed that the Center for Biological Diversity is not opposed to wind farms, but said they must be built in areas where they will have minimal impact on wildlife. "We definitely support wind power, but it needs to be sited in appropriate areas."

Here's to more truth, and here's to clean energy.

Offset your carbon emissions with carboncounter.org

In modern society, every action we take causes some carbon emissions into the atmosphere. When we turn on a lightbulb, it causes electricity to flow, and more often than not that electricity is derived from burning a fossil fuel, and when the fossil fuel is burned carbon is released to the atmosphere. Similarly while the refridgerator is whirring away in the corner, every kilowatt-hour it consumes means electricity, which means (usually) fossil fuels, etc. When you drive your car down the road, 99.9999% of you are burning fossil fuels to do so. When you fly an airplane, fossil fuels. The delivery of food to your grocery store, fossil fuels. The manufacturer of products you buy, fossil fuels at every step.

There are several programs allowing individuals to buy up carbon credits, and those credits come from other organizations who are investing in some kind of carbon abatement project. For example, planting a forest of trees causes absorption of carbon to create those trees. For example, investment in efficiencies causes a reduction of carbon emissions.

The idea is to bring market forces to the equation. It's market forces that caused the problem, as the search for cheap energy led the world to oil addiction and oil abuse. Perhaps market forces can cause the market to change behavior?

Carbon Counter (http://www.carboncounter.org/) is one such organization.

Carboncounter.org is a collaborative project enabling The Climate Trust, a pioneering non-profit organization that invests in high-quality projects that reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions, and Mercy Corps, an international relief and development agency, to address the threat millions face each year from the effects of global climate change.

Unfortunately the web site doesn't make it terribly clear how it works. They describe investing in projects, but what does that mean, what projects, etc? I wonder what the form of their investments are?

The process is twofold. First you go through a questionaire to determine an estimate of your carbon emissions. You can have either a rough estimate, or an exact one. The second step is to determine a contribution amount, and whether to make it a one-time contribution or monthly.

They couldn't have made it easier, but I wonder at the assumptions made. For example, while I live in a medium size single family house, our household probably uses less energy than their estimate. We use compact flourescent lightbulbs everywhere, we live in California and it doesn't get terribly cold, etc. Also, while I drive a small SUV, it's one with a very high gas mileage (for SUV's) and I attempt to minimize my driving of it, and I have an electric scooter I drive as often as possible. Neither of their questionaires gives me sufficient room to indicate what I already do to reduce energy usage.

Still, this is a very interesting idea and one to research further.

Siberia is meeeeeeeeeltinnnnnnnnnnnng

Hey, President Bush, Global Warming is happening. Get your head out of the sand and pay attention!! And, oh, paying attention doesn't have to mean economic troubles!!

Climate warning as Siberia melts (11 August 2005, NewScientist.com news service, Fred Pearce)

A huge area of Siberia's permafrost is melting. In this case "huge" means 1 million square kilometers. Now, that's interesting by itself, but what's most interesting (alarming actually) is what this means.

he sudden melting of a bog the size of France and Germany combined could unleash billions of tonnes of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere.

The news of the dramatic transformation of one of the world's least visited landscapes comes from Sergei Kirpotin, a botanist at Tomsk State University, Russia, and Judith Marquand at the University of Oxford.

Kirpotin describes an "ecological landslide that is probably irreversible and is undoubtedly connected to climatic warming". He says that the entire western Siberian sub-Arctic region has begun to melt, and this "has all happened in the last three or four years".

What was until recently a featureless expanse of frozen peat is turning into a watery landscape of lakes, some more than a kilometre across. Kirpotin suspects that some unknown critical threshold has been crossed, triggering the melting.