Happy March, everyone! Say goodbye to universally crappy February and hello to the month when Coca-Cola, pancakes, the rubber band, and the parachute were invented. None of those things directly relate to ethanol or green energy, granted, but the world would be in pretty sad shape without pancakes. Or rubber bands, quite frankly.
As it is, we’re living in weird times. The relationship between Democrats and Republicans has gotten more caustic and spiteful than ever, to the point where ANY legislation sent to Congress will run aground, energy legislation being no exception. But state governments, hoping to reverse a wheezing economy and ballooning unemployment, “are increasingly courting renewable energy companies with stringent new rules mandating that a share of their state’s electricity come from renewable sources.” Generally, these “renewable portfolio standards” require that utilities either produce or buy renewable energy. Specific percentages and timelines are left to the individual states: New York wants 24% green energy by 2013, while Michigan only wants 10% by 2015. Maine, ever the overachiever, has its sights set on 40% by 2017.
This move towards green energy is rooted in studies finding that “almost 300,000 clean energy jobs could be created nationwide by 2025.” It’s not quite the 800,000 jobs we lost a year ago, but it’s still an impressive figure from a field wide open for innovation and growth. The most common sources of green energy are wind and solar power, but everything from ethanol production (yay!) to dredging up geothermal energy to torching biomass is being considered. Even the clean coal people are still building castles in the air. It’s so wide open that CO Democrat Max Tyler and FL Republican Lee Constantine are pushing for almost the exact same green energy bill for their respective states - their mandates only differ by 10%.
Finally! We’ve been cheerleading the economic benefits of green energy production for what seems like ever, and so have a lot of other, more prominent bloggers and public figures and people with good sense. Hopefully Washington won’t let things get too desperate before acting on the states’ momentum.
We’re back, as promised, with more book suggestions for our dedicated readership. Most fiction with an alt. fuels focus is sci-fi, so we’re not sure what to tell you if that’s not your thing. But if you’re reading a biofuels/alt. energy blog, you’re essentially telling the world that it is, so we’re not worried about insulting anyone with more traditionally literary tastes.
First up is Ben Bova’s Powersat; Bova has always been pro-space exploration, and this book’s plot hinges around “a terrorist conspiracy…to sabotage Astro [Corporation]’s plans to put satellites in geosynchronous orbit capable of beaming solar energy in microwave form to earth.” Bonus: the villains have ties to oil barons. Bova isn’t the most sophisticated writer on earth, but his science is plausible and he’s certainly a passionate environmentalist, to the point that he was hired as a consultant for Repo Men.
Along the same lines is Fallout!, by Lawrence Dunning; it’s about a disgruntled, drug addict scientist who plans to blow up a nuclear power plant near Denver. Yeah. Not exactly Gravity’s Rainbow, but what can ya do? Anyway, said scientist and another character discuss the pros of combined solar/wind energy around page 170, and lament the campaign against considering energy sources beyond petroleum and nuclear power. Don’t we know it.
Moving on, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Sixty Days and Counting has a plot devoted to the issue of global warming and resource scarcity - as Publisher’s Weekly puts it, “time will tell if the world has both the scientific know-how and the political will to reverse the ongoing rush toward an ecological precipice.” Discussions of environmental science abound without killing momentum in favor of a shiny hardware exhibition (an unfortunate tendency of hard sci-fi), and the idea that a Buddhist liberal eco-dork (the main character) could be elected president ever is just precious.
Finally, Lyle Estill’s Biodiesel Power: The Passion, the People, and the Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel isn’t a novel, but it does focus on the people in the biodiesel movement, exploring tensions between grass-roots activists/co-ops and their agribusiness counterparts. It also touches on ethanol’s technical properties, but this is much more of a Howard Zinn treatment of the subject than ethanol usually gets.
So there you have it. That oughta keep everyone busy for a while, us included. We’ll be back on Tuesday with some news updates, and maybe a movie recommendation or two if we can think of any.
Well, Baltimore officially welcomes December by possibly seeing its mayor lose her office over $630 worth of stolen gift cards. If only there were some way to convert her myriad indictments into ethanol…
Oh well. We’ve got bigger fish to fry today, and the heat might be coming from outer space: Japan is investing in space-based solar technology, which is something we mentioned a while ago with great excitement, because we are basically children when it comes to the idea of things beaming down from space. This isn’t totally surprising, though, as Japan is a tiny country with few domestic energy resources, and they’ve been longtime proponents of solar energy.
But this is especially ambitious; their proposed Space Solar Power System (SSPS), would put huge photovoltaic dishes “in geostationary orbit outside the Earth’s atmosphere.” They would capture solar energy there (to quote researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, “the sun’s rays abound in space”), and beam it down through clusters of lasers or microwaves. Like China and India, Japan is investing heavily in new ideas to reduce their country’s carbon footprint, and this is yet another sign that America needs to spearhead some innovation of its own.
Meanwhile, normally pacifistic Sweden is having something of a rabbit problem - rabbits are not native to their country and have been, as is customary for them, overbreeding and feasting on Stockholm’s local crops. And while it’s more than legal to hunt the little bastards, it’s definitely illegal to toss them into landfills once they’re dead. So Sweden has been turning dead rabbits into fuel. Apparently they, and other dead animals, are “crushed, ground and then pumped into a boiler where it is burned together with wood chips, peat or other waste to produce heat.” Critics of this system think it’s disgusting and claim that it doesn’t solve the basic overpopulation problem; rather, it tries to build an industry from it. And we agree with them - although it’s hard to condone their idea of using rabbit-repellent pesticides, comments like “we can’t give them bunny birth control pills, so we have to put the rabbits away,” come off as cold, rapacious, and sociopathic, even from people who think lye is a garnish.
Anyway, enough about dead bunnies. Click the Corn Car logo for a more pleasant article about how some American scientists want to turn trees into carbon banks. Happy December, everyone!
All right! Now that the Solar Decathlon is officially over and the solar houses on display are being shipped back to their places of manufacture, we can write up a more substantive post about it. We’re still waiting for our pictures to come back, but we do have our notes and individual house propaganda handy for reference. Click the Corn Car logo for Treehugger’s awesome photo/video slideshow of the event.
Last Saturday, the 10th, we got to DC in enough time to see three of the houses. First up was Team Alberta’s house, provided by students and researchers from the University of Calgary, SAIT Polytechnic, Mount Royal College, and the Alberta College of Art and Design. They built a Western Canadian timber frame house, with vaulted ceilings and strategic keyholes to let in as much of Alberta’s abundant natural sunlight as possible. They also put in a logic controller that automatically lowers blinds, a solar-assisted GSHP, an energy recovery ventilator, LED lighting in the bathroom, and an audio system that isolates itself from the house’s AC power and runs on DC instead. They also had a Mountie greeting people at the door. Cool, huh?
Next was Team Arizona, from the University of Arizona, who built a “SEEDpod” house (SEED stands for Solar Energy-Efficient Dwelling) that can be easily assembled and modified to the regional climate and tastes of whoever bought it. The angle of the house’s roof is adjustable, and the house itself can be rearranged, thanks to its unique segmented construction. One of the coolest elements of the house is the water conservation - it has a greywater filter for the greenhouse, and rainwater is collected in tanks to use for gardening and landscaping. In addition, the outdoor deck is made from water-permeable material, allowing it to run through into the ground below. We could spend all day explaining the vacuum-tank walls and solar-heated water systems, but their 8.6-kW solar energy system relies on bi-facial solar panels that allow daylight to pass through them and has cavities underneath to catch ambient light and ventilate the panels. It was probably the most cleverly designed house, environmentally speaking.
Finally, we hit up Team Wisconsin’s house, brought to us by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They were especially proud of their house’s “inverted butterfly” roof that channeled water into a reflecting pool for irrigating plants on the deck. The entire house was built out of locally collected materials, including Paperstone, a wood product made from recycled paper. Heating and cooling are controlled by multiple sensors that take temperature measurements and relay the information to the house’s two heating/ventilation/HVAC zones. The solar panel system is grid-connected, sending excess energy back into the grid, and can be adjusted to follow the changing angles of the sun. Finally, the house’s energy monitoring system is very cool; a live Web interface displays energy consumption and production.
We were surprised by the levels of regionalism shown in the houses, but it was nice to see such practical measures literally built into these houses - every team we spoke to was very community-minded. It’s also worth noting that they had their most photogenic team members on hand to give tours. In fact, we noted that several times during the day, often by nudging each other and grinning stupidly. Also, Dell was a Decathlon sponsor this year, which puts our list of potential sponsors into new perspective.
We’re back from the Solar Decathlon! Overall, it was awesome and very educational, even if you’re like us and have no practical background in engineering. There’s a much more substantive post on the way, but here’s some reconnaissance from one of our readers, who also attended:
1) German women are hot; 2) Canadian women are hot; 3) University of Ohio women are hot; 4) Many of the houses were regionalized: built using local materials in response to local weather/environmental conditions. A tourist from Iowa was overheard saying that the house built by a German research team “looked like it wouldn’t be able to withstand an Iowa hail storm.” Take THAT, Deutschland.
The Solar Decathlon is this weekend! Yaaay! We’re heading down there on Saturday to check out the proceedings and take some pictures for a full report here on Corn Car, so keep your eyes here for that.
In the meantime, we promised a list of ways to introduce cellulosic ethanol to the mainstream. This was before we realized that we’d previously made a list of how to sell automakers on the idea, which is pretty similar. But we’ve still got some ideas that break away into their own category: 1. Park cellulose-fueled cars at Wal-Mart, Target, and other discount department stores. Wal-Mart and its ilk are where Middle America shops, if their corporate propaganda tells it right, and flex-fuels are still seen as uppity for reasons we’re still not clear on. Regardless, it wouldn’t hurt for people to see those cars around places where “ordinary” Americans go, just to prove the point that this technology isn’t leverage in some weird, beside-the-point class struggle.
2. Establish that pot and beer can fuel cars. This was the intern’s idea, so blame him, but there is merit in explaining that cellulosic ethanol can be made from nearly anything. Molson Coors already used their waste beer to fuel vehicles for the last Democratic National Convention, so the precedent has been set. Inserting pot into the equation will draw crazy people, but it’s still an ordinary facet of American life that can make cellulosic ethanol more approachable, and it deflates the anti-corn people who think we’re stealing ethanol stock from famine-ravaged Africans.
3.Hot girls. Another intern suggestion, but he’s right; hot girls can sell anything.
4. Auto racing, which has been underway for more than a year now. Racing is a great venue for showcasing flex-fuels, and Indy cars have been using methanol since the 1960s. Switching over to cellulosic ethanol would help out a lot, and already has: a biobutanol/ethanol blend car was raced at Petiti Le Mans last month.
Looks like a sudden, multi-million dollar set of tariffs on foreign solar panel imports might hamper the delicate solar energy market, and strain US/China trade relations in the process. Awesome.
Solar panels coming in from China have been deemed too sophisticated to count as duty-free, and are being taxed like electric generators, a decision made on the heels of new higher tariffs on Chinese tires. Which wouldn’t be terrible, except that “virtually no one in the industry became aware of [the tariffs] until the last few weeks…unpaid duties piled up, along with penalties that are likely to double the cost.”
China has been ramping up their solar panel production to the detriment of other manufacturers (which we already knew), so this might be an attempt to keep them in check lest they glut the market with solar panels and ruin their overall trade value. But the Solar Energy Industries Association “argues that American tariffs on solar panels could lead other countries to impose tariffs on American exports.” Granted, their board chairman works for Suntech, China’s biggest solar panel maker, but that’s still a valid point. And really, there had to be a better course of action for dealing with China than putting them on double secret probation.
Frankly, it’s a wonder that the world ever got oil off the ground, given how quickly any new energy source gets clamped onto by assholes trying to skew it to their personal advantage. We’ll keep an eye on this as it develops, but as it stands, things are shaky.
When we hear about the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, we usually picture, well, this sort of thing. So color us surprised when “ethanol was welcomed with open arms at last week’s 69th annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally.” The Renewable Fuels Association made its presence felt at the rally as a partner (and sponsor, we’re assuming) to suggest ethanol fuel blends as part of the solution to our current dependence on foreign oil. Put that way, it makes more sense; many of the Sturgis faithfuls are “America First” guys, politically speaking, and shameless gearheads, so ethanol would appeal to them from more than one perspective.
Heck, there might even be a biker contingent at the 4th Annual Cellulosic Biofuels Summit in November. We just found out about the Summit; it’s in DC and allows “leaders from the agricultural, biotech, technology, developer, oil, auto and financial communities” to convene and hash out a plan to reach the commercial production of cellulosic ethanol. Between this and the Solar Decathlon in October, the nation’s capital might be running on alternative fuels until New Year’s. Quick, someone forward this to Rush Limbaugh so maybe he’ll have a heart attack and leave politics forever.
As we mentioned a few days ago, we sat down with Aliza from Baltimore DIY Squad (a blog that champions “sustainable projects for an urban environment) to talk solar ovens - since readers have been sending us a fair amount of solar energy items as of late, it seemed like a topical and relevant thing to discuss. Besides, solar ovens are pretty cool.
A solar oven traps heat via reflective material in a black container, which essentially makes it a solar crock pot. Since solar ovens can’t really overheat or burn food, they can be used to bake almost anything; apparently someone had solar-baked cupcakes for sale at this year’s Artscape. They’re also good for drying/dehydrating food, and they can be made out of anything - the DIY Squad’s model is made from a car windshield reflector (pictured at right), and others have made them out of pizza boxes. We can see these things being put to good use for camping and other outdoor activities since they use practically no resources beyond sunlight.
We were also pointed to Homegrown.org, which is a resource center for local/responsible food consumption. As one might expect, the DIY Squad has issues with food crops like corn being converted to ethanol, but the recent advances in cellulosic ethanol blends fit right in with their mindset of making useless things functional (of COURSE we asked about that). Check out their blog and try their laundry soap mixture, if nothing else. Stuff works wonders.
Stay tuned to Corn Car for an exclusive interview with Baltimore DIY Squad about their solar oven, and other sustainability efforts - we’ll be talking with them on Wednesday and posting soon afterwards. In the meantime, here’s a link they sent us to the “Sport” Solar Oven. It works like a crock pot and, of course, cooks using the power of our mother star.
Also, just for fun, here’s a cartoon illustrating how ethanol is made.
Happy March, everyone! Say goodbye to universally crappy February and hello to the month when Coca-Cola, pancakes, the rubber band, and the parachute were invented. None of those things directly relate to ethanol or green energy, granted, but the world would be in pretty sad shape without pancakes. Or rubber bands, quite frankly.
As we mentioned a few days ago, we sat down with Aliza from 
