Hybrid Living

With the recent rash of toy recalls due to the use of harmful lead paints and suspected dangerous plastics containing phthalates and BPA, parents are demanding toys made with non-toxic, non-hazardous materials. Economic times being what they are, it helps to know you’re hard-earned money is going to trustworthy, earth-friendly companies.  By using renewable materials [...]

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A new report by the Denmark government’s climate commission says that the country could by fossil fuel-free by 2050.  The majority of the nation’s energy requirements would be met by wind and biomass energy.

Denmark is already a world leader in wind, with about 20 percent of its energy coming from wind, so compared to other countries, they don’t have quite as far to go, but going completely fossil fuel-free will still be quite an overhaul.

The report says that the government will actually save money through this transition to renewables and it has a clear-cut plan for the government to follow.  The committee says by investing 0.5 percent of the annual GDP every year in renewable energy, the country could easily meet the 2050 goal.  The total investment would total about $2.5 billion.

The government is releasing an official climate strategy in November and will be taking this report into account. 

via Guardian

Here’s a surprise statistic:  the nation’s largest concentration of electric vehicle charging stations is in Elk Horn, Iowa.  Not anywhere in California or Oregon, but in Iowa.

Now, to be clear, Elk Horn’s population is only 650, so it didn’t take many charging stations to hit that high concentration, but at four charging stations, it sadly still beats out many cities just in the amount of stations.

The town got these stations from a local businessman, Mike Howard, who is in the alternative-energy business.  Each charger cost $7,000 and each charge costs no more than $3.

The town itself has only four all-electric vehicles, but a more important fact is that Elk Horn is the only place to charge an electric vehicle for people traveling along the entire stretch of Interstate 80 between Chicago and Denver.

Currently, the charging stations take six hours to fully charge a vehicle, but Howard and his team are planning on installing faster charging stations that would only take three hours within the next month and they’re working with partners elsewhere in Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska to build more stations throughout the Midwest.

via Wall Street Journal

While there are a lot of good things about electric cars, one of the biggest drawbacks is the heavy load of batteries they must carry. But students at the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences are building a car that instead gets its power from the road. The power is delivered to the vehicle through cables embedded in the roadway using inductive charging, allowing a much lighter electric vehicle that does not need to haul a great mass of batteries.

There are companies proposing to charge electric vehicles without a plug, so why not take it a step further? Taking the batteries out of the vehicle lightens it considerably. These induction powered vehicles would be constrained in where they could travel, but that could be a benefit to cities that might want to sponsor such vehicles in order to limit access to crowded urban areas or provide small, automatic vehicles as an alternative to buses or other mass transit.

The work is still very developmental and preliminary. The vehicle only carries a single passenger. It has a top speed of only 50 kph (31 mph), and, for now, it operates only on a small, indoor test track. But, on the other hand, the entire vehicle only weighs 60 kg (132 lbs), a mere one-fifth the weight of just the batteries in the Nissan Leaf
- 300 kilograms (660 pounds). Less battery weight allows lighter structure, smaller motors, and many other improvements to make a lighter vehicle.

There are certainly efficiency issues to be worked out with this approach, and the development of the infrastructure for this would be neither quick nor cheap to install. This is certainly the kind of thing that would work best in dense, urban areas, rather than for suburban sprawl. Investing billions of dollars into a road network for this technology is still a number of years off. However, this could be an important element for an automated transport network. Someday, you might get around in a city in a small vehicle, without the need for a monorail.

via: Gizmodo

It’s in our drinking water, our toothpaste and even the bottled juices and sodas we drink. Fluoride, according to the American Dental Association, is a key mineral in the fight against cavities and can even repair the early stages of tooth decay. The ADA warns, however, that, like any other nutrient, fluoride can be misused [...]

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Recently, I received a can of Sprayway claiming to be the “World’s Best Glass Cleaner”. I quickly put it to the test in the bathroom after my 3 kids were done with their morning routine of spraying toothpaste and hair products all over the mirror. I was impressed. It cleared the destruction with a few [...]

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Another big grant recipient from the six seriously geeky developments that received USDOE funding as part of the ARPA-E program is a program to develop thermal energy storage with supercritical fluids from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

We’ve noted that the State of California has started approving solar-thermal power plants, and Google is even involved in research for solar-thermal power; it is a technology that has languished for some years, but is now starting to gain wider notice and application.

Presently, solar thermal power plants use a two-tank molten salt method for energy storage. Developing a supercritical fluid thermal storage system promises increased power storage and lower cost for solar thermal power plants. The proposed system is expected to have twice the energy storage density of current two-tank molten salt systems and cost less than 70% of what current systems cost.

Perhaps the least photogenic of the six recent projects which received US Department of Energy ARPA-E funding is also the most timely. GE Labs is working on the development of next-generation permanent magnets that include lower amounts of rare-earth elements. Recent reports have indicated that the Chinese government may cut off the export of rare earth materials as part of a trade dispute, or as a political move. The current dispute between China and Japan is one aspect of this, but there are concerns that a similar embargo could be imposed in other areas. The development of new magnets could lead to more efficiency in a range of devices, as well as reduced reliance on “globally critical rare-earth minerals.”

Permanent magnets are an important part of many electrical and electronic components used throughout contemporary life. From earbud headphones to hard disk drives to hybrid and electric vehicle motors to the generators in wind turbines, permanent magnets are a part of the technology that makes all of these work. China presently produces about 90 percent of rare earth oxides.

There is concern that rare-earth metals shortage could slow green innovation. New permanent magnets will not be, in and of themselves, a transforming technology, but developments could lead to improvements including lighter electric motors (leading to more efficient hybrid and electric vehicles), lighter generator equipment (leading to more powerful wind turbines and other power production systems), and increased availability of a range of other products.

Brush. Floss. See your dentist. We all know the basics of keeping our mouths healthy, but if you’re hitting the high points and still having trouble staying out of the dental chair, there could be a missing link in your overall dental health plan: nutrition. We all know that eating our fruits and veggies and [...]

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The UK has starting operating the Thanet wind farm, the largest offshore wind farm in the world — for now.

The wind farm occupies 35 square miles off the coast of Kent and contains 100 turbines capable of generating 300 MW of power.  This new project establishes two major milestones for Britain:  the country is now generating more offshore wind power than the rest of the world combined and it’s now caught up with other European countries like Germany by having generated 5 GW of power from renewable energy.

The Thanet wind farm will only hold the title of world’s largest for a short time though.  Two larger offshore wind farms are currently under construction — the Greater Gabbard project with a 500 MW capacity and the London Array project with a 1 GW capacity — but both of those will reside in the UK, meaning it will continue to be a world leader in offshore wind.

The UK has set a target of generating 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.  These large projects should help them to get there.

via Guardian