Hybrid Living

Now that Toyota has dominated the hybrid market for a decade, the automaker is finally coming out with an all-electric in the U.S. to compete with other leading automakers’ offerings.  At a dealer meeting in Las Vegas, Toyota announced that it will launch the Scion iQ sometime next year.

The Scion iQ is known as the Toyota iQ outside the U.S. and has existed as a super efficient gasoline engine car in other countries for a few years now.  The urban ultra compact EV will be a small four-passenger car that will have a 50 mile range, good for those who just need to get around town.

The car has a 3+1 seating arrangement to optimize seating room within the small car.  Because of its smaller size, it will be interesting to see how much lower it’s priced compared to something like the LEAF, since we’ve recently seen that when it comes to EVs, price seens to be the biggest factor of all.

Through its partnership with Tesla, Toyota will be coming out with an all-electric RAV4 in 2012 as well.

via Treehugger

The Nissan LEAF and Chevy Volt launched around the same time, both offering American drivers electric vehicle options.  Automobile magazine decided to see which car was most capturing the consumers’ attention and the LEAF came out as the clear winner so far.  Nissan has sold 3,875 LEAFs so far in 2011 while Chevy has sold 2,745 Volts.

One would assume that the combination of all-electric and gasoline engine like the Volt offers would be more desirable to drivers right now since electric charging infrastructure is slowly expanding, but it seems that a price difference of $8,000 is a bigger factor. The LEAF costs $32,780 before tax incentives and rebates while the Volt starts at $41,000.

These sales numbers only reflect six months of activity, but this could be a great sign for automakers getting ready to release all-electric models, especially since these sell numbers include the production setback Nissan faced after the tsunami that hit Japan in March.  Nissan expects to deliver 10,000 – 12,000 vehicles by the end of 2011.

via Automobile

Here’s some really exciting renewable energy news.  Spain’s Gemasolar concentrating solar power plant just became the first solar power plant to generate power for 24 continuous hours.

The plant uses a Power Tower design where a field of mirrors concentrate the sun’s heat onto a boiler in the central tower.  That boiler creates steam which turns a turbine.  None of that is out of the ordinary when it comes to concentrated solar power, but the Gemasolar plant is the only one in the world to use molten salt as a heat transfer fluid, which allows for the storage and generation of electricity even once the sun goes down.

The 19.9 MW capacity plant on average is able to generate power for 20 hours a day and during the summer, many days will see 24 full hours of energy generation.  The molten salt storage really makes a big difference here.  Compared to the larger 21.2 MW Solarpark Calaveron plant that generates about 40 GWh per year, the Gemasolar plant generates almost triple that with 110 GWh per year.

Power storage is one of the major issues facing the growth of renewable energy generation.  The wind isn’t always blowing and the sun isn’t always shining, but innovative storage solutions like the one at Gemasolar will be what turns renewable energy into not just a clean source of electricity but also a reliable one.

via Grist

At last week’s Paris Air Show, French pilot Hugues Duval set a world speed record for all-electric airplanes when his small Cristaline aircraft hit 175 mph, beating his previous record by 13 mph.

The tiny plane has a wing span of 16 feet and only weighs 200 pounds — just big enough to fit its pilot. It’s powered by two 35 horsepower electric motors and two 1.5 kWh batteries which could only sustain the high speed for just a moment. When flown at a slower 65 mph, the plane can fly for about 25 minutes.

Other electric airplanes have accomplished greater flight lengths, but at much slower speeds.

You can check out a video of the plane above (in French).

via Wired Autopia

At last week’s Paris Air Show, French pilot Hugues Duval set a world speed record for all-electric airplanes when his small Cristaline aircraft hit 175 mph, beating his previous record by 13 mph.

The tiny plane has a wing span of 16 feet and only weighs 200 pounds — just big enough to fit its pilot. It’s powered by two 35 horsepower electric motors and two 1.5 kWh batteries which could only sustain the high speed for just a moment. When flown at a slower 65 mph, the plane can fly for about 25 minutes.

Other electric airplanes have accomplished greater flight lengths, but at much slower speeds.

You can check out a video of the plane above (in French).

via Wired Autopia

Within a week of each other, Google and Microsoft both announced that they were pulling the plug on their home energy management services after only two years of them being active.

Last week, Google said that it was giving up on its PowerMeter online software that allowed people to track their home energy use and pinpoint ways make their home more efficient and end up with cheaper electricity bills.  The reason was that not enough people and utilities were signing up for the free service.

Microsoft has given the same reason for ending its Hohm service, a similar program that offered a sleeker interface and a greater depth of information regarding consumer’s energy use patterns and the related costs.  Hohm was also free, but Microsoft had planned to make it into a paid service.

Home energy monitoring and management is a necessary part of lowering our overall energy use and living more sustainably, but it’s possible these programs were launched a little too soon.  When smart grid technology starts reaching more areas of the country and people start becoming more accustomed to using technology to tweak their energy use habits, these type of programs will be more popular, but it seems the interest just wasn’t there yet.

via Earth2Tech

Last month, Google announced that it would no longer use any of the construction materials found on the Living Building Challenge’s “red list.” For a company that is opening new office space at a rate of 40,000 square feet (about 3,700 square meters) per week, that’s a lot of construction activity, and a lot of materials that are no longer being used for those projects. It’s also a leadership role from a company that wants to be environmentally positive.

The red list (as opposed to the green list) is a list of construction materials that include components made from products such as mercury, asbestos, PVC, formaldehyde and lead. In most cases, these materials are poor for the indoor air quality of the spaces where they are installed. But, even if the final form is relatively inert, the production of these materials also has a large environmental toll due to the extraction of materials used to produce them and from the processing of raw materials to make the finished products.

The Living Building Challenge goes beyond LEED and other green building programs with a standard for creating buildings that are restorative and balanced, rather than being merely “less bad” than typical construction. The red list is found in the Materials section of the Living Building Challenge 2.0 guidebook (pdf).

Like LEED itself, Google’s size makes this a decision that will have ramifications throughout the construction industry. Manufacturers who use red list materials in their products will see sales declines not only from Google, but from other companies who will follow Google’s lead in this.

The Building Green blog has a wonderful followup that talks not only about these rules, but offers a wider approach to considering appropriate building materials from an environmental perspective.

link: International Living Future Institute

via: friends on Twitter

Butte College, which lies about 75 miles outside Sacramento, will be the first college in the nation to go grid positive — that is, generate more electricity than it uses.

The college is achieving this amazing feat by operating 25,000 solar panels on its property that will generate 6.5 million kWh per year, enough to power 941 homes.  The reduction in emissions from using renewable energy will be equal to taking 615 cars off the road.

The college will also benefit financially from the solar arrays, saving $50 million – $75 million in the first 15 years by getting rid of an electricity bill, getting paid for excess electricity and avoiding future electricity rate hikes.  That number also accounts for project costs.

Butte has also put a lot of emphasis on efficiency and sustainability measures with several LEED certified buildings, a 75 percent recycling rate of waste materials and a large student transportation system.

via Butte College

Wave power is a compelling technology, but there has been little news on that front in the last few years, other than the cancellation of the Pelamis Power project off the coast of Portugal. The PowerBuoy will be the first commercial-scale wave park on the west coast of the U.S. with an expected capacity of 1.5 MW.

Ocean Power Technologies has been working on this project for several years already. The latest PB150 PowerBuoy will be launched later this year as the first of a ten buoy fleet that will make up the grid-connected wave power park.

The Department of Energy is particularly pleased with its investment because the project is helping to create nearly 100 new jobs, and local governments are further pleased that so much of that work, including the fabrication and construction, is being done by local companies.

The sea is a tough environment to work in, and development has been slow. But the oceans offer massive energy flows with winds and waves and tides, and harnessing that power will be far better than continuing to burn up dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.

via: DOE Energy Blog

Wind turbines have a lot of opponents, and lots of regulatory hurdles that they must go through between initial proposal and final approval. One particular difficulty has been from aviation authorities (both civilian and military) whose radar can pick up interference from wind turbines. These objections have led to many wind projects being delayed or shelved indefinitely. But solutions are being developed that may allow wind turbines to coexist with radar.

The moving blades from wind turbines can cause intereference to show up on radar displays.

“At one stage trade association Renewable UK estimated that around 40 large wind farm projects were being delayed because of objections from the aviation sector.” Given the wide expanses of open land in the US, the problem has been less of an issue, but as more wind facilities are developed for locations close to population areas, the problem is likely to become more of a concern. In the UK, a software solution is being explored that will enable air traffic controllers to differentiate between aircraft and wind turbines.

Another possible solution is to build turbine blades with material that is not radar reflective. Using composites that either absorb or scatter radar beams would make the turbine blades invisible to radar.

image: CC-BY 2.0 by Ken Hodge

via: EWEA Wind Directions