Change

November 08, 2009

We're changing our blog presentation (to make them more accessible and searchable I think). All the tech blogs will be posted at discoverynews.com. You can still rummage through the old PowrTalk stuff  at http://news.discovery.com/contributors/chris-davis/.  

See you over at the new place. 

Oh, also, there's an interesting presentation of the Discovery Tech on facebook (one thing that makes it better than the webpage: you can see who the Discovery Tech fans are, and where they come from...Argentina, Greece, India, Poland).

Chris

Doing Volt Math at the Cracker Barrel

November 04, 2009

Project Get Ready emailed me a summary of their latest efforts to get cities ready to put electric vehicle charging infrastructure in place. One thing they've done is put together "Plugging In: A Stakeholder Investment Guide for Public Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure" to help organizations figure out the costs, the pros, and the cons of deploying charging stations for electric vehicles.

A scenario that has always intrigued me is places like Cracker Barrel providing free charging stations (like the free wi-fi you get at a coffee shop). It's cold and rainy and you're hungry, so you stop at a Cracker Barrel to get a warm meal by their fireplace. You plug your car into their electric hitching post, in front of the rocking chairs there on the porch. Part of the draw to choose Cracker Barrel is that they're going to provide you with a free fill up.

Geothermal from an Oil Well

November 03, 2009

Today and tomorrow, Southern Methodist University is hosting "an international energy conference specializing in the enhancement of existing oil and gas wells for electrical production from the Earth’s heat."  The idea is to capitalize on the high temperatures that oil drilling fluids are exposed to when they go "down there," then use the temperature differential when it gets topside to generate electricity. Apparently this is already being done in two places: Chena Hot Springs, Alaska and the Wyoming Rocky Mountain Oil Field Testing Center. The business opportunity to increase the revenue generating potential of tired, old wells provides ancillary benefits of producing renewable energy, developing our geothermal capabilities, and producing more oil stateside.

For more info on the conference, see here. For more info on SMU's geothermal efforts, seehere. 

Saved by Zero

November 02, 2009

The Zero Energy Building (ZEB) is happening. Announcements of new ZEBs are popping up everywhere. Most recently: NASA's Ames Research Center, but also: Singapore's first ZEB,BASF's model ZEB for home builders, a Vermont school field house, a net zero island, a 71 story tower underway in China (rendered to the right).

All this ZEB focus is at once impressive and insufficient. Impressive in that so many projects are breaking ground in the few years since the ZEB concept debuted, insufficient if real headway is to be made in reducing building energy use (buildings, which use over two thirds of our electrical power). The ZEB, or more specifically a world blanketed with ZEBs, would be a breathtaking goal requiring significant focus and commitment. But it also could be just a mere stepping stone to the ulterior goal: the building as power plant, as producer of energy to power things like, uhm, cars. (What do we call this? Building based power plant? Net plus? Energy Plus?).

Crafting the dream-ZEB:

Strip down the building's need for power:

• Optimum orientation of building to sun
• Thermal massing
• Insulated Concrete Form Walls
• Chilled concrete beams
• Underfloor air distribution
• Green Roof
• Solar Chimney
• High efficiency windows
• High efficiency lighting
• Smart building (sophisticated building automation controls)
• Smart grid
• Geothermal

Make power:

• Wind turbines integrated into the building structure
• Photovoltaic
• Solar Thermal
• Geothermal
• Enhanced Geothermal
• Wave/Tidal (assume this building's next to big water)

Export the surplus power:

• to the grid 
• to the electric vehicles parked in the building's parking garage.

Rendering: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP

Consumers Commandeer the Smart Grid

October 28, 2009

Well, okay, they didn't really commandeer it, and it's really more about smart metering than smart grid, but, this is an interesting, inexpensive offering that helps you see how you're using electricity. The EnergyDetective (TED) provides instant feedback on your electricity consumption, which can help you trim electric bills by ten to twenty percent. To put a TED in my house would be about $240, so a ten percent utility bill savings would mean the TED pays for itself within a year.

Waiting at Lights

October 18, 2009

Usually have this thought at a light, waiting alongside cars that are stopped in the other three directions.

Wouldn't it provide quick payback, at a societal level anyway, to install more intelligent traffic lights to better move traffic through stoplights?

Better yet, wonder if there's a technology brewing out there (maybe based on GPS equipped cars) where traffic signals look out at incoming traffic to analyze how to get traffic efficiently through their intersection. Benefits: better throughput on existing roads (maybe deferring the need to build more roads), saved time for motorists, road rage reductions, saved fuel. A light googling didn't turn up anything.

Photo: Fredrik73 on flickr

Car Batteries, Dreamers and a Voice of Reason

October 17, 2009

The dreamers are dreaming up the Holy Trinity, a vision where electric vehicles, smart buildings and the smart grid come together in a synergistic marriage that transforms the way we use energy; that lets us ditch the oil-powered car. It is an intoxicating view that offers to solve multiple problems, and create whole new worlds of human enterprise and purpose. But the dream is hampered by at least this issue: finding a cost effective, production scale energy storage solution to help power those electric vehicles. Current thinking focuses on the lithium ion battery.

John Peterson, an energy sector lawyer focused on "guiding small growth-oriented companies through the corporate finance process" offers a sensible, constructive critique that the electric vehicle actually derails our quest to end our oil dependency. 

The Ultimate Energy Saving Tool: Trust

October 10, 2009

Here is an odd leap from the abstract to the concrete. It will make sense, though, if you follow the thinking. Trust me.

To found a construction project in trust is to save money (and energy, more on this later). This I know in my bones from having lived on projects founded in trust, that go on to be successful by all the usual measures: budget, function, grand opening dates, reputation of the facility, reputation and profitability of the organizations that put it up. On the other hand are projects shaped by people who are niggardly in advancing trust to the undertaking, where collapse and failure is the inevitable, miserable result.

Rex Miller et. al. just published The Commercial Real Estate Revolution, which I've just begun, but can already tell is on target about much of what ails the construction industry, described by the book as "broken." On the first page Revolution claims there is a 50 percent waste factor in the $1.3 trillion U.S. construction market (need more proof though to swallow that 50 percent number). And that a good portion of the waste results from lack of trust.

Paperless

October 04, 2009

We went paperless. 

On the construction project just completed, we used a paperless submittal process. For those not familiar with how a commercial construction project is managed, the submittal process is a last check before materials are ordered and building components fabricated. Subcontractors provide shop drawings, cut sheets, and samples to ensure the right things are procured, and to coordinate the work before a dozen guys with tools are standing around ready to install them.

The submittal usually involves lots of big paper (think of the blue lines you see architects rolling out in TV ads or movies) in multiple copies, and the byzantine, time consuming practice of transcribing notes (by hand!) to each of those copies. 

Photo: ღĴęNňζ™(OFF) on flickr

Sequestering Carbon: the Answer Could Be at Our Feet

September 26, 2009

Went to a meeting of the North Texas Energy & Environment Club, a well attended affair with a nice mix of students, staff and faculty from the University of North Texas. Met Greg Hawk, who whispered in my ear that he knew a little something about a process (possibly carbon negative, possibly market worthy) that would sequester carbon in an agrichar (see biochar). I leaned in. He said "I'm sure you're familiar with pyrolysis." I nodded yes, because maybe this is something that I should be familiar with (and, assuming I caught the word correctly, I would look it up later, so when I nodded yes what I really meant was that I would become familiar with pyrolysis shortly).

Hmm? What? No one told me about a new, carbon negative way of sequestering carbon. The last time I paid attention to carbon sequestration, it was all about deep sixing CO₂ in the Marianas Trench or the Norwegian North Sea, which came with big price tags and fretting about the CO₂ leaking from its sequestered places. Now it appears we can just burn up some agrichar and throw it in the dirt, where it remains, inert and sequestered.

The Hybrid Done Good

September 21, 2009

My 2005 Toyota Prius company car has 120,000 miles on it, and so soon will be sold out of the fleet to the highest bidder. How'd it do? 

Well.

It averaged something like 50 miles to the gallon over the life of the vehicle. Maintenance costs besides preventative stuff and tires? A changed belt, and a lamp for the driver side tail light. Never even changed the brake pads. After 120,000 miles! 

I don't know what price it will fetch, but blue book is $10,195 (the equalized blue book for the Crown Vic it replaced is $6,090).

The analysis that lead to the trial incorporation of the Prius into the fleet was a life cycle cost of $35K for the Crown Vic and $20K for the Prius, based on gas at $2.15 a gallon and trade in values of $4,500 for the Vic and $7K for the Prius (current resale values are a grand or so better than initially assumed).

The hybrid done good.

Photo: TailspinT on flickr

Try This Pairing: Big Companies and Urban Wind

September 20, 2009

Urban wind offers much: power made where it's used in dense urban settings, a new layer stacked atop the traditional renewable offerings, no big transmission obstacles to choke an urban wind project and keep it from seeing the light of day, wind dovetails well with the other urban renewable: solar (which of course is at work when the sun's up, whereas wind is usually working harder at night when the sun is down and the night breezes blow).

Meanwhile, corporations everywhere are setting up green storefronts, then scrambling to put product behind their "we are sustainable" storefront. As they do, urban wind struggles on in the "garages" of so many start-ups. 

You two ought to get together. 

Appliance Makers are the Good Guys

September 15, 2009

Toby Considine calls himself an "integrator of the un-integratable." He works as an infrastructure analyst, an in-house consulting resource to the Facilities Services group at the University of North Carolina and occasionally advises building owners and engineering companies on business strategies.

In a recent blog, Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances, he points out that appliance makers, "are starved for information," particularly when it comes to pricing energy in applicances that work in a smart grid. As Toby sees it, the appliance makers are the good guys and the energy suppliers the curmudgeon defenders of old world, fixed-price electricity. The energy suppliers need to give it up, and provide the price signal information the appliance makers crave.

How to Buy the Road

September 14, 2009

The mileage fee is a sensible plank that belongs in any platform developed to remake the way we use energy. Among its other virtues, the mileage fee creates a way to incentivize efficient use of a constrained resource: the road.

In Bern Grush's dedicated to exploring the mileage fee (where he responds to this "PowrTalk") he identifies a complex of purposes that would try to shape road policy, then argues that the mileage fee is the one tool capable of addressing them all:

The Complex of Purposes

[1] The move to improved or alternate power plants makes the gas-tax less useful every day. Mary Peters put it best: “Relying on the gas tax is like relying on cardboard to keep the rain out – the longer you use it the less it works.”

Battery Swap, Time Me

September 13, 2009

Better Place has a deal with Japan's government and the country's largest taxi operator to work out the details of doing a battery swap on an electric vehicle. 

Two things worth noting:

• Government support creates a welcome landing spot for Better Place, that could foster opportunities for the hosting country to produce and enjoy the technology Better Place deploys.

• Using a taxi company makes sense because it subjects the battery swap testing to the rigors, to the discipline, of an operational business enterprise. There's an implicit litimus test of being at least as quick as a gas station fill-up, and a taxi operation will demand that the swap meet this test.

Photo: Better Place on flickr

How to Buy the Road

September 12, 2009

The mileage fee is a sensible plank that belongs in any platform developed to remake the way we use energy. Among its other virtues, the mileage fee creates a way to incentivize efficient use of a constrained resource: the road.

In Bern Grush's blog dedicated to exploring the mileage fee (where he responds to this old PowrTalk post) he identifies a complex of purposes that would try to shape road policy, then argues that the mileage fee is the one tool capable of addressing them all:

Carving the Wilderness

September 05, 2009

It used to be that survival and improving our lot depended on our ability to carve a place in the wilderness, and to extract resources to shape them to our purposes.

Now survival depends on extracting those resources wisely, and using those resources wisely.

iCar

September 03, 2009

The day of the car that does what you want is coming. The iCar if you will. Ford is developing 21 Escapes that do vehicle-to-grid communication, where the driver gets to program "when to recharge the vehicle, for how long and at what utility rate" when it is connected and recharging from the grid. 

Good.

Cars that give you the option to get there fast or get there efficiently, to charge quickly or cost effectively, to secure a parking spot in a crowded central business district? 

Better.

And then, to top it off: "Dr. Jasna Tomic with CALSTART estimates that the national grid would only need 7 percent additional capacity to off-peak charge 100 million electric vehicles.Those same vehicles could provide 70 percent of the national grid’s needed peak power."

Best.

Make driving better. Tackle big energy issues.

Photo: Georg Hoermann on flickr

Big Fat Roof

September 01, 2009

Oh yeah, the guy with the big fat walls? He has a big fat roof too. Three quarter inch concrete shingles that contribute to his skinny little utility bill. 

When neighbors replace their roofs on account of hail damage, he doesn't. 

Big Fat Walls

August 31, 2009

Went Saturday to the house of a guy that's in the concrete business, and he has big, fat concrete walls. So big and fat that he says they have an R-value of fifty something (most commercial construction walls use materials that have R-values of, maybe, 19). (Which means the wall assembly has an R-value of less than 19 because of gaps between the stuff that's rated R-19--a concrete wall wouldn't have stud gaps and fewer of the other gaps that you get in a typical wall). 

He expected a five year payback, but got it much sooner (granted, he might of gotten a deal on his concrete supply). He said his utility bills are thirty percent of his neighbors, who have equivalently sized houses.

I'm interested.

His big, fat concrete walls were made with concrete insulating forms. The drawback? It's hard to move walls if you didn't think things through.

The upside, though, is pretty tantalizing.

And, consider this: you'd probably be more comfortable in a big fat wall house if you were Alyssa Danigelis trying to live without AC for the summer.

Photo: ramon2002 on flickr