NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Freshwater Ecosystem Lives Off Seawater

Over half of the world's population lives and works within 120 miles from a coastline. Regardless of your views on climate change, it's safe to say that rising sea levels would present nothing short of a catastrophe. 

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In the event that the ivory towers of denial do start to surround with sea water, detractors will be happy to know that Studiomobile won't leave you high and dry.

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Billing themselves as makers of art and technology for architecture and urban research, the firm came up Networking Nature, an ecosystem that lives off seawater and produces fresh drinking water.

Glass tanks anchored near the coast would fill with seawater where a series of solar-powered stills would extract fresh water. Heat produced by small lamps would evaporate the saltwater and convert the condensed steam into fresh water. That water would then be collected in reservoirs near the coast and distributed to those who need it.

Here's how Studiomobile explains it:

However, water is not produced in isolated systems under central control. The new model provides for a large ecological infrastructure as well as small local production units connected to a network able to integrate the production of fresh water and to supply it where needed. It's a Smart Water Network controlled by sensors that read the local lack of water and, through an Arduino board, activate the pumps providing the water where there is a peak of demand. The Smart Water Network will be a layer of the ecological network as well as the Smart Power Grid and the communications network. This strategy not only gives response to the preservation of the environment, but it is also a radically new model that ensures free and democratic access to the resources to everybody.

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Networking Nature was created for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale.

via Inhabitat

credit: Studiomobile

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Adidas To Debut World's First 'Smart Game'

Every time I watch a sporting event on television, I'm gobsmacked at some of the statistics broadcasters pull out of their hat. Washington National's pitcher Stephen Strasburg is undefeated on overcast days on the road, but only if he's had a pregame haircut, eats two handfuls of sun flower seeds between innings and is playing in stadiums in the Eastern time zone.

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Maybe the stats aren't that detailed, but often times they seem like it. And every sports junkie, coach and journalist gobbles them up like they are jelly beans that'll predict the game's outcome.

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Well, the rabbit hole of sports stats analysis is about to get a lot deeper. Adidas will debut a new player tracking system called "Micoach" Elite System at the Major League Soccer All-Star game on July 25 in Chester, Pa.

Players insert a "player cell" into a pocket located in the shoulder blades of thier uniform. The system uses a RF radio, a 3D accelerometer, a GPS unit, a gyroscope and a magnetometer to track a player's heart rate, power, intensity of play, speed, distance covered and acceleration. The RF radio is used to relay that data to a computer on the sideline, which then routes the info to an iPad app.

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The idea is that Micoach will let coaches and trainers better analyze a player's peak level of performance, fitness level and what impact the game is having on his or her body.

“We are proud to partner with our long-term partner Major League Soccer to debut our latest innovation the micoach Elite System at the MLS All-Star Game and then across the league in 2013,” said Adidas Group CEO Herbert Hainer in a press release.  “As the paths of sports and technology continue to converge, we are pleased to be pioneering in this area and continue to deliver cutting-edge innovations to teams and leagues worldwide.”

via Gizmodo

Credit: Adidas

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More Reliable Power in a Cabinet?

Electrical transformers, the giant copper-and-steel structures we see underneath high-voltage lines, have pretty much stayed the same since they were invented by Nikolai Tesla in the 1890s. They exist in every city and are critical for taking high-voltage power from generating stations and converting it to a lower voltage power that people can use in their homes.

The problem is, these transformers are big, old, breaking down and are almost all made in China. New technology being developed by North Carolina-based CREE and North Carolina State University will eventually allow utilities to convert high-voltage power in a 100-pound box, rather than an 10,000 pound sub-station, says Rajeev Ram, program director at the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPAe). "Right now these transformers, all they do is change voltage. They don’t do anything else. You can’t control them," Ram told Discovery News.

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The new transformers will handle two-way flows of electricity, which happens when folks want to send their own solar rooftop power back to the grid, and better able to sense unusual power fluxes, shortages and potential blackouts. CREE, a Durham-based lighting and electronics firm, made a big breakthrough in recent weeks with successful testing of a tiny, five-millimeter-long silicon carbide superconducting transistor that can handle close to 15 kilovolts of power, compared to the 110 kilovolts carried by transmission lines.

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"It's a device that's well on its way," Ram said. While some of this may sound a bit geeky, or perhaps a bit engineer-y, imagine a landscape without power transformers, and maybe even without high-tension lines. Communities would be able to generate power closer to home by using smaller superconducting transformers. Consumers would benefit by having a more reliable power supply, and the ability to put new sources of renewable energy on the grid.

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There's also the aesthetics, Ram said. No more creepy high-frequency transformers sitting next to parks, schools or on the other side of your back fence, Ram said. The new superconducting transformers "will look more like a small shed or a cabinet."

Photo courtesy AMSC

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Austin Plugs In Big-Time

Credit: Thomas McConnell
There's this bumper sticker I sometimes see: "Keep Austin Weird." It's from a place that doesn't quite fit in with the rest of Texas, culturally, politically, gastronomically, and doesn't seem to want to either. Texas is the country's leading energy-producing state, and ranks near the top in pollution emissions. But a new renewable energy plan based in Austin fits right in with the "weirdness" on that bumper sticker.

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The idea of the Pecan Street Project is to connect an entire neighborhood with solar panels, electric vehicles, utility smart meters and household batteries in a giant green power blender. Corporate partners include General Motors, Sony, Intel, SunEdison, Whirlpool, Best Buy and Toshiba. They’ll be using participating households to try out how their products do on an integrated smart grid, according to Brewster McCracken, executive director of Pecan Street Inc."To be relevant, smart grid innovations must solve consumers' problems and provide services that excite them," said Brewster McCracken told the Austin American-Statesman.

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This fall, 200 homes were outfitted with about a half square-mile of solar panels -- that's about a third of the neighborhood. By spring 2012, they will also get systems that automatically regulate heating, cooling and lighting. In June 2012, GM will offer Chevy Volt EVs to 100 people in the Mueller neighborhood with a $15,000 rebate instead of the normal $7,500, against the $40,000 pricetag. While some cities have looked at integrating EVs and solar panels, nobody’s done something this ambitious.

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Supporters hope a $10.4 million stimulus grant, plus matching money from corporate partners, will keep it going for its five years. Companies say they will get feedback on how well their appliances work, and probably a little green marketing cred. Local utility, Austin Energy, will be developing a green building code. Will the whole thing work? Will all these devices and power supplies integrate? Will Gov. Rick Perry pull the giant plug? Researchers from UT Austin, the National Renewable Energy Lab and the Environmental Defense Fund at using Pecan Street Project as a test bed to answer (some) of these questions.

How to Run a City Like It's a Big Computer

A fire starts in a building and as people evacuate, the fire department is called in. It's rush hour, so the roads are jammed. In response, the traffic signals at every intersection are adjusted to allow emergency vehicles to pass unimpeded. Meanwhile, in the building itself, the fire alarm system automatically turns on lights to guide people to safety. Water flow is adjusted in the area to make sure that the firefighters have enough.

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This is the scenario envisioned by Living PlanIT, a European technology company that wants to build smarter cities using an operating system, called Urban OS, that works similar to operating systems in ordinary computers. The key is coordinating a network of sensors that would feed the information into the operating. By monitoring waste, water use, traffic flows and even the temperatures of individual rooms, the entire city could be run at peak efficiency. That means saving energy, water and even reducing the waste that goes into landfills (Living PlanIT says it has a system for extracting useful compounds from garbage). It also means being able to respond to emergencies more quickly than now.

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The Urban OS will run PlaceApps, the equivalent of apps on a smart phone. These apps, however, would control vital systems in buildings. The OS would also be open to independent developers, and the whole system could even connect to individual smart phones to monitor household appliances, for example.

The company is building a demonstration project in Paredes, Portugal, called PlanIT Valley, though it will be a few years before it is fully up and running.

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There are a few issues that will need to be addressed. Privacy is one, as well as the possibility of hacking. Then there’s the relative openness of the system. Living PlanIT has several technology partners but it isn’t clear how open the standards used will be; if the UrbanOS is designed in a way similar to Apple’s OS products, then it means a given city would be locked into a single set of vendors. A more open system would solve that, but then one would have to decide how open -- and how robust -- they should be. That said, with a single platform running a whole city any problems could be addressed more easily.

Via: Physorg, The Engineer

Image: PlanIT

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What Do You Want Obama To Say?

Tonight, President Obama will report on the condition of the Nation, and also outline his legislative agenda and priorities. Everyone and their uncle is wondering what the President will say in the State of the Union Address. It's not too much of a mystery. In a four-minute preview video published on the Organizing for America website, Obama said, "My principle focus ... is going to be making sure we are competitive, that we are growing and creating jobs -- not just now but well into the future."

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He asks the question that anyone watching the video would ask: How? "How are we going to make sure that we have to most innovative, dynamic economy in the world?"

The answer, he says, is "...we're going to have to out-innovate and out-build and out-compete and out-educate other countries."

I like the way that sounds, but what does it mean to you?

To me, out-innovate means we need to go back to our turn of the 20th-Century roots when Americans were cranking out world-changing inventions like electrification, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, computers and the Internet. Those inventions improved the lives of millions of people and brought about jobs. We need new ideas that will do the same and that takes investment.

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I don't know what "out-build" means. Build what? Infrastructure? Cars? Buildings? Lots of things that were built here are now manufactured elsewhere for much less money. So what can we build here that would make us "out-compete?"

In terms of out-educating, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics, seven countries consistently outperform the United States in science: Chinese Taipei, the Czech Republic, England, Hungary, Japan, Korea, and Singapore. We're also outperformed by other countries in reading and in math. Not only does having an education give a person the opportunity to earn more money (see this graph from the Bureau of Labor Statistics), it also keeps him/her employed.

So what do you think? Yes, the country needs job and it needs to cut the deficit. But how does it do that and still stay competive in the world market? Post your feedback and tell us what you think.

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Is Solar Power Worth It?

Sunlight is free, but harnessing that radiant heat energy and converting it into usable solar power costs a pretty penny.

Materials handling and manufacturing, production efficiency and installation all drive up the price of photovoltaic solar array systems, those sun-catching panels installed on roofs. Once in place, the amount of sunlight and array performance will determine how much of a return on investment solar power systems generate.

But while the up-front expenses starting around $5,000 for at-home installation are a big, expensive pill for some people to swallow, the long-term benefits of photovoltaic solar power systems are worthwhile.

“Where you have good (sunlight) and access to financing and a combination of federal and state incentives, you have a number of markets around the country that are very vibrant, and it’s very cost-effective with financial paybacks in the order of five and 10 years,” said Robert Margolis, a senior energy analyst at National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Solar power prices have actually fallen significantly in recent years, thanks to developments on the production end as well as component design, which has edged away from customization and moved toward standardized solar power kits.

As a testament to this progress, the California Energy Commission recently calculated the average cost of installing a commercial solar power system at $4.85 per watt, which represents a roughly 50 percent reduction from only five years ago.

A Range of Innovation

Although other types of cutting-edge solar power systems, including concentrated photovoltaics and solar thermal power, hold particular advantages, technology innovations for photovoltaic array systems are also contributing to a bright future for solar energy in the United States.

“One of the exciting things about solar energy … is there’s been so much change and advancement in the technology in the past couple of years, and there’s so much more coming in the pipeline that I think it hasn’t really entered the consciousness of the mainstream utilities at the level that it’s going to really come on,” Margolis told Discovery News.

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For instance, Margolis points to the evolution of crystalline silicon solar cells, the building blocks of photovoltaic panels, into second generation thin-film solar cells.

These thin-film cells made of cadmium-telluride and other materials not only outperform their predecessors but also cost less.

Jeffrey Grossman, an engineer with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has also developed a 3-D solar cell model that could capture up to two and a half times more sunlight than flat panel photovoltaics arrays.

Inspired by the light-loving shape of trees, Grossman generated the most efficient 3-D solar cell shapes possible using genetic algorithms that apply natural selection principles to mathematics.

The 3-D shapes eliminate the need for the panels to tilt to follow the sun’s path, resulting in a relatively constant power input throughout the day.

Lower Cost and Higher Efficiencies

“While it’s encouraging that solar cell costs are lowering and their efficiencies increasing, the truth is that the pressing challenge of producing electricity renewably calls for game-changing leaps forward as opposed to our current path of incremental advances,” Grossman said.

Ideas like Grossman’s could propel the solar power industry forward even faster, especially as support for the alternative energy is buoyed by federal and state tax breaks and renewable portfolio standards requiring specific amounts of energy generated by a state to come from renewable resources.

But ultimately, solar power has to become more cost-competitive with coal and other fossil fuels in order to become a major player in the energy sector.

“Coal today is very cheap, like 4 or 5 cents a kilowatt-hour in wholesome prices, or even less in some places,” Margolis with NREL said. “But are we going to go on forever having really cheap coal and not addressing climate and other pollutant issues that are still problem for coal?”

In solar power hot spots like California, solar power costs at least twice as much, around 12 to 14 cents per kilowatt hour.

Paying that extra money today, however, could serve as a crucial investment to protect our environmental future.

“The sun provides to the Earth that entire 3 trillion barrels worth of oil energy in just two days,” Grossman said. “And yet, tapping into this enormous power to generate electricity is the least utilized renewable energy resource today.”

Image: Paul & Lindamarie Ambrose/Getty Images

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Smart Tech Halts Heat Wave Blackouts

It's so hot, scrolling through the list of National Weather Service heat advisory areas will give you a hand cramp. The heat wave smothering the East Coast is straining sanity and the electric grid. While waiting for smarter grid systems, this is the perfect time to help avoid blackouts with your own smart tech.

Smart power strips have a series of dedicated outlets, depending on what you're plugging in. Electronics that shouldn't be shut off go in certain outlets, while ones that can be turned off go in others. Several models in the $40 to $80 range are on the market now, as the Wall Street Journal's Katherine Boehret pointed out recently: the Bits Limited Smart Strip Power Strip, HP's Monster Digital PowerCenter and iGo's Power Smart Tower.

Then there's the next step -- systems that can make dumb appliances into smart ones. Earlier this year at the Greener Gadgets Conference, several startups showed off their concepts for smart outlets and plugs while Home Automation Inc. president and CEO Jay McLellan described using low-power processors to monitor and control energy usage in the home. The Austin-based company GreenSwitch makes a whole home system that replaces standard outlets with smart ones that are connected wirelessly to a central "GreenSwitch" that can actually shut everything off when you leave the house.

To find out where the real energy culprits are, Google's PowerMeter might be one of the easiest options. Several utilities have formed partnerships with Google so their customers can use the free online application to get details about their energy use. For everyone else, several energy tracking devices work with PowerMeter, including ones made by the Energy Detective and Current Cost.

You can also go old school by setting thermostats to no lower than 78 degrees F, unplugging nonessential appliances, delaying the laundry until after 10 pm and reducing phantom loads by shutting off power strips whenever possible.

And finally, there's the really lazy option: shut off and unplug everything, and then retreat to a public place that has air conditioning. Don't be surprised if you contemplate sleeping there, too.

Photo: Temperatures soared this week, prompting drivers to hit the AC button. Credit: Michael Gil

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Is the Smart Grid a Dumb Idea?

Amid recent media reports of smart grid security concerns and meter angst, it's easy to wonder whether U.S. plans for an energy overhaul are really all that "smart." Ask the experts, however, and they'll assure you that we've chosen the right direction for energy production, transmission, distribution and usage. We just have to fine-tune how we're going to get there.

"Yes, the smart grid is generally a good idea," says professor Deepak Divan, director of Georgia Tech's Intelligent Power Infrastructure Consortium (IPIC). "The bigger concerns are, 'What is the smart grid and why are we doing it?' I think the answers to those two questions are at the heart of the issue. I always joke that if you have 50 people in a room and ask them what the smart grid is, you'll get a hundred different definitions."

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The confusion is understandable.

The nation's power grid is, by some definitions, the largest machine in the world. It encompasses hundreds of vendors and more than 300 million users. It entails hardware, software and a complex infrastructure that encompasses more than 300,000 miles (482,803 kilometers) of sprawling transmission lines. All of these pieces enable us to use a resource that cannot be stored and has to be used the moment it's generated.

The problem is that much of the current electrical infrastructure depends on a skeleton of early 20th century engineering. This makes for an often glaringly inefficient mixture of 100-year-old design, 50-year-old assets and modern technology. Meanwhile, energy consumers demand an increasing amount of juice from a carbon-emitting, fossil fuel-dependent system.

"A lot of the older infrastructure was certainly not smart in any sense of the word," Divan says, "but utility companies have systematically been deploying smart meters in commercial establishments for 15 to 20 years. Some of that has migrated out to residential users in some states.

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In other words, utility companies haven't been resting on their laurels this whole time. They've deployed intelligent devices such as Phasor measurement units that measure electrical waves on the grid. They've also introduced computerized management systems for the deployment and control of electrical power.

So shouldn't we just let utility companies stay the course?

"That's one story, but I'm not sure that's the right story," Divan says. "My worry is that [smart grid updates] will inevitably raise the cost of electricity and if it does, you're going to start seeing push back from consumers who really are not prepared for a substantial increase in the cost of electricity. So if we just do that and allow the utilities to do what they've been doing anyway, it is not going to achieve all the objectives."

As to what those objectives are, again, it depends who you ask. The U.S. government, Divan says, primarily puts the emphasis on reduced carbon emissions and improved sustainability, stressing the increased integration of wind and solar energy. Utilities, on the other hand, tend to play up smart meters and automated infrastructure.

"My concern is that without any broad agreement on overall objectives that relate back to sustainability, we're going to spend a lot of money without seeing any immediate results, and people are going to get disillusioned," Divan says. "And you know what happens when people get disillusioned. The whole thing disappears and we'll be left halfway there with a dead program."

GreenTech Media analyst David Leeds, author of "The Smart Grid in 2010," also contends that it's how we get there -- not where we want to go -- that needs figuring out. 

"A lot of very smart people agree with the smart grid vision and what it should ultimately become," Leeds says. "I think the flaws are much more human, in terms of existing policies and existing utility business cases. So it's more kind of reinventing how we do business in terms of electric power than it is anything else."

Ultimately, Leeds contends, energy consumers are going to have to learn to better manage their energy consumption while utility companies and the U.S. government develop better means of incorporating renewable resources such as wind and solar into the power grid.

"In a sense, the smart grid becomes the fundamental platform necessary to transition from an oil-based civilization to an electricity-based civilization," Leeds says. "Green technologies and electric transportation will be a big part of the answer -- and we're now witnessing a phenomenal and once inconceivable growth in solar power -- but there are still a lot of hardcore engineering challenges that come with transitioning from a one-way power grid to a two-way energy trading platform.”

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Photo: iStockPhoto

Bill Nye the Science Guy Visits the Friday News Feedbag

Bill Nye... yes... THE Bill Nye the Science Guy is on this week's show, talking about everything from the Large Hadron Collider to his "green-off" with Planet Green's Ed Begley, Jr. Listen to him on this week's Friday News Feedbag!! (Yes, I'm excited.)

If this is your first exposure to the Friday News Feedbag... we're glad to have you in the club. Welcome to Feedbag Nation, which stems from our weekly science news podcast that you can subscribe to here on iTunes and chat with fellow Feedbaggers on Facebook.

Once you listen to the show, please vote below for your favorite story.