NEWS : TECH (NFPC)

Flooding Hinders NYC Power Restoration

New York City got hit with widespread power outages in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, with some 793,000 in the metropolitan area without power, according to a Con Edison spokesperson.

Getting the power back won't be easy, largely because of the flooding. It will probably be at least a few days before power can be restored. "We're focusing on damage assessment," the spokesperson said. Con Edison Senior Vice President for Electric Operations John Miksad told CBS New York that it was the biggest storm-related power outage in the company's history.

Con Edison serves 3.2 million people in Westchester County and New York City. In Westchester, some 180 roads are closed by downed trees, so crews are going to have a tough time getting to places where trees have hit power lines.

Anatomy of a Power Outage

The utility company cut power for customers south of Wall Street at 7 p.m. on Monday. The same thing was done in parts of Brooklyn. Deliberately cutting the power was necessary as it's more dangerous to have current flowing through equipment that gets flooded -- it can cause short circuits, fires, and other damage.

Con Edison has an outage map showing areas that are currently without power.

In New York City, the water has to be flushed out of the flooded areas first before power equipment can be checked to be sure it's safe to run current through. And the current to damaged equipment has to be shut down before repairs can be made.

Odds are, if your area is served by underground lines, the power should be back in four days; it will be a week or so for those served by telephone poles. But those timelines are approximate; a lot will depend on what the situation is locally. Anyplace there is standing water and downed power lines is dangerous; there have been 10 fatalities in New York City and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a press conference that a few were the result of people stepping into puddles near live power lines.

While it's certainly inconvenient, there is also another logic to cutting the power in certain areas. When power is suddenly cut off in one part of the system, it increases the current flowing through other parts of the grid. That can overload the system causing more damage and an even wider power failure.

Could A Smart Grid Curb Blackouts?

Another twist for some Manhattanites is losing the steam heat system. In New York, many buildings are heated by a system of steam pipes from a central plant. Con Edison had to shut down the system in some areas because if water hit the pipes, the temperature difference would weaken the metal, which could lead to explosions. The loss of the steam system means that some people will be without heat and hot water.

At about 8:30 p.m. last night a power plant explosion on the eastern shore of Manhattan was caught on video, though a Con Edison spokesperson said it wasn't clear whether it was caused by flooding or flying debris. After the explosion, power was out south of 39th street. The substation served about 250,000 people.

Photo, top: The Brooklyn Battery Tunnel floods after a tidal surge from Hurricane Sandy (Allison Joyce/Getty Images); bottom: Downed trees in lower Manhattan block streets (Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis)

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How Do Air Purifiers Work?:Gotta-See Videos

Air purifiers and filters are ubiquitous in much of our society, however, very few of us know how they really work. via Science Channel

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Light Switch Cover Holds On To Keys

Magnetic Switch Cover: $24.95

At first mention, Jake Frey's Magnetic Light Switch Cover may seem like a lame novelty item, but if you’ve ever been in a hurry to get out of the house and can’t find your keys, it can be a life saver. The switch cover’s design is simple, yet effective. The powerful magnet is situated behind the base plate so that keys can be placed there and stay until it’s time to go out again.

NEWS: Magnet Drives Pill to the Right Spot

The third-year industrial design student thought up this switch cover while thinking of ways to combine multiple products in to one. Frey says, “ It’s a simple little thing that can do a lot and makes a lot of sense. When you come home you always turn the lights on and put your keys somewhere. This simply blends those two actions into one.” The cover can be custom made in different colors and is available in single, double or triple switches.

Credit: Jake Frey

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Bill Gates Seeks To Reinvent The Toilet

After revolutionizing the computer world with Microsoft, Bill Gates is now looking to revolutionize the toilet.

BLOG: Who Invented The Toilet?

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recently launched a "Reinvent the Toilet" competition and have already awarded $3 million to researchers at eight universities to redesign the porcelain throne. The challenge? Develop an economical toilet that is doesn't need to be connected to a sewer system, or to any water or electricity grid. 

SCIENCE CHANNEL: Top 10 Accidental Inventions

The program aims to address the plight of nearly 40 percent of the world's population who do not have access to flush toilets. Throughout the developing world, billions of people lack safe, reliable toilets.

DNEWS VIDEO: SYNTHETIC LIFE, ENGINEERING TISSUE AND MORE …

President of the foundation's Global Development Program, Sylvia Mathews Burwell spoke last month at the 2011 AfricaSan Conference in Kigali. According to foundation press release, in her keynote address, Burwell said, “No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches. New ideas. In short, we need to reinvent the toilet.”

One design that's making a splash is a toilet that uses solar panel to power the pot's electrochemical system (photo, top). In it, electrodes generate chemical reactions that cleanse the bowl and turn organic waste into carbon dioxide and hydrogen that can be stored in a fuel cell for use at night.

Michael R. Hoffman,the professor of environmental science at the California Institute of Technology who is developing this solar toilet told the New York Times, "We can clean the waste water up to the same level as would come out of a treatment plant."

NEWS: Texas Town to Recycle Urine

Hoffman,who received $400,000 for development, said prototypes of the solar toilet might cost as much as $5,000, but assured that prices would drop once commercial production got underway. He also said operational costs would sum to only a few cents a day.

Photo: Prototype concept for the self-contained, pv-powered domestic toilet and wastewater treatment system. Credit: Caltech/Brian Lee

[Via New York Times]

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Wind Power Takes Flight in the Jet Stream

Earth-based wind power is becoming rather passe. The future is in the jet stream, where winds blow at 150 miles per hour. An unmanned turbine flying 30,000 feet above the ground has the potential to generate 50 times the amount of watts that ground-based turbines can.

What would one of these high-flying turbines look like? Plenty of designs have been proposed, from balloons to blimps to kites, with all manner of rotating appendages to collect energy. Discovery News blogger Alyssa Danigelis has a great round up here of technology being worked on by companies including Joby Energy, Makani Power, Sky WindPower and Magenn Power.

But what many of them have in common is a long nanotube tether that relays captured energy from on high to where it's needed on the ground. NASA is using a $100,000 federal grant and the talents of aerospace engineer Mark Moore to figure out which of these futuristic schemes is best. That means they'll have to also consider airspace allocations -- how to share the sky with other flying vehicles.

The jet stream's high wind speeds are used by large international flights to save fuel and shorten travel time, making the region somewhat of an in-demand resource. But even at lower altitudes, wind turbines and their tethers could get in the way -- each turbine would likely need a 2-mile-wide restricted area to keep it out of collisions. Such a patchwork of “do” and “do not fly” zones would take some expert planning to work in busy airspace.

As he explains in a press release, Moore thinks one part of the answer may be to deploy the wind devices offshore, where there is little demand for low-flying airspace from commercial crafts. That would help eliminate most potential hazards below the jet stream. It would also avoid taking up land for the tethers and would not add any cost, since the flying turbines wouldn't need expensive platforms or towers to support them.

Leaders in the wind power industry and other government agencies, including the Department of Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, have been talking to NASA while it researches turbines. Moore says in the same press release that the other parties “welcome this study because they've never dealt with flying systems and NASA has.”

Photo: Getty Images/Richard Osbourne

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Bloom Energy Server Could Bring Microgrids Online

I'm seeing news everywhere about Bloom Energy's announcement today of its Energy Server, a new kind of fuel cell that can generate clean energy. So I did a little poking around and here's what I found.

First, just a refresher: You may have heard about hydrogen fuel cells, which use hydrogen as fuel. (California has a whole Hydrogen Highway project to develop this energy for transportation.) When the hydrogen mixes with oxygen, it produces a chemical reaction that generates a charged particle. That charged particle is captured in a battery and can be used to power a car.

But there are a few problems developing hydrogen fuel cells. It takes energy to produce hydrogen. And to get the most bang for the buck, you need to very expensive precious metals, molten materials that are unstable or dangerous corrosive acids.

Bloom Energy says it has a fuel that steps over these problems to produce clean energy 'round the clock.  For starters, their fuel cell doesn't use pure hydrogen as a fuel. It uses a hydrocarbon fuel, such as ethanol, biodiesel, methane or natural gas. Yes, some of those are fossil fuels or otherwise used in combustion engines. But with a fuel cell, there is no combustion and therefore no combustion-related emissions. Keep reading.

The fuel cell has three layers: an electrolyte sandwiched between an anode and a cathode. There's a pretty good, simple and short animation that describes how it works. I'll just give you the basics. Air passes through one layer, fuel enters the other and a chemical reaction occurs that pulls the charged particles through the middle, which is a solid, ceramic layer made from a common sand-like powder.

That produces electricity, water and small amount of carbon dioxide. When running on a hydrocarbon fuel, the system is approximately 67 percent cleaner than a typical coal-fired power plant.

The co-founder, K.R. Sridhar, thought of this idea after working for NASA on a technology that would use solar energy and water to produce air to breath and fuel for transportation on Mars.

According to the company, each Bloom Box provides 100 kilowatts (kW) of electricity, enough to power approximately 100 average U.S. homes.

60 Minutes did a report on Bloom Energy and you can watch that here.

Planet Green has a video that gives a good over view of how it works, and props to Gizmag for their great write-up. 

I'm not sure about a so-called new form of power generation that is not 100 percent clean.  But when I was reading about Bloom Energy, I was reminded of this article I saw in the New York Times today, which talks about micro-grid power. If you had a system to generate your own electricity, either for your house or for your small business, you could get off the grid or better yet, you could generate energy that you sold back to the grid for a profit.

The idea is that a distributed network of small, energy-generating stations would help utility companies with "grid stability and integrating distributed generation sources like rooftop solar panels into their renewable energy goals."

So far there aren't many energy generating machines that are making this happen. But something like the Bloom Box could bring up the distributed energy market.

Photo: Bloom Energy