Dadamotive: Life after cheap oil: December 2008 Archives

Big City, Brighter Lights

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:25 PM | permalink

Where design meets sustainability.

The Office for Visual Interaction has designed a marvelous sleek new streetlamp for New York, based on (up to) 100 LED's that use very little energy. The light distribution pattern can be tailored to the specific place and purpose.

When do we get them over here?

Double duty

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:20 PM | permalink

We all know about the ideas that cars with large batteries might be used as a temporary storage of energy, to be fed back to the grid when needed. Reality has more or less overtaken us.

A Prius owner in the USA has used his car as a source of electric energy to run his household after heavy snow storms created a very long outage, lasting almost a week. The engine kept the batteries charged and one tank of gas lasted long enough.

Clever...

Ultralight

Posted by Herman | December 29 | 2008 12:06 PM | permalink

2008 is the year marking the fact that more laptops were sold than desktop PC's.

Combining low weight, a bright screen, high performance and a long batterylife is the ultimate goal for any laptop producer. This has spurred a continuous flow of improvements with impressive results: the latest Apple Macbook uses something like 9 Watt, and there is still some more room to reduce the power requirements according to GigaOm.

mere 9 watts....... it will only be a matter of time before solar cells will be integrated in the casing of the laptop, extending the battery life to unprecedented lenghts.

Given the potential of E-ink or OLED based screens that are well readable in bright light while using very little power on might envision a future where we carry selfsustaining netbooks with us. Through wireless connections we communicate with the infrastructure: "computing clouds" that do the heavy computing stuff and secure storage.

Easier, flexible and efficient use of energy.

Waves

Posted by Herman | December 22 | 2008 11:37 PM | permalink

Some recent news gives new hope to the viability of extracting energy from the motion of the sea.

Seagen's tidal wave generator (see photo) has reached its maximum output of 1.2 MW in real life circumstances.

At the same time Eric Stoutenberg, a researcher from Stanford University, published a paper which shows that wind and (surface) wave energy usually peak at different moments. The impact of this result is twofold. First of all it promises that the variation in power generated by renewables can be reduced. But that is not all: the cost of power transmission lines from offshore windparks can be shared by both the wave generator and the windpark, reducing the cost per KWh.

Broadband motoring

Posted by Herman | December 18 | 2008 6:32 AM | permalink

Our petrolheads have done it. If you want to see how the Tesla faired, see the video below.

Update: And for the comments of Tesla on the "mis-characterizations" of Topgear see this link.

Update: The BBC does not like all this interest apparently, so the video has been removed from Youtube. But you can find it through here.

Lightheaded

Posted by Herman | December 16 | 2008 12:06 PM | permalink

Even more interesting than the Tesla is the test by our petrolheads of a Honda fueled by hydrogen. Looks like a normal usable real car.

Bottom up

Posted by Herman | December 14 | 2008 8:41 PM | permalink

Electric vehicles are hot. If you would believe all the news releases and PR it is only a matter of years before we all will be buying electric cars. Unfortunately (as anyone who tries to buy 50 cars will notice) reality is different. The technology is advancing fast but the practical hurdles as charging time, charging stations, limited range and costs of batteries are still there. I am not pessimistic: we humans usually overestimate the speed of developments for the short term and underestimate the changes over a longer period of time. But most likely we will be driving more hybrids and plug-in-hybrids than you might expect now.

The bottom end of the mobility scale is much less sexy: electric bicycles and electric scooters do not attract as much attention as a Tesla, but they are much closer to practical use.

E-assist bikes are being sold as fast as they can be produced. According to Ecovelo there are more than 1400 e-assist bicycle manufacturers in China, producing 5.5 mln units a year for prices between Euro 400 and 1000.

A number of manufacturers produce E-scooters with very practical specifications, like this one:(source Autobloggreen) 80 to 120 km range with speeds up to 80 km/hr is OK. It is well known that 50 cc twostroke engines in scooters produce a disproportionate amount of emissions (including noise), so a strategy that would force the replacement of twostroke scooters to EV would be welcomed in cities. Combine this with free parking where at the same time you could charge up your scooter and this might be a winning combination in cities like Amsterdam.

Life in the fast lane

Posted by Herman | December 10 | 2008 12:05 AM | permalink

It's about time our favourite petrol heads at Top Gear start testing electric cars. More and more Youtube movies show how devastating the effect is of having all the torque available at low RPM's. Or in simple terms: a normal car engine needs to revv up to 3000-5000 RPM before it can deliver a lot of acceleration and its maximum power. An electric motor starts to deliver all its pulling power right from standstill. The difference? Check out this video of drag races between a converted Atom and a Ferrari and Porsche. Smoking.....!!

Aptera promo video

Posted by Herman | December 08 | 2008 8:44 PM | permalink

For something completely different (and I sincerely hope they will be succesfull) a video about the Aptera.

Vortex Energy

Posted by Willem | December 07 | 2008 11:38 AM | permalink

Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.

The machine is called VIVACE, which stands for Vortex Induced Vibrations for Aquatic Clean Energy. It doesn't depend on waves, tides, turbines or dams. It's a hydrokinetic energy system that relies on "vortex induced vibrations." And it is now being commercially exploited, always a good sign!

Vortex induced vibrations are undulations that a rounded or cylinder-shaped object makes in a flow of fluid, which can be air or water. The presence of the object puts kinks in the current's speed as it skims by. This causes eddies, or vortices, to form in a pattern on opposite sides of the object. The vortices push and pull the object up and down or left and right, perpendicular to the current. Although small by themselves, collectively they can generate massive amounts of energy. For example, these vibrations in wind toppled the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington in 1940 and the Ferrybridge power station cooling towers in England in 1965. In water, the vibrations regularly damage docks, oil rigs and coastal buildings. And now there is the potential to use them for renewable energy. Nice.

Electra Glide

Posted by Herman | December 05 | 2008 11:46 AM | permalink

I did not think it was already possible but here is the proof. A full electric twoseater airplane you can purchase (as a kit) and use (120 km/u for 90 minutes). Ecogeek has the link to this website.

One nice touch: the propellor can be set to regenerate energy and fill the batteries.

No plowing

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 5:49 PM | permalink

The debate about biofuels is increasing.

It amazed me to see a full page ad by a Brazilian biofuel company in the "Financieele Dagblad" claiming that first generation biofuel production did not trigger rising food prices. After discovering that the Brazilian ethanol industry is booming it started to make sense. They export 605,000 m3 of ethanol this year to the EU, Asia and the USA but the drop in oil prices and the doubts about fuel-for-food implications might hamper the growth.

Second generation biofuels are still many years away of delivering this kind of volume to the market, triggering a response from outsiders " let' s focus now on reducing the amount of fuel we waste instead of waiting for an alternative supply of fuel".

Researcher at the University of Illinois have added valuable information to the debate. The topsoil (first meter) captures and stores a massive amount of carbon. Plowing previously untouched soil actually releases a large portion of the carbon to the atmosphere and it can take many years or decades to compensate for the extra emissions.

If you want to reduce carbon emissions by using second generation biofuels you need to plant selected perennial plants on cultivated plowed soil.

Which catapults you head-first into the fuel-for-food dilemma, because plowed land is food-producing.

A video of Stuff?

Posted by Herman | December 03 | 2008 7:51 AM | permalink

The Story of Stuff shows how the price of a good does not reflect all the costs that are carried by society as a whole. A very well made piece.

BoingBoing points to a series by the BBC, following goods shipped by a container around the world. Seems like the interest in externalities is picking up.