Category — environment

(click to view full size in new window)

The map above was created by Lee Byron by scraping some data from Walk Score. It would be nice to have these for every city!

[map by Lee Byron | Walk Score]

Mike is an “energetic guy”. Heh.

[Scientific American]

“Rock Port, Missouri, is a small city of 1,300 people, and they just made history by being the first city in the US to be 100% powered by the wind, also making them #1 in the US for percentage of renewable energy. The Loess Hills Wind Farm, built by the Wind Capital Group, employing 500 workers from 20 states for about a year, is expected to produce about 16 million kilowatt hours annually, while Rock Port only uses 13 million. The excess wind power will be sold to other communities in the area.”

Way to go Rock Port!

[via TreeHugger | photo by andrijbulba]

TreeHugger gathered a panel of experts to discuss this here.

View Larger Map

[map by Earth2Tech]

“LINC is leased to the user as a service, not a product.”

It’s like netflix but for cell phones. You hold onto it for a year then it gets shipped back to the factory to be disassembled. They send you a newer phone with the latest hardware.

[Read More | via Kitsune Noir]

The following was written by STEVE LOHR for the New York Times.

Giving people the means to closely monitor and adjust their electricity use lowers their monthly bills and could significantly reduce the need to build new power plants, according to a yearlong government study.

The results of the research project by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory of the Energy Department, released Wednesday, suggest that if households have digital tools to set temperature and price preferences, the peak loads on utility grids could be trimmed by up to 15 percent a year.

Over a 20-year period, this could save $70 billion on spending for power plants and infrastructure, and avoid the need to build the equivalent of 30 large coal-fired plants, say scientists at the federal laboratory.

The demonstration project was as much a test of consumer behavior as it was of new technology. Scientists wanted to find out if the ability to monitor consumption constantly would cause people to save energy — just as studies have shown that people walk more if they wear pedometers to count their steps.

In the Olympic Peninsula, west of Seattle, 112 homes were equipped with digital thermostats, and computer controllers were attached to water heaters and clothes dryers. These controls were connected to the Internet.

The homeowners could go to a Web site to set their ideal home temperature and how many degrees they were willing to have that temperature move above or below the target. They also indicated their level of tolerance for fluctuating electricity prices. In effect, the homeowners were asked to decide the trade-off they wanted to make between cost savings and comfort.

The households, it turned out, soon became active participants in managing the load on the utility grid and their own bills.

“I was astounded at times at the response we got from customers,” said Robert Pratt, a staff scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and the program director for the demonstration project. “It shows that if you give people simple tools and an incentive, they will do this.”

“And each household,” Mr. Pratt added, “doesn’t have to do a lot, but if something like this can be scaled up, the savings in investments you don’t have to make will be huge, and consumers and the environment will benefit.”

After some testing with households, the scientists decided not to put a lot of numbers and constant pricing information in front of consumers. On the Web site, the consumers were presented with graphic icons to set and adjust.

“We gave them a knob,” Mr. Pratt said. “If you don’t like it, change the knob.”

Behind the fairly simple consumer settings was a sophisticated live marketplace, whose software and analytics were designed by I.B.M. Research. Every five minutes, the households and local utilities were buying and selling electricity, with prices constantly fluctuating by tiny amounts as supply and demand on the grid changed.

“Your thermostat and your water heater are day-trading for you,” said Ron Ambrosio, a senior researcher at the Watson Research Center of I.B.M.

The households in the demonstration project on average saved 10 percent on their monthly utility bills. Jerry Brous, a retiree who owns a three-bedroom house in Sequim, Wash., did a bit better, saving about 15 percent, which added up to $135 over a year.

Mr. Brous, 67, said that at first he was a real price hawk, allowing the household temperature to go 10 degrees above or below the target as the outside temperature changed. In the winter, he and his wife, Pat, decided the house was too cold at times, so they changed the range to five degrees.

The monetary savings were nice, but Mr. Brous said his main motivation for joining the project was to participate in research that might accelerate the spread of energy efficiency programs.

Shortly after the demonstration project ended last March, the digital thermostat and other equipment supplied by Invensys Controls were removed from Mr. Brous’s home. “I miss it a lot,” he said. “It was cool.”

The research project was done with an eye toward guiding policy on energy-saving programs. Efficiency programs promise to curb the nation’s fuel bill and reduce damage to the environment, if consumers can be persuaded to use energy more intelligently. Still, a big question among economists and energy experts is how to tailor incentives to prompt changes in energy consumption.

The market signals from household utility bills are not clear to people, some experts say. Conservation steps, they note, may bring savings of only a few percentage points, and even those may be obscured by seasonal swings in electricity use and pricing. Thus, they say, the only way to make real progress in household energy efficiency is with sizable subsidies and mandated product standards.

The federal laboratory’s project was instead a test of market incentives and up-to-the-minute information. But how quickly the kind of technology used in the project might be deployed across the country is uncertain. Many utilities are experimenting with this so-called smart-grid technology, but most are using it to upgrade their own networks, not to let households manage consumption.

One big hurdle is that in most states, utilities are still granted rates of return that depend mainly on the power plants and equipment they own and operate instead of how much energy they save.

“What they did in Washington is a great proof of concept, but you’re not likely to see this kind of technology widely used anytime soon,” said Rick Nicholson, an energy technology analyst at IDC, a research firm.

[New York Times]

Vertical Farming

Cloud Making Ships

“Scientists have come up with extreme — some might say crazy — schemes to counteract global warming. This year saw the most radical geo-engineering ideas yet: man-made volcanoes, orbiting mirror fleets and ocean re-engineering to cool the planet and absorb carbon dioxide.

Some say the extreme temperatures predicted for the near future call for extreme measures. Others say the solutions could be worse than the problem. In increasing order of unorthodoxy, here are the 10 craziest geo-engineering schemes of 2007.”

[Wired Science]

The following is from Nokia PR:
URL: http://www.nokia.com/A4707477

At the cutting edge of innovation
We envision developing mobile technologies in new ways to help us all reduce our environmental footprint. To meet our future vision, the Nokia Research Center supported by Nokia designers conceived the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept. Our visionary design concept is a mobile phone and compatible sensing device that will help you stay connected to your friends and loved ones, as well as to your health and local environment. You can also share the environmental data your sensing device collects and view other users’ shared data, thereby increasing your global environmental awareness.

The concept
The concept consists of two parts – a wearable sensor unit which can sense and analyze your environment, health, and local weather conditions, and a dedicated mobile phone.

The sensor unit will be worn on a wrist or neck strap made from solar cells that provide power to the sensors. NFC (near field communication) and RFID (radio frequency identification) technologies will relay information from the sensors to the phone or to other devices that support RFID technology.

Both the phone and the sensor unit will be as compact as possible to minimize material use, and those materials used in the design will be renewable and/or reclaimed. Technologies used inside the phone and sensor unit will also help save energy.

Stay in touch with your health and local environment
To help make you more aware of your health and local environmental conditions, the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept will include a separate, wearable sensing device with detectors that collect environment, health, and/or weather data.

You will be able to choose which sensors you would like to have inside the sensing device, thereby customizing the device to your needs and desires. For example, you could use the device as a “personal trainee” if you were to choose a heart-rate monitor and motion detector (for measuring your walking pace).

Environmental monitoring
* Atmospheric gas-level monitor (including carbon monoxide, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone detectors, for example)
* Ultraviolet radiation sensor
* Subscription to environmental catastrophe warning and guidance system

Personal health
* Motion detector
* Heart rate monitor
* Noise level monitor

Weather monitoring
* Air pressure sensor
* Humidity sensor
* Temperature sensor
* Subscription to environmental catastrophe warning and guidance system

A mobile device that builds on the “three Rs”
Reduce, reuse and recycle – the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept is built upon all three of these underlying principles of waste reduction. Emphasis will be placed on materials use and reuse in the phone’s construction:

Printed electronics
* Printed electronics is an innovative technology in which simple components are created by printing electrically conductive inks (nanoinks) onto surfaces such as plastic using standard printing processes. The technology allows us to create smaller electronic components – and smaller components mean more compact phones!

Bio-materials
* Bio-materials, such as polylactic acid (PLA) plastics with plant or other biomass-based modifiers, can help to reduce the use of non-renewable materials. An additional bonus is that the energy required to produce PLA - from raw material to plastic pellet - is minimal.
* Elastomers based on biomaterials can be used as rubber-like materials to seal off battery case.

Reclaimed materials
* The phone’s casing will be made from 100% reclaimed steel. Imagine – your scrapped car could become part of your next mobile phone!

A phone for the energy-conscious consumer
To complete the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept, the phone and detector units will be optimized for lower energy consumption than phones in 2007 in both the manufacturing process and use. Alternative energy sources, such as solar power, will fuel the sensor unit’s power usage. Thus, we aim to create a self-powered sensing device to reduce dependence on external, non-renewable energy sources.

Electronics
* Printed electronics consume less energy during manufacturing than traditional circuit board production and will be used in the phone, detection units, and their chargers.

Display screens
* Display technologies widely in use in 2007, such as liquid crystal display (LCD) or organic light-emitting diode (OLED), are continuously evolving – resulting in increasingly energy-efficient screens. But other technologies, such as electrowetting, also exist that produce screens that consume less energy than LED or OLED displays. Electrowetting is the process of applying electrical voltage to tiny drops of oil, causing the droplets to expand and contract. When compressed under the display glass, expanding droplets produce an effect similar to a pixel “lighting up,” whereas contracting droplets can be compared to a pixel “turning off.”

Alternative energy sources
The wearable sensor unit will be powered by alternative energy sources, and may incorporate multiple energy technologies:
* Solar energy will be harvested from the device strap, which would be made from solar cells.
* Kinetic (energy derived from motion) and heat energy might also be harvested from the user, in the way some wristwatches already get their power.

Innovative Services
The possibilities to introduce creative and useful mobile applications and web services that build upon the environmental data collected from such a design concept are numerous. These services can range from personal health monitoring and improvement, to large-scale collective efforts to promote sustainable lifestyle choices. Even very simple environmental variables can bring about novel solutions when shared and integrated into a global network of mobile explorers.

Where next?
By creating the Nokia Eco Sensor Concept, we hope to stimulate an ongoing discussion and idea sharing – both within the mobile industry and with consumers. Through these discussions, we hope to gain a better understanding of what we can do with mobile technology in the near future and how we can lead the mobile industry towards a sustainable future.

[Nokia]

Designer: Delroy Dennisur

Designer: Delroy Dennisur

[via Yanko Design]