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Prof. Richard Lazarus of Harvard’s Law School spends 6:30 describing how unlikely it seems that climate change legislation will become law, and then spends the remaining time discussing how to overcome the barriers that prevent the law from being enacted. Just when you thought that there was no light at the end of the tunnel (the 6:30 mark) he shows us what might be a way out.
Scientists at Berkeley Lab do. One DOE-funded project at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab takes Berkeley scientists and pairs them with expertise from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and General Motors (GM). The net result? A plan to develop a cost-effective hydrogen storage system for vehicles.
The basic idea is to make a material that can store large volumes of hydrogen at low pressures. This makes using hydrogen more cost-effective (less energy use for high-pressure pumping) and safer (lower pressure makes it safer). So, how does one make a container store more of something without high pressures? Simple, make the storage container’s material a sponge for hydrogen. (That’s the material in the image above.)
Read more about the project here.
A few years ago, MIT’s Smart Cities project developed the idea for the City Car. You may remember the City Car – it’s the one that folds up into itself when parked, the one that opens from the front, and the one that takes up 1/3 the space of a normal-sized vehicle on the street. Back in 2006 it seemed so advanced that the Discovery Channel and the BBC both included it in programs depicting what the future will look like.
It’s certainly not the future any longer. The City Car can now be found in Spain. It looks a lot like the concept, and should help with traffic problems in some of Spain’s crowded urban areas. Read more about the car here!
(Clockwise, from top left: concentrated solar in red and wind; concentrated solar, wind and biomass in green; hydro in purple and geothermal; PVs and wave energy.)
It’s easy to spend a lot of time adding and removing layers from NREL’s RE Atlas tool. It’s simple to use, and provides a wealth of information. Recently, while using the RE Atlas we started looking at where the various RE resources intersected.
Why? Well, not so much for land-use questions (biomass and wind don’t really compete for land) but for investment. Yesterday’s post showed that the U.S. had a strong year for RE investment, but that different technologies fared better than others. So, we wanted to see which states had a diverse range of resources and which didn’t. Above, you see a few images of what we found.
One more thing that came to mind while using the RE Atlas, none of these places are that close to major urban areas on the east or west coasts. Which made us wonder, where are the transmission projects?
The USGBC recently announced their 2011 list of top 10 states for LEED green buildings. DC beat out every state with 31 sq. ft. of LEED-certified space per person. The fact that this announcement comes not long after the Treasury Building was LEED certified – and became the oldest building to receive certification – firmly places D.C. in a leading role for building efficiency and design in the nation.
Read more about the list, including notable projects from the top ten, at CEILeadership.org.
Watch Pavan Sukhdev’s TED talk and find out how he and his team converted nature’s contribution to world economies into terms of dollars and cents. The moral of the talk: just because something isn’t priced doesn’t mean it lacks value.
The two EIA graphs above tell a good-news/bad-news tale. The good news? Industrial and transportation energy costs have gone down significantly lately. The bad news? Residential and commercial costs haven’t, and those two of the sectors that have grown the most, by consumption, since 1960.
Thanks to the EIA for the visuals!
Nissan’s wireless charging system video just made nearly every other charging system look dated. We haven’t seen details on charging times for the wireless option, but assuming that it’s competitive, wireless charging may be here to stay.
That is, if it is actually launched when the insiders predict – 2013.
Here is a brief list of some of the interesting sustainability news articles from this week:
And you’ll find more headlines at CEILeadership.org!
