Carbon Footprints – We have the biggest feet

Posting the pictures and results of personal projects gets delayed by great stuff that aids developing opinions. This link from Arts & Letters Daily squelched my thought that energy efficiency would solve the planet’s problems:

“We can talk up wind and solar power all we want. But billions of people in China and India will never trade 3¢/kwh coal for 15¢ wind or 30¢ solar. Time to get real, says Peter Huber… more»”

The article, Bound to Burn by Peter W. Huber, actually paints a much darker picture:

“Shoveling wind and sun is much, much harder. Windmills are now 50-story skyscrapers. Yet one windmill generates a piddling 2 to 3 megawatts. A jumbo jet needs 100 megawatts to get off the ground; Google is building 100-megawatt server farms. Meeting New York City’s total energy demand would require 13,000 of those skyscrapers spinning at top speed, which would require scattering about 50,000 of them across the state, to make sure that you always hit enough windy spots. To answer the howls of green protest that inevitably greet realistic engineering estimates like these, note that real-world systems must be able to meet peak, not average, demand; that reserve margins are essential; and that converting electric power into liquid or gaseous fuels to power the existing transportation and heating systems would entail substantial losses. What was Mayor Bloomberg thinking when he suggested that he might just tuck windmills into Manhattan? Such thoughts betray a deep ignorance about how difficult it is to get a lot of energy out of sources as thin and dilute as wind and sun.”

Read the whole piece: http://www.city-journal.org/2009/19_2_carbon.html

Great Battery Information/Comparison Site

While ranked #7 in an informal polling, and you know how painful those can be, the battery section is A, number 1 in my links.

See it here: http://michaelbluejay.com/batteries/

Tiny Lithium-ion Cells for Your Tiny Needs

New virus-built battery could power cars, electronic devices

Anne Trafton,  News Office
April 2, 2009

For the first time, MIT researchers have shown they can genetically engineer viruses to build both the positively and negatively charged ends of a lithium-ion battery.

The new virus-produced batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as state-of-the-art rechargeable batteries being considered to power plug-in hybrid cars, and they could also be used to power a range of personal electronic devices, said Angela Belcher, the MIT materials scientist who led the research team.

The new batteries, described in the April 2 online edition of Science, could be manufactured with a cheap and environmentally benign process: The synthesis takes place at and below room temperature and requires no harmful organic solvents, and the materials that go into the battery are non-toxic.

In a traditional lithium-ion battery, lithium ions flow between a negatively charged anode, usually graphite, and the positively charged cathode, usually cobalt oxide or lithium iron phosphate. Three years ago, an MIT team led by Belcher reported that it had engineered viruses that could build an anode by coating themselves with cobalt oxide and gold and self-assembling to form a nanowire.

The whole article: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/virus-battery-0402.html

Researchers build tiny batteries with viruses

April 7, 2006

MIT scientists have harnessed the construction talents of tiny viruses to build ultra-small “nanowire” structures for use in very thin lithium-ion batteries.

Read the whole announcement for the itsy-bitsy details:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2006/virus-battery.html

Vehicle mass, the consideration that drives my interest in electric bicycles, gets some emphasis:

“The work is important, too, because energy density is a vital quality in batteries. A lack of energy density — meaning the amount of charge a battery of a given size can usefully carry — is what has hampered development of electric cars, since existing batteries are generally too heavy and too weak to compete with gasoline as an energy source. Still, battery technology is gradually being improved and may someday even become competitive as the price of oil escalates.

“The nanoscale materials we’ve made supply two to three times the electrical energy for their mass or volume, compared to previous materials,” the team reported.”