19.9%: New Thin Film Solar Efficiency Record

The US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has created thin film solar panels that are very close to competing with their more traditional silicon-based cousins. "The copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS) thin-film solar cell recently reached 19.9 percent efficiency in testing at the lab, setting a new world record."

While thin film has been cheaper to produce, it has been much less efficient than its silicon brethren. Hopefully this research will allow thin film to increase its efficiency while maintaining its low price.

It is estimated that thin film producer Nanosolar's cells are 6.7% efficient. At that level, just a 3.3% increase in efficiency to 10% would allow each cell to capture 50% more energy, reducing the price per watt by 33%.

via Tree Hugger and EcoGeek

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Interesting Articles of the Week

In search of the perfect battery.

Social networking hits the genome.

There are more slaves on the planet today than at any time in human history.

Top 5 reasons it sucks to be an engineering student.

Medicine's cutting edge: re-growing organs.

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Virent’s Biogasoline

Virent Energy Systems announced its second collaboration with oil giant Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) today, saying the two plan to work on developing a biogasoline that could be used in regular cars and take advantage of the existing gasoline infrastructure.

Virent said its BioForming technology, based on research started at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, uses a solid-state catalyst to convert plant sugars into hydrocarbon molecules like those produced at a petroleum refinery.

And the company said the technology can take in a broad menu of feedstocks. Virent said the sugars for its biogasoline can be sourced from non-food sources like corn stover, switch grass, wheat straw and sugarcane pulp, in addition to conventional biofuel feedstock like wheat, corn and sugarcane.

This sounds very interesting. Instead of using bacteria or yeasts to convert sugars into alcohols organically, they are using a catalyst to convert the carbohydrates inorganically. Apparently they first created this catalyst to create hydrogen and now are switching their focus to biogasoline.

Ethanol has always had the disadvantage that it could not be sent down pipes used for gasoline and that it has 30% less energy per gallon as gasoline. I had become a fan of bio-butanol over ethanol for that reason. But, this sounds even better. I can't tell if this process is able to use cellulosic feedstocks, but if it can use non-food sources that is a big improvement over using corn.

My 3 questions for this technology are: what is the energy efficiency of conversion vs. ethanol, what is the cost per gallon, and how scalable is this solution?

As for energy efficiency, their website states:

Produces gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels with 2X the net energy yield per acre as traditional ethanol processes.

That sounds good.

For cost and economics, things are pretty vague with just this statement:

The system’s scalability enables the economical matching of production with available feedstock supplies.

I would have expected somewhere they would state the cost per gallon. The lack of information on the website and in the articles makes me wonder.

And for scalability:

Apfelbach said the company's pilot plants can produce about a gallon of fuel a day, and they would likely have a commercial demonstration size in the 10,000 liters range within a few years.

A gallon a day, that's it? That's not even a drop in the bucket of the 160 billion gallons of gasoline used in the US a year. And we have to wait a few years just to get to 10,000 liters?

Looks like we are still quite a few years off from this technology making any kind of serious impact, but if the energy efficiency of conversion and economics are good, I bet they will find a way to ramp this up pronto.

via CleanTech via TreeHugger

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Volunteering Abroad To Climb at IBM

Many multinational companies insist that promising executives do stints in their overseas offices. And many will free employees to do pro bono work at community organizations. But I.B.M.’s program, which it calls the Corporate Service Corps, stands out on several counts. It uses the volunteer ethos to bring together employees who might otherwise never meet, even as it gives I.B.M. a high profile in countries where it does not yet have a significant presence.

“As a development tool, this is a four-for-one,” said Allan R. Cohen, dean of the Olin Graduate School at Babson College, near Boston. “It’s stretching to work in another culture, to work in a nonprofit where the measurement of accomplishment isn’t clear, to take a sabbatical from your everyday routine and to learn to accomplish things when you can’t just bark orders.”

Clearly, the Service Corps concept sits well with the I.B.M. employees. More than 5,500 of them, from more than 50 countries, applied for the program. I.B.M. narrowed the pool to those who had been designated as fast-trackers, who had familiarity with volunteerism and who submitted the best short essays on how participation would help them develop as leaders.

The final list comprises 100 people from 33 countries, who will form 12 teams that will be deployed to projects in Romania, Turkey, Vietnam, the Philippines, Ghana and Tanzania. I.B.M. said it would select another 100 before the end of the year and have a total of 600 participants over the next three years.

After their four-week trips, the participants will go through two months of intensive debriefing to discuss what they learned about leadership — and about the countries they visited.

Interesting. I have never heard of using a volunteering program as a way of building the leadership skills of those on the fast track in a corporation. Sounds like a good program to me, although I wonder how much good you can really accomplish in just 4 weeks.

via NY Times

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1366 Technologies

1366 Technologies, a company named after the solar constant (there are 1366 watts of solar radiation hitting each square meter of the Earth on average) is working on improving multi-crystalline silicon solar panels. They claim to have found ways to make them about as efficient as single-crystal silicon solar cells, which are more efficient but also more expensive, without losing the cost benefits.

Three different innovations (described below) allowed them to make their prototype 27% more efficient than conventional multi-crystalline silicon solar cells, bringing its total efficiency to 19.5%, about the same as single-crystal silicon solar cells.

1366 Technologies plans to make its own cell - they just raised $12.4 million and are planning to build a 25 megawatt plant if all goes well - but they are also open to licensing their technology to other solar panel makers. The company expects solar cells produced on a large scale to compete directly with coal at about $1/watt generated by 2012.

I hope they are right that we will be able to achieve RE<C in just 4 years. Check the article if you are interested in the 3 different innovations.

via TreeHugger

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3D printed Brain Lamp

Alexander Lervik's MyBrain lamp is modeled on his own brain, as run off a 3D printer. In the coming era of mass-customization, we won't have to settle for lamps based on their designers' brains -- we can each of us get lamps based on our own brains.

Cool.

via Boing Boing

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Spongelike Air-Capture Gadget Scrubs Away Carbon Emissions

The Atmospheric Carbon CapturE SystemS (ACCESS) Air-Capture System, developed by Global Research Technologies in Tucson, Ariz., holds sheets of material capable of capturing CO2 molecules directly from open air.

To remove the molecules, the sheets are sprayed with a chemical solution that bonds to the carbon dioxide. The solution is then drained off to a separation unit, where the CO2 is isolated as pure gas through electrodialysis. A design goal was to avoid using toxic or corrosive chemicals that would require special handling, so ordinary PVC pipe is used to transfer the solution back to a collection unit so that it can be recycled.

Ideally, the ACCESS machines would be placed in clusters, similar to windmill groupings, near facilities capable of storing the carbon permanently. Unlike turbines, however, these devices can be placed anywhere. Locating them in windy areas would increase their efficiency by moving air across the surfaces more quickly, but they are not dependent on a strong breeze.

The current prototype captures less than 100 kilograms of CO2 per day, but Lackner predicts future models will capture 1 ton per day—several hundred times the amount saved by an equal-size windmill. New versions of ACCESS could capture carbon at a rate of about 3 kg per second, the same amount an average tree absorbs in a year.

Skeptics of the technology point to carbon emissions coming from ACCESS and similar devices themselves. Because it uses electricity from the grid to separate gas from the solution, the prototype barely breaks even in CO2 savings. The price of capturing the CO2 is also high, predicted to cost several hundred dollars per ton once commercially developed. "In the long term, the price will come down to $30 per ton," Lackner says, "but this will not happen overnight."

Lackner says the ACCESS system could be paired with any form of carbon sequestration being developed, including underground or underwater storage. His preferred method is to pack carbon away Han Solo-style with mineral carbonation, a process that turns CO2 into a solid by mixing it with other compounds.

I first became aware of Lackner and his idea 2 years ago. Glad to see that he is getting close to a commercial version. But, at a cost of several hundred dollars per ton of CO2 sequestered, I don't see much of a use for it. If they can get it down to $30 a ton, then this would be a game changer.

via Popular Mechanics

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Key to Happiness: Give Away Money

New research reveals that when individuals dole out money for gifts for friends or charitable donations, they get a boost in happiness while those who spend on themselves get no such cheery lift.

Dunn and her colleagues surveyed a nationally representative sample of more than 630 Americans, about evenly split between males and females. Participants indicated their general happiness, annual income and a breakdown of monthly spending, including bills, purchases for themselves and for others, and donations to charity.

Statistical analyses revealed personal spending had no link with a person's happiness, while spending on others and charity was significantly related to a boost in happiness.

"Regardless of how much income each person made," Dunn said, "those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not."

In a separate study of 13 employees at a Boston-based firm, the researchers found that employees who devoted more of their profit-sharing bonus (which ranged from $3,000 to $8,000) to others reported greater overall happiness than those who spent the windfall on their own needs.

And as much as I would like to read the actual study, you need a subscription to do so. Apparently, Science Magazine read the study and decided they would allow their readers the opportunity to increase their happiness by giving their money away to Science.

via LiveScience

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Health Care Costs More than Social Security For Elderly

The cost of government benefits for seniors soared to a record $27,289 per senior in 2007, according to a USA TODAY analysis.

That's a 24% increase above the inflation rate since 2000. Medical costs are the biggest reason. Last year, for the first time, health care and nursing homes cost the government more than Social Security payments for seniors age 65 and older. The average Social Security benefit per senior in 2007 was $13,184.

The federal government spent $952 billion in 2007 on elderly benefits, up from $601 billion in 2000. It's the biggest function of the federal government. States chipped in $27 billion more in 2007, mostly for nursing homes.

The senior boom, however, starts big time in 2011, when the first baby boomers (79 million people born between 1946 and 1964) turn 65 and qualify for Medicare health insurance. The oldest baby boomers turn 62 this year and qualify for Social Security at reduced benefits.

The cost of senior benefits is equal to $10,673 for every non-senior household.

You would think with these large costs looming on the horizon that this would be a major issue in the current election and candidates would explain how we are going to pay for this. And yet I have no idea how any of them plan to handle this.

Economist Dean Baker calls it "granny bashing" to focus on the cost of senior benefits. The elderly paid a designated tax for Social Security and Medicare taxes during their decades of working to support these programs when they retired, says Baker, co-director of the liberal Center for Economic Policy and Research.

The problem with thinking like this is that the money was not really set aside. Instead it has been used to finance the massive budget deficits we have run. And even if the money really was set aside and grew with interest I don't believe it would have been enough to cover the increased costs of health care and the increased lifespan of Americans.

via USA Today

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Digital Tools Help Users Save Energy

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.

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.

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.

“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.

Sounds cool to me. Looks similar to what Bell Canada was doing. Wish I could sign up for something like that.

A system like this would also be useful with renewable intermittent energy sources like solar and wind. Personally, I would be more interested in adjusting my energy usage to be able to take advantage of renewable energy than I would to lower my electricity bills (though they might go hand and hand).

via NY Times

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Interesting Articles of the Week

The 6 cutest animals that can still destroy you.

Scientists unveil genetics of plant-fungi symbiosis.

Philip Morris tries to engineer the cancer out of tobacco.

Gene may help explain stress disorder.

How many billionaires does it take to fix a school system?

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$90 Wine Tastes Better Than The Same Wine at $10

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

via CNET

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The Pentagon's Cyborg Insects

For years, now, Pentagon-backed researchers have been trying to create cyborg insects that could serve as living, remote-controlled spies. The problem is, those modified bugs never survived long enough to be useful. Now, Georgia Tech professor Robert Michelson says he's managed to get the bug 'borgs to live into adulthood.

DARPA's Hi-MEMS program aims to implant place micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] "inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis," the agency explains. That way, as the bugs get older, tissues grow around -- and fuse together with -- the tiny machines.

Flight International reports that, in his latest work, Michelson truncated a Manduca moth's thorax "to reduce its mass." Then he put in "a MEMS component... where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage."

Ultimately, DARPA wants these MEMS to remote-operately the insects, either through "direct electrical muscle excitation, electrical stimulation of neurons, projection of ultrasonic pulses simulating bats, [or] projection of pheromones," the agency says. The ultimate goal would be to have the cyborgs "carry one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, [and] relay back information."

In a couple years the term "getting bugged" is going to be a literal one.

via Danger Room

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World’s First Zero-Carbon City

Construction work on the world's first zero-carbon city housing 50,000 people in a car-free environment will begin in the oil-rich Gulf emirate of Abu Dhabi next month, the developers said on Monday.

Abu Dhabi sits on most of the UAE's oil and gas reserves, ranked respectively as fifth and fourth in the world. Proven oil reserves on their own are expected to last for another 150 years.

Oh, the sweet irony of the first zero-carbon city being paid for by the sales of oil and gas.

Once completed in 2013, residents will be able to move around the six-square-kilometre (2.4-square-mile) city using a light railway line and a series of automated transport pods.

"They're like a horizontal elevator. You just say where you want to go, and it takes you there," Awad said of the pods.

Unlike the gleaming towers of nearby Abu Dhabi, a model of the Foster and Partners-designed Masdar City displayed at the summit showed only low-rise buildings with solar panels on each roof.

The city will be sited to take advantage of sea breezes, and a perimeter wall will protect it from the hot desert air and noise from the nearby Abu Dhabi airport.

I am conflicted about this. On the one hand, I love the idea of trying to build a zero-carbon city just to see if it is possible. An undertaking like this is sure to generate new technologies that can be used elsewhere. And I am really curious what those transportation pods will be like.

On the other hand, I am highly skeptical that centralized planning like this can work. As far as I know these pods have never been used on a scale of a city. What happens if they don't work? Or what happens if they don't work as well as other forms of transportation like motorbikes or cars? Will they stop them from being allowed into the city?

And what happens when you want to travel to another city or if someone wants to come visit you? Do you have to park your car at the gate of the city?

The Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Mohammad bin Zayed al-Nahayan, pledged 15 billion dollars to Masdar at the opening of the three-day summit on Monday.

Despite its constant access to sunshine, only parking meters in the UAE are currently powered by solar energy. Even solar water-heaters -- popular in several hot-climate countries -- are seldom seen.

Instead of building this city, I wonder if the $15 billion could be spent in a way that would reduce carbon even more. Seems like you would get more bang for your buck by offering incentives to people to start using solar water heaters and add solar panels to their roofs rather than creating a brand new city with futuristic transportation pods. Another idea would be to support research and development of new solar technologies.

But, here's hoping that the city and the transportation pods disprove my doubts and are a big success.

via Next Energy News

Update: The Transportationist has a cool 5 minute YouTube video on this city.

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Longevity Costlier Than Obesity or Smoking

Preventing obesity and smoking can save lives, but it doesn't save money for health systems, researchers reported yesterday.

It costs more to care for healthy people who live years longer, according to a Dutch study that counters the common perception that preventing obesity would save governments millions of dollars.

Van Baal and colleagues created a model to simulate lifetime health costs for three groups of 1,000 people: the "healthy-living" group (thin and nonsmoking), obese people, and smokers. The model relied on "cost of illness" data and disease prevalence in the Netherlands in 2003.

The researchers found that from age 20 to 56, obese people racked up the highest health costs. But because both the smokers and the obese died sooner than the healthy group, it cost less to treat them in the long run.

On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived 77 years, and obese people lived 80 years. Smokers and obese people tended to have more heart disease.

Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most - $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, $326,000.

To reduce health care costs, the solutions seems simple: pass the Twinkies and cigarettes.

Reading this article made me wonder, what assumptions did the reseracher use, and how did they impact the conclusion? Fortunately, because this research was published in the open source journal PLoS, I was able to find out (PLoS, I PLoVe you).

Having looked at studies like this before, I knew that the discount rate that they chose would be crucial to the conclusion. So, what did they use?

To reflect the concept of time preference, meaning that an amount of money spent or saved in the future is worth less than the same amount today, net present values were calculated using discount rates of 3% and 4%.

Not clear for the present values of health care shown above whether it was the 3% or 4% rate.

Only for discount rates above 4.7% would costless obesity prevention be cost saving. For smoking prevention to be cost saving, the discount rate for costs should be at least 5.7%

I interpret this to mean that at a 5.7% discount rate, the net present value of health care costs at age 20 of a smoker and a healthy person are identical (and 4.7% for obese people). If you are paying for your own health care costs and you can invest your money at a greater than 5.7% rate of return (which is quite possible for a long term investor) then your health care costs would actually be lower if you didn't smoke or become obese.

If the government is paying for obesity or smoking prevention, I am not quite sure what the best interest rate would be to use for this analysis. If people quit smoking and there were lower medical care costs right away, who would get that money and what would they do with it? On the margin, would that money be invested at a greater than 5.7% rate of return? I don't know, but it seems possible. If it was then the conclusion of this study would no longer hold.

Even if health care costs go up, because it is extending lives it is probably still worthwhile spending. The question becomes how much it costs to extend an additional life year, and if there are more cost effective ways of doing that than anti-smoking or obesity reduction campaigns.

Another issue, as noted over at FuturePundit, is that this analysis also does not take into account productivity. You are likely to be able to work many more years and in a more productive way if you are healthy. While health care costs might go up, they are likely to be more than offset by increases in income taken home due to that increased productivity and the ability to work more years.

This analysis also doesn't take into account that 20 years from now new medical technologies will be available and costs are likely to be higher for them.

Another interesting thing that I found in the journal article was this chart that shows expected health care costs by age. While not really surprising, I hadn't realized how much more an average person spends on health care when they get old. A 40 year old spends on average 2,000, while a 65 year old spends double that at 4,000 and a 75 year old spends double that at 8,000. Like old cars, old people are expensive to maintain.

While in the US we debate over whether we want to move towards socialized medicine, the reality is that we already have socialized medicine for those over 65 in the form of Medicare and this will account for more and more of health care spending as our population ages.

via Philadelphia Inquirer

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