Waste coffee grounds offer new source of biodiesel fuel

This is pretty sweet news. Assuming that it can be made commercially viable, it’d be great to have a way of squeezing just a bit more goodness from the tons of coffee this nation consumes annually. Oh and the exhaust fumes would smell like Colombian Supremo.  Anything we can do to reduce the use of corn as an ethanol feedstock would be good right about now.

Solar Annual 2008

Technology Review: A Better Solar Collector

Here’s another screamingly cool addition to the panoply of   new solar innovations happening these days. A small  company based in Cambridge, Ma, Covalent Solar, is introducing its concept for dramatically increasing the efficiency of polysilicon photovoltaic power cells.  Specifically, their innovation places a sheet of chemically dyed glass (or plastic conceivably) over an existing PV panel. The dyed glass actually shunts a specfic wavelength of sunlight sideways..that’s right…at a 90 degree angle to the direction of travel, forcing it out the edges of the glass panel and into a PV panel waiting there. It concentrates the light and allows a much smaller PV panel to capture roughly as much as a full-sized standard PV panel. If you put this literally on top of an existin PV panel you could nearly double the efficiency of the panel alone.  Founded by researchers at MIT, Covalent Solar is a new startup and the technology is still developing, but I love the simple elegance of the idea. I can definitely see how this could work either stand alone or in conjunction with traditional PV panels.  Way effin cool.

Here’s a cool idea for generating energy: Harness the power of one of Nature’s baddest mammajammas and use it to do good. Tornados: They suck, a knowledge gained firsthand by many a hapless trailer park inhabitant across the American midwest. Well, a Canadian engineer has decided to try to capitalize on cyclonic power to spin turbine engines and generate electricity. He thinks he’s found a way to basically create a tornadic vortex in a controlled environment for just such a purpose. Better yet, he figures he can do it using waste heat from existing power plants.

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Check this thing out. It’s a parabolic solar array from Stirling Energy Systems. The thing in the center, the Power Conversion Unit, collects the concentrated solar energy and converts it to mechanical energy by heating gas and letting it move some pistons. Stirling Energy Systems have developed this puppy based on the design of the Stirling Cycle Engine designed in 1816.

Since it’s a dish shape much like any radio telescope or satellite dish, it’s fully motorized and gimbaled, thus able to automatically track the sun. The electricity output can be pumped right into the grid too.

Stirling Energy recently broke the standing grid efficiency record too apparently. They achieved 31.25% net efficiency putting power into the grid. The old record of 29.4 has stood since 1984. Moving ever closer to the elusive “Grid parity”.

This is cool stuff.

Wow. I’m swooning over the prospects put forth in an article I just read. Jane’s Addiction’s song “Jane Says” came immediately to mind while reading it because oil is after all the new heroin.

The article, appearing in the January ‘08 Scientific American, is titled A Solar Grand Plan, by Ken Zweibel, James Mason and Vasilis Fthenakis. It’s a very sober, and hope-evincing, look at what it will take to get the Fossil Fuel Monkey off our national back and get us on the road to sensible, sustainable energy self-sufficiency by 2050. No methadone-esque ethanol plan this, these guys propose a warm-turkey weaning by implementing a solar grid. Sounds pretty damn good to me.

Here are the article’s highlights, as presented by the authors:

KEY CONCEPTS:

â– A massive switch from
coal, oil, natural gas and
nuclear power plants to solar
power plants could supply
69 percent of the U.S.’s
electricity and 35 percent
of its total energy by 2050.

â– A vast area of photovoltaic
cells would have to be
erected in the Southwest.
Excess daytime energy
would be stored as compressed
air in underground
caverns to be tapped during
nighttime hours.

â– Large solar concentrator
power plants would be
built as well.

â– A new direct-current power
transmission backbone
would deliver solar electricity
across the country.

â– But $420 billion in subsidies
from 2011 to 2050
would be required to fund
the infrastructure and
make it cost-competitive.
—The Editors

I’m good with all of that. $420 Billion over the next 40 years?? Even if they’re wrong by half, $800 Billion is peanuts in the larger scheme of things. We could fund that in 10 years if we chose to. The payoff would be immediate and the benefits almost inconceivably luscious economically, politically and environmentally.

Consider what we spend on the damn Irag/Afghanistan boondoggle…nearly $193 Billion is going to be spent in 2008 alone. Since the war began in 2001, we’ve disgorged in excess of $570 Billion. And for what? Despite being rabid neo-cons, I don’t think the Bush babies did a proper RoI analysis on this little muscle-flexing jaunt. Hmmm, $570 Billion + Total loss of all international credibility + increased global terrorism VS. a possibly steady supply of oil at $100+ a barrel until extremists blow up the infrastructure. For that kind of dough we could be well on the way to funding and implementing a new solar energy industry and national infrastructure and actually making the Middle East and OPEC fairly beside the point.

I’m sure there are flaws and miscalculations in the proposed Solar Grand Plan, though I don’t see them. It’s still a well-thought feasibility study of what it would take to become energy independent using the free, abundant energy of the sun.