Tuesday, June 30. 2009
by Jonathan Watts
The garish gunk coursing through a greenhouse filled with transparent pipes appears to belong on the set of a particularly slimy episode of Star Trek. Multiplying rapidly as it flows through tubes, stacked 14 high in four long rows, the organism thickens and darkens like the bio-weapon of a deranged scientist. But this is not a science fiction horror story, it is one of humankind's most ambitious attempts to recruit algae in the fight against climate change. Developed by a groundbreaking Chinese firm, ENN, the greenhouse is a bioreactor that breeds microalgae, one of the fastest growing organisms on the planet, with carbon captured from gasified coal.
China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely because it relies on coal for 70 per cent of its power. Almost none of the carbon dioxide is captured, partly because there is no profitable way of using it. Algae may be the answer. The organism can absorb carbon far more quickly than trees, a quality that has long attracted international scientists seeking a natural method of capturing the most abundant greenhouse gas. At ENN's research campus in Langfang, an hour's drive from Beijing, scientists are testing microalgae to clean up the back-end of a uniquely integrated process to extract and use coal more efficiently and cleanly than is possible today. Coal is first gasified in a simulated underground environment. The carbon dioxide is extracted with the help of solar and wind power, then "fed" to algae, which can be then used to make biofuel, fertiliser or animal feed.
Foreign experts are enthusiastic. "Algae biofuels and sequestration are being tried in a bunch of places, but never with such an innovative energy mix," said Deborah Seligsohn, of the World Resources Institute, who visited ENN recently with a group of international energy executives. "It is really interesting and ambitious." Researchers at the algae greenhouse plan to scale up the trial to a 100 hectare (247 acre) site over the next three years. If it proves commercially feasible, coal plants around the world could one day be flanked by carbon-cleaning algae greenhouses or ponds. "Algae's promise is that its population can double every few hours. It makes far more efficient use of sunlight than plants," said Zhu Zhenqi, a senior advisor on the project. "The biology has been proven in the lab. The challenge now is an engineering one: We need to increase production and reduce cost. If we can solve this challenge, we can deal with carbon." The algae must be harvested every day. Extracting the oily components and removing the water is expensive and energy intensive.
ENN is experimenting with different algae to find a hybrid that has an ideal balance of oil content and growth speed. It is testing cultivation techniques using varying temperatures and acidity levels. Algae tests are also being carried out at the University of Ohio. In Japan, algae is farmed at sea where it absorbs carbon from the air. Elsewhere carbon is sprayed or bubbled into algae ponds. But ENN is focusing on a direct approach. "Here we can control it, like in a reactor," said Gu Junjie, a senior advisor. "Theoretically we can absorb 100% of carbon dioxide emissions through a mix of micro-algae and chemical fixing with hydrogen." This might work on a large scale in the northern deserts of Inner Mongolia, where land is cheap, plentiful and in need of fertiliser. But elsewhere, application may be limited because of the large areas of land or water needed for cultivation. "Algae is not likely to be the main solution for the carbon problem because of the amount of CO2 that needs to be consumed," said Ming Sung, Chief Representative for Asia Pacific of Clean Air Task Force. But, he said: "Algae is part of the solution and is closer to what nature intends. Being one of the simplest forms of life, all it takes is light and CO2 in salt water,"
The advanced algae, solar and coal gasification technology is the latest stage in the rise of ENN, which has been spectacular even by modern Chinese standards. Founded in 1989 as a small taxi company, it has branched successfully into the natural gas industry and now into the field of renewable energy. The private company now employs about 20,000 people, and owns a golf course and hotel near its headquarters in Hebei province, where a new research campus is under construction. In the short term, ENN's advanced underground coal gasification technology is likely to prove more significant than its algae work. This technique enables extraction of fuel from small, difficult-to-access coal seams, and could double the world's current coal reserves. It also avoids the release of the pollutants sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide.
The company is also one of only a small handful in the world capable of mass producing thin-film solar panels, which can be manufactured with less water and energy than conventional photovoltaic materials. Late last year, the World Bank's International Financing Corporation announced a US$136m loan for ENN's solar business. ENN executives have talked to the US department of energy about joint research , a sign that the transfer of low-carbon technologies is no longer a one-way street from west to east. The development of the algae technology trails the others, but Zhu says the results from the 10,000 litre algae greenhouse have been sufficiently encouraging to move ahead.
For the 100 hectare test facility, ENN is looking at sites near the company's 600,000 tonne-a-year coal mine in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, where the cold winters will require a heated greenhouse, and a location on Hainan Island, where the hot weather would allow the algae to be grown more cheaply in open ponds, but further away from China's main coal deposits. China building the equivalent of more than one new 500MW coal-fired plant every week and likely to be dependent on coal for at least two decades, the further studies planned by ENN could be crucial. Recognising the continued role of the fossil fuel in China, the European Commission proposed a plan this week to co-finance a demonstration coal plant that aims to have near zero emissions through the use of carbon capture and storage technology.
If members states and the European parliament agree on the €50m plan, the facility would be operational by 2020.
This piece originally appeared in Guardian Environment..
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Via WorldChanging
Friday, June 26. 2009
Putting OLPC's software on a USB drive gives old PCs a new lease on life.
By David Talbot
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Sugar coating: The Sugar interface is designed for children. Bundled programs help users engage in reading, writing, math, painting, and game playing, and emphasize creativity and collaboration.
Credit: Sugar Labs |
Multimedia
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The open-source education software developed for the "$100 laptop" can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.
"What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost," says Walter Bender, former president of the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project. "It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines."
Bender left OLPC last year to found Sugar Labs, which promotes the open-source user interface, dubbed Sugar, and educational software originally developed at OLPC. Bender has dubbed the new effort Sugar on a Stick. The software can be downloaded for free from the Sugar Labs website as part of the new initiative, which will be announced at a conference in Berlin today.
This summer, Sugar Labs will also deploy the software at the Gardner Pilot Academy, an elementary school in Boston, under a $20,000 grant from the Gould Charitable Foundation. Sugar Labs also plans to release an improved version of the software at the end of 2009.
The Sugar interface was custom-designed for children. The new Sugar on a Stick download features 40 software programs, including core applications called Read, Write, Paint, and Etoys. Many other applications are available for download, most of which emphasize creative collaboration among children. The USB software can boot up an aging computer, or a netbook, and save data from any of the programs.
In addition, Sugar-powered machines are designed to work with server software that can also be downloaded for free. This server software can be operated by a school and used to distribute content, collect homework, back up data, and filter access to the Internet. Once Sugar and the server software have been installed, two children using different computers can work on the same document at the same time, for example.
The Sugar interface and related software have already been used by more than one million children, nearly all of them users of the original OLPC XO laptop.
Bender's departure from OLPC came after a disagreement over the organization's plans to break away from a pure open-source approach and offer a "dual-boot" version of its laptop that could also run a stripped-down version of Microsoft's Windows operating system, something Bender said he feared would make OLPC "just another laptop company." But Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC and, previously, cofounder of MIT's Media Lab, said that the move was necessary to boost sales and, consequently, expand the availability of the machines to children.
Despite some large-scale deployments, such as one in Peru, the XO has fallen short of Negroponte's ambitious plans: in 2006 he was predicting sales of more than 100 million machines by 2008.Negroponte said last night that almost a million children have XO laptops, in 19 languages and 32 countries, including Haiti, Rwanda, Afghanistan and Mongolia, and that "another million are in process." But even if its own laptop sales were relatively modest, OLPC essentially pioneered the netbook concept, prodding the industry to start making small, stripped down, cheap computers, which are now a significant share of the computer market.
And now, with Sugar available to run old computers, the OLPC learning model can expand in a new direction. "Putting Sugar on a stick is absolutely the right thing to do," Negroponte added.
Copyright Technology Review 2009.
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Via MIT Technology Review
Personal comment:
Dans l'idée du développement durable (ou plutôt de la récupération ici), c'est évidemment une bonne initiative que de donner une deuxième ou troisième vie à un pc! Pour un coup dérisoire. L'interface, par contre... (bureau pour les grands, sucre pour les petits... un peu réducteur non?)
Chicago's Sears Tower (soon to become "Willis Tower") will be undergoing a major update, cutting electricity usage by 80%. Also planned is a new "net zero" hotel next door. The hotel and tower updates are both being designed by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture. Chicago Sun-Times
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Via Archinect
Personal comment:
News à creuser. ce serait intéressant de savoir comment ils coupent 80% de consommation électrique dans un skyscraper existant (si la climatisation tourne sur l'électricité, mais j'en doute).
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
A novel water-cooling system makes it more efficient for computers to heat buildings.
By Duncan Graham-Rowe
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Keeping cool: A novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by IBM could make it efficient for data centers to provide waste heat for buildings.
Credit: IBM Zurich Research Laboratory |
They have been used to model climate change, forecast economic trends, and simulate the intricate complexities folding proteins. Now IBM has something new in store for high-performance computers: heating buildings.
Thanks to a novel on-chip water-cooling system developed by the company, the thermal energy from a cluster of computer processors can be efficiently recycled to provide hot water for an office, says Bruno Michel, manager of advanced thermal packaging at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory, in Switzerland. The goal, he says, is to improve the energy efficiency of large computing clusters and reduce their environmental impact.
A pilot scheme involving a computer system fitted with the technology is expected to save up to 30 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year--the equivalent of an 85 percent carbon footprint reduction. A novel network of microfluidic capillaries inside a heat sink is attached to the surface of each chip in the computer cluster, which allows water to be piped to within microns of the semiconductor material itself. Despite its close proximity to the circuitry, there is no danger of leakage, says Michel, because the capillaries are hermetically sealed. By having water flow so close to each chip, heat can be removed more efficiently. Water heated to 60 °C is then passed through a heat exchanger to provide heat that is delivered elsewhere.
IBM has spent several years developing the microfluidic cooling technology, and it plans to test it in partnership with Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich. A 10-teraflop computer cluster consisting of two IBM BladeCenter Servers in a single rack will be used by the university's Computational Science and Engineering Lab to model fluid dynamics for nanotechnology research. The water will then be plumbed into the university's heating system, where it will help heat 60 buildings. "This is the first large-scale system," says Michel. "It's about one-twentieth of the size of an average data center." Ultimately, he says, the technology could help address the energy problems posed by large data centers.
Up to 50 percent of the energy consumed by a modern data center goes toward air cooling. Most of the heat is then wasted because it is just dumped into the atmosphere. There have been a few efforts to recycle the heat generated by conventional data centers. For example, a nine-story, 18,500-square-meter data center being built in London by the hosting company Telehouse Europe will provide heating for nearby offices. Other companies, including IBM, have used excess thermal energy to heat green houses or swimming pools. But reusing waste heat is expensive because usually only relatively low temperatures can be harvested, says Frank Brand, director of operations of the Dutch data-center engineering firm Imtech. "You can only get about 30 to 35 degrees Celsius," he says.
In contrast, because water is many times more efficient at capturing heat than air, water cooling can deliver much higher temperatures, says Michel. Water was once commonly used to cool mainframe computers, but this merely consisted of piping cold water through server cabinets to cool the air near the racks.
By some estimates, information technology infrastructure is responsible for as much as 2 percent of global carbon emissions, putting it on a par with aviation. And some experts say that this figure is set to double in the next five years.
"It's more efficient to heat water and move it somewhere else than it is with air," says Jonathan Koomey, a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories and a consulting professor at Stanford University. In 2005, data centers were responsible for 1 percent of global electricity--a doubling of 2000 levels, Koomey says. But he's not convinced that the figure will continue to grow. "There are many ways to improve the efficiency of data centers," he says. For example, better management of computer centers can improve efficiencies dramatically. "We have servers that on average are running at 5 to 15 percent of their maximum load," Koomey says. "Even if the server is doing nothing, it's still using 60 to 70 percent of its power."
Brand also notes that "air is a much cheaper way to do the cooling" and that modern data centers consume far less energy than do their older counterparts for cooling.
The trend toward stacking processors on top of each other to increase their power density is another reason why IBM is pursuing this sort of microfluidic water cooling, says Michel. Such three-dimensional chips will pose serious problems for traditional air-based cooling systems, he says.
Copyright Technology Review 2009.
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Via MIT Technology Review
Personal comment:
Voilà quelquechose qu'on attendait depuis longtemps et qui permettrait de développer un cycle énergétique-information au sein d'une architecture (ou d'un groupe architectural et une ferme informatique, etc.)
Thursday, June 18. 2009
What if our buildings could harvest power from the air, not wind or solar but literally out of thin air? Its not as crazy as it first sounds with cities literally spewing out electromagnetic radiation from TV, Radio, and Mobile phones constantly. That’s just what Nokia is doing right now, actively researching this for future generations of Mobile phones.
It’s also not a new idea, in fact the first station to harvest the power from the atmosphere has already been built and now stands derelict in a plot on Long Island for sale for $1.6 million. (map)
The tower was conceived by Nicola Tesla to transmit information and power. It was even speculated that Tesla intended for the tower to demonstrate how the Ionosphere could be used to provide free electricity to everyone without the need for power lines. The First transmission tower, Wardenclyffe Tower was actually built, work started in 1901:
In 1901, Nikola Tesla began work on a global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also, unbeknown to investors such as J. Pierpont Morgan, free electricity for one and all….The first tower rose on rural Long Island and, by 1903, stood more than 18 stories tall. One midsummer night, it emitted a dull rumble and proceeded to hurl bolts of electricity into the sky. (via)
Tesla Tower or Wardenclyffe Tower building was designed by infamous NY Architect Stanford White who was later shot at Madison Square Roof Garden by the jealous husband of one of his lovers . (See the excellent book on White called The Architect of Desire us/uk). However the project soon ran into financial problems and when Marconi sent a radio transmission across the Atlantic on the 12th Dec 1901, it helped to scupper Tesla’s much more ambitious project. Tesla quickly tried to change the purpose of the Tower to a power generator and transmitter taking power from the ionosphere, but time and money ran out for him and he eventually had to sell the station to pay his debts. Now the site is derelict and for sale and campaign has started to save the building.
Image from NYT article
So the idea is not new but perhaps more powerful than ever. If we can suck in energy from the air around us for mobile phones then why not by buildings? Whether it would be mega projects of huge pylon towers sucking in power from the city around or more ambiently from integrated receptors on the roofs of housing blocks powering heating systems locally, the idea really seductive.
References:
Nokia want to build phones that will recharge this way.
NYT has an excellent article about Tesla and Wardenclyffe.
The Tesla Memorial Society of New York & The Telsa Wardenclyffe Project
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Via Lewism
Personal comment:
On a déjà blogué sur le sujet, intéressant de constater que l'idée continue à faire son chemin!
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