I think it is safe to say that many if not all of us know what global warming, and the causes of it. If not I have posted several articles on the issue. Instead of informing you on what you already know I'm going to share some new innovative ways on how to prevent the spread of global warming/pollution. New energy saving technologies along side new fuels that will some day replace gasoline.
http://timeforchange.org/main-cause-of-global-warming-solutions
http://www.acoolerclimate.com/causes-of-global-warming.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
http://www.greenfacts.org/climate-change/global-warming/global-warming.htm
EY
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Dance away
Power generating dance floor. Would be implemented into the floor of clubs and while hip hoppers are dancing the floor would take their energy that they release onto the floor and store it in batteries.The creator of this claims that it can generate up to 60% of the energy needed to run a club if the dance floor is full and people dance vigorously. This would prevent these clubs from using amples amount of electricity which they currently do and would help them cut back, to help the environment every little thing counts.
Look at these tiles at a larger scale, maybe implement them into malls and public places and use peoples foot steps for power.
EY
Facts consider
Cars are currently killing people at the rate of 10 jumbo jet crashes a day. That's only direct fatalities;
an additional some three million lives are lost each year to air pollution, for which cars are the major source.
50% of all car trips are 5 miles or less
Burning one gallon of gas creates 22 lbs of carbon dioxide
EY
Air Car
Compressed-Air Powered cars could take you over 800 miles on a single fill-up, at speeds of up to 96 mph. They should refuel in less than 3 minutes, and at speeds over 35 mph emit about half the CO2 of aToyota Prius. Best part? You could see them in the US at the end of next year.
Car-tech aficionados may already be familiar with Zero Pollution Motor’s (ZPM) compressed-air powered car. For those that haven’t heard of it yet, compressed air vehicles are a new generation of vehicle that finally solves the motorist’s dilemma: how to drive and not pollute at a cost that is affordable!
What happens when you replace the explosions in your car’s combustion chamber with clean compressed air? Well, as long as you lighten things up by replacing heavier parts with aluminum, you end up with a clean, efficient way to power a vehicle.
The world’s first commercial compressed-air powered vehicle is currently being produced by India’s largest automaker, Tata Motors, who is licensing the technology from European-based company MDI. They anticipate having about 6000 of these vehicles on city streets in India in 2008.
Although potentially revolutionary it really isn’t that complicated. What a compressed-air car does is use the force of super-compressed air to move the engine’s pistons up and down, as opposed to explosions produced from injecting a small amount of fuel.
To get things moving on compressed air, weight reduction is a top priority. MDI’s aluminum-based engine weighs half what a normal engine does, and the frame is also built out of lightweight materials.
ZPM’s US model will store about 3200 cubic feet of compressed air in carbon fiber tanks at 4500 psi. Carbon fiber tanks are used for safety reasons since they tend to split open (as opposed to explode) when punctured.
Compressed air from the tanks will run directly to the engine under speeds of 35 miles per hour. That means that under 35 mph the car qualifies as a zero emissions vehicle. At higher speeds the engine will burn a small amount of fuel to create more compressed air, sort of like how a plug-in hybrid like the Chevy Volt produces on-the-fly electricity. The hybrid air-car setup should be able use any number of fuels, including gasoline, propane, or ethanol.
1 tank of air + 8 gallons of gas = 848 mile range
The car’s compressed air tank can be refilled in about 3 minutes from a service station. To fill it up at home the car would be plugged in, where an onboard compressor would refill the tank in about 4 hours, at an electrical cost of about $2.
At speeds over 35 mph the air car emits about half the CO2 per mile as a 2007 Toyota Prius (0.141lbs of CO2 per mile, while that the Toyota Prius emits 0.34 lbs of CO2 per mile).
EY
Trash Power
Tapping Power From Trash
Phil Marino for The New York Times
RECOVERY WORK an enclosed flare at the landfill burns off gas that has an insufficient methane content for effective energy production.
Buried in airless pockets deep inside landfills, the organic matter in these great mounds of waste is consumed by bacteria that give off gas rich in methane, increasingly used to generate electricity and heat.
In fact, power from landfill methane exceeds solar power in New York and New Jersey, and landfill methane in those states and in Connecticut powers generators that produce a total of 169 megawatts of electricity — almost as much as a small conventional generating station. The methane also provides 16.7 million cubic feet of gas daily for heating and other direct uses.
There is ample opportunity for energy-producing projects at more landfills, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Landfill Methane Outreach Program and officials and groups in the three states. As scouring for alternative energy intensifies, landfill methane is getting more attention from state, federal and local governments together with private energy and waste-management companies, landfill owners and energy entrepreneurs.
If it is not captured, the E.P.A. says, landfill methane becomes a greenhouse gas at least 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, when it rises into the atmosphere. The agency estimates that landfills account for 25 percent of all methane releases linked to human activity.
As a result, capturing methane at former and active landfills is a global housekeeping benefit as well as an important alternative energy niche.
In New York, power from landfill methane far exceeds solar power and is led by the 72-megawatt capacity of Covanta’s American Ref-Fuel incinerator in Hempstead, the largest Long Island plant making energy from refuse burning. In New Jersey, power from landfill methane surpasses both solar and wind power.
The Environmental Protection Agency lists more than 51 operating landfill methane projects in the three states, 7 under construction and 23 shut down. It lists opportunities at more than 90 other sites, most in New York and several on Long Island.
Landfill methane powers generators that produce 83 megawatts of electricity in New Jersey, 80 in New York and 6.1 in Connecticut, and more landfill energy could be on the way. Waste Management, the largest garbage hauler and landfill operator in the country, is in the midst of a five-year, $400 million plan to build methane-to-electricity projects at 60 landfills nationwide. It already has a project at the landfill in New Milford, Conn.
At some landfills, methane is not harnessed but is burned off, or flared, keeping it from the atmosphere but wasting its energy potential. That is changing.
“As the price of energy has increased, there is more interest in getting some energy production out of these landfills as opposed to simply flaring,” said Janet Joseph, director of clean energy research and market development for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.
Ms. Joseph and others acknowledge that energy production from landfill methane, while desirable, will go only a short way toward meeting overall energy needs.
Still, available and anticipated incentives — including renewable energy credits, tax breaks and carbon offsets, linked with market forces and a regional initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — are increasing interest in methane capture and use.
In New Jersey, more than half of captured landfill methane is now used. The state’s largest project, at the 600-acre Ocean County landfill in Manchester, generates 20 megawatts, the E.P.A. said. Projects are in operation at more than 20 New Jersey landfills, under construction at 3 and possible at 8 others, E.P.A. data show.
On Long Island, the Wehran Energy Corporation project at the 8.1-million-ton Brookhaven Town landfill, which closed to garbage in 1996, has pumped 350,000 megawatt-hours of electricity into the power grid over the past 30 years. Wehran’s president, Fred L. Wehran Jr., said the Long Island Power Authority pays 8.5 cents per kilowatt-hour for power the company delivers to its grid.
With gas from the closed landfill declining, Mr. Wehran said he was seeking ways to make power from the lower-methane gas coming from Brookhaven’s adjacent and still operating landfill for construction and demolition debris. “I’d like to use every cubic foot of gas,” he said, “because once it’s gone it’s gone.”
Wind Power
Wind-Power Politics
“The moment I read that paper,” the wind entrepreneur Peter Mandelstam recalled, “I knew in my gut where my next wind project would be.”
I was having lunch with Mandelstam last fall to discuss offshore wind in general and how he and his tiny company, Bluewater Wind, came to focus on Delaware as a likely place for a nascent and beleaguered offshore wind industry to establish itself. Mandelstam had been running late all morning. I knew this because I received a half-dozen messages on my cellphone from members of his staff, who relayed his oncoming approach like air-traffic controllers guiding a wayward trans-Atlantic flight into Kennedy. This was the Bluewater touch — crisp, informative, ever-helpful, a supercharged, Eagle Scout attentiveness that was part corporate style, part calculated public-relations approach. It would pay off tremendously in his company’s barnstorming campaign of Delaware town meetings and radio appearances to capture what he had reason to believe would be the first offshore-wind project in the country’s history.
These features were, unsurprisingly, manifestations of Mandelstam himself, who arrived in a suit and tie, a wry smile, his wiry hair parted in the middle and tamped down like someone who had made a smooth transition from a Don Martin cartoon. Mandelstam, a 47-year-old native New Yorker who is capable of quoting Central European poets and oddball meteorological factoids with ease, had long committed himself — and the tiny company he formed in 1999 — to building utility-scale wind-power plants offshore, a decision that, to many wind-industry observers, seemed to fly in the face of common sense. Offshore marine construction was wildly, painfully expensive — like standing in a cold shower and ripping up stacks of thousand-dollar bills. The very laws for permitting and siting such projects had yet to be enacted. Indeed, the recent past was littered with failed offshore wind projects. Never mind that there were so many more opportunities in the continental United States to build land-based wind farms, which cost half as much as offshore projects. While wind-energy companies in Europe were moving offshore at great speed, neither Mandelstam nor anyone else had ever successfully built an offshore wind farm in the United States. Failed, stalled or delayed projects sounded like a catalog of coastal shipwrecks: Long Island, Padre Island, Cape Wind. Entrepreneurs, of course, need to anticipate the next market, but when it came to offshore wind, Mandelstam seemed too far ahead of the curve to ever succeed.
Then in 2005 Willett Kempton, a University of Delaware professor in the school’s College of Marine Studies, began teaching a course on offshore wind power. “In our department,” Kempton recalls, “most of my colleagues were working on some aspect of the global-warming problem.” Coal-fired power plants, a major contributor of carbon in the atmosphere, had recently been linked in Delaware to clusters of cancer outbreaks and to high levels of mercury in the state’s fishery. One of the first things Kempton and his class did was go down the list of clean-energy options for Delaware — “It was a pretty short list,” he said. Solar power was still far too expensive to be economically sustainable. And the state had no land-based wind resource to speak of. But a team of students, led by Amardeep Dhanju, became curious about measuring the winds off the coast to determine whether they might serve as a source of power. What he found was that Delaware’s coastal winds were capable of producing a year-round average output of over 5,200 megawatts, or four times the average electrical consumption of the entire state. “On the wholesale electricity markets,” Dhanju wrote, “this would produce just over $2 billion” in annual revenue.
It so happened that the day Dhanju’s semester-long research project was discussed, Kempton had invited several wind entrepreneurs to class. Mandelstam was the only invitee to show up in person. It was then that Mandelstam had his eureka moment. The amount of power Dhanju was describing, Mandelstam knew from Kempton, was but a small fraction of an even larger resource along what’s known as the Mid-Atlantic Bight. This coastal region running from Massachusetts to North Carolina contained up to 330,000 megawatts of average electrical capacity. This was, in other words, an amount of guaranteed, bankable power that was larger, in terms of energy equivalence, than the entire mid-Atlantic coast’s total energy demand — not just for electricity but for heating, for gasoline, for diesel and for natural gas. Indeed the wind off the mid-Atlantic represented a full third of the Department of Energy’s estimate of the total American offshore resource of 900,000 megawatts.
Cellphone for the earth
Cellphone That Is Made With the Environment in Mind
By AZADEH ENSHA
Hundreds of millions of cellphones containing toxic chemicals are discarded each year, and many end up in landfills. If you want your technology company to do its part for the environment, the new Motorola W233 Renew is one place to start.
Made using plastics composed of recycled water bottles, the Renew is being billed by the company as a carbon-neutral cellphone. Motorola offsets the carbon dioxide required to manufacture, distribute and operate the Renew through investments in renewable energy sources and reforestation.
Other environmental efforts by the company include printing the Renew’s packaging on 100 percent recycled paper and providing a prepaid shipping envelope so that users can recycle their old phones. The Renew is also free of polyvinyl chloride, asbestos, chlorofluorocarbons and halons.
The Renew offers up to nine hours of talk time on a single charge and up to two gigabytes of optional removable memory. The phone is available at T-Mobile for $10 with a two-year service contract. You can get it in any color you want, as long as it’s green. AZADEH ENSHA
This is a really big deal! If all cell phone companies started to building their phones using all recycled materials a lot of materials would be saved and not used. Also most phones are discarded within two years and then thrown out to never be used or recycled again. So even if this phone were to be thrown out it wont be harming the environment with all of its toxic chemicals and plastics that it has. So this is a really good idea and all cell phone makers should start to adopt this and then many resources and materials can be saved and used on something more important then helping us keep in touch with others.
Alternative Fuels (Ethanol vs. Biodiesel
Wet Milling
Dry MillingEthanol is an alcohol product produced from corn, sorghum, potatoes, wheat, sugar cane, even biomass such as cornstalks and vegetable waste. When combined with gasoline it increases octane levels while also promoting more complete fuel burning that reduces harmful tailpipe emissions such as carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons.
Biodiesel is a domestic, renewable fuel for diesel engines derived from natural oils like soybean oil. Or for those of you who want a more technical definition, it is a fuel comprised of mono-alkyl esters of long chain fatty acids derived from vegetable oils or animal fats.
That information just gave you an idea of what I will be talking about and so that you aren’t confused later on. Now I am going to go into how these two fuels are made.
There are two ways to make ethanol, wet milling and dry milling. Instead of boring you with the facts about these two processes I am simply going to leave you two charts to refer to.
Biodiesel is made through a chemical process called transesterification whereby the glycerin is separated from the fat or vegetable oil. The process leaves behind two products -- methyl esters (the chemical name for biodiesel) and glycerin (a valuable byproduct usually sold to be used in soaps and other products)
The main question in all of this is which is best for the environment. Both forms of biofuel have definite environmental advantages over petroleum-based gasoline and diesel fuel. Ethanol contains 35% oxygen. Adding oxygen to fuel results in more complete fuel combustion, thus reducing harmful tailpipe emissions. Ethanol also displaces the use of toxic gasoline components such as benzene, a carcinogen. Ethanol is non-toxic, water soluble and quickly biodegradable.
Biodiesel, on the other hand is the only alternative fuel to have fully completed the health effects testing requirements of the Clean Air Act. The use of biodiesel in a conventional diesel engine results in substantial reduction of unburned hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, and particulate matter compared to emissions from diesel fuel. In addition the exhaust emissions of sulfur oxides and sulfates from biodiesel are essentially eliminated compared to diesel.
Energy Balance/Energy Life Cycle Inventory
Fuel * Energy yield Net Energy (loss) or gain
Gasoline 0.805 (19.5 percent)
Diesel 0.843 (15.7 percent)
Ethanol 1.34 (34 percent)
Biodiesel 3.20 (220 percent)
As you can see ethanol and biodiesel are the two highest in energy yield and biodiesel being two times and then some higher then ethanol. At the same time all these huge companies are putting all their resources into hydrogen, which lets face it isn’t going to happen.
How much does it cost to use these fuels? A gallon of E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline, usually costs about the same as a gallon of regular gasoline, although prices may vary somewhat depending on location. The bad thing about this ethanol blend is that it is a bit less fuel efficient then just gasoline.
Biodiesel is priced a little lower then conventional diesel fuel about 12 cents lower. Biodiesel has shown similar fuel consumption, power, torque, and haulage rates as conventional diesel fuel.
When it comes down to it cost and efficiency of the fuel biodiesel comes out on top.
Food vs. fuel, this is a main argument in that with a lot of these biofuels such as ethanol you have to use food sources like corn or other crops and take them and make fuels out of them. People are arguing that this will affect undeveloped countries because they don’t have as much food and divert agriculture productions away from 3rd world countries. Other say that this is completely false and they say that as the demand will rise for these products such as corn then the supply will rise eventually and they will both reach an equilibrium price, but the supply will be lagging behind the demand and it will take some time to reach an equilibrium price. Also the price of corn or fuel that they are using will sadly rise in price, which also hurts people that have to buy that corn to raise their live stock. I have researched this topic or question that is presented for some time and there are strong arguments on both sides of the fence and to tell you the truth I don’t know which side I’m on or which one I believe so I am going to present both and let you decide. Here’s the more precise argument.
Food vs. fuel is the dilemma regarding the risk of diverting farmland or crops for biofuels production in detriment of the food supply on a global scale. The "food vs. fuel" or "food or fuel" debate is internationally controversial, with good-and-valid arguments on all sides of this ongoing debate. There is disagreement about how significant this is what is causing it, what the impact is, and what can or should be done about it.
A common objection to biofuels such as ethanol is energy production could divert agricultural production away from food crops in a hungry world -- even leading to mass starvation in the poor countries.
As you can conclude from the information above both ethanol and biodiesel are great alternatives to the normal forms of fuels today such as gasoline and diesel. Also ethanol and biodiesel don’t pollute nearly as much as the conventional fuels. A lot of people are thinking that it is a good thing that we should start using electricity as a fuel, but if you look back on how you get the electricity for the car you then realize that it isn’t the greatest idea because electricity comes from huge factories burning fossil fuels for that electricity. So then you come back to these two fuels and maybe hydrogen and you think which is the best. As you can see from the information presented they are two great fuels, but only one can come out on top and be the fuel of the future, and it’s obvious that fuel is biodiesel.
EY
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)