• Scientists work to build a better leaf

    Researchers are analyzing the molecular pathways that plants use for photosynthesis.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News




    Researchers have been trying for decades to improve upon Mother Nature's favorite solar-power trick — photosynthesis — but now they finally think they see the sunlight at the end of the tunnel.

    "We now understand photosynthesis much better than we did 20 years ago," said Richard Cogdell, a botanist at the University of Glasgow who has been doing research on bacterial photosynthesis for more than 30 years. He and three colleagues discussed their efforts to tweak the process that powers the world's plant life today in Vancouver, Canada, during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    The researchers are taking different approaches to the challenge, but what they have in common is their search for ways to get something extra out of the biochemical process that uses sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar and oxygen. "You can really view photosynthesis as an assembly line with about 168 steps," said Steve Long, head of the University of Illinois' Photosynthesis and Atmospheric Change Laboratory.

    Revving up Rubisco
    Howard Griffiths, a plant physiologist at the University of Cambridge, just wants to make improvements in one section of that assembly line. His research focuses on ways to get more power out of the part of the process driven by an enzyme called Rubisco. He said he's trying to do what many auto mechanics have done to make their engines run more efficiently: "You turbocharge it."

    Some plants, such as sugar cane and corn, already have a turbocharged Rubisco engine, thanks to a molecular pathway known as C4. Geneticists believe the C4 pathway started playing a significant role in plant physiology in just the past 10 million years or so. Now Griffiths is looking into strategies to add the C4 turbocharger to rice, which ranks among the world's most widely planted staple crops.

    The new cellular machinery might be packaged in a micro-compartment that operates within the plant cell. That's the way biochemical turbochargers work in algae and cyanobacteria. Griffiths and his colleagues are looking at ways to create similar micro-compartments for higher plants. The payoff would come in the form of more efficient carbon dioxide conversion, with higher crop productivity as a result. "For a given amount of carbon gain, the plant uses less water," Griffiths said.

    Making the grid more efficient
    Anne K. Jones, a biochemist at Arizona State University, wants to make use of the power that goes to waste during photosynthesis. On a sunny day, a plant's molecular machinery generates more electrons than the Rubisco carbohydrate-producing engine can handle. "A lot of those electrons get thrown away," she said.

    In this sense, photosynthesis is like "a badly connected electrical grid," Jones said. She's studying ways to use biological nanowires to transfer the extra energy from the light-harvesting cell into another cell that's genetically engineered to produce fuel or food. The nanowires would be analogous to electrical transmission lines, distributing power from one part of the grid to another.

    Jones said filaments found on the surface of many bacterial species, known as pili, could be adapted for this purpose. Other researchers have already been looking into using those filaments as the basis for bioelectronic circuits.

    "Components in future systems need not even be biological, so long as they interface with the wires developed in this project, paving the way for hybrid biological/inorganic photosynthetic systems," Jones explained in an abstract for her presentation.

    Creating an artificial leaf
    Jones' research meshes with Cogdell's efforts to adapt the chemistry of photosynthesis ujsing synthetic biology. Cogdell's project, backed by Britain's Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, is aimed at developing an artificial leaf that produces a dense, portable fuel you could put in your car.

    "We would aim to produce hydrocarbon fuel from carbon dioxide," he said. His favorite candidate is terpene, the main ingredient in the plant resins that are today distilled into turpentine. Under the right conditions, terpene behaves "rather like octane," Cogdell said.

    He envisions a process in which carbon dioxide and water are chemically processed to produce a scummy sheen of terpene, which could be skimmed off and turned into fuel. Even though the end product is a hydrocarbon, the process would be carbon-neutral because of the CO2 capture, Cogdell said.

    "We can't do it yet, but we have a dream," he told me.

    Whether the future belongs to artificial leaves, or nanowired bacteria, or turbocharged rice, all these researchers believe that coming up with a better way to turn sunlight into energy is a crucial challenge for the next generation. They estimated that there was only a 30- to 50-year window for completing the transition from the fossil-fuel era to the age of total renewable energy.

    Griffiths said the next generation will need more food as well as more fuel. He referred to the "green revolution" that has transformed global agriculture over the past half-century, and added that "what we now need is a new green revolution for the next 50 years."

    Cogdell echoed that view: "This is one of the grand challenges that mankind faces," he said.

    Do you agree? Which path will lead us out of the energy crunch, the climate-change conundrum and the fuel-vs.-food debate we're dealing with today? Please feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

    More on the future of plants:

    More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

    Alan Boyle is science editor at msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding the Cosmic Log Google+ page to your circles. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

  • It's not fracking's fault, study says

    Men with Cabot Oil and Gas work on a natural gas valve at a hydraulic fracturing site in South Montrose, Penn. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, stimulates gas production by injecting wells with high volumes of chemical-laced water in order to free up pockets of natural gas below.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News




    A university study asserts that the problems caused by the gas extraction process known as hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," arise because drilling operations aren't doing it right. The process itself isn't to blame, according to the study, released today by the Energy Institute at the University of Texas at Austin.

    The report is likely to add new fuel to a blazing controversy over fracking. Researchers reviewed the evidence contained in the reports of groundwater contamination from three prominent shale-rock formations where the process is employed: the Barnett Shale in North Texas, the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, New York and other areas of Appalachia; and the Haynesville Shale in western Louisiana and northeast Texas.

    The groundwater contamination is graphically portrayed in the documentary "Gasland," which showed residents near shale-gas operations setting their drinking water on fire as it came out of the tap. Worries about such contamination have sparked political resistance to fracking, leading some states and countries to hold up new drilling operations.

    At the same time, shale gas is seen as an increasingly important domestic energy source. About a quarter of U.S.-produced natural gas currently comes from shale, and that proportion is projected to rise to nearly half by 2035. Last month, President Barack Obama suggested that the natural gas industry could support 600,000 jobs in America by the end of the decade, in large part due to the rise of hydraulic fracturing. In its latest budget request, the White House proposed new studies by the Environmental Protection Agency to ensure that fracking is done safely.

    Mike Groll / AP

    People take part in a rally against hydraulic fracturing at the Legislative Office Building in Albany, N.Y., on Jan. 23. New York state legislators are considering a number of bills to limit fracking.

    "It's a game-changer in terms of the energy balance," study leader Chip Groat, associate director of the Energy Institute, told journalists today. He and other scientists discussed the report in Vancouver, Canada, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    Where does fracking go wrong?
    Hydraulic fracturing involves drilling deep into shale beds, then injecting water, sand and chemicals under high pressure to shatter layers of rock — liberating trapped pockets of natural gas. The gas is captured for energy use, but the water and other byproducts have to be cleaned up. The procedure has been used since the 1950s, but it's become far more widely applied in recent years due to advances in horizontal-drilling technologies.

    The researchers concluded that many of the reports of contamination can be traced to above-ground spills or other mishandling of the wastewater, Groat said. Other causes of the contamination include underground casing failures or poor cement jobs. "These problems are not unique to hydraulic fracturing," Groat said in a news release.

    In the reports reviewed by the researchers, "we found no direct evidence that hydraulic fracturing itself ... was a cause for concern," he told journalists at the AAAS meeting. He acknowledged, however, that shale gas development "can be bungled" due to problems with drilling and extraction techniques used closer to the surface.

    Such problems are most likely behind the water-on-fire phenomena documented in "Gasland." But it's difficult to identify precisely what the problem was or what the long-term effect will be without before-and-after data, Groat said.

    "We really feel hobbled in a lot of these [cases] by the lack of baseline information," he observed.

    Spencer Platt / Getty Images

    Ray Kemble delivers fresh water on Jan. 18 to family members whose water was contaminated due to a shale-gas drilling operation hydraulic fracturing in Dimock, Pa.

    Today's release of the final report follows up on a preliminary version that was issued last fall. In addition to discussing the causes of contamination, the report evaluated the ability of states to enforce existing regulations, and analyzed the public perceptions surrounding fracking.

    Among the other findings:

    • Natural gas found in water wells within some shale gas areas, such as the Marcellus Shale, can be traced to natural sources. The report said the gas was probably present before the onset of shale gas operations.
    • Some states have actively addressed the regulatory issues surrounding shale gas, but most regulations were written before the process became widespread. In those cases, regulations may need to updated to reflect new situations. However, "there isn't the need for new regulatory frameworks," Groat said.
    • News coverage of the controversy has been "decidedly negative," and few media reports mention the scientific research related to the process.
    • Surface spills of the fluids used in the fracking process were judged to pose a greater risk to groundwater sources than the fracking itself.

    The Energy Institute said its report was conducted using general university funds, but received assistance from the Environmental Defense Fund in developing the scope of work and the methodology for the study. The EDF said it reviewed drafts of the report during the course of the project but did not contribute to its conclusions.

    Not the final word
    Scott Anderson, senior policy adviser for the Environmental Defense Fund's energy program, discussed the report in a blog posting published after the report's release. "If the problem isn't hydraulic fracturing, then what is?" the headline asks. Here's some of what Anderson said:

    "As has been the case in other inquiries, the University of Texas study did not find any confirmed cases of drinking water contamination due to pathways created by hydraulic fracturing. But this does not mean such contamination is impossible or that hydraulic fracturing chemicals can’t get loose in the environment in other ways (such as through spills of produced water). In fact, the study shines a light on the fact that there are a number of aspects of natural gas development that can pose significant environmental risk. And it highlights the fact that there are a number of ways in which current regulatory oversight is inadequate."

    Anderson said the report deserved widespread attention, but was "by no means the final word on these topics."

    Groat said the report was based on a review of previously published data rather than fresh field observations. "We did not go out and measure things," he acknowledged.

    He said further studies will be conducted into the atmospheric and seismic impact of hydraulic fracturing — two much-debated environmental issues that were not addressed in detail in the newly issued report. The Energy Institute also plans to conduct a detailed case study on groundwater contamination in Texas' Barnett Shale, as well as a field investigation into the effects of shale gas drilling on the water above and below fracturing sites in the Barnett Shale.

    "Certainly more work needs to be done," Groat said.

    Update for 11:15 p.m. ET Feb. 16: One of my correspondents on Twitter, Pamela Oldham, notes that ConocoPhillips committed itself in 2010 to contribute $1.5 million to the University of Texas at Austin for energy research. The petroleum company said at the time that the Energy Institute would administer the grants, with the money going to UT-Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering and the McCombs School of Business. I'll check on how that squares with the institute's claim that the study was funded from general university accounts.

    Oldham also notes that ConocoPhillips was recently named in a civil lawsuit alleging fracking-related water contamination in Texas' Panola County.

    Update for 10:20 a.m. ET Feb. 17: Chip Groat, associate director of the Energy Institute and the leader of the study released this week, responded to my inquiry about the ConocoPhillips grant last night with this email:

    "Three or four of the large energy companies give money to UT  for student support (a recruitment investment) and for research that is spread among various departments. ConocoPhillips has done this, and part of the funding they provided was to the Energy Institute to support the Barnett Shale Case Study which will be a follow-on to the study we reported on today. None of the ConocoPhillips money went into this study [the one released this week]. For the [follow-up] case study, we will use Energy Institute money plus funds from energy companies and governments in the Barnett Shale development area. This is a matter of financial necessity, but we want to spread the funding among organizations with different interests in Barnett Shale development."

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

  • Liquid batteries to pour on green energy?

    Liquid batteries that can store excess energy generated by sources such as wind turbines could accelerate adoption of the green technology.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Banks of scorching hot batteries filled with molten metals may be the long-sought silver bullet to make large-scale adoption of wind and solar energy a practical, purely green reality.

    Such a storage solution is needed because, as we know, the wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine where and when it's needed.

    "Right now, if you run a solar farm or a wind farm and you want to deliver electricity when the wind isn't blowing or the sun isn’t shining, the cheapest way is to get a gas-fired peaking unit," Donald Sadoway, a materials chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me Monday.

    Gas-fired peaking units are mini power plants that can be turned on and off quickly to meet demand for electricity when other sources are unavailable or maxed out.

    "Those things are cheap to buy, they are cheap to run, and the price of natural gas has been falling recently in the United States. So the way people have been looking at (shoring up) renewables is to turn to natural gas," Sadoway explained.

    "And that's fine. It's not illegal. There's nothing immoral about it," he added, "but it is not 100 percent green at this point."

    For the industry to adopt the greener battery technology, the cost of the battery has to be as cheap, efficient, and reliable as state-of-the art natural gas-fired peaking plants. 

    Sadoway and his colleagues are hard at work on a liquid battery they believe will meet these criteria. On Monday, they described their progress in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

    Metal cocktail
    The battery is a cocktail of metals that naturally settle into distinct layers because of their different densities, similar to a "black and tan" pint served at British pubs, where dark stout rests on top of denser pale ale.

    Batteries need three layers — positive and negative poles and a membrane between the charges. In the case of the liquid battery, molten metals on the top and bottom serve as the positive and negative poles and a layer of molten salt serves as the membrane.

    "The principle of the battery is an alloying reaction," Sadoway explained. 

    Alloys are metals made via the combination of two or more metallic elements. In the liquid battery, the top layer is magnesium and the bottom layer is antimony.

    "The driving force for current is the desire of magnesium to enter the antimony and form an alloy," Sadoway said. "In order to alloy, the magnesium has to first get across the molten salt and in order to do so, the magnesium has to lose two electrons and become a magnesium ion."

    Those two electrons are what escape to the wires to power our gadgets and appliances. 

    "When the magnesium ions get to the interface with the antimony, they acquire two electrons which have been pulled out of the external circuit and then that makes neutral magnesium which then alloys with the antimony," said Sadoway.

    To charge the battery, the process is reversed. 

    Sadoway and his colleagues have tweaked the recipe of this liquid cocktail for several years and gradually scaled up the size of the batteries. 

    The initial tests consisted of a battery about the size of a shot glass; then they went to a battery the size of a hockey puck and, now, the team reports a six-inch-wide version that has 200 times the storage capacity of the original.

    Keeping them hot
    To keep the metals in a liquid state requires a battery operating temperature of 700 degrees Celsius (1,292 degrees Fahrenheit).

    This heat comes at an energy cost — "we have to lose some of the energy we are storing in order to keep the battery at temperature," Sadoway explained.

    Tests show about 75 percent efficiency — that is, for every 100 units of electricity put in the battery, 75 units come out. The rest is spent keeping the battery hot and lost due to inefficiencies in power electronics and converting back and forth between AC and DC.

    A loss of 25 percent is actually quite reasonable, according to Sadoway. As long as more than a 25 percent spread between the price of electricity when the battery is charged and discharged, a utility can recoup its investment cost and make a buck.

    For example, a utility could charge up its battery in the middle of the night when the wind is blowing and rates are low and then sell it back to the grid in the afternoon when rates are high. 

    "In certain markets like California, there can be day-night price swings that can be not so many percent, but so many X," Sadoway noted. "In a market like that, this thing would do just fine."

    Battery vs battery
    According to Sadoway, who has started a company, Liquid Metal Battery Corp. to scale up and sell these batteries, the liquid approach is potentially better than competing technologies such as lithium ion batteries, which require the expansion and contraction of solid parts in order to work.

    All this swelling and contracting amounts to wear and tear, which is often why the lithium ion batteries in laptops, for example, go kaput after a few years.

    "Those kinds of failure mode are absent in this battery because it is all liquid and liquid can accommodate volume changes," Sadoway noted. 

    Lab tests, he said, show that the lifetime of the battery isn't limited by its capacity to hold a charge so much as by the lifetime of materials used to encase and insulate it.

    Current materials, he said, may begin to corrode after 10 to 15 years sufficiently to change the chemistry of the battery or permit the battery "to eat its way out of the case."

    Another advantage to the liquid technology, he added, is the abundance of the raw materials used to build it. Magnesium and antimony are abundant in the United States and low cost.

    As well, assembly of the battery is straightforward. Due to density differences, for example, the layers self assemble. "No clean rooms, no fancy nano-tech, nothing like that," Sadoway said.

    Daniel Kammen directs the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California at Berkeley. He said the biggest challenge for the liquid battery is the high operating temperature.

    "Even if the waste heat can be harvested for an added benefit, systems operating at over 1,000 degrees are going to be a challenge for long-term maintenance," he told me in an email exchange on Tuesday. 

    Shipping-container-sized battery
    Sadoway's startup up is focused on scaling up the battery technology with the best chemistry that comes out of his lab at MIT. While the lab has reached a six-inch diameter cell, the company has cells that are 16-inches in diameter, he said.

    The idea is to take these cells, stack them about 20 high, and link the stacks together in rows about 20 deep that that fit inside a 40-foot shipping container. This shipping-container-sized battery would provide about 2 megawatt hours of juice.

    By the end of 2014, the goal is "to have something that can be readily shipped to a potential customer for testing," Sadoway said.

    While the utility companies may be interested in the batteries as an alternative to gas-fired peaker plants to make their solar and wind farms viable, the batteries also could ease transmission line congestion.

    This could be particularly useful in tech-heavy regions such as the Bay Area, where the energy demands of server farms are steadily climbing, noted Sadoway.

    On certain days of the year, for example during a heat wave in the middle of the summer, "you can't get enough electricity through the lines. The transmission lines are running at full capacity," he said.

    Instead of building additional transmission capacity — bringing more wires into the city, which is usually controversial and requires a drawn-out permitting process — companies could plop a battery in the basement of their buildings.

    "From midnight to 5 a.m., when the lines aren't congested [and rates are low] you could be shipping electricity into the center of the city and storing it in the basement of these buildings," Sadoway explained. 

    "Then, in the middle of the day, you just take it right out of the basement into the servers."

    Kammen, the University of California energy professor, said this is "exciting stuff and a welcome area of long-overdue innovation."

    Updated at 1:40 pm PT to reflect comments from Daniel Kammen.

    More on battery and storage technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website and follow him on Twitter. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

     

  • How to make solar cells from grass clippings

    Grass clippings could be turned into solar cells using inexpensive chemicals and materials, according to new research.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Within a few years, a special powder sold in little plastic baggies could turn your grass clippings into an electricity-generating solar cell, scientists reported Thursday.

    "That's the dream," Andreas Mershin, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of a paper describing the process, told me.

    The powder in the bag is an inexpensive chemical cocktail that stabilizes the molecules in green plants that carry out photosynthesis known as photosystem-I so that they can be used to generate electricity.

    Instructions on how to build the rest of the so-called biophotovoltaic would be printed on a cartoon included with the baggie.

    One step is to extract and concentrate photosystem-I from yard waste, for example, with a membrane such as cheesecloth and spinach. "It is not that hard," Mershin promised. "The green stuff is easy."

    In addition, these do-it-yourselfers will need to roughen up a piece of glass or metal, which increases the surface area, to stick the stabilized green goo onto.

    Wires connected to this plate would deliver the trickle of electricity to a battery, cell phone or a light.

    Mershin and his colleagues explain their process for building one of these biophotovoltaics in the open access journal Scientific Reports. 

    The research improves on previous work by Mershin's MIT colleague Shuguang Zhang, who coated photosystem-I on a flat glass surface. 

    This produced an electric current, but such a small amount that it was practically useless. In addition, the stabilizing chemicals used were expensive and assembling it all involved expensive lab equipment.

    Mershin looked to nature for inspiration and found a potentially better design in forests of pine trees that allow "for more light to be absorbed," he said.

    He mimicked this forest effect with zinc oxide nanowires and a sponge-like titanium-dioxide nanostructure. 

    When this chip is coated with the light-harvesting material extracted from plants, it creates a solar cell with 0.1 percent efficiency.

    "At 0.1 percent, you can only do this as a proof-of-principle," Mershin said. "Nobody is going to be doing this in real life until we get to about 1 or 2 percent efficiency and about 12 months of lifetime."

    The hope is that researchers around the world will replicate the results — which can be done with inexpensive materials and equipment — and improve on the design to reach that milestone.

    If so, this technology could be a way to bring electricity to the 1.2 billion people in the world who live without it today.

    Ideally, he said, not even the plastic baggie with the powder will be required. "We'll just send out fliers that have the information."

    MIT researcher Andreas Mershin has a vision that within a few years, people in remote villages in the developing world may be able to make their own solar panels, at low cost, using otherwise worthless agricultural waste as their raw material.

    More on solar energy technology:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

     

  • Ocean motion could produce 9 percent of U.S. electricity

    Georgia Institute of Technology / DOE

    A map generated by Georgia Tech's tidal energy resource database shows mean current speed of tidal streams.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Next-generation technologies that harvest electricity from ocean waves and tides sloshing along the U.S. coasts could provide about 9 percent of the nation's demand by 2030, according to a pair of recent studies.

    The findings, which include maps of these ocean energy resources, should help guide companies looking to develop them.

    "We have believed for a long time that the resource was significant and these assessments add a tremendous level of confidence to what that potential is," Mike Reed, water power team lead with the U.S. Department of Energy's Wind and Water Program told me Monday. 

    Today, about 6 percent of the nation's electricity comes from traditional hydropower projects, such as the Grand Coulee Dam, that direct the flow of the river through turbines to generate power.

    Since such dams plug up rivers and make it difficult for migrating fish species such as salmon to reach their spawning grounds, they have lost favor in recent years. 

    Looking forward, energy developers see promise in technologies that capture the energy in waves and tides off the coasts. 

    Designs to do this range from buoys that harness the up-and-down motion of passing waves to turbines on the ocean floor that are spun by the ebb and flow of the tides.

    The studies released earlier this month from the U.S. Department of Energy could help nudge along the development and deployment of these technologies by showing the resource is there to be captured.

    Motion of the ocean
    The U.S. uses about 4,000 terawatt hours of electricity per year. The maximum theoretical electric generation that could be produced from waves and tides is approximately 1,420 terawatt hours per year, the assessments found.

    "We are never suggesting that all of that would be captured," Hoyt Battey, team lead for water power market acceleration and deployment with the DOE Wind and Water Program, told me. 

    But based on the resource assessments and current understanding of what it will take to scale up and deploy the technology, wave and tidal power could be upwards of 9 percent by 2030.

    The DOE has set a goal that water power, including traditional hydroelectricity, total 15 percent of the nation's supply by 2030.

    To measure the wave resource, the DOE worked with the Electric Power Research Institute and Virginia Tech to develop a model that accurately predicted past wave regimes and used it to predict future wave climate.

    Those predictions are converted into wave power densities. As surfers know, waves from one day to the next are not the same, but they know what beaches tend to have the best waves when conditions are right, Reed noted.

    Like surfers trying to figure out where and when to vacation, utility owners and operators can use the new resource data to figure out where the best reliable waves are to put their converters.

    This knowledge, combined with reliable forecasts out several days on wave heights, will allow utilities to balance their loads with other sources such as a natural gas fired power plant.

    "Wave energy is predictable and forecastable," he said. "If you are a utility operator or utility owner, that predictability adds value."

    Tides are even more predictable, noted Battey. "You know down to the second years ahead of time what the tidal regime will be," he said.

    The tidal resource maps were created by researchers at Georgia Tech and are available online.

    Realizing the potential
    Resource assessments such as these, as well as others mapping potential geothermal, solar and wind resources, can nudge development of green energy technologies.

    But a key word in such assessments is "potential." As long as generating electricity from coal, oil, and natural gas remains cheap and politically salable, wave and tidal resources will struggle to compete.

    Reed takes the long view. Although wave and tidal energy projects today are expensive, he said, their costs should fall as the technology is improved and scaled up over the next few decades.

    "A good comparison would be to go back 15 to 20 years in the wind and solar industry and see how their costs have dramatically come down," he said.

    While wind and solar still struggle to compete with traditional sources today, the falling prices of the technologies and abundance of the resources are beginning to make them attractive.

    Given the size of the wave and tidal resource identified, Reed said there's plenty of room for wave and tidal energy developers to get their feet wet and begin to drive down costs.

    More on wave and tidal energy:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

     

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

     

  • Quantum dots: A big boost to solar tech?

    Susan Montoya Bryan / AP file

    Solar panels at a 2-megawatt photovoltaic array in Albuquerque, N.M. are shown. Charged quantum dots could increase the efficiency of solar cells by 45 percent, according to researchers.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Itsy bitsy particles with a built-in charge could provide a big boost to the efficiency of solar cells, according to researchers aiming to take their innovation to market.

    The particles, called charged quantum dots, are embedded into conventional solar cells, and increase their efficiency by up to 45 percent, the team from the University at Buffalo reports.

    The boost comes because the dots permit harvesting of infrared light, which is otherwise lost, and the charge on the dots prevent them from absorbing free-flowing electrons in the cell.

    "These two special effects we can use to increase solar cell efficiency," Andrei Sergeev, an electrical engineer at the university, told me Monday. 

    He and colleagues published their findings in May 2011 in Nano Letters and recently created a company, OPtoElctronic Nanodevices, to commercialize the technology.

    The company aims to develop solar cells with the tiny particles and then license them to manufacturers.

    "These cells will be at least 50 percent and up to 100 percent more efficient than current solar cells," according to a presentation given at an energy conference in October.

    Such improved cells could be a boost to the U.S. military, which is on the lookout for light and powerful energy technologies for use on the battlefield. 

    In fact, researchers with the U.S. Air Force and Army collaborated on the project.

    Key to the team's success is doping their quantum dot, which is made of semiconductor materials, so that it has a charge. 

    "This built-in charge is beneficial because it repels electrons, forcing them to travel around the quantum dots," the University of Buffalo explains in a news release.

    "Otherwise, the quantum dots create a channel of recombination for electrons, in essence 'capturing' moving electrons and preventing them from contributing to electric current."

    The team calls their quantum dot with a built-in charge Q-BICs. 

    Working in the lab, the team has demonstrated a "substantial increase in photovoltaic efficiency," Sergeev said. They now hope to scale it up and make it a viable technology. 

    "This is only the beginning," he added.

    In other words, whether this solar breakthrough will be the one that succeeds in the marketplace remains unknown. To check out more ideas in the solar technology landscape, see the stories below.

    More on solar technology:

     

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

     

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

  • Blowing bubbles to make ships more fuel efficient

    YouTune / Damen Shipyard Group

    This is a screen shot from an video on how Dutch company Damen Shipyards Group has incorporated the concept of air lubrication to its ships.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    Blowing a lot of bubbles under cargo ships turns out to be a good way to cut down on fuel costs, according to ongoing research on so-called air lubrication technology.

    "The basic idea is that if you could somehow have air close to the hull, it would help the hull slip through the water better by reducing the skin friction," Steven Ceccio, a professor of naval architecture and mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan, explained to me Wednesday.

    That works, he added, because air is about 1,000 times less dense than water, which has a corresponding reduction in friction around the hull.

    "So the potential is really good," he said.

    The caveat is that the air has to be pumped beneath the hull and kept there. The pumping takes energy and keeping it beneath the hull is a combination of physics and architecture.

    In research over the past decade largely funded by the U.S. Navy, Ceccio has found if just a little air is pumped down, the bubbles just flow away and do little good.

    "But if you get to a critical amount, if you put enough in, the bubbles coalesce together and they form a film and then it works really well," he said.

    "It was one of those circumstances where half measures would not do the trick. You have to persevere, put a bunch of air in, and then things get better."

    At least, things get better if the ship has a flat-bottomed hull, like most cargo ships. On V-shaped hulls, like those found on most Navy destroyers, "the bubbles may not form these layers and therefore your ability to lubricate with air is reduced," Ceccio noted.

    Most recently, he applied air lubrication modeling to the typical type of flat-bottomed cargo ships that ply the Great Lakes region and found the technology could increase fuel efficiency by 5 to 20 percent.

    Since fuel costs are often more than half of a cargo ship's total operating expenses, these types of savings could be huge, notes an Economist story on the technology. 

    What Ceccio's study for the Great Lakes Maritime Research Institute failed to consider is what it costs to install a bubble maker on existing ships and payback time.

    "Of course," he noted, "that's what business people care about."

    Businesses, especially in Europe and Asia, are making a go at the technology.

    Dutch firm Damen Shipyards Group, for example, has patented an air lubrication ship design that results in about 15 percent fuel savings on an annual basis. (See this video to learn more.) 

    In general, more savings are found with slower-moving ships, the company notes.

    As for Ceccio, he and his colleagues have yet to be approached by any shipping companies, though he hopes "we could find some folks in the U.S. who might say that's something we would like to do."

    More on shipping technology:

     

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

     

     

  • Sunflowers inspire improved solar power plant

    Yuriko Nakao / Reuters

    In this file photo, a bee is pictured on a sunflower planted to help fight radiation the Fukushima nuclear power plant. Now, researchers are turning to sunflowers to improve the design of solar power plants.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    The well-tuned geometry of the florets on the face of the sunflower head has inspired an improved layout for mirrors used to concentrate sunlight and generate electricity, according to new research.

    The sunflower-inspired layout could reduce the footprint of concentrating solar power (CSP) plants by about 20 percent, which could be a boon for a technology that's limited, in part, by its massive land requirements.

    CSP plants employ arrays of giant mirrors, each the size of half a tennis court, to beam the sun's rays up to heat a tube of fluid in the top of a tower. This hot fluid drives steam turbines that generate electricity.

    In the traditional layout, the mirrors are arranged in rows of circles that ripple out from the central tower. Some, such as the Spain's Gemsolar power-generating array, take up 185 acres. That plant, when complete in 2013, will provide power for about 25,000 homes.

    Geoeye

    A commercial satellite picture from GeoEye shows the Gemasolar power-generating array in Seville, Spain.

    This voracious appetite for land sent Alexander Mitsos, a mechanical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues in search of an improved layout.

    They started with a computer model that evaluates the efficiency of layouts and tested it on a CSP plant in Andalucia, Spain, called PS10. They found its arrangement of mirrors results in shading and blocking of sunlight that dampens the plant's efficiency.

    In a bid to increase the efficiency, Mitsos and colleagues used some numerical optimizations to tinker with the layout. They came up with a design where the mirrors are closer together, reducing the amount of land required by 10 percent.

    The pattern, a team member noticed, had some elements that resembled the spiraling pattern in sunflowers and suggested they mimic the florets.

    "We started looking into it and it turns out that was an excellent idea," Mitsos told me Wednesday.

    This "a ha" moment, in turn, led them to a simulated field of mirrors that even more closely resembles a sunflower, with each mirror angled at 137 degrees with respect to its neighboring mirror, as mathematicians had previously found each sunflower floret is turned.

    The result was a layout that takes up 20 percent less space than the PS10 layout and is more efficient to boot, Mitsos said.

    "It is very scary that we did all the [numerical optimization] work and then we go back to nature," he noted. "We could have started there."

    While the finding is based on computer simulations, Mitsos has no doubts it is correct.

    "The thing to realize is that a plant like [PS10] costs many millions of dollars and it takes some time to build, so it is not an experiment you can do in the lab," he said.

    But he hopes that developers in the CSP industry will adopt his design, saving land and money in the process.

    More on solar power technology:

    Findings are published in the journal Solar Energy. 

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

     

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

  • New Year's Resolution: Get fit, make electricity

    SportsArt Fitness

    A new system of fitness machines turns the watts you generate while working out into electrticity to power the gym.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    A new generation of workout machines that generate electricity as you work up a sweat are poised to invade fitness centers and help you keep your New Year's resolution to trim down your waistline.

    The electricity generated by the machines is fed back into the grid, helping the gym save on its utility bills.

    The so-called Green System from Woodinville, Wash.,-based SportsArt Fitness, represents a novel way to harness "human power," Ken Carpenter, director of sales for the company, told me.

    It joins a growing list of similar concepts, including PaveGen's pavers that generate electricity as people walk (and boogie) on them and devices such as shoes and a backpack that charge batteries as you go for a jog or hike in the woods.

    Sweaty watts
    The Green System consists of recumbent and upright bikes as well as elliptical trainers, each with a box that captures 75 percent of the watts you generate during a workout. 

    Boxes in several machines are hooked together and routed through an inverter that can handle up to 2,000 watts. Assuming an average of 133 watts per person, a pod might have 15 machines on it, Carpenter said.

    "Most facilities are going to be drawing so many watts and amperage, you'd have to have a lot of inverters to really reverse that meter, because of light bulbs, air conditioning, and all the other things being powered," he said.

    Nevertheless, 2,000 watt hours are enough to power a clothes washer for 6 hours, a microwave oven for 2.5 hours, or a 27-inch flat screen TV for 17 hours, according to SportsArt Fitness.

    This is enough electricity that the system will pay for itself in about three years, according to Carpenter. The company has an online calculator where you can figure out your potential savings.

    The system includes an inverter and the exercise machines. The inverter runs about $3,000, while the the machines could cost about $3,500 to $7,000.

    Generating award points
    The system is also hooked up with Victoria, Canada,-based EcoFit, which produces digital technology to calculate the number of watts an individual generates during a workout, put it on a graphical display and keep track of watts over time on a card.

    In the future, the companies hope to turn these "eco-points" generated at the gym into currency accepted at coffee shops and other retail outlets. 

    Back at the gym, the display technology also allows individuals to compete. For example, if you see your buddy is generating 115 watts, you might ramp it up so you can generate 130 watts.

    Right now, most people measure their performance at the gym in terms of workout time, or distance biked, or calories burned, but Carpenter said he thinks this paradigm will shift to watts "the more eco-conscious people get."

    So, eat, drink, and be merry this weekend. But come the New Year, hit the gym and generate some watts.

    More on harnessing human power:

     

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

  • 100 years of natural gas? Hype gets reality check

    Pavillion Area Concerned Citizens released this photo saying it shows a hydraulic fracturing drill site in the Pavillion/Muddy Ridge gas field. The group said it was taken from the porch of its chairman, John Fenton.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    The hype around seemingly limitless reserves of natural gas made available through the technological innovation known as hydrologic fracturing, or fracking, may be just that — hype — according a new analysis of the data behind the claims.

    An April press release from the Potential Gas Committee lies in the crosshairs of Chris Nedler's analytical reporting for Slate.com. 

    The committee, an organization of petroleum engineers and geoscientists, estimated a future gas supply of 2,170 trillion cubic feet (tcf), which at the current rate of consumption of 24 tcf per year, translates to a "95-year supply of gas, which apparently has been rounded up to 100 years," Nedler writes.

    He then explains that only 273 tcf of that total are "proved reserves." That fits with data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The remaining amount is broken down into categories ranging from probable to speculative. Of this reasoning, Nedler writes:

    C.J. Marshall / AP

    This file photo shows the outside of a natural gas drill site owned by Chesapeake Energy in Leroy Township, Pa.

    By the same logic, you can claim to be a multibillionaire, including all your "probable, possible, and speculative resources."

    Assuming that the United States continues to use 24 tcf per annum, then, only an 11-year supply of natural gas is certain. The other 89 years' worth has not yet been shown to exist or be recoverable.

    Of course, consumption could rise, especially if we convert coal-fired power plants to natural gas and use it to fuel more of our cars and trucks. 

    At the end of the day, the future natural gas supply could end up being as large as the most optimistic projections, or fall way short. "We simply don't know, and we may not know for years to come," Nedler concludes.

    The full analysis is well worth a read including Nedler's discussion of Houston-based energy consultant's Arthur Berman's skepticism about the claims of our natural gas reserves.

    Other energy analysts really do see a bright future in natural gas, especially shale gas.

    In "The Quest," the author and energy analyst Daniel Yergin, calls shale gas "the biggest energy innovation since the start of the new century, [that] has turned what was an imminent shortage in the United States into what may be a hundred-year supply and may do the same elsewhere in the world."

    The sentiment is echoed in Michael Graetz's "The End of Energy", where he notes that "a consensus among analysts has emerged that domestic reserves, along with those in Canada, are adequate to supply both countries for many decades, if not a century."

    These writers and analysts also point to the controversy surrounding the environmental impact of fracking technology, which involves injecting millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals into wells to break apart the shale and release the trapped gas.

    This controversy, in turn, could hobble the pace of natural gas drilling and put a damper on the hype machine surrounding the future of natural gas. Or not. Only the future will tell.

    More on natural gas and fracking:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

  • Map shows when solar power is a bargain

    California's investments in renewable energy help make San Diego one of the hottest markets for green jobs in the U.S.

    By John Roach, Contributing Writer, NBC News

    In 2013, the cost of solar power in San Diego will be cheaper than electricity from the local utility grid, according the predictions of an energy policy analyst who created a handy graphic to illustrate when so-called grid parity will be achieved.

    Sam Mircovich / Reuters

    A prototype sun tracking solar panel made by Concentrix Solar collects energy from its location at the University of California San Diego in this file photo.

    The interactive graphic posted on the Energy Self Reliant States website shows when this moment will be reached in major U.S. cities between now and 2027. 

    Parity is a "tipping point, when democratization of the electricity system not only makes political and economic sense, but becomes more competitive than using utility-delivered electricity," writes analyst John Farrell.

    His calculations assume that the cost of solar will continue to fall by 7 percent a year and grid electricity will rise at 2 percent a year. 

    If true, then San Diego will be the first to reach the parity milestone, followed by New York in 2015. From there, parity is progressively reached across the southern tier of the U.S. with my cloudy, rainy, northern hometown of Seattle not reaching parity until 2027.

    More on solar power:

    John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

     

    Next-gen nuclear plants could provide carbon-free energy, but the painfully slow process of approving better, safer reactors — not to mention real anxiety over meltdowns and waste — threaten to derail projects before they can be built.

  • Holiday calendar: Circle of power

    GeoEye

    A picture taken by the GeoEye 1 satellte on Nov. 4, 2010, shows the Gemasolar power-generating array in Seville, Spain. At the center of the array is a 40-story-high concrete tower, ringed by 2,650 mirrors. The mirrors focus sunlight on the tower, which stores the heat and converts it to energy.

    By Alan Boyle, Science Editor, NBC News



    Will future archaeologists assume this circular structure was some sort of 21st-century Stonehenge? They wouldn't be completely wrong if they did: This is Spain's Gemasolar power-generating array, as seen in a satellite image from the GeoEye commercial Earth-imaging venture.

    Like Stonehenge, the array is laid out geometrically to track the position of the sun. But Gemasolar isn't meant to mark the year's astronomical milestones. Instead, it will concentrate sunlight to provide power for 25,000 homes around the city of Seville.

    The light is focused by 2,650 large mirrors on a 450-foot-high concrete tower, with a central core that heats up to 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit (900 degrees Celsius). The energy is transferred to molten salt for storage, and the heat of the salt drives steam turbines that generate electricity even when the sun isn't shining. The $325 million plant had its official inauguration in October and is due to reach full operation in 2013. At its peak, the concentrated solar-power plant should be able to produce 19.9 megawatts of power.

    Check out this previous PhotoBlog posting for ground-level pictures of the array, and watch this video to learn more about the Gemasolar project:

    Learn how the Gemasolar power plant works.

    Today's view of a solar power plant from space is the latest offering from the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which has been presenting images of Earth from space every day this month. It's also one of the pictures featured in GeoEye's 2012 calendar. You'll find more satellite views on the GeoEye High Resolution Imagery blog.

    Only three more treats remain to be revealed on this year's Space Advent Calendar. Catch up on the pictures you may have missed:

    Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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