Energy & Environmental Leaders Day 2016

From our main site:  Great event that we enjoyed covering.  We ask you, as we asked the audience that day, are you a leader in green?  If not, what is holding you back?  Time to step forward and be part of the solution and not just part of the problem:



On Friday, September 30, Providence, RI played host to the 7th Annual Energy and Environmental Leaders Day an event that is produced by Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and his staff. This year’s theme was “Oceans,” and with that, the event brought together a stellar group of keynote speakers who addressed a range of topics on the theme. They included Dr. Jeremy Jackson, Professor of Oceanography Emeritus, who spoke about the effects of climate change will have on our oceans, its life, and the cities that are on the coastline. From the University of Georgia, Associate Professor Dr. Jenna R. Jambeck spoke on the plastic contaminates that are plaguing our waters. And Dr. Enric Sala, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, spoke on the conservation efforts needed to protect our marine ecosystems. Though there were many examples that should raise concern, such as Dr. Jeremy Jackson’s reference to what Miami and other coastal cities will be facing in the next thirty years due to climate change, there were also examples hope as Dr. Sala indicated that oceans, if protected, have an incredible ability to rejuvenate life. 

The guests were also treated to a fascinating panel discussion titled"Climate Change and the Web of Denial." This panel discussion looked at how big money is influencing Washington, and how it is used to actually punish those who would accept the science of what is happening in the world today.

 The panel also looked at Dark Money and helped to define what it is, how it gets its message out and how intent is camouflaged behind otherwise respected titles. The panel was moderated by Brown University Professor, J. Timmons Robert, and the panelists included Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, New York Times and Brown University writer Cornelia Dean, and Climate Nexus Executive Director Jeff Nesbit. Following the panel discussion was a passionate speech delivered by Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey, a true leader when it comes to renewables, who shared his thoughts on the urgency of addressing climate change and other threats to our environment.

As always, Senator Whitehouse not only provided an excellent learning opportunity, but was a gracious host who concluded the event by recognizing two outstanding professionals from the public service sector: Curt Spalding, Regional Administrator, EPA Region 1, and Grover Fugate, Executive Director, Rhode Island Coastal Resources Management Council.

The entire event is being produced into a multipart series that will be available for on-demand viewing on RNN and will be released over the course of the next month. Stay tuned.

- See more at: http://www.renewablenow.biz/governmental-green.html#sthash.nVQFaSWb.dpuf

Bionic leaf converts energy

More on bionic uses of energy--this time on the solar side.  How cool to imagine liquid fuel processed through such a natural, low-cost method?

Bionic leaf converts energy from our sun better than nature does

Researchers at Harvard have created a device that mimics the natural process of photosynthesis, taking solar energy and converting it into chemical energy or liquid fuel. 

By Jason Thomson

Researchers at Harvard University have created a system that allows them to store the energy of the sun, converting solar energy into chemical energy using a hybrid mechanism of inorganic chemistry and living organisms.

Comparing their invention with the natural process of photosynthesis, they refer to it as a “bionic leaf” or “artificial leaf,” and they say the level of efficiency they have achieved far exceeds that of other similar systems – including photosynthesis itself.

The paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, describes the work as addressing two fundamental goals: storing the energy of the sun, rather than merely converting it for immediate use, and building something useful from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thereby reducing a major greenhouse gas.

“I think this is actually quite exciting research,” Johannes Lischner of Imperial College, London, who was not involved in the study, tells The Christian Science Monitor in a telephone interview. “Converting sunlight into chemical fuels with high efficiency is something of a holy grail for renewable energy.”

The system works like this. A jar is set up containing little more than two electrodes, Ralstonia eutropha bacteria, and water. Electric current is passed through the electrodes, which then break down the water molecules, releasing hydrogen gas.

“You can use hydrogen as a source of energy, burn it,” says co-author Pamela Silver of Harvard University in a phone interview with the Monitor. “Instead, we decided to take advantage of bacteria that take in hydrogen and carbon dioxide and use them to grow.”

As they grow, explains Dr. Silver, these organisms produce certain compounds. The bacteria can be genetically engineered to make useful things like alcohol and plastic precursors.

Scientists have been trying to grow bacteria off water-splitting electrodes for decades, and while they have succeeded, certain constraints have defeated their efforts to create systems that run with any degree of efficiency.

Chief among these challenges were the leaching of heavy metals from the electrodes and the production of reactive oxygen species, none of which leads to happy, healthy bacteria. The critical innovation in this latest research was to use a cobalt-based water-splitting system.

“It is essentially self-healing,” Michael Strano of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was not involved in the research, tells the Monitor in a phone interview. “The anode and cathode synergize: As one degrades it feeds the other, and vice versa.”

Dr. Strano, whose work includes incorporating nanomaterials into actual leaves, describes this latest research as “pioneering,” explaining that the major innovation is the way in which the team has “used water-splitting chemistry and rendered it biocompatible.”

When scientists first started these kinds of experiments, as far back as the 1960s, with all of the obstacles they faced, they could only achieve efficiencies of about one percent, in terms of the conversion of solar energy into biomass. That is the figure the authors of this paper also award to photosynthesis, though some experts take exception to this, saying that it oversimplifies the complexities of energy use in plants.

Nevertheless, this latest research boosts that figure to 10 percent, putting it well above the generally accepted threshold of eight percent that makes it worth considering for real-world applications.
“The fact that this research exceeds that figure is promising,” says Dr. Lischner, who is a Royal Society Fellow and lecturer in Imperial’s department of materials, “but the question is does it work as a real-world device?”

The researchers talk of using the mechanism in developing countries, where access to infrastructure for storing and accessing energy can be limited, and Lischner wonders whether these biological systems can survive in such areas as, say, the Sahara desert. But while the practicalities of application “remain to be proven,” he insists “the promise that this paper shows is quite intriguing.”

That hope is that this technology can be hooked up to photovoltaic cells, so that the energy of the sun is used to drive the water-splitting reaction. The bacteria could then be engineered to convert the hydrogen's energy into a multitude of carbon-based products, including biofuels and plastics, "essentially making products out of thin air," as co-author Brendan Colón describes it in a podcast.

Thus one of the major drawbacks of solar power – its inability to store energy to tide it through the hours of darkness – could be remedied. This research even has the potential to herald a breakthrough in worldwide efforts to reduce carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and turn that carbon into something useful.

Moreover, as Strano of MIT points out, the paper is suggestive of a new dawn in science, an area still in its nascency.

“There is a whole community that works on microbial biosynthesis, and on the other side you have inorganic chemistry” says Strano. “In this work you see a merging of these worlds.”

Are biofuels worse for the planet than gasoline?

Yes, we've done shows suggesting the same.  But, and it is a big but, most biofuels are now made from non-food based crops that actually complement farmers growing seasons.  These plants also provide much needed ground cover when fields are normally barren.

Therefore, we feel biofuels are, in fact, much more friendly to the environment.

Are biofuels worse for the planet than gasoline?  A new study suggests that biofuels can mitigate only 37 percent of the CO2 released by burning the biofuel.

By Rowena Lindsay

 

Corn ethanol and biodiesel biofuels may be more environmentally damaging than petroleum gasoline, according to a new study from the University of Michigan Energy Institute (UMEI),
The surprising finding comes after the research team, led by UMEI researcher John DeCicco, analyzed the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbed as the crops grow and then released when they are burned as biofuel. They calculated that the aggregate US crop yield can remove only 37 percent of the CO2 that burning biofuel releases into the air.

“What we found is that when you actually look at how quickly crops like corn and soybeans pull CO2 from the air and compare that with the emissions that occur when the biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel are burned, you find out that they are not carbon neutral like everyone has been assuming,” Dr. DeCicco tells The Christian Science Monitor.

That's a flawed premise, argues Daniel Schrag, a geology professor at Harvard who advises the EPA on bioenergy climate impacts. He says that biofuels don't have to be carbon neutral to be an environmentally preferable alternative to petroleum gasoline.

“For about 10 years there have been very careful studies of corn ethanol and all of the fossil carbon that is used to make it ... and those studies have gotten a range of answers, but it is about a 20 percent reduction of net emissions relative to gasoline,” says Professor Schrag in an interview with the Monitor. “Nobody ever thought corn ethanol was carbon neutral, because there are lots and lots of fossil inputs to it.”

The biofuel debate has raged for years, with critics worried about the impact of the additional land deforested to convert to corn fields, and proponents arguing for biofuel as a green alternative to gasoline. Another group says that it is really too soon to tell.

The conversation has generally been dictated by the food vs. fuel debate. This focuses on the indirect consequences of biofuel crop production, such as land use and deforestation, which create a ripple effect felt by the entire global food market.

DeCiccio decided to question the basic life cycle analysis model that previous studies relied on, some of which had assumed that biofuel is carbon neutral and that only production-related greenhouse gas emissions need to be taken into account when comparing biofuel to fossil fuels.

Whether you burn biofuel ethanol or petroleum gasoline, he argues, the same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere. So comparing the fuels' environmental impacts comes down to how efficiently that carbon can be removed from the air, he says – and forests are better at that than cornfields.

"The United States uses 40 percent of its corn harvest to make ethanol, but that does not mean mean we eat 40 percent less corn-based products," DeCiccio tells the Monitor. 

DeCiccio explains that as cropland once used for food is transferred to fuel use, food must be produced elsewhere, meaning that more grasslands and forests are converted to production. However, grasslands and forests can neutralize more carbon dioxide than crops, he says.

Schrag says that this ignores the long-term perspective, when biofuels make up for carbon loss from forests.

“In their approach time scale does not come into it,” he tells the Monitor. “They are looking at crop yield data and assuming that you should balance the carbon cycle based on how much crops you produce.”

Michael Wang, a researcher at the Argonne National Laboratory, tells the Monitor that he also questions the study's carbon accounting, arguing that the study does not properly account for the carbon uptake or that corn production for both ethanol and for food increased over the period of the study.

“The carbon uptake by the US farming systems is calculated based only on grain harvest," Dr. Wang tells the Monitor. "Carbon uptake embedded in above- and below-ground biomass is ignored in the paper with a simple assumption that carbon in these biomass sources are oxidized back to the air."

Additionally, the research received funding from the American Petroleum Institute, which critics say is grounds for skepticism, but the UMEI researchers stated that “the analysis, results and conclusions presented [in their study] are those of the authors alone.”

Other experts have come out in support of the research. Tim Searchinger, a researcher at the Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Program at Princeton University, said that the research was very narrow, but useful.

“This article is saying that if you think the reason biofuels are helping to solve climate change is because the US is increasing its production of crops and that increased production of crops offsets the carbon release from burning the biofuels, you’re wrong. That is not what is happening,” Mr. Searchinger tells the Monitor. “What reduces carbon in the atmosphere is not the biofuel, it is the plant growth.”

DeCicco says that the solution is not to make biofuel more efficient, but to invest in reforestation.

“We should not be trying to make biofuels at all, any time soon,” DeCicco tells the Monitor. “It is much better to reforest and restore ecosystems.... Reforestation is a much better way to remove CO2 than anything we can do with biofuels.”

5 environmental wins to celebrate

We are just finishing up a great convention on CA and are in the mood to celebrate these environmental wins.

5 environmental wins to celebrate

By David J. Unger

A volunteer transports leaves and brush off the trail during the Housatonic River Walk cleanup for the annual Earth Day Workday in Great Barrington, Mass., Saturday. Stephanie Zollshan/The Berkshire Eagle/AP

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned about planet Earth – rising carbon emissions, long bouts of extreme weather, development’s strain on local ecosystems, among others. But it is worth taking a look at some of the areas where humans have made progress on energy and the environment.

It can take decades or longer to show signs of positive environmental change, so most good news doesn't show up in everyday headlines. A gradually more efficient economy or fewer pollutants in the air are not exactly breaking news, but they are benchmarks worth noting. A lot of that progress has come since (and a result of) the first Earth Day in 1970. Advances in science, engineering, and technology have made it easier for humans to maintain higher standards of living while minimizing the impact on local animals, wildlife, as well as the global climate. There is hope that as a new wave of economies modernize, they can do so more cleanly and efficiently than past industrializations.  

Of course, the environment still faces enormous challenges. Most notably, scientists have come to better understand how the consumption of carbon-heavy fuels can trap heat in our atmosphere. Over decades of analysis and discourse, climate change remains a pressing and divisive issue. Perhaps, there are lessons to be learned in confronting future challenges from five past environmental successes.

 

Developed nations have drastically improved air and water quality while sustaining economic growth. Between 1990 and 2008, the US cut emissions of six common pollutants by 41 percent, while gross domestic product (GDP) grew 64 percent, according the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Much of that success is attributed to the the Clean Air Act, first signed in 1970 and revised in 1990. The nation's water, too, is cleaner.  Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, billions of pounds of sewage, chemicals and trash have been averted from US waterways, and the number of American waters that meet standards for swimming and fishing has doubled, according to the EPA.

Still, conventional pollutants still pose a challenge to developed nations and are a rising challenge for the developing world – The skies of Los Angeles may be clearer, but Beijing is coming to grips with a smog problem of its own. Meanwhile, the risks of greenhouse gas emissions have reached new levels of urgency.

For clean energy, think small...nano small

Hydrogen continues to show up, with advance changes, as a great alternative and a, done right, clean, powerful source of fuel.

For clean energy, think small...nano small

Inexpensive nanotubes – sheets of carbon rolled into pipes thinner than a human hair – may be the key to making hydrogen fuel cleaner and less expensive. A new study shows how nanotubes could bring clean energy technologies closer within reach.

By Andy Tully 

Hydrogen has a reputation as a clean source of energy, especially when compared to fossil fuels such as oil and coal. But there’s just one problem: You need to burn methane, itself a fossil fuel, to make hydrogen. So with current technology, hydrogen isn’t as clean as its reputation.



Add to that, current technology is expensive because to isolate hydrogen you must create electrolysis reactions, which separates hydrogen atoms from oxygen atoms in water. Again, with current technology, you need expensive platinum as a catalyst for that process.

So hydrogen fuel isn’t that clean and isn’t that inexpensive – yet. But a team of researchers led by Tewodros (Teddy) Asefa, an associate professor of chemical and biochemical engineering at the Rutgers School of Engineering, says it’s solved that problem.

In a paper published in Angewandte Chemie [Applied Chemistry] International Edition, Asefa and his colleagues report that they based their new catalyst not on platinum, but on inexpensive nanotubes, sheets of carbon one atom thick that are rolled into pipes 10,000 times thinner than a human hair.

And instead of relying on methane, hydrogen could be produced by electricity generated by such renewable sources as wind and solar energy, or even by nuclear energy.
Further, they say, the nanotube process is so efficient and today’s emission controls are so effective that cars and even power plants could even use methane in the process and operate far more cleanly than they would using oil or coal.



The new technology is called “noble metal-free, nitrogen-rich carbon nanotubes.” Asefa’s team reports that the tubes function properly in any environment, whether basic, neutral or acidic, increasing their options for coupling with the most efficient oxygen-evolving catalysts that are important in separating oxygen and hydrogen atoms from water.



Further, they say, these nanotubes react catalytically with the hydrogen with nearly the efficiency of platinum. This would be analogous to the difference between two cooking vessels, one made of copper – an excellent but expensive heat conductor – and the other made of aluminum – nearly as good a conductor and much less costly.



There are several benefits of relying on hydrogen for energy. Among them is that it generates no air pollutants, especially if it is created without burning methane. Another reason is that it is plentiful: The United States produces 100 billion cubic feet of hydrogen each year, enough to power as many as 11,000 homes, according to the American Gas Association.



“Hydrogen has long been expected to play a vital role in our future energy landscapes by mitigating, if not completely eliminating, our reliance on fossil fuels,” Asefa says. “We have developed a sustainable chemical catalyst that, we hope with the right industry partner, can bring this vision to life.”

In fact, Asefa and his colleagues already have filed for a patent on their technology.

Goodbye coal, oil?

This is clearly a great day for solar.  Back-to-back stories on breakthrough research around water and solar.  We are in CA covering events after spending part of the weekend hiking the San Bernardino mountains in beautiful, sunny weather.

Two continents, two research teams, two remarkable potential technologies to help power the world on renewables.  Game changing in so many ways.  Let's speed the innovations along to market.

Goodbye coal, oil? Team tests cheaper way to use sunlight to produce hydrogen

In principle, solar-derived hydrogen could replace fossil fuels for uses ranging from powering vehicles to producing electricity via fuel cells. One 'proof of concept' way to achieve this is outlined in Friday's issue of Science.

By Pete Spotts

Researchers have developed a tool for splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen that holds the potential to significantly cut the costs of using sunlight to drive the reaction.



The team, led by Jingshan Luo, a researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, used chemical elements that are abundant and relatively cheap to make solar cells and give them electrodes that reach what some researchers have called "exceptional" efficiency.



At this stage, the devices represent a proof of concept, cautions Thomas Hamann, a chemist at Michigan State University who didn't take part in the study but is also conducting research on photovoltaic cells and their applications.

"It's not game over, but it's an important step with a lot of promise," he says.

Using sunlight to produce hydrogen is a way to capture the sun's energy and store it for future use, much as a plant captures sunlight and through photosynthesis uses the sun's energy to produce hydrocarbons – the basis of fossil fuels.
 
In principle, solar-derived hydrogen could then replace fossil fuels for uses ranging from powering vehicles to producing electricity via fuel cells.



The basic approach for splitting water molecules might be familiar to anyone who has visited an elementary school science fair. Connect a wire to each terminal of a battery, then put the other ends into a jar of water with the bare wire exposed. Oxygen bubbles up from the end of the positive wire, and hydrogen bubbles up from the negative wire.



The earliest effort to use sunlight, instead of a battery, to split water molecules and produce electricity dates back to 1972: A pair of Japanese scientists found that when an electrode made from titanium oxide was submerged in water and exposed to light, it split water into hydrogen and oxygen
.
Since then, researchers have been exploring ways to use photovoltaic cells to do the same thing. But these have been made largely with more-expensive minerals, including rare ones such as indium and platinum. Their relatively high cost represents a challenge to large-scale commercial use. In addition, many of these cells have to be grouped in gangs of three or four to provide enough voltage to split water, researchers say.



Dr. Luo and colleagues used solar cells made from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, lead, and iodine with a crystal structure that chemists call a perovskite. The cells' electrodes were made from a blend of nickel hydroxide and iron.


To generate the water-splitting voltage, the team needed only two cells, which they showed to be 12.3 percent efficient at converting sunlight to hydrogen.
"This is the first time we have been able to get hydrogen through electrolysis with only two cells!" Luo said in a prepared statement.



The efficiency achieved is higher than other systems built from earth-abundant chemicals, Dr. Hamann notes. And it's a scant 1/10th of a percent below the 12.4 percent efficiency of a system using cells and electrodes made from more-expensive, less abundant elements such as platinum.


The results appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.



The team acknowledges one hitch: The recipe for its solar cell grows less efficient over the course of about 10 hours, although the cell appears to reconstitute itself when it isn't being used – a phenomenon the team uncovered when it cycled the system through simulated day and night cycles.


This instability "clearly needs to be addressed before commercialization would be considered," says Alex Martinson, an assistant chemist at the Argonne National Laboratory in Lemont, Ill., who focuses on developing new approaches to solar-cell and solar-fuel production.



Still, "putting everything together into an efficient water-splitting system is never an easy task," he says, tipping his hat to the team's achievement. Dr. Martinson made his comments via e-mail.


If that problem is solved, one additional improvement could come by twinning one of the perovskite cells with a silicon-based cell. In principle, the water-splitting efficiency could rise to 20 percent or more, because the two in tandem would cover more wavelengths of light than either alone, Hamann says. Although the voltage would be lower, researchers could make up for that by choosing the right materials for the electrodes, which include a catalyst to enhance electrode performance.



Researchers have been tantalized by the potential of perovskite-based photovoltaic cells because they convert sunlight to electricity with high efficiency and potentially inexpensive materials, Martinson says.


That this technology can be arrayed "to produce a voltage that conveniently splits water is a nice added bonus," he says.

MIT researchers attain solar 'nirvana'

MIT is an amazing school.  They continue to change the face of energy.  This is exciting news.  Power storage solves intermitten issues of renewables getting to the grid.  This is truly, "nirvana".

MIT researchers attain solar 'nirvana'      

A big drawback of solar power is that it doesn't work at night or on cloudy days. But researchers at MIT say they now have an inexpensive way to store solar energy when the sun isn't out.

By Eoin O'Carroll

A big drawback of solar power is that it doesn't work at night or on cloudy days. But researchers at MIT say they now have an inexpensive way to store solar energy when the sun isn't out.



Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT, and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Mr. Nocera's lab, have developed a catalyst made from cobalt and phosphate that can split water into oxygen and hydrogen gas. When used in conjunction with a photovoltaic solar panel, their system can use water to store the sun's energy.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan's new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity – whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source – runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

At night, the hydrogen and oxygen can be recombined into a fuel cell to produce a carbon-free electric current that can power your home or charge an electric car.

Solar energy currently makes less than one percent of the world's electricity. The main drawback of the technology, preventing wider adoption, is that solar systems only make power while the sun is shining. At night or on cloudy days, those in need of power must look elsewhere. So storage of electrical energy has been a long-sought after technological advance. Batteries work but they're too big and expensive. Fuels, fossil or renewable, are different: They act as their own storage, allowing for easy transport and usage. That's one reason that coal and oil have such a dominant hold on the world's energy market.

But how much water would it take to power a home? The Guardian suggests that it would be less than a gallon a day:

Converting an Olympic swimming pool of water into hydrogen and oxygen per second would create 43 terawatts of power. "In the next 50 years, the world needs 16 terawatts. By the end of the century, we'll need around 30," said Nocera. "There's a heck of lot of energy stored in chemical bonds."

For a home, Nocera said that it would be enough to split a few litres of water per day into hydrogen and oxygen. The water would be reformed when the gases were put through the fuel cell.

There is much work to be done in converting Nocera's idea into a commercial product. At the moment, his catalyst can only accept small amounts of electrical current at once, meaning that it would be an inefficient way to quickly store large amounts of energy. But Nocera is certain that engineers will iron out the issues and produce commercial-scale products within a decade.

Nocera and Kanan are not the first to come up with a way of splitting water molecules to produce hydrogen and oxygen. The process, known as electrolysis, was discovered as early as 1800. But electrolysis has always required expensive machines using exotic metals or nanoparticles, and it has required the water to be pressurized and heated. Nocera and Kanan's process uses common elements to split room-temperature water.



"This is the nirvana of what we've been talking about for years," said Nocera in the press release. "Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon."



Scientists don't normally talk like this, and Nocera is not alone in his robust claims. The MIT press release quotes James Barber, a biochemist at Imperial College London who was not involved in this research.



"This is a major discovery with enormous implications for the future prosperity of humankind," he said. "The importance of their discovery cannot be overstated since it opens up the door for developing new technologies for energy production thus reducing our dependence for fossil fuels and addressing the global climate change problem."

(At this point, it's hard not to think of the story in the satirical Onion newspaper titled "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever.")

This is the second time this month that MIT has made headlines with advances in solar technology. Two weeks ago researchers in the university's engineering school announced that they had developed an inexpensive mixture of organic solar concentrating dyes that can be painted on to windows.