Posts Tagged ‘Green’

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Green Your School Challenge January 25, 2011 NYC.

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BOSTON–Ford Motor expects to manufacture as many as 2 million all-electric and gas-electric vehicles in the next 10 years, betting that rising oil prices and consumer interest will sustain a long-term transition to new technologies.

The company has set a goal of making 10 percent to 25 percent of its fleet “electrified” by 2020, which represents somewhere between 800,000 and 2 million cars, said Nancy Gioia at a media event here on Wednesday. Ford announced on Wednesday that Gioia will hold a newly created position of director of global electrification, which covers hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery-electric vehicles.

Plug-in electric vehicles promise to offer a much lower cost-per-mile than gasoline cars and deliver substantial environmental benefits. But in the near term, hybrids will likely represent the largest volume in the mix of technologies, said Gioia at the event.

“We’ve finally demonstrated the technology, the life, the durability, the safety (of hybrids)–all of that has reached a comfort zone to make it viable. Now it’s going to be affordability that will drive mass market adoption,” she said.

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass.–MIT professor Daniel Nocera is a “huge centralized energy person” but when he looks at the world’s energy challenges, he thinks the key is to make energy generation cheap and distributed.

MIT last year announced that a technology developed by Nocera’s lab– a catalyst that can split water–could be used store solar energy. Earlier this year, Nocera formed a company called Sun Catalytix, backed by venture capital firm Polaris Ventures, to commercialize that discovery.

Engineers are now working on a prototype design for the system, Nocera said at the EmTech conference on emerging technology last Thursday. He added that the company has also hired Art Goldstein, the retired CEO of water desalination company Ionics which was purchased by General Electric, to be chairman.

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I’m a big fan of “German engineering”–that combined focus on power and precision that distinguishes the better automobiles designed or manufactured in Germany.

At Frankfurt’s International Motor Show, BMW will be showing off two new hybrid cars intended to deliver the full promise of German engineering. This is no small thing because most hybrid cars to date have been lightly built and somewhat underpowered in order to improve fuel economy.

The two new BMWs are more like previous offerings from that company: big, solid cars with lots of power to maintain performance in spite of the weight. They’re also real cars, not just prototypes.

Fortunately, I don’t need to describe these new cars here; there’s a great article by Antuan Goodwin over on CNET’s Car Tech blog that does a fine job of that (see “BMW unveiling two big hybrid models at Frankfurt“). What I would like to do instead is to drill down into their respective powertrains, which represent two different solutions to high-performance hybrid design, using images provided by BMW.

The ActiveHybrid X6, due to go on sale in the U.S. later this year, represents one end of the spectrum: higher-power electric motors and a larger battery pack. As the first image shows, the new X6 model has a twin-turbo V8 gas engine with 400 horsepower. Though this is a reasonably efficient engine for its size, it certainly wasn’t chosen primarily for its fuel economy.

BMW’s ActiveHybrid X6 uses a large NiMH battery pack and a new transmission with two integrated electric motors to augment its 400-horsepower gasoline engine.

1366 Technologies, a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says it can produce a very efficient solar cell from silicon which will be in the market in two years.

The Lexington, Mass.-based company on Monday plans to disclose the details of its Self-Aligned Cell (SAC) architecture, a set of technologies it has developed to convert 18 percent of sunlight to electricity with polysilicon, the most common solar cell material. Engineers forecast that they will be able to hit 19 percent efficiency in the next nine months without adding significant cost to existing processes, said Ely Sachs, chief technology officer.

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Control4 Energy Systems, one of a growing number of home energy display providers, said on Tuesday it will supply energy monitors in a planned smart-grid project in rural Texas.

The home energy monitor–a five-inch-wide monitor that resembles a car GPS unit–will display electricity usage in real time and provide consumers the ability to program a thermostat, according to Will Holford, the public affairs manager at Bluebonnet Electric Cooperative.

The system works by using Zigbee wireless networking within the home to connect the monitor to the thermostat, which communicates with the utility via a smart meter. Other providers in the project, which the utility hopes to begin work on in the second quarter next year, include smart meter provider eMeter and Silver Spring Networks which provides a networking card for the meter.

Control4, which is perhaps better known for its home media management systems, raised $17.3 million in July to expand into the energy monitoring business.

Control4′s display for managing home energy along with home media.

(Credit: Control4.)

Home energy monitors, or in-home displays, are a key piece of the more advanced smart-grid programs being pursued by utilities. By providing more data and ways to program appliances, utilities hope that consumers will be able to find ways to shave back on consumption.

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Food waste is one of the least recycled materials in municipal solid waste systems, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. But at least one organization in the San Francisco Bay Area is trying to change that.

The East Bay Municipal Utility District is experimenting with innovative techniques to convert raw food waste into usable energy, taking some of the massive amounts of food waste generated by local restaurants and using it to power its operations in Oakland, Calif.

In 2007, EBMUD was awarded a $50,000 grant from the EPA as part of the Resource Recovery Program to explore new ways of digesting food waste to produce methane gas.

Today, the facility is home to a million-dollar facility that is generating usable methane and producing nearly 100 percent of the power needed to operate the regional wastewater treatment operation.

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