Tag: who
Evaluating the Cleanliness of Solar Photovoltaics Can Be Complicated
I am a frustrating individual who likes to delve deeply into decision making computations and hates easy answers that sound like sales pitches. One of the best compliments I ever received came from one of my division officers when I was serving as the Engineer Officer on a submarine – he told me “Eng, you ask hard questions.”
As vocal advocate for nuclear fission power I recognize that it has many associated questions, but I after 30 years of study, I have determined to my own satisfaction that most of the important questions have reasonably good answers. In contrast, I have not yet found reasonable answers for many of my questions related to other renewable energy sources. (Yes, I – perhaps controversially – classify fission as renewable, but that is a discussion for a different post.)
Solar photovoltaic (PV) cells are a popular and often discussed (see, for example Atlantic City Convention Center Plans Largest Solar Roof in U.S., 10% of U.S. Electricity From Solar by 2025, SF Passes Largest City Solar Program in U.S. (Finally), all of which were published within the past week) form of “renewable” or “green” energy, but a casual scratching of the surface knowledge that many people have about the technology reveals some troubling details.
Not only are the panels expensive sources of electricity, but they do not last as long as advertised, they do not provide as much energy as the nameplate capacity implies, they consume significant quantities of energy in their production, installation and transportation, and they often use some very nasty materials in their manufacturing process.
The longevity of a solar panel will vary greatly depending on where it is installed, but any customer should remember that they are buying a product that will inherently need to spend as much time as possible fully exposed to the sun and weather. Though there are no visibly moving parts in a solar PV panel, there are many parts of the system where continuous chemical and physical reactions take place that can eventually lead to system degradation and failure.
Take a good look at panels that have been installed for several years and you will notice discontinuities and shiny areas where the components have been damaged and where the power production is reduced. If you have any panels, might want keep a record of the current production so that you can see this effect – or perhaps you will not want to find out just how fast that long term investment is decaying.
The literature accompanying most solar panels provide customers with numbers related to their peak capacity – what I call “noon on a clear day at the Equator”. That quantity of power is only available when the sun is directly overhead, when the panel is perfectly clean and when there are no clouds shading the cells. The cleaning part is important, any panel owner that wants maximum performance needs to set up a routine for cleaning and clearing the panels of any debris.
Leaves and snow are particular nuisances for rooftop solar panels, but sand and bird droppings can be important in some areas as well. Not that the article was specifically discussing PV panels, but I recently read about the 4,000 gallon water tanker trucks that are part of the maintenance equipment at some desert solar power plants.
Some of the most energy efficient solar panels, in terms of both the energy required to produce the panel and the panel operating efficiency are made of a semiconductor material called CdTe (Cadmium Telluride). Companies that make CdTe cells like to brag about the quality of their products, but they have also recently had to warn their investors that they may not be able to sell their panels in the EU for much longer because of rules about using toxic heavy metals in electronics. What they have not made clear yet is what their long term liability is for the panels that they have already sold. What will happen in 5, 10 or 20 years when the panel output is no longer useful and the materials need disposal? Can they be recycled without releasing the heavy metals? Will their customers be able to return the panels to the original producer? Will they make the effort or simply take the systems to the dump like many consumers do with batteries made of similar materials? (Those are the kinds of questions that my former division officer was talking about.)
There are definitely answers to some of the questions that I have about solar PV, but that does not mean that the issues are fully solved. If you are in the market for solar PV systems, please ask the hard questions and realize that anyone who wants you to buy the systems without good answers is just a salesman who is not much different from any other salesman.
Photo credit – The Sun Works (photos to be shared)
Tech Causing Cancer?
With kids using cell phones earlier and earlier (pre-paid companies like Boost and Virgin Mobile cater to the tween and teen markets who aren’t quite ready for contracts), and after reading a post from Eco Child’s Play last week, I was reminded that healthier tech alternatives aren’t necessarily all about green. Below is a list of some tech products that may help promote better health or at least reduce exposure to radiation.
1. Ego Cup from Funkwerks – This plug n’ play speaker phone syncs with Bluetooth enabled handsets and slides easily into the cupholder for easy storage when driving. I love that it’s so easy to set up and doesn’t require lengthy instructions to use or block vision by hanging from the rear view mirror. This is especially important for residents of California and other vicinities that are going hands-free on July 1st.
2. Bluetooth earpieces – no doubt Samsung makes some of the best quality, more affordable earpieces, but for talking in the car, the Yada YD-V1 is a great system (especially for those who tend to forget to bring their earpiece with them.) The universal phone cradle sticks onto your dash or wherever its most convenient for your to reach it, and also has a holder for the earpiece, which gets up to 6 hours of talk time and has 105 hours of standby time. The set auto powers on when you turn on the engine and hangs up with the push of a button or when you re-cradle the earpiece.
3. One other option for the less tech-savvy, is the plug in earpiece. Simply plug it into the jack on your phone and insert into your ear – no need to worry about syncing or answering an incoming call from another system. This is as basic and functional as it gets if you don’t mind the wire hanging down. Most phones ship with these in box or you can pick one up to match your phone at mass retailers, like Target.
While research has shown little correlation between cell phone use and cancer, in a recent New York Times article, the FDA admits that the studies did not take into account long term exposure to the radiation and notes that the best brain surgeons try to limit their exposure through use of ear pieces and speaker phones when they can.
Regardless of the healthy risks, studies have convincingly shown that cell phone use on the road leads to an increase in the number of accidents; so, this summer, try out one of the options above.
Clean Alternatives to Everyday Machines: Introduction
It started with a long discussion betweeen my wife and me. We each thought it’d be fun to get a scooter, but worried that, for us–a 1 car, 2 bike family–we would actually be doing more environmental damage by getting a scooter. Meaning, unlike many who get a scooter to use instead of their car (wise choice), we’d end up using our scooter instead of our bikes (un-wise choice). Being our primary mode of transport, the bikes would likely fall victim to the newer, sexier, faster scooter.
This got me on the thought process that I wished more people would first give a bike a try for their short trips, instead of viewing the scooter as their only alternative to combat gas prices. Of course it’s more work–but more work can be more rewarding. Which got me to thinking that there are plenty of tools that have traded elbow grease for electricity–yet we have benefitted little. Which turned me on to this mini-series…
Just as John Henry fought the steam hammer to show that human power cannot be undone by the industrial revolution. I am hoping to open a few eyes to the alternatives that are possible when we replace one of our everyday machines with the same machine sans motor/electricity/etc.
In the interest of full disclosure John Henry did beat the steam hammer but he also dropped dead in the process.
That said, I will be realistic with my comparisons–I don’t want anybody to drop dead of exhaustion. I’m sure I’ll find, in some cases, the modern invention to be more beneficial to the manual powered version it replaced.
I am of the same mindset as Wendell Berry, when he said:
a new contraption should be adopted only if it is cheaper, smaller, and locally made; uses less energy; does not disrupt anything good that already exists (including family and community relationships); does not infringe on the rights of other species (plants and animals alike); and does not harm the interests of the next seven generations…
That is the premise of this blog–we at Cleantechnica point out such “contraptions”. However, in the case of progress–when we’ve gone too far–it is often best to kick it old-technica. Because, in many cases the cleanest solutions are the oldest.
So, beginning next Tuesday (and lasting roughly 1 month) I will give an unbiased comparison as I weigh the pros and cons of popular machines most people use, with their human powered counterparts.
Stay tuned for the first match-up:
June 24th, 2008–The Motorized Lawnmower vs. The Push Reel Mower!!!
image credits: Postal Museum and Amazon.com
Should Ships Slow Down, Go Back to Sails, or Use Nuclear Fission?
There was a time when commercial shipping was an emissions free transportation mode that required little or no fuel. Inventors, craftsmen, and engineers all worked to refine the hulls, sails and control systems and skilled people spent their entire careers figuring out weather patterns, determining efficient loading schemes, and recognizing opportunities for transporting goods with a long shelf life. When things went well, owning sailing ships was a lucrative investment.
Of course, there were some limitations of that technology that encouraged a number of very smart, number crunching businessmen and engineers to look for a better way. Sailing ship limitations included time consuming voyages, space and weight constraints, inability to maintain a schedule, dependence on poorly paid or forced labor, vulnerability to numerous natural hazards, and a high mortality rate caused by lack of good nutrition and clean water.
In May, 1918, Captain Moses Roberts, Steven Vail and some unnamed investors formed a company called the Savannah Steam Ship Company and began the work necessary to build a ship that could cross the oceans using coal and wood heat to create steam power to assist the sails. S. S. Savannah made a successful two way crossing but was a financial failure. Sailing ships continued to dominate the seas, but engineers kept improving coal and wood heated steam engines for railroads and inland river travel.
Within twenty-five years after Savannah’s initial voyage steam ships began crossing the Atlantic regularly and within seventy years steam essentially replaced sails in commerce. I can testify that sails have never disappeared – I live in one of the world’s most sail addicted towns – but anyone who has ever operated both sail and power vessels understands that as a business vessel, a sailboat is a great hobby.
Not surprisingly, when fuel prices increase rapidly, people focus their attention on ways to save money on fuel purchases. They seek to reduce their specific fuel consumption and to find cheaper sources of fuel. Both can require trade offs.
One of the easiest ways to reduce consumption is to slow down, but slowing down reduces productivity. I know that some environmentally minded people might scoff and say, “so what”, but if all of the ships on the ocean slowed down by 10%, we would need 10% more ships to carry the same quantity of goods. Each of those ships would require materials and energy to build, they would be a bit less profitable and some of the owners might be tempted to find other ways to save money, like buying cheaper fuel.
With the large engines used on ships, there are often a variety of available fuel options at different price points, but the lower priced fuel often comes with some real environmental baggage. There has been a lot of attention paid – finally – to the fact that ocean going ships are prodigious sources of sulfur emissions and other noxious pollutants since they often burn the dregs left over from refining – a fuel known as residual fuel. Based on studies that made a big splash at the end of 2007, ship emissions are now considered to the source of about 60,000 early deaths every year.
A friend of mine pointed me to a post on Treehugger.com titled Slower Shipping Could Reduce GHG Impact that discussed additional options for reducing fuel cost and environmental impact. In addition to slower speeds, the post and associated comments mention schemes that add sails to assist in propulsion. When fuel prices are high enough, such schemes can provide a positive return on investment by cutting several percentage points of off some large fuel bills. (An ocean going ship with a 70 MW power plant would burn about 90,000 gallons of fuel every day. When marine diesel fuel costs $5 per gallon, a 5% fuel savings is worth $22,500 per day.)
My recommendation is different. Let’s get rid of all of the emissions, switch to a fuel that costs about 2% of the cost per unit heat (50 cents per million BTU versus $25 per million BTU) as marine diesel fuel, and increase shipping speed so that ocean going ships can more readily compete with aircraft for time sensitive shipments. It is possible to achieve that amazing feat using technology that has been in use for more than 50 years, all we have to do is to follow the example of another pioneering financial failure named Savannah.
Nuclear powered ships are well proven, there are tens of thousands of people around the world who know how to operate, build and maintain them, and they offer capabilities that the world needs today. Because nuclear ship propulsion plants would be much smaller than the commercial nuclear power plants that are currently either under construction or being planned, they would not necessarily have to wait in the same supply chain lines for large components.
There was a time (1962-1972) when the United States produced about 100 ocean going nuclear plants in just a decade; such an industrial effort today would yield great benefits. Just think about all of the emissions that would not be released and all of the oil that would no longer be burned at sea. The effect on the market price for the rest of us would be the same as finding a new deposit capable of expanding production to about 5-8 million barrels of oil per day. That is at least 2-3 times as large as ANWAR.
Update posted June 20, 2008: A couple of days after posting this, Joe Stroud contacted me to share an updated photo of the N.S. Savannah that was taken in Baltimore, Maryland on May 23, 2008. The date was 50 years to the day after her keel was laid in 1958. 
Until last year, Savannah had been slowly deteriorating in the James River Fleet, but the Maritime Administration has invested some money to stabilize and repaint her. Though her reactor has not operated for more than 30 years, she is still a pretty ship.
Photo credits: Schooner under full sail and Annapolis Sailboat Show from Rod Adams under Creative Commons.
N. S. Savannah under power from US Government archives.
Savannah moored in Baltimore, MD on May 23, 2008 with permission from Joe Stroud.
A Clean Future equals a Cheaper Future
It comes as no surprise to me to see time and time again examples of human stupidity. I’m not the sunniest of people on my best day, and when all around me the world is going to hell in a handbasket for a veritable multitude of reasons, one can only get depressed, or rise above it and become as arrogant as me.
This most recent spate of reviling the human race was sparked by an opinion piece by Elizabeth R. Sawin from the Sustainability Institute. Her title was enough to make me smile: “$4.00 per Gallon Gasoline and Climate Change Both Call for the Same Solution: Collective Investment in Clean Energy.” I smiled again when she opened with a question she was recently asked: “What do you have to say about global warming to the whole segment of Americans who are just waking up to energy issues with $4.00 per gallon gasoline?”
Needless to say, my revulsion of the human species, or at least a vast majority of them (I have a variety of revulsions, this one is environmentally based), seem to have only just realized that maybe, just maybe, it might be a good idea to have a look for something other than fossil fuels to power our transportation.
And the terms “climate change” or “global warming” do not even register.
I must admit to a certain measure of childish glee, when I see petrol prices rising as they are. You see, I do not drive a car, and at 24, I have no real desire to drive one either. No doubt by the end of 2008 my peer group will have bullied me in to getting my license, but apart from the sporadic 3am drive to the supermarket for a chicken, my feet and my bike are all I need (and maybe the occasional bus/train ticket).
So at a time when petrol prices are skyrocketing and the US Senate defeating the Climate Security Act, people are suitably concerned. But as I mentioned, it isn’t because of any fear of melting ice-caps or drowning polar bears – although I like to think that many at least feel they should care about such things, even if they don’t actively do so.
Now Sawin quickly antagonizes a great magnitude of people out there by using the term “scientific consensus” to describe what is happening to our environment; it’s never a good move. But I don’t even want to discuss that. The point I want to make is this: how come with fuel prices getting higher than Willie Nelson, people don’t want a cheaper alternative?
It would seem to me that, even though you may be 100% against the idea that man has decided to pollute Earth in to oblivion (guess where I stand), surely you would like to be paying a little less to get to work in the morning? (Another gleeful admission: I work from home!) Wouldn’t you like to pay a little less to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer? (I got nothing for those two! I’m sufferin’ like the rest of you!)
So if there ever comes a time where there is a vote to be cast, calls to be made and politicians to be swayed, make sure you do your part: vote to bring in alternative energies, call your local whatever and let him know! Because even if you don’t feel the environment needs the helping hand, I can sure bet that your hip-pocket wouldn’t mind one.