Other Source of Energy

The New York Times has an article on ARPA-E investing in General Compressions CAES technology for an energy storage pilot project with Duke Energy - ARPA-E Is Poised to Put Products on the Grid.

ARPA-E, the government’s incubator for high-risk energy inventions, has its first graduate in the electricity area — a new energy storage technology — and on Thursday it announced a preliminary agreement to get it tested.

The agency, more formally the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, modeled after the Defense Department’s longstanding program, said it had signed a memorandum of understanding with Duke, the big utility company, and the Electric Power Research Institute, the nonprofit utility consortium, to try out the inventions in the real world.

The agreement will “provide the connective tissue for ARPA-E,’’ said Arun Majumdar, the agency’s director, and “provide the test bed to see how to create value in the actual business.’’

The first candidate will probably be General Compression, a company to which ARPA-E directed $750,000; that advanced the technology enough for the firm to raise $12 million privately, Mr. Majumdar said. The company developed a way to pump air into an underground cavern, using electricity generated at inconvenient hours. When the energy is needed, the air flows back out again through a generator.

An older technology accomplishes this by adding natural gas to the exiting air and burning it to spin a turbine; General Compression uses no fuel at all. Its “round-trip efficiency,” meaning the amount of energy delivered versus the amount it takes in, is 70 to 75 percent, the company says.

Energy storage is considered a crucial complement to wind power and possibly solar power as well, smoothing out production and ensuring that the energy is available when it is most valuable, but today’s systems are expensive and thus are not in wide use.

Mr. Mujamdar said that ARPA-E hoped the air compression technology can be scaled big enough to store a gigawatt-hour, equal to the entire output of a large nuclear plant for an hour. Price is a crucial consideration, and ARPA-E has determined that a utility could probably afford to pay $100 per kilowatt-hour of storage.

I noticed this TED talk recently on the benefits of freshening the air inside buildings in urban areas using plants - How to grow fresh air.

Researcher Kamal Meattle shows how an arrangement of three common houseplants, used in specific spots in a home or office building, can result in measurably cleaner indoor air.

The SMH has an article on the ugly pustule on the face of modern day media - the conservative radio shock jock - Cane toads of the air thrive on stupidity.

Im always amazed by how readily we let our buttons be pushed. Its almost as though we want them to manipulate us. As though we like it. "Them", here, obviously includes politicians, advertisers and spin merchants, but the worst offenders, partly because theyre the least explicit, are "shock jocks".

They are the cane toads of contemporary culture: ugly, ubiquitous, toxic to most other life forms and adept at using their peculiar behaviour to force change in ours.

Its not so much that theyre rude, lowbrow or just plain wrong, although these, too, are often the case. The most destructive effect of the shock-jockariat is the poisoning of the logic-well itself; followed by the incremental death of the argument tree that is root and branch of intelligent civilisation. ...

Take Alan Jones. Though it pains me to say it, he is forcing me to change my mind. Not on climate change, or cycling, or the right to public protest, all of which he opposes, but on censorship.

Foucault argued that unreason died with the enlightenment. But the shock-jock phenomenon proves repeatedly that if you make an argument sufficiently idiotic, the sheer scale of stupidity makes it hard to defeat. It was highlighted for me this week by a letter that argued, as Jones does, that anything so small as 0.04 per cent - the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere - couldnt possibly matter. "Please let me know," concluded my correspondent, "how anyone could believe that CO2 is responsible for climate change?"

Its like arguing that a virus is too small to give you AIDS. Or that a lethal dose of heroin, at about 0.0007 per cent of your body weight, couldnt possibly kill.

Never mind that applying the same logic to asylum seekers would make you wonder what all the fuss was about (our total asylum applications - 8150 last year, including dependants - being a mere 0.04 per cent of the population.)

These climate-change rants deliberately ignore everything about eco-balance, homeostasis, the greenhouse effect and tipping points weve all been taught since primary school and instead raucously promote a red herring.

Why do politicians tolerate it? Why do we? My theory is this. Most shock jocks, and their audiences, are pretty long in the tooth. Perhaps theres just a certain kind of person who, as the hormones start to recede, needs this pseudo-emotion to feel alive.

Wired has an article on an interesting substitute for air conditioning - MIT Wristband Could Make AC Obsolete.

Here’s a scary statistic: In 2007, 87 percent of households in the U.S. used air conditioning, compared to just 11 percent of households in Brazil and a mere 2 percent in India. Another one: By 2025, booming nations like those are projected to account for a billion new consumers worldwide, with a corresponding explosion in demand for air conditioning expected to arrive along with them. Keeping indoor spaces at comfortable temperatures requires a huge amount of electricity–especially in sweltering climates like India and Brazil–and in the U.S. alone it accounts for a full 16.5 percent of energy use.

All of that adds up to a big problem. At a point when humans need to take a sober look at our energy use, we’re poised to use a devastating amount of it keeping our homes and offices at the right temperatures in years to come. A team of students at MIT, however, is busy working on a prototype device that could eliminate much of that demand, and they’re doing it by asking one compelling question: Why not just heat and cool our bodies instead?

Wristify, as they call their device, is a thermoelectric bracelet that regulates the temperature of the person wearing it by subjecting their skin to alternating pulses of hot or cold, depending on what’s needed.