Tag Archives: electricity

Environs, tD

Anti-Eco-Friendly Consumption

It should come as no surprise that those who deny the science of climate change and human-propelled impact on the environment would also shirk from purchasing products and services that are friendly to the environment.

A recent study shows how extreme political persuasion sways purchasing behavior of light bulbs: conservatives are more likely to purchase incandescent bulbs, while moderates and liberals lean towards more eco-friendly bulbs.

Joe Barton, U.S. Representative from Texas, sums up the issue of light bulb choice quite neatly, “… it is about personal freedom”. All the while our children shake their heads in disbelief.

Presumably many climate change skeptics prefer to purchase items that are harmful to the environment and also to humans just to make a political statement. This might include continuing to purchase products containing dangerous levels of unpronounceable acronyms and questionable chemicals: rBGH (recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone) in milk, BPA (Bisphenol_A) in plastic utensils and bottles, KBrO3 (Potassium Bromate) in highly processed flour, BHA (Butylated Hydroxyanisole) food preservative, Azodicarbonamide in dough.

Freedom truly does come at a cost.

From the Guardian:

Eco-friendly labels on energy-saving bulbs are a turn-off for conservative shoppers, a new study has found.

The findings, published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that it could be counterproductive to advertise the environmental benefits of efficient bulbs in the US. This could make it even more difficult for America to adopt energy-saving technologies as a solution to climate change.

Consumers took their ideological beliefs with them when they went shopping, and conservatives switched off when they saw labels reading “protect the environment”, the researchers said.

The study looked at the choices of 210 consumers, about two-thirds of them women. All were briefed on the benefits of compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs over old-fashioned incandescents.

When both bulbs were priced the same, shoppers across the political spectrum were uniformly inclined to choose CFL bulbs over incandescents, even those with environmental labels, the study found.

But when the fluorescent bulb cost more – $1.50 instead of $0.50 for an incandescent – the conservatives who reached for the CFL bulb chose the one without the eco-friendly label.

“The more moderate and conservative participants preferred to bear a long-term financial cost to avoid purchasing an item associated with valuing environmental protections,” the study said.

The findings suggest the extreme political polarisation over environment and climate change had now expanded to energy-savings devices – which were once supported by right and left because of their money-saving potential.

“The research demonstrates how promoting the environment can negatively affect adoption of energy efficiency in the United States because of the political polarisation surrounding environmental issues,” the researchers said.

Earlier this year Harvard academic Theda Skocpol produced a paper tracking how climate change and the environment became a defining issue for conservatives, and for Republican-elected officials.

Conservative activists elevated opposition to the science behind climate change, and to action on climate change, to core beliefs, Skocpol wrote.

There was even a special place for incandescent bulbs. Republicans in Congress two years ago fought hard to repeal a law phasing out incandescent bulbs – even over the objections of manufacturers who had already switched their product lines to the new energy-saving technology.

Republicans at the time cast the battle of the bulb as an issue of liberty. “This is about more than just energy consumption. It is about personal freedom,” said Joe Barton, the Texas Republican behind the effort to keep the outdated bulbs burning.

Read the entire article following the jump.

Image courtesy of Housecraft.

Technica

Steam Without Boiling Water

Despite what seems to be an overwhelmingly digital shift in our lives, we still live in a world of steam. Steam plays a vital role in generating most of the world’s electricity, steam heats our buildings (especially if you live in New York City), steam sterilizes our medical supplies.

So, in a research discovery with far-reaching implication, scientists have succeeded in making steam at room temperature without actually boiling water. All courtesy of some ingenious nanoparticles.

[div class=attrib]From Technology Review:[end-div]

Steam is a key ingredient in a wide range of industrial and commercial processes—including electricity generation, water purification, alcohol distillation, and medical equipment sterilization.

Generating that steam, however, typically requires vast amounts of energy to heat and eventually boil water or another fluid. Now researchers at Rice University have found a shortcut. Using light-absorbing nanoparticles suspended in water, the group was able to turn the water molecules surrounding the nanoparticles into steam while scarcely raising the temperature of the remaining water. The trick could dramatically reduce the cost of many steam-reliant processes.

The Rice team used a Fresnel lens to focus sunlight on a small tube of water containing high concentrations of nanoparticles suspended in the fluid. The water, which had been cooled to near freezing, began generating steam within five to 20 seconds, depending on the type of nanoparticles used. Changes in temperature, pressure, and mass revealed that 82 percent of the sunlight absorbed by the nanoparticles went directly to generating steam while only 18 percent went to heating water.

“It’s a new way to make steam without boiling water,” says Naomi Halas, director of the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University. Halas says that the work “opens up a lot of interesting doors in terms of what you can use steam for.”

The new technique could, for instance, lead to inexpensive steam-generation devices for small-scale water purification, sterilization of medical instruments, and sewage treatment in developing countries with limited resources and infrastructure.

The use of nanoparticles to increase heat transfer in water and other fluids has been well studied, but few researchers have looked at using the particles to absorb light and generate steam.

In the current study, Halas and colleagues used nanoparticles optimized to absorb the widest possible spectrum of sunlight. When light hits the particles, their temperature quickly rises to well above 100 °C, the boiling point of water, causing surrounding water molecules to vaporize.

Precisely how the particles and water molecules interact remains somewhat of a mystery. Conventional heat-transfer models suggest that the absorbed sunlight should dissipate into the surrounding fluid before causing any water to boil. “There seems to be some nanoscale thermal barrier, because it’s clearly making steam like crazy,” Halas says.

The system devised by Halas and colleagues exhibited an efficiency of 24 percent in converting sunlight to steam.

Todd Otanicar, a mechanical engineer at the University of Tulsa who was not involved in the current study, says the findings could have significant implications for large-scale solar thermal energy generation. Solar thermal power stations typically use concentrated sunlight to heat a fluid such as oil, which is then used to heat water to generate steam. Otanicar estimates that by generating steam directly with nanoparticles in water, such a system could see an increased efficiency of 3 to 5 percent and a cost savings of 10 percent because a less complex design could be used.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Stott Park Bobbin Mill Steam Engine. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Environs, Technica

GigaBytes and TeraWatts

Online social networks have expanded to include hundreds of millions of twitterati and their followers. An ever increasing volume of data, images, videos and documents continues to move into the expanding virtual “cloud”, hosted in many nameless data centers. Virtual processing and computation on demand is growing by leaps and bounds.

Yet while business models for the providers of these internet services remain ethereal, one segment of this business ecosystem is salivating — electricity companies and utilities — at the staggering demand for electrical power.

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

Jeff Rothschild’s machines at Facebook had a problem he knew he had to solve immediately. They were about to melt.

The company had been packing a 40-by-60-foot rental space here with racks of computer servers that were needed to store and process information from members’ accounts. The electricity pouring into the computers was overheating Ethernet sockets and other crucial components.

Thinking fast, Mr. Rothschild, the company’s engineering chief, took some employees on an expedition to buy every fan they could find — “We cleaned out all of the Walgreens in the area,” he said — to blast cool air at the equipment and prevent the Web site from going down.

That was in early 2006, when Facebook had a quaint 10 million or so users and the one main server site. Today, the information generated by nearly one billion people requires outsize versions of these facilities, called data centers, with rows and rows of servers spread over hundreds of thousands of square feet, and all with industrial cooling systems.

They are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of data centers that now exist to support the overall explosion of digital information. Stupendous amounts of data are set in motion each day as, with an innocuous click or tap, people download movies on iTunes, check credit card balances through Visa’s Web site, send Yahoo e-mail with files attached, buy products on Amazon, post on Twitter or read newspapers online.

A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness.

Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.

To guard against a power failure, they further rely on banks of generators that emit diesel exhaust. The pollution from data centers has increasingly been cited by the authorities for violating clean air regulations, documents show. In Silicon Valley, many data centers appear on the state government’s Toxic Air Contaminant Inventory, a roster of the area’s top stationary diesel polluters.

Worldwide, the digital warehouses use about 30 billion watts of electricity, roughly equivalent to the output of 30 nuclear power plants, according to estimates industry experts compiled for The Times. Data centers in the United States account for one-quarter to one-third of that load, the estimates show.

“It’s staggering for most people, even people in the industry, to understand the numbers, the sheer size of these systems,” said Peter Gross, who helped design hundreds of data centers. “A single data center can take more power than a medium-size town.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of the AP / Thanassis Stavrakis.[end-div]

Arts and Letters, BigBang

Mr. Tesla, Meet Mr. Blaine

A contemporary showman puts the inventions from another to the test with electrifying results.

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[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

David Blaine, the magician and endurance artist, is ready for more pain. With the help of the Liberty Science Center, a chain-mail suit and an enormous array of Tesla electrical coils, he plans to stand atop a 20-foot-high pillar for 72 straight hours, without sleep or food, while being subjected to a million volts of electricity.

…

When Mr. Blaine performs “Electrified” on a pier in Hudson River Park, the audience there as well as viewers in London, Beijing, Tokyo and Sydney, Australia, will take turns controlling which of the seven coils are turned on, and at what intensity. They will also be able to play music by producing different notes from the coils. The whole performance, on Pier 54 near West 13th Street, will be shown live at www.youtube.com/electrified.

[div class=attrib]Read more after the jump. Read more about Nikola Tesla here.[end-div]

Environs

Air Conditioning in a Warming World

[div class=attrib]From the New York Times:[end-div]

THE blackouts that left hundreds of millions of Indians sweltering in the dark last month underscored the status of air-conditioning as one of the world’s most vexing environmental quandaries.

Fact 1: Nearly all of the world’s booming cities are in the tropics and will be home to an estimated one billion new consumers by 2025. As temperatures rise, they — and we — will use more air-conditioning.

Fact 2: Air-conditioners draw copious electricity, and deliver a double whammy in terms of climate change, since both the electricity they use and the coolants they contain result in planet-warming emissions.

Fact 3: Scientific studies increasingly show that health and productivity rise significantly if indoor temperature is cooled in hot weather. So cooling is not just about comfort.

Sum up these facts and it’s hard to escape: Today’s humans probably need air-conditioning if they want to thrive and prosper. Yet if all those new city dwellers use air-conditioning the way Americans do, life could be one stuttering series of massive blackouts, accompanied by disastrous planet-warming emissions.

We can’t live with air-conditioning, but we can’t live without it.

“It is true that air-conditioning made the economy happen for Singapore and is doing so for other emerging economies,” said Pawel Wargocki, an expert on indoor air quality at the International Center for Indoor Environment and Energy at the Technical University of Denmark. “On the other hand, it poses a huge threat to global climate and energy use. The current pace is very dangerous.”

Projections of air-conditioning use are daunting. In 2007, only 11 percent of households in Brazil and 2 percent in India had air-conditioning, compared with 87 percent in the United States, which has a more temperate climate, said Michael Sivak, a research professor in energy at the University of Michigan. “There is huge latent demand,” Mr. Sivak said. “Current energy demand does not yet reflect what will happen when these countries have more money and more people can afford air-conditioning.” He has estimated that, based on its climate and the size of the population, the cooling needs of Mumbai alone could be about a quarter of those of the entire United States, which he calls “one scary statistic.”

It is easy to decry the problem but far harder to know what to do, especially in a warming world where people in the United States are using our existing air-conditioners more often. The number of cooling degree days — a measure of how often cooling is needed — was 17 percent above normal in the United States in 2010, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, leading to “an increase in electricity demand.” This July was the hottest ever in the United States.

Likewise, the blackouts in India were almost certainly related to the rising use of air-conditioning and cooling, experts say, even if the immediate culprit was a grid that did not properly balance supply and demand.

The late arrival of this year’s monsoons, which normally put an end to India’s hottest season, may have devastated the incomes of farmers who needed the rain. But it “put smiles on the faces of those who sell white goods — like air-conditioners and refrigerators — because it meant lots more sales,” said Rajendra Shende, chairman of the Terre Policy Center in Pune, India.

“Cooling is the craze in India — everyone loves cool temperatures and getting to cool temperatures as quickly as possible,” Mr. Shende said. He said that cooling has become such a cultural priority that rather than advertise a car’s acceleration, salesmen in India now emphasize how fast its air-conditioner can cool.

Scientists are scrambling to invent more efficient air-conditioners and better coolant gases to minimize electricity use and emissions. But so far the improvements have been dwarfed by humanity’s rising demands.

And recent efforts to curb the use of air-conditioning, by fiat or persuasion, have produced sobering lessons.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Parkland Air Conditioning.[end-div]