Will Silicon Light Illuminate the Future?  

Technology Review has a look at developments in silicon-based lighting and its potential to compete with conventional (energy wasting) incandescent bulbs and existing LED-based lighting.

Researchers at a Canadian startup say they've found a way to make low-cost, white-light LEDs that could one day end our addiction to inefficient incandescent bulbs. They claim to have cracked the cost barrier for solid-state lighting by replacing the expensive semiconductors compounds traditionally used in LEDs with low-cost silicon.

"Because it's a silicon-based system, we think [the lighting] will be affordable," says Stephen Naor, chief executive officer of Ottawa-based Group IV Semiconductor (named after silicon's position in the periodic table). "That's critical, because if you don't have affordability, then nobody is going to buy it."

Roughly 60 percent of all lightbulbs in the world are still incandescent--and for good reason: most cost pennies to produce. However, 95 percent of the energy used by these bulbs is wasted as heat. Solid-state lighting is already widely used for specialty applications; LEDs on Christmas tree lights, for example, are based on gallium nitride semiconductors. And experts predict that this technology will be increasingly used for general lighting purposes.

...

CEO Naor says Group IV's silicon-based light chips could use up to 90 percent less energy than incandescent bulbs and last up to 50 times longer. He adds that the ultimate goal is to have brighter, higher quality light at far less cost than conventional LEDs, which today can run around $40 for bulbs containing a cluster of 36 LEDs. "You can build an LED lightbulb out of many LEDs," he explains. "But we anticipate one [silicon-based] chip will be bright enough to replace a 100-watt lightbulb, so in that sense we're brighter. And that one chip has huge cost benefits."

But Naor concedes that Group IV's technology is not yet ready to take on conventional LEDs. "We have a lot of work ahead to get brighter, to get it to the efficiency we're targeting, and of course to get the lifetimes that the industry is expecting."

Meanwhile, the traditional LED market isn't standing still. San Jose, CA-based Philips Lumileds Lighting, the world's largest manufacturer of high-powered LEDs, continues to roll out products. The Optoelectronics Industry Development Association estimates that the mass substitution of incandescent lighting with LEDs could happen by 2012, while significant displacement of fluorescent technology would follow several years later.

Technology Review also has a skeptical look at GM's Fuel Cell Strategy, pointing out the advantages of plug in hybrid vehicles.

Last month, GM announced plans to distribute 100 fuel-cell-powered vehicles to customers next fall, along with plans to develop home-based hydrogen refueling stations. It's the automaker's latest move in its stated goal to build the world's largest fuel-cell vehicle fleet. The first 100 vehicles will be available for evaluation in California, New York, and Washington, DC.

But, from an environmental and technical standpoint, does it make sense?

Fuel-cell vehicles, which are being developed by other automakers as well, are powered by electricity generated from hydrogen. They emit only water vapor from their tailpipes, and the fuel cells are significantly more efficient than an internal-combustion engine in extracting energy from the fuel.

But GM's focus on creating a fleet of hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles could be a costly mistake as a strategy for combating global climate change and for decreasing U.S. dependence on oil, many energy experts say. The problem, these critics argue, is that powering electric vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells is both inefficient and expensive.

Wired's "Autopia" blog has a post on the Case for Plug-in Hybrids and talks a little about the V2G concept.

Last month I questioned the wisdom of connecting a plug-in hybrid to the grid, but after hearing James Woolsey speak I'm a bit more open to the idea.

Woolsey, who at one time was the head of the CIA, is passionate about freeing us from oil dependency for national security reasons, and he wowed a crowd of financiers last week at a clean energy conference in Seattle with his justification for plug-in hybrids. He argues that in addition to substantially reducing the amount of oil we import, plug-in hybrids can also serve as battery backups for the power grid.

If we had a few million plug-in hybrids, their batteries could collectively be tapped by the electric utilities during peak demand. The vehicles would recharge at night, and then if we get an electricity crunch, electricity from the cars could be sent upstream, which is cheap and cleaner than what utilities do now -- burn more expensive natural gas or fire up their dirtiest coal power plants. The vehicle owners would be compensated by receiving the substantial difference between what they paid for off-peak to peak power.

The other benefit is to supplement the grid in time of crisis. If terrorists destroy a power station, then individuals could use their cars to keep their houses functioning until power is restored. This also would come in handy for natural disasters too. In addition to the getting power from the grid, Woolsey argues that homes with small solar arrays could also keep vehicles charged.

The Onion appears to think the word hybrid is getting a little over-hyped, reporting Green-Conscious GE Develops Hybrid Lightbulb.

One year after pledging to develop more energy-efficient products, General Electric Co. unveiled a product it is calling its most eco-friendly lighting source to date: the first-ever gasoline-electric hybrid lightbulb. "With the price of petrol escalating as its supply dwindles, now is the perfect time to introduce innovative lighting technology that only relies on this fast-depleting, nonrenewable resource for a portion of its power," GE chairman Jeff Immelt said in a statement released Monday.



If the Wisebulb, which will be available in stores by November for the retail price of $89.99, is used only for recommended short-term, dim, and frequent on-and-off lighting, it could eliminate nearly 80 percent of global-warming pollution that would be caused by using solely gas-powered lightbulbs, GE spokesman Brian Tormey said.

"A full tank of gas can illuminate a hybrid bulb for an average of two weeks," Tormey said. "Once the 1.5-gallon tank is empty, all customers have to do is drive their lightbulb to the gas station and fill it up for only about $6."

The hybrid bulb's structure—slightly more complex than the older filament-and-wire models—features a small, efficient four-cylinder internal-combustion engine at the base of the bulb that powers an electric generator attached to the glass mount. The generator produces electricity that is then fed to the electric motor, which ignites a small flame inside the glass casing. Any excess electricity is used to charge the bulb's 300-volt lead-acid battery, which at full capacity is capable of independently lighting a 60-watt bulb for up to 30 minutes.

The "Peak Oil and Permaculture" roadshow has made its way onto ABC Radio National.

Today on the program, a public forum on the future of oil and what falling global reserves may mean for our economies and societies.

A recent Senate committee interim report said Australia should be planning now for 'peak oil' - the point at which international demand for oil begins to outstrip supply.

Research bodies liked the International Energy Agency and some oil company executives dispute the peak oil theory but there are also plenty of well credentialled peak oilers, including some experts with considerable experience in the industry, who say peak oil is a real problem.

Today, in a public forum I hosted in Melbourne in early September, we hear from five people who believe, like the Senate Committee, that Australia needs to start preparing now for future oil security.

Guests:
Richard Heinberg
Journalist and Peak Oil writer

David Holmgren
Permaculture originator

Ken Davidson
Journalist, The Age

Elizabeth Heij
Facilitator of the CSIRO Sustainability Network

Philip Sutton
President, Sustainable Living Foundation

It seems high fuel prices have managed to reduce air travel, which should make George Monbiot happy.

HIGH oil prices have forced Australians to change their transport plans in the air as well as on the ground. They are taking fewer plane trips because of fuel surcharges imposed by airlines.

Analysis by CommSec shows the cost of air travel rose 3.9 per cent last financial year despite price discounting led by the Qantas offshoot, Jetstar. Consumers responded by making 1.5 per cent fewer plane trips.

Reduced air travel coincides with a 2.9 per cent drop in international visitors to Australia in the year to August.

The Australian's "Criterion" column has a long look at local coal seam methane producers in "Not Just Hot Air".

A decade ago, the idea of tapping methane from coal seams was about as fanciful as harvesting gas from flatulating cows. After all, Australia has plentiful reserves of conventional natural gas.

The trouble is, the gas reserves aren't conveniently located to serve the fast-growing southern Queensland and northern NSW markets. Energy shortages are looming and the gap will widen if the delayed PNG gas pipeline does not eventuate.

Already, 25-30 per cent of Queensland's gas is derived from coal seam gas (otherwise known as coal-bed methane gas), up from 2 per cent in 1998. Until recently, coal-seam methane was a dangerous and unwanted by-product of coal mining.

In a further sign of a maturing sector, Santos last week bid $606 million for the biggest producer, Queensland Gas Company (QGC, $1.45). Last year Santos paid a similar amount for Tipperary's stake in the Fairview seam, while Arrow Energy (AOE, 86.5c) paid $140 million for CH4 Gas.

The prevailing view is, Santos has raised the price bar: the bid values QGC's 2P (proven and probable) reserves of 422 petajoules at a "pretty rich" (Macquarie Equities' words) $1.36 per gigajoule. There's a good chance QGC can increase these reserves to 1000PJ, which would make Santos look smarter.

With about 20 companies now involved in the CSG sector, it's reasonable to expect a further shakeout.

But investors shouldn't rely on Santos sparking an acquisition race at silly multiples. Their choice is between the established producers - the likes of Queensland Gas, Arrow Energy, Origin and Santos - or a good spread of emerging plays.

Of the juniors, Eastern Star Gas (ESG, $1.85) boasts the land's biggest onshore natural gas accumulation, so given such a "look at me" assertion we have to take notice. Eastern Star's Gunnedah Basin project contains rated P3 reserves of 17,000PJ, more than three times Australia's current average consumption of all types of energy (P3 reserves are proven, probable and possible - otherwise known as an educated guess).

...

Sydney Gas has a half stake in the Camden Gas Project, having sold down full ownership of the deposit to operating partner AGL.

Criterion rates Metgasco, Molopo and Eastern Star as SPECULATIVE BUYS.

As for Sydney Gas, no one doubts the quality of its asset, so perceptions about former management have much to do with the share price malaise. So we also rate it a SPECULATIVE BUY, in the hope it can benefit from higher NSW gas prices relative to Queensland's.

There's reasonable scope for another offer for Queensland Gas despite Santos's full price, so QGC investors should HOLD. We also rate Arrow a HOLD.

Vaunted counter-bidders for QGC include Origin Energy, AGL and Babcock & Brown, although the former two may be preoccupied in the retail energy market.

It's a given that the eastern seaboard's demand for gas will soar, but not every CSG hopeful will make the grade. The winners will be those who take advantage of the PNG pipeline uncertainties to snare long-term customer contracts.

The Australian also reports that the US is hatching a plot to carve up Iraq. I thought that was the plan all along - did The Australian only just work this out ?

AN independent commission set up by the US Congress is believed to be drawing up a plan to carve up Iraq into three highly autonomous regions.

The Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, the former US secretary of state, is preparing to report to President George W. Bush next month amid signs that sectarian violence and attacks on coalition forces in Iraq are spiralling out of control.

The conflict is claiming the lives of 100 civilians a day and bombings are at record levels.

Rumours about a pre-election invasion of Iran continue to circulate (with the Republicans looking headed for a thrashing at this point) - here's one from Past Peak.

Chris Hedges, who used to be the Middle East bureau chief for the New York Times, thinks a Bush administration attack on Iran is inevitable. And the disaster that follows, he says, will be, quite literally, apocalyptic. Excerpts:

The aircraft carrier Eisenhower, accompanied by the guided-missile cruiser USS Anzio, guided-missile destroyer USS Ramage, guided-missile destroyer USS Mason and the fast-attack submarine USS Newport News, is, as I write, making its way to the Straits of Hormuz off Iran. The ships will be in place to strike Iran by the end of the month. It may be a bluff. It may be a feint. It may be a simple show of American power. But I doubt it.

War with Iran — a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East — is probable by the end of the Bush administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks. This administration, claiming to be anointed by a Christian God to reshape the world, and especially the Middle East, defined three states at the start of its reign as "the Axis of Evil." They were Iraq, now occupied; North Korea, which, because it has nuclear weapons, is untouchable; and Iran. Those who do not take this apocalyptic rhetoric seriously have ignored the twisted pathology of men like Elliott Abrams, who helped orchestrate the disastrous and illegal contra war in Nicaragua, and who now handles the Middle East for the National Security Council. He knew nothing about Central America. He knows nothing about the Middle East. He sees the world through the childish, binary lens of good and evil, us and them, the forces of darkness and the forces of light. And it is this strange, twilight mentality that now grips most of the civilian planners who are barreling us towards a crisis of epic proportions. [...]

These men advocate a doctrine of permanent war...[b]ut this war will be different. It will be catastrophic. It will usher in the apocalyptic nightmares spun out in the dark, fantastic visions of the Christian right. And there are those around the president who see this vision as preordained by God; indeed, the president himself may hold such a vision.

The hypocrisy of this vaunted moral crusade is not lost on those in the Middle East. Iran actually signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It has violated a codicil of that treaty written by European foreign ministers, but this codicil was never ratified by the Iranian parliament. I do not dispute Iran's intentions to acquire nuclear weapons nor do I minimize the danger should it acquire them in the estimated five to 10 years. But contrast Iran with Pakistan, India and Israel. These three countries refused to sign the treaty and developed nuclear weapons programs in secret. Israel now has an estimated 400 to 600 nuclear weapons. The word "Dimona," the name of the city where the nuclear facilities are located in Israel, is shorthand in the Muslim world for the deadly Israeli threat to Muslims' existence. What lessons did the Iranians learn from our Israeli, Pakistani and Indian allies? [...]

And another from the way-out-left Michel Chossudovsky.

The overall significance of these military drills must be assessed in relation to the sequence of Russian, Chinese and Iran war exercises conducted since late August.

There is a consistent pattern. These war games are not isolated events. They are part of a carefully coordinated endeavor, in response to the US-NATO military build-up. They should also be considered as acts of deterrence, intended to display military capabilities to deter military action by US led coaltion.

The issue of war preparation has been carefully avoided by the Western media. The sequence and interrelationship between these war games is not mentioned.

While the war exercises are casually acknowledged in separate wire service reports, the Western media fails to address the broader implications of these military exercises.

Military Alliances

The SCO and CSTO war games must also be examined in relation to the structure of military alliances. Both China and Russia are allies of Iran, involved in extensive military cooperation agreements.

China and Russia are major actors in Central Asian oil. They have significant strategic and economic interests in the Central Asian region and the Caspian sea basin. They also have economic cooperation agreements with Iran's State oil company.

US Sponsored Military Build-Up

The Cold War although officially over has not quite reached its climax.

The US military agenda is not limited to gaining control over Iran's oil and gas reserves, (using the "campaign against international terrorism" as a pretext). Reminiscent of the Cold war era, the objective of US military intervention also consists in weakening and ultimately displacing China and Russia from playing a significant role in Central Asia.

Most Western press reports have failed to acknowledge the seriousness of the US-NATO- Israeli military build-up. Underlying what is normally understood as a Middle East war, the conflict could evolve towards a clash between former competing super powers of the Cold War era.

Directed against Iran and Syria, the US sponsored military operation, if it were to be launched, could result in a broader conflict marked by the indirect involvement of Russia and China and their central Asian allies. In fact that indirect involvement is already established through Iran's observer status to the SCO, various bilateral military cooperation agreements as well as the sale of Chinese and Russian weapons systems to Iran.

...

The threat of an Al Qaeda "Attack on America" is being used profusely by the Bush administration and its indefectible British ally to galvanize public opinion in support of a global military agenda.

Known and documented, the "Islamic terror network" is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus. Several of the terror alerts were based on fake intelligence as revealed in the recent foiled "liquid bomb attack". There is evidence that the several of the terrorist "mass casualty events" which have resulted in civilian casualties were triggered by the military and/or intelligence services. (e.g Bali 2002).

The "war on terrorism" is bogus.

I tend to think that Iran is safe for now and the Bushies are melting down (but maybe that's wishful thinking on my part) - however the fear campaign associated with the bogus war on terror has a momentum of its own. Now the football season is over and we're in the dead zone before cricket season commences, we've been subjected to breathless reports that Al Qaeda wanted to attack an Ashes test match between Australia and England last year. Couldn't pick a better way to get the day's headlines...

FRANKLY, the news that plans had been made to attack the Australian and English players during the Ashes series last northern summer did not come as a surprise. The walls came down long ago, the battlelines were blurred, the general population became fair game, the rules went out of the window.

Nor is the enemy easily pinned down. Nowadays battles are waged by nationalists, religious extremists and other unsavoury types. No one is sitting in trenches. Hit-and-run tactics, and the fear they create, are the chosen weapon of the ecstatic killers.

Given my recent post that looked at Maurice Strong, I thought this little snippet from a Canadian paper 30 years ago was interesting - apparently he thought there was lots of oil and gas offshore Nova Scotia.

AN "energy surplus area" was the East Coast’s future,said Maurice Strong, who added that the search for oil off the coast had "just begun." The president of Petro-Canada told members of the Engineering Institute of Canada meeting in Halifax that he would "stake his reputation on the prospect" that the area "would soon become an important supplier of oil and gas."

Although Petro-Canada had not found commercial amounts of either oil or gas in the four exploratory wells the company had drilled, Strong said the signs were "very encouraging" and that the history of the exploration process off the east coast "was no different than that of most great oil-producing areas."

This isn't really tinfoil, but Cryptogon came up with a tinfoil title for it - "Monsanto and India's Agricultural Apocalypse" - a look at the impact of GE seeds in India.

Indian farmers now must compete or go under. To compete, many have turned to high-cost seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, which now line the shelves of even the tiniest village shops.

Monsanto, for instance, invented the genetically modified seeds that Mr. Shende planted, known as Bt cotton, which are resistant to bollworm infestation, the cotton farmer's prime enemy. It says the seeds can reduce the use of pesticides by 25 percent.

The company has more than doubled its sales of Bt cotton here in the last year, but the expansion has been contentious. This year, a legal challenge from the government of the state of Andhra Pradesh forced Monsanto to slash the royalty it collected from the sale of its patented seeds in India. The company has appealed to the Indian Supreme Court.

The modified seeds can cost nearly twice as much as ordinary ones, and they have nudged many farmers toward taking on ever larger loans, often from moneylenders charging exorbitant interest rates.

Virtually every cotton farmer in these parts, for instance, needs the assistance of someone like Chandrakant Agarwal, a veteran moneylender who charges 5 percent interest a month.

He collects his dues at harvest time, but exacts an extra premium, compelling farmers to sell their cotton to him at a price lower than it fetches on the market, pocketing the profit.

His collateral policy is nothing if not inventive. The borrower signs a blank official document that gives Mr. Agarwal the right to collect the farmer's property at any time.

Business has boomed with the arrival of high-cost seeds and pesticides. "Many moneylenders have made a whole lot of money," Mr. Agarwal said. "Farmers, many of them, are ruined."