The Wind Bank and the Battery  

ANother short post tonight - I'll try and produce something more substantial on the weekend.

WorldChanging had an interesting post recently about the Tasmanian flow battery experiment and other forms of harnessing wind power, including an interesting project on oil rigs off Texas.

When it was announced at the beginning of January that Australian researchers had developed a kind of wind battery – an "electricity storage system that promises to transform the role of wind energy" – I immediately thought of a scene from Virgil's Aeneid.

There, we read about a place called "Aeolia, the weather-breeding isle," where all the winds of the world are stored:

Here in a vast cavern King Aeolus
Rules the contending winds and moaning gales
As warden of their prison. Round the walls
They chafe and bluster underground. The din
Makes a great mountain murmur overhead.
High on a citadel enthroned,
Scepter in hand, he molifies their fury,
Else they might flay the sea and sweep away
Land masses and deep sky through empty air.
In fear of this, Jupiter hid them away
In caverns of black night. He set above them
Granite of high mountains – and a king
Empowered at command to rein them in
Or let them go. (Book 1, 75-89)

In other words, King Aeolus, "high on a citadel enthroned," ruler of these "contending winds and moaning gales," serves as a kind of literary precedent for the new wind bank project in western Australia.

Less abstractly, New Scientist explains how a local utility company on King Island, Australia, has "installed a mammoth rechargeable battery which ensures that as little wind energy as possible goes to waste":

When the wind is strong, the wind farm's turbines generate more electricity than the islanders need. The battery is there to soak up the excess and pump it out again on days when the wind fades and the turbines' output falls. The battery installation has almost halved the quantity of fuel burnt by the diesel generators, saving not only money but also at least 2000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions each year.

The battery works through an ingenious system of chemical mixture and separation. It is thus referred to as a "flow battery":

In the lead-acid batteries most commonly used, the chemicals that store the energy remain inside the battery. The difference with the installation on King Island is that when wind power is plentiful the energy-rich chemicals are pumped out of the battery and into storage tanks, allowing fresh chemicals in to soak up more charge. To regenerate the electricity the flow is simply reversed.

This bit of news, however, arrived at the same time as another wind-based story, in which we learned that offshore oil rigs on the coast of Texas are being retrofitted to act as gigantic windmills.

In other words, there is a plan now to "mount conventional windmills on decommissioned oil platforms," and then to anchor those platforms at sea, like artificial islands, where the planet's winds are at their strongest.

Combining these stories, though, I can't help but picture a suitably mythic vision of gigantic flow batteries, standing on iron strutworks and gantried legs, like some sci-fi sea-city on the Texas horizon, dispensing power to all those who visit them: a modernday version of Aeolia, in other words, the weather-breeding isle.

In any case, all of this takes a turn inland when we add yet another article, published last month in Metropolis. Metropolis introduces us to a man named Mark Oberholzer, who has proposed "integrating turbines into the barriers between highway lanes," which would thus "harness the wind generated by passing cars to create energy."

By tapping into an otherwise overlooked urban energy source, Oberholzer's plan transforms a space of pollution, waste, and indulgence – i.e. the modern highway system – into a place of energetic productivity.

Better yet, his system capitalizes not on already existing wind patterns, such as those roaring across the ocean waters of the world, but on inland breezes generated by human activity. His highway-based turbines thus exhibit an interesting, if problematic, symmetry when it comes to human-centered climate change: these devices rely upon the passage of automobiles, even as they generate an electrical supply that doesn't itself burn fossil fuels.

Returning to the Classical theme with which this post started, there is one aspect to all of this that perhaps even Homer himself would like to hear. I'm referring to the Anemoi, Greek gods of wind, each associated with one of four cardinal directions. There was Boreas, the north wind; Eurus, the east wind; Notus, the south wind; and Zephyr, the west wind.

To these, though, Oberholzer's highway project would seem to add a new wind, and another direction: the wind of Man and Cities, those agitated inland breezes from our architectural world, where constant motion now generates its own unruly weather.

An even larger symmetry opens up here, then, when we realize that Oberholzer's inland winds of highways and boulevards might yet be stored, years from now, in wind batteries like those on King Island, Australia.

In other words, these new winds of modernity – urban weather – would be welcomed back into the embrace of King Aeolus, tying the knot, joining those older breezes locked deep inside the isle of Aeolia, where their energy will be stored for another day.

Celsias has a roundup of news on the bee colony collapse disorder problem.

Things are getting dire on the U.S. agricultural front, and there are similar reports beginning to filter through from countries in Europe.

Disappearing by the billions, on a worker strike we do not know how to negotiate

The sad mystery surrounding the humble honeybee - which is a vital component in $14bn-worth of US agriculture - is beginning to worry even the highest strata of the political class in Washington.

“Hillary Clinton’s got interested in this in the last week or so,” said David Hackenberg, the beekeeper leading the drive to publicise their plight.

“And she’s not alone,” he said. “There’s a lot of Congressmen have called…wanting to know what’s going on. It’s serious. - BBC

There’s still no concrete evidence about what is killing the millions and billions of bees around the country, but there are a lot of guesses.

The phenomenon is recent, dating back to autumn, when beekeepers along the east coast of the US started to notice the die-offs. It was given the name of fall dwindle disease, but now it has been renamed to reflect better its dramatic nature, and is known as colony collapse disorder.

It is swift in its effect. Over the course of a week the majority of the bees in an affected colony will flee the hive and disappear, going off to die elsewhere. The few remaining insects are then found to be enormously diseased - they have a “tremendous pathogen load”, the scientists say. But why? No one yet knows.

… The disease showed a completely new set of symptoms, “which does not seem to match anything in the literature”, said the entomologist.

… the few bees left inside the hive were carrying “a tremendous number of pathogens” - virtually every known bee virus could be detected in the insects, she said, and some bees were carrying five or six viruses at a time, as well as fungal infections. Because of this it was assumed that the bees’ immune systems were being suppressed in some way. - The Independent

There are as many theories as there are members of the panel, but Mr Hackenberg strongly suspects that new breeds of nicotine-based pesticides are to blame.

“It may be that the honeybee has become the victim of these insecticides that are meant for other pests,” he said. “If we don’t figure this out real quick, it’s going to wipe out our food supply.”

Just a few miles down the sunlit road, it is easy to find farmers prepared to agree with his gloomy assessment.

… Dennis van Engelsdorp, a Pennsylvania-based beekeeper and leading researcher… is adamant that it is too early to pin the blame on insecticides.”We have no evidence to think that that theory is more right than any other…” - BBC

Urban sprawl and farming also have taken away fields of clover and wildflowers, as well as nesting trees.

Pesticides and herbicides used in farming and on suburban lawns can weaken or kill bees.

Caron said a new class of pesticides used on plants, called neonicotinoids, don’t kill bees but hamper their sense of direction. That leaves them unable to find their way back to their hives.

… Because these bees aren’t returning to their hives, researchers don’t have a lot of evidence to study.

Those dead bees that have been found nearby have only deepened the mystery.

“They are just dirty with parts and pieces of various diseases,” said Jim Tew, a beekeeping expert with the OSU Extension campus in Wooster. “It looks like a general stress collapse.”

Similar disappearances have occurred over time. Tew said he remembers a similar phenomenon in the 1960s. Then, it was called “disappearing disease.”

“It was exactly the same thing,” he said.

But this one, Caron said, apparently causes hives to collapse at a much quicker rate and is more widespread.

Cobey said it could be from too much of everything: bad weather, chemicals, parasites, viruses.

“If you give them one of these things at a time, they seem to deal with it,” she said. “But all of these things, it’s too hard.

“I think the bees are just compromised. They’re stressed out.” - Columbus Dispatch

Whatever the cause, some farmers are getting desperate, to the point of not bothering to plant their crops.

“The squash crops that we grow have a male and female bloom, and the bee has to visit…to make it pollinate and produce,” he said.

“We’re going to have a hard time finding rental bees to aid in this pollination and if it’s as critical as it looks like it will be, I probably won’t even plant anything this spring.” - BBC

Huge monocrop farming systems and specialisations, and the spread of suburbia across natural habitat, are removing natural diversity. Bees have been lumped together in the millions, in a factory farm type environment not so unlike that of our chickens and other livestock animals. Many of these bees are transported across several states to perform pollinations in orchards and farms around the country. Today they are in contact with substances they shouldn’t have to deal with - pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and pollen from genetically modified crops. Researchers are scrambling to find answers, and as the spring season is upon us, time is running out.

Honey bees, which are not native to the U.S. incidentally (they were imported for crop pollination), are tasked with the pollination of approximately one third of all U.S. crops.

… scientists are very worried, not least because, as there is no obvious cause for the disease as yet, there is no way of tackling it. - The Independent

Mobjectivist has a few words about the relative complexity of peak oil and climate change models.

A commenter at TOD named "memmel" claimed climate change models had approximately the same level of complexity as oil depletion models. No way! I contend that scientifically modelling peak oil actually shows orders of magnitude less complexity than predicting global warming. Consider this self-help motto:

* Oil Depletion: An exercise in extraction of fluids from a container.
* Climate Change: An exercise in non-linear fluid dynamics of N-dimensionality.

Which one sounds more difficult to make sense of?

I know it has nothing to do with coming up with new forms of renewable energy, but for this small corner of the simulation universe we can hold out hope to make sense out of nonsense and extract signals from the noise. As Robert Rapier indirectly points out, why use empirical formulas while we have a fighting chance to use some real theory?

Robert McLeod makes a comment regarding something that I like to moan about from time to time - that the main problem with peak oil models is that they are working with data that is largely rubbish.

True, but the climate scientists have reliable scientific data from which to generate their models and draw conclusions. Modellers of oil theory do not have reliable data, or in many cases, any data at all.

As they say, garbage in = garbage out.

The Energy Blog has a post on Applied Materials' plan to install 1.9 MW of solar panels, the largest corporate installation seen thus far.

Applied Materials announced today that it will install over 1.9 megawatts of solar power generation capability at its research campus in Sunnyvale, California. This is believed to be the largest solar power installation on an existing corporate facility in the United States and will be rolled out in three phases.

“When the project is complete we will have a silent, non-polluting 1.9 megawatt power plant on what is currently open roof space and parking areas, and a great hedge against future energy cost increases,” said Mike Splinter, president and CEO of Applied Materials. “As we pursue our strategy to significantly drive down the overall solar cost-per-watt we feel it is important to lead through example and that installations of this size will help lower consumer cost and spur overall market growth.”

Applied Materials will start installing panels later this year that use a variety of state of the art solar technologies. Once completed in 2008, Applied Materials’ system will generate over 2,330 megawatt hours annually – the equivalent of powering 1,400 homes.

This megawatt installation by a single company is certainly the way for all companies to go in the future. This is the ultimate example of distributed renewable power. Applied Materials has its own interests also, recently entering the market as a supplier of equipment to manufacture solar cells and solar panels that they believe will reduce the cost of this equipment through greater efficiency in production.

Technology Review has an article on The Incredible Shrinking Engine - "a new engine design could significantly improve fuel efficiency for cars and SUVs, at a fraction of the cost of today's hybrid technology". While I still think all electric cars are the future, its interesting just how much scope there is for efficiency gains using existing engine technology.

Also at Tech Review - Nanocharging solar and The Precarious Future of Coal, which just reinforced my belief that coal has no future.

For Daniel Cohn, a senior research scientist at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, the ­century-­old internal-combustion engine is still a source of inspiration. As he strides past the machinery and test equipment in the MIT Sloan Automotive Laboratory, his usually reserved demeanor drops away. "An engine this size," he says, pointing out an ordinary-looking 2.4-liter midsize gasoline engine, "would be a rocket with our technology."

By way of explaining that technology, he shows off a turbocharger that could be bolted to the 2.4-liter engine; the engine, he adds, uses direct fuel injection rather than the port injection currently found in most cars. Both turbocharging and direct injection are preëxisting technologies, and neither looks particularly impressive. Indeed, used separately, they would lead to only marginal improvements in the performance of an internal-­combustion engine. But by combining them, and augmenting them with a novel way to use a small amount of ethanol, Cohn and his colleagues have created a design that they believe could triple the power of a test engine, an advance that could allow automakers to convert small engines designed for economy cars into muscular engines with more than enough power for SUVs or sports cars. By extracting better performance from smaller, more efficient engines, the technology could lead to vehicles whose fuel economy rivals that of hybrids, which use both an electric motor and a gasoline engine. And that fuel efficiency could come at a fraction of the cost.

NASA scientist James Hansen appeared on the 7:30 report this week to talk about global warming and sea level rises.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Jim Hansen, now we've had the IPCC report, do you believe the world has an accurate picture of the risks ahead for global warming?

DR JAMES HANSEN, NASA CLIMATOLOGIST: There is quite a large gap between what is understood about global warming by the relevant scientific community and what is known by the public. The one thing that I've become particularly concerned about is sea level rise, where the current IPCC report is going to suggest smaller numbers than the last report, although all of the information that we're getting in the last year or two points in a very much different direction. Now, in defence of IPCC, their procedure required that they stop getting new inputs more than a year ago and a lot of the data on ice sheet stability has come up in just the last year or two.

KERRY O'BRIEN: What are your particular fears with regard to the melting of the polar ice caps?

JAMES HANSEN: Well, the problem is that the climate system in general has a lot of inertia and that means that it takes time for the changes to begin to occur but then, once they do get under way, it becomes very difficult to stop them and that is true in spades for the ice sheets. If we once begin to disintegrate it will become very difficult, if not impossible, to stop them and we are beginning to see now on both Greenland and west Antarctica disintegration of those ice sheets. They're both losing ice at a rate of about 150 cubic kilometres per year and that's still not a huge sea level rise. Sea level rise is now going up about 3.5 centimetres per decade. So that's more than double what it was 50 years ago.

But it's still not disastrous; it's a problem, but it's not disastrous. But the potential is for a much larger sea level rise. If we get warming of two or three degrees Celsius, then I would expect that both West Antarctica and parts of Greenland would end up in the ocean, and the last time we had an ice sheet disintegrate, sea level went up at a rate of 5 metres in a century, or one metre every 20 years. That is a real disaster, and that's what we have to avoid. ..

KERRY O'BRIEN: You said just a couple of weeks ago that there should be a moratorium on building coal fired power plants until the technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide emissions is available. But you must know that that's politically unacceptable in many countries China, America, Australia for that matter, because of coal industry jobs and impact on the economy.

JAMES HANSEN: Well, it's going to be realised within the next 10 years or so that we have no choice. We're going to have to bulldoze the old style coal fired power plants. We can burn coal, provided we capture the CO2 and sequester it, and we're working on technology that would allow us to do that and we should have been working a little harder but, nevertheless, we will have, within five to 10 years, we will have that technology. In the meantime, we should be emphasising energy efficiency so that we don't need new old style coal fired power plants. We're just not doing that. Buildings could be 50 per cent more efficient. The architects and engineers will tell you they have the technology to do that, but if it's not required it's not likely to happen. ..

MIT's "Open CourseWare" has been online for a while, but they have no extended it to put their entire curriculum up.

The entire catalogue of information from 1,800 courses at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) will be available free online by the end of the year. Once uploaded, it will represent one of the internet’s most important resources.

By providing free access to course material such as lecture notes, assignment details, podcasts and videocasts, MIT’s Open CourseWare programme will transform the e-learning landscape.

MIT initiated the programme in 2001 and material from 1,550 MIT courses is already available. Anne Margulies, executive director of Open CourseWare, said that in January alone, the site had had 1.5 million visits, and the figure rose to two million if visits to language translated sites were included. Overseas visitors– from China and India in particular – dominate usage traffic, with 60% of visits originating outside the US.

Margulies said that MIT had seen little potential for making money from putting materials online and had decided to give them away. She said that about half of the Open CourseWare users were teaching themselves with the materials, 35% were students at other institutions, and 15% were teachers.

“MIT is eager for the material to be re-used, as long as it is for noncommercial purposes, and whoever re-uses it gives proper citation to the original MIT author as well as to MIT,” Margulies said.

An international consortium of open courseware providers has been formed ( http://www.ocwconsortium.org/ ). It has 120 members, half of whom are already providing open courseware.

For tonight's tinfoil installment, here's Websurdity asking Uncomfortable Questions: Was the Death Star Attack an Inside Job?.

We’ve all heard the “official conspiracy theory” of the Death Star attack. We all know about Luke Skywalker and his ragtag bunch of rebels, how they mounted a foolhardy attack on the most powerful, well-defended battle station ever built. And we’ve all seen the video over, and over, and over, of the one-in-a-million shot that resulted in a massive chain reaction that not just damaged, but completely obliterated that massive technological wonder.

Like many Americans, I was fed this story when I was growing up. But as I watched the video, I began to realize that all was not as it seemed. And the more I questioned the official story, the deeper into the rabbit hole I went.

Presented here are some of the results of my soul-searching regarding this painful event. Like many citizens, I have many questions that I would like answered: was the mighty Imperial government really too incompetent to prevent a handful of untrained nerf-herders from destroying one of their most prized assets? Or are they hiding something from us? Who was really behind the attack? Why did they want the Death Star destroyed? No matter what the answers, we have a problem.

Below is a summary of my book, Uncomfortable Questions: An Analysis of the Death Star Attack, which presents compelling evidence that we all may be the victims of a fraud of immense proportions....

Actually while I'm doing tinfoil humour here's one from the Electric Monkey Pants Intergalactic News Network, noting the strange coincidence of a flurry of news about the many confessions of Al Qaeda's Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (is there any heinous act this furry monster was not responsible for ?) taking the glare of publicity away from the travails of Alberto "The Torturer" Gonzales and his attempt to decimate the US Attorney corps (or at least the ones stupid enough to investigate Republican criminals).

Porn-star Ron Jeremy has confessed to masterminding the attacks of September 11, 2001 along with his long-lost brother Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. "We did it," Ron Jeremy wrote in his confession, calling the mysterious collapse of the towers "the money shot."

Also confessing was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (or "KSM" as he is known to lazy Americans). KSM had long eluded capture by the Americans by disguising himself as a grizzly bear. Later it was revealed that it wasn't a disguise; he is just really, really hairy. He twice escaped captivity by pretending to be a dog with rabies, but was recaptured while picking nits and lice out of his fur.

Calling themselves the Hairy Brothers of Destruction, Mr. Jeremy and KSM confessed to a long list of crimes against humanity.

Authorities also seized a hard drive containing details of several assassination plots (including attempts to kill the Pope, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter's gardener), and hundreds of gigs of midget porn, bestiality porn, and pictures of Ron Jeremy rubbing KSM with sandpaper in what appears to be an attempt at hair removal.

The deranged duo admitted to being tortured by federal agents, and hinted at Abu Ghraib-style torture involving being stacked in a pile of naked men and being led around on a leash. They also indicated that they kind of liked it.

While enjoying a breakfast of bacon and eggs the confessed masterminds of 9/11 assured their interrogators that they were devout Muslims and that their confession was not coerced: "Karl Rove didn't call me and ask for a confession in exchange for 30 Brazilian hookers. Nothing like that happened, at all" Mr. Jeremy assured his captors, who then fed the revelations to several unquestioning, servile reporters, including this one.

KSM supplied a type-written note that listed all of the crimes the duo is responsible for masterminding. The list includes:

* the bombing of U.S. Cole
* the decapitation of Daniel Pearl
* the planting of explosives that brought down WTC 7
* farting in the interrogation room -- twice
* the bombing of a nightclub in Bali, Indonesia
* jump-starting Paris Hilton's career
* the Democrats' strong showing in the November elections
* happy-slapping
* Abu-Ghraib (specifically: getting the Americans caught)
* Hurricane Katrina
* eye-boogers
* killing Anna Nicole Smith
* causing President Bush to appear stupid and clueless on TV
* the Hindenburg disaster
* pimples
* the estate tax
* the illusion of global warming (to scare hippies)
* the Oklahoma City bombing
* Watergate
* killing Jesus Christ (and Old Yeller)

Ron Jeremy supplied an identical list, but he crossed out "Paris Hilton" and wrote "virneeral dizees", then crossed that out and wrote "VD."

The above information was provided to reporters on the condition that we not mention Alberto Gonzales, the word "impeachment" or the many inconsistencies in the official 9/11 story for 3 weeks. Naturally, we agreed because we just repeat whatever they say anyway.