Thoughts on Energy, Water, Social Development & Sustainability

Dr. Derel Lovely at UMass Amherst is working on something that I had no clue about; a Microbial Fuel Cell. To get an introduction of what that is you can watch this 4 min video on PBS site which is available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/si/ ( video # 4). Dr. Lovely's website is available at http://www.bio.umass.edu/micro/faculty/lovley.html

I always wondered as a child (and I still do, very less often though) how the bugs glow. That has always enticed me and made me think that we should generate electricity from them. Well, that was 20 years ago, when I was ignorant of the energy problems and had no clue that it's even a possibility that some scientist will heed any attention to. But with this new development that I got to know of my thought process is again being dragged to that possibility. Why is it that the scientists are concentrating on microbes when we have bugs that are capable of generating visible light and electric shock. This brings me to my second point, are there people seriously considering it? Is it the size to energy ratio that plays a role here.

My new quest is now to find out if someone had already compiled data of organism size to electric potential difference or charge that the organism generates.

In this year's Consumers Electronics Expo in Las Vegas a marvelous piece of technology was revelead; Jadoo. Its a portable Fuel Cell based power generation unit ( https://jadoopower.com/ ), which as expected is very expensive right now. The unit is about $8000 (USD) and provides 2000 W-h runtime capacity. Like any other technology, the prices will fall steeply once the production technolgy gets mainstream and the demand increases. One thing that caught my attention was the future business model of Jadoo. Here's what their website says:

In our new model:
• Your home has a built-in power interface, similar to our existing Fuel Cell Power Unit.
• Each interface holds several fuel canisters, which might look like our N-Stor canisters.
• You buy several of these canisters and click them into place to power your entire home.
• When the canisters are empty, you drop them in the mail to Jadoo.
• We send you new, full canisters, delivered right to your door.
• You’re free from high utility bills, power grid outages, polluting fossil fuels, and all the limitations associated with the way you get your power today. It’s the way you get DVDs today. Soon, it will be the way you get the power to watch those DVDs as well. If it seems a bit far-fetched, it isn’t. This exciting new model is a top priority for us, and we’ve already taken great strides in making it a reality. Once again, we’re revolutionizing the industry with what this amazing technology can achieve.

1. The model is no doubt good but there are some that I can forsee in it:
   The unit owner will still be not fully independent; (s)he will have to depend on an external entity for fuel supply.
2. The unit will not be fully portable. If I have to take the unit to a remote area for extended period of time, there are chances that I may run out of fuel.
3. What if the user runs out of fuel and has no spares at home. Does the consumer wait for the mail carrier to bring new?
4. Isn't there a big risk in the whole supply chain? If the mail carrier goes on strike, that's it; darkness all over.
5. What happens in cases of disasters when all the transportation to a certain part of the country is cut off?
6. There'll be precious energy wasted by the carriers to supply energy to the consumer. This is not a very sustainable process. It is like burning gasoline to supply gasoline to gas stations.

Why can't Jadoo have it's own Hydrogen fuel generator power by PV in it? I guess, this is Jadoo's model of having a continuous revenue stream that is hampering production of an innovative idea. Now that I think about it, this business model will provide such an obvious hole in the consumer expectation and product feature cycle that very soon new players will enter the market and the technology will leapfrog.

For a long time I used to wonder how I can contribute to protecting the environment. The two easy (pragmatic) and the only clear paths I saw were to save/plant trees and burn less fuel (gasoline, diesel, firewood, etc.). And I must say that that I have been very faithful to my ideas; I plant trees and I don't burn firewood unless I am camping of course.

But, is this enough? Am I done, is the environment safe? Probably not. It's safer but it is not protected from me, yet. And, this is because there are certain other habits I have cultivated over the past few years that are detrimental to the environment. A friend of mind recently forwarded this article to me, which exposed a number of ways I may be harming the environment, ranging from drinking bottled water to eating excessive meat.

So, here's what you can do to help protect the environment:

1. Take luke warm showers instead of hot ones.
2. Avoid hot drying of dishes in dishwasher. See if you can handwash small utensils rather than dumping them into the dishwasher.
3. Run large loads of laundry instead of smaller loads more frequently.
4. Dry clothes on the lines in your garage. Does that bedsheet/kitchen towel/curtain really needs an electric drier? Can your shoes/sneakers be air dried?
5. Avoid using anti-weed spray/feed in your lawns. See if you can take some time out to weed the weeds out of your lawn manually.
6. If your house is not on an acre of a property or more you can use electric garden tools rather than gasoline powered.
7. Have you considered opening blinds and curtains on your windows and doors to let the sunlight come in and warm the house in winter months?
8. Using fans inside of your house reduces electricity consumption.
9. Set your garden sprinker system to run every 3-4 days instead of twice a day during wet/rainy season.
10. Use organic manure in your garden/lawn.
11. Reduce your shower time from 15 mins to 10 mins. Turn the shower off when you are using body soap or shampoo.
12. Turn the water off when you are brushing your teeth.
13. See if you can use brooms and mops to clean your hard floors instead of vaccum cleaners.

All of the steps above either help reduce gasoline, water, and electricity consumtion or reduce the toxic chemicals that we introduce into the ground water and natural streams.

Becoming eco-friendly and green is not an overnight transformation but a change in lifestyle that takes several months or even years. Get green and spread the word and practices around.

There was a news article a few months back that mentioned Larry Page and Sergey Brin having invested in Nanosolar, a company that makes thin-film solar cells. I am not sure who is influencing whom, is it Vinod Khosla guiding these two or is it the other way round. Whichever way it is, it's a good development.

I have been a fan of PV (PhotoVoltaic) for a long time and Fuel Cells have caught my attention in the last 3-4 years. This is for the first time I am witnessing a sense of urgency in wealthy investors to get a fair share of these alternative energy producing device manufacturers.

But, at Google the developments are taking a different turn. It now has a position on its payroll that I have never hear of before; Corporate Environmental Programs Manager. Here's what Robyn Beavers, the Corporate Enviromental Programs Manager, at Google has to say:

Soon we plan to begin installation of 1.6 megawatts of solar
photovoltaic panels at our Mountain View campus. This project will be the
largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S., and we think
it's one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. The panels will
cover the roofs of the four main buildings of the Googleplex, and also those of
two additional buildings across the street. There will also be a portion of this
installation on new solar panel support structures in a few parking lots. The
amount of electricity that will be generated is equivalent to powering about
1,000 average California homes. We’ll use that electricity to power several of
our Mountain View office facilities, offsetting approximately 30% of our peak
electricity consumption at those buildings.

So, what's new about it? Well, nothing except that this is yet another commitment for renewable energy and enviromental friendliness at a Google, one that will now directly affects thousands of educated employees at a prestigious center of technical excellence. The other thing to notice is the capacity of this installation, 1.6 MW.

Quite honestly, I had no idea that Vinod Khosla has his time, energy, and money dedicated, at least in part, to alternative energy source(s). It is indeed very encouraging to know that venture capitalists are now beginning to take interest into alternative energy sources. To me it seems that we are in time where the PC and software industry would have been in the late 70s. There a technology out there that we all know is the future, there's a few people and big companies invested, the technology is still expensive, and the market is not yet ripe, but the imperative is huge, and small time players are experimenting with different products. Isn't this exactly how it was with the PC industry when the, then small, players got into it; Microsoft, Apple, etc.

I had always heard of how big companies lobby and eat out or threaten small new entrants. But Vinod shares a story where a big European oil executive threatens to lower the oil prices so low that the whole biofuel industry will become economically implausible. Quite a statement to make, but one that reveals how difficult and challenging it can get for innovators to get going. But the interesting thing out of this all is Vinod's proposed tax structure that can be used as a hedge against this price manipulation. Smart idea!

This is the presentation ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-570288889128950913&q=vinod+khosla%2C+google ) that Vinod shared with Google folks. It's a good one to go through because there are some amazing statistics. At a lot of points during the presentation it raised questions in my mind about a lot of things. Also, this is a good introduction to how legislations are made and how they can be influenced by the influential few.

But this presentation and several others still leave me with a question, why biofuels only, why not PV or Fuel Cells?