In the abandoned mines and sandstones of the Midwest, compressed-air storage ventures are trying to convert the intermittent motions of the air into the kind of steady power that could displace coal.

Compressed-air energy storage plants use compressors to store electricity generated when it’s not needed. The air, pumped into large underground formations, is like a spring that’s been squeezed and when it’s needed, it can deliver a large percentage of the energy that it received.

The first and only such plant in the United States went online in 1991, and though the technology didn’t take off, it did prove that it worked. And now, combining cheap wind energy and compressed-air storage could create a potent new force in the electricity markets.

“This is the first nonhydro renewables technology that can replace coal in the dispatch order,” said David Marcus, co-founder of General Compression, a new company that received $16 million in funding from investors including the utility Duke Energy to build a full-scale prototype of their energy storage system, which would be deployed with arrays of wind turbines.

The dispatch order is how grid operators decide which power plants to switch on. They have to balance the amount of generation and consumption or they risk the grid’s stability. The amount of power people use goes up and down, but it stays above a certain level all the time. To meet that need, utilities buy consistent always-on power from the large, cheap coal and nuclear power plants that are the backbone of the electric grid.

The electricity they need to meet the peaks in energy demand is generated by what are known as peaking plants, usually powered by natural gas. When the wind is blowing, it is usually the cheapest peaking power available, so it keeps the natural gas plants shut off. If they want to replace coal plants in the pecking order, though, they’ll have to work all the time.

And to do that, they’ll need a way to unlink themselves from the on-again, off-again nature of the wind.

“It’s a fractal problem,” said Marcus. “You have intermittency problems on every time scale.”

That problem has brought compressed-air energy storage roaring back. Marcus’ company has a long way to go before they can turn their prototype system into the kind of technology that can be deployed at the nation’s vast wind farms. But compressed air storage of one type or another is on the verge of becoming a mainstream power technology.

The nation’s largest energy storage option right now is pumped hydroelectricity. When excess electricity is present in a system, it can be used to pump water up to a reservoir. Then, when that power is needed, the water is sent through a turbine to generate electricity. The U.S. electric system has 2.5 gigawatts of pumped hydro storage capacity, but most of the good, cheap sites are already occupied, and creating new reservoirs is not environmentally benign.

While wind farmers say storage isn’t technically necessary until the amount of wind power on the grid exceeds 20 or 30 percent of the electrical load, private analysts, the Electric Power Research Institute, and the Department of Energy have identified grid-scale storage as a key need for the rapidly diversifying electricity system.

And going forward, compressed-air energy storage looks like the cheapest option available. Independent analysts have come to similar conclusions.

The more images on the website of the Laboratório de Bioluminescência de Fungos at the University of Sao Paulo is here.

A Brief History of Geobacter

Geobacter is a mud-loving microbe that Lovley and his colleagues first discovered over twenty years ago in the Potomac River.  Initially the team developed Geobacter as a means of bioremediating contaminated soil. The organism “breathes” iron and other metals, which enables it to render petroleum-based contaminants into carbon dioxide.  It can even remediate radioactive metals in groundwater.  In 2002 Lovley and his team discovered that Geobacter could generate electricity from organic matter in sediment and wastewater.  By 2005 they had identified the mechanism: the “pili,” hairlike protruberances that festoon Geobacter like nanowires.  They create a thin biofilm that conducts electrons from the organism to iron in the mud or wastewater.  Other bacteria colonies also anchor themselves to a food source by attaching a biofilm to it, but Geobacter is especially skillful at electron transmission.  Possibly in combination with other bio-based treatment systems, Geobacter could help transform sewage treatment plants from energy-sucking pieces of infrastructure into electricity generators that produce reusable water.

Geobacter and Microbial Fuel Cells

Dr. Lovley and his team developed a more powerful strain of Geobacter by adding a small electric current to the growing medium, or substrate.  The extra current forced Geobacter to work harder to shed its electrons.  In a few months a new, more powerful strain developed that appears to be suitable for application to microbial fuel cells using a variety of wastes or renewable substrates.  In a conventional microbial fuel cell, glucose or acetate provide the juice.  As a more powerful microbe, Geobacter could prove just as effective on less than ideal substrates such as wastewater or even beer waste.

For more information about this intriguing study, check out The Geobacter Project website here.

To see original posting of article on the CleanTechnica website, click here.

About a Jellyfish, cannot resist posting this:

This November 2009, a boat was capsized off Chiba in Japan, as its three-man crew was trying to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura jellyfish, a gelatinous beast that has inundated the waters of Japan since 2005. The giants, which can grow 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide and weigh up to 450 pounds (220 kilograms), have clogged fishing nets and poisoned potential catches with their toxic stings, costing coastal fishers billions of yen.

The gelatinous seaborne creatures are blamed for decimating fishing industries in the Bering and Black seas, forcing the shutdown of seaside power and desalination plants in Japan, the Middle East and Africa, and terrorizing beachgoers worldwide, the U.S. National Science Foundation says.

Scientists have since been racing to unlock the mysteries of this giant jellyfish species in an attempt to forecast invasions and prevent damages.

This June researchers at Hiroshima University made some of the first surveys of the jellyfish’s spawning grounds off the Chinese coast. The team found a huge new brood lurking in the waters, prompting experts to warn that another giant jellyfish invasion may be on the horizon.

Japanese scientists speculated that the jellyfish are drifting from China’s Yangtze River Delta, where unusually heavy rains may have created a flow that is pushing the jellyfish flotilla to Japan.

Another theory suggests that seas heated by global warming are better suited for breeding, turning the Nomura’s otherwise modest numbers into an armada.

As the research continues, Japanese fishers continue to grapple with another issue: What to do with all the jellyfish they’ve caught? So far, resourceful anglers have turned their unwanted catch into crab food, fertilizer, and novelty snacks—served dried and salted.

Reported on the National Geographic website.

The Seawater Greenhouse uses the sun, the sea and the atmosphere to produce fresh water and cool air. The process recreates the natural

hydrological cycle within a controlled environment. The entire front wall of the building is a seawater evaporator. It consists of a honeycomb lattice and faces the prevailing wind. Fans assist and

control air movement. Seawater trickles down over the lattice, cooling and humidifying the air passing through into the planting area.

Sunlight is filtered through a specially constructed roof, The roof traps infrared heat, while allowing visible light through to promote photosynthesis. This creates optimum growing conditions – cool and humid with high light intensity.

Cool air passes through the planting area and then combines with hot dry air from the roof cavity. The mixture passes through a second sea water evaporator creating hot saturated air which then flows through a condenser. The condenser is cooled by incoming seawater. The temperature difference causes fresh water to condense out of the air stream. The volume of fresh water is determined by air temperature, relative humidity, solar radiation and the airflow rate. These conditions can be replicated in the thermodynamic model and, with appropriate meteorological information, the detailed design and performance of the Seawater Greenhouse can be optimised for every suitable location and environment.

For more information in this exciting development by lighting designer turned innovative greenhouse inventor Charlie Paton, click here.

Also featured on www.treehugger.com

Paul Debevec, who spoke at TedTalks March 2009, is the master of  digital inventions that have powered the breathtaking visual effects in films like The Matrix, Superman Returns, King Kong and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He explains the scene-stealing technology behind Digital Emily, a digitally constructed human face so realistic it stands up to multiple takes. The image above shows Emily in the light stage during a scan, with all 156 of its white LED lights turned on. The most recent process requires only about fifteen photographs of the face under different lighting conditions  to capture the geometry and reflectance of a face. The photos are taken from a stereo pair of off-the-shelf digital still cameras, and a small enough number of images is required.

To read more about the creation process, visit Paul Devebec’s website here:

Below is a brief introductory video:

An eye-opening exploration of the human-plant relationship with author Michael Pollan. Featuring Michael Pollan and based on his best-selling book, this special takes viewers on an eye-opening exploration of the human relationship with the plant world — seen from the plants’ point of view. The program shows how four familiar species (the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato) evolved to satisfy our yearnings for sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control.

“Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulop, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, the plants have also benefited at least as much from their association with us. So who is really domesticating whom?”

Below is a preview of the film.  To see the full length video go to the PBS website

Los Angeles, CA – July 15, 2009 – OriginOil, Inc. (OOIL), the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform algae, the most promising source of renewable oil, into a true competitor to petroleum, today announced a breakthrough Dynamic Control System designed to respond continuously to the algae’s behavior. This invention improves energy efficiency and growth rates by ensuring the right types and amounts of light are used at all times as the algae grows to maturity.

“This is a true bio-feedback system,” said Scott Fraser, VP Operations and one of the inventors of the process. “The algae lets the controller know what it needs as it needs it, creating a self-adjusting growth system.”

At the heart of the system is a programmable controller that receives information from multiple sensor types reading the algae culture. The controller, which can be programmed for specific algae strains, responds by sending out commands to change lighting parameters such as intensity, pulsing frequency, and duty cycle. OriginOil’s existing automation of the nutrient delivery process. read more

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, or the Doomsday Vault as the media have nicknamed it, was officially opened on February 26, 2008, to serve as the ultimate safety net for one of the world’s most important natural resources.

The world’s seed collections are vulnerable to a wide range of threats – civil strife, war, natural catastrophes, and, more routinely but no less damagingly, poor management, lack of adequate funding, and equipment failures. Unique varieties of our most important crops are lost whenever any such disaster strikes: securing duplicates of all collections in a global facility provides an insurance policy for the world’s food supply.

The Vault is dug into a mountainside near the village of Longyearbyen, Svalbard. Svalbard is a group of islands nearly a thousand kilometres north of mainland Norway. Remote by any standards, Svalbard’s airport is in fact the northernmost point in the world to be serviced by scheduled flights – usually one lands a day. For nearly four months a year the islands are enveloped in total darkness. Permafrost and thick rock ensure that, even without electricity, the samples remain frozen.

Below is a video of  biodiversity warrior Cary Fowler, and an inside tour of the facilities.

Today the Vault holds over 420,000 samples. Information on the seeds held in the Vault, and how deposits can be made, is available at the vault website

Eli Zabar’s greenhouse operation in the Upper East Side of Manhattan illustrates the potential for integrating commercial-scale food production onto rooftops. Significantly more food can be produced over a much longer growing season in rooftop greenhouse operations than with open-air green roofs and container gardens. Zabar’s idea for the greenhouses emerged around 1995 from two of his interests. He wanted to stretch the season during which he could sell fresh, local tomatoes, and he wanted to use the waste heat from a bakery he operates. “When I put the two ideas together, the light bulb went off,” Zabar told EBN. He currently manages four greenhouses, the largest 40′ x 100′ (12 x 30 m), with a full-time greenhouse staff of two. Since he built the first of his rooftop greenhouses, Zabar has always grown in soil. While he has visited lots of successful hydroponic greenhouse operations, he believes that produce grown in soil tastes better. “I’m not interested in hydroponics,” he said. With soil-based growing, he’s also able to make use of compost that he produces on the roof using discards from his market. He has an eight-foot (2.4 m) diameter drum with an auger that is turned regularly to mix the compost. His recipe for compost includes sawdust and bread from his bakery (which supplies about 1,000 restaurants in the city). Zabar would like to compost more of his organic waste but can’t. “We could do a ton more, but there’s a space limitation,” he said. Ducts from his bakery ovens heat the rooftop greenhouses, providing all of the needed heat for his lettuces and herbs. For tomatoes, he has to supplement that heat to maintain an optimal temperature of 75°F (24°C).