Inhabitat reports on a new stadium in Taiwan designed by Toyo Ito that provides all it’s power via an enormous PV array built into the roof:

I’ve been collecting information for a post on this topic, but it appears our new mayor, Brewter McCracken just passed some legislation to start tinkering with the electrical grid. The details are a little sketchy (this seems more like a publicity stunt than an announcement of actual plans), the project seems to involve using the new meters that Austin Electric’s been installing to provide customers with realtime monitoring, facilitate distributed energy generation, and possibly introduce demand-based pricing for electricity. Hopefully Google will get on board and provide the data visualization to users.

Artist Jonathan Schipper had a show where he wrecked two cars into each other over a period of 5 days.  Sort of a meditation on the beauty of entropy. Timelapse video on the site

From Technology Review

One novel idea is to cool a system by using ions to push air molecules across a hot microprocessor, thereby creating a cooling breeze. So-called ionic-cooling systems have been demonstrated in research labs before, but now Tessera, an international chip-packaging company based in San Jose, CA, has demonstrated an ionic-cooling system integrated into a working laptop.

Tessera’s ionic cooler sits near a vent inside the laptop. Heat pipes, which transfer heat using the evaporation and condensation of a fluid, draw heat away from the computer’s processing units and toward the ionic-cooling system. Inside the ionic-cooling device are two electrodes: one that ionizes air molecules such as nitrogen, and another that acts as a receiver for those molecules. When a voltage is applied between the two electrodes, the ions flow from the emitter electrode to the collector. As they move, their momentum pushes neutral air molecules across a hot spot, cooling it down.

Green Car Congress brings news that researchers in the UK have developed a battery powered in part by catalyzing a reaction between atmospheric oxygen and litium.  They’re claiming up to 10x efficiency gains over current litium cells:

Lithium-air batteries use a catalytic air cathode in combination with an electrolyte and a lithium anode. Oxygen from the air is the active material for the cathode and is reduced at the cathode surface. An issue with Li-air batteries can be the accumulation of solid reaction products on the electrode, which blocks the contact between electrolyte and air.

The four-year EPSRC research project, which reaches its halfway mark in July, is targeting the development of a Li-air cell that is rechargeable and can sustain cycling. The project addresses a number of the materials issues necessary to realize this high energy storage battery based on a non-aqueous O₂ electrode. During the project, the team has so far more than tripled the capacity to store charge in the STAIR (St Andrews Air) cell.

Via Infoaesthetics:

While this “media” facade might strongly resemble that of “Flare Facade“, originally posted about a year ago, it is fundamentally different in its lack of any computational power, motors or sensors. Instead, designer Ned Kahn [nedkahn.com] developed a mechanical version which is composed of thousands of aluminum panels that move in the air currents and reveal the complex patterns of turbulence in the wind. The kinetic facade is designed for Technorama, a major science center in Switzerland, located in Winterthur, Switzerland, and visible from the large urban plaza in front of the museum. Similar works from the same artist can be admired on his wind themed portfolio page.

I love this guys work.  The first time i saw it was in person at a parking garage in Charlotte NC.  It’s facinating to watch.

The times has a great article written by a mathematician on the subject of the topological similarities between cities and living organisms.  This is a lot of text, but it’s interesting:

… But instead of focusing on the sizes of cities themselves, the new questions have to do with how city size affects other things we care about, like the amount of infrastructure needed to keep a city going.

For instance, if one city is 10 times as populous as another one, does it need 10 times as many gas stations? No. Bigger cities have more gas stations than smaller ones (of course), but not nearly in direct proportion to their size. The number of gas stations grows only in proportion to the 0.77 power of population. The crucial thing is that 0.77 is less than 1. This implies that the bigger a city is, the fewer gas stations it has per person. Put simply, bigger cities enjoy economies of scale. In this sense, bigger is greener.

The same pattern holds for other measures of infrastructure. Whether you measure miles of roadway or length of electrical cables, you find that all of these also decrease, per person, as city size increases. And all show an exponent between 0.7 and 0.9.

Now comes the spooky part. The same law is true for living things. That is, if you mentally replace cities by organisms and city size by body weight, the mathematical pattern remains the same.

…

But now consider the elephant or the mouse as an intact animal, a functioning agglomeration of billions of cells. Then, on a pound for pound basis, the cells of an elephant consume far less energy than those of a mouse. The relevant law of metabolism, called Kleiber’s law, states that the metabolic needs of a mammal grow in proportion to its body weight raised to the 0.74 power.

This 0.74 power is uncannily close to the 0.77 observed for the law governing gas stations in cities. Coincidence? Maybe, but probably not. There are theoretical grounds to expect a power close to 3/4. Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and his colleagues Jim Brown and Brian Enquist have argued that a 3/4-power law is exactly what you’d expect if natural selection has evolved a transport system for conveying energy and nutrients as efficiently and rapidly as possible to all points of a three-dimensional body, using a fractal network built from a series of branching tubes — precisely the architecture seen in the circulatory system and the airways of the lung, and not too different from the roads and cables and pipes that keep a city alive.

This seems to address some of the issues we’ve been discussing regarding the efficiency of shared infrastructure and the benefits of scale.

I hadn’t heard much about this in a few years so I did some digging and it looks like we’re on the verge of having some very interesting technology for networking.  Back before wireless routers became commonplace there was talk of using a house’s electrical wiring as a data network – after all the copper is already there, why not use it for signalling as well as power.  The problem is that all the stuff we plug into our electrical wires creates a lot of noise, so transmitting data packets at a reasonable speed is difficult (older standards were too slow to use for networking).

Well it looks like they’re managed to solve most of those problems.  There are systems now that operate at up to 200Mbps (Wireless-G maxes out at 20Mbps in best-case scenarios), and there are standards being worked out which will provide gigabit/second transmission rates.  The first chips for these new standards are expected to start rolling out later this year or early 2010.  The most exciting of these new standards, G.hn, is designed to work over power lines, phone lines, or coax (I suspect the transmission rates will vary depending on which line is being used).

The reason this is interesting to me is that it allows practically anything in your house to be networked; toasters, garage door openers, fridges, televisions, lights, security systems, speakers, HVAC systems, PV arrays, etc.  Anything that plugs in could be networked by simply adding another chip to it’s internal circuitry (I would guess these chips will cost less than $10 in bulk).  Think of the possibilities!  This allows control and monitoring, so not only can the lights turn themselves off when you leave the house, you could graph the exact energy consumption of every appliance in your house.  Coupled with demand pricing for electricity, this would enable enormous gains in energy efficiency.

From Good

Lake Mead stores water from the Colorado River. When full, it holds 9.3 trillion gallons, an amount equal to the water that flows through the Colorado River in two years. The water from Lake Mead is used for many things. It irrigates a million acres of crops in the United States and Mexico, and supplies water to tens of millions of people. Its mighty Hoover Dam generates enough electricity to power a half-million homes. Additionally, the power from Hoover Dam is used to carry water up and across the Sierra Nevada Mountains on its way to Southern California.

In 2000, the water level at Lake Mead was 1,214 feet, close to its all-time high. It’s been dropping ever since. When Lake Mead was built during the 1920s and 1930s, the western United States was enjoying one of the wettest periods of the past 1,200 years. Even today, our so-called drought is still wetter than the average precipitation for the area averaged over centuries. In other words, for the last 75 years, we’ve been partying like it’s 1929. Farmers grow rice by flooding arid farmland with water from Lake Mead; residents of desert communities maintain front lawns of green grass; golfers demand courses in areas where the temperature exceeds 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the summer.

In 2008, the Scripps Institute of Oceanography issued a paper titled “When will Lake Mead go dry?” which set the odds of Lake Mead drying up by 2021 at 50-50. No more water, no more electricity, no more pumping power.

“Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system,” concluded the paper’s authors. “The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region.”

One of the more radical proposals involves pumping water from the eastern United States (where many regions are suffering the consequences of flooded rivers) over the Rockies to the West. In a Las Vegas Sun interview on May 1, Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, said, “We’ve taken water from the West now for a hundred years, maybe it’s time to start taking water from the East, rather than from the West.” Another speculative proposal lies beyond the shores of California, where there’s an ocean of water available for desalinization. In April, the California Coastal Commission approved the West Basin Municipal Water District’s plan to build a desalination system in Redondo Beach that can desalt 100,000 gallons of seawater per day.

The power requirement for either proposal—desalting seawater or transporting water over great distance—is enormous. But if the only other alternative is a mass evacuation from the western United States, what other choice do we have?

As B-rad has been suggesting, the potential for harvesting energy from algae is immense, and quite real. The Austin Business Journal reports:

Biologists and engineers at The University of Texas at Austin are part of a $25 million project attempting to transform algal oil to jet fuel.

Algal feedstock is considered one of the best sources for biofuel. It is renewable, does not compete with food crops and grows in wet or dry environments using brackish water or treated wastewater. Furthermore, algae use carbon dioxide as a food source, which means greenhouse gases can be converted back to energy.

UT is home to one of the world’s largest collections of algae, UTEX, the Culture Collection of Algae . It has more than 3,000 strains and supplies them to scientists around the world.

The DARPA project is expected to spark commercial development of jet fuel for military and commercial applications and possibly diesel fuel for land transportation. One of the project’s goals is to produce algal oil-based jet fuel on a large scale at a cost to the user of $3 a gallon. The current cost of a gallon of diesel fuel made from algae ranges from $10-$20 a gallon.