Archive for the ‘researchers’ Category

A call for scientists to call on citizens

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

A research paper in tomorrow’s Science shows that higher levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide inhibit plants’ ability to take up nitrogen from the soil. This counteracts much of the boost plants get from breathing more carbon dioxide, and it could pose a threat to agriculture.

What flashed in my mind when I saw the paper was that I’d like to find a way to track changes in the Community Supported Agriculture farm I belong to. I’ve been a member for more than a decade and I’m likely to remain so for years to come. Maybe I could contribute to climate change science by collecting data. But there are several problems: I don’t know what data to collect or how to collect it, and I don’t know who to collect it for.

Citizen science, the idea of ordinary citizens contributing to science, could be especially helpful for monitoring the effects of climate change. People are everywhere, and they usually have the means of communicating what they observe.

A research paper in the April 6, 2007 Science is a good example of the potential of citizen science. The paper showed that the length of the fungi fruiting season in southern England more than doubled in the last half century due to warmer summers and wetter autumns. The data for the paper — more than 55,000 records — was collected between 1950 and 2005 by a nonscientist.

Scientist and writer Aaron E. Hirsh wrote an essay in the New York Times in 2009 that called for greater citizen participation in science. He singled out climate change:

“Widespread networks of observers are especially well-suited to detecting global change — shifts in weather patterns; movements in the ranges of species; large-scale transformations of eco-systems…”

Hirsh wrote the essay before a series of stolen e-mails touched off the recent media storm that has hurt climate scientists’ standing with the public, but it could hold the key to repairing the damage and preventing similar events in the future. As Hersh put it:

“What may be most important about Citizen Science is what it could mean for the relationship between citizens and science. When everyone is gathering data, that rather austere and forbidding tower becomes a shared human pursuit.”

An example of climate change citizen science is Project BudBurst, which taps the public to collect data about the timing of leafing and flowering.

I’d like to see more scientists develop how-to kits for citizens. Online tools should make developing and promoting citizen science fairly straightforward. Websites with how-to videos and forms for recording data are well within the means of most researchers.

Social media could be useful for matching citizens with science projects. The data collector in the fungi study was the lead author’s father. The key is making it easy for people without connections in the world of science to contribute.

A few questions: how do we expand citizen science beyond visual observations of plants and animals? For example, are there ways citizens can contribute to monitoring the hydrological cycle, say by collecting data on soil moisture? What about collecting and transporting samples?

I imagine a network of laboratories that cooperate by analyzing locally-collected samples and making the results available to researchers around the world. If that were to materialize, it would be no sweat for me to swing by a nearby university to drop off samples on my way home from picking up the vegetables.

Posted in climate change, ideas, researchers | 1 Comment »

Caldeira on geoengineering: scary if we do, scary if we don’t

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Scientific American has a meaty interview with climate scientist Ken Caldeira about geoengineering. He describes plausible scenarios where we could deploy solar radiation management schemes to avert catastrophes, and he also describes some of the risks involved:

“The offsetting of sunlight and CO2 is not perfect. We would expect there to be some impact on ocean circulation. Ocean currents could change dramatically. We’re basically entering into uncharted territory here. There’s a host of potential bad things that could happen…. Any time you try to intervene in a complex system, you have unexpected results.”

One risk the interview didn’t cover is the rebound effect if a solar radiation management scheme is halted. I had the chance to ask Caldeira in 2007 about his research on the rebound effect (Climate Engineering Is Doable, as Long as We Never Stop). Here’s an excerpt from that article:

Bring the geo-engineering process to a halt, and those sun-warmed carbon sinks spit the carbon dioxide right back into the atmosphere. The rebound warming, to temperatures that would have been reached without the geo-engineering, would be 10 to 20 times the pace of today’s global warming. The rapid warming, up to 7 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, would wreak havoc on the planet and threaten civilization.

To prevent disaster, the geo-engineering process would have to continue as long as carbon-dioxide levels were elevated. A quarter of the carbon dioxide that comes out of your car’s tailpipe is still in the atmosphere a thousand years later, Caldeira said.

“We’ve never had systems work for a thousand years without failure,” he added.

Even scarier is the potential political and military fallout from geoengineering that Caldeira touches on in the SciAm interview:

“I think it’s highly likely that as a result of any climate intervention there will be winners and losers. In a nuclear-armed world, a world with terrorism and where losers have the ability to strike back at winners, the potential for the kind of political or military risk to overwhelm any environmental benefits is very real.”

Posted in climate change, researchers | 2 Comments »

Hansen in town

Tuesday, April 6th, 2010

Famed NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen is scheduled to speak at the Down2Earth conference here in Boston on Saturday. Hansen has been sounding the alarm about global warming since the Reagan administration.

Posted in climate change, researchers | No Comments »

Report on ultracapacitors: major advances on tap (updated)

Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010

You’ll be hearing a lot more about ultracapacitors in the next few years. The devices are poised to transform energy storage by taking over high-power functions from batteries in three key areas:

* Tying wind and solar farms to the power grid
* Stabilizing the grid
* Powering hybrid and electric vehicles

The ERN Research report, Ultracapacitors: Emerging technologies for high-power energy storage, analyzes ultracapacitor technologies for these large-scale applications.

The report details ultracapacitor types, emerging ultracapacitor applications, the components that make up ultracapacitors, the factors that contribute to ultracapacitor cost, performance variables, and future directions.

The report includes detailed profiles of

* 15 startups that are readying potential ultracapacitor breakthroughs
* 27 manufacturers and 29 other companies that have recently developed ultracapacitor technologies
* 52 researchers around the world who are pushing the boundaries of ultracapacitor science and engineering

Some highlights:

One of the hottest ultracapacitor technologies is electrodes made from closely-packed, vertical carbon nanotubes. These prototype electrodes store an order of magnitude more energy than today’s best commercial devices. Players to watch include MIT spinoff FastCAP Systems, research firm ADA Technologies and major ultracapacitor manufacturer Nippon Chemi-con.

Much ultracapacitor development is aimed at driving down costs. This usually means making cheaper carbon electrodes. Players to watch include startup SolRayo, activated carbon maker Reticle, research company TDA Research and University of Kentucky researcher Stephen Lipka.

Electrolytes are another key area, and ionic liquids and lithium are the hot topics. Players to watch include ADA Technologies, Kansai University’s Masashi Ishikawa, Bologna University’s Marina Mastragostino and research company LithChem.

Meanwhile, cutting-edge materials and nanotechnology research promise to push the boundaries of ultracapacitor technology. Researchers to watch include Yonsei University’s Kwang-Bum Kim, University of Texas’ (and Graphene Energy, Inc.’s) Rod Ruoff, MIT’s Yang Shao-Horn and Florida State University’s Jim Zheng.

Given the expected boom in ultracapacitors over the next five years and the differences among application requirements, it’s likely that there will be room for several emerging technologies to reach the market.

Ultracapacitor energy storage capacities are likely to increase by five to 10 times in the next five years, but ultracapacitors aren’t likely to make batteries obsolete. They will, however, replace batteries for many power-intensive applications, including hybrid vehicle acceleration and regenerative braking.

Several laboratory ultracapacitor prototypes are already providing 10 times the power and capacity of today’s commercial ultracapacitors. The key question is how readily these materials can be mass-produced and whether they can be made cheaply enough.

Posted in ERN, batteries, capacitors, informative, researchers, startups, vehicles | No Comments »

Personalized energy: toward a prototype

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Daniel Nocera’s vision of a solar water splitter on every rooftop is moving steadily down the long road to commercial reality.

Sun Catalytix, the spinoff company the MIT chemistry professor formed to commercialize his lab’s cobalt phosphate catalyst, is building a prototype and plans to have a kilowatt demonstration system with two years. Here’s Cnet’s writeup of Nocera’s recent update of his company’s progress.

The grand scheme calls for every home and business to use photovoltaics to generate electricity and solar water splitting to generate hydrogen for vehicles and fuel cells. The company’s catalyst provides a stable, inexpensive way to extract hydrogen from water using sunlight.

Posted in hydrogen, ideas, researchers, startups | No Comments »

Manufacturing clean energy

Saturday, July 11th, 2009

The energy and climate portion of the G8 nations’ statement issued at the end of this week’s summit includes a promise to intensify clean energy research and development.

I’m a big supporter of basic research and I hope a lot more money goes to science, but a less sexy piece of the clean energy puzzle deserves equal attention: manufacturing. An exciting piece of technology isn’t going to do much good if it can’t get out in the world, and that means it has to be mass producible.

Sterling Energy Systems, makers of a concentrating solar-thermal power system, recently unveiled their second-generation model. The company is tapping the automotive industry supply chain to enable economical high-volume production. It’s using stamped sheet metal to make the system’s mirrors.

This makes me wonder if in the near future we’ll be able to point to a breakthrough in production as the Model T of clean energy. It also makes me think of John Deutch’s comment that energy innovation needs to be a team sport where science, engineering and business all happen at the same time.

Another often overlooked aspect of this interrelationship is research focused on manufacturing processes. One researcher who exemplifies this is Frederik Krebs of the Technical University of Denmark’s National Laboratory for Sustainable Energy. Much of the polymer scientist’s work is focused on roll-to-roll solar cell manufacturing. It’s not headline-grabbing work, but it could quietly make the difference in when and how clean energy technologies reach the market.

The familiar R&D acronym has recently been expanded to RD&D, meaning either research, development and demonstration, or research, development and deployment. We could start using RD3 to encompass both meanings. And maybe we could parse this further by adding manufacturing: RD3M.

Posted in funding, government, researchers, solar cells, solar thermal | No Comments »

Green doings in Beantown

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

It’s been busy here in Boston. Two conferences hit town this week (along with midwinter temperatures): the Conference on Clean Energy and Greenbuild.

And what a contrast.

Greenbuild is a sea of well appointed exhibitor booths filling the massive Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Bishop Desmond Tutu kicked off the series of high-profile keynote speakers. One hundred six educational sessions covered all aspects of sustainable design, construction and building management.

The Conference on Clean Energy was a much more intimate affair of panel discussions ranging from technology spinout strategies to regulatory and policy wish lists, and topped off by a business plan competition.

Conference on Clean Energy highlights:

Harvard’s George Church and MIT’s Angela Belcher answered the question of whether they would prefer to win a Nobel Prize or launch a green Google. Both chose green Google, reasoning it would effect greater change.

Science writer Oliver Morton’s keynote speech covered his new book Eating the Sun. He laid out an elegant vision of energy flows as the paradigm for natural energy systems ranging from the astronomical to the molecular and for sustainable energy technologies. I look forward to reading the book.

Speakers on the venture capital panel emphasized that though economic upheaval has changed the game, the pipeline is still open. Marianne Wu of Mohr Davidow said that VCs are continuing to invest in new clean tech businesses because of fundamental trends and the increasing pace of innovation, particularly with universities gearing up energy-related research.

This doesn’t mean business as usual, however. Chuck McDermott of RockPort Capital said that startup valuations are in flux: “We’ve hit the reset button but we don’t know yet what numbers will come up”. He also said it would be better for startups to avoid trying to raise funds in 2009.

The Ignite Clean Energy Competition 2009 kickoff topped off the Conference on Clean Energy last night. The business plan competition for clean energy entrepreneurs started with a networking/teambuilding mixer where five randomly chosen competitors had the opportunity to give one-minute pitches.

The pitches:

  • simultaneous waste heat and waste material recycling
  • waste conversion to hydrogen and biofuels
  • an information system for connecting electric car drivers to charging ports
  • a foldable shopping cart that converts to a bicycle trailer
  • limitless clean energy from water

Even though it’s only tangentially related to energy, I was tickled by the bicycle trailer shopping cart. A couple of years ago I thought it was a neat idea but couldn’t find one. I sketched out a plan for what I wanted, but quickly encountered several engineering challenges, and so filed it away in my overflowing ideas folder where it languishes alongside many ungerminated seeds of screenplays and novels. I hope the idea is well executed and I get to buy one.

The pitch for limitless clean energy from water mysteriously provided no information and hinted at world-changing potential. We’ve all heard this many times before. But rather than dismiss the presenter, I choose to hold out the hope that maybe this time it’ll be different.

Posted in funding, ideas, informative, researchers | No Comments »

Pitching clean tech in turbulent times

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

Congratulations to Riccardo Signorelli, winner of the MIT Elevator Pitch Contest last Saturday. Signorelli and his MIT colleagues developed a carbon nanotube ultracapacitor that promises to boost storage capacities to battery levels while retaining capacitors’ fast charge and discharge rates (see Nanotubes hold more electricity, TRN’s coverage of the researchers’ breakthrough two and half years ago).

At the MIT Energy Night earlier this month Signorelli told me that the nanotube growth process is well in hand and he’s focusing on developing a scalable manufacturing process. During his winning pitch Signorelli said he’s looking for people with manufacturing experience. Check out the webcast of the contest. Signorelli’s pitch is at about the 1:21 mark.

I’m no expert on venture financing, but I’d bet on Signorelli getting funding and building a team despite the current financial crisis. Two key applications he’s targeting are storing energy for intermittent renewable generation technologies like wind power and replacing toxic lead batteries in delivery truck fleets (UPS, FedEx, etc.) that burn through batteries every two to three months. It’s a strong, novel technology addressing acute needs.

Although the credit crunch has hit the clean tech sector, the impact is strongest on existing companies looking for later round financing. Early-stage ventures are likely to fare better, according to Rob Day, a VC with @Ventures. “Early-stage cleantech venture capital remains a very attractive investment area,” he said in a recent post on his Cleantech Investing blog. Incidentally, Day was one of the judges for the Elevator Pitch Contest’s energy track.

Posted in capacitors, funding, researchers, startups | No Comments »

Are we too late?

Friday, September 5th, 2008

Can we convert our energy system from fossil fuels to clean, renewable energy sources in time to avoid ecological and economic disaster?

Many climate scientists say it’s too late to avoid climate disruption, and many proponents of the peak oil theory say it’s too late to avoid economic disruption. Remaking our energy system is a decades-long process. The argument goes that we don’t have that kind of time.

First, most major renewable energy sources are works in progress; there’s a long lag time between laboratory innovation and everyday technology. Second, there’s a lot of work to do on the electric power grid to support increasing demand and to handle distributed clean energy generation. I touched on those issues in a couple of posts (Blackout memories, Clean energy and the grid).

Third, energy-consuming technologies must be converted to cleaner technologies. I talked about the challenges of converting the US car population to clean technologies in a recent post (Is Better Place good enough?). There’s also aircraft, home heating, and factories that are powered by their own fossil fuel plants.

None of this is to suggest that we give up or even ease up. We have no choice but to convert our energy system, and any delay makes it harder. But it does raise questions about what we do and what our priorities are. Should our energy research and development efforts account for increasingly volatile weather, agricultural disruption, shifting populations, fuel shortages, economic hardship, etc.? Should we stress decentralization by focusing on technologies that make regions, communities and individuals more energy self-sufficient?

I think a lot of energy research either tacitly or consciously assumes a political, economic and environmental continuity that may not survive for very long. Should scientists and engineers keep their heads down, work as hard as possible, and only address the larger context as citizens and advisers, or should the research itself reflect the external realities?

In recent years researchers have become more pragmatic by addressing the practical implications of new technologies. More recently some energy researchers have begun to think holistically by considering how their work fits into end-to-end energy systems and how it affects the environment. It’s a trend I’d like to see continue.

Posted in ideas, policy, researchers | No Comments »