innovation

New breed of houses makes use of carbage

Guess what will save the economy and the environment? Buying a new car! Cadillac ranch? OK, maybe not save — but according to the folks at Oregon-based Miranda Homes, it can help. The automobile industry has lost some half a million jobs and $50 billion in revenue while we hang on to our old jalopies. […]

Everything about this idea is recycled … even the idea

A boat made of plastic bottles! Now that's cool. Why hasn't it been done before?

Greening the alleys of Los Angeles

This article is part of a collaboration with Planetizen, the web’s leading resource for the urban planning, design, and development community. Green alley projects are popping up in cities all over the U.S. and Canada, in an effort to make the concrete jungle a little better at absorbing rainwater. A new program in Los Angeles […]

Is Toyota developing a purely solar-powered car?

An AP report is generating headlines around the world:

Toyota Motor Corp. is secretly developing a vehicle that will be powered solely by solar energy ...

According to The Nikkei, Toyota is working on an electric vehicle that will get some of its power from solar cells equipped on the vehicle, and that can be recharged with electricity generated from solar panels on the roofs of homes. The automaker later hopes to develop a model totally powered by solar cells on the vehicle, the newspaper said without citing sources.

Getting some electricity from rooftop PV panels isn't news, though it is a good idea, if only a "symbolic gesture" until panel costs drop sharply. (See also Treehugger's "Solar-Powered Toyota Prius Project.")

But there isn't enough rooftop area to run a car solely on rooftop solar cells. I don't see how it would work even for an ultra-lightweight short-range city car with a really big roof area -- an ungainly, unaerodynamic design. And don't forget, cars are often parked inside.

With heat pumps, smart cooperation is as important as technology

Commenter Pangolin made a point about the cost of ground source heat pumps, an energy-saving technology, in his comment about Hansen's open letter: "If I cluster installation of my geo-exchange systems (4 homes) I can realize significant savings in the greatest cost of the system, the drilling for the ground loop. If I bundle systems into neighborhood or block thermal-service units unit costs go down again."

Just so. To take an extreme example, a neighbor of mine had a ground source heat pump installed for $15,000 in a single-family residence (her home was ideal for the technology in a number of ways). Normally such systems run $20,000-$40,000. However, that cost can drastically be altered when shared. In 1992, a HUD Oklahoma apartment complex, Park Chase Apartments [PDF], installed heat pumps for 348 units for a cost of around $6,800 per unit -- about $10,000 per unit in 2009 dollars.

Even on the four-unit basis Pangolin mentions, the price could be lowered not only by a shared ground loop, but by shared pumps, and by timing installation to coincide with road repair, and placing the loop under the street. I suspect that done on the block level or even along a single street the length of a block, this could lower costs to $15,000 per unit.

This is not a technological change in the usual sense. But it makes use of smart cooperation to use technology more effectively. And this is only one of many cases where we can use cooperation to drastically lower the cost of the investments we need to make to replace fossil fuels. You can look at it as a form of technology if you want to. Certainly it is innovation -- an innovation in social relations rather than machines.

The World Community Grid sets its sights — and processing power — on clean energy

IBM’s World Community Grid is a global network of computers linked up to become a single super-computer. The processing power of idling computers is put to use number crunching solutions to AIDS, Dengue Fever, um, Human Proteome Folding, and, now, clean energy: The mission of the Clean Energy Project is to find new materials for […]

The X-Prize and the dream of a losing presidential candidate

John McCain might have lost the presidency, but he still has a shot at achieving his battery dream. The X-Prize Crazy-Green-Idea contest has three finalists, and one of them stars a magic battery. Check them out and vote here.

Helicopters collect whale snot from blowholes!

I’m just saying.

A potentially game-changing development in concentrated solar PV

In the Toronto Star, Tyler Hamilton takes a close look at a cool new company, Morgan Solar, which has developed a potentially revolutionary form of "concentrating photovoltaic" solar technology. It’s intended to be simple and cheap enough to make solar ubiquitous, particularly for the developing world. Here’s the nut: Morgan Solar has come up with […]