Faster Cars and Smellier Air

First off, Robert Reich has just written much of what I wrote here on Tuesday, but way smarter. Here’s hoping this guy gets a prominent cabinet position.

Next, this weekend’s Green Festival at the Washington DC Convention Center. If nothing more, it was great to see so many people show up in the name of living in harmony with the environment… even if some of it did involve holistic vegan Yoga massage.

I got to meet William McDonough at a book signing (not sure whether his bow-tie was biodegradable) and talk to several solar contractors. I was pleased to see The Washington Area Bicyclist Association and the Anacostia Watershed Society were there to represent.

One group that was new to me was The Electric Vehicle Association of Greater Washington DC. These folks brought a Prius modified with a kit to permit recharging by plug, without gasoline. It was neat to see and hear about one of these things first-hand.

Another interesting attendee was Burr Technologies. This company is trying to assemble computers that use less power, primarily by the use of more efficient power supplies that can be passively cooled, without resorting to a fan. In the same vein, this month brings the news that researchers at Penn State have made progress with the use of electrocaloric plastics for high-efficiency electric cooling, which would be perfect for computer chips. Having grown disenchanted with “Sleep Mode”, I think these folks may be onto something.

Start Me Up?

Computers have to load instructions into memory when first starting up. This process can take a long time. As Peter Gibbons learned in Office Space, the same is true for shutdown, when your computer has to clean-up open resources.

Well-intentioned engineers came up with Sleep Mode as a solution: instead of turning a computer off, just dump the system state to the hard drive, power down most components, and reload the state later, if needed.

Unfortunately, sleep mode hasn’t worked out so well. Even today, many non-Mac laptops struggle to wake when opened, presumably a consequence of poor software/hardware integration.

But even systems that wake up successfully when roused by an operator have come smashing up against a broken abstraction of the Network Age.

A “server” is any computer that provides services to another computer. When most clients were little more than screens or teletypes, this was a useful distinction. Today, it’s often hard to distinguish the server from the client. If you stream downloaded television shows from your desktop computer to a set-top box, or sync your calendar from your desktop to a mobile device, which machine is the server? And what happens if that “server” happens to be asleep when you need its services?

Efforts to address this, like Wake-on-LAN mode, have not seen wide adoption. So maybe the better solution is to reduce the computer’s energy footprint all the time.

Government is not perfect. But properly managed, it can harness our collective genius in times of challenge.

Government investment brought us the Internet, put us on the Moon, and built a system of trails and highways that reach from one end of this country to the other. New investments like these in energy technology can save us from global climate change and from our dangerous dependence on foreign oil. The money we spend will also put Americans to work and help jump start our stalled economy.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/newenergy

It’s Election Day in the United States, everybody. Let’s do this.

We got to see many of the Maryland homes on the DC Solar Tour this weekend. The center of Maryland solar activity is clearly Takoma Park. Sadly, Roscoe the Rooster and Chris Carter’s Lone Gunmen have moved on. But happily, the hippies endure. They are a little grayer and have traded in their VW Buses for Toyota Prii.

Several photovoltaic technologies were on display. “Green All Over” on Conway Avenue has SunPower panels. These are traditional, crystalline Silicon panels… very effective and very expensive, not just in terms of cost but also input manufacturing energy. I read in Scientific American that SunPower is able to squeeze out a few more watts by moving the conduction wires to the back of the cells, where they don’t block the sun.

Lots of innovative companies are now hard at work on “thin film” solar panels. Thin films can essentially be painted onto a surface using printing technology, and can be bent or rolled-up without damage. Alternately, they can be incorporated into ordinary building materials like roofing tiles.

The cheerful, marigold “Hutchinswasser Haus” on Holly Avenue employs UNI-SOLAR thin film panels. These are thin film, amorphous Silicon cells. UNI-SOLAR is manufactured by Energy Conversion Devices. Another, prominent competitor in this space is Innovalight.

No Takoma Park solar tour would be complete without Mike Tidwell’s Clean Energy Home, and in fact he and his Chesapeake Climate Action Network give them regularly, complete with endearing descriptions of his “pancake-powered” push lawnmower.

Mike was able to score BP (formerly British Petrolium) thin-film panels before they gave up and ceased production, re-focusing on traditional Silicon. BP’s effort, like that of the more successful First Solar company, employed Cadmium Terlluride.

The other thin film technology on the horizon involves CIGS cells (Copper Indium Gallium Selenium) and is being pursued by companies like nanosolar and Miasolé. (source, Earth: The Sequel.)