A hundred years later, Ciamician’s apostles, chief among them Daniel Nocera, are still pursuing the “guarded secret of the plants.” Nocera, who is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is working to realize that long-ago dream of capturing “the guarded secret of the plants.” He has built an artificial leaf.

Photosynthesis “is how the whole world operates,” he said. “We’ve been operating like that for 2.5 billion years, and we’ll probably keep on operating like that.”

When dropped into a jar of water exposed to sunlight, the leaf bubbles like a tablet of Alka-Seltzer.

Nocera’s leaf, which he described in American Chemical Society’s journal Accounts of Chemical Research, is designed to capture the solar energy of the sun. It plays upon the underpinning principle of green plants’ photosynthesis, which splits water molecules to capture energy. It’s a simple contraption, free of wires and operating only with the help of reactive coatings. To convert energy from sunlight into chemical energy, the leaf splits water molecules into its component hydrogen and oxygen parts through the photosynthetic process.

This model is more practical than past efforts, which relied upon costly elements like platinum for manufacturing. It utilizes cheap, earth-abundant materials like cobalt and a nickel-molybdenum-zinc compound to do work its photosynthetic magic. A sunlight collector is sandwiched between the two film layers, which, when dropped into a jar of water exposed to sunlight, begins to bubble like a tablet of alka-seltzer. One side of the leaf produces hydrogen, the other, oxygen. The hydrogen bubbles, if captured, can be used in fuel cells to make electricity.

“You can use it under very, very simple engineered conditions,” Nocera said. “It lends itself to being highly distributed because of its simplicity.”

Nocera has big plans for his leaf. Because it’s easy to manufacture and doesn’t require a large infrastructure, he sees it as a means for producing energy for the billions of people living in the developing world. He can also envision uses for it in the remote wilderness; for example, if soldiers were dropped off in a rural area and needed to make their own fuel. For the developed world, there would be potential marketing possibilities to people wanting to live in a self-sustaining way and get off the grid. Practically, however, it might be more difficult for someone in North America to unplug than someone in, say, Sudan, since U.S. amenities are so closely tied to existing infrastructure. “That’s why people in the developing world could adopt this technology easier than in the developed world,” Nocera said. “That’s always the problem with renewables.”

The leaf requires complementary technology in hydrogen capture and usage.

Nocera says that the leaf needs to be improved and refined before it can make a positive impact in the developing world. First, nanotechnology may make it even more efficient. Rather than needing big panel hydrogen-yielding leaves, millions of microscopic nano leaf particles could be sprinkled into a smaller container of water to produce the same effect. This would save on space and manufacturing costs. “When you get into nano, there is a potential for big cost reductions,” he said. Secondly, Nocera imagines coating the edges of plastic with the reactive layers. The plastic would collect light and feed it to the photosynthenthetic periphery. This same principle could be applied to other materials, or to nanorods. “The thing I like about it a lot is that the simplicity and the architectural design of it makes itself really adaptable to lots of new avenues of exploration,” he said.

This vision, however, cannot be realized without complementary technology in hydrogen capture and usage. “At the end of the day, you’d need to take hydrogen into an existing infrastructure,” Nocera said. Fuel cells could be one option, but they are expensive. Or burning hydrogen in an engine or a turbine could potentially work, too. Unfortunately, those capabilities have not been developed yet, though companies and labs around the world, including Nocera’s, are working on it. He predicts the necessary innovation could arrive in about five years. “The downfall of a hydrogen-based economy is that it confronts that challenge,” he said.

“We’ve done the front end, and my greatest hope is that someone will come up with the way to capture hydrogen for fuel,” Nocera said. “If anyone came on board with the technology I could adopt it immediately.”

Top image: MIT professor Daniel Nocera has developed an artificial leaf chip that can split water molecules using light. Photo by Dominick Reuter

The city has typically emphasized green growth over architectural significance (it seeks to be the “world’s greenest city” by 2020.) But “much of the debate in Vancouver is over the architecture,” urbanist and architecture critic Trevor Boddy says. “Because while it’s been good for the environment – it’s been high-density and all that — the actual design has been uninspired and frankly boring.”

The 490-foot-tall “Beach and Howe” project, currently winding its way through the approval process, would up the design ante while still propelling Vancouver toward its green goal.

Designed by Copenhagen-based Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), Beach and Howe (named for its cross streets), would re-develop three tracts nestled under and alongside the Granville Bridge, a major highway portal into downtown Vancouver.

A 49-story tower would twist skywards, morphing from a triangular base into a roomy rectangular tower.

At street level, a linked complex of six- and nine-story buildings would emphasize community-oriented retail like grocery, liquor, and drug stores, as well as office spaces and childcare services.

From this mid-rise pedestal, a 49-story tower would twist skywards, morphing from a roughly 6,000 square-foot triangular base into a rectangular tower roomy enough to contain 600 apartments. The entire complex would create almost 200,000 square feet of space.

The dramatic curve’s visual punch is form with function. The design arose from mandated setbacks which shrank the footprint for tower construction, including buffers to retain sightlines for drivers on the bridge, prevent local parks from sitting in permanent shade, and allow for future street widening.

BIG’s challenge was to devise a dynamic city neighborhood as well as a high-density, architecturally significant tower within these restrictions. The solution also had to position lots windows toward those desirable sea and mountain vistas that are so attractive to potential residents and the developer’s financial bottom line. Vancouver helped by re-zoning the site for taller towers.

The city also called for a proposal that would create a unique “gateway” effect into downtown along the Granville Bridge. The site is “a key punctuation point” in the city’s skyline, says Brent Toderian of Toderian UrbanWORKS, who was Vancouver’s director of city planning from 2006 until earlier this week. “It’s not just about the building, it’s about how the building relates to our plans for the city, our values, the skyline, and our urban architectural dialogue.”

Beach and Howe could herald Vancouverism 2.0.

Given the combination of restrictions and opportunities, “we as designers asked a simple question,” says Kai-Uwe Bergmann, a principal architect at BIG. “The setback of 30 feet from the bridge makes sense where you have cars. But do you need it 200 feet up in the air?” The answer was no, you didn’t, which allowed BIG to develop a plan for structure that twisted and expanded as it rose.

The project will be built to the LEED Gold standard for environmentally sustainable construction, a city requirement. But what really makes Beach and Howe green, says Bergmann, is that that it reclaims “waste” spaces created by large-scale urban infrastructure like bridges and highways into high-density use. (“You’re left with scars in cities where you can’t imagine people would want to be,” he says.)

A mixed-use high-rise tower is “one of the greatest green inventions going,” says Boddy, “as long as you have workplaces nearby, and have good public transit.” A concentrated population in a small area shares infrastructure, ultimately reducing energy use, which lowers pollution as well as costs – all key to 21st century sustainable urbanism.

“A lot of the data is showing that the higher the density, the lower the per capita greenhouse gas,” says Patrick Condon, the James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Livable Environments at University of British Columbia. People who live in very high-density areas walk, bike, and use transit much more, and cars much less, says Condon. “As the density of downtown Vancouver [an area of about 2.5 square miles] has risen from 40,000 in 1990 to 90,000, where it is now, the number of car trips in and out of downtown have decreased rather than increased.”

Vancouver’s towers have so far been designed around sightlines, instead of growing out of site-specific conditions, says Bergmann. And the podium-plus-tower solution to livable, green urban growth “has really only been applied to entire blocks, [not] to fragmented spaces or places.”

With its answers to unique zoning restrictions and spatial challenges compared to the city’s other skyscrapers, the Beach and Howe complex will have “another layer of information and movement and people flow” says Bergmann. “We call it Vancouverism 2.0.”

San Francisco-based architect Scott Dergance of Blu Homes worked for 12 years on high-rise towers he describes as “usually stand-alones as opposed to being woven into the fabric of a city,” often in the Middle East and China. He calls Beach and Howe “the leading edge of a good trend in large-scale architecture” toward using innovative design to solve pragmatic urban problems, rather than “an ego-driven notion of style over substance.”

Top and homepage images: Renderings of Beach and Howe. Courtesy BIG

These days, there are a host of competing technologies – from diesel to hybrid to plug-in hybrid to battery electric – and environmental considerations to consider. Volatile gas prices add yet another layer of complexity. IntelliGauge, a new application for desktop and mobile devices from GE Capital Fleet Services, is designed to take all of those variables into account and help companies and consumers make smart decisions about their vehicle purchases.

The app, which is available for use on tablets, smartphones and desktops at geintelligauge.com, helps users calculate annual fuel savings, CO2 emissions and fuel efficiency. The intuitive interface asks users to input information about the makeup of their vehicles, annual mileage estimates and delivers a customized report that can be saved, shared or compared against other scenarios. Users can sign in using their LinkedIn accounts.

A screenshot from GE’s IntelliGauge app.

“Fuel price volatility continues to have a big impact on the decisions companies make, including vehicle replacement strategies,” said Brad Hoffelt, senior vice president and general manager of products and services at GE Capital Fleet Services. “We’re focused on identifying ways to couple technology solutions with our deep domain expertise to help our customers preserve capital and optimize fleet efficiency.”

The app also includes links to other GE Capital Fleet Services resources including an alternative fuel locator application, a U.S. fuel price map and information about GE’s WattStation technology.

Top image: The GE Fleet in Connecticut.

The technical breakthrough necessary to cool the LED without making it any larger emerged from a collaboration between GE and ecomagination-challenge winner Nuventix. This open innovation allowed GE to harness and develop emerging technology to make a leap forward.

The bulb will be unveiled on May 9 at the LIGHTFAIR international in Las Vegas and will be on store shelves in the U.S. and Canada in the first half of 2013.

Using open innovation to tackle a previously insurmountable lighting challenge.

“Our innovation team has tackled a previously insurmountable technical challenge: cooling a 100-watt A-19 shaped replacement LED bulb without making it physically bigger,” says Steve Briggs, general manager of product management, GE Lighting Solutions.

LEDs are semi-conductors that need to be cooled to ensure long life. Nuventix worked with GE to develop a method for moving air to cool LEDs using an oscillating membrane called a synthetic jet, which fits within the A-19 bulb shape.

“Once we came together last year, our teams wasted no time getting in the lab to build on the genius of GE’s LED bulb design, and to incorporate a synthetic jet solution that enabled GE to leapfrog its competitors,” said Jim Balthazar, CEO and president of Nuventix.

The bulb – developed in GE’s East Cleveland LED lab – meets all of the 100-watt incandescent performance metrics: 1,600+ lumens, uniform omnidirectional light distribution, 3000K color temperature, 25,000-hour life rating (22.8 years at 3 hours per day), dimmable, no mercury, instant full brightness and 60+ lumens per watt.

The 100-watt replacement LED will expand GE’s current family of LED bulbs already offered in a broad range of shapes, wattages and colors, including its 40- and 60-watt LED standard incandescent bulb replacements, spot and flood lights (PAR20 & PAR30), ceiling fan bulbs (A15), medium globes (G25), small globes (G16.5), candles (CA10) and night lights (C7). All of GE’s Energy Smart LED bulbs are rigorously tested to ensure constant color, long life and verifiable lumen ratings.

Top image: The 27-watt GE Energy Smart® LED bulb that can replace a 100-watt incandescent bulb. Courtesy GE Lighting

“They’re self-propelling, so you send them out and on their way they’ll pick up the oil droplets—eventually they’ll collect everything,” said Joseph Wang, a nanoengineer at the University of California-San Diego.

Wang and his team have been working on these so-called tubular microengines for a decade. They were one of the first labs to pioneer the new technology, which started as an idea for delivering targeted drug therapy or even removing cancer cells by traversing a person’s bloodstream like a biological highway. The current venture, however, is the first Wang knows of that applies nanomachines towards environmental remediation.

The subs have a little bling, too. Their surface is plated in gold for snagging oil droplets.

The tiny machines are about one tenth the width of a human hair, or 8 micrometers long. The cone-shaped tubes have a platinum inner surface that oxidizes hydrogen peroxide fuel to create “bubble-induced propulsion.” Those bubbles are no joke, either—the little tubes zip around at ultrafast speeds that take them distances up to 1,400 times their body length in a second. “The bubble propulsion is amazing!” Wang said.

The subs have a little bling, too. Their surface is plated in gold, which gives them a rough texture perfect for snagging oil droplets. But the gold in itself is not sufficient to do the trick; normally, the microsubmarines would simply pass through oil without collecting it, as they did in control trials. To make them “superhydrophobic,” or extremely water repellant but appealing to oil, Wang coated them in a special alkanethiol polymer chain. The end of the polymer chain is very attractive to oil droplets, which get stuck to it like rockachaws on a sock as the little robots pirouette around the spill. By tweaking the type of polymer chain used, the researchers can optimize the robots for targeting various types and densities of oily contaminants.

Wang and his team performed experiments with their new creations, placing them in dishes containing olive oil and motor oil. The mini subs swam around like otters, gathering up to 80 oil droplets that dragged behind them in lengthy chains. Thanks to Stokes’ law of drag force, the larger the cargo size, the slower the robots were able to swim. Still, they were able to handle a towing force up to 10-fold their volume. When it was time to call the microengines back to unload the oil, Wang exploited a magnetic layer situated between the gold and platinum. “The magnetic guidance allows us to navigate like a steering wheel,” he said. After dumping the oil, the machines can be used over and over again.

The study is just a proof of concept. Some tweaking remains.

The study, which was published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano, is just a proof of concept. Unfortunately, there will need to be some tweaking before we’re ready to send an army of microscopic robots out into the Gulf. Technical problems still abound, like how many millions of microscopic machines would be needed to tackle an entire spill. Wang also suggests it may be possible to scale them up in size in order to be more efficient.

Another issue is environmental impediments, like waves or strong currents. Wang’s team showed in trials that the microsubmarines can swim against a stream’s flow, but whether they could weather a tropical storm is a different question. The team also hopes to replace the robots’ dependence on hydrogen peroxide, eventually finding a fuel-free solution, like wave energy or a magnetic tail that rotates like that of an energetic spermatozoon.

Despite the challenges ahead, Wang is optimistic. Eventually this technology could be used not only to clean up oil spills, but to remove contaminants within the human body, or even undertake a “seek and destroy” mission targeting toxic bacteria, he said. Years down the line, he sees opportunity for private sector investment and commercialization of the technologies.

“We’ve developed all of these capabilities, and more recently we’ve been finding specific applications for them,” he said. “It’s an exciting time with much more to come, so stay tuned.”

Top image: A slightly larger version of the microsubs. Courtesy Flickr user MATEUS_27:24&25

A new proposal, published in the journal Conservation Letters, would create forest insurance to make the U.N. forest preservation program Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation, or REDD, more effective. REDD is generally supposed to function by paying developing countries to protect their forests in exchange for carbon pollution credits. Currently the program has 42 partner countries across the globe. The program is crucial to the fight against climate change since deforestation and forest degradation accounts for about 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and threatens biodiversity.

“REDD is a fantastic idea,” said Corey Bradshaw, director of ecological modeling at the University of Adelaide and co-author of the study. “You get a carbon advantage and biodiversity doesn’t get wiped out at the same time, it seems perfect.”

But it has a few major flaws that the insurance scheme, called iREDD, seeks to remedy.

REDD only works if the parties are honest and stick to the agreement. Bradshaw doesn’t have much faith that will happen. “If there’s a way to cheat, people will cheat. That’s the nature of all life, not just humans, but we excel at it,” he said. If, for example, a country is paid to conserve one forest but moves its deforestation efforts to an adjacent forest in order to get both money and timber, in terms of carbon offsets, that transaction was a failure. This phenomenon is called “leakage.”

Carbon-capture also only works if it’s maintained indefinitely. If a country accepts money for ten years and then cuts its forest the day after the agreement expires, then all of that conservation was for naught. This issue is called “permanence,” usually translated into an arbitrarily defined period of time set by countries in terms of decades or centuries.

Finally, there is the concept of additionality: there is no point in paying to protect forests that aren’t in danger of being cut. Bradshaw calls leakage, permanence and additionality, the “unholy trinity” of REDD.

In order to stifle the temptation to cheat, Bradshaw and his colleagues proposed translating ecosystem services (hard-to-quantify but impossible-to-live-without benefits like the water cycle, pollination and forest carbon capture and storage) into a format that the market could understand: the insurance industry. “This polices the system through a financial mechanism,” Bradshaw explained. “People have an incentive to do the right thing because they get more money at the end.”

How would such a system work?

Individual contractual agreements must be drafted between the buyer, or the party interested in carbon credits, and the seller, or the forest manager. The researchers propose setting a premium based on an assessment of risk. To quantify this, an outside broker would use a Likert scale to assess an area’s governmental reputation, management capabilities, monetary resources, community endorsement, and political buy-in. Once the risk ranking has been made, then a certain amount of the invested cash – generally no more than one-third – is used to purchase an insurance policy that scales to that agreed-upon risk, Bradshaw explains in his blog, Conservation Bytes. The amount is put into an insurance account, which collects interest over the project’s duration.

If the forest managers meet the agreed upon conservation goal — including monitoring to make sure there is no leakage and maintaining the project over the agreed upon permanence scale—at the end of the contract, the seller gets all the money from the insurance premium plus the interest gathered. (Even if a contract was set for 100 years, a decadal pay scheme could be set).

If, on the other hand, the forest managers violate the contract and clear-cut parts of the forest anyway, the sellers could be charged or the buyers could pull out and get all of their money back plus the premium.

If this system worked, it would provide a means to sequester more carbon to offset increasing anthropogenic emissions. The potential interested parties are extensive, including companies, countries, forest ministries, governmental departments, individuals and agencies like USAID. “This won’t completely solve the problem, but it would put dent in the way emissions are tracking,” Bradshaw said. “It’s just one of the many things we have to do to get our heads around climate change and do something about it.”

Top image: Deforestation in Sarawak, Malaysia. Courtesy Flickr user Wakx

In his speech to open the conference, GE CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt affirmed the company’s commitment to EVs and the smart grid technologies that support them: “For every dollar invested in electric vehicles, GE has about 10 cents of content,” Immelt said. “So this is a business that makes sense for us over the long term…We only invest in things that we think can be long-term business competitive and long-term pervasive. We think electric vehicles can become that.” He then backed up his words by touring the booth and climbing in a Nissan Leaf.

In the video, we follow Immelt as he tours the GE/Nissan booth while Chief Technology Officer Mark Little explains how GE has created a home that is connects your Wattstation EV charger to your Nucleus Home Energy Manager to the smart grid. As Little notes, it isn’t just in a trade show booth; it’s ready and working today.

Soon Fowler had become a standard-bearer for towns looking to become green town by going grid neutral, or producing as much or more power than it uses. They looked at a variety of renewable energy technologies, from putting the 2,400 tons of cow manure that are produced every day in Fowler into an anaerobic digester to make methane gas, to a wind farm to bedecking town buildings and grounds with solar panels.

Town leaders started exploring renewable energy first as a preserving the town coffers, according to Wayne Snider, a former executive with Grumman Aerospace, who was the town’s administrator during this period. The economic development and environmental benefits were an added bonus.

I think the impetus behind everything at first is to save money.

“I think the impetus behind everything at first is to save money,” Snider said in a recent interview. “Then they can see also that there’s potential for creating jobs.”

Fowler and a handful of small green towns and cities across America are on the vanguard looking to lower electricity costs, draw state and federal dollars or simply turn the community a nicer shade of green. But they face considerable challenges in realizing energy independence.

Big plans in Fowler

Snider’s team sifted all of the options for renewable energy in Fowler. They installed an anemometer to measure the potential for wind power in the region and got to work on an initial solar project to get residents on board. That project included about 600 kilowatts of photovoltaic panels at seven sites around town on municipal property – from water pumping stations to a cemetery (“People thought that was weird,” says Snider). Denver-based Vibrant Solar, Inc. built the $1.2 million project and sells the electricity back to Fowler at about half the rate of the current utility.

The efforts attracted notice from all over – they got help from Colorado State University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and others. They celebrated the solar arrays’ commissioning with a visit from then Gov. Bill Ritter.

“We hooked it up to show the public how much money could be saved, and it worked, the town is saving money,” Snider says. “It should have saved somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000 the first year.”

A dream on hold

The hope was to follow up with a 2-megawatt solar array to the south of the town, and the anaerobic digestion plant that would not only bring Fowler closer to grid-neutrality but also add 45 jobs or so to the struggling economy.

So far, these bigger plans haven’t come to fruition. The town’s leadership changed over, the company that installed those first solar arrays dissolved after state solar rebates disappeared, and the grid-neutrality goal stalled.

The story isn’t unfamiliar. One of the more high profile efforts to go grid-independent is Reynolds, Ind., the self-proclaimed BioTown, USA. The project began in the mid 2000s with a stated goal of getting all of Reynolds’s energy – not just electricity, but heating and vehicle fuel as well – from renewable sources. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels got on board, and just as in Fowler, a number of big ideas started to take shape.

The town’s leadership changed, the solar company went out of business and the grid neutrality goal stalled.

Reynolds had designs on an anaerobic digestion plant, a perfect match for the 150,000 pigs within a 15-mile radius. But again, logistics got in the way; last year a large plant went online at a nearby cattle farm, but it is outside of Reynolds and feeds electricity to the grid. Still, it does produce more power than Reynolds uses, so the original dream did result in some renewable power generation. It’s just not how planners imagined it.

And there are ancillary benefits: Companies are looking at siting new projects in the area. “The publicity from it is positive, it’s kept Reynolds on the radar,” says John Heimlich, who was the president of the BioTown Development Authority when the ideas were being formed.

Spreading the word

Fowler’s Snider is now working with other towns in Colorado – Olney Springs, Ordway, and others – to develop wind and solar projects. They are still also seeking to build a regional anaerobic digestion plant.

“If you get to a point where your town is not quite off the grid, but you’re able to offer a utility to your residents that’s less than the current rate, you can see that attracting people wanting to move to your town” Snider says. If Fowler had built the 2 MW solar plant it had planned, he says they could have locked into a super low electricity rate of six cents per kilowatt-hour; now, the utility rate is closer to 15 cents.

Tempered expectations

The lesson of Fowler and Reynolds may be simple: keep expectations realistic.

Wade Yost, the town manager of Poolesville, Md,, says they have started with energy-saving LED street lighting in the town center, and hope to grow their renewable projects from there.

“Ultimately, we were looking at being independent of the grid itself, but that’s very difficult to do for a town our size,” Yost says (Poolesville’s population is a bit over 5,000, about ten times bigger than Reynolds). “So now we’re doing the best we can.”

The next project for Poolesville is a 1.5 MW solar array for the town’s wastewater plant. They are currently accepting proposals from industry to build it, with the hope of taking a big chunk out of the $65,000 spent on electricity for the plant every year.

“We’re just trying to tie it all in and be a really green community,” Yost says.

Top image: Cows near the wind turbine in Butler County, Kansas. Courtesy Flickr user brentdaley

“Bug Oil”

Take a genetically programmed microbe, add in carbon dioxide and electricity and what do you get? According to Arun Majumdar, director of the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E, you get oil. In this short, based on the VICE/ecomagination video “The Energy Fixers,” Majumdar explains how “bug oil” could change the future of transportation.

“Seaweed Power”

If biofuels are going to be an important part of our energy future, seaweed is the most attractive option. Unlike cane sugar or corn, seaweed grows everywhere and is one of the most attractive options. In this short, BAL Chief Technology Officer Richard Bailey talks about his company’s efforts to prove seaweed’s viability.

“Windmills in the Sky”

Makani Power CEO Corwin Hardham was a professional windsurfer at age 17. Now he’s trying to harness the wind for energy. Makani’s high altitude tethered wings are lightweight and therefore lower cost than conventional wind turbines. Hardham explains here how his technology could meet our future energy needs by taking to the sky.

Top image: A composite image of a single wing 7 prototype demonstrating the flight path of the wing during crosswind flight, Sherman Island, CA, June 2011. Courtesy Makani Power

GE Energy announced the mobile apps on Tuesday as part of the ecomagination-qualified Fully Networked WattStation and WattStation Connect software package that links the device to drivers, fleet owners and station owners. GE will begin taking orders for the device next week and will begin shipping in about six weeks time.

“The WattStation Connect platform is designed to make the process easy for the consumer,” said Michael Mahan, product general manager for GE Energy’s Industrial Solutions business.

If you install a GE WattStation, every driver out there that uses the app is going to see these stations and be attracted to your business.

The WattStation announcement followed on an address by GE CEO Jeff Immelt at the SAE World Congress in Detroit on Tuesday where he said the company is committed to EVs for the long haul.

A key part of that commitment is providing the infrastructure to make EV charging more accessible. The WattStation connect app, which will be available for download in the coming weeks, will allow users to control and monitor their charging remotely.

In addition, Hertz rental car customers will also be able to track down a charging station using the company’s NeverLost in-car GPS systems.

The other enhancements to the platform will benefit WattStation owners, like businesses or cities, who will now be able to use software to track when the devices are used or how much electricity they are using at a given moment. The software also allows owners to track the CO2 reductions that result from the use of EVs.

The WattStation also tidies up after itself with the first retractable cord of any EV charging station out there.

“It’s a beautiful product that people are proud to put in front of their facility,” said Mahan.

The WattStation will also put businesses that own them on the map.

“If you install a GE WattStation, every driver out there that uses the app is going to see these stations and be attracted to your business,” he said.

Top image: The WattStation Connect app.

Now compare that happy spectrum with the monochrome lights in your home or office, which are the same all day. No wonder you felt glum after you flew home. “Our biology is dependent on the variability of light through the day and through the seasons,” says Gary Allen, a lighting physicist at GE. “Artificial lighting is the same all day long.”

But, in the coming years, physicists expect to unlock the killer app for lighting – a bulb that could wake you up in the morning with sunrise colors, keep you alert during the day with daylight colors and put you to sleep with low-blue light. This bulb could even help regulate our circadian rhythms. The possibilities have opened up because of advances in LED technology, which allow manufacturers to mix different temperatures and colors of light in one bulb.

Our biology is dependent on the variability of light through the day and through the seasons. Artificial lighting is the same all day long.

Not only could we get a lightbulb that’s closer to the light of the sun, we could also have control over when we get certain types of light.

This could be useful for people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder or shift workers.

Jet lagged

Jet lag isn’t just for world travelers. Research by Mariana Figueiro, of the Lighting Research Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, shows that the orange and yellow light of incandescent bulbs doesn’t do a good job of keeping us awake and throws off our circadian rhythms in the same way that jet lag does.

How could a lightbulb correct this?

To answer that question, you need to understand a bit about how light is classified by temperature and color. Morning light has a lower color temperature – roughly 3,000 degrees Kelvin – than midday light – about 5,000 – 6,000 K, which is roughly the temperature of the sun’s surface.

The easiest way to create a variable spectrum of light through the day, Allen says, is to put two or three different LEDs with different color temperatures into the same lightbulb. They would all appear white but some would be warmer than others. “In the morning and at night I can have the 3,000 K (a warm white) only and during the day I can have 5,000 K only,” Allen says.

The right color mix

Such a lightbulb would be tunable for the color temperature but would not have the sun’s exact colors. The color is important because our eyes have melatonin receptors that respond to the sun’s light. “Our bodies respond to the specific colors, not just the mixture of colors,” Allen says.

There are an almost infinite number of ways to mix colors to get white light – but the sun has a specific recipe. The technology, then, would need to incorporate green, blue and amber LEDs that could be mixed throughout the day to mimic the color composition of the sun’s light at different times of the day.

“It’s not whether I have warm white or cool white,” Allen says. “It has to be the right color mix.”

Remote control

The idea of tunable lights raises all kinds of possibilities for controlling the spectrum, Allen says. You could change the spectrum and temperature with a push-button remote (or a smartphone app) or the lights could automatically cycle through the day. Multiple colors also mean that every room could become a disco.

Or, you could set the lights to automatically respond to sensors in the room.

Improvement curves

There are some universally tunable lights already on the specialty market, but they’re still too expensive for wide application. This is partly because the technology to achieve tunable lights is not yet mature and partly because LEDs themselves are still relatively expensive.

But LEDs, have been rapidly dropping in cost while efficiency increases – a trend predicted by Haitz’s law, which says the amount of light you get out of an LED is doubling every two years and every decade the cost per lumen decreases by a factor of ten. “We’re getting on improvement curves that were followed by the cell phone and the computer,” Allen says.

Once LEDs come down far enough in price, these more exotic applications will start to appear.

Top image: A GE 9-watt LED bulb.

Scientists at Yale University have recently published an analysis of the process in the American Chemical Society’s journal Environmental Science and Technology. They suggest that it could provide power for half a billion people just by taking advantage of the mixing of fresh river water as it flows into the salty sea at the river’s mouth.

Osmosis: a refresher

To understand this new energy source, you’ll need to recall high school science lessons on osmosis: if two solutions are divided by a semi-permeable membrane, the less concentrated liquid will move into the more concentrated liquid until the two form an equilibrium. This is how plants draw water from the soil, and why potatoes shrink when they are boiled in salt water.

Power from pressure-retarded osmosis could flow all day and night, unlike intermittent solar and wind.

The same process occurs when freshwater from rivers empties into salty oceans. The river water is evenly distributed into the sea. If a semi-permeable membrane could be situated amidst the mixing, however, the energy associated with that exchange could be harnessed. And unlike with solar and wind power, which are intermittent sources, the power would flow all day and all night.

Researchers first struck upon this hypothesis in the 1970s, but their ideas exceeded the technological capacities of the time; a membrane the size of a college campus would be needed to harness energy of any value. In past years, technological advances allowed labs and companies to begin designing economically viable membranes with a greater energy-harnessing efficiency, reigniting the field.

“If you have freshwater on one side and salty seawater on the other side with a membrane in between, because of the chemical potential between them, the water will flow from the fresh to the sea water side,” said Menachem Elimelech, a professor of environmental and chemical engineering at Yale University who co-authored the paper. “We convert osmosis into mechanical work to create energy,” he said.

Pressure-retarded osmosis relies upon pressure from the osmotic flow to push the river water through specially designed membranes that spin a turbine generator and produces electricity. The system can be thought of as a reverse of the way water desalination plants work, since the energy of mixing is equivalent to that of separation.

Norway test case

In 2009, Norway built the first prototype pressure-retarded osmosis power station. Norway’s plant demonstrated that the system could produce electricity, and since then the membrane technology has improved to become more economical and efficient. “In our lab, we produce small scale membranes,” Elimelech said. “In principle, someone can upscale the membranes into a larger system relatively easily.” He predicts a marketable system will be available in two or three years.

A power source that could potentially meet the needs of 520 million people.

Because rivers flow continuously into the ocean, pressure-retarded osmosis would yield a constant source of electricity. The researchers calculated that about 157 gigawatts of renewable power could be harnessed by channeling only a tenth of the world’s river water discharge, taking into account losses and inefficiencies. That figure is the equivalent electrical consumption of 520 million people based on the average global electricity use of about 300 watts per capita, according to the study. Producing the same amount of electricity through coal-fired power plants would release over a billion metric tons of greenhouse gases each year. And unlike, renewables that are located far from population areas, large cities are often situated around rivers mouths such as the Mississippi and Hudson rivers.

Many challenges remain, such as designing a system that prevents membranes from becoming clogged with dissolved organic material contained in the river water. Environmental factors must also be taken into account. Engineers would need to locate plants away from sensitive areas, like estuaries, and take into account potential disruption of the water’s natural flow. With proper environmental assessments and planning, though, Elimelech thinks the system can be a viable source of alternative power.

“Because there are so many other renewable energy options, this one did not get as much attention as wind and solar,” he said. “But I think it’s getting there, and lots of people are starting to realize its potential.”

Top image: the fjords of northern Norway. Courtesy NASA

Skarpherdinsson now hopes his angling skills will come in handy as he and Iceland cast about for something decidedly different from the customary haul of smelt, herring, cod, mackerel, and other creatures.

The North Atlantic island is trying to reel foreign industry on to its shores to prop up an economy still recovering from the 2008 banking collapse. For bait, it is dangling what no other country in the world can—100 percent renewable electricity.

Renewable unleashed

Iceland generates all of its power from hydro and geothermal sources. There’s not a coal- or gas-fired station in sight. No nuclear reactors, either. In a global economy that increasingly values green, Iceland hopes to lure businesses from across the metals, chemicals, media, agriculture, and IT industries.

“This is the beginning of a new chapter in the industrial life of Iceland,” says Skarpherdinsson. “The greatest advantage in the future will be green, renewable energy with no carbon.” He was speaking to journalists in Reykjavik in February while saluting an early catch: British data hosting company Verne Global.

By locating in a climate where annual average temperatures range from around freezing to 56 degrees Fahrenheit, Verne is slashing the amount of electricity it uses to cool its data center.

Verne recently opened a data center in a sprawling former NATO munitions warehouse on a windswept lava plain in Keflavik, 29 miles southwest of the capital, connected via subsea fiber lines to Europe and the U.S.

Verne is just the sort of foreign presence that Iceland hopes will alleviate an unemployment rate of 6 percent—astronomical in a land accustomed to one percent.

That’s cool

But “green” is just part of the power play. So, too, is the price of electricity, which CEO Hordur Arnarson of state-owned utility Landsvirkjun calls “the most competitive price in Europe.” Landsvirkjun intends to keep it that way too. It locks in rates for a dozen years or more—enticing amid volatile fossil fuel prices.

It all helped bring Verne.

“We are able to serve the international community from our 100 percent renewably powered data center,” says Verne CEO Jeff Monroe. “What we have done as a first mover here in Iceland is we have secured a long-term power contract with Landsvirkjun that is substantially better than what you’ll see as the published rate—and you get green without paying the premium.”

For Verne, Iceland also literally provides a chillingly good natural advantage: year-round natural cooling.

By locating in a climate where annual average temperatures range from around freezing to 56 degrees Fahrenheit, Verne is slashing the amount of electricity it uses to cool its data center. That delivers a financial benefit as well as an environmental one. Verne is able to cool its computers using only natural air circulation, eliminating the refrigeration systems that can account for over half of a data center’s power usage.

But creating growth isn’t as simple as it sounds. Growth in general contends with Iceland’s strong environmental movement.

Verne itself is beginning to sign customers. UK telecommunication and network services firm Colt is building a “point of presence” at the data center, tying it into its private network for companies in 21 countries. Other Verne clients include Jersey City-based Datapipe, an IT services firm that supports financial and technology industries in New York and London; CCP Games, the Icelandic creator of the popular game EVE Online; GreenQloud, a Reykjavik cloud computing services firm; and Opin Kerfi, an Icelandic systems integrator.

The company is expecting business to continue to perk up late in the year, when Iceland is scheduled to fire up an additional—and faster—subsea fiber line to join those in place and run by Icelandic firm Farice. While the Farice connections to Europe and North America are fast enough for many applications, they cannot support certain super fast transactions, like derivatives trading.

Raging debates

This isn’t the first time Iceland has attempted to lure foreign business. The country has had limited success diversifying away from fishing, aluminium, and tourism—their three big industries.

But creating growth isn’t as simple as it sounds. Growth in general contends with Iceland’s strong environmental movement.

Icelanders don’t agree on how much more energy they can tap from the country’s vast geothermal and hydro sources. Many people believe it’s at least two times more and could be much higher. Even among growth enthusiasts, strong-minded localities fight each other to land new business. Politics is as fiery as the volcanoes on this island where Jules Verne sent his explorers to the center of the earth.

One grand Landsvirkjun vision calls for exporting electricity to Europe via a sub-Atlantic high voltage line. For now, Iceland is focusing on hooking in foreign companies.

“We will do everything within our means to make this a story of great success,” says Skarpherdinsson. The old fisherman hopes that his vision turns into a tale of the big one, not of one that got away.

Photo from Flickr by Pocius.

Renewable energy use is on the rise in the U.S. In 2010, renewables accounted for only eight percent of all domestic power production; during the first six months of 2011, that number had climbed to about 14.3 percent. Still, considering the U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of energy, we’re still using an enormous amount of not-so-pretty fossil fuels: Coal power plants, which provide nearly half of America’s energy needs, burned through 860 million tons of fuel through the first half of 2011, while natural gas plants accounted for another fifth of our needs.

As it stands right now, there’s no perfect solution to our energy needs. But the Department of Energy has already signaled that it’s pushing for clean tech; of the $37.2 billion in energy subsidies in 2010,$14.7 billion went to renewables. The wealth of new energy IPOs over the past few years suggests people are ready and willing to bet on green tech.

One of those bettors is ARPA-E, the DoE’s incubator for solutions to the energy crisis. Following in the legacy of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, which kickstarted the internet and all sorts of mind-bending technologies, ARPA-E is shooting to make low-cost bets on ideas that could change the energy landscape. Those projects from university labs and startups include BAL Labs and Makani Windpower.

In the interest of spurring breakthroughs large and small programs like ARPA-E are helping U.S. researchers keep up with the worldwide march towards clean energy.

Text: Derek Mead/MOTHERBOARD

The Matrix, of course, is science fiction—at least for humans. But for one snail, life as a battery recently became a reality. Researchers at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York, successfully implanted the first continuously operating biofuel cell in a live snail. Between bouts of rest and feeding, the cell utilized the snail’s glucose as fuel for producing electrical power over a several month period.

The “electrified snail,” as the researchers call it, brings science one step closer to realizing the goal being able to extract micropower for activating tiny sensors or wireless transmitting devices for environmental monitoring, said Evgeny Katz, Clarkson University’s chair of chemistry and the senior author of the paper published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. “It also may be interesting for homeland security or military operations,” he added.

Klatz and his colleagues’ research pursues an answer to one sub direction of this line of research: micropower. The counterpart to micropower occurs on the comparably macro scale of human beings and biomedicine. In theory, researchers could develop biofuel cells that could be implanted in a human body to provide energy for devices like pacemakers.

Researchers struck upon the idea of implantable biofuel cells more than 20 years ago. Katz’s snail experiment—and a similar operation he took part in that strung clams together and managed to generate enough electricity to rotate a small electrical motor—are only the fourth and fifth successfully implanted biofuel cells in living creatures. “There’s a big difference between something being potentially possible and actually doing it,” he said.

To accomplish this undertaking, the researchers inserted high-tech electrodes made from compressed carbon nanotubes into two small holes they drilled in the snail’s shell. They coated each of the conductive nanotubes with a different type of enzyme, or the proteins that catalyze chemical reactions in animal’s bodies. One enzyme coating pulled electrons from the snail’s glucose, and another used those electrons to turn oxygen into water. The net effect was an electric current.

The power and current produced by the snail, about 0.5 V, was quite small— much smaller than a 1.5 V AAA battery. However, the electrical energy produced by the hapless gastropod can be accumulated in an electrical condenser, which could release the energy over a period of time to power an external device, like a small video camera or a wireless environmental monitoring tool.

Unlike in The Matrix, the snail took regular breaks for feeding and relaxing in its tank before producing a new portion of electrical energy. Though the snail was limited in its movements during its battery shifts, the researchers don’t think the little guy was bothered too much. In the future, they plan to connect the bioelectrodes to a microelectronic device fixed to the animal’s body, which would allow the snail to go about its snail life as usual, or, maybe eventually, spy on the enemy.

Top image: Neohelix albolabris (Whitelip Snail) Courtesy Jeffrey Nekola and Matt Kuchta/University of Wisconsin-La Crosse

“You don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket,” Chu told columnist Thomas Friedman at The New York Times Energy for Tomorrow conference, which is sponsored by GE.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Chu said industry should continue to develop domestic energy resources such as shale gas in order to keep energy affordable in the U.S., but also heed concerns about the impact of hydraulic fracturing.

See videos from the conference panels.

“It’s in the industry’s best interest to do it in an environmentally responsible way,” Chu said of the fracking discussion.

He also noted the role of natural gas in promoting renewables, particularly since new gas power plants can go from a cold start to 99 percent in minutes, which makes it “perfect” for pairing with intermittent energy sources like wind and solar.

Chu’s discussion with Friedman came after a morning of panels featuring industry heavyweights like famed oilman, and natural gas supporter, T. Boone Pickens, President Obama’s former industry Czar Carol Browner and IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates and Pulitzer-prize winner Daniel Yergin.

The morning’s talks found the panelists generally upbeat about America’s decreasing dependence on foreign oil and abundant natural gas but mindful of the challenges of developing the next generation of energy solutions.

But the environmental challenges posed by fracking, including the disposal of frack water, and the effect the natural of gas has on other energy sources loomed large in the discussion.

During the late morning session, Friedman asked Chu, “Will [natural gas] kill the cleantech industry?”

On the contrary, Chu said, renewable technologies such as solar were swiftly reaching parity with traditional sources like natural gas. Chu said cleantech, despite some well-publicized hiccups, had made amazing advances in recent years – from a four-fold decrease in the cost of solar modules to vast improvements in battery technology.

Chu stressed that investing in renewable technology, even in the face of an abundance of gas, was the right approach for a number of reasons.

“Clean energy shouldn’t be a political debate… it’s the sensible thing to do, it economically propels us forward,” he said.

Top image: Driving into the future, North Palm Springs, Calif. Courtesy Flickr user kevin dooley