Power plants contribute one-third of this country's greenhouse gases so this is a good place to start.
Under the Clean Air Act the EPA can work with states to develop new standards for curbing emissions at existing power plants.
He needs to get right on to regulating the Sun Volcanic eruptions and the Electromagnetic Field. They have been causing far too much climate change
How about solar panels! Oh wait that uses more energy than it takes to produce them still have to get power somewhere!
@mike13323 Solar panels pay back there energy usage in two years but last 40+years. About 85%of the oxygen comes from the oceans.
Old growth forests are not the source for these products wood is most commonly a farmed product. www. popsci. com/science/article/2013-04/solar-panels-now-make-more-electricity-they-use@adaptation. It was my understanding that solar panels only pay themselves off in a short period of time
After 30+years of this stuff the solar panels are just starting to break even on that front.
I just didn't think solar panels are currently worth it. In reality the actions taken by the GW Bush administration were so effective at combating global warming that we are now potentially facing a period of global climate cooling.@
I read somewhere that coal fire power plants release more radiation (in the form of radioactive impurities being vaporized) into the atmosphere every year than all nuclear power plants ever (including meltdowns.
By contrast coal-fired power plants release higher quantities of radioactive isotopes directly into the atmosphere than even the oldest nuclear reactors ever did.
Yes you could replace every watt of energy production with wind and solar...but you would destroy cover
You can replace hundreds of wind turbines and square miles of solar farms with one bnuclear power plant.
The newest generations of nuclear power plants are some of the most well design and safest power plants in the world.
If you leave your solar panel running in your garage no one will die. Some benefits to health and the environment are just a better trade off.
It takes more people to maintain solar panels associated power supply systems and power storage systems. These type of jobs are technical in nature and pay better thereby giving more people a higher level of money and yes medical benefits.
#How To Save The Electrical Gridthe explosion lit up the Manhattan skyline. A sudden boom a one-two punch of yellow light then everything went black.
After Hurricane Sandy shoved water into Con Edison's 14th street substation in October causing electricity to arc between capacitors about a quarter million customers were left in the dark.
A tree blown down wires ravaged by wind a flooded power facility each event had rippled out to affect homes far from the point of failure.
In 2011 Hurricane Irene cut electricity to about 5. 5 million homes. Tornadoes ice storms wildfires and drought now routinely overwhelm the nation's aging electrical infrastructure inflicting sweeping blackouts.
In the early 1990s the U s. experienced about 20 mass outages a year; today it's well over 100.
A century ago when the foundation of today's power distribution system was laid electric appliances were just beginning to enter homes.
Demand is now rising at 1 percent a year pushing more electricity through lines that were intended never to handle such high loads.
The existing U s. electric grid has a linear structure. Large power plants typically located far from the customers they serve produce most of the electricity.
Transformers at the plants increase the voltage so it can be moved more efficiently to local substations
which reduce the voltage and send it out to neighborhoods and individual homes. When a fault current or surge occurs anywhere along the line automatic circuit breakers open to halt it.
That's why a single felled tree can cut power to thousands of customers. And that's how overgrown trees brushing high-voltage lines in Ohio could black out 50 million people along the East Coast in 2003.
One way to reduce the impact of any individual failure is to replace the linear structure with a looped one.
Imagine a power line studded with five smart switches that connects back to a substation on both ends.
He's developing the refrigerator-size device at the university's National Center for Reliable Electric power Transmission.
As bad things happen circuit breakers just start opening and the lights go out Mantooth says. Rather than simply stopping the electrical surge altogether his machine can absorb the excess current
and send a regulated amount down the line. Utilities have been slow to adopt looped systems
In urban centers like New york city and Los angeles their fault currents are getting so high that they're having to start replacing all of their circuit breakers Mantooth says.
We would insert this guy into the grid he says leave the existing circuit breaker and limit the current so that the breaker is overwhelmed not.
and people so adding power from another source is not helpful until the initial problem is dealt with and considered safe for electrical power.
Of course true electrical engineers might find problems with my solutions and have better solutions of their own. Your Grid problem in the US is political.
With these smaller grids the loss of transmission lines would be far less critical and whats left would be easy and cheap to engineer.
A tree blown down wires ravaged by wind a flooded power facility each event had rippled out to affect homes far from the point of failure.
Just cut damn trees 15 feets on each side of each power line. It was Nikola Tesla who made the grid of today not Thomas Edison.
You would think a science mag like this would get big things like this right!
gotta stop thinking whole cities out of the blocks. start small then progress. you tube search ore5ssgit was David Manning-executive director of the Smart Grid Consortium--who doesn't know his electrical basics.
Not that either Tesla or Edison deeloped the grid. Tesla's AC and transformer technology did enable the grid that we have today.
Side note to the Euros--there are high voltage DC lines in the US they've been in place for years.
But to the point of the article. A lot of the NYC problems with Sandy were related to the physical location of certain elements.
Some burned electrical wires in open pits to recover the copper. Others acid-stripped circuit boards in caustic baths near the river to salvage bits of gold.
while the heavy stuff moves past magnetic separators that pull out the steel. And then all three material streams land in these three piles.
and electrical and magnetic properties plastics have overlapping densities and nearly identical electrical and magnetic properties.
Biddle s reluctance to get specific isn t surprising. MBA is one of the only companies in the world doing more than down-cycling mixed plastics.
After graduation he landed In general Electric s plastics lab. Most people would look at this pile
Overhead Magnet Belt This device consists of a strong magnet with a conveyor belt moving around it.
Eddy Current Separator An electromagnet inside a rotating drum creates a force field at the end of a conveyor belt.
The resistance arose from assumptions about wood as a material: Clients believed that any wood structure would behave like a balloon frame with its structural weaknesses and vulnerability to fire.
and sometimes piping and electrical installed. Construction is as easy as screwing the panels together. 7) Elevators have double walls with insulation sandwiched between them for fire safety
Dickinson and electrical engineer Ron Fearing won a $2. 5-million DARPA grant in 1998 to apply these principles to a fly-size robot.
and the Massachusetts institute of technology to pursue novel batteries micro fuel cells and wireless power transfer. He estimates he is only one or two years away from his first autonomous-power demonstration.
but its propellers can still get tangled in branches or power lines. We wanted to bring something to the field fast Guiler says.
he s using electrodes to record the activity of neurons in insects brains. He links them to a flight-simulation system and presents them with visual stimuli picture of a predator for instance hat cause them to react.
while the other renewable technologies would require electric or hydrogen vehicles and infrastructure in order to power transportation.
For example the described technique is used to develop tomatoes with resistance to tomato yellow leaf curl virus
The environmental scientists experts in air quality atmospheric chemistry and ecology have been studying the fate of nitrogen-based compounds that are blown into natural areas from power plants automobile exhaust and--increasingly--industrial agriculture.
The outdoor setup was powered by solar panels and photographed an Arizona grassland in a panorama four photos high by seven photos wide.
#Diesel or electric? Study offers advice for owners of urban delivery truck fleetsfor owners of delivery truck fleets who may be trying to decide between electric
or diesel vehicles researchers at the Georgia Institute of technology are offering some advice: comparisons of the energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and total cost of ownership for the medium-duty vehicles.
The advantages of electric versus diesel depend largely on how the trucks will be used--the frequency of stops
and average speeds--and the source of electricity for charging batteries. In city driving with frequent stops the electric trucks clearly outperform diesel vehicles.
On average in the United states electric urban delivery trucks use about 30 percent less total energy and emit about 40 percent less greenhouse gases than diesel trucks for about the same total cost taking into account both the purchase price
and the operating costs said Dong-Yeon Lee a Ph d. student in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
-and-start driving electric trucks are roughly 50 percent more efficient to operate than diesel trucks overall.
and the regenerative braking systems in electrical vehicles help provide better efficiency. However electric delivery trucks lose their advantage in suburban routes that involve fewer stops and higher average speed.
Electric vehicles have limited a daily range and top speed and without a lot of stops lose their regenerative braking advantage.
Electric vehicles can cost more than their diesel counterparts under certain conditions particularly if high-cost charging systems are used
if the battery must be replaced early or if they are used mainly for highway driving. The relative benefits of the electric vehicles the researchers found depend on vehicle efficiency associated with drive cycle diesel fuel price travel demand electric drive battery replacement
and price electricity generation and transmission efficiency electric truck recharging infrastructure and purchase price. The study findings were reported July 16 2013 in the journal Environmental science and Technology.
The research team took into account the sources of electricity used to charge the electric vehicles in evaluating greenhouse gas emissions.
Electricity produced from hydroelectric sources--more common in the northwest United states--dramatically reduced total greenhouse gas emissions for electric vehicles operated there.
Vehicles operated in states heavily dependent on coal for producing electricity showed higher emissions. In every state in the U s. electric trucks provided some reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with urban routes providing the most advantage.
In about half of the states the electric trucks cut greenhouse gas emissions by a third
or more compared to diesel vehicles. Wild cards in the study included the future costs of both diesel fuel
and electricity and the potential cost of replacing an electric truck's battery pack if it has a shorter-than-expected lifetime.
Lithium-ion battery packs are expected to last the lifetime of the trucks as much as 150000 miles for the drive cycles tested.
Technology advances make predicting the long-term price of electric trucks difficult said Valerie Thomas one of the study's co-authors and a professor in Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and School
Battery price reductions down the road could have a large effect on the cost-competitiveness of electric trucks
The researchers decided to study electric trucks in urban delivery applications because vehicles in these applications tend to travel the same routes each day spend significant amounts of time in stop
The comparison involved a 2011 Smith Newton electric truck powered by a 120 kw electric motor
The researchers were surprised to find that the electric truck had cost advantages over the diesel vehicle under some conditions.
They had expected that costs would always be higher for the electric vehicle especially since the purchase price of the electric truck studied was higher than the diesel truck
--and other models of electric trucks would have larger cost differentials. Over the life of the truck there are many situations in
which the total cost of operating an electric vehicle is less than operating a diesel vehicle noted Marilyn Brown another co-author and a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy.
Our expectation was that the electric vehicle would provide environmental benefits but at a cost.
We found that particularly in urban settings and in locations with relatively low greenhouse gas emissions from electricity electric delivery trucks both save money
and have environmental benefits. Depending on what happens with vehicle and fuel costs the advantages could swing even farther in the direction of electric vehicles.
The relative benefit of electric trucks over diesel counterparts could be much more significant than one might expect said Lee.
If the electric truck is deployed in the right drive or duty cycle application fleet operators could enjoy higher returns on investment while saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Georgia Institute of technology. The original article was written by John Toon.
and electricity designing a product that consumers will actually buy is complicated a process. More often than not such products--even those that are distributed at no charge--go unused due to poor quality unreliability or differences in cultural expectations.
Sanitation and sterilization are enormous obstacles without reliable electricity said Rice photonics pioneer Naomi Halas the director of LANP
Halas Rice's Stanley C. Moore Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering professor of physics professor of chemistry and professor of biomedical engineering is one of the world's most-cited chemists.
Photovoltaic solar panels by comparison typically have an overall energy efficiency of around 15 percent. When used in the autoclaves in the tests the heat
When electricity passes through a layer of silicon oxide it strips away oxygen molecules and creates a channel of pure metallic phase silicon that is less than five nanometers wide.
Normal operating voltages can repeatedly break and heal the channel which can be read as
The devices dubbed one diode-one resistor (1d-1r) worked especially well when compared with test versions (1r) that lacked the diode Wang said.
Setting adjacent bits to the on state--usually a condition that leads to voltage leaks and data corruption in a 1r crossbar structure--had no effect on the information he said.
Douglas Natelson a professor of physics and astronomy and of electrical and computer engineering and Krishna Palem the Ken and Audrey Kennedy Professor of Computer science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and a professor of statistics.
Early CVD experiments produced MDS with grains that were too tiny to be of use for their electrical properties.
Graphene a single sheet of carbon atoms is the thinnest electrical conductor we know. With the addition of the monolayer molybdenum disulfide and other metal dichalcogenides we have all the building blocks for modern electronics that must be created in atomically thin form.
The growth and electrical measurements were made by the Hone lab in mechanical engineering; the optical measurements were carried out in the Tony Heinz lab in physics.
Also known as elephant grass miscanthus is one of a new generation of renewable energy crops that can be converted into renewable energy by being burned in biomass power stations.
and do not require electricity or fuel. Instead they use the kinetic energy of flowing stream water to power the lifting of a fraction of this water to a higher elevation.
The key enzymes immobilized on the magnetic nanoparticles can easily be recycled using a magnetic force. Zhang designed the experiments
or glow while others are magnetic or conductive. Some can have multiple properties. The organic salts used to make GUMBOS are not the familiar organic sea salt products sold for cooking and other uses.
and automobile manufactures are aggressively trying to develop vehicles that run on hydrogen fuel cells. Unlike gas-powered engines that spew out pollutants the only byproduct of hydrogen fuel is water.
and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future Zhang said.
The energy stored in xylose splits water molecules yielding high-purity hydrogen that can be utilized directly by proton-exchange membrane fuel cells.
and will allow us to better understand the mechanism of drug resistance that is common in prostate cancer patients.
#Waste heat may economize CO2 capturein some of the first results from a federally funded initiative to find new ways of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants Rice university scientists have found that CO2 can be removed more economically using waste heat
--low-grade steam that cannot be used to produce electricity. The find is significant because capturing CO2 with conventional technology is an energy-intensive process that can consume as much as one-quarter of the high-pressure steam that plants use to produce electricity.
This is just the first step in our effort to better engineer a process for capturing CO2 from flue gas at power plants said George Hirasaki the lead researcher of Rice's CO2-capture research team The researchers hope to reduce the costs of CO2 capture by creating an integrated
reaction column that uses waste heat engineered materials and optimized components. Hirasaki's team was one of 16 chosen by the Department of energy (DOE) in 2011 to develop innovative techniques for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
The team's first findings appear in two new studies that are available online this month in the International Journal of Greenhouse Gas Control.
Power plants fired by coal and natural gas account for about half of the CO2 that humans add to the atmosphere each year;
these power plants are prime candidates for new technology that captures CO2 before it goes up in smoke.
Each of these plants makes electricity by boiling water to create steam to run electric turbines.
while the CO2 at power plants is said not Hirasaki There's also a greater volume of CO2 per unit mass at a power plant than at a natural gas well.
if it is to be cost-effective for CO2 capture at power plants. A major challenge in adapting two-phase amine processing for power plants is the amount of heat required to recycle the amine in the second phase of the process.
Using existing amine processing technology at power plants is impractical because amine recycling would require as much as one-quarter of the high-pressure steam that could otherwise be used to drive turbines
and make electricity Hirasaki said. This phenomenon is known as parasitic power loss and it will drive up the cost of electricity by lowering the amount of electricity a plant can produce for sale.
It has been estimated that the use of current technology for CO2 capture would drive up the cost of electricity by 70 to 100 percent said Rice graduate student Sumedh Warudkar a co-investigator on the Rice university team.
In our study we examined whether it would be possible to improve on that by using lower-value steam to run the amine recyclers.
To test this idea Warudkar used a software package that's commonly used to model industrial chemical processes.
The group plans to achieve this by optimizing the optical properties of the solar cell's electrode.
Solar Electric Materials an Energy Frontier Research center funded by the U s. Department of energy Office of Science Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0001084 (Y. Z
and power lines findings that could affect the oil and gas industry as much as farmers and land owners.
the use of alternative fuels like biofuels electricity and hydrogen; and strong government policies to overcome high costs and influence consumer choices.
This approach includes reducing work the engine must perform--reducing vehicle weight aerodynamic resistance rolling resistance
hybrid electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius; plug-in hybrid electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt;
battery electric vehicles such as the Nissan Leaf; hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles such as the Mercedes F-Cell scheduled to be introduced about 2014;
and compressed natural gas vehicles such as the Honda civic Natural gas. Although driving costs per mile will be lower especially for vehicles powered by natural gas
or electricity the high initial purchase cost is likely to be a significant barrier to widespread consumer acceptance the report says.
All the vehicles considered are and will continue to be several thousand dollars more expensive than today's conventional vehicles.
Each combines highly efficient vehicles with at least one of three alternative power sources--biofuel electricity or hydrogen.
Vehicles powered by electricity will not emit any greenhouse gases but the production of electricity and the additional load on the electric power grid are factors that must be considered.
To the extent that fossil resources are used to generate electricity the report says that the successful implementation of carbon capture
and storage will be essential. These vehicles also rely on batteries which are projected to drop steeply in price.
and long recharge times are likely to limit the use of all-electric vehicles mainly to local driving.
When hydrogen is used as a fuel cell in electric vehicles the only vehicle emission is water.
Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles could become less costly than the advanced internal combustion engine vehicles of 2050.
Fuel cell vehicles are not subject to the limitations of battery vehicles but developing a hydrogen infrastructure in concert with a growing number of fuel cell vehicles will be difficult and expensive the report says.
The technology advances required to meet the 2050 goals are challenging and not assured. Nevertheless the committee considers that dramatic cost reduction
The most common choices would be to either burn it for electricity or dispose of the ash.
Ceramics are used in a wide variety of technologies including body armor fuel cells spark plugs nuclear rods and superconductors.
This increases the strength of the ceramic as well as improving its optical magnetic and other properties.
The key to Narayan's approach is the application of an electric field at approximately 100 volts per centimeter to the material.
and draw current from the electric field to the area --which raises the temperature along the grain boundary.
Preheating the grain boundary with an electric field is allowed what Narayan to lower the sintering temperature from 1450 C to 800 C
A typical BECCS system converts woody biomass grass and other vegetation into electricity chemical products or fuels such as ethanol.
The technology can be used in power plants paper mills ethanol processors and other manufacturing facilities. As a carbon-negative technology BECCS takes advantage of the innate ability of trees grasses
Approximately 60 percent of global CO2 emissions come from power plants and other industries fueled by coal natural gas and oil.
To make the process carbon negative researchers have proposed a BECCS co-fired power plant that runs on a mixture of fossil fuel (such as coal) and vegetation (wood grass or straw for example.
Unlike BECCS and biochar systems which produce electricity or fuels mechanical trees do not generate power
and Technology are the latest in a long effort to understand the environmental aspects of antibiotic resistance which threatens decades of progress in fighting disease.
The propagation of antibiotic resistance has been perceived as a medical or microbiology-related problem Alvarez said.
and/or oxygen through successive generations they found that in the absence of tetracycline both microbes dumped the resistance plasmid though not entirely in the case of E coli.
But P. aeruginosa completely shed the genetic element responsible for resistance which made it susceptible once again to antibiotics.
When a high level of tetracycline was present both microbes retained a level of resistance One long-recognized problem with antibiotics is that they tend to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
So there is incentive to eliminate the resistance plasmid from bacteria in the environment as close to the source as possible.
His study of the Haihe River in China funded by the Chinese government and published last year found tetracycline resistance genes are common in the environment there as well.
Killian and fellow scientists from Rice and the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center co-founded Nano3d Biosciences in 2009 after creating a technology that uses magnetism to levitate
The technology relies on inert nontoxic magnetic nanoparticles that are inserted into the living cells. Researchers can then use magnets to lift
and suspend the cells as they grow and divide. Growing realistic lung tissues in vitro is a particular challenge said study co-author Jane Grande-Allen professor of bioengineering at Rice.
The undergraduate team Cells in 3-D worked on a magnetic pen that could be used to grab move
We also used primary cells rather than engineered cells which is important for toxicological testing because primary cells provide the closest possible match to native cells.
Souza said bronchiole tissue could solve another problem that's frequently encountered in testing the toxicity of airborne agents.
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