That's according to U s. Department of energy secretary Steven Chu, who said this morning that innovation has changed the world in remarkable ways
We need innovation in energy he said. Innovation in energy is going to be a second industrial revolution.
In a 45-minute presentation at the  Stevens Institute of technology, Chu outlined several technological innovations in history that transformed the world
ENERGY Chu said he saw similarities to Ford's assembly line when he visited a Suntech solar plant in China.
Clean energy technologies can positively impact the environment the same way that automobiles did. Not that cars don't produce smog,
At the time, gasoline-powered vehicles provided clean streets, Chu said. Now we have another environmental problem,
he said of pollution and greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. It may not be quite as visible or an assault on our senses as horse manure
That's why the Department of energy asks itself: how can we accelerate the decline to achieve the elusive $1/watt price where clean technologies are price-competitive with fossil fuels?
We think that even at $1. 50 a watt, this will go viral, he said.
if it doesn't fight to popularize clean energy technologies, too. Invented in America is not good enough,
The same ought to happen in energy. We can become us again, he said. We did in many other sectors.
We better become us again in the energy sector
Cloning vs. conservationsuppose you knew the rain forests would be destroyed totally in 20 years, no matter what.
At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, a clever engineer named Rudolf Diesel demonstrated his namesake engine with peanut oil.
But in the age of cheap petroleum, biofuels could never really overtake gasoline as the fuel of choice.
And now, the popularity of solar and wind power suggest that the entire discussion is moot.
Gasoline has a special vapor pressure specification for volatility for fumes. They end up back in the atmosphere.
Ethanol can only be made into gasoline. Butanol, the kind we use, can be converted into diesel fuel and also into jet fuel.
It has essentially no impurities and is essentially indistinguishable from normal diesel and jet fuels.
We can make it from a variety of feedstock. We can make butanol from corn, but we've decided to avoid that route.
That's really the challenge with all these fuel and chemical technologies, they have to cross the Valley of Death.
because prices are higher than they are in fuels and the key to getting the technology really, really, really cheap,
and not try to sell into the gasoline market at $2 a gallon. If you're building cellulosic ethanol, the second,
when you've been at BP--there, I was responsible for purchasing oil and selling crude products--is:
how do you make money in this business? You need to have cheap crude oil --i e. waste materials--and you don't want to be in competition for feedstocks,
or you're squeezing your margins. And you need to have good products. A lot of my competitors fall in love with the product
I actually ran clean fuels research for Amoco at the time, which actually involved cleaning up gasoline,
so I know what it takes to bring technology from test-tube scale to production.
But that's not a solution to the cellulosic fuel problem. I think you're going to see those show up,
DOE Dept of energy grants can support research and development, a pilot plant, a demonstration facility. Those programs have been out there,
The job the DOE has is sifting through applications. I do think in their first round that they made a few mistakes
but you have to realize that with the BP-Transocean oil spill we just poisoned half the food chain down there in the Gulf of mexico.
Knowing BP, it's not a surprise. It's a broken culture. The winners can come from anywhere in the last minute.
From a volume perspective, the fuels market is much better than the chemicals market. The chemicals market is pretty exciting--the revenues are the same.
Reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Protecting people & the environment. Growing in developing markets. The Applied Biosciences division,
A zero-fat soybean oil called Plenish under its Pioneer brand in 2012. We have a unique capability to have both science in advanced materials as well as biotechnology,
help clients satisfy government mandates for renewable fuels. To begin, Binetti offered a look at the global biofuels market.
Ethanol is projected to rise to 20 percent of the overall transportation fuel supply. Drop in fuels and non-food feedstocks are needed.
Drivers: energy security, rural community growth, fewer greenhouse gas emissions, food constraints, green jobs. Binetti outlined the advantages of cellulosic ethanol:
60 percent reduction in greenhouse gases. Grown on marginal land. Good income for farmers. Then he outlined the advantages of biobutanol:
It has a higher energy density/content than ethanol, at 26 percent. Key to Dupont's gains in cellulosic ethanol:
Binetti said he expects a lot of interest in the fuel. Once the technology becomes available, we expect plants to be built quickly,
the company is partnering with oil giant BP on commercialization in the U s. and Brazil.
and BP brings the fuel blending, testing and marketing.)The advantage of butanol is that its higher energy content means more of it can replace gasoline,
Binetti said. This makes it easier for fuel producers to meet mandates, he said. Ã Â Retail gas stations can be taken into and out of butanol service without problem.
The technology that Cherry Central is using includes IBM DB2 Web Query running on the Power system platform.
quantity, quality and the energy consumption related to it. From a quantity standpoint, we've reached a point globally where the demand for fresh water is exceeding the global supply.
take the energy cost out--about 50 percent of the cost of running a desal plant is energy
Some of the less conventional fuels used right now...take natural gas. In New york and Pennsylvania, we're sitting on one of the greatest shale gas reserves in the world.
and they have problems with extraction and the development of the oil sands. We have a joint development center with Conocophillips in Doha, UAE.
coal, nuclear, gas. A big power plant uses a boatload of water. The primary use is to cool those processes--the big hyperbolic cooling towers.
People underestimate the amount of energy that it takes to make and pump water. California's the highest--19 percent of their energy bill goes to that.
There are a lot of things you can do to reduce the amount of energy you consume. With this next wave of megacities being built,
there's a great opportunity to rethink how we do things. The smart grid and energy
there's a parallel, probably five to 10 years behind. There's a smart grid out there for water, somewhere.
At our nuclear plant in Wilmington, North carolina we're doing water treatment there. Our aircraft engines plant in Cincinnati.
It's been used for energy for a number of years but now it's been expanded for water.
Making sense of water consumption (Water Wednesday) The Energy star label has become an iconic way to help people identify the most energy-efficient electronics gadgets, appliances and other technologies.
the EPA believes that it has helped consumers save up to 125 billion gallons of water and more than $2 billion in water and energy bills.
Smartplanet turned to David Biello who has been writing about the environment and energy for nearly 15 years, most recently for Scientific American.
which has helped fuel our exploding population and our overwhelming population is now causing even more problems.
Extending modern energy to the billion or so people who are still burning wood or dung.
These are things we should be doing right away to buy us some time to solve the harder problem of how to stop burning fossil fuels.
Eighty percent or more of our energy is still coming from fossil fuels. Eventually we need to go to zero or negative with our CO2 emissions.
But we need to remember the energy transitions in the past. Going from wood to coal took 200 years.
And we still are not completely there! As I mentioned earlier, there are still parts of the world where wood is the primary fuel source.
We need to get started on our transition from fossil fuel burning so that we can complete the transition in time to save human civilization.
That is if we want the Anthropocene to be more than a blip in the geologic record.
even if we burn all the fossil fuels, the planet as a rock will survive and so will a lot of the life on the planet,
What about the government agency Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E? Â Are they working on useful solutions?
They are trying to get us off fossil fuels. SP: Are they as â Å out there â Â as their brother, DARPA,
And what we require is cheap energy. They are working on things like better batteries to replace oil used in transportation.
And they are doing natural gas research. And better biofuels research, like re-engineering plants, so they do a better job of turning sunlight into fuels than current plants do.
Or bypassing plants altogether, by taking sunlight and somehow turning it into a fuel that you can burn.
We are going to need every little bit of innovation to displace the burning of fossil fuels. SP:
What does success look like to you? DB: Success has three parts. One is a resilient and robust human civilization.
The U s. uses roughly 21 million barrels of oil per day. According to a recent U s. Census bureau report, 2. 8 million people have so-called oeextreme commutes,
Public transportation is cited often as a cure for oil addiction. In the United states, rise of disabled elderly Americans will strain public transportation systems.
The U s. military hopes to soon use drones for cargo transportation and refueling. This is certainly a realistic hope according to Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Automation Lab at MIT.
(and compressing the air in the first place requires energy that may not necessarily be oegreen), so refinements will be needed before we could all be riding on air.
All that can be said of it is a set of equations that describe its probability of being given in a place with a given energy
getting rid of the extra energy by giving off a burst of light. Astonishingly, that light contains all the quantum information needed to reconstitute the atom.
Energy The Future: World energy demand will increase dramatically. Experts predict that energy demand will rise by 60%between 2002 and 2030
and will require about $568 billion in new investments every year. Developing nations growing hungrier for scarce oil supplies,
coupled with concern over the environment in developed nations, will signal the end of the oil era.
Petroleum alternatives now comprise about 17%of global energy use and are growing at just 30%per year.
By 2020, only 30%of global energy is likely to come from alternative energy sources. Futurist Fixes 1. Piezoelectrics.
As covered in THE FUTURIST magazine (November-December 2007: Two students at MIT School of architecture are attempting to capture the untamed energy of urban crowds and convert it into a source of electric power.
James Graham and Thaddeus Jusczyk call their project a oecrowd farm. It a series of connected floor blocks that depress very slightly when people walk, run,
or jump on them, causing the blocks to move against one another. The design converts this oeslippage into power.
Ambient energy i e. vibrations in the surrounding environment derived from the piezoelectric phenomenon could provide power for future nanoscale devices.
In the future, nanodevices could use zinc oxide nanowires that draw energy from vibrations such as from the flow of blood
As a replacement for oil, algae is extremely practical, utilizes mostly cheap and abundant resources like saltwater and wasteland,
the cost of halophytic algae biofuel is less than the cost of petroleum trading at $70 per barrel or higher.
Tidal-current turbines and tidal-stream turbines tapping the power of sea systems like the Gulf stream could provide energy for power-hungry states such as Florida.
Energy use in Florida will go up nearly 30%in the next decade as a result of growth. Researchers from Florida Atlantic University have received a $5 million grant to see how the Gulf stream,
The Center of Excellence in Ocean Energy Technology at Florida Atlantic University The Issue: Hunger The earth population is projected to increase by 2. 5 billion people in the next four decades,
the main reason people eat is to replace the energy they expend walking around, breathing, living life, etc.
Like all creatures, we take energy stored in plant or animal matter. Freitas points out that the isotope gadolinium-148 could provide much of the fuel the body needs.
But a person can t just eat a radioactive chemical and hope to be healthy,
The gadolinium-powered robots would make sure that the person body was absorbing the energy safely and consistently.
which the body could convert to energy to eat a bit less. In the January-February 2010 issue of THE FUTURIST magazine, Freitas lays out his ideas for improving human health through nanotechnology. 2. Better Design.
With sections focusing on food, water, shelter, health and sanitation, energy and transportation, and education, oedesign for the Other 90%focused on problem solving for the vast majority of the world people who survive under the poverty level
Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution.
and adjusts room temperatures accordingly to save energy. At the Nest offices in Palo alto, Calif.,there is a lot of talk of helping the planet,
whereas in the energy market you need 50,000 calories per person, Brabeck-Letmathe told BBC News in July. oeit takes about 4,
900 litres of water if it comes from palm oil. Advances in bioechnology have helped us push food production to its limit.
¢Built to harvest all of the water and energy from the site;¢¢Smaller and reconfigurable to the needs of the mobile workforce;
whether synthetic biology that utilizes plants for food, energy, and medicine might lead to an increase or loss of biodiversity.
synthetic fuels, biofuels, electricity, hydrogen, etc. â agriculture and food production: engineered crops, pest control, fertilizers, etc. â environmental protection and remediation:
This may well favor applications in existing industrial processes and commodity chains (energy, agriculture, aquaculture) and the operations of large business corporations.
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