the love of change
You may remember that way back when Tropophilia received free carbon offsets from Move Neutral, a carbon-offset company based out of Austin, TX. We’ve also featured a badge in our sidebar as part of the 350 Challenge from Brighter Planet in Middlebury, VT. Brighter Planet is feeling festive and is offering the gift of free carbon offsets. Just follow the link below to pass along some carbon credits to your eco-geek friends. ‘Tis the season to be neutral:
A guest post by James Q.
First off, I want to thank Jarred for inviting me to guest post on Tropophilia. I’ve been following the blog since its inception and have been nothing but impressed. I hope I can meet the standards of this site.
Jarred linked me to an article about using solar power in conjunction with a small water powered fuel cell. While photovoltaics power a home during the day, surplus power splits water into hydrogen and oxygen, and the two are combined again at night in a fuel cell to produce power. Sounds good enough, but I cannot in good faith agree with the concept.
I’m not an engineer or scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but I do believe that simplicity works. My first thought when reading the article was, “why not just store the excess power in a battery instead of using it to power another process?” To me, adding extra steps, equipment, and parameters only complicates things. Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t efficiency fall every time an energy source passes through a different medium?
Continue reading ‘The Future of Power’
Last month John McCain made a campaign promise that, if elected, he would champion a $300 million prize to develop an inexpensive and powerful automotive battery that could “leapfrog” current available batteries. While the announcement garnered some press coverage, it was covered with fervor in the political as well as technology blogosphere. In fact, it seems to have been one of the most polarizing political announcements in technology and clean-technology investment spheres since a number of candidates promised to make changes in laws regarding carried interest. Tech investors left a number of interesting commentaries on the McCain battery plan. Many deemed the intentions of the plan as noble, but the logistics poor. One of the major arguments, among others, was that the development of such a battery would have a monetary upside that would far outweigh the $300 million prize. Others argued that such money would be better used in some kind of federal R&D program that could foster emerging battery research.
These commentaries got me thinking about prizes and the inherent “carrot and stick” issues that surround such achievement-based prizes. While the clean-tech detractors certainly make interesting and very true points, they’re forgetting the intangible inspiration factor that such a prize could create. An excellent example of such inspiration success could be the $10 million Ansari X-Prize awarded in October of 2004. In the the nine years from introduction to its presentation to the Paul Allen-backed winner Mohave Aerospace Ventures, the prize inspired over twenty-six teams made up of both amateurs as well as professionals to create and successfully launch a reusable manned spacecraft in two separate flights within two weeks. What many fail to point out is that over $100 million was invested in technologies leading up to the two successful Mohave flights.
Wait, isn’t something off here? Why would Mohave and Paul Allen put up ten times the financial muscle into winning a prize that doesn’t even cover the costs of research and development? In the typical investment world such ideas are shear lunacy. In this case wouldn’t it make sense that the prize money merely inspired the group towards the end goal? Why can’t the same true for battery improvements, or wind power, or any other publicly available prize? Isn’t the mere possibility that such a prize could inspire a talented scientist or engineer to shift their efforts towards developing new technology worth forgetting a few logistical shortcomings in a plan?
There however is another important fact that many clean-tech investors have left out. Beyond talk of batteries and prizes, recent campaign statements by both major party candidates illustrate the fact that both candidates are actively interested (at least for now) in making some serious changes to federal energy policy. Placing individual candidates positions aside, if promises from both candidates hold true into a new administration shouldn’t clean-tech investors (as well as the general public) be excited about the possible sea change such policies will bring?
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user AndyArmstrong.
One of my new favorite blogs is Ryan Avent’s site The Bellows. In a post about biking and mass transit in DC, Avent makes a striking statement about density:
Imagine [...] a world where the city established dedicated bus and bike lanes, free from automobile traffic. Imagine that drivers who did want to come into the city had to pay a daily toll, and that the proceeds of that toll went toward increased bus, streetcar, and rail capacity in the city and out into the burbs. Does it not seem that everyone, drivers included, would get where they were going a lot faster? That those without cars would enjoy greater mobility, and that the metro area as a whole would spend a lot less on gas?
Automobiles just weren’t made for the kind of urban density one finds in the District, and it’s incredibly inefficient to just give the streets over to them. At some point, a city reaches a threshold at which it needs to say that cars are welcome, but they’re going to defer to people using other modes of transportation, because we simply can’t afford to accommodate the parking and road space occupied by thousands of single-passenger motor vehicles.
I would love to bike to work, though doing so would necessitate some sort of showers at my office and–in the relatively small city where I live–a death wish as I combat obscene amounts of traffic, no bike lanes, etc.
This is of course an issue of city planning priorities and resources, an unchecked car culture (where 15 minutes waiting in traffic still, for many folks, beats a city bus or a bike ride up a hill), and a host of other factors (like pre-existing narrow streets with scant room for a bike lane). But it’s also, fundamentally, an issue of density.
I have no real wisdom to offer on this subject, but I wanted to highlight Avent’s comments and pose a few questions: What’s the solution for small or mid-size cities that lack the requisite density for these measures to really work? Is that density threshold lower than I imagine? Instead of transportation alternatives, should we be equally concerned with expanding incentives for tele-commuting and satellite work locations?
Image used under a Creative Commons License courtesy of Flickr user bfick.
Happy Memorial Day to everyone. Monday Links are a little late today, but nobody is at work to read them anyway, so enjoy these on Tuesday Morning:
Among adults, the words “geek” and “nerd” exchanged status positions. A nerd was still socially tainted, but geekdom acquired its own cool counterculture. A geek possessed a certain passion for specialized knowledge, but also a high degree of cultural awareness and poise that a nerd lacked. [...]
So, in a relatively short period of time, the social structure has flipped. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the earth.
Yesterday I came across a slightly mysterious website — a collection of Polaroids, one per day, from March 31, 1979 through October 25, 1997. There’s no author listed, no contact info, and no other indication as to where these came from. So, naturally, I started looking through the photos. I was stunned by what I found.
Enjoy! Check back this week for more regular bloggin’ (thanks for your patience last week).
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