Sub's Alternative Energy Thread

[1972Shocker]

Here is the spedific tweet.

[wufan]

Whoa…so I used a couple of carbon foot print calculators online. A trip from Seattle to Sydney in a full size 747 puts off about 1000 metric tons of carbon. My wife’s civic puts off 5 metric tons per 15000 miles…about one year of driving.

So yeah…200 years of daily driving = 1 private flight half way around the world. 400 years if he flys home.

[ShockerDropOut]

Yeah, but ole Bill is saving the planet. We are all just users. Amiright?

[pinstripers]

[wufan]

They will rejigger the data to fit the model.

[SubGod22]

Interesting way of dealing with EV battery waste and reusing it.

The Biggest EV Battery Recycling Plant Opens in the US

In Covington, Georgia, a 30,000-ton-per-year recycling facility for batteries and battery scrap just switched on the disassembly line for the very first time.

Inside its walls, a Massachusetts-based startup will be harvesting lithium carbonate, cobalt, manganese, and other battery minerals and selling them back to the market, circumventing the huge challenges that come from opening new mines.

Ascend Elements hopes to take advantage of massive government spending on electric vehicle production by dotting the Carolinas, Georgia, Tenessee, and the Midwest with recycling facilities within an hour’s drive from new automotive plants.

The Covington location can take apart around 70,000 electric vehicles worth of batteries, while allegedly providing enough free cash flow to allow Ascend to pay car manufacturers a little for their old batteries to make doubly sure they don’t end up in landfills.

Once they arrive on site, the batteries are shredded and sieved into “black mass” which is sorted by mineral type.

[pinstripers]

"The narrative since that day in 1988 is that Earth is entering a dangerous warm era created by man’s carbon dioxide emissions. Every heat wave, cold snap, drought, hurricane, heavy snow, torrential rain, and change in sea level has been supposedly caused by man. And all are allegedly unprecedented events.

Except they’re not. It’s been warmer, and extreme weather has visited us before, all in a time long before man began to drive cars and operate power plants that helped move him from an almost primitive existence to a modern one."

----------------Ben Powless

[SubGod22]

More water capture technology that could benefit those in areas that deal with water scarcity. This sounds as if it's more efficient than previous tech that pulls water from the air.

Device Pulls Dozens of Liters of Water from the Air - Already Being Installed in Jordanian Desert Homes

Entrepreneurs in Jordan have created a sophisticated machine that pulls water from the desert air at a rate that could cure the country’s water woes.

1,000 units of their flagship device have already been pre-ordered by the Jordanian government, and the success of the invention has allowed the innovators to attract dozens of promising scientists who can hopefully expand on their success and bring water resources up to speed in the relatively-stable Near Eastern nation.

Jordan has an interesting contradiction of celebrating the highest academic involvement in the Arab world, but also suffering in one of its least-successful entrepreneurial landscapes and from a problem with water insecurity that ranks among the highest in the world.

Stepping up to address this problem is Aquaporo, a relatively straightforward, air conditioning-sized machine that can harvest 35 liters of water every day in a desert climate of 20% humidity.

Much of Jordan’s population may only have access to 200 cubic meters of water per year, and only 36 hours of tap water per week provisioned by the authorities. The WHO warns these levels can create harm to human health and economic development.

Aquaporo CEO Kyle Cordova and engineering director Husam Almassad got their start at Jordan’s Royal Scientific Society with a group of trainees. Their invention looked a bit like a chest freezer, but now more an A/C unit above a normal water cooler.

Inside, rows of nanomaterials formed into tubes and other shapes act like a sieve that filters water out of the air. The physics behind it are much the same as those found in this Classical Indian architectural feature and takes advantage of air’s tendency to speed up as it moves through a narrow passageway; called the Venturi Effect.

[SubGod22]

Another cool development for some alternative plastic options.

Compostable Plastic Wrap Made from Seaweed Can Withstand Heat - and Biodegrade in Weeks

An invasive seaweed species from the Caribbean has been turned into a compostable plastic wrap that has the potential for mass production.

Furthermore, it may have the properties to transform the whole supply chain of this ubiquitous product used in huge quantities every day in restaurants around the world.

The breakthrough comes from the University of Leeds, in the UK, where Keeran Reed and his colleagues were looking to turn the brown seaweed species called sargassum, (Sargassum natans) which inundates the shores of Reed’s home of Trinidad and Tobago, into a sort of biopolymer.

Sargassum is made up of long chains of molecules similar to those found in conventional plastic. the researchers found that mixing it with acid, salt, and some chemicals rendered it thicker and pliable.

They then turned it into sheets of film like normal plastic wrap to study how it held up in heated conditions, and when thrown into the compost bin. Existing biodegradable plastics can take months, even more than a year, to break down in a compost heap. By contrast, the sargassum needed two to three weeks.

Despite this rapid decomposition, the films were robust and held together at temperatures of around 450°F (230°C). Also, the film didn’t leach out any of the chemicals when left in water over a period of 10 days, meaning it can be safely used to cover moist containers of food like chopped fruit.

“Studying the whole supply chain really is where ideas for sustainable materials make it or don’t. We want to find one best application for our material and study the environmental impact of pursuing it from the lab to the consumer,” Koon-Yang Lee at Imperial College London, part of the research team, told New Scientist.

[SubGod22]

More seaweed repurposing. It has a ton of uses all around the world, and the uses appear to be growing.

Visionary Gardener Turns Piles of Beached Seaweed Into Bricks for Sustainable Construction

While tourists visiting Mexican beaches complain about piles of smelly seaweed, one Mexican gardener reckoned it was something like a gift.

The governments in places like Cancun have been required to clear away as much as 40,000 tons of sargassum seaweed, which smells like rotten eggs, but Omar de Jesús Vazquez Sánchez is steering it away from the landfills and into a kiln, where he makes adobe-like blocks that pass regulation as a building material.

He started SargaBlock to market the bricks, which are being highlighted by the UN Development Program as a stroke of brilliance, and a sustainable solution to a current environmental problem.

His story begins back in 2015 when, like any experienced laborer, he found rich people were stuck with a job they didn’t want to do. In this case, it was cleaning up the sargassum on the beaches of the Riviera Maya.

Omar grew up in poverty, immigrated to the US as a child to become a day laborer, and eventually dropped out of school and became a substance abuser. The American dream never appealed to him as much as a “Mexican dream”—a mix of memories from his childhood and dreams of being a gardener back home, so he moved back.

His time feeling unwanted as an addict and immigrant gave him a unique perspective on the smelly seaweed.

“When you have problems with drugs or alcohol, you’re viewed as a problem for society. No one wants anything to do with you. They look away,” Omar told Christian Science Monitor in a translated interview.

“When sargassum started arriving, it created a similar reaction. Everyone was complaining, I wanted to mold something good out of something everyone saw as bad.”

[Atxshoxfan]

More seaweed repurposing. It has a ton of uses all around the world, and the uses appear to be growing.

Visionary Gardener Turns Piles of Beached Seaweed Into Bricks for Sustainable Construction

Ya, but the important question is, can you smoke it?

[WstateU]

Ya, but the important question is, can you smoke it?

[Atxshoxfan]

It's my wife's, and she has her medical card officer.

[SubGod22]

This was done to not only save a lot of money ($150M), but it was also done to limit CO2 usage. I don't personally care about the CO2 aspect, but this was a pretty cool endeavor and a successful one at that.

Instead of Demolishing its Tallest Building, Australia Holds Contest to 'Upcycle a Skyscraper' Saving Tons of CO2

In 2014, the Australian firm AMP Capital launched a bold and bizarre call to action to the architectural community of Sydney—replace their skyscraper headquarters without demolishing it.

They wanted their AMP Center, the once-tallest building in Sydney, to become the world’s first “upcycled skyscraper,” and the results were truly inspirational.

By grating a second tower onto the existing core of the AMP Center and not demolishing it, 12,000 tons of CO2 were saved which would have otherwise been created through the use of heavy machinery and the loss of carbon captured in the cement. 12,000 tons is equal to 3 years of the 49-story tower’s maximum energy consumption.

Built in the 1970s, the AMP Center wasn’t necessarily on its last legs, but wasn’t viable for the company any longer. But the firm was unwilling to commit to the massive costs of carbon and money when another option was available.

First though, sufficiently bold architects were needed for the project. Three firms teamed up, led by Danish architects 3XN, an Engineering company called Arup, and the Australian architects BVN.

“The tower was coming to the end of the end of its life, in terms of viability… but the structure and the ‘bones’ can actually last a lot longer,” said Fred Holt from 3XN in a video interview. “You can’t always retain everything. But if you can retain the structure—and that’s where the majority of your embodied carbon is—then you’re lowering your footprint.”

There's a pretty cool, and short, time lapse video at the bottom of the article that shows a bit what the process looked like. They were able to double their office space.

[SubGod22]

It will be interesting to see how this concept progresses and which direction it ultimately goes.

Sweden's First EV-Charging Road Will Power Electric Vehicles as They Drive

The “E-20” highway stretch in Sweden will soon become the nation’s first functioning charging road to juice the batteries of heavy vehicles carrying freight around the nation.

E-20, (the E actually stands for Europe, rather than electric) runs between Hallsberg and Örebro in the middle of the country’s three major cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö.

Construction is slated to begin in 2025 along a whopping 21 kilometers of road (13 miles), but it hasn’t been decided which method of charging will be used. Previously-constructed charging roads in Europe have used methods that require outside equipment—overhead wires like a city tram line or undercarriage-mounted arms that attach to an electrified rail along the roadway.

These are highly impractical for regular motorists, who can neither reach the cables nor afford to mount a robotic arm on their car.

The last option, and the only sensible one for cars as well as trucks, is to build wireless charging infrastructure down the center of the lanes that send out an electromagnetic signal to a coil on the underside of the vehicle small enough to be fitted to a sedan or a tractor-trailer.

In any case, in order to conduct long-haul trucking in the larger European countries, there has to be sensible charging infrastructure to prevent the trucks from becoming overloaded with the battery packs necessary to drive long distances.

“If you are going to have only static charging full battery solution for heavy-duty vehicles, you will get vehicles with a huge amount of batteries that the vehicles need to carry,” said Jan Pettersson, Director of Strategic Development at Trafikverket, the Swedish transport administration.