Monthly Archives: February 2014

Solar Energy Innovation

 

Solar energy has been making its way into our collective minds as a viable way to generate electricity and power. Today, the general interest in solar power has changed to more of a craze, with more and more people coming up with ways to incorporate photovoltaic panels into their home and businesses. Solar panels and photovoltaic energy is a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of generating energy, and many people around the world are coming up with interesting and innovative ways to generate solar energy.

The first thing that I came across in my research was a way to use solar energy without solar panels. I first saw a picture of a kitchen in someone’s house. This was a regular looking kitchen, but in the corner and in front of the counter there were floor-to-ceiling clear tubes. Inside the clear tubes was a large amount of water. These are called passive heat storage tubes. The idea is for the tubes to be placed in areas of someone’s home or business that get a lot of sunlight in through the windows. The water in the tubes then heats up and radiates that heat out and into the room. It sort of works like an old-school radiator, but on a much larger scale and the water stays stagnant inside of the tube. Of course, these tubes cannot power a building with electricity, but they do provide heat within a single room. The main purpose is for the tubes to be in someone’s home and the heat that they radiate would help cut down on heating oil and other heating costs. However, there are problems with passive head storage tubes. For starters, one could not depend entirely upon these tubes to give them adequate heat, especially in desperately cold climates. They serve as a good supplementary source of heat, but certainly not a primary. Additionally, the tubes are not too cosmetically appealing. One website says that they can be used as “room dividers or attractive accents” but I’m not buying it. They look more like a storage device for someone’s human clone projects than a way to heat a room.

Passive heat storage tubes… charming.

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Around the world people spend a great deal of their time and money on sporting events. Sporting arenas require massive amounts of energy to power lights, scoreboards, television equipment and countless other facets to make their events fun. Most arenas still rely on power from power plants to power their arenas but arenas such as Fenway Park, AT&T Park, and Lincoln Financial Field use some solar power to power their stadiums. But one stadium uses 100% solar power as their energy source: The National Stadium in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The stadium is a spherical shape and uses 8,844 solar panels as its roof. It is estimated that the stadium generates 1.14 million Kilowatt-hours of energy a year, which is enough to power 80% of its surrounding neighborhood. This project is incredibly innovative because it takes something that requires a high level of energy to function and turns in into all renewable energy.

The National Stadium. Solar panels visible on roof

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A new species of trees has been sprouting up in Serbia. But these trees don’t produce fruit or lumber. Instead, they produce electricity. They’re called Strawberry Trees and they are found in urban centers in Serbia. Strawberry Trees are public cell phone chargers and Wi-Fi stations that are completely run off of solar power. I find that these Strawberry Trees incorporate renewable energy in a way that touches everyone today, through cell phones. Everyone has one, they all need to be charged, so why not use a renewable resource to keep them running? There are currently only 3 Strawberry Trees in Serbia, but more installations are planned. To add to the convenience of the Tree, it stores the solar energy gathered during sunny days so that users can still charge their phones in cloudy weather and at night.

A man sits under a Strawberry Tree in Serbia. Many cell phone chargers visible behind him

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Innovations in the industry of solar power seem to be sprouting up all around the world. However, I feel that the US is lacking in their innovations. I find these international innovations very interesting and I will continue to research them.

 

References

http://solarenergy.net/News/2010040902-7-ways-to-use-solar-energy-around-the-house/

http://mashable.com/2012/01/04/innovative-solar-energy-tech/

http://www.archdaily.com/22520/taiwan-solar-powered-stadium-toyo-ito/

http://www.archdaily.com/22520/taiwan-solar-powered-stadium-toyo-ito/

Labview Generator

In this lab we were charged with the duty of running a generator powered off of our own bodily energy. For this lab we used the Lego Mindstorm technology and software to power and capture our results. We were given a flashlight looking device that housed the generator, a magnet that passes through coils and the change in current creates power, and we needed to shake the device to move the magnet and create the energy. This lab illustrated to me the way in which a generator works, and how many times that the magnet must pass through the coils in order to generate a good amount of power.  We did six trials and used varied amounts of shakes in each trial, then we took that data and sumsquared it. Here is our data and results:

data from lab. Shakes vs. Sumsquared

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For our first test we did a trial without shaking the generator at all. What I found to be interesting is that the generator was still able to generate some power, albeit a very low amount. I am not entirely sure why this is, but I suspect that it is because there is some pent up energy left within the coil from the last run or while the magnet was running through the coils before we started the trial.

Something that I find interesting as well is the fact that every trial that we did produced more energy than the last, despite the fact that we did not increase the number of shakes that we did each time, sometimes we did less shakes. This, similar to why not shaking the device at all yielded some energy gain, I feel is because there was some pent up energy left in the generator from the previous trials.

graph showing number of shakes on the X axis and the sumsquared on the Y axis.
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A challenge that we encountered in the process of doing this lab was in collecting the data. I found it incredibly hard to count the number of times that I shook the device, especially when we were attempting to maximize the shaking. Because of that, some of ‘the number of shakes’ might be estimations of how many times the device was shaken. This perhaps could have hindered the data in some way. However this lab was a lot of fun and did a very good job of helping us understand exactly how a generator works.

LabView 3

This lab involved using the Lego Mindstorm in a new and innovative way. For this lab only the wheel portion of the car was used. The actual wheel was tied to a string that was fed through a pulley system and attached to a few weights on the other side. We had to use one force three times and change the amount of weight on the other side of the pulley for each trial. Then we had to change the amount of force for the next three trials and keep the weight constant. For each trial we had to calculate the acceleration. For the first trial set we used the force of 75 Newtons and we changed the mass to .2Kg, .1 Kg, and .16 Kg. For the second set of trials we used the forces of 50 Newtons, 100 Newtons, and 150 Newtons and kept the weight constant at .2Kg. Here are our results for the acceleration of each trial:

force(N) mass (Kg)  accel(m/s^2)  Potential energy

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Here are some graphs:

 

Mass and Acceleration
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Force and Acceleration

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This lab was a lot different but also a good deal of fun. It was simple and challenging. The lab was challenging because we had to set up and be fluent in the language Lego Mindstorm and Labview, and also we had to be able to calculate acceleration which took a lot of unit conversion and math skill (I’m not great at either one of those things). But it was simple because we just had to watch and measure heights and speeds of some weights being raised in the air with a pulley.

Electricity Generation

Ever since the concept of energy has been around there have been many ways to generate it. Today, when our entire lives are run off of electricity in order to be productive, those different types of energy generation play a major role in our efficiency. Additionally, these different types of energy sources have different effects on the environment. Today, the way to create and generate electricity comes from the heating of water, which creates steam and turns the turbines that create electricity.

Coal is doing the worst damage to the environment of all fossil fuels. 40% of our energy comes from coal, and that means that coal is one of leading contributors to the future of our climate. It is a substance that is mined from below the Earth’s surface and is created from pressure on dead vegetation. Because it is created from pressure, coal takes millions of years to form. The amount of coal being mined will take longer than human existence to replenish, making it a fossil fuel. Coal is mined, and then burned to create steam, which is used to spin the turbines that create electricity. 93% of the coal mined in the US is consumed for the generation of electricity. When coal is burned some of the emissions that are expelled include Sulfur Dioxide (contributes to respiratory illness and acid rain), Nitrogen Oxides (contributes to respiratory illness and smog), and many other types of emissions.

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Another fuel that is used to create electricity is natural gas. Natural gas is a fuel that is trapped in the shale rock layers deep within the earth. The process of extracting that gas is called hydraulic fracturing or simply fracking. In order to successfully frack, the fracking company must drill deep down to the shale rock and then inject pressurized fracking fluids into the rock, creating channels within the rock where the gas is then extracted. When the process is done, the drill hole is filled with cement. Then, the natural gas is taken to a plant and used to heat water that creates steam, similar to the coal burning process. The problem with this process is the fluid used to actually break the shale rock is highly toxic. The fluid contains 600 chemicals that are known to be toxic such as carcinogens, mercury, and formaldehyde. So basically, it’s like getting shale rock addicted to smoking cigarettes, because all of those chemicals are also found in cigarettes. These chemicals then leach out of the rock and can contaminate ground water, which is consumed by animals and humans.

Big fracking problem if ya ask me!

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Finally, another way that electricity is generated is through nuclear energy. Nuclear energy comes from the splitting of uranium atoms in a process called fission. When done in the reactor of a nuclear power plant, the fission process gives off heat, which is applied to water and creates steam to turn turbines, therefore create electricity. A huge issue with nuclear power is the danger that comes along with splitting uranium atoms. Essentially, these power plants are giant nuclear bombs that have the potential to level entire geographical regions, something that happened in the case of Chernobyl in the 1980’s. Also these plants give off nuclear waste, which must be put somewhere, and can contaminate our soil and drinking water.

It is clear that we are using many different channels of generating electricity. However, all of the options that I have just talked about have extremely costly downsides. Unfortunately, almost all of the options we have to aid in the generation of electricity have some sort of downside. For now however, it seems that these are the worst options that we have, and yet we continue to use them more often than any others.

 

References

http://www.westinghousenuclear.com/Community/WhatIsNuclearEnergy.shtm

 

http://www.darvill.clara.net/altenerg/nuclear.htm

 

http://www.dangersoffracking.com/

 

http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-and-you/affect/coal.html

 

http://www.eia.gov/kids/energy.cfm?page=coal_home-basics

Labview #2

This lab involved a lot more mathematical and technical skill than the last lab. The goal of the lab was to set up the lego car and to have it run at a certain power amount, and we would measure the distance that it would travel using a meter stick. Then we would have to record the distances and times that would read out in the LabView application, and repeat the process three times for each power value. Using all of our collected data we would then have to calculate our percent error.

Data

 

Power= 15

Measured travel distance (cm)

1)   25.3

2)   25.5   Average dist.= 26.6cm, .260m (LabView readout)   # of turns= 1.47

3)   26

Power= 85

Measured travel distance (cm)

1)   30.2

2)   30      Average dist.= 30.1cm, .304m (LabView readout)   # of turns=1.7

3)   34

Power=95

Measured travel distance (cm)

1)   33.5

2)   33.3   Average dist= 30.1cm, .304m (Labview readout)   # of turns= 1.7

3)   33.4

 

% error

showing my work…

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Power=15

            %error= 4.9%

Power=85

            %error= .99%

Power=95

            %error= 4.1%

 

Something that we had a hard time doing was getting an accurate reading on the ruler. The car would usually not travel in a perfectly straight line, which made it hard to measure the distance clearly. Also remembering the exact mark on the wheel to measure from was a challenge as well, but our % error stayed very low. From time to time our car would not run either too, but eventually it would catch up to the commands of the computer.

Germany’s Green Energy Policy

The issue of Global Warming has changed from a theory to a fact over the last few years due to most environmental scientists saying that it is a growing and real issue. The issue of global warming is something that touches each and every one of us on the planet, and it is up to us to do something about it. However, lets not be idealistic here. Most people will do very little to help better our environment, so that is why the world’s legislators must begin to spin the wheels of change and write and enforce environmental protection laws. An excellent example of that are the German green energy policies.

renewable energy. wind.

wind turbine

The bottom line for German energy is that it wants to derive 80% of its electricity from renewable resources by 2050, an ambitious goal for the world’s fifth largest economy. It is clear that Germany has already come leaps and bounds in attaining their goal, as they currently are at 25% of their energy coming from renewables. They did not think that this would come along quite so quickly, seeing how they were only at 7% thirteen years ago.

But while this is primarily an environmental effort, that’s not the only thing that has the potential to improve. Bloomberg.com says that since 2004 clean energy business investments and projects have grown by 122% and jobs in the energy sector have doubled in that same time period. They also report that since this quantum shift in energy dependency, Germany has the most dependable energy supply in all of Europe, meaning that the power seldom goes out in Germany.

renewable energy. solar.

panels

This system is not without its flaws however. instituteforenergyresearch.org explains that in 2009 the cost of energy goes up every year by 10%. They explain that because of this energy price hike, Germans on average are forced to spend 34% of their yearly income on energy and rent. This energy policy has affected German business as well, as the energy bills go up the price of producing goods also grows. This has the potential to lead to Germany having a tough time becoming a true competitive economic force in Europe.

So this is a huge challenge for Germany; keep the progress in increasing the use of renewable energy while keeping costs low. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel is determined to make economics and environmental improvement less of a dichotomy and more of a partnership. In 2014 Merkel has said that if the cost of energy goes up for German industries, they must find ways to cut costs somewhere else, and plans to create even more jobs to expand the clean energy industry to help the economy.

 

References

 

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-11-14/2014-outlook-germanys-green-energy-switch

 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-15/u-s-energy-policy-should-take-a-lesson-from-germany-s-energiewende.html

 

 

http://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/2012/10/30/germanys-energy-policy-man-made-crisis-now-costing-billions/