Panasonic's new home battery could store a week's-worth of electricity.

source: http://green.venturebeat.com

Panasonic is charging into the green space headlong - first with deals to supply batteries for electric and hybrid vehicles - and now announcing that it will launch a massive lithium-ion storage battery capable of powering an average home for up to a week, the company says.

This is significant for two reasons. First, if home batteries like this one become commonplace, renewable sources of energy like rooftop solar and residential turbines could finally take off. The biggest roadblock to their adoption is that they are intermittent; reliable storage is needed to make them effective. Second, if affordable storage is achieved on the home-level, there might be less need to grid-scale storage, which is pricier and harder to accomplish.

The announcement is hastened by Panasonic's acquisition of a more than fifty percent stake in Sanyo, making the company a battery manufacturing powerhouse that could trounce almost everyone else in the market, including A123Systems, Johnson Controls-Saft, Valence Technologies, and others. Becoming the earliest entrant into the home storage space would solidify its dominance.

Panasonic, which says it has already thoroughly tested this technology, plans to bundle its storage device with a home energy monitoring system that would allow users to view how much power they are using and how much it is costing them right on their television displays. This could make the company a major player in the smart grid arena as well.

Depending on how successful Panasonic is at marketing its household batter (and bringing down the cost), it could become a formidable competitor for fuel-cell makers like Clear Edge Power. Fuel cells also allow for low-emission operations, converting natural gas into electricity and recycled heat. But they don't store electricity for use later, which is a major need for alternative energies to gain traction.

Panasonic, which scored a deal to supply batteries to Tesla Motors in October, has already successfully pushed automotive battery makers out of the market, like Imara, which shuttered earlier this month. Valance, being kept afloat by a new contract with Smith Electric Vehicles, could be next if it doesn't move fast. In any case, it will have a head start, with Panasonic's storage system not hitting stores until 2011.

Baylor professor turning cow manure into fuel-grade ethanol

source: The Waco Tribune

By J.B. Smith Tribune-Herald staff writer

Friday, December 18, 2009

To critics who object to making ethanol fuel out of grain, Larry Lehr, of Waco, has an ecology-minded answer: Run it through a cow first.

Lehr, who teaches environmental science at Baylor University, is planning to build a manure-to-ethanol demonstration plant at a model dairy that Tarleton State University is building in Stephenville.

Lehr and his Waco business partner, Norm Burgess, have already used a $250,000 Texas Emerging Technology grant for research into converting animal waste into fuel-grade ethanol. Now their firm, called Environmental Quality Management Associates, is applying for another $750,000 to build the demonstration plant in Stephenville next year.

The project will be designed to turn the manure from the dairy’s 400 cows into pure ethanol that can be blended with gasoline as fuel. Unlike conventional ethanol, it would require no fossil fuels to produce. The distillery would run on methane from a manure digester.

The byproduct of the distillations would include concentrated nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizer, which could be packaged and sold. And carbon dioxide emissions from the process might even be used to grow algae that could be turned into biofuel.

But the main purpose is to develop systems that dairy farmers can buy to turn their herds’ waste into a profitable commodity instead of allowing it to pollute streams, Lehr said.

“The focus is not particularly on alcohol fuels,” he said. “It’s a pollution remediation project. What’s the value of clean water, or of a dairy farmer being able to increase herd size and decrease pollution?”

Many of the dairies in the Stephenville area drain into the North Bosque watershed, which feeds Lake Waco, and city of Waco officials have long blamed them for algae problems in the lake.

If the ethanol technology is successful and widely adopted, it could solve some of those problems, said Don Cawthon, resident director of the Texas AgriLife Center in Stephenville and dean of Tarleton’s College of Agriculture and Human Sciences.

“We’re hoping to resolve some of the environmental issues in the Bosque River area and, beyond that, to all concentrated animal feeding operations nationwide, by diverting all the animal waste out of the watershed and converting it into energy,” he said. “The second outcome could be helping achieve the president’s energy plan to convert 25 percent of our energy to renewable energy.”

The Debate over Bottle Water Rages on...

source: www.msnbc.msn.com

Heather Lewis was wracked with guilt when she realized she was addicted to the bottle.

Bottled water, that is.

At her worst, she said she went through five plastic bottles of water a day nearly every day for two years.

“It was appalling,” said Lewis, an architect from Louisville, Colo. “I felt like Aquafina’s trained monkey.”

But one day in January, as she gazed at the piles of plastic in her recycling bin, she decided to quit. “It was a cumulative sense of responsibility that made me do it,” Lewis said

Lewis is part of a bigger backlash against bottled water happening across the nation, and after decades of growth, the $11 billion industry is stuttering.

After steady expansion that saw U.S. per capita consumption grow from less than two gallons a year to a peak of 29 in 2007, bottled water sales slipped 3.2 percent in 2008 and are projected to dip another 2 percent this year, according to estimates by the Beverage Marketing Corporation, a New York research and consulting firm.

The primary cause of the decline is hotly contested.

Industry executives say the downturn is purely due to the economy. “We don’t think that anti-bottle water activists have had any impact,” said Tom Lauria, spokesman for the International Bottled Water Association. “People love their bottled water.”

Every other bottled beverage segment — soda, energy drinks, tea and the like — saw even worse sales declines this year, said Gary Hemphill, managing director of Beverage Marketing Group, a research and consulting firm in New York.

“Environmental concerns among consumers may have had an effect on bottled water sales, but the primary reason sales are soft is the economy,” he said.

Certainly environmental groups are eager to take credit after campaigning for years against the industry over waste, safety concerns and the corporate privatization of water.

Restaurants, towns ditch the bottle
And there is no doubt the campaign has resulted in some high-profile changes.

Hundreds of high-end restaurants — from celebrity chef Alice Waters’ Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., to Mario Batali’s Del Posto in New York City — now serve tap instead of bottled water.

In some towns, residents are protesting and rejecting large-scale water extraction by big water bottlers. Even during a severe recession, residents of Wells, Maine, rejected last month a proposal to extract up to 250,000 gallons a day from an aquifer for Nestlés Poland Spring brand.

New York, Illinois and Virginia state governments now bar bottled water at public events and in state offices. Cisco and Google ditched it from their corporate campuses as well.

“In some ways, bottled water has become the SUV of the ecological movement,” said Tony Clarke, director of the Polaris Institute, a Canadian nonprofit that organized an anti-water bottle campaign called “Inside the Bottle.”

Web sites like InsidetheBottle.org, TakeBackTheTap.org and ThinkOutsideTheBottle.org encourage consumers to ditch the bottle, while environmental research groups like the Environmental Working Group publicize startling facts like the existence of an area twice the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean awash with millions of plastic water bottles and garbage.

Companies take notice of protests
Environmental concerns are not going ignored by big bottle water producers like Nestlé, the world's largest water bottler.

Nestlé has introduced bottles with less plastic and launched a new brand of water called Resource that uses bottles made of 25 percent recycled plastic. The company also is doling out local grants for recycling programs.

“We recognize we have an environmental footprint and it’s possible to lower it,” said Jane Lazgin, Nestlé spokeswoman. “We think about that every day.”

PepsiCo and Coca-Cola also have launched bottled water products that use less plastic.

Next on the horizon for the industry: compostable bottles made from corn, said Lauria. “We will see in our lifetime biodegradable plastic, and this whole controversy will disappear,” he said.

Maybe, or maybe not.

Besides the concern about waste, a separate battle rages over privatization of shrinking water resources and the impact of bottled water operations on local aquifers, wildlife, water quality and community access to drinking water.

Voters in Shapleigh, Maine, this year passed an ordinance that protects groundwater rights for citizens but not corporations. The nearby town of Fryeburg has been in litigation with Nestle for six years over the company's expansion plans. Similar protests have played out in McCloud, Calif., and in Mescota County, Mich.

“There’s a realization that bottled water is simply taken from a community and put in a bottle with a giant price tag,” said Jon Keesecker, senior organizer of the Take Back the Tap campaign at Food & Water Watch in Washington D.C. “Many of these small communities feel like they’re being cheated by these corporations.”

Executives of Nestlé, which has faced criticism for its extraction practices, say they use groundwater just as any farmer or beer plant might, and its 75 springs provide jobs and economic diversity to small communities.

“The health of these springs requires vigilance to be sure they’re stable and safe and sustainable, and that allows us to be in business,” said Lazgin, Nestle spokeswoman.

Water safety questioned
Meanwhile, YouTube videos, research studies and press releases continue to fly about another controversy — the health and safety of tap vs. bottled water.

Each side argues over which water is more highly regulated. The Environmental Protection Agency oversees tap water while the Food & Drug Administration examines bottled water, so they’re handled differently.

“For the last 10 to 15 years, bottled water companies have been marketing that theirs was safer and healthier than tap water,” said Patti Lynn, campaign director at the environmental group Corporate Accountability International. She said the marketing undermined consumer confidence in tap water as well as necessary public investments needed to maintain public water systems, which face a $24 billion gap in funding.

So environmental groups have been making their case against bottled water on safety. Last year, the Environmental Working Group looked at 10 brands of bottled water and found that bottled water can contain complex mixtures of industrial chemicals never tested for safety, and may be no cleaner than tap water.

Bottled water companies defend their water and claim they are highly regulated by the FDA. Industry Web site BottledWaterMatters.com reports that bottled water is tested 30 times more often than tap water and that the Centers for Disease Control attributes more than 19 million illnesses to tap and none to bottled water.

Congress held hearings on safety regulation of bottled water over the summer, and the Government Accountability Office issued a report that revealed current FDA rules don’t require certified laboratories for water testing of bottled water nor public disclosure of quality and contaminants found in bottled water as EPA rules do for tap water.

Earlier this month, Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., introduced the Bottled Water Safety and Right-to-Know Act intended to inform consumers about what's in bottled water. Lautenberg has introduced similar legislation in the past.

Earth Check-up: 10 Signs of the Planet's Health

source: livescience.com

With world leaders gathering at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen to brainstorm ways to quash increasing temperatures and hold back rising seas, LiveScience takes a look at the state of Earth's ecosystems and its inhabitants — from polar bears to us. Here are 10 signs of how well (and not-so-well) our planet is doing.

10. Arctic Meltdown

After dramatic meltdowns in recent summers that have left Arctic ice thinner than in the past, some scientists are increasingly worried about the future survival of Arctic sea ice. One recent study estimated that Arctic waters could be ice free during the summer in as few as 30 years, much sooner than previous estimates. Such catastrophic melt could reinforce the global warming trend and further imperil Arctic residents, from humans to narwhals and polar bears, which were first listed as an Endangered Species in May 2008.

9. Collapsing Antarctic Ice

Antarctica has seen its share of melt as well: In April, an ice bridge believed to pin the Wilkins Ice Shelf in place snapped. Wilkins is one of nine Antarctic ice shelves that have receded or collapsed in recent decades — the most dramatic collapses were those of the Larsen A and B shelves, which abruptly crumbled in 1995 and 2002, respectively. Most of the dramatic melting has occurred in the Antarctic Peninsula, the only part of the southernmost continent that juts north of the Antarctic Circle. In contrast, the interior of the frozen continent was thought to be cooling, but earlier this year, new research suggested that these vast ice sheets are also experiencing warming, though the trend has so far been masked by the cooling influence of the ozone hole. The 47 countries that have ratified an agreement called the Antarctic Treaty have agreed to tourism limits to protect the continent's fragile ecosystems.

8. Ozone Hole Recovery

It's been more than 20 years since scientists discovered the gaping hole in the ozone layer, which normally protects Earth's denizens from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays. Since then efforts to ban or reduce the chemicals that eat away at the ozone in the stratosphere have initiated the gradual recovery of the hole. This recovery will take decades, though, because these pollutants hang around for a long time. So far the ozone hole over Antarctica has remained about the same size, fluctuating year to year with changes in wind circulation patterns. While it will still take some time for the ozone hole to recover, if countries hadn't acted to ban ozone-destroying substances, the situation could have been much worse.

7. Ocean Dead Zone Expansion

For years now, so-called oceanic dead zones — pockets of the sea where oxygen is so depleted that many fish, crustaceans and other aquatic species can't survive, such as in the Gulf of Mexico — have been a growing concern. These suffocating spaces are primarily formed when fertilizer runoff pours in from rivers and promotes algae blooms that eat up all the oxygen as they die and decompose. Controlling fertilizer runoff could improve the situation fairly quickly. But some studies have suggested that increased crop growth for producing biofuels could send more fertilizer running downstream.

6. Corals in Crisis

Coral reefs, sometimes called the "rainforests of the ocean," are critical marine habitats. But reefs from the Caribbean to the Great Barrier Reef have been under pressure in recent decades from overfishing, pollution, disease, warming waters and ocean acidification. Ocean waters become more acidic as they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As the water becomes more acidic, it dissolves the minerals used by corals and other animals to build their skeletons. A 2007 study found that this stressor alone could make most current coral habitats too acidic for reef growth by 2050. And so the outcome of the climate summit in Copenhagen, where great minds are hashing out ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions among other issues, will have implications for the survival of the world's coral reefs.

5. Vanishing Forests

On land, the actual rainforests aren't fairing much better, thanks in large part to deforestation. Forested areas, particularly rainforests, are key areas of biodiversity. They also absorb carbon dioxide and produce oxygen, and so clearing such trees could boost greenhouse gas emissions. Globally, the rate of deforestation is about 32 million acres a year, or 36 football fields a minute. This amount of forest clearing generates nearly 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, according to the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund). One verdant sign: Fewer trees were cut down in the Brazilian Amazon this year than since record-keeping began in 2000, according to the WWF. Even so, the Amazon did lose swaths of forest, just not as much. Asia and Africa have seen rising rates of deforestation. Forests in the United States and Europe are fairing better, as reforestation has occurred in the last decade.

4. Water Stress

It's essential to life as we know it, and though the planet's surface is two-thirds water, pollution is making it unsuitable for the humans who drink it and the animals that live in it. The effects of global warming are also altering the patterns of water availability for drinking and agriculture: Already arid regions will likely get drier, and rising sea levels could force salty sea water into normally freshwater aquifers. Some scientists say western U.S. water supplies are already being impacted by climate change and that policy advisors need to set better management practices. Depending on where they are grown, the crops used to make biofuels could stress local water supplies.

3. Atmospheric Buildup

This year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency formally declared that carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, paving the way for regulations of emissions. Some companies and nations have already pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but many of these goals have not been met. That and the rapid pace of development in countries like China and India have kept levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rising globally, and at a faster rate than in previous years. China leads all nations in total emissions, but the United States is still number one in emissions per capita. Many proposals for cap-and-trade systems, methods for trapping carbon dioxide emissions underground and alternative forms of energy have been put forward, but it's up to governments and other groups to put them into action.

2. Animals in Peril

As wild lands are plowed over, built upon or otherwise altered, the animals and plants that dwell there also come under pressure. In fact, the 2009 Red List of Threatened Species issued by the World Conservation Union identified more than 17,000 species threatened with extinction out of the nearly 48,000 assessed.

Tigers, elephants, rhinos, and several species of primates are known victims of habitat change — and poaching — in Africa and Asia. Frog populations across the globe have been decimated by the spread of a deadly fungus. In the oceans, sharks, whales, dolphins and some species of fish are also hurting. The news isn't all bad, as many bird populations are recovering thanks to the ban on DDT. Polar bears were placed on the Endangered Species List last year, which means they will have protection under the Endangered Species Act. On the other end of the Earth, however, new studies have found that penguins are also in peril due to a combination of changes in climate, overfishing and pollution.

1. Humans Impacted

While we are the significant force behind much of the change to Earth's systems, those effects can come back and impact us through our health and changing environmental conditions that we must adapt to. This feedback will be magnified as human populations continue to grow. In 2007, the world population passed the 6 billion mark. That year also marked the first time in human history that more people were living in urban settings than rural areas. All 6 billion of us must compete for limited resources, including water, food and fuel. Some scientists say that we have already reached the limits of what our planet can support and that we need to curb population growth for the health of our species and the planet.