Making Tractor Trailers More Fuel Efficient

Sixty-eight percent of all goods in the United States spend some of their journey across the country stored on tractor trailers attached to a tractor. With the average semi-trailer truck getting about 5.6 miles per gallon of diesel, however, tractor trailers take an immense amount of fuel to transport. It’s not simply the weight of the materials on board causing this low MPG, either--the boxy tractor trailer isn’t exactly areodynamic.

Addressing this problem, Advanced Transit Dynamics (ATDynamics) produces TrailerTails, which are designed to make the bulky tractor trailer more areodynamic and thus more fuel efficient when pulled by the tractor. Attached to the back of a trailer, they fold out, almost like extensions of the trailer’s walls. Saving about 3 cents profit per mile when deployed, most trucking companies make back their investment in under a year, according to the company. The environmental boon seems sizable, too: each TrailerTail, when used at highway speeds for 50,000 miles for a year, is effectively like removing an average passenger car from the road for a year.

With that much CO2 reduction possible, this statistic reveals more about the immense inefficiency of trailer trucks than the net environmental-boost TrailerTails provide. But given that tractor trailers are such a mainstay of goods transportation in the U.S., this technology seems a step in the right direction in an area that demands significant improvement.

image credit: ATDYNAMICS, INC.

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Grid-Tied Renewables Savings Outweigh Costs

The additional costs associated with adopting renewable energy are frequently used to argue that it is too expensive to adopt renewables. However, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory has taken a look at the costs and offsets from renewable energy use and finds "The answer: the cost is a tiny fraction of the ultimate savings."

Although the costs for the equipment needed to integrate renewables into the existing grid are not insignificant, the associated savings in reduced fuel costs are far greater. Cycling fossil power plants to generate power intermittently also increases wear on the equipment, which leads to increased maintenance costs. But overall, the savings are far more than the increases.

The other key finding is that, as renewables continue to be integrated into the grid, the continuing costs will become smaller. Making the systems able to work with renewables connected to the grid is something that gets easier and less expensive. So, in a way, the early adopters have made an even bigger contribution to improving the energy infrastructure.

via: Ars Technica

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New Solar Cell Material Offers Both Cheap and Efficient Power

Another potential path for ever cheaper solar power is now being researched by scientists investigating the use of perovskite minerals to make solar cells. Perovskites are a very cheap material that have good light capturing properties as well as good conductivity. The advantage that perovskites offer is a great combination of inexpensive production combined with good efficiency in energy production.

Current laboratory experiment versions of perovskite-based solar cells have efficiencies of about 15 percent. Although there are other solar cells with greater efficiency, the figure for perovskite cells is higher than other cheap-to-manufacture methods.

The advantages provided with perovskite materials come from requiring a far less intensive manufacturing process. While fabricating silicon-based solar cells requires careful and expensive processing of silicon to a high degree of purity (not to mention the energy intensity of that manufacturing), cells using perovskites are made by spray applying materials to a glass or metal foil substrate, described as a "solar cell [that] can be fabricated as easily as painting a surface."

Perovskite-based solar cells might eventually be able to be produced for 10 to 20 cents per watt, as compared to present soalr panels which are around 75 cents per watt.

image: by Andrew Silver, USGS via Wikimedia Commons

via: MIT Technology Review

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Biomimetic Vascular Solar Cells

Researchers at North Carolina State University have come up with a new way of making solar cells with a method that uses circulation much like that in plant leaves to maintain the efficiency of the cells.

Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSC) are organic cells that use light-sensitive dyes to generate electricity. These cells could eventually make low-cost and more environmentally-friendly collectors for solar energy, but until now, the problem has been that the dyes eventually break down due to ultraviolet rays from the sun and lose their efficiency.

The NCSU scientists have created a cell with vascular chanels, much like the veins in a leaf, to allow them to replenish the dye and thereby maintain the efficiency of the cell. Lead author Prof. Orlin Velev describes the process: “We considered how the branched network in a leaf maintains water and nutrient levels throughout the leaf. Our microchannel solar cell design works in a similar way. Photovoltaic cells rendered ineffective by high intensities of ultraviolet rays were regenerated by pumping fresh dye into the channels while cycling the exhausted dye out of the cell. This process restores the device’s effectiveness in producing electricity over multiple cycles.”

DSSCs are made with "a water-based gel core, electrodes, and inexpensive, light-sensitive, organic dye molecules that capture light and generate electric current." The simpler, non-metallic makeup of these cells could make them less expensive to produce, and could mean less extraction of rare minerals required in order to continue to provide solar energy.

via: Cleantechnica

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Saving a Solar Archive

Six decades of collected research and information about solar energy was nearly lost last month when torrential rains flooded parts of Boulder CO. The American Solar Energy Society, a non-profit organization supporting solar energy research and implementation is based on Boulder. The archives are now sitting in the organization's executive director's garage, but the organization has bigger plans in store.

The ASES is running a Kickstarter to raise funds to digitize 60 years of archives. The fundraiser seeks to raise a relatively modest $118,977 to not just scan the documents, but also to OCR the information and make it more readily useful. "After a page is scanned from a paper format, whether it's a book, magazine, research paper, or pdf, it will be converted to plain text via OCR. The images and diagrams will also become separate entities with their own tagging and categorization methodology that allows searching to be optimized as well as displayed in different contextual formats."

ASES plans to make all of this information freely available. "Similar to the way that the open source code community shares information, where code is open for others to see and build or improve upon, within open systems, creativity and innovation are able to grow exponentially. We want the same thing to happen with solar and renewable technologies."

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Making Tractor Trailers More Fuel Efficient

Sixty-eight percent of all goods in the United States spend some of their journey across the country stored on tractor trailers attached to a tractor. With the average semi-trailer truck getting about 5.6 miles per gallon of diesel, however, tractor trailers take an immense amount of fuel to transport. It’s not simply the weight of the materials on board causing this low MPG, either--the boxy tractor trailer isn’t exactly areodynamic.

Addressing this problem, Advanced Transit Dynamics (ATDynamics) produces TrailerTails, which are designed to make the bulky tractor trailer more areodynamic and thus more fuel efficient when pulled by the tractor. Attached to the back of a trailer, they fold out, almost like extensions of the trailer’s walls. Saving about 3 cents profit per mile when deployed, most trucking companies make back their investment in under a year, according to the company. The environmental boon seems sizable, too: each TrailerTail, when used at highway speeds for 50,000 miles for a year, is effectively like removing an average passenger car from the road for a year.

With that much CO2 reduction possible, this statistic reveals more about the immense inefficiency of trailer trucks than the net environmental-boost TrailerTails provide. But given that tractor trailers are such a mainstay of goods transportation in the U.S., this technology seems a step in the right direction in an area that demands significant improvement.

image credit: ATDYNAMICS, INC.

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Blu Homes Completes a Chalet in Colorado

One of our favorite prefab home designers, Blu Homes, just completed a home in Colorado at the beginning of the October. The Fischer Chalet, a modern green prefab home in Breckenridge, Colorado, is a perfect example of what Blu Homes is capable of. While designed as a custom home built with the Colorado climate in [...]

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Winning Homes of the 2009 Solar Decathlon

We’ve been watching in eager anticipation to find out which amazing solar powered green home would win this year’s Solar Decathlon. This year marks the fourth competition, with teams from around the world journeying to Washington DC to showcase their most technically advanced and energy efficient prefabricated homes. The best and brightest turned out this [...]

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Blu Homes Acquires Green Prefab Pioneer mkDesigns

Blu Homes, a LIL favorite in the green prefab sector, announced today that they have purchased the assets of mkDesigns, the pioneering prefab company founded by architect Michelle Kaufmann that has been one of the most visible leaders in modular sustainable design. The plan is to bring some of mkDesigns' leading models (Glidehouse TM, mkLotus TM, Sunset Breezehouse) to customers around the country via Blu's proprietary manufacturing and building system innovations. This could be an intriguing combination, for mkDesigns and Blu were targeting different segments of the market and didn't overlap much.

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Straw Bale Home in Sonoma County

Passive solar design is the most economical way to provide heat for a home and also reduce cooling loads. But what do you do when passive solar design is impractical because your lot or the surrounding terrain makes it challenging or impossible? You make sure the home is very well insulated and install a very [...]

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New Green Product Reviews and Information

While it’s easier than it used to be to find truly green products out there, it’s still not that easy. It’s often hard to find that Energy Star label on appliances or home electronics, even if the product qualifies. And there seem to be five dubious green claims for every one legitimate one. Through time, better [...]

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Tax Credits for Plug-In Hybrid Conversions

If you live in Colorado and own a Prius, here’s a New Year’s Day gift for you: $6,000 off a plug-in hybrid retrofit. Earlier this year, Colorado passed House Bill 1331, “Incentives for Efficient Motor Vehicles,” which creates new tax credits of up to $6,000 for the purchase of, or conversion to, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. The new credit will be a substantial discount off the average price of a plug-in conversion, which generally run around $10-14,000. On top of the Federal Tax Credit of 10% (up to $4,000), plug-in retrofits could start to make a lot of sense for some car owners.

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New Guide to Cell Phone Radiation

Over 4 billion people in the world have cell phones. They’re handy, portable, inexpensive and we wonder how we even got along with out them before we had one. Cell phones are here to stay, there’s no doubt about that. But there are mounting concerns about the adverse health affects from radiation emitted from your [...]

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