Shifting Solutions

“To most Americans, the word ‘Coors’ means beer,”

CoorsTek’s manufacturing roots go back to the early 20th century, when Adolph Coors diversified his beer brewing empire based in Golden, Colo. He set up a ceramic manufacturing business called the Herold China and Pottery Company, whose early product line included dinnerware and utensils but later moved to high-tech industrial products made of ceramics. With World Wars I and II, the company stepped up to provide needed ceramics for industry and the military, including materials used in the production of the atom bomb.

“To most Americans, the word ‘Coors’ means beer,” wrote Business Wire on the ceramic maker’s 75th birthday. “But to scientists and industrialists throughout the world, the word ‘Coors’ means technical ceramics of extraordinary quality.”

That hasn’t changed. Cellular telephones, car engines, computer chips, soda dispensers, semiconductor casings, blood processing pumps, bulletproof vests and armor for military vehicles, to name just a few items in a dizzying high-tech product array, all use ceramic components produced by Coors enterprises. And so it was natural in 2008 for CoorsTek to purchase the hottest ceramics R&D firm going — Ceramatec, with its 165 employees in Salt Lake City.

Ceramatec was founded in 1976 by a group of University of Utah professors who made important contributions to the sodium-sulphur battery technology being pursued by Ford Motor Company for vehicles at the time. Those early liquid-core batteries didn’t pan out well for transportation, though, because of their size and weight, and because of the extremely harsh internal chemical conditions required for them to work.

In the years since, electric cars have remained on the sexy-tech list, with substantial industry efforts aimed at developing various flavors of zippy batteries to power them. Ceramatec had other ideas, recognizing a vast potential market for a different sort of power — for homes.

“With a house, you don’t need to get energy in and out instantaneously. You need huge amounts of storage capacity,” says MIT’s Nocera. “That suggests a different commercial market and different technical restraints and opportunities.”

Different for sure, but what a boon for for us, who take renewable energy systems seriously! We can install out own home solar system along with this new battery and we should be able to outlast any potential disaster! Why wait for the government to act, that could take years to design and implement anything worthy, and when they do, it wioll nt be all that cheap. build your own solar panels, you can do it in a weekend, and stop being dependant on your local utility.

Monday, find out what coor’s is doing next!

“Batteries and photovoltaics are about to merge,”

18 kWh of electric consumption per day in the summer is about average for a small three-bedroom home, that’s 1,000 watts for 18 hours. Now take a five bedroom home which is much larger, it may average about 80 kWh, according to Provo Power; In either case , an additional 20 to 40 kWh per day is substantial. So imagine if you could generate that much electrical power in one day by implementing solar panel systems or even a wind power generator for your home – your power bills would plummet.

Ceramatec’s battery breakthrough now makes that all possible.

In an article I read, this one person indicated he was floored by the prospect. He had recently installed the second of two wind power generators on his property that are each rated at 2.4 kilowatts continuous output. He had searched for the right battery system that can capture and store some of that for later use when it’s calm outside, but he hadn’t found a good solution., that is ……until now!

“This changes the whole scope of things and would have a major impact on what we’re trying to do,” Shepherd said. “Something that would provide 20 kilowatts would put us near 100 percent of what we would need to be completely independent. It would save literally thousands of dollars a year.”

This fellow, along with many others in the locations they are living in find that their utility companies charge a variable rate for power depending on demand during a given 24-hour period. With his windmill setup, this fellow has what’s called “net metering” — an electric meter that spins both ways. He pays for electricity coming in, but gets a credit back from his Utility company for the access power generated by his residential wind power system that flows back onto the grid. He says that he’s cut his power bills in half, and with good storage batteries he thinks he could reduce his total bill to zero.

Now in this article, tis fellow choose a wind power generator over home solar system when he was planning his renewable energy systems installation, he said he would reconsider that decision today as the bottom continues to fall out of the cost of solar cells.

Well golly… more to tell, tune in for part 6 tomorrow!

The essence of this batteries breakthrough is that high energy density

The inside of Ceramatec’s wonder battery is a chunk of solid sodium metal that is mated to a sulphur compound by an extraordinary, paper-thin ceramic membrane. The membrane conducts ions — electrically charged particles — back and forth to generate a current. Ceramatec calculates that the battery will cram 20 to 40 kilowatt hours of energy into a package about the size of a refrigerator, and operate below 90 degrees C.

You may not be startled, but you should be, I was, it’s totally amazing. These are the most energy-dense batteries available today,

Compare these to the previous huge bottles of super-hot molten sodium, swirling around at 600 degrees or so. At that temperature the material is highly conductive of electricity but it’s both toxic and corrosive. You wouldn’t want your kids around one of these.

The essence of Ceramatec’s breakthrough is that high energy density (a lot of juice) can be achieved safely at normal temperatures and with solid components, not hot liquid.

Ceramatec says its new generation of battery would deliver a continuous flow of 5 kilowatts of electricity over four hours, with 3,650 daily discharge/recharge cycles over 10 years. With the batteries expected to sell in the neighborhood of $2,000, that translates to less than 3 cents per kilowatt hour over the battery’s life. Conventional power from the grid typically costs in the neighborhood of 8 cents per kilowatt hour.

Did you really get that? Read it again….. Five kilowatts over four hours — how much is that? Imagine your trash compactor, food processor, vacuum cleaner, stereo, sewing machine, one surface unit of an electric range and thirty-three 60-watt light bulbs all running nonstop for four hours each day before the house battery runs out. Now that’s pretty darn cool….

And then you recharge. With a projected 3,650 discharge/recharge cycles — one per day for a decade — you leave the next-best battery in the dust. Deep-cycling lead/acid batteries like the ones used in RVs are only good for a few hundred cycles, so they’re finished in a year or so.

How do you recharge? By tapping your renewable energy system such as home solar panels or wind power generator ( like a windmill) . It’s just like plugging in your cell phone or iPod, only you plug in your house.

Wow, I’m just getting started…… more on this exciting development tomorrow…tune in.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewable s,”

It’s well known that Solar Energy has been around now for a very long time. However it has been very expensive to purchase, setup and utilize. That is until now! The cost are tumbling, dr4iven by new thin-film chemistry and manufacturing techniques. First Solar, an Arizona based company can paint solar cells onto glass; and Konarka, an upstart that purchased a defunct Polaroid film factory in New Bedford, Mass., has plans to print cells onto rolls of flexible plastic. Lately there has been a new surge in funding for new technology and far more interest in alternative forms of energy as world markets of oil prices continue to climb and supply is becomes very unstable.

So now we can bring together these two key technologies — solar power and deep-storage batteries — which will have a deep and profound impact for oil-strapped America.

“These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables,” said Daniel Nocera, a noted chemist and professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who sits on Ceramatec’s science advisory board. “They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 — a 110-year-old approach — and turn us forward.”

President Obama proposed, in his economic stimulus package; “Why not just upgrade to a so-called “smart grid” ? Well…there are complications, Nocera said.

“First you have to rebuild the grid because the one we have now is a creaky machine from the 1920s, and we keep trying to retrofit it,” he said. “Then you’re going to have computers trying to manage the energy, which brings up issues like security. You have to make it really secure so you don’t have people hacking into things. And then politics. Just wait until you try to run power lines through someone’s backyard.”

“I can’t imagine anything more secure than generating my own energy with the sun at my house, and now I’ll have a way to store it. It’s the ultimate in security, and the ultimate in control.”

But as home owners, we the people need not wait for the Fed’s to come up with and implement a new plan on a national level. We can begin this new energy revolution by ourselves, individually, doing so with with small-scale electrical generation like a wind power generator or a home solar solar system, Imagine this taking place in millions of individual homes, as opposed to say… today’s large-scale power generation from a handful of giant power plants…. We could worry a lot less about what’s called “point failure” on the grid. That’s when a single component gets knocked out and shuts off power to a whole region. California-style rolling blackouts would be history.

The threat of terrorism has heightened the worry. But wide distribution of batteries in homes would virtually eliminate it.

OH…. there is so much more…. tune back tomorrow!

The U.S. Electrical Grid is Like the “Third World,”

Mr. Bill Richardson, the former energy secretary, at one time compared the U.S. electrical grid as “third world,” and he wasn’t so far off the truth of it. I find it an aging relic of a century-old approach to providing inefficient energy and at the same time a security risk nationally that could tempt any fool with an adverse agenda on his or her mind.

As individual home owners, we CAN, each of us, make a difference and BEGIN a new era in how we generate and use ENERGY for our ourselves. We can start by helping to take a bit of the load off the U.S. Electrical Grid through electricity production and storage at home with such use of DIY residential wind power or home solar power systems. Consider this an effort on your part to not only provide your own electrical, store and save your own energy and save a lot of money by replacing your utility company, but reducing the eventual cost the Feds, might eventually spend on repairs and upgrading this antiquated system, which we’ll all end up paying for in tax’s anyway, when they do!

BUT BACK TO THE BATTERY : This new battery design has come from a Salt Lake company called Ceramatec, the R&D arm of CoorsTek, a world leader in advanced materials and electrochemical devices. This innovative design, according to the developers, promises to reduce dependence on tour antiquated power grid system, by allowing us to have installed or install our own renewable energy systems! As well, now with this battery, we can store the energy we produce for longer periods of time, and will not need to replace the batteries near so often as the traditional batteries system currently used.

Oh there is so much more I can say about this new find! Tune back tomorrow for more………

For all of us our goal should be to protect our homes, our family’s and help reduce the carbon footprint we leave on the environment. The question most of us ask is:

HOW DO WE START?

” GOING GREEN” is a viable solution to a sustainable living lifestyle that puts you on track to reduce your carbon footprint in your everyday life.

Kits are available for home solar panels that will show you how you can build your own solar panels to create your own home solar po wer, with complete instructions and videos to guide you through the process of find the materials cheaply, building the panels and installing them on your home. With the home solar system kits package you can save hundreds of dollars or more each year, on your home electric bills. You can find out more on this exciting product here!

You ask, how is Google using Google Earth to better the environment?

What Google has done is create a converted version of Google Earth for those in the renewable energy industry. This new version still gives us, the lowly, all the same fun features, but where they changed it is how it now also incorporates all protected areas. In the ingenious way, the developers of these renewable energy systems should be able to see that the 50,000 square acre plot that looks like a barren desert but would be a perfect site for a solar farm is actually the habitat of some endangered species. O my, won’t the environmentalists be happy with this news!

This new tool is they now call “Path to Green Energy”. It is available to anyone, at least for now, and it’s still FREE, which means, yes, you can use it.

This tools value is really rather simple in that it creates a very clear profile of the land to help the developers in their decisions as to where they should put up their renewable energy system platforms without drawing any criticism from anyone. Oh and there is more…. It can also help the government agencies and our utility companies map out areas for electrical lines and any other thing their imaginations can come up with.

Go figure … why is it then that the huge and often funny online fights between Google, MSN and Yahoo has been such a lopsided fight for so long? The “Path to Green Energy” tool just confirms why it is that Google still controls the online markets.

Ah well…. check out the resource section a the link above, and find some better reading material than this! Mean while, you all have fun!

All Road’s Lead to Google , including Green Energy.

How many of you think that Google is the Pre-eminate online search engine? Google has tremendous resources, including wealth. Even right now while we all struggle with the economy and many business’s face declining revenues, Google has reported huge profits, Does this tell you anything about Google?

In no need to slow down, then, Google continues to pump much of it’ vast financial resources into free tools for you and me to play and have fun with, and waste a lot of time with too!

One such free program Google has come with is Google Earth, possible not earth shattering news, it’s been around for a little while already. What it does is use a composite database of images to let you look at various places in the world. Most folks always check out their own home first , then check o0ut their girlfriends or Ex wife’s place, their place of work and the whatever. Now blasting away time surfing Google Earth can be hugely entertaining, the company now has decided to make real, honest to god, good use of the program as it relates to the renewable energy debate.

Gosh, darn, time slips away, gotta close Google Earth, it hampered my time, now I can’t finish this article…

Tune in Tomorrow, to find out what Google is doing with Google Earth and Green energy!

In the mean time, check out some books on Green Energy and what the government is currently doing to bring us environmentally friendly energy and how that might affect the homeowners renewable energy systems.

All Roads Lead to Google, including Green Energy !

One of the great things in working in the renewable energy systems field, is you get to hear a lot of stories about the POWER OF SUSTAINABLE THINKING. Google must have read the book you see to the left here too! We all know by know, and if you don’t you soon will, that Google Earth is a very popular and very free online tool that’s available for everyone to use and enjoys playing around with. Oh, and did I say it was free? Umm, I did didn’t I? Well it’s true, there ARE still some free things in this world and that’s one of them. It’s a lot fun! .

Now, Google is spending some of it’s vast resources to map sites for solar and wind farm developers. Why? They are trying to be peace makers I guess, they wish to use it in an effort to cut off disputes.

How ironic is it that the renewable energy expansion finds itself having to sort out some unusual conflicts that keep showing up. For those less informed, the renewable energy projects are frequently opposed , quite lamentably by…can you guess? You got it, the environmentalist! Just look at what happening to many of the wind farms, they consider the wind mills to be harmful to birds. Another argument is that solar farms break up the local ecological environment for the amount of acres they require. The ones laughing , I am sure are the oil, coal and nuclear industries. But what gets me , is that all these industries have a similar impact on our environment, and often much worse!

Now I say that that is short term thinking! If the environmentalists were thinking straight, they would realize that, Passive solar or wind farms do far less damage than pit mining, say, and would soon displace, oil rigs, coal pits and nuclear facilities, all of which produce harmful environmental conditions. Ask you self this, if they are concern about birds, how many birds die in the pollution infested air, because they can’t breath? Come to think of it, how many of us, will soon die too early because of the toxic air we breath?

Well, I kind of strayed there a little didn’t I? Now I have run out time , so tune in tomorrow, I’ll tell you what Google is spending their money on….