The Solar Powered SmartClock

The SmartClock is a personal handheld/wearable device that communicates with other electronic devices in your environment to enhance your experiences in any office or home. The SmartClock is designed for people who want the convenience of having lights automatically turn on and waking up sleeping electronic devices, but also the desirable benefits of eliminating energy losses due to vampire loads, using wireless presence-awareness technologies.

The device is marketed to environmentally conscious technophiles who often have multiple electronic devices plugged in, oftentimes not in use, but consuming electrical power. Wireless presence-awareness technology is readily available, and has been applied to mobile devices and is easily transferrable to our application. Our product would allow smart power management that aims to be the initial steps to reducing overall power consumption of our electronic devices. The aim to use solar energy is both a choice for sustainable design, as well as ensuring long-life power dependability.

Posted for Elyse, Andy, Chi, Hai

American Airlines to Unbundle Fee for First Checked Luggage Item

It seems that the groups that have been snooping around airports doing their research for DP2 have had an effect! American Airlines will start charging $15 for the first checked bag. Let’s see what happens!

Design vs. Marketing

The distinction between design and marketing has traditionally been clear. Design builds solutions for people’s needs, and marketing communicates with a market segment to build a customer base.

That line is starting to blur, particularly in the area of sustainability where both design and marketing are concerned with success in the marketplace. Jackie’s article sums lessons to be learned for marketers by writing:

“…effective green marketing requires applying good marketing principles to make green products desirable for consumers.”

Even this sounds like advice to designers. In fact many of the marketing cases and principles she talks about involve design. So what’s the difference between the green marketing and green design?

Form your answer by critiquing the following product through a sustainability lens: the Neti Pot:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ethnomedicine/Home_Remedies/Saline_Nasal_Wash
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzK9Gn4E_Eg

Apply the principles outlined in Jackie’s article. Who’s the audience? Will it succeed in the marketplace? What’s the green story? How should it be marketed? How would you redesign it? And again, what’s the difference between green marketing and green design?

So, Batteries

I was going to write my second user-chooser about something automobilistic, but yesterday’s lecture happened to turn me on to innovative and exciting energy storage solutions, like the one you see here.

(Yes, there will be many battery/”rapid thermal event”/a.k.a. “FIRE” puns; you’ve been warned)

So, batteries.

They’re in lots of stuff nowadays. They aren’t the only energy storage solution ever invented, of course. I could go into a couple more very cool options, like flywheels (the power of a spinning disk), hydroelectric dams (the power of water, going downhill) and electric double-layer capacitors, also know more colorfully as super- or ultracapacitors, which I’ll talk about later. But, it just so happens that Wikipedia probably does a better job at giving a super-broad and super-almost-perfectly-cited overview of the topic, so enjoy at your leisure.

The skinny on batteries: repositories of chemical energy that use (oftentimes eco-unfriendly) electrolytes to transport negative charges from where they want to be to crowded on one side of the battery, setting up a potential difference, or “voltage,” across the battery. This voltage produces an “electromotive force” otherwise known as either (technically) “e.m.f.” or (essentially) “push” which, indeed, pushes electrons along a circuit if the battery happens to be connected to one.

The problem(s, of which there are many): the less obvious problem is the tendency of batteries to be eco-unfriendly. Even the rechargeable ones eventually run out of chemical energy, or have developed what is known as “battery memory” (not charging back up to full charge) sometimes to the point of being utterly useless. Just before I switched out my laptop’s primary battery a month ago, I couldn’t use the laptop while not plugged into the grid because the battery didn’t last long enough to boot up. And you can’t really do much with used up batteries.

Batteries use up many valuable materials in their manufacturing processes, and the processes themselves often involve toxic and dangerous chemicals. Among the dangerous substances contained in various batteries, heavy metals include mercury, lead, cadmium, nickel, zinc, manganese, potassium hydroxide and manganese dioxide. These are not friendly things to be putting directly into the earth as landfill.

From a non-ecological, user-end point of view, batteries are also rather unpleasant. Those suckers are big. And they’re heavy. Take a look at any hi-tech portable electronic device you own; your phone, or, in particular, your laptop. Take out the battery (make sure it’s off first, of course) and notice how light it is. My laptop battery is condensed (only takes up a little under 1/4 of the space in the chassis) but it accounts for more than half the weight of my laptop. Fully one half of the chassis of my phone, a skinny Samsung Blackjack, is taken up by the battery, and once again, the battery accounts for more than half the weight of the device.

If the early 90’s are remembered, among other things, for the ridiculous brick-phones, then the early 21st century will be remembered for its gargantuan batteries in all devices. Even back then, the batteries tended to be the main culprit for the brick-ishness of most “portable” electronics.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however. Part of the reason I wanted to write about this was actually so that I, myself, could feel better about the future of batteries, seeing as how the present seems so gray and sooty. It seemed like batteries weren’t really going anywhere for a while, but wait! The internet reveals all:

According to a January 2008 article from Technology Review, an online technology news site published by MIT, a company called Boston-Power has developed a lithium-ion battery (called the “Sonata”) that can complete 80% of its recharge cycle in only 30 minutes. The article is low on technical details; it essentially alleges a “new shape” and switching in manganese for the typical cobalt oxide cathode were enough for this improvement. That said, it’s very generous with company funding stats, product cost and battery time-to-discharge data. The “Sonata” model batteries also incorporate some fairly significant safety upgrades, including changing the canister from carbon steel to aluminum – which breaks at lower temperatures. This prevents the major heat and pressure buildups that can lead to the oh-so-deliciously euphemized “rapid thermal events” that have been cropping up in the news of late. I tend to trust TR’s articles, and this one alleges that the battery maker is in “in discussions” with the big notebook companies of the world, so this looks like a good short-term bet.

I mention trust because I also stumbled upon this article from PhysOrg.com, which has interesting articles, but seems a little less reputable. This article alleged that Toshiba had developed a “nanobattery” that recharged to 80% capacity in 1 minute. Needless to say, I found this to be a questionable claim. I was even more surprised to find a press release from Toshiba itself backing this claim. It’s official-looking and everything, with a fun and somewhat obviously jargon-y graphic that you see somewhere around here. Until I find further confirmation of this marvelous breakthrough, however, I’m going to call it an amusing locker-room-worthy case of exaggeration, since both the article and the press release are dated March of 2005. That’s three years ago, for those counting, and no more sign on the ‘tubes of any superbattery being developed in Toshiba’s secret underground mountain lab/lair.

A more long-term development to look forward to, however, would be the modestly-termed ultracapacitor.

Capacitors, unlike batteries, store energy in electric fields, not in chemical suspension. If you charge two metal plates with opposite polarities (one negative and one positive) and orient them so that they are facing each other from a very small distance, but aren’t touching, there will be an electric field set up between them. The concept of storing energy in an electric field is a little abstract for those who haven’t taken a physics class in a while, but I won’t attempt to explain it with a weak and misleading metaphor (if your curiosity burns, Wikipedia is there for you).

In short, however, the advantages of capacitors are thus: unlike electrochemical batteries, ultracaps can take up and release large amounts of charge very quickly, and for many more cycles than the traditional rechargeable battery – the only wear on capacitors is structural and environmental, not chemical and certainly not part of normal operating conditions, so they last longer. On the green side of things, capacitors do not include as many toxic substances in their manufacture, and are quite a bit more long-lasting than traditional batteries. If they were able to replace batteries, the ever-so-traditional cradle-to-grave paradigm epitomized by disposable battery use would be stopped in its tracks.

The downside of normal capacitors is that they can’t match batteries in terms of total capacity for storing charge per unit area (the amount of charge a capacitor can store is directly proportional to its surface area). So capacitors are much faster than batteries at charge transfer, and are more reliable and durable, but can’t store as much charge, and thus, energy.

As always, however, there are ways of getting around problems: at least two companies have proposed, prototyped and are (presumably) testing their respective “ultracapacitors” which share all the advantages of normal capacitors, while making up for their disadvantages vis-a-vis electrochemical batteries – and in some cases surpassing them altogether.

One Texas company called EEStor, has designed an ultracap with a new dielectric material (an insulating substance that separates the charged plates, which can be engineered such that it increases the energy storage capacity of the capacitor). The seeming wonder-substance, a ceramic powder, is called “barium titanate”. According to the company, its system “… claims a specific energy of about 280 watt hours per kilogram, compared with around 120 watt hours per kilogram for lithium-ion and 32 watt hours per kilogram for lead-acid gel batteries” (quoted from the above-linked January 2007 article). The company already has a partnership with a small Canadian electric car company (ZENN Motor), and expects to sell them their power storage system for use in their light cars. The article indicates that there is considerable skepticism about the company’s claim, but if they’re con artists, then they’re the best damned ones out there for fooling Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers into backing them. It wouldn’t be the first mistake that venture capital has made, but I think it’s safe to say that Kleiner Perkins knows their business pretty well, and where there’s smoke, there may well be fire. EEStor is a company to be watching.

In another twist on ultracapacitors, the MIT Laboratory for Electromagnetic and Electronic Systems (LEES) is using the ever-more-useful carbon nanotube to increase the energy capacity of traditional capacitors. Their process is fairly straightforward to explain: using the regular geometry of nanotubes (i.e. they’re straight) and the fact that nanotubes are one-thirty-thousandth the diameter of a human hair and can be made to be 100,000 times as long as they are wide, the scientists have effectively managed to squeeze a lot more “parallel plate” area from the total available volume in a capacitor housing, thus increasing its energy capacity. It’s nothing more than using nano-scale control over geometry to get every penny’s worth of surface area from these new ultracaps. There are no blockbuster numbers included in the cut-and-dry news release (dated, incidentally, from February of 2006) which makes me think that is is the most promising of all the “ultracapacitor” promises I’ve seen to date.

In conclusion (finally): new (less stone-aged) battery technologies are coming, and much more eco-friendly eletrochemical-battery-replacement technologies are following not quite hot on their heels. They most certainly cannot get here soon enough.

Solar Energy Used to Keep Roads Heated During Winter

A new way of heating roads during the winter to prevent the roads from freezing is being tested in the UK. It uses solar power energy. If successful and cost-efficient, this technology will eliminate the need of salt trucks, which are extremely expensive to send out and maintain for obvious reasons. Also, the gas-powered trucks add pollutants to the air and the salt is not environmentally friendly either.

Essentially, the technology is very simple, yet is currently extremely expensive. A series of tubes will be placed linearly underneath the surface of the road. These pipes will be made out of a combination of plastics and will be filled with water. This mechanism is called interseasonal heat transfer, or IHT. In summer, when road temperatures can reach 40C, the water is warmed and pumped to pipes insulated with polystyrene. In winter, when sensors detect the temperature at 2C, warm water is pumped back under the road to heat the ground and prevent ice forming.

At this point, the technology is still very expensive. As a result, only “cold spot” on highways are being considered for this mechanism. These are spots that are known to become frozen earlier than other parts. So, realistically salt trucks will not be fully replaced at this point in time. At least, that is not the goal.

This plan follows a 2-year trial on a small stretch of highway in the UK. Scientists found enough heat was captured in the summer of 2006 to keep the road above freezing for almost all of the following winter. On average, the heated surface was 3C warmer than the surrounding ground. This particular test also showed that buildings near the road could be heated by the solar heat captured by the roads. In another instance, an elementary school had discovered that its playground could be heated by roads. Apparently solar energy can produce half the amount of energy captured by solar panels placed on the roof of a building, but at one-twelfth the cost.

Greendex: Nat’l Geographics Environmental Consumer Index

This is actually my first design class and from what I’ve learned so far, a couple of the most important questions in design are: Who are we designing for? and What are their values?. In class after we read “the Death of Environmentalism,” we talked a little bit about the deficiencies of designing something with the sole intent of being environmental. Essentially I think it takes for granted that as “sustainable designers” we might value the environment more than the average consumer.

Greendex is a new index of consumer environmental responsibility (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080507133314.htm). Thus far, it has been used to analyze 14 different countries, including the US, China, and India, by surveying 1000 consumers in each country.

The index was based on a number of environmental metrics, such as energy efficiency of home, mode of transportation, use of fresh water, energy and pollution intensity of food, repairing rather than replacing goods, using cold water to laundry, etc. Of these 65 variables, 60% were determined by discretionary behavior (such as choosing to take public transport over driving a car), while the rest were determined more by circumstances (such as availability of public transportation). Brazil and India had the best scores, with China and Mexico close behind. The US had the worst score of the countries surveyed, with Canada and France close behind.

Despite the small sample size and the fact that there must be some arbitrariness to their scoring algorithm, the results should put us on alert as designers. Even though people in developed countries are more well-to-do and more educated, they are relatively less concerned with the environment than their consumer counterparts in developing countries.

This presents us with both challenges and opportunities as designers. The developing world wants to consume like the developed world, but the developed world consumes not only more, but with less regard for the environment. Opportunities are therefore abundant in a) offering developing countries a more sustainable path to development and b) changing consumer behavior in developed countries. I think this latter opportunity will actually be the more difficult to exploit, but I think examining the differences in the consumer landscape in developing and developed countries will shed some light on how we might get consumers in developed countries to exercise more discretion in favor of the natural environment.

You can check out your Greendex score here:

http://event.nationalgeographic.com/greendex/

Will bike-sharing work in the U.S.?

Inspired by the cool Trek/Shimano 3-speed bike that we saw (and got to ride) after class on Monday, this blog post is about bicycles and the introduction of bike sharing programs in the United States.

Here at Stanford, I think we take the prevalence of bicycles for granted. According to P&TS, there are spaces for more than 12,000 bikes on 800 bike racks, and 3,300+ bikes are registered every year. That’s roughly one bike for every incoming student! While this may not seem unusual to us because bikes are so ingrained into our campus culture, consider that only about 1% of all trips made in the U.S. are on a bike. Even in the Bay Area, which is generally considered to be one of the most progressive areas of the country when it comes to bicycle policy, I am often amazed by how many cars are on the road, and how many of them could easily be replaced by bikes.

One way to potentially get more people riding is through bike-sharing programs such as SmartBike DC, which is starting up this month in Washington. Proponents of bike-sharing programs argue that eliminating the hassles of bike ownership (security, storage, maintenance, cost), will increase the number of trips taken by bike. Detractors argue that the answer is not increased availability, but rather safety improvements such as creating more bike lanes and corridors.

Sponsored by Clear Channel Outdoors, SmartBike DC is calling itself “America’s first self-service public bike rental program.” The general idea is that members will pay a $40 annual fee, for which they will have unlimited use of 120 rental bikes parked at 10 locations in the city. (Well, not quite unlimited… rentals must be returned after three hours.) Bikes are checked out with RFID or swipe cards from electronic racks, similar to the way luggage carts are rented out in airports.

As part of their agreement with Washington, Clear Channel gets exclusive advertising rights in the city’s bus shelters in return for running the bike program, an arrangement similar to many of the bike-sharing programs in Europe. One of the better known programs in Europe is Velib, in Paris. That program, which was started last year, has grown to more than 20,000 bikes and 1,450 pickup/dropoff locations. Like the DC program, it is also sponsored by an advertising company, JCDecaux. Another well-known program is Bicing, in Barcelona. That program currently offers 3,000 bikes at 200 stations.

In contrast to the formal systems in place in Paris and Barcelona, bikes have been shared informally in Amsterdam for about fifty years. There, about 40% of all trips in the downtown are on a bike. The city’s transportation policies are also very conducive to biking: many streets are either closed to cars or are one-way, and it is expensive to park a car. (This brings up the concept of congestion pricing plans, where cities charge for the privilege of driving into the city center… this might be a good topic for another post).

Personally, I think bike-sharing is a great idea (though my opinion may be skewed because I’m a bike & train commuter). Perhaps the biggest potential issue is theft, but if the locking racks work as designed, hopefully that will be minimized. A distinctive design can also make the shared bikes less desirable to thieves. Another issue is getting people to ride when the weather isn’t perfect…

In any case, it will be interesting to see how the SmartBike DC programs works out. If it does work, and people discover that biking is a viable alternative to driving, more bike-sharing programs will undoubtedly spring up around the U.S. But regardless of the outcome, it’s still a step in the right direction, and many lessons are sure to be learned from this terrific experiment.

Links:

SmartBike DC webpage:
http://www.smartbikedc.com/

NYTimes article about SmartBike DC:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/us/27bikes.html

A bike-sharing experiment in New York:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/10/nyregion/10bike.html

An Op-Ed arguing for bike-sharing in New York:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/18/opinion/18haskell.html

User Chooser 2: personal solar panels

I was looking out my window a few days ago, and I noticed one of my neighbors had small solar panels on his windowsill. I asked him about it, and he told me they came from a small company called Solardyne. This company

The solar panels come in a kit, which includes 22W Panels, a battery, DC and AC power ports, a light, a carrying back, and other various components. The solar panels charge the batters, which can then provide AC power. The dormmate who owned them told me that he has no trouble charging the battery, and that he is able to get all his laptops power from the solar panels.

Although this product is marketed mainly towards campers and missionaries, I believe it has many applications in promoting sustainability. Buying this kit is a small step that many people could do to make themselves more sustainable. It’s affordable ($419 for the entire kit), and using it isn’t overly inconvenient or require a lifestyle change from the user (plugging devices into the battery instead of your wall). The kit is small and portable, and could be set up in any apartment or dorm room.

The one disadvantage of these panels is the high cost. You will not save money with this product. I did some quick calculations, and at 22W power intake, 12 hours of sunlight a day, you only save about 8 kWh per month, or $1 per month. The Solar panels are rated to last about 5 years, so you will not break even. Still, you can get a sizeable quantity of ones electricity from a pollution free source.

I checked out some other Solardyne products, and found one other that also has potential to promote sustainability. The company also sells a small, all inclusive windmill kit to generate home electricity. The windmill even comes with a special inverter, so that you can sell surplus electricity back to the power grid, reducing your electric bill further.

Like the solar panels, this product is expensive (the entire kit goes for $4979). However, the windmill is more cost effective and more litely to break even or even save you money. With an average windspeed of 12 mph (which is the case in most places), the windmill produces 400 kWh/month. This translated is to $48/month less in power costs. The windmill pays for itself in 9 years.

The windmill is also an example of a small step many people could take towards sustainability. If every house had a small windmill, it would reduce the need for pollution emitting power plants greatly. Congratulations to Solardyne for making it possible for many people to take small steps towards sustainability.

(Note: for my calculations, I assumed power costs $.12/kWh. This statistic came from http://michaelbluejay.com/electricity/cost.html. All images come from www.solardyne.com).

Recycled Water Hits The Showers

So-called “gray water” recycling is nothing new—car washes have been doing it for years, including our local favorite Lozano’s Brushless Car Wash. It is also being used in many other applications, mostly in irrigation, but has also been extended to use as toilet flushing water.

Now, there’s a new product out that I think we will probably all fall in love with. It’s called Quench, and it’s a shower system for the home that allows you to take showers of unlimited duration, while using only 4 liters of fresh water each time. It also shows us that indeed, cool stuff can come from Down Under! Actually, the 4 liter rating pertains only to the recycling phase of the shower. Because they haven’t built in a filtration system, with a Quench shower you first wash yourself off, then you indulge in the heated, recycled, showery goodness (YouTube). In effect, you use electricity (hopefully the renewable kind) to heat your body, while using recycled shower water as the medium. Which is nothing super-innovative, as it is simply a permutation of the Jacuzzi bathtub experience. So it’s really a Jacuzzi for the space- or water-conscious. Now if they’d only make one that filters the water such that you shower for multiple days on the same 4 liter supply… that would truly be awesome. It would then be a challenge to dispose of the filtered material—maybe they can take a cue from the weirdest pet product in recent memory, the CatGenie.

Walmart- i kinda got carried away

Walmart is a company of strong paradox. Whatever opinions it evokes, they are probably strong. On one hand it epitomizes American mass corporate culture that stymies creativity and small businesses. During the late 90s it was an easy target for the anti-globalization market: a lucrative business producing billions for a select few and dumping its factories and human rights and environmental abuses in poor countries.

On the other hand, it’s provides cheap goods for lower income Americans. And most recently, it’s being hailed as a model for green business. Here are the its two most important claims to greenness researched on their website (http://walmart.triaddigital.com/Sustainability.aspx and http://walmartstores.com/Sustainability/):

1. environmentally friendly products: I went on their website and investigated their eco-friendly production section. They divide their products up into apparel (they offer organic cotton), home (more organic cotton), baby (reusable cloth diapers, biodegradable toilet paper, endangered species butterfly stroller), energy efficient appliances, electronics & entertainment (energy efficient stuff, Planet Earth!), and garden & patio (sustainably harvested wood). Ok so none of these products seem particularly innovative, but then again with Walmart’s target clientele (generally more concerned with saving a buck than saving the Earth), I want to say it’s great how they are bringing the Earth into the consumer picture by advertising the eco-friendliness of their products. In the end though, I think it’s more appropriate to celebrate that consumers are demanding these products and making it more economic for companies like Walmart to carry these products. In other words, it’s a sign of a good consumer trend, but there is nothing truly innovative going on here.

2. Reducing energy and pollutants: There are two main avenues through which Walmart is seeking to reduce energy. The first is by reducing emissions of its truck fleet through a number of measures. They are attacking this with more efficient trucks and even getting involved with projects to develop cleaner engines that run off alternative energy sources. The second is by building sustainable buildings. Now I was pretty impressed with what they are doing in this area. You expect fluorescent light bulbs? You got some catching up to do. In their experimental stores they have installed LED lights. They monitor their energy and water usage. Their long term goals are 100% renewable energy and zero waste. Yeah those may be fuzzy long term goals, but once the rhetoric is there, we have something to hold them accountable to. I think what they are doing in this area is truly innovative. I haven’t seen the numbers, but I feel like I don’t even need to. Everything they are doing here is to their benefit. A carbon tax is around the corner. Energy prices are skyrocketing. We’re going to have to adjust our infrastructure to alternative energies in the future anyway. So they are not only saving money now, but investing in their future.

Precisely because I was impressed by their claims (ie that they embodied all that was talked about in “The Death in Environmentalism,” that being sustainable is self-serving) I felt I needed to dig deeper into the changes Walmart is making.

First I wanted to check the validity of its claims. There are actually a number of groups that monitor Walmart and jump on it any opportunity they get (http://wakeupwalmart.com/ and http://walmartwatch.com/). Their main concerns regarding Walmart and the environment persist, but really only because of Walmarts shear size. Of course Walmart is going to have an enormous impact because it serves so many customers. However, I saw nothing on either website that made me question that Walmart’s initiatives are a good model for other corporations.

Second, I was curious about whether Walmart is greening as a response to trends in consumerism, whether it is narrowly defining itself as “green” (as in how environmental movements can narrowly and harmfully define themselves as “environmental”), or whether we are witnessing Walmart progress in a more holistic sense. There is an enormous article on Wikipedia about Walmart (well cited too). Basically, as I kind of expected, Walmart is progressing in a more holistic sense. The main reason I thought this would be so is because Walmart is #1 on the global Fortune 500. It is run by smart people. They aren’t ideologues, so they are free to take the best ideas they can find and use them to their interest.

This is evident in the way Walmart is trying to open its customer base to a up-scale liberal base, as opposed to its traditional low income, conservative customer base. Its rating by human rights groups have been climbing since 2000. It even elected to sell Brokeback Mountain in the face of anti-gay protests (http://www.cbc.ca/arts/story/2006/04/06/brokeback-walmart-protest.html).

I think this is a perfect illustration of what Adam Werbach was saying when he talked about environmentalists harming their cause by narrowly defining themselves as environmentalists. Walmart and other corporations were harming themselves by not considering how a little greening and progressing could help them. Walmart is tactfully drawing in a liberal base without isolating its conservative base. It is loudly exclaiming “Yes!” to the environment and gay rights, while still saying “yes” to its billions of dollars and family values. Key lesson: the value systems are not mutually exclusive and we only hurt our causes by closing door on other values.