You are browsing the archives of 2010 February.

Green wine is catching on.

Solar panels have become a common sight across wine country. Vintners are realizing that the sun not only ripens their grapes, but provides power to their wineries as well.

Rodney Strong Vineyards installed a 766-kilowatt system, thought to be the largest solar winery array in the world, and it provides 40% of the 600,000 Sonoma County wineries electricity needs. When Domaine Carneros unveiled their 120-kilowatt system it was the first in California to power a winemaking facility instead of offices. Frog’s Leap Winery installed a 160-kilowatt system.

The trend has caught on. The wineries listed here use solar power energy systems to provide electric needs for their winery and other facilities on their estate such as tasting rooms and on-site residences. This website profiles all of California’s solar powered wineries. The lists are long and continue to grow.

The title “America’s Greenest Winery” goes to Parducci Wine Cellars. Parducci is the oldest family-owned winery in Northern California’s Mendocino County. It is the nation’s first carbon neutral winery, powered by 100% solar and wind power.  The annual positive environmental impact of the winery’s 100% green power use is equivalent to:

•    Removing 172 cars from the road for a year, or
•    Planting 242 acres of trees, or
•    Not driving a passenger vehicle 2,171,450 miles.

California’s tax rebates are vital in encouraging businesses to convert to solar power. “With California’s tax rebates and available federal tax breaks, wineries can recoup the initial investments more quickly,” said Mark Mosher, Acting Executive Director for Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth.

So as you’re touring California wine country, it’s becoming easier to support the wineries that have invested in their environment by making the switch over to solar. Many of these wineries, like Cade, provide outlets to recharge your electric car, too.

Share

Credit: Science + Son

I sense a trend emerging. Last week I featured a set of speakers that evoke the Nipper side of the old RCA logo. Now its a pleasure to present a speaker that represents the other half.

Science + Son has developed two generations (I and II) of these patent-pending Phonophone passive amplification speakers. From the website:

Through passive amplification alone, These unique pieces instantly transform any personal music player + earbuds into a sculptural audio console.

Without the use of external power or batteries, the Phonofone inventively exploits the virtues of horn acoustics to boost the audio output of standard earphones to up to 55 decibels (or roughly the maximum volume of laptop speakers).

Upon connecting active earphones to the Phonofone their trebly buzzing is instantly and profoundly transformed into a warm, rich and resonant sound.

The Phonofone is constructed entirely from ceramic. Not only environmentally low impact, ceramics are inherently rigid and resonant, lending themselves well to this application.

This diagram shows a little more about what is going on, acoustically speaking.

The pictures may be a little deceiving: The actual size is 11″ x 9.5″ x 20″. Unfortunately, the price is going to run a little more than your iPod or iPhone. Charles and Marie are selling a Phononphone II online for $500.

Share

CBS now has posted links to the original Bloom Energy solid oxide fuel cell story, plus several other “web extras” that expand a little on what was covered in the SOFC broadcast:

Full Segment: The Bloom Box

Web Extra: The Magic Box

Web Extra: Plug-In Power Plant

Web Extra: Naming The Bloom Box

Web Extra: A Skeptic’s View

Share

In case you missed it, in his 60 Minutes interview on Bloom Energy’s solid oxide fuel cells, company founder K.R. Sridhar recounts how he first got into the field by devising a method for NASA to use solid oxide carbon dioxide electrolysis to produce O₂ for future Mars explorers. He says he basically reversed the engineering of the O₂ production method to devise his SOFC components.

For those that are curious about that work, here are a few key links to his work (along with G. Tao and C.L. Chan) on that topic:

Oxygen production on Mars using solid oxide electrolysis (Solid State Ionics, 1997)

Study of carbon dioxide electrolysis at electrode/electrolyte interface: Part I. Pt/YSZ interface (Solid State Ionics, 2004)

Study of carbon dioxide electrolysis at electrode/electrolyte interface: Part II. Pt-YSZ cermet/YSZ interface (Solid State Ionics, 2004)

Sridhar also has pubished in ACerS’ journals:

Experimental Method for a Dynamic Biaxial Flexural Strength Test of Thin Ceramic Substrates (Journal of the American Ceramic Society, 2002)

Share

Via a note from Kristen Brosnan, I learned that Lesley Stahl and her 60 Minutes crew at CBS are doing a big story tomorrow (Feb. 21) on Bloom Energy and the apparent success of their solid oxide fuel cell system that has been packaged into what the company is marketing as a “Bloom Box.” Click on the picture above for a promo video.

Apparently, Bloom has moved testing out of the lab some time ago and has found success in testing five of the appliances on eBay’s corporate offices The CBS web site says:

John Donahoe, CEO of eBay, confirms Bloom Boxes were installed at his corporate campus nine months ago. The company says the boxes already saved them over $100,000 in electricity bills. “It’s been very successful thus far. [The Bloom Boxes] have done what they said they would do,” says Donahoe. The five boxes are able to produce five times as much electricity as the 3,248 solar panels that eBay installed on its campus roofs, says the CEO. “The footprint for Bloom is much more efficient,” he tells Stahl.

The CBS website report that Bloom Energy says each box could support 100 residences and cost $700,000-$800,000, and that a single-family unit might be available in another five years for an estimated $3,000.

The 60 Minutes story is something of a teaser. Bloom Energy, formerly known as Ion Technologies America, for quite some time has been advertising a “countdown” to a heretofore secret corporate unveiling.

I’ll try to get some reaction from the participants at ACerS’ upcoming Materials Challenges in Energy 2010 conference that starts Sunday night in Cocoa Beach.

… adding, if you want to know more about Bloom, and the role their investment partners at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, it is definitely worth checking out Jon Gertner’s Oct. 2008 long article written for the New York Times Sunday Magazine. The link takes you to the part of the article to gets the deepest into Bloom, but the whole article is a good read.

… also adding two additional data points. First, a post at earth2tech has some more information on what’s going to happen at Bloom’s big event Wednesday. More, importantly, there is some interesting information revealed about Bloom’s vision of its SOFC that came out in an October interview by Alison van Diggelen (Fresh Dialogues) in which Bloom Energy founder KR Sridhar expands on the Bloom Box’s potential as a generic hydrogen-creation machine. Here is the payoff in the exchange:

Alison: And I also understand part of the Bloom box is splitting out the hydrogen?

KR: That’s an option. People always ask, ‘it’s electricity – is it a fuel cell for the car?’ The answer is no. This is for stationary uses like buildings and houses.

So then the question is, you have a big transportation infrastructure that requires fuel for that. Transportation can potentially go in two directions in the future: one is a hydrogen infrastructure for the car, the other one is an electrical infrastructure. We’re already getting a lot more comfortable with plug-in hybrids… which is right on the horizon.

[. . .]

So, our device can either produce the electricity that will charge the car or provide you hydrogen if the transportation becomes hydrogen based. So we’ve sort of become the gas station for the transportation industry.

Alison: Your vision of the future with this KR…has been described as a refrigerator-sized device.

KR: That’s the ultimate vision. How we get there I cannot describe right now.

Alison: So that’s maybe,  what 20 years off…who knows?

KR: Silicon Valley time, ultimate is within a decade, right?

Alison: So it’s all within a decade.

KR: Right, right.

For additional recent CTT stories on SOFCs, see

Ohio Funding to bring better Li-ions and SOFCs

Can natural gas-SOFC combo be cheapest route to cleaner electricity?

Commercial rollout of residential SOFCs planned for Japan in 2014

First marine SOFC test

Lowering the temperature of SOFCs

Plans underway to market mobile SOFC products

Microtubular SOFC: Small is beautiful - and cooler and powerful

Planar anode-supported fuel cells

NexTech shows off big SOFC

DOE pumping $42 million into fuel cells

Share