Tag Archives: engineering

Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization – John Browne

by Myrna Posted on August 30, 2019

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Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization

John Browne

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $14.99

Publish Date: August 28, 2019

Publisher: Pegasus Books

Seller: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

An impassioned defense of progress and innovation—and an argument for social responsibility from engineer, businessman, and former CEO of BP Lord John Browne. Today's unprecedented pace of change leaves many people wondering what new technologies are doing to our lives. Has social media robbed us of our privacy and fed us with false information? Are the decisions about our health, security and finances made by computer programs inexplicable and biased? Will these algorithms become so complex that we can no longer control them? Are robots going to take our jobs? Will better health care lead to an aging population which cannot be cared for? Can we provide housing for our ever-growing urban populations? And has our demand for energy driven the Earth's climate to the edge of catastrophe?             John Browne argues that we need not and must not put the brakes on technological advance. Civilization is founded on engineering innovation; all progress stems from the human urge to make things and to shape the world around us, resulting in greater freedom, health and wealth for all. Drawing on history, his own experiences and conversations with many of today's great innovators, he uncovers the basis for all progress and its consequences, both good and bad. He argues compellingly that the same spark that triggers each innovation can be used to counter its negative consequences. Make, Think, Imagine provides an eloquent blueprint for how we can keep moving towards a brighter future.

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Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilization – John Browne

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The radical tools that could save coral reefs

by ChristoHogben Posted on December 4, 2018

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This story was originally published by the HuffPost and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Coral reefs, considered the canaries of the world’s oceans, are being cooked. As many as 50 percent of reefs worldwide have been lost over the last few decades, with major die-offs in recent years due to mass bleaching events brought on by warmer ocean temperatures.

As the planet heads toward potentially catastrophic climate change, scientists have come to a sobering realization: Coral reefs, sensitive ecosystems that provide habitat for more than 25 percent of marine species and are vital to coastal communities around the globe, may not persist without radical human intervention.

On Wednesday, a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a 200-page interim report that identifies more than two dozen intervention strategies, many of them experimental, that could make corals more resilient to the effects of climate change.

Coral scientists have reached an “unheard-of state of urgency,” recognizing that the status quo likely won’t be enough to stabilize reef ecosystems in a warming world, Stephen Palumbi, the committee’s chair and a marine biology professor at Stanford University, said at a briefing on Wednesday. This sense of urgency was on full display at the committee’s first meeting in February, where Mark Eakin, the coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Coral Reef Watch, said the situation facing corals is dire.

The new report — the first of two that the 12-person committee is tasked with producing — provides an in-depth look at 23 techniques scientists could use to give corals a fighting chance, from relocation and genetic manipulation of coral species to antibiotic use and spraying salt water into the atmosphere to shade and cool reefs.

This is the “first time anyone has looked into what abilities we might have to stabilize any major world ecosystem,” Palumbi told HuffPost. In much the same way that the agricultural sector is planning for changing climate conditions, the committee set out to identify the range of resilience tools available to the field of coral science, he said.

The good news is, there are many.

“Not all of them are usable. Not all of them will work. Not all of them are actually feasible at the scale we want,” Palumbi said at the briefing. “But the fact that the coral reef community is pulling together to produce this list right now is, in fact, I think, the take-home message. The toolbox is not empty.”

The report primarily focuses on ways of protecting corals against bleaching, a phenomenon in which heat-stressed corals turn white after expelling their algae, which provide most of the coral polyps’ energy. If not allowed to recover free of stressors, the corals can perish. The most recent bleaching event, which lasted from June 2014 to May 2017, was the “longest, most widespread, and possibly the most damaging coral bleaching event on record,” Coral Reef Watch says. Among the reefs hardest hit was Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, where an estimated 29 percent of shallow water corals perished.

Scientists say failing to rein in greenhouse emissions, the primary driver of global climate change, will spell the end of coral reefs as we know them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading United Nations consortium of researchers studying human-caused climate change, issued a dire report in October that found reefs could decline by 70 to 90 percent if the planet warms 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels, and by 99 percent at 2 degrees Celsius. And the latest federal climate assessment, released last week by the Trump administration, concluded that the loss of unique coral reef ecosystems “can only be avoided by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.”

Palumbi emphasized Wednesday that the known interventions are not a substitute for cutting carbon emissions or reducing other environmental stressors.

“These interventions will help coral reef ecosystems be resilient enough to hang out while we figure out fixing climate change,” he said.

The “huge lift,” he added, will be finding ways to implement them on regional or global scales. So far, none have made it beyond lab or field trials, “making their efficacy and impacts uncertain,” the report states.

The project, sponsored by NOAA and called Interventions to Increase the Resilience of Coral Reefs, is expected to take up to two years. The committee’s second report, due out next year, will provide a decision-making framework for world leaders to assess the risks and benefits of intervention strategies and to implement them to help protect reefs.

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The radical tools that could save coral reefs

Posted in Accent, alo, Anchor, FF, GE, global climate change, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged climate & energy, Coral, engineering, global climate change, intervention, king, Ona, radius, watch | Comments Off

This natural gas plant could be a big breakthrough

by XiomaraAlves01 Posted on May 31, 2018

Yesterday, the startup Net Power switched on its 50-megawatt power plant, proving it could burn natural gas without releasing greenhouse gases. If this technology works at scale, it could be the flexible, emissions-free lynchpin the world needs to reverse climate change.

That’s a big “if” of course. After the engineering challenge comes the market challenge: We could make a laundry list of promising energy sources that launch to great excitement, then struggle for years to compete against the incumbent technologies (see cellulosic ethanol).

Net Power captures the carbon dioxide given off as gas burns. That’s the same thing done by carbon capture and sequestration plants already in existence. But the crucial difference here is that carbon capture and sequestration usually uses a lot of energy (and money) to separate the carbon molecules out of all the other gases and particles in a plant’s exhaust.

Net Power uses an elegant trick to simplify the process (David Roberts explains the basics here) so that its exhaust is nearly pure carbon dioxide, which it can capture in its entirety. And the company says it can do all that while operating more cheaply than the best existing gas plants.

The next step? The company is in the process of developing a 300-megawatt plant, which would start providing electricity by 2021 at the earliest.

As the United States has built solar panels and wind turbines, natural gas has expanded even more. The fuel’s ability to cheaply ramp up and down with fluctuations in electric supply and demand have made it an apt partner for renewable energy. If it could do that without adding insulation to the Earth’s heat-trapping jacket, it would provide us a much-needed reprieve.

Original source –

This natural gas plant could be a big breakthrough

Posted in alo, ALPHA, Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, solar, solar panels, Uncategorized | Tagged alo, david, dry, energy, engineering, news, roberts, science, united, works-at-scale, world | Comments Off

Cities and states may be able to officially join the Paris Agreement after all.

by PriscilBenny Posted on June 12, 2017

There’s been much high-profile gushing over the spaceship-in-Eden–themed campus that Apple spent six years and $5 billion building in Silicon Valley, but it turns out techno-utopias don’t make great neighbors.

“Apple’s new HQ is a retrograde, literally inward-looking building with contempt for the city where it lives and cities in general,” writes Adam Rogers at Wired, in an indictment of the company’s approach to transportation, housing, and economics in the Bay Area.

The Ring — well, they can’t call it The Circle — is a solar-powered, passively cooled marvel of engineering, sure. But when it opens, it will house 12,000 Apple employees, 90 percent of whom will be making lengthy commutes to Cupertino and back every day. (San Francisco is 45 miles away.)

To accommodate that, Apple Park features a whopping 9,000 parking spots (presumably the other 3,000 employees will use the private shuttle bus instead). Those 9,000 cars will be an added burden on the region’s traffic problems, as Wired reports, not to mention that whole global carbon pollution thing.

You can read Roger’s full piece here, but the takeaway is simple: With so much money, Apple could have made meaningful improvements to the community — building state-of-the-art mass transit, for example — but chose to make a sparkly, exclusionary statement instead.

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Cities and states may be able to officially join the Paris Agreement after all.

Posted in alo, Anchor, ATTRA, Casio, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Ringer, solar, solar power, Ultima, Uncategorized, Vintage | Tagged city, climate & energy, cupertino, engineering, rogers, rogers-at-wired, trump nation, united-nations | Comments Off

Why Solar Financing Truly Is An Art Form

by RetaEdengjymusl Posted on August 24, 2016

A decade ago, a residential solar system was a relatively elite product available only to homeowners with the means to finance the installation. Banks were still a little shy about investing in this new technology and solar financing programs were relatively rare. Solar energy was more expensive than electricity from the power grid in most markets, and solar energy prices were much higher than today. So what’s changed? The market for one and one company has crafted solar financing down to a digital art form.

Solar financing – a retrospective

Solar financing hasn’t always been the easiest to obtain. Image Credit: InnervisionArt / Shutterstock

Solar financing hasn’t always been the easiest to obtain.

Then, the cost of solar PV fell 50% in five years, according to a 2015 report and the federal tax credit was increased to 30%.
The total cost of installing a solar system has fallen dramatically, and over the same period of time — retail electricity rates have climbed across much of the country.
In fact, solar energy has reached grid parity in 20 states, according to a recent report from GTM Research, U.S. Residential Solar Economic Outlook: Grid Parity, Rate Design and Net Metering Risk.

What does it all mean? It means that solar power electricity is cheaper than retail electricity in much of the nation.

Homeowners in many states can save money with solar energy, thus financing the upfront cost is often the missing ingredient to solar system ownership. Now that solar power has proven itself as a reliable technology and a sound financial investment, solar financing programs are becoming hot. One of the most noteworthy is the Mosaic PowerSwitch loan program, a peer-to-peer loan initiative for affordable solar loans.

This online solar marketplace connects investors with aspiring solar system owners. The platform has crowd sourced numerous solar installations, including university housing projects, conference centers, and single-family homes. Mosaic started out with commercial and non-profit solar systems and has expanded to also serve homeowners. This California start-up was launched in 2010, right when solar leases were becoming really popular.

Why not just lease a solar system?

Solar leases emerged as a popular way for people to have a solar system with as little as no money down and they took the industry by storm several years ago. Suddenly many more homeowners had the means to go solar with billions in institutional money. The leasee can have many of the benefits of solar energy, but not all. Although lease agreements vary, many involve locking in electricity rates from the solar energy. As the cost of retail electricity grows, the savings from the solar system also increase.

The downside is that some home shoppers are shy about purchasing a home with a leased solar system on it and the homeowner is not entitled to the federal tax credits associated with the solar system. Solar system owners experience double the utility savings with solar energy because they aren’t sharing the profits generated by the system and they own their solar system outright at the end of the loan period. On the bright side, the solar leasor is responsible for solar system maintenance and repairs, but most solar systems require little if any maintenance over time. Some solar installers also offer an additional warranty that products solar system owners.

Solar leasing seems to have peaked in 2014 at 72 percent of the market and is likely declining. Now many large solar companies have started offering loan programs in addition to solar leases and they are growing in popularity. In fact, Sungevity and NRG Home Solar both offer loans through Mosaic. The business model is shifting behind solar, and Mosaic entered the market just at the right time to take advantage of this.

How do Mosaic loans work?

The Mosaic loan was specifically designed for solar energy. The idea behind it is that if the loans are structured properly, they will remove the barriers stopping many homeowners from going solar.

Investors can lend money to people, businesses and organizations wishing to install solar panels.

The loans are considered to be low-risk because people are saving money by using solar energy, thus failure to make monthly payments puts this in jeopardy.
The homeowner is entitled to the 30% federal tax credit (unlike with a leased solar system), and they can either use this money to pay down the Mosaic loan or keep the tax credit.
When they keep the tax credit, it doubles the rate of the loan after 18 months.

What is peer-to-peer lending?

Peer-to-peer lending matches investors with borrowers using an online platform. The fees for such services are often lower than with a brick and mortar bank because the overhead for such companies is lower. Peer-to-peer lending serves as an alternative way for borrowers to seek credit and can pay higher returns for investors.

Image Credit: Mosaic

Peer-to-peer lending has been around for roughly a decade, but it really took off during the financial crisis. It became very difficult for borrowers to access credit, encouraging the growth of peer-to-peer lending. This alternative model serves a customer base that could otherwise be excluded or be poorly served with high rates. The peer-to-peer model can also be more nimble to changes in the business environment, like we saw during the financial crisis.

Many banks have been slow to see solar as a cash-generating asset with proven, reliable technology. Most solar panels have a 25-year production warranty while solar inverters (which converts the DC solar electricity to AC current) typically have 12 to 25-year warranties. With no moving parts, solar systems are practically maintenance free.

Solar energy has become a mainstream way to save on utility bills and hedge against rising electricity rates and has wide appeal beyond the green consumers niche. Due to the upfront cost of the solar equipment and installation, financing the system is often the largest hurdle, especially for people and organizations that would like to purchase instead of lease the system. This hurdle is rapidly shifting now that solar is more widely seen as a wise financial investment, in addition to being far more sustainable than fossil fuels.

Mosaic’s solar financing model is helping to fuel the clean energy movement by matching investors and borrowers. This is a win-win arrangement that allows investors to help further solar energy use, creating a very green investment opportunity. Now that the federal tax credit for solar systems has been extended, the solar energy market is ripe for further growth.

Feature image credit: Rawpixel / Shutterstock

About
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Sarah Lozanova

Sarah Lozanova is a renewable energy and sustainability journalist and communications professional, with an MBA in sustainable management. She is a regular contributor to environmental and energy publications and websites, including Mother Earth Living, Earth911, Home Power, Triple Pundit, CleanTechnica, Mother Earth Living, the Ecologist, GreenBiz, Renewable Energy World, and Windpower Engineering.Lozanova also works with several corporate clients as a public relations writer to gain visibility for renewable energy and sustainability achievements.

Latest posts by Sarah Lozanova (see all)

Why Solar Financing Truly Is An Art Form – August 24, 2016
Deconstructing Construction Waste – August 22, 2016
This Is One Sweet DIY Kombucha Recipe – August 12, 2016

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Phosphorus pollution poses a major threat to the world’s lakes

by Myrna Posted on July 13, 2016

Humans dump millions of tons of phosphorus into lakes every year, and it’s destroying their ecosystems. From: Phosphorus pollution poses a major threat to the world’s lakes ; ; ;

Originally posted here –

Phosphorus pollution poses a major threat to the world’s lakes

Posted in ALPHA, eco-friendly, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, Monterey, ONA, organic, solar, solar power, Uncategorized | Tagged agriculture, ants, art, business, eco-friendly, engineering, geo-engineering, national, oceans, rivers, tuna, united-states | Comments Off

6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

by graptorm Posted on April 14, 2016

6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

By Clayton Aldernon 14 Apr 2016comments Share

Next Wednesday marks the sixth anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon spill, the BP gusher that killed 11 workers and released at least 4 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. On Thursday, the Obama administration finalized a set of regulations that will help ensure we never have to witness this kind of disaster again — or so the administration claims. But environmental experts have real concerns about the rule’s rigor and implementation.

The new rule — the result of years of investigations by the Department of Interior, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Academy of Engineering — will tighten standards for blowout preventers (the type of device that failed spectacularly in 2010). It will also strengthen the design of other offshore well elements, including wellheads and the steel casings used in construction.

Speaking to press on Thursday, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell cited the complexity of oil drilling technology as one of the reasons why the regulations took six years to compose. And learning from the blowout was a part of taking time “to do this right,” she said.

“As offshore oil and gas production continue to grow every year and our dependence on foreign oil continues to decline, we owe it to the American people to ensure we are developing these resources responsibly and safely,” said Jewell, who was once a petroleum engineer in Oklahoma.

Asked point blank on a press call if the blowout preventers will be fail-safe, Brian Salerno, director of the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, said he couldn’t give a conclusive answer. “We do believe this is a significant increase in the level of safety,” he said.

The new regulations incorporate several existing industry standards, produced by the likes of the American Petroleum Institute. API’s reaction to the announcement has been relatively calm.

But environmentalists have found much more to criticize.

A major concern is how rigorous the rule is around severing capability, the ability of blowout preventers to seal a pipe or wellbore by cutting through the pipe or casing in the event of a leak.

Liz Birnbaum, former director of the Minerals Management Service and an expert in offshore energy development, also pointed to the long phase-in periods that appear in the proposed regulations. “The rule says that they have three more years to set up real-time monitoring [of oil-well safety by onshore personnel],” Birnbaum told Grist. “Which is just insane.” She pointed to the fact that BP was able to set up real-time monitoring in less time than that after the Deepwater Horizon spill. “It doesn’t take three years.”

Environmental groups worry about providing too much flexibility for industry players, too. The only solution, Director of Environment America’s Stop Drilling Program Rachel Richardson said, “is to transition away from dirty fuels altogether.”

With respect to blowout preventers, Birnbaum argues that industry is being given too much temporal wiggle room to update their technology. In drilling operations, companies aren’t currently required to install parts that center the drill pipe during severing operations — which was exactly the problem during the Deepwater Horizon spill. The regulations would require them to do so, but not for another seven years.

Before the seven years are up, the Gulf of Mexico may be open for another 10 offshore leases, based on Obama’s proposed five-year offshore drilling plan. According to Birnbaum, “Another seven years is seven years too long.”

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6 years after BP disaster, Obama administration thinks it has a way to prevent future spills

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Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

by KarolynKZFX Posted on November 23, 2015

Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

By Suzanne Jacobson 23 Nov 2015comments Share

Bioart is weird, pure and simple. It’s DNA engineered to encode messages like “I am the Riddle of Life. Know me and you will know yourself,” paintings made of bacteria, rabbits genetically modified to glow (then don’t actually glow because fluorescent proteins don’t work in fur), living tissue grown to resemble Guatemalan worry dolls or mini leather jackets, and a “biocompatible” ear replica implanted in a human arm.

In short, bioart is what you’ll find at the bottom of the lab-grown, biofluorescent rabbit hole that emerges when scientists and artists get together and turn the building blocks of life into a new kind of creative medium. And according to a group of researchers at MIT and Harvard, it’s also a funky new way to engage the public in the controversial and often frightening world of biotech. Here’s how they put it in the latest issue of the journal Trends in Biotechnology:

Regardless of their potential for health benefits and quality of life, genetic technologies have consequences that are not absolutely foreseeable and this has led to public uncertainty about implications for personal privacy and human rights, eugenics, food and drug safety, replacement of natural systems with bioengineered counterparts, involvement of multinational corporations with genetic propriety, worldwide agricultural monopolies, and prospects for the weaponization of biotechnological accessories for the military and law enforcement. Bioartists find these issues to be compelling subjects for their art.

“Historical and Contemporary Bioart. (A) Germ paintings on paper by Alexander Fleming. Bar, 1 cm. Courtesy of Kevin Brown of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum. (B) Cleared and stained Pacific tree frog gathered from Aptos, CA, USA by Brandon Ballengée (2012) in scientific collaboration with Stanley K. Sessions. DFA 186: Hades, unique digital c-print on watercolor paper. Bar, 9 cm. Courtesy of Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York and reproduced with permission. (C) Conceptual drawing of Microvenus. Courtesy of Joe Davis, 1988. (D) Victimless Leather project showing a miniaturized leather jacket using skin cells by SymbioticA. Bar, 2 cm. Courtesy of Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr and reproduced with permission. (E) Ear on Arm project. Bar, 3 cm. Courtesy of Nina Sellars and reproduced with permission.”

Yetisen, et al. Trends in Biotechnology

George Church, a Harvard geneticist and synthetic biologist famous for trying to bring back the woolly mammoth by splicing mammoth DNA into an elephant, was one of the co-authors on the paper. His lab at Harvard is currently hosting the artist Joe Davis, another co-author, who in the ’80s worked with a geneticist to encode a message into the DNA of E. coli. The project, called Microvenus, was meant to explore the possibility of one day sending such messenger organisms into space as a way to communicate with extraterrestrials. In a press release about the new paper, Davis and Church spoke with Cell Press about their collaboration:

“It’s Oz, pure and simple,” Davis says. “The total amount of resources in this environment and the minds that are accessible, it’s like I come to the city of Oz every day.”

But it’s not a one-way street. “My particular lab depends on thinking outside the box and not dismissing things because they sound like science fiction,” says Church, who is also part of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. “Joe is terrific at keeping us flexible and nimble in that regard.”

For example, Davis is working with several members of the Church lab to perform metagenomics analyses of the dust that accumulates at the bottom of money-counting machines. Another project involves genetically engineering silk worms to spin metallic gold — an homage to the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin.

Bioart isn’t entirely new. It goes all the way back to the 1920s, when one Alexander Fleming was making stick figure paintings with bacteria and discovered that a fungus called penicillin was killing some of his work. It also hasn’t always been successful. There was one time, for example, in 1970, when German artist Hans Haacke tried to draw attention to the destructiveness of the pet trade by buying and releasing ten endangered Hermann’s tortoises in a part of France where the tortoises roam free. Turned out, a few of Haacke’s purchases belonged to the wrong subspecies of tortoise and ended up messing with the local gene pool, ultimately compromising the distinct genetic lineages of both subspecies.

And then there was the controversial environmental art of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s — hillsides paved with asphalt, islands covered in plastic, craters carved with tunnels and chambers. Davis, Church, and their co-authors note that environmental art eventually became more about restoring nature, and together with advances in biological sciences, paved the way for today’s bioart.

With the rise of Romanticism several centuries ago, artists seemed to shed longstanding commitments to scientific and technical literacy while, at the same time, science started its long march toward secularization [68]. In this century, art and science are in the process of disengaging from this legacy of separation. The interdisciplinary landscape of life sciences has come to include chemists, physicists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists. Partnerships with bioartists can contribute cultural and aesthetic contexts essential to translating basic research into useful applications. While the role of bioart in both the criticism and application of science will undoubtedly continue, perhaps a more profoundly important and yet less recognized contribution may be the ability of bioart to help science understand itself.

That’s deep, man. Call it Oz, call it Wonderland, call it whatever you want — all I know is, this is one glowing white rabbit that I intend to follow.

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Forget psychedelics. If you wanna get weird, check out this bioart

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Will Canada export its fresh water or will the US just take it?

by Myrna Posted on September 21, 2015

It’s probably one or the other, whether Canadians like it or not. Link: Will Canada export its fresh water or will the US just take it? ; ; ;

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Will Canada export its fresh water or will the US just take it?

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A Hawaiian clean energy plant makes electricity from seawater and ammonia

by HansNorthcote Posted on August 25, 2015

A Hawaiian clean energy plant makes electricity from seawater and ammonia

By Clayton Aldernon 25 Aug 2015comments Share

The ocean is often considered to be the final frontier for energy, whether we’re talking about Arctic oil reserves or giant floating wind turbines. Now, a 40-foot tall tower on the Big Island of Hawai’i will harvest the oceans’ energy using a method that has renewable energy advocates drooling. It’s part of a new research facility and demo power plant that uses seawater of different temperatures to power a generator via turbine.

Most sources of energy (even the naughty ones!) originate from the sun’s rays, and the technology at the demo plant — a joint project of Makai Ocean Engineering and the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority — is simply experimenting with a different way to capture them. Oceans cover upward of 70 percent of the earth’s surface, which means that 70 percent of Earth-bound sunlight strikes the ocean — and that makes for a lot of unharnessed heat. The Makai project extracts this thermal energy from the warmed ocean water.

Popular Science has the story:

The plant uses a concept called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Inside the system is a liquid that has a very low boiling point (meaning that it requires less energy to evaporate), like ammonia. As ammonia passes through the closed system of pipes, it goes through a section of pipes that have been warmed by seawater taken from the warm (77 degrees Fahrenheit), shallow waters. The ammonia vaporizes into a gas, which pushes a turbine, and generates power. Then, that ammonia gas passes through a section of pipes that are cooled by frigid (41 degrees Fahrenheit) seawater pumped up from depths of around 3,000 feet. The gas condenses in the cold temperatures, turning back into a liquid, and repeats the process all over again. The warm and cold waters are combined, and pumped back into the ocean.

Despite the cool factor, the type of OTEC technology powering the Makai plant isn’t the most efficient out there. It takes a good chunk of electricity to pump in (and out) all that deep seawater. The demo plant currently uses a 55 inch-wide pipeline pumping 270,000 gallons per minute in order to operate. There are also relatively few ocean sites — off the U.S. coast or otherwise — that allow for the depth and temperature gradients necessary for ideal OTEC conditions. But above all else, the Makai plant is a research facility, and teams of engineers are constantly fiddling with the heat exchangers in the name of efficiency gains.

Of course, the thermal plant would also be more efficient if it were actually offshore, closer to the chilly ocean depths. Making the expansionary move could boost the plant’s capacity to powering upwards of 120,000 homes — 1,000 times as many as Makai expects the demo plant to power today. The energy company projects that a single full-scale offshore plant would prevent the burning of 1.3 million barrels of oil annually.

Watch the rather patriotic video above for more info.

Source:

A new energy plant in Hawaii generates power from ocean temperature extremes

, Popular Science.

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