A year ago when we saw an article at MAKE: on how to make a fuel cell out of a band aid we knew we had to get in touch with this guy. Gavin D.J. Harper is a frequent contributor to EcoGeek and has written several books in McGraw Hill’s “Evil Genius” series.

Most recently, Gavin completed Solar Energy Projects for the Evil Genius. The book, filled with projects on how to harness the sun for your own personal gain, was forwarded by Willie Nelson and has been sitting on my nightstand for the last few days. We’re happy to have Gavin as this week’s ecogeek of the week.

EcoGeek: When I think of evil geniuses, I don’t generally thing of solar power. That’s more for benevolent geniuses. Where do evil geniuses fit with solar?

Gavin D.J. Harper: Hey Hank! You must have missed the Solar Powered Death Ray….. It’s OLD technology: Archimedes was rumoured to have suggested it waaay back when, like a lot of renewable innovations - we’ve known how to do it for a long time - we are only now starting to refine the technology. However, I must state, despite the natty title, I think solar power is definitely a force for good in the world.

EG: What’s your favorite project in the book?

GH: I think that the photochemical solar cells are ‘really cool’ as they are such a futuristic high tech - wowfabgroovy technology and yet they are something easy that you can make at home and get to understand relatively easily. It’s complicated science, but made easy for the smart kid in the street.

EG: What’s the easiest project in the book?

GH: Hmmm… that all depends on your skills and where you are coming from, but I have to say making a solar powered engine from a drinking bird is the most impressive project for the least effort… that is if you’re not a clumsy klutz and manage not to break the drinking bird (no names…. Gavin Harper).

EG: As an environmentalist, what scares your pants off.

GH: Transport. Electricity we can do easily if we put our minds to it. I have total faith in renewables, and think that their large scale adoption could meet our electricity needs with relative ease. However, transport is waaay scary - I think there are a lot of issues surrounding alternative vehicle fuels that we don’t yet fully understand - these problems are as much social, economic and political as they are technical. I also think that we are going to struggle to live in the built environments that we have created with a ‘reduced’ level of transport that will be necessitated by an increase in the cost of energy.

EG: What keeps you hopeful.

GH: Kids. I see some really great ideas come out of school Design & Technology departments, and I passionately believe that if we can get more kids fired up about science and technology, they can come up with some fantastic ideas for the future. I have less faith in adults… they’ve kind of got us where we are today, and the rate of change isn’t fast enough by far, so I think if you are going to do anything important… drum it into a kid who is a friend how important these issues of sustainability are, and show them, empower them with the tools to change the world. (Pass the tissues Hank, I think I’m going to burst into song.. “I believe that children are our future…. teach them well and let them lead the way….”)

EG: OK…that’s enough of that…What applications for solar power do you think will be most important in the next 20 years.

GH: Thin film… thin film… we all love thin film. I think we will see thin film everywhere very soon indeed. I look forward to seeing innovative building designs using vast arrays of thin film solar. I think we are going to see solar power become ‘ubiquitous’ due to the versatility of the thin film material - we are already moving forward to ‘ubiquitous computing,’ we see power-munching computers in every possible application - but I think we now need to move forward to ubiquitous energy generation, where everything you see around you has some element of embedded generation, doing its bit to capture some ambient energy.

EG: Do you hope that solar power will someday be a significant source of electricity for our planet?

GH: I don’t hope Hank, I ‘know.’ Let’s face it: as time goes on, our options are going to get more and more limited. We have this huge nuclear reactor that is 149 600 000 000m away (which I think is the only safe distance away from my home that I’d wish to have one), and it is producing this massive amount of energy for free. The smart man harnesses that energy. I think that there is going to have to be a focus on large scale solutions as well - I think that ‘embedded’ generation has it’s place in the world - and we can go a long way by deploying solar panels on our homes, but I think that we still need to be considering some element of centralised generation, albeit implemented using renewable technologies.

EG: What’s next for “High Tech Guru” Gavin D.J. Harper?

GH: Lots more learning, lots more books. I’m going to be a research student for the next several years, looking at Alternative Vehicle Fuels and their impact in society, which I am really excited about. I love writing the books, on the immediate horizon, ‘Fuel Cell Projects for the Evil Genius’ is going to print very soon indeed, and I’m already discussing ‘what next’ - probably a How-To book on Biodiesel Conversion. Of course, expect lots of posts to EcoGeek!

EcoGeek of the Week is a syndicated column from EcoGeek.org. If you would like to syndicate the column, or know an EcoGeek that proffiling, email our editor at editor@ecogeek.org

Dear EcoGeek,

My parents are always bugging me about computer usage and how the computers are sucking up energy. I want to know what I can do so that my computer doesn’t waste so much energy? I totally wanna go green and save the Earth from Global Warming!

- Lukas

Hey Lukas,

You probably won’t be surprised to discover that I spend quite a bit of time thinking about this very question. First, you should let your parents to know that your computer, with all of it’s amazing opportunities for educational, economic and social advancement, likely uses less power than the light bulbs that share the room with it.

Most desktop computers use between 100 to 150 watts. Now, this goes way up if you’ve got some kind of monster high-end gaming system, but 100 watts is a pretty good energy investment for what these glorious machines give us…in my opinion anyhow.

But that doesn’t mean that they’re aren’t steps you can take to decrease your computer’s power usage.

First, it’s important to realize that computers use varying amounts of power depending on what they’re doing. So writing an email doesn’t use as much power as playing Unreal Tournament. However, when your computer is completely idle, even if your monitor is off, it still is probably pulling about 100 watts from the wall. And when you’re not using your computer, that’s a pretty significant amount of waste.

So, always either shut down or suspend the operation of your computer when it’s going to be idle for a long time. This is the most important step we can take to decrease computer use. Of course, sometimes it’s hard to remember. Which is why I like to use Snap’s CO2Saver application. It keeps an eye on the way I use my computer, and idles my machine when I’m not using it. It also lets you know how much CO2 you’ve saved by using the application’s new settings. Unfortunately, it only works withy XP and Vista.

It’s also really important to consider not just the cost of the energy needed to power your machine, but also the energy required to create it. By most measures, more energy goes into creating a computer than will ever be used to keep it running. So one of the best ways to lower your computing carbon footprint is to try and keep your machine alive. You can do this a few ways. Don’t weigh your computer down with too many unnecessary applications. Learn how to upgrade and fix your computer when things go wrong, and never complain about taking your machine in to a repair shop. You’re doing the right thing for your pocket book and the environment.

And when you do finally need to upgrade (I like to try and make my computers last at least five years), look into computers that are designed specifically for efficiency. A new breed of low-energy desktops, like the Zonbu and Shuttle, are drawing far less than traditional PC’s. Dell, Toshiba and HP are all looking into low-energy solutions. Additionally, laptops will always be far more energy efficient than desktops, because they have to be designed to run on battery power.

I hope that’s a help to you and everybody else who’s concerned about PC power use. But don’t fret too much: you’ll save way more by changing your light bulbs than your computer.

EcoGeek of the Week is a weekly column provided by EcoGeek.org and syndicated all over the net. If you’d like to ask a question, or if you’re interested in syndicating the column, just use our submission form.

I just saw a kinda disturbing article on fark.com and wondered what you would think of it. Could walking really be worse of the environment than driving?

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2195538.ece

Seulswalker

Seulswalker,

When I read your question, I assumed that there was no way the article had any credibility… that it was written by an angsty high school student who was sick of people telling him what to do. But I was wrong, and that is scary.

Someone took the results of a scientific study on how inefficient our food production system is, did some really bad math, and then found themselves a glorious headline that would send shock waves throughout the blogosphere. You could call it sensationalism…I just call it evil.

Here’s the "scientific" basis for their thesis:

Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg of CO2 to the atmosphere … If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

Now I hope we can all see some gaping holes here, but maybe not all of them at first glance. So let’s go through the five I came up with one by one.

Most obviously, this assumes that 100% of the calories we use to walk come from beef. Actually roughly 75% of the calories most people burn come from plants (usually in the form of carbohydrates.) Plant calories are much less energy intensive to create. This leaves out Atkins dieters…but I hope they’re offset by vegetarians.

Second, We need to pick our battles in this war. As both driving and eating inevitably add to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, these are both issues that we should be working on. But if we go 100% I’dl rather remove cars than exercise from my lifestyle. Not because it’s better for the earth, but because it’s better for me.

Third, we have the supposed correspondence between exercise and consuming food. Yes, if you exercise, you’ll have to eat food to replace those calories, but the obesity epidemic is a testament to the fact that, frankly, most people eat because they want to, not because they need to.

Fourth is probably the least obvious hole…but it might turn out to be the most important. Walkers don’t travel thirty miles to go to the grocery store, but drivers do. Walkers opt for the corner grocer over the Wal-Mart. Driving doesn’t encourage waste because just because it’s inefficient. It also exponentially increases the amount of ground we can cover, creating sprawling cities and destroying local economies. Even if walking produced four times more CO2 emissions per mile than driving, walking reduces the number of miles traveled for most errands by ten to forty times.

Fifth, and this really is a huge omission, the study counts every piece of CO2 produced in the creation of the cow, but it only counts the carbon produced by burning the gasoline for the car. That’d be like only counting the CO2 that we exhale while walking. The hidden carbon costs of automobile travel are gigantic, more than double the final emissions for the car. They include the cost of mining and smelting the steel, pumping the oil, shipping the oil, refining the gasoline, shipping the gasoline, creation and maintenance of roads, construction of the car, etc etc. To leave out these costs while counting every drop of fertilizer sprinkled on a cow’s pasture is extremely foolish and, frankly, disappointing.

So, in short, walking is better for you and the world than driving is. Biking, being even more energy efficient than walking, however, is indeed better for the Earth. However, the point of the original study rings true. Our food production system is foolishly inefficient and unhealthy. It must be reformed in order for this to become a healthy and sustainable world. And for more on that, I suggest Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy.

Dear EcoGeek,

Who killed the electric car? Seriously, why can’t I buy one yet and when will I be able to?

Alan Carney
Dallas, Texas

Hey Alan, Much love to the people who made Who Killed the Electric Car?, because they got a lot of stuff right. It wasn’t any one person, corporation or technicality that killed the EV1. As with all product failures, it was a combination of tons of factors.

The reason major auto companies aren’t making electric vehicles look like this. First, Americans were looking for SUVs, not ultralights. Second, the technology was primitive, the biggest problem being that batteries could only take cars a hundred miles before they needed to spend hours at a charging station. Third, major car companies were too foolish to see that, in the next decade, electric cars could quickly become technologically viable and extremely appealing, so the abandoned their projects completely.

And now, here we are. Electric cars are technologically viable and extremely appealing. But no one’s done the kind of development necessary to introduce a pure electric vehicle to the mass consumer market. But it will happen. It’s just probably going to happen intermittently, by solving all three of the above problems in different ways.

Drivers will have to get used to smaller, lighter, sportier, more aerodynamic vehicles. It’s already starting to happen, and the new Prius body, most folks agree, is a very nice looking car.

Technology to make EVs more viable are being developed constantly. Ten minute recharge times, higher capacities and energy densities, and safer and more environmentally friendly components are all on the way, if not already proven. Of course, there’s a difference between a battery working in the lab, and being able to get it into a car for less than $30,000.

The short answer, for you, is that you can buy an electric car now. But you’ll either have to pay a premium for a Tesla or a Phoenix model (both companies have battery packs that cost more than Honda Civic) or you’ll have to go small, with NICE Cars or the Smart Fortwo. Or you can head to EVFinder, and search through listings for quite a lot of new and used electric vehicles.

But if you wait for mainstream manufacturers to catch on, it might be a while. Plug-in hybrids will soon (though no one has any concrete dates planned) offer an intermittent step which will allow for at least some emissions-free driving. We should see a Prius plug-in and possibly a plug-in from Saturn before 2010. And plug-in series hybrids (which always use the electric engine, but use a gasoline engine to charge the batteries (not to spin the wheels)) will offer another step toward full EVs.

But we’re going to have to wait for the ultra-expensive, high capacity, quick charging batteries to start getting way cheaper before we see any major car company embracing electric vehicles. Because if the EV1 hit the streets again…chances are, we still wouldn’t be able to get it off life support.

Ask the EcoGeek is a syndicated column provided by EcoGeek.org. If you want to ask a question, send it to Hank through our submission form.

Editor’s Note: In this week’s Ecogeek of the week, Hank Green interviews Ron Pernick, author of The Clean Tech Revolution.

Maybe my ears are just pointed in a very specific direction, but it seems rare when a day passes and I don’t hear someone extolling the possibilities of clean technology. But it’s not entirely clear what clean technology encompasses and how this very broad new category of technology is going to benefit our world in the coming decades.

I honestly don’t know…but Ron Pernick does. Ron is the head of the leading clean tech research firm, Clean Edge. His experiences at Clean Edge working with experts from industries ranging from carbon composites to water filtration has made him a leading clean technology expert, and uniquely qualified to write a book entitled “The Clean Tech Revolution.”

We’re very happy to have Ron Pernick as our EcoGeek of the Week.
EcoGeek: The work that Clean Edge does seems extremely important, even though I don’t really have any idea what you do there. Can you tell us about Clean Edge and your work?

Ron Pernick: We do a lot of interesting things at Clean Edge to track and analyze the development of clean technologies. This includes our annual Clean-Tech Investor Summit which we coproduce with IBF; the NASDAQ Clean Edge U.S. index which is a benchmark index tracking U.S.-listed clean energy companies; the publishing of our web site at www.cleanedge.com and our monthly newsletter CLEANWATCH; and a range of research reports including our annual Clean Energy Trends series. We also provide clean-tech related consulting services to investment firms, corporations, start ups, governments, and foundations. Since 2001 our clients have included such organization as Sharp, California Energy Commission, the City of San Francisco, the Solar Catalyst Group, Nth Power, Solaria, Solaicx, Miasole, and the Connecticut Clean Energy Fund.

EG: How do you draw a box around clean tech? It seems to be a category that can includes facets of every industry. So what is clean tech, and how do you know what not to include?

RP: We’re pretty explicit in the book. We define clean technologies as those technologies that reduce or eliminate the need for fossil fuels or limited natural resources; significantly reduce emissions and/or pollutants, and are equivalent or superior to conventional offerings. We group clean technologies into four buckets: energy, transportation, water, and materials. This covers everything from solar power, wind power, and biofuels to advanced lithium ion batteries, plug-in hybrids, and the smart grid.
Two technologies that we don’t consider clean are nuclear and “clean coal.” We spend time in the book explaining why – but with current technology we find the concept of clean coal oxymoronic and we believe that nuclear, with containment, waste, and proliferation issues, doesn’t fit our criteria of reducing waste/pollutants and that it’s just too costly to develop and deploy new nuclear power plants – especially in the United States . As Amory Lovins likes to say reviving the nuclear industry is like trying to defibrillate a corpse.

EG: Your recent book, The Clean Tech Revolution, is somewhat rare in “environmental” non-fiction in that it was entirely solution oriented and dealt very little with the crises we face. We try to have that same attitude at EcoGeek, and I think it makes us happier people. So, needless to say I loved it, but I’m curious why you needed to write it, and what your personal goals are for the book.

RP: We had to do it exactly for the reason that you point out. Nobody had written the business case for clean technologies – and so we set out to do that in a general business book with broad appeal that shined a light not only on the issues but on the solutions.
When we started Clean Edge back in 2001 the concept of clean technology wasn’t on the radar screen of the investment, business, or policy communities. If you did a Google search on the term you’d get just a handful of returns. Today, that same search would yield approximately 1 million results.

So the book’s goal is to paint a picture of how clean tech is shaping up globally and how individuals, businesses, and others can participate.
At the very beginning of the book we use a quote from Thomas Edison in which he says: “I found out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent.” I think that quote helps explain our positive approach to the big issues facing us. I’d rather spend time working on solutions than being paralyzed by impending doom and gloom. We owe it to our collective children (on a personal note my wife and I just had twins) and to future generations to try to figure a way out of today’s challenges of volatile fossil fuel supplies, natural resource constraints, climate change, and the needs of a growing global population.

EG: Revolution is a big word that is a lot of fun to use, often poorly. How do I know that we’re really dealing with a revolution here? What should I be expecting to see revolutionized?

RP: OK, you got us there — revolution is an overused term. But in the case of clean-tech development I do believe that we are experiencing a major shift that is both evolutionary and revolutionary. We call it a revolution because the timing is finally right for the mass emergence of these technologies.
For example, I wanted to get involved in clean energy when I first graduated from University in 1985 – but the timing wasn’t really right. The technologies weren’t mature, the capital markets weren’t behind it, governments weren’t really demanding it at a large scale.

Indeed – clean energy was still “alternative.” It was the domain of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating, back-to-the-earth zealots (in full disclosure I ate granola this morning for breakfast and I love wearing my Birkenstocks).
But that’s all changed today. It’s becoming the domain of Wall Street and Main Street. When GE is reporting more than $12 billion last year in revenues from its “Ecomagination” products and services, Toyota has shipped more than 1 million hybrid vehicles, Goldman Sachs is investing billions in clean energy, Denmark is getting around twenty percent of its electricity from wind power, and governments around the globe are competing for their piece of the clean-tech prize – you know things have changed.

Indeed, part of our definition of revolution is that you can not only change the world but make money doing it. That’s what we’re finally seeing today – and it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. MBA grads, engineers, marketers, and others – in Asia, North America, and Europe — are now finding that they can support their families and help develop and deploy next-generation, clean, efficient technologies. They don’t have to wait fifteen years like I did. Now there’s something revolutionary about that!

EG: Some of the subjects in your book (solar, wind, automobiles) are pretty straightforward clean tech industries. But others, like mobile technology and water purification, are less obviously connected to the environment. Can you talk a bit about why you include these subjects in your book?

RP: Our focus isn’t really on the environment per se. It’s on a host of challenges facing the planet from population growth to volatile natural resource supplies. The environment, in particular global warming/climate change, is just one of multiple drivers. In the book we highlight the 6 Cs — a confluence of forces that are driving clean-tech development.
Under this framework everything from water filtration to mobile technology to advanced transportation makes sense.
For example, how will the world supply clean water as water tables are depleted and more people move to areas without sufficient water supplies? There are 2 billion people without access to reliable potable water – and this contributes to massive illness and death. It’s a huge issue that will require new forms of energy-efficient or renewable-energy powered desalination, water conservation technologies, new on-site water filtration, etc.

EG: I think it’s pretty likely we’re going to be surprised a lot in the next couple decades. It’s a bit mean to ask where I should be expecting the unexpected, but I’m curious if you have any thoughts on where those world-changing clean tech surprises may come from?

RP: I believe we will see both incremental advancements in technology as well as disruptive breakthroughs. I think one of the most important things is that we push the boundaries on both incremental and disruptive changes at the same time.
So, for example, how could we make today’s grid more like the Internet – with built in redundancy, two way flow of information and electrons, the ability for people to be both energy consumers and producers? That shift is already underway – but it will require new breakthroughs in energy storage devices, net metering, grid interconnect, etc.

In the book we highlight breakthrough opportunities in each of the eight technology chapters. Some are more obvious and others are more out there – like the possibility that we might be able to cost effectively capture water from the air in remote locations.
So I believe our book highlights many of the surprises you ask about – but our focus was definitely on the near- to mid-term – in other words over the next 3-10 years. Beyond that, truly, is anybody’s guess…

EG: A lot of people I talk to feel that a great deal of good could be accomplished if only economies were more local. This is discussed a bit in The Clean Tech Revolution, but I’m curious what technologies might enable a shift toward local economies and how that might affect our world.

RP: Biofuels are a great example of how you might apply a regional approach to clean-tech development. In fact, there’s likely to be a battle in the marketplace between locally harvested and distilled fuels and biofuels produced in places like the Midwest or Brazil.
There’s certainly a great opportunity for local biofuels production and it does make a lot of sense in some regions. A number of folks are looking at closed-loop systems in which you take the cow manure from a feedlot and gasify it to provide energy to a distillery. You then produce biofuels with locally harvested crops and you sell the biofuels to regional communities (say in a 100 mile radius) and you feed the distiller’s grain (a coproduct of ethanol manufacturing) to the same cows whose poop is powering your plant. It’s an elegant scenario and one that should be pursued.

But I’m a big supporter of both regional and global solutions. So I believe we’re likely to see both taking shape simultaneously with markets and policies impacting how things play out. There’s the old saying: “think globally, act locally.” I’m of the belief that we should think globally and locally, and act in both.

EG: What scares your pants off?

RP: Well, like many people, I’m scared of major collapses – whether that happens from a technological meltdown like a nuclear accident, environmental destruction like climate change, or regional/global terrorism or war. Generally, though, I’m an optimist and don’t like to dwell too much on a “sky is falling” mentality. I consider myself a pragmatic optimist — which means I look for where there are problems and try to uncover solutions. I also always prefer diplomacy and open dialogue over unilateralism and radicalism.
Personally, I’m scared from the usual stuff – public speaking, car crashes, my own mortality, that sort of thing. But I try to be comfortable in my own skin and keep a smile on my face.

EG: The Clean Tech Revolution is an extremely hopeful book. If Climate Change gives you lemons…I suppose you should just, well, make 60 billion dollars a year. What keeps you hopeful in the face of the various apocalyptic crises we’re facing?

RP: Perhaps it’s genetic. Or how I was raised… Two messages that I remember hearing clearly from my parents as a young child is that I could be anything I wanted to be (though I think they harbored hopes I’d be a doctor) and that it was alright to cry. Maybe these sweet messages somehow gave me my sunny disposition.

EG: I notice you use the word “Investment” in your subtitle. I’m taking that as an invitation to ask you what I should do with my billions of dollars after EcoGeek.org’s IPO.

RP: Well, I assumed from your URL that you were a non profit – but I see that I was wrong. So in the event that you do cash out and join the ranks of billionaires – I recommend looking at your own web site for guidance on how to spend that wad of cash. I love what you say, that “Technology can be a force for evil, or for awesome.” Hopefully you’ll use your money to push the boundaries on “awesome.”

EcoGeek of the Week is a syndicated column provided by EcoGeek.org. If you are interested in publishing this column, or participating in the series, please email our editor at editor@ecogeek.org.This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

Dear Mr. EcoGeek,

I've heard that it takes more energy to produce photovoltaic cells than the cells will ever produce throughout their lifetime. Is there any truth to that, or are those naysayers just saying nay?

David
Spokane, WA

Short Answer:

Those naysayers are just saying nay! But that doesn't mean there's not more to this story.

Long Answer:

This myth was probably perpetuated by studying solar panels created for NASA. If you need something extremely efficient for use in outer space, yes, then it doesn't matter how much energy you use to create the panel. But for use here on Earth, it's ridiculous for anyone to say that solar panels consume more energy than they produce.

Of course, doing anything in this world takes energy. Whether it's building power lines or shipping oil from Saudi Arabia, it takes energy to make energy usable. In fact, there's a nifty number that puts all of this into perspective. It's called the “energy balance”, and it is, in short, the amount of energy you get out divided by the energy you put in.

So, for corn ethanol, for example, we get 1.3 units of energy for every 1 unit we put in, so its energy balance is 1.3. Whereas for Brazilian sugar cane ethanol, we get 8 units of energy for every one we put in. As for gasoline, its energy balance is about 5.

So what does this have to do with solar? It is a bit incorrect to apply energy balance to solar panels, because they don't actually contain the energy, so it's not something that I've ever actually seen done. But I think it makes sense to fudge it a bit in light of your question.

Data from a study (pdf) from Energy Environment and Economics Inc. showed that the average solar panel gets five times more energy out than was originally put in. Roughly the same “energy balance” as gasoline.

Still, no one is satisfied with that number.

Thousands of scientists, engineers and business people are working, right now, to increase solar's energy balance, and many have done it substantially. The simplest and most common methods include making sure that the panels are always at a 90 degree angle to the sun, increasing the life of the panels, and decreasing the amount of photovoltaic (PV) material needed in the panels.

As PV material (usually polysilicon) is energy intensive to create, a lot of folks are trying to figure out how to use less of it. One common method is to use mirrors or lenses to concentrate the sunlight on a relatively small amount of polysilicon material. Additionally, a whole other branch of the solar industry is trying to make solar panels from less energy-intensive materials, including the much-touted copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) thin-film solar panels.

There may be some economic reason to not be an early adopter of solar, but there is certainly no doubt that they produce a lot more energy than they consume. And soon, they'll be producing even more.

Got a question for the EcoGeek? Use our submission form to send it to him.

Ask the EcoGeek is a syndicated weekly column from EcoGeek.org. If you are interested in syndicating Ask the EcoGeek, please contact us at editor@ecogeek.org

Instead of solar and wind power to supply to your own house - which are both weather dependent - has anyone thought about systems that might require some actual work, but provide a usable amount of power?

I was thinking, what if each member of my family carried a 40lb bag up 3 floors and hung it on a hook that was connected to a generator; would an effort like that actually provide a significant amount of energy? Just a thought.

Regards,

Jens, London

Oh Jens…you don't even know what you've done! Your question is totally a word problem from a physics exam. And as much as this will likely frighten most people reading this, I'm going to treat it as such.

If 120 lbs is lifted thirty feet and then allowed them to drop slowly over twelve hours, how much energy will be produced?

120 lbs * 30 ft = 3600 ft/lbs = 4880 joules = 1.356 watt hours / 12 hours = 0.113 watts.

So, in answer to your question, no, that would not provide a significant amount of electricity. In fact, in order to power one 60 watt equivalent CFL for twelve hours, each member of your family would have to march up the stairs about ten times.

But that doesn't mean that you don't have an excellent point. Every person is a magical little energy factory. Whataburgers go in…watt hours come out, and it is possible to harness that energy.

Some schemes in converting muscle power to electric power even seem pretty intelligent. A gym in Hong Kong has hooked its treadmills to a battery bank, using the energy of its clients to power the lights. A subway in Japan harnesses the energy used by people walking through turnstiles to power lights. And we've all seen various gadgets that can be shaken, squeezed, cranked or yanked to generate the juice that makes them work.

But a more personal and powerful option for a muscle-powered home is a pedal generator. Basically, it's just your average exercise bike, except there's a generator on the inside. The maximum output for a toned adult would be about 500 watts, but a sustainable level for someone like me (who's eaten his share of Whataburgers) is more like 150 watts. Amazingly, this would be enough to power both of my laptops, two CFL light bulbs and my cell phone charger for as long as I kept pedaling.

There are two problems though. First, no one can pedal forever. And second, they're not yet selling pedal generators at your local hardware store. But if you can get your hands on one, like the $230 pedal-a-watt bike-to-generator conversion kit, you could easily lower your electric bills, or charge an emergency backup battery, and become a healthier EcoGeek at the same time.

Ask the EcoGeek is a column provided by EcoGeek.org. If you've got a clean technology question for the ecogeek, you can send it to him through our form.

Dear EcoGeek,

I did a survey and I have 33 recessed bulbs in the house (120W)! I've switched all my non-recessed bulbs with CFLs, but I need something for our recessed lighting.

Thanks,

David

David,

Thirty three 120 watt bulbs will keep your house competing with a small star for both power consumption and light intensity, but I'm not here to judge. If you've got the sockets, they should have high-efficiency bulbs in them.

The good news is two-fold. First, you don't have to wait for LED bulbs to show up at Wal-Mart to find a high efficiency alternative because they've started selling excellent recessed CFLs. I've actually got one shooting down on me right now! To match a 120 watt incandescent, you should look for a 23 to 26 watt CFL.

The bad news is that LED bulbs would likely be a better choice for you, but a good one won't be easy to find. LED lighting is facing a few barriers that will take some time to overcome. First, LEDs are currently fairly expensive to manufacture, and while their extreme long life and efficiency will eventually pay for the extra cost, it's hard to get folks to cough up 30 bucks for a bulb when they're so used to paying 30 cents. You might be able to find a good one somewhere like Ace Hardware or specialty stores online, but be ready to cough up some change.

Second, LEDs have a very high theoretical efficiency, but that doesn't mean they're all created equal. While incandescents and fluorescents have had all their kinks worked out, the materials that will go into creating LED bulbs haven't been settled yet. Engineers at GE, Philips and elsewhere are all slaving away trying to get the maximum light out of the least amount of power without sacrificing the quality of the light…all while decreasing costs.

But I guarantee you it'll be worth the wait. LEDs promise huge energy savings, high quality light, instant turn-on, and long-term lifespans while containing absolutely no toxic chemicals. What's my estimate for a $5-$10 120 watt equivalent LED bulb at Wal-Mart? Five years. Which, luckily, is right around when your CFLs will start burning out!

Got a question about green technology for Hank Green, publisher of EcoGeek.org? Use our form to submit it to him. And check back on Thursdays for further installments of "Ask the EcoGeek."

Editor's note: Yesterday, we discovered that both Green Options and EcoGeek have representatives visiting WindPower 2007, the American Wind Energy Association's annual convention and trade show. In order to give readers of both sites a wide range of coverage, we decided to join efforts and share our posts. This first one comes from EcoGeek writer Ransom Riggs, and was published earlier today.

Day one of the Windpower 2007 conference has come to an end, and having just rubbed elbows with something like 6,000 attendees, 400-plus exhibitors and national legislators and policymakers from around the country, I thought I'd try to make sense of it all. The confab was put on by the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), and heavily attended by many of folk who belong to it: wind energy producers, manufacturers who produce things like wind turbines, poles, and transmission lines and wind outreach and education organizations. The conference features tons of panels, discussions and presentations, but much of the talk at this year's Windpower focused on just a few issues:

• A lot of people -­ and not just wind industry representatives, either ­- believe that wind energy is and will remain an increasingly crucial part of our national renewable energy portfolio. No one had anything particularly negative to say about nuclear or other non-c02-emitting power generation technologies, but all agreed that of those other options, none were as ready as wind power was to step up to the plate and work. (It takes years and years to bring a nuclear power plant online, for instance, and not nearly as long to build and permit wind turbines). The wind industry feels that its golden moment is now.
• The AWEA has set a really tough goal for itself and for the wind industry: to produce 20% of the U.S.' power by the year 2020. As good as that sounds, no one really knows how it's going to be accomplished. Panelist Bob Lukefahr, of BP's alternative fuels division, stressed the challenges: It will require "technology we haven't invented yet," he said, and entails "political and economic complexity this business has never faced before." For starters, they're going to have to figure out how to deliver all that energy; even if we had the turbines to do it right now, it would cost at least $60 billion to build the transmission lines to get that power onto the country's grid, according to AWEA President Randall Swisher.
• The future of the wind industry depends on the White House, and if the next few presidents we have aren't wind-friendly, wind will stay small for the long haul.

The good news is, there are plenty of states out there interested in having the wind industry set up shop in their regions. At Monday's confab alone, the mayor of Los Angeles and the governors of Montana and Iowa made nice to the assembled windustryites, and at least one congressman (D.C.'s own Jerry McNerney) and a senator (Tom Daschle) lent their support to the cause as a whole. In short, the industry is booming, consumer interest in renewable energy has never been higher, and the future ­ depending in part on what happens in the 2008 election ­ looks bright.