Category — Alternatives

2008 was a good year for investment in renewable energy technologies.  Over $150 billion was invested, much of it directly funding the construction of new projects worldwide, according to a report from New Energy Finance, the people who crunch the numbers of the UN’s Sustainable Energy Finance Initiative.  Considering the economic climate, the numbers are both encouraging and surprising.

Solar energy continues to be the fastest growing sector, but the most encouraging stat is that worldwide investment in renewable enregy  quadrupled between 2004 and 2008.  Check out the link above for more highlights from the report, or download it here.

I’ve mentioned Herman Daly and some of his ideas here before; he’s by far the most interesting and outspoken Economist I know of.  Here’s a link to a great interview he did with Developing Ideas Digest, where he’s very critical of the existing Economic institutions in Academia and discusses topics from free trade to the World Bank to the fundamental questions of Economics and how traditional Economists have failed to truly answer them.  It’s a great read for anyone with an interest in this kind of stuff, and important information for anyone who’s not!

It looks like some clever scientists have developped what could be the next big optical storage medium.  Their new format – which has yet to be branded with any ridiculous marketing labels – can hold up to 1.6 TB on a single disk!

How did they do it?  Well, I told you they were clever.  On current-gen optical storage disks, data is stored in one long spiral, which the read laser follows, reading the data bit by bit as the disk spins.  With this new format, data can be read in parallel, because each position along the read line of the disk contains information encoded in several different ways – by wavelength, polarization, and layered into the depth dimension of the disk.  This means that the read head (probably a combination of several different lasers – it’s still in development) will read several different pieces of info at any given point on the disk – from different layers, at different wavelengths, and at different polarizations.

Sounds to me like a handy way to store data for parallel processing!  The data is stored in different ways, apparently including gold atoms and nano-rods made of… well, I’ll have to get back to you on that (carbon atoms?  Some kind of semiconductor?).

Don’t go throwing out your Blu-ray players and PS3s just yet.  This is till early in development, and I personally doubt this format is going to find its way into the realm of personal entertainment.  Even if it becomes economically viable to produce these disks (not to mention the players), by then we’ll have all joined the download/streaming revolution, and individually purchased multimedia disk units that gather dust on shelves will be a thing of the past!  I can hope, right?!

Mother Jones has an interesting article on how our current ideas about making food production sustainable need revamping.  Well-known approaches, such as organic farming and buying locally, are not enough to create a food production chain that is sustainable in all the ways required:

“When most of us imagine what a sustainable food economy might look like, chances are we picture a variation on something that already exists—such as organic farming, or a network of local farms and farmers markets, or urban pea patches—only on a much larger scale. The future of food, in other words, will be built from ideas and models that are familiar, relatively simple, and easily distilled into a buying decision: Look for the right label, and you’re done.

But that’s not the reality. Many of the familiar models don’t work well on the scale required to feed billions of people. Or they focus too narrowly on one issue (salad greens that are organic but picked by exploited workers). Or they work only in limited circumstances. (A $4 heirloom tomato is hardly going to save the world.)”

One of the ideas discussed in the article is vertical farming, which uses (potentially) tall buildings,  soil-free farming practices and recycled water to grow crops of high yield and quality.  This idea has always appealed to me; as our population grows, using up more and more land for farming is obviously not a sustainable approach.  Why not take lessons from the economics of dense urban real estate and build our farms up?  The technology exists, the yields are comparable to existing industrialized farming, and these facilities can be created much closer to urban centres than traditional (and industrial) farms, lowering the costs and energy requirements of transporting food to where consumption is highest.  Vertical farming does have drawbacks (high cost of urban real estate, among others), and any attempt at truly sustainable food production will need to incorporate many different solutions, but it’s an example of using technology to improve the system we’re already working with.

The article also stresses the importance of government spending choices (particularly with respect to farming subsidies) and personal consumption habits in any attempt to modernize our food supply chain.   Reducing our use of animals products is still the easiest and fastest way to lower the energy and land requirements for farming, and governments have plenty of power to improve the situation by changing the criteria for farm funding and by investing in the right technologies.  All told, it’s an interesting and eye-opening read for anyone who gives a damn about where their food comes from and how the hell we’re going to feed a growing population without razing all the rainforests for farmland.

Researchers at the University of Arizona have created a form of organic LED that is the most efficient light source yet, with an internal quantum efficiency of 100% (i.e. every electron passing through the device frees up a photon). Current consumer lighting sources come nowhere near this level of efficiency (traditional light bulbs in particular), so the hope is that this breakthrough can usher in a new era of energy-efficient lightbulbs to help us all cut down our energy use.  They’re also cheap to manufacture, and likely to last far longer than traditional bulbs, or today’s LED bulbs!