GENeco, an “organic waste solutions” specialist (AKA sewage treatment) company in the UK is bringing something new to the green table: a human-powered car.  The Bio-Bug is a VW Beetle converted to run on Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) which is a lot like Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) only, well, less compressed as it remains in a harder-to-contain gaseous form rather than the denser and more commonly used liquid form.  Presumably the choice was made because the hardware to convert natural gas into LNG requires a cooling phase and more expensive equipment.  In any event, the Bio-Bug is essentially run on methane gas.  And where does that gas come from?  In this case it’s from cleaned-up leftovers from the Avonmouth sewage treatment plant of Wessex Water.

You see the Avonmouth plant normally produces CNG from sewage waste, which powers its “digesters” through a combination of electrical power and heat generated from, you guessed it, burning off the CNG surplus from the sewage.  It’s a brilliant idea as methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide so should not be released into the atmosphere.  Burning it, turning it into carbon gasses instead, is far less harmful to our environment.  So using it in any way is a big plus, and where can you get more methane than from organic waste?  It’s not a new concept and in fact it’s a new trend to convert livestock farms to methane power.  But it’s nice to see it in action wherever possible and a sewage treatment plant is certainly a good place to use the technology.  Especially when there’s enough produced to also generate electricity to sell back to the grid, as is the case in Avonmouth.

But the thing is, even with all of that, Avonmouth still has a surplus of methane biogas, which would normally just be burned off before releasing it into the atmosphere to break down the methane into less damaging carbon gasses.  And that’s where GENeco has stepped in with their Bio-Bug.  With a little cleaning up of the excess CO2 naturally found in the biogas, the methane is converted into a cleaner burning fuel fit for automotive use.  And the Volkswagon Beetle, converted to run on CNG, is just the kind of vehicle to use it.

GENeco Bio-Bug - a human-waste powered car

Which all sounds brilliant and green!  It’s a great way to convert waste into a renewable resource, right?

Well, with a few caveats.  The first being that this isn’t really a carbon-free system.  It’s a good use of carbon that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere, carbon-shifting I guess you could call it.  It is not however carbon free.

The second caveat, one could simply replace the CNG cleansing and distribution with more electricity production for recharging electric cars, or even used to generate hydrogen from hydrocarbons through steam reforming to power hydrogen cars.  There are green paths here that are more synergistic with the modern green automotive trends that can be done at a big facility where as the typical farm cannot.

And the third caveat, and perhaps one of significant note, is that this is a process that does not equate to one car per household.  No.  It takes approximately seventy households to produce the quantity of CNG needed for one Bio-Bug.  It won’t work for every household to run their daily automotive needs, but it could be used in the fleet vehicles needed in the running of any facility.

So clearly, this is not a magic pill that could solve all of the world’s problems.  It is however a very interesting and creative approach to better utilizing the resources available to us, even (if not especially) the ones that we consider to be useless waste.  The smarter that we can innovate with these under-utilized resources, the better off our planet will be.  And the more intriguing the solutions are now, the more advanced and opportunities to replicate or even improve upon them will be in our future.  Sometimes being green isn’t just about the perfect zero-sum product, but about more efficiency with what we have.  If there’s one thing that we have a lot of, it’s poo.  So brown is the new green, and innovatively trapping, collecting, and utilizing methane gas will make for a better tomorrow, no matter how silly it might seem to drive a poo-powered car.

Some German and Australian scientists have been working on a project to revolutionize renewable resources.  They have found a way to make synthetic “natural gas” from carbon dioxide (CO2), water, and electricity, much in the same way hydrogen can be produced from water.  Dr Michael Specht of the Zentrum für Sonnenenergie- und Wasserstoff-Forschung (Solar energy and Waterstuff [Hydrogen] Research center – ZSW) explains:

“Our demonstration system in Stuttgart splits water using electrolysis. The result is hydrogen and oxygen.  A chemical reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide generates methane – and that is nothing other than natural gas, produced synthetically.”

And the process they currently use will supposedly will scale up remarkably well.  Plans are to create a double-digit megawatt-range unit by 2012 to prove that it really can be done, and to provide homes with synthetic natural gas.

Brilliant!

Err … maybe.

The thought behind it is that electricity is a somewhat wasteful system as during lulls in usage the generation has no useful way to store large amounts of energy for when the peak usage times hit.  This is especially a hindrance to renewable green sources of electricity like wind and solar where peaks of energy production rely upon the timetable of Mother Nature and not upon peak usages by mankind.  Where as converting electricity into natural gas allows one to store a lot of energy created during lulls to take the load off during peaks.

Colleague Dr Michael Sterner explains, “Surplus wind and solar energy can be stored in this manner. During times of high wind speeds, wind turbines generate more power than is currently needed. This surplus energy is being more frequently reflected at the power exchange market through negative electricity prices.”

Plus there are other theoretical benefits, like the ability to modify vehicles to run on Liquid Natural Gas (LNG) which is just a compressed form of natural gas that turns it from a gaseous state to a liquid state.

Which is all well and good.  In theory.

One might want to remind the world that we can however already do this with hydrogen.

And then there’s the conversion efficiency, which is only 60% efficient.  Where as processes like just pumping water up higher into a dam to store as potential energy for a hydroelectric plant are more than 70% efficient.

But the largest concern would be that according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) methane gas has a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 21, meaning that methane is twenty one times more effective as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide (CO2).  So while proponents of synthetic  natural gas try to tell you that their methods are carbon-neutral, thus not harming our environment any more than it is saving it, this is not necessarily the case.  Any of their synthetic natural gas going up up and away is far more damaging to the environment than CO2.  Where as hydrogen isn’t.

But then one of the main problems with hydrogen is that, being the smallest atom, it escapes easily from systems that try to hold or transport it.  Where as methane, a much larger molecule, has no such problems.

So then, is it really such a great idea?  Yes, potentially, it holds a lot of interesting promise.  But then so does generating hydrogen from electrolysis.  Where as, potentially, it also holds a number of potential concerns, where as generating hydrogen from electrolysis doesn’t.

It’s certainly something to think about, and goes to show that when we put our heads to it, we can come up with all manner of interesting solutions to any problem.  And that it is likely a combination of efforts that will solve the world’s woes and not any one singular invention or ingenuity.

If you’ve been wondering where our solar cells are and why they’re not just everywhere yet as the green revolution churns onward, there’s a reason for that.  So far their construction still requires all manner of expensive rare materials such as silicon and cadmium.  And because of the way that they’re manufactured, silicon panels grown in vacuum, they’re just plain expensive to produce.  So as much as we’d like to see a solar renaissance, where we finally go from wow to now, it’s just not happening.

But all that may change.

Researchers at IBM think that they’ve hit the next best thing since sliced silicon: “High-Efficiency Solar Cell with Earth-Abundant Liquid-Processed Absorber”  It’s a completely new take on producing solar cells, based primarily on more “earth-abundant” materials such as copper, zinc, tin, selenium, and sulfur in a chalcogenide compound.  In fact, unlike silicon-based photovoltaics which have to be grown in a vacuum, these materials can just be sprayed on.  They’re applied in a slurry state, so spraying, dunking, printing, spin-coating, or what have you can be done to apply them to the solar cells.  So not only are the materials more friendly and available, but they’re applied in a process that is much cheaper and easier to manufacture.  And because they’re basically painted on, they can be applied to all sorts of shapes that would cause traditional solar panels to shatter if attempted.  The next paint job on your car or house might be “High-Efficiency Solar Cell with Earth-Abundant Liquid-Processed Absorber”.

The only downside is that so far the efficiency rate is only around 9.6 percent.  That’s a bit shy of today’s silicon-based photovoltaic efficiency between 10 and 15 percent.  Though researchers do like to point out that the technology is still in an early phase and efficiency may improve as the process is refined.  And still, for the price and theoretical availability, what one lacks in efficiency one can easily make up for in volume.

But Big Blue isn’t the only horse in this race.  Researchers from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena have made their own headway in a new photovoltaic direction: silicon wires.

In a new paper published in Nature Materials entitled “Enhanced absorption and carrier collection in Si wire arrays for photovoltaic applications” is described an entirely new process of solar absorption using arrays of 1mm thick silicon wires to create a flexible polymer.  This is a markedly different direction from the normal use of silicon in solar panels.  It uses far less material, a mere 1 percent of the silicon needed for traditional solar panels.  And yet in spite of the incredible reduction in the amount of silicon used (or perhaps because of it) panels made from these silicon wires have been measured at 17 percent efficiency, blowing away the competition.

What’s more, the bundles of silicon wires absorb solar energy “over a broad range of incidence angles“, meaning that they don’t need to be adjusted for optimum absorption nearly as often as traditional solar panels.

And just as amazing, because these panels are made from bundles of silicon wires, they’re flexible.  So not only are they much less likely to be damaged from things that would normally ruin the traditional brittle silicon panels, it’s a technology that would be easy to adapt to locales that aren’t traditionally flat, such as car roofs, or even the curtains in your window!

With the incredible savings and improvements in manufacturing that each of these new solar technologies offer, we just one day may find photovoltaic solar panels common building materials available to every home.  And with the flexibility that they offer, solar energy just may make the jump from small electronics and home panels to … everything and anything.  What a wonderful world it would be.

Okay, so I kind of forgot to finish up my work on converting a Red Green Blue color system to a Red Yellow Blue color system.  For those of you who don’t remember (and who would) here is the basic recap:

Since the dawn of time, children have been taught their primary colors: Red, Yellow, and Blue.  And they have been taught their secondary colors: Red and Yellow make Orange, Yellow and Blue make Green, Blue and Red make Violet (otherwise known as Purple).  It’s a simple system.  We all know it.  Artists have been using it forever.

The Red Yellow Blue Color Wheel

And computers have these lovely computer programs that have all sorts of neat artistic tools.  There’s Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, even MS Paint.  The list goes on virtually forever.  But they all have one basic flaw:  They don’t use the same color system as artists do.

What?

I know!

Computers base their color system on the invention of the monitor, which itself is based on the color TV.  And these devices base their colors on the light spectrum, which has the primary colors of Red, Green, and Blue.  Making for secondary colors where Red and Green makes Yellow, Green and Blue makes Cyan, and Blue and Red makes Magenta.

The Red Green Blue Color Wheel

Somehow this RGB (or sometimes known as CMY ) color system has dominated computers, so much so that software doesn’t even try to give users an option of a Red Yellow Blue color system.

Until now!

Yes, that’s right.  I, Arah J. Leonard, have written a bit of Python code (though the formulas should translate easily into any language) that converts RGB to RYB and back again.  And let me tell you, it makes a huge difference in calculating complementary colors!  Using this bit of code you can make, for example, button text that always stands out correctly against the color of a button.

And I’m making the code free to use, to all, and free to distribute.  It’s licenced under the LGPL and the MIT License both, giving you the option to use and/or distribute this under either one license (or both) as your project needs.  Use it to your heart’s content folks!  Download your free copy of rgb2ryb.py to convert between Red Green Blue (RGB) and Red Yellow Blue (RYB).

Enjoy!

# Author: Arah J. Leonard
# Copyright 01AUG09
# Distributed under the LGPL - http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/lesser.html
# ALSO distributed under the The MIT License from the Open Source Initiative (OSI) - http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
# You may use EITHER of these licenses to work with / distribute this source code.
# Enjoy!

# Convert a red-green-blue system to a red-yellow-blue system.
def rgb2ryb(r, g, b):
	t = type(r)

	# Remove the whiteness from the color.
	w = float(min(r, g, b))
	r = float(r) - w
	g = float(g) - w
	b = float(b) - w

	mg = max(r, g, b)

	# Get the yellow out of the red+green.
	y = min(r, g)
	r -= y
	g -= y

	# If this unfortunate conversion combines blue and green, then cut each in half to preserve the value's maximum range.
	if b and g:
		b /= 2.0
		g /= 2.0

	# Redistribute the remaining green.
	y += g
	b += g

	# Normalize to values.
	my = max(r, y, b)
	if my:
		n = mg / my
		r *= n
		y *= n
		b *= n

	# Add the white back in.
	r += w
	y += w
	b += w

	# And return back the ryb typed accordingly.
	return t(r), t(y), t(b)

# Convert a red-yellow-blue system to a red-green-blue system.
def ryb2rgb(r, y, b):
	t = type(r)

	# Remove the whiteness from the color.
	w = float(min(r, y, b))
	r = float(r) - w
	y = float(y) - w
	b = float(b) - w

	my = max(r, y, b)

	# Get the green out of the yellow and blue
	g = min(y, b)
	y -= g
	b -= g

	if b and g:
		b *= 2.0
		g *= 2.0

	# Redistribute the remaining yellow.
	r += y
	g += y

	# Normalize to values.
	mg = max(r, g, b)
	if mg:
		n = my / mg
		r *= n
		g *= n
		b *= n

	# Add the white back in.
	r += w
	g += w
	b += w

	# And return back the ryb typed accordingly.
	return t(r), t(g), t(b)

# Return the complementary color values for a given color.  You must also give it the upper limit of the color values, typically 255 for GUIs, 1.0 for OpenGL.
def complimentary(r, g, b, limit=255):
	return limit - r, limit - g, limit - b

# Debugging test code.  Not intended to be used as an application.
if __name__=="__main__":
	red = (255, 0, 0)
	green = (0, 255, 0)
	blue = (0, 0, 255)
	cyan = (0, 255, 255)
	magenta = (255, 0, 255)
	yellow = (255, 255, 0)
	black = (0, 0, 0)
	white = (255, 255, 255)
	orange = (255, 128, 0)
	darkgreen = (0, 128, 0)
	tests = [red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow, black, white, orange, darkgreen, (255, 128, 64), (255, 64, 128), (64, 255, 128), (128, 255, 64), (64, 128, 255), (128, 64, 255)]
	for test in tests:
		ryb = rgb2ryb(test[0], test[1], test[2])
		rgb = ryb2rgb(ryb[0], ryb[1], ryb[2])
		cryb = complimentary(ryb[0], ryb[1], ryb[2])
		crgb = ryb2rgb(cryb[0], cryb[1], cryb[2])
		print test, "rgb2ryb", ryb, "ryb2rgb", rgb
		print "complimentary rgb", complimentary(rgb[0], rgb[1], rgb[2])
		print "complimentary ryb", cryb, "to rgb", crgb
		print

Researchers at Rochester University in New York have found a nifty and easy way to improve the incandescent lightbulb.  All that it takes, actually, is a quick zap (a femtosecond-long pulse) with an extremely high energy laser.  The burst of intense light travels through the glass of the bulb and into the tungsten filament (that wire that makes the light happen) causing a complex series of nano-scale and micro-scale structures to form on the surface of the filament.  This makes the filament more efficient, on an order of approximately 40%.

The handy thing is, any production facility could easily add this extra lasering step into their manufacturing line, automating the efficiency improvement with nary an effort.

The less-than-stellar problem is however that not only have greener compact-fluorescent lightbulbs been around forever now, practically replacing all incandescent use in many businesses and homes, but even LED lightbulbs with a much higher order of magnitude in energy savings, yet at a price point similar to compact fluorescents.  One wonders then where the actual benefit of these new green incandescents may be.

Still, there are a lot of people slow to uptake on the greener lightbulbs.  So if green incandescents can reach the shelves at the same price as the energy-wasting incandescents, the technology possibly could still do quite a lot of good.