Jacques of all Trades

inothernews:

DARK NIGHT RETURNS   The lights go out a second time during a National League Football match between the San Francisco 49ers and the Pittsburgh Steelers at Candlestick Park on Monday, Dec. 19.  Video prior to the game showed what appeared to be a transformer explosion outside the stadium just before the first power outage.  (Photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images via the San Francisco Chronicle)

It actually looks beautiful like this.  Almost like a scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Is it a coincidence that this happened on the same day as the trailer for the new Batman movie was released? (Which also involves a disaster at a football game — with a faux-Pittsburgh team)?

npr:

Used restaurant grease has become a hot item for thieves, who siphon it from barrels behind restaurants to sell on the booming biofuels market. (via Restaurant Grease As Good As Gold To Biofuel Thieves: The Salt)

Photo: from grease to fuel (by durhamskywriter)

A Problem For Smart Meters: People Don’t Understand Electricity | Fast Company

Smart power meters are, in theory, supposed to help with everything from electric vehicle adoption (low electricity rates encourage people to charge up at specific times) to bringing more renewable energy on the grid (pricing will vary based on when it is available). But smart meter implementation hinges on the idea that consumers actually understand their electricity use. According to a new survey, they don’t.

(via shaneguiter)

Hess drops bid to build LNG plant in Fall River

boston:

- The Hess LNG energy company has withdrawn a controversial proposal to locate a liquefied natural gas plant in Fall River, welcome news for residents and political leaders who have spent almost a decade trying to prevent the terminal from being built in the crowded Southeastern Massachusetts city.

I am sure this is good news to my family in RI, who have been concerned about this project for a long time. Environmental concerns notwithstanding, the safety concerns of this non-pipeline-fed facility would have led to near-weekly closings of several major roads and waterways in Rhode Island to all traffic every time a new “ball” of LNG fuel was delivered to the plant.  

Urban Density & Transportation Energy Consumption

secretrepublic

(It doesn’t get much clearer than this)

I have to say, for someone who “recreationally” follows planning and smart growth conversations,  I had no idea that even New York City is much less dense than most major European cities.  

Houston, on the other hand, was less surprising.   

(via sunfoundation)

boston:

PROTOTYPES — Yes, you have heard it before: In five years, solar panels will be super-flexible and incredibly efficient - capable of powering everything from smartphones to homes after a few hours in the sun. This time, it may be real.

Scotch Whisky gives back, in new Scottish bioenergy plant.

sylviac:

This is how you do energy efficiency: by recapturing waste energy:

It is the spirit that powers the Scottish economy, and now whisky is to be used to create electricity for homes in a new bioenergy venture involving some of Scotland’s best-known distilleries.

Contracts have recently been awarded for the construction of a biomass combined heat and power plant at Rothes in Speyside that by 2013 will use the by-products of the whisky-making process for energy production.

Vast amounts of “draff”, the spent grains used in the distilling process, and pot ale, a residue from the copper stills, are produced by the whisky industry each year and are usually transported off-site. The Rothes project, a joint venture between Helius Energy and the Combination of Rothes Distillers (CoRD) will burn the draff with woodchips to generate enough electricity to supply 9,000 homes. The pot ale will be made into a concentrated organic fertiliser and an animal feed for use by local farmers. (via Scotland toasts new whisky-powered bioenergy plant | Environment | guardian.co.uk)

(via sylviac)

Energy is not a thing.

It is not a cell phone. It is not a PS3. It is not a new Lexus. It is not a product in the sense we denizens of consumer culture have become so comfortable embracing. Find an intro-to-physics book, look up “energy” and you will find something like “the ability to do work.”

What a strange, amorphous, slightly circular sounding definition. If you want to understand the depths of the problem facing our culture you need look no further. We treat energy like a product, like a thing. From the fundamental perspective of physics, however, it is something altogether different.

—From the npr commentary “Energy Choices Are Bearing Down On Us, With Hard-To-Swallow Costs In Tow”

A sobering look at energy use…

New York Times via jayparkinsonmd:

“A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he says. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

(via abcworldnews)

Philips Unveils World’s First LED Replacement for Most Common Bulb - Inhabitat (via abcsoupdot)

There are over 425 million 60 watt incandescent bulbs sold every year, which makes the energy-sucking globes the most commonly used bulbs in the United States. Lighting the way to a more energy-efficient tomorrow, Philips has just unveiled the 12-watt EnduraLED – the world’s first replacement for the commonly used 60 watt incandescent. The EnduraLED is capable of lasting 25 times longer than a standard incandescent and only consumes 20% of the energy. If all the bulbs in the states were switched to these LEDs it would save 32.6 terawatt-hours of electricity each year — enough energy to power 17 million homes.

Pending price, this could be a great investment. I’m not sure how much more efficient this is than the fluorescents that are roughly on a 4:1 ratio of efficiency, but the fact that the LED bulbs would work on a standard dimmer is a huge improvement.

An infographic map of gas consumption in the U.S.  The relative size of the state is determined by total consumption, and the color indicates consumption per capita.  

In addition to a general “rural state=high gas usage” trend, this map suggests some very interesting things about population density and public transit availability.  

• The two large states with low per-capita consumption are dominated by large cities with well-established public transit systems (in NYC and Chicago).
• Many of the states in the blue (mid-range) per capita consumption are also heavily concentrated with some old-style cities dominating the population map (e.g., the Rust Belt states) often in old hub-and-spoke development patterns, with smaller populations in rural areas. This stands in contrast to the suburban sprawl and new-style exurban communities that often dominate in states like Virginia, North Carolina and Texas and can create both long commutes (and supermarket runs) and heavy traffic jams on widely-dispersed roads.
• One note that is not immediately apparent but may have an impact is that few of the states with high proportions of retirees or senior citizens are in the red. The presence of these “low-mileage” populations may be keeping down the per capita gas consumption in states such as Florida, Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Rhode Island.  (A few rural states buck the trend, including Iowa and North Dakota). 
• Utah is a big outlier, but it would be interesting to know if sociologists or demographers have studied the state to determine whether the influence of Latter Day Saints (Mormons) in the Beehive State, from its founding to the present, influence the growth of tightly-knit communities and impact population density and development in a way that is significantly different from that of neighboring states in the Mountain West.  

(Map via beevee:Andrew Sullivan)