A novel use for used rail tracks

Here's a man in the Bronx who looks at abandoned rail yards as a park rather than a place to leave graffiti. With $3,500, Justin Fornal and his father bought a used rail car and are planning on driving it around old rail tracks, encouraging investment and public use and converting these areas into parks. There is a lot of green and Justin envisages a version of the Highline but with passengers riding on trains.

 Justin is taking this plan seriously and invited William Goetz, a vice president of CSX Transportation, one of the nation’s largest freight railroad companies, along for the inaugural ride.

Justin is asking CSX for assistance in riding his car on the rails across the country mostly on unused tracks to raise awareness for his plan. Goetz is skeptical but has not ruled out the plan.

Spain reneges on Solar Power guarantees

Spain was once one of the bright spots (pun intended) in the solar power generating world. Generous guarantees by the goverment brought it close to 20% reliance on renewable energy. Investors big and small poured money into solar power projects. Only one thing was missing: the money to pay for all this. When the federal goverment guaranteed men like Justo Rodriguez that it would buy the electricity he generated at a fixed price for the next 25 years, he mortgaged two houses and his workshop to buy the equipment. He, in turn, guaranteed his banks that he would return the money they lent him.

Justo Cruz Rodríguez faces ruin after investing in solar power in the Spanish town of Águilas. Samuel Aranda for The New York Time

Abruptly, the Spanish govenment told him that they would not pay anywhere near as much for the power he generates and, to add insult to injury, wants to charge him for the power he generates and uses himself.

Countries must operate on a rule of law and gurantees made by the government cannot be withdrawn when people are investing based on those guarantees. This is just one more step into anarchy that the PIGS (Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain) countries are falling into.

Read the details in this article.

Storing Solar Power

 

As Solar Power becomes more prevalent, there is a push to store this energy for night-time use. I've posted before about storing wind energy in people's water heaters and electric cars. Here is a new method that stores heat in salt which melts until it is needed again. The system is small now but can be expanded. Currently the Arizona utility buys all the energy produced by this method.

Humble heroes

Right after I saw the movie Witness, I've always wanted to assist the Amish in a barn-raising.

Seeing a worthy project like this from groundbreaking to completion in one day, watching the whole community pitching in to help a young couple, it all brought tears to my eyes. I've been fascinated with the Anabaptists since, visiting Lancaster county multiple times and reading about them whenever possible.

I watched a documentary recently and saw how, after some maniac shot a bunch of Amish children, they had pity for the shooter's widow and attended his funeral.

In yesterday's Times, I read an article detailing how, ever since Hurricane Sandy, 1,300 Mennonites have been volunteering in Far Rockaway and Staten Island, rebuilding destroyed homes. Some are even commuting from their Lancaster County farms after putting in a full day's farm work, then volunteering for another day and commuting back the three hours. Others are coming in from Ohio, staying in temporary housing built by Amish carpenters and trucked to the sites.

abin Botsford/The New York TimesMennonite volunteers are living in Far Rockaway in trailers built by Amish carpenters.

They assist the neediest cases: cancer victims, wheelchair-bound, handicapped. They plan on helping out for two to five years. And there is no proselytizing. They are here only to rebuild other's homes. Humble heroes indeed.

NYC Bike program finally kicks off

Finally! New York City's bike program has started and it seems to be a success. For now it is only open to the annual subscribers and only 6,000 bicycles are deployed but it will soon expand to the general public and boast 10,000 bikes.

Michael Appleton for The New York Times Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, left, on Monday morning with Michele F. Imbasciani of Citibank, a sponsor of New York's new bike share program.

Times reporters raced around the city to see which was faster: bike, subway, cab or bus and the results are posted here:

Spoiler alert, the bike beat the subway and bus almost every time, and often the cab.

I've given Bloomberg his share of poor reviews in this blog but, to give the man credit, he pulled off this project and I wish it nothing but success.

Efficiently turning Garbage into Energy

Brian Cliff Olguin for The New York Times Trash piled nine yards high is converted to heat and electricity at a waste-to-energy incinerator in Oslo. By JOHN TAGLIABUE  Published: April 29, 2013

Oslo is so efficient in converting garbage to heat and energy that it is importing garbage from Sweden, England and Ireland and is even looking to import it from the US.

Why don't we import their technology and burn our own garbage?

Electric car batteries smooth out power distribution

In a previous post I discussed the use of home water heaters to store excess electricity generated by wind farms. The problem is simple, Electric companies want to deliver to a constant demand of power at 60 cycles per second. But with wind and solar power generation being up to the whims of mother nature, supply is not so constant.

An unexpected solution to this is the growing numbers of electric cars that are plugged in to charging units during this unstable time. With the addition of a small gadget, these cars can send electricity back into the grid when needed. While the cars will still charge, they will do so in fits and starts, evening out the peaks and valleys of the power supply.

Why should electric car owners do this? Presumably it would take a little longer to bring the cars up to full charge and, if you unplug it after it has just discharged some power, you may be starting off with less than a full charge. The answer, as always, is money. Cars with the gadget added will earn $5 a day. That adds up to $1,800 a year for a gadget that costs $400.

This won't work until there are a lot of electric cars out there with this capability but pilot programs are starting up. Pretty cool, huh?

Electric Taxi Experiment

New York want to experiment with replacing their fleet of yellow cabs with electric versions in a continuing effort to make the city greener. As this article presents, they will start this week with six but hope to convert 1/3 of the fleet by 2020.

Since NY cabbies want to maximize the time they spend driving during their shift, the Limousine commission needs to encourage these drivers to make up for the 60 - 90 minutes they will be charging their cabs. They have done that by reducing the daily rental rate and allowing them to decline fares that put them out of range of charging units when they are nearing the end of a charge.

The big surprise I received when reading this article is that a typical cab only drives about 100 miles in a typical day. Since the car goes 80 miles on a charge, only one charge a day is expected.

One cabbie suggested placing charging units near restaurants with bathroom facilities so that the drivers can be efficient during their charging times.

It seems like a better solution would be to have 23 cabs for every 24 drivers and allow them to switch out one per hour with the car they are driving on a regular schedule. But maybe drivers are particular about which car they use.

Home-based batteries for wind power

A wind farm near Ellensburg, Wash. Utilities have asked homeowners to help store excess energy to protect the grid.

As the trend continues to generate electricity closer to the point of use and people are setting up wind and solar electricity generators in their homes and businesses, the need to have storage of excess energy increases. Oversupply of electricity can cause blackouts to the grid so utilities need to find some kind of battery system. But how to do this?

In the Pacific Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration has set up a program to store this excess electricity in people's appliances. This is an interesting take on the way they control limited power here on the East Coast.

Last summer, for instance, I was wondering why my house was getting so hot on a particular summer day. I checked the thermostat, then went outside to look at the unit. While I watched, I saw it turn on. Then, after a few minutes, it turned off again, even though the house was still not down to the temperature I had set. What was going on? I called the utility and they laughed at me. They reminded me that I had signed up for a program that reduced my power bills by 10% and gave the utility the power to turn off my AC "for a few minutes at a time" to save energy. Well, the utility got through the day without needing any rolling blackouts but I and many thousands of other suckers had a hot, uncomfortable day in their homes.

So what does this have to do with storing electricity? The BPA is setting up some customers with ceramic bricks in electric space heaters that can be warmed up several hundreds of degrees by remote control. Water heaters can be heated up by up to 60 degrees. Then this energy can be returned later when the excess is gone. Apparently the utility can still control the tap-water temperature in the homes so that customers don't get scalded.