Hybrid batteries cost Toyota, Matsushita £98 million

If you want something doing well, do it yourself, goes the saying. Toyota’s version might go a bit like this: if you want something doing well, do it yourself and then Matsushita Electric Industrial Co to help you out a bit. And then go and polish your Prius.

Toyota has, according to reports, decided to buddy up with Matsushita to invest some more yen in their joint venture, Panasonic EV Energy Co., which will be responsible for making a shedload of batteries to go with the shedload of hybrid vehicles Toyota plans on making in the next few years.

Investment in the battery building joint venture will cost Toyota and Matsushita 20 billion yen (that’s around £98 million for you currency watchers) and will finance a new nickel-hydride battery factory in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture, according to Bloomberg.

Japan’s Nikkei newspaper, meanwhile, indicates the expansion plans are even bigger than that, with another li-ion battery factory to be built in Shizuoka Prefecture, although there’s no confirmation on that one yet.

All of this factory building malarkey, reckons the Nikkei, will lead to one million hybrid batteries a year making their way through the factory gates. Handy number, really, and about the same as the number of Priuses that Toyota has sold to date.

Airline delays cost $1.6 billion in wasted fuel

That flight delays suck is not exactly news. The extent to which they suck has now been worked out in all its numerical glory, however. According to a US Joint Economic Committee report called Your flight has been delayed again, all that sitting around on the runway, reading the in-flight magazine and wishing the idiot next to you would share the armrest is responsible for eye-watering amounts of jet fuel being burnt.

According to the report, “burning fuel during flight delays released an additional 7.1 million metric tons of climate-disrupting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere” with airlines consuming an additional 740 million gallons of jet fuel in 2007 as a result of delays.

And there’s more. Says the report:

The JEC finds that delay-related jet fuel burn emitted at least 7.1 and up to13.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MMTC), or about 5 to 9 percent of all carbon emissions from domestic commercial aircraft in 2006.

All of this wasted fuel comes at a cost of $1.6 billion. Ouch.

So how does the airline industry fix all this? The JEC says most of these delays come from flights arriving late, and as a result, delaying subsequent take-offs. It recommends overhauling the air traffic control system and it does it like this:

Seven long years of laissez-faire government policies have left the U.S. aviation system in need of significant improvements and reform; exacerbating the number of flights delayed and the total cost to the U.S. economy. Inaction by the administration has only worsened the problem. Failure to fund equipment upgrades, particularly new air traffic control systems, such as Next Gen, which would convert the nation’s radar-based aviation tracking system to a satellite based one, has added to the volume of flight delays. Additionally, the administration has failed to act upon the recommendations of the New York Aviation Rulemaking Committee, which among other things, called for an opening of 15-20 mile band of air space directly off the coast of the eastern seaboard that is currently used for military training purposes. Opening up a portion of this underutilized space would allow commercial airlines to avoid congested areas over New York City, Washington, Atlanta and Florida or bypass bad weather when it arises on the east coast, thus significantly reducing delays.

Certainly, some air traffic delay is unavoidable. Flights can and should be delayed if safety issues arise as a result of severe weather or mechanical problems. Additionally, some level of air traffic congestion is desirable, particularly at “hub airports,” to allow airlines to cluster arrival and departure times to offer passengers the most efficient connections. However the staggering levels of delays experienced in 2007 and the significant costs associated with these delays are clearly troublesome and suggest substantial room for cost effective improvements.

As the number of traveling passengers and air traffic congestion is expected to continue to increase, steps must be taken to alleviate pressures on the U.S. air traffic system. Government inaction over the last eight years has left the U.S. aviation system in need of reform. Without such reform, the total costs to the U.S. economy of air traffic delay – including costs to the airline industry, the flying public, the environment, and travel dependent businesses – are sure to increase.

You can read the whole thing here.

Sony cracks solar with silicon-free cell

Imagine if you could make caviar without actually needing any fish eggs - how good with that be? Or diamonds without needing carbon squished by the earth over millions of years? Or hamburgers without needing any eyelids or scrotums?

Well, Sony may well have come up with an invention of similar majesty, according to reports.

Trading Markets says the Japanese tech supremo has come up with a new type of solar cell that doesn’t need silicon, known as dye sensitised.

Such cells are still in their infancy at the moment, but everyone’s rather hoping they mature quickly, due to their relative cheapness to manufacture. For that matter, there’s also been a bit of a silicon shortage in recent years, so dye sensitized cells would also be handy there too by passing the need for it altogether.

Back to Sony: Trading Markets, quoting Japanese paper Nikkei, notes that the cell has been “achieving an energy conversion efficiency of 10 percent, the minimum level seen as necessary for commercial use”.

Apparently, it also uses a gel electrolyte rather than a liquid one, making the whole shebang more stable. The Nikkei reports Sony is now mulling over whether to make an entrance into the solar market.

SmartSync picks up $20 million for smart grid expansion plans

It must be nice to be a smart grid company at the moment. Everyone’s lauding your products, there’s a bright future ahead, you just snap your fingers and there’s some lucky devil wanting to throw cash at you. Greenbang warrants that if smart grid companies wanted to request that all their M&Ms came with all the blue ones taken out, someone would extract them. That’s how popular smart grids are right now.

The latest evidence? Smart grid bunch SmartSynch has just received $20 million in its latest round of funding.

Credit Suisse’s Customized Fund Investment Group has joined in investing for the first time, as has Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company, while existing investors like Battelle Ventures, Beacon Group, Endeavor Capital Management, GulfSouth Capital, Innovation Valley Partners, Kinetic Ventures, OPG Ventures and Siemens Venture Capital all came back to SmartSync with wallets out. So far, SmartSynch has received $80 million in funding.

SmartSynch says the money will “fund working capital growth, expand market presence and accelerate the product roadmap for new Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and Smart Grid Intelligence solutions”.

The company’s raison d’être is selling wireless smart grid systems, which “measure how much and when electricity is consumed”. The idea behind all this is that consumers realise where they’re hogging energy and cut down, while utilities find out where and how to better balance energy loads and find leaks, with information relayed over mobile networks. Smart huh?

Photos: SeaGen turbine in action

Don’t say we don’t spoil you. Earlier this month, Greenbang brought you the news of Marine Current Turbines‘ SeaGen turbine up and running in the sea off Strangford Lough. Well, now Greenbang has pictures to share.

Greenbang realises in retrospect that the fact she has pictures to share is blindingly obvious but will press on regardless.

Here is the 1.2 MW bad boy in all its fashionable red and black glory.

It’ll be tested for 12 weeks and then, if all is to everyone’s satisfaction, it’ll start feeding electricity into the Northern Irish grid.

Once its fully operational, it should be running for at least 18 hours a day and chuck out enough power to run 1,000 homes.

As you can see from the pictures, the SeaGen turbine is what scientists call “bloody massive” and getting the thing actually in place took six weeks.

If you’re wondering just how bloody massive SeaGen is, Greenbang can enlighten you: it weighs 1000 tonnes and it rotors are 16 metres in diameter.

If the residents of Strangford Lough don’t like the Dennis the Menace look of the turbine, they’ll have five years to learn to love it, as that’s how long it’s licensed for.

This isn’t Marine Current Turbines’ first foray into the world of bloody massive turbines. It’s had it first bite of the cherry way back in 2003 with the Seaflow tidal energy system, which was installed at Lynmouth in Devon.

Apple patent hints at solar iPhone

What’s your thoughts on Apple? It seems to be de rigeur for Mac users* to wander around in a haze of smugness and defending Apple as if it was one of their own children at any sign of criticism.

Now the fanboys have another reason to love the of purveyor all things white, plastic and overpriced: it looks like the Mac maker is going to start whacking solar panels all over its kit.

According to the sites that watch all things Apple, the company has filed a patent which hints that iPods and iPhones might be up for the solar treatment in the future.

Here’s the telltale snipped from the patent filing:

The present invention generally relates to various methods and systems for using solar cells with portable devices such as PDAs or digital media players. In particular, in embodiments of the present invention, solar cells are integrated into a portable device. The solar energy device (e.g., the plurality of solar cells) are an integral part of the enclosure of the portable device; for example, the solar energy device may be coupled, through a shock absorbing material, to the exterior enclosure such that the enclosure, with the solar energy device, may be separated from the internal electrical components (e.g., media processing system, storage device, and battery). According to at least one embodiment of the present invention, the devices have rechargeable batteries. The solar cells embedded into the device then provide the electrical power to charge the batteries. The power generated from the solar cell can also directly power the operations of the device.

*Greenbang is a self hating Apple user. Why? Charlie Brooker sums it up nicely here.

Wafer maker CrystalQ gets funding boost for LEDs

Wafers: is there anything they can’t do? Hold KitKats together, form that basis of an oft-quoted Monty Python joke, make ice cream look a bit more art punk with their geometric wafery glory and be a lynchpin of low-energy lighting.

Dutch wafer makers CrystalQ have bent the might of wafers to their will and harnessed them in the production of white LEDs, the latest low energy lighting star that crops up in consumer electronics like mobile phones, and will shortly be making its way into cars, according to the company.

LEDs are rather popular, in case you weren’t familiar with their work, in some lighting circles as they use about 10 percent of the energy of average light sources and last a lot longer.

CrystalQ has announced a wedge of funding from clean tech investors Sustainable Energy Technology Fund’s SET Fund, EPT / Benno Wiersma and E2 Cleantech.

No word on how much lolly they dished up though but EPT / Benno Wiersma says it will be used to expand CrystalQ’s manufacturing base.

If you’re wondering what CrystalQ does with wafers, let Greenbang enlighten you:

“[CrystalQ] is specialized in the preparation of the base material for the production of white LED’s. The company prepares sapphire crystal wafers and polishes these to high quality wafers for the fast growing LED industry. This round of investments will support CrystalQ entering into the growing of sapphire crystals. Its customer base consists of leading LED manufacturers.”

Fuel cell cars: How they work

Sustainable schools: Must try harder, says Ofsted

Schools and sustainability? Must try harder, seems to be the report card from watchdog Ofsted. If they carry on at this rate, they’ll have to go and stand in the naughty corner.

While schools should be teaching the future leaders of Britain to be greener than Kermit the Frog, the reality isn’t quite as promising. “Some schools are already leading the way in encouraging pupils to be green, but most have limited knowledge of sustainability and place little emphasis on teaching or promoting it,” says Ofsted.

Pah. And all this with the government’s sustainable schools framework looming in 2020 too. (As a side note, Ofsted found few schools knew anything about the framework. You can find out more here if you’re in the dark too).

Here’s some highlights (lowlights?) from the report:

• In most of the schools visited during the survey, there was little emphasis on sustainable development and limited awareness of national and local government policies for this area.
• In the large majority of the schools, promoting sustainable development through National Curriculum subjects was inconsistent and uncoordinated.
• In many of the schools, sustainable development was a peripheral issue, often confined to extra-curricular activities and involving only a minority of pupils.
• A small number of the schools placed considerable emphasis on sustainable development. In these cases, teaching was good, lessons were stimulating and pupils took an active part in improving the sustainability of the school and the wider community.
• Primary schools were more successful than secondary schools in promoting sustainability, particularly in terms of using their grounds as a resource for learning about it.
• Schools were more successful in developing pupils’ understanding of local rather than global issues of sustainability.

But Greenbang doesn’t like to leave it on a bad note. Here’s some of the good examples of sustainability found by Ofsted:

By monitoring meters, pupils in a primary school had ensured average savings of £50 per week on electricity bills. They were now going to extend this activity to water meters.

In another school, Year 2 pupils could explain that the more electricity they used, the more fossil fuels would need to be burned to produce it. Therefore it was important to turn off lights, computers and other electrical apparatus when not in use. They recognised that their actions could have wider implications. They understood that two local wind farms also generated electricity and realised that these had prompted differing reactions from members of the local community.

In a third school, pupils had studied wind farms and made and investigated model turbines in science and design and technology lessons. They expressed their views with passion and enthusiasm and showed considerable depth of understanding.

Awww.

Coffee beans hold secret to better biofuels

Greenbang would like to donate her body to science, on the off chance boffins are trying to pin down the idiocy gene in the human DNA sequence. Greenbang’s fairly certain she’s got it.

What prompts this modest assertion? Greenbang’s inexplicable love of coffee from the cafe downstairs. She thinks it tastes vaguely like burnt toast, it makes her feel a bit queasy and the amount of caffeine in a single cup is enough to bring on palpitations that would sent the elderly across the River Styx. And yet, every morning, she wanders down, reusable cup in hand for a white with no sugar.

At least, it seems, all this coffee nonsense is benefitting the world - and not just in the hunt for the idiocy genes. Researchers from Leeds University, you see, have discovered that the process used to roast coffee beans, called torrefaction, could in fact increase the energy from biofuels crops.

The scientists tested what happened if energy crops willow, canary grass and agricultural residue wheat straw to see how torrefaction affected them. Apparently,after undergoing this coffee roasting process the crops “needed less time and energy to heat to burning point, and also that they offered increased energy yields upon burning”.

Here’s PhD student Toby Bridgeman on the findings:

“Torrefaction is not currently used in the UK in either the agricultural or the energy sectors. But our paper shows that it has a lot of benefits, besides those to do with fuel handling, so we feel it’s definitely something we’d like to explore further.”

Greenbang tracks the explosion of the environmental industry, reporting on news of green innovation and thought leadership.

We blog on this rather than the environmental problems of the world because we are interested in the answers to climate change.