Waterlife on the NFB

The National Film Board of Canada has a great website for the documentary Waterlife. The site has music by Brian Eno and features a neat way to explore the issues surrounding water in the Great Lakes region of Canada.

Here’s some info on the film.

Waterlife follows the epic cascade of the Great Lakes from Lake Superior to the Atlantic Ocean, telling the story of the last huge supply of fresh water on Earth. Filled with fascinating characters and stunning imagery, Waterlife is a cinematic poem about the beauty of water and the dangers of taking it for granted. Narrated by Gord Downie, lead vocalist of The Tragically Hip and Waterkeeper’s Trustee of Lake Ontario. Featuring music by Sam Roberts, Sufjan Stevens, Sigur Ros, Robbie Robertson and Brian Eno.

Portland Bike Lanes Keep Improving

Portland, Oregon is trying some groovy bike lanes that other cities around the world have implement. It’s always good to see sustainable infrastructure being built, but the really good thing about what Portland is doing is how they communicate their plans to their citizens. Check it out:

On the Right Track from Mayor Sam Adams on Vimeo.

Powering Tomorrow With Ancient Plant Technology

Photosynthesis is how plants convert energy from the ball of fire in the sky into useful plant-growing energy. The USA’s Department of Energy is actually looking into how photosynthesis can be used to power our homes and even turn homes into miniature power stations using the power of nature.

According to Nocera, his new system can work at ambient temperatures and pressures, without corrosion in a simple glass of water, even polluted water. “If you need pure water for energy storage, they’ll drink it,” Nocera said. “Use puddle water instead.” In fact, Nocera has been running his prototype on untreated water from the Charles River in Boston. And it’s cheap, not $12,000 per kilowatt like commercial electrolyzers that do the same thing. “That’s not going to help the energy situation for the U.S. or poor people of the world.”

Using the electricity generated by a photovoltaic array five meters by six meters, Nocera claims he can split enough water in less than four hours “to store enough energy for the average American home” for a day, a little more than 30 kilowatt-hours. “We need to stop making big energy systems one a time to service lots of people. We need to do it the old American way of making one small one and then manufacturing that system to give it to the masses.”

Read more at Scientific American

Super Solar Storage to Revolutionize Sustainable Energy

Getting renewable energy is the easy part whereas storing it is the hard part. Battery technology has not kept pace with the green technology field. That is until a team at MIT figure out how to store sweet savoury solar energy efficiently.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

Read more at MIT’s page on the project.

Thanks to Greg!

How California Tracks the Air That They Breathe

California has a law that dictates the quality of air, but that needs to be tracked so it can be enforced. Here’s a video about how Berkeley Lab keeps track of the air.

Last March, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist Marc Fischer boarded a small airplane loaded with air monitoring equipment and crisscrossed the skies above Sacramento and the Bay Area.

Instruments aboard the aircraft measured a cocktail of greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide from fossil fuels, methane from livestock and landfills, nitrous oxide from agriculture, and industrially produced gases such as refrigerants.

The flight was part of the Airborne Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California, Davis to pinpoint the sources of greenhouse gases in Central California.

The airborne survey is intended to improve inventories of the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn will help scientists verify the emission reductions mandated by AB-32, the ambitious legislation passed by California in 2006 to slash the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 25 percent by 2020.

“In order to comply with AB-32, we need to know where the gases are coming from and how much,” says Fischer, a scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

Keep reading.

Scroll To Top