Technology

Engineers have turned to pine cones as inspiration for a new way to reduce the energy used by buildings. By mimicking the way these woody fruits open in response to humidity, the researchers have made shades that can open and close without using any electricity.

Folding shades that adjust the amount of sunlight hitting a building have been around for a while. By helping to regulate temperature, they reduce the cooling burden of a building. Such shading systems today work with electrically-driven motors.

Buildings account for around 40 percent of global energy use and carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. A big chunk of this energy consumption is for cooling, and the use of energy for cooling is growing faster than any other end use in buildings. Researchers have been coming up with cooling films, aerogel window coatings, and other high-tech materials to cut cooling energy use.

Chiara Vailati and her colleagues at ETH Zurich instead turned to good old wood to make a low-tech, sustainable shading system that adjusts its shades throughout the day without the need for any sensors and motors. Instead, the shades open and close in response to their environment.

The mechanism is based on pinecones, which keep seeds safe by tightly closing their scales when it’s wet and cold. The scales open to disperse seeds when the weather is dry and warm. The secret behind this is simple: the scales are made of two different layers with fibers that oriented perpendicular to each other. When moisture in the air decreases, the two layers contract differently, making the scales go from straight to curved so the cone opens up.

The new shading device, reported in the journal Energy and Buildings, have panels made of two different kinds of wood: spruce and beech. The panels are joined in a way that the grain of two kinds of wood are oriented perpendicular to each other.

Next, the researchers couple two such wood panels together so that one is suspended over the other one, which is vertical. The shading device is meant to be mounted horizontally like an awning as opposed to vertically like blinds.

When the air is humid, such as at night, early mornings, and when the sky is overcast, the planks sit almost flat against each other. But as it gets sunny and the air heats up and dries, the panels bend so that the lower one pushes the upper one out and makes it horizontal, producing shade.

“I wanted the system to be made of environmentally friendly materials, use very little energy, and have low installation and maintenance costs,” Vailati said in a press release.

Energy from the ocean breakers that pound Mexico’s Pacific Coast could soon be turned into electricity as an Israeli joint venture finalizes permits and financing for the country’s first wave energy plant.

Wave power development has long lagged renewable rivals such as solar, but Eco Wave Power says it could prove an effective way to deliver power to coastal communities in countries such as Ghana or Kenya that have little access to electricity.

“The ocean is the biggest renewable resource that we have and it’s completely untapped, and it has to change,” said Inna Braverman, co-founder of Tel Aviv-based Eco Wave Power.

“At the moment we’re a comparable price to solar, but the advantage on top of solar is the availability of the resource… It keeps working 24/7,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

After scanning the coast for optimal wave conditions, the company decided to set up its first Mexican plant near Manzanillo, the country’s busiest cargo port some 845 kilometers (525 miles) west of Mexico City.

Situated close to the shore, hundreds of floating buoys connected by arms to a jetty would move with the waves to generate clean electricity at the 4.8-megawatt plant.

The power then would be fed into a sub-station controlled by the state-owned electricity company, said Ernesto Delarue Rodriguez, chief executive of joint venture partner Eco Wave Power Mexico.

The plant would be able to power about 2,000 homes, he said.

In the event of storms, Eco Wave Power’s system could lift its buoys or submerge them until high waves pass, the company said on its website.

WANTED: KILLER APP

Aside from wave energy, companies around the world are looking to tap the vast potential of the oceans by creating energy from tides, currents and temperature differences – but commercial breakthroughs have so far been limited, experts say.

“Ocean energy has not yet reached the commodity phase of development. If you want solar, go buy some solar panels. If you want wind energy, go buy a wind turbine,” said Mark Horenstein, professor of electrical engineering at Boston University

“In the case of ocean energy, no one company or entity has come up with the killer application that’s going to be the definitive method for ocean energy.”

Any ocean technology also has to be able to survive a “100-year storm” – the worst storm expected over a century – and such events could become increasingly more likely with a changing climate, he said.

The patchy history of large-scale wave energy projects has made some investors cautious about sinking their money into ocean projects, said Braverman, whose company is considering a stock market listing to help raise capital.

The Manzanillo project, which expects to receive final permits in the coming weeks, will cost around $15 million. A chunk of the financing will come from the Israeli company but much of it will be raised by the Mexican venture partner.

Delarue, who is also working on a wave energy project in the Bahamas, said construction should start this year once financing and permits fall into place, though admitted that, in some cases, “Mexican investors… are not used to investing in start-up projects.”

Aside from Mexico, Braverman said her company was waiting to start work on a 5-megawatt wave power plant in Gibraltar that could provide 15 percent of the enclave’s electricity, and has orders in countries including China and Britain.

Born 200 miles from Chernobyl, just two weeks before the 1986 nuclear power plant disaster, Braverman said her experience of the devastating impact of contamination helped spur her interested in clean power.

“There’s many people saying yes, we need to fight pollution in the future, yes, we need to recycle, we need to invest more in renewable energy but they don’t actually understand the meaning behind it,” she said.

“I experienced first hand the negative impact of pollution and I got a second chance in life,” she said.

Buoyed by a recent $6 million infusion, Ocean Renewable Power Co. hopes to raise $12 million this year and $18 million later, but venture funds have been favoring wind and solar projects.

Portland-based alternative energy startup Ocean Renewable Power Co. is stepping into rough financial waters as it tries to secure investments worth tens of millions of dollars to advance its unique marine power projects.

The company wants to raise $12 million in private investment by the end of the year to set up improved versions of its RivGen and TideGen underwater turbines, said founder and CEO Christopher Sauer. Ocean Power, which recently got a $6 million infusion, has developed a sustainable technology that allows underwater turbines to generate electricity from flowing rivers and shifting tides.

An initial funding round will be followed by a push for another $18 million intended to start production for the commercial market and reach profitability in the next four years.

“We are getting closer and closer to commercialization. We have a clear path how to get there,” Sauer said.

But the company is fighting investment headwinds. Despite the promise of tidal energy, big investors are shying away from marine projects in favor of wind turbines and solar panels, cheaper proven technologies with relatively low risk and high yields.

MARINE POWER WARINESS

“It is a tough world out there,” said Angus McCrone, chief editor of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “Most of the big funds want to invest in wind and solar projects, not tech developments.”

Recent memories of well-funded, but ultimately failed, wave energy companies like Scotland-based Pelamis Wave Power make venture funds wary of fronting new marine power attempts, McCrone said.

“It doesn’t mean it is impossible to raise money, but it is more difficult than it was 10 years ago,” he said.

Globally, marine power receives the least investment by far compared with other renewable energies, excluding large hydro dams.

The marine energy sector attracted just $200 million in total new investment worldwide in 2017, a 14 percent drop from the year before. In contrast, investors sank $161 billion into solar and $107 billion into wind last year, according to the 2018 annual renewable energy investment report by the United Nations Environment Program and Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“From an investor perspective, tidal has been very much a sideshow and is of lower importance,” said Edward Guinness, lead manager for the alternate energy fund at Guinness Atkinson Asset Management, a firm with offices in Los Angeles and London.

The fund manages about $400 million in energy investments, with about $30 million in alternate energy, Guinness said.

“The thing about tidal is that it is a very nice idea, it is very compelling,” he said. “But it has not been providing cost reductions that other technologies have and it is unlikely to do so.”

Marine power ventures tend to be expensive, risky and unproven – prone to escalating costs and damage from saltwater and heavy seas, Guinness said.

“We are not really looking to invest in early-stage tech companies,” he said. “We are looking for reasonably mature investment opportunities.”

Sauer is clear-eyed about the realities of lining up money to move ORPC ahead, but believes the company has the right plan.

It intends to install optimized versions of its turbines on the Kvichak River in Alaska and the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City in Canada – models intended to demonstrate the possibility of power generation in remote communities.

“We think once those systems are up and operating that it is a good break point to raise the rest of the money we need to be cash flow-positive by 2022,” Sauer said.

The 14-year-old company has received millions of dollars in federal and state funding and private investment on its path to making commercially viable hydrokenetic power systems. In 2012, ORPC was the first company in the U.S. to generate electricity to the power grid with a tidal turbine in Cobscook Bay, in easternmost Maine.

Since that experiment, the company has branched out. In 2014, it tested a river version of its turbine on the Kvichak River, and over a two-year trial proved it could provide about a third of the power for Igiugig, a remote village nearby.

In June, the Igiugig Village Council and ORPC were awarded $2.3 million from the Department of Energy for further tests of the river turbine. His company received a separate $650,000 award for research and development and has pulled in about $3 million from private investors this year, Sauer said.

SERVING REMOTE MARKETS

A focus on remote communities in North America may give ORPC the base it needs to make the leap into commercial markets, Sauer said. Energy costs are typically very high in isolated villages and townships that depend on generators and fuel. Transportable underwater turbines are a cheaper and cleaner alternative and one that may provide local employment opportunities.

“The early adoption market for us are these remote communities because our systems today can save them money,” Sauer said.

If more communities buy into the product, it could help ORPC overcome the production cost barrier and provide a springboard into European and South American markets.

“Once these are operating and have benchmark performance, we are then in a sales mode,” he said.

The company also plans a new tidal project in Eastport with the prospect of generating 5 megawatts.

Raising money for marine power technology has always been tough, Sauer said. Most of the private investment his company has received has come from independent family funds focused on “impact” investing – putting money into companies that match investors’ ethical goals.

Recently, however, parties that have been on the sidelines, such as private equity firms and renewable energy funds, have shown more interest in marine power innovations, Sauer said.

“We are making progress” he said. “I am hopeful that in our next ‘raise’ here we will have all types of investors involved.”

Houston’s Genesis Energy is selling its Powder River Basin pipeline assets in Wyoming for $300 million.

Genesis is unloading its facilities in a basin that’s considered by several oil producers to be the next big emerging shale play in the country. Independent Houston producers like EOG Resources and Anadarko Petroleum are all expanding in Wyoming.

In Genesis’ case, it is selling its pipeline, rail and oil gathering assets in the Powder River Basin to Dallas-based Silver Creek Midstream, which is growing in the Wyoming region.

Genesis plans to use the cash proceeds to reduce its debt. Genesis, while primarily a pipeline business, spent more than $1.3 billion to expand into the soda ash business when it bought an alkali mining business that produces soda ash in Wyoming.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has handed down a landmark ruling, stating that data collected by smart meters is protected by the Fourth Amendment.

The court pointed out that the smart devices, in fact, collect information for a deeper insight which can be obtained by thermal imagining tech. Furthermore, the court held that residents have a reasonable expectation of privacy and government access of this data constitutes, in essence, a search.

Jamie Williams, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said: “The Seventh Circuit recognised that smart meters pose serious risks to the privacy of all of our homes, and that rotely applying analog-era case law to the digital age simply doesn’t work.”

This has shone the spotlight on whether or not smart meters can be used to spy on consumers. Through the collection of usage data at high frequencies (every five, 15 or 30 minutes), a clear picture can be garnered of activity occurring on the property.

Individual lifestyles can be examined, such as predicting daily routine, sleep patterns, meal times and periods away from the property.

Previously, courts ruled that the Fourth Amendment does not protect household energy data, however this precedent was based on traditional analog meters, that revealed little information.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Privacy International filed an amicus brief urging the Seventh Circuit to reconsider their position on energy data throughout the US.

This ruling sets a critical precedent. According to the EFF more than 40 per cent American homes have a smart meter – a number set to rise to 80 per cent 2020.

While this ruling is only for the state of Illinois, there are hopes that the same judgment is followed all around the county highlighting the risks of data collected by smart meters.

A wearable energy-harvesting device could generate energy from the swing of an arm while walking or jogging, according to a team of researchers from Penn State’s Materials Research Institute and the University of Utah. The device, about the size of a wristwatch, produces enough power to run a personal health monitoring system.

“The devices we make using our optimized materials run somewhere between 5 and 50 times better than anything else that’s been reported,” said Susan Trolier-McKinstry, the Steward S. Flaschen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering, Penn State.

Energy-harvesting devices are in high demand to power the millions of devices that make up the internet of things. By providing continuous power to a rechargeable battery or supercapacitor, energy harvesters can reduce the labor cost of changing out batteries when they fail and keep dead batteries out of landfills.

Certain crystals can produce an electric current when compressed or they can change shape when an electric charge is applied. This piezoelectric effect is used in ultrasound and sonar devices, as well as energy harvesting.

In this work, Trolier-McKinstry and her former doctoral student, Hong Goo Yeo, used a well-known piezoelectric material, PZT, and coated it on both sides of a flexible metal foil to a thickness four or five times greater than in previous devices. Greater volume of the active material equates to generation of more power. By orienting the film’s crystal structure to optimize polarization, the performance — known as the figure of merit — of energy harvesting was increased. The compressive stresses that are created in the film as it is grown on the flexible metal foils also means that the PZT films can sustain high strains without cracking, making for more robust devices.

“There were some good materials science challenges,” Trolier-McKinstry said about this work, reported in an online early view edition of Advanced Functional Materials ahead of print publication. “The first was how to get the film thickness high on a flexible metal foil. Then we needed to get the proper crystal orientation in order to get the strongest piezoelectric effect.”

Collaborators at the University of Utah and in Penn State’s Department of Mechanical Engineering designed a novel wristwatch-like device that incorporates the PZT/metal foil materials. The device uses a freely rotating, eccentric brass rotor with a magnet embedded, and multiple PZT beams with a magnet on each beam. When the magnet on the rotor approaches one of the beams, the magnets repel each other and deflect the beam, plucking the beam in a process that is referred to as frequency up-conversion. The slow frequency of a rotating wrist is converted into a higher frequency oscillation. The design of this device is more efficient than a standard electromagnetic harvester— like those used in self-powered watches — according to Trolier-McKinstry.

In future work, the team believes they can double the power output using the cold sintering process, a low-temperature synthesis technology developed at Penn State. In addition, the researchers are working on adding a magnetic component to the current mechanical harvester to scavenge energy over a larger portion of the day when there is no physical activity.

Co-authors on the paper, titled “Strongly (001) Oriented Bimorph PZT Film on Metal Foils Grown by rf-Sputtering for Wrist-Worn Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting,” are Hong Goo Yeo, Xiaokun Ma, Christopher Rahn and Susan Trolier-McKinstry, all of Penn State, and Tiancheng Xue and Shad Roundy of the University of Utah.

The National Science Foundation Nanosystems Research Center for Advanced Self-Powered Systems of Integrated Sensors and Technologies funded this project.