How Electric Cars Could Save the Grid

How Electric Cars Could Save the Grid

Backup Power
The "vehicle to grid" project being developed by researchers at the University of Delaware aims to use the idle batteries of electric cars as electricity "sponges" to soak up and wring out the excess power from utility companies. Utility companies would benefit because they'd have a place to store energy; car owners would receive a fee to participate; and car manufacturers would have an attractive selling-point by which to promote their vehicles.

Buy a new, gas-powered auto and it depreciates by hundreds, even thousands of dollars as soon as you drive it off the lot. But buy an

electric car and you could receive hundreds, even thousands, of dollars a year, just for plugging it in.

The cash benefit is just one of many in the so-called "vehicle to grid" -- or V2G -- project being developed by researchers at the University of Delaware.

Their idea is simple: electric cars have to plug into the power grid anyway to get their batteries recharged. Why not use those batteries collectively as electricity "sponges" to soak up and wring out the excess power from utility companies that fluctuates notoriously on any given day?

Utility companies would benefit because they'd have a place to store energy; car owners would receive a fee to participate; and car manufacturers would have an attractive selling-point by which to promote their vehicles.

And it doesn't take much to get started.

"If you can collect 300 cars, that fleet is sufficient for a utility operator to run a V2G operation," said team member Ajay Prasad, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Delaware in Newark.

Car owners drive, on average, about one to two hours per day. So statistically, a large percentage of the total population of cars is sitting idle at any given time.

At the same time, electric grid operators play a balancing game of generating electricity that will meet customer demand. On top of that, they must pay to keep a generator fired up that will serve as a back up in the event of a catastrophic failure on the grid. Until the failure, that energy is wasted.

But if all of those parked cars were electric and plugged into the grid, the utility operator could automatically draw on the batteries exactly as needed, meeting demand. And instead of paying a power plant to generate energy that would be wasted anyway, they would pay a fee to the electric car owner for making the battery available.

"The utilities understand the value immediately," said team leader Willett Kempton, associate professor of urban affairs and public policy, also at the University of Delaware.

Communication between the power company and the electric car owner would occur via the Internet or some other wireless network, such as a cellular phone network.

Car manufacturers may be the last to clue in, though. For the system to have the most value, electric cars need to be equipped with a high, 80-amp/240-volt plug -- something a little more powerful than the plug on an electric dryer. (An electrician can install the corresponding outlet into any home.) But most of the existing electric hybrid cars come equipped with a low, 15-amp, 110-volt plug.

Sure, the low-amp plugs work, said Kempton, but if the electric car owner is selling electricity back to the grid, they want to sell as much as possible. A 15-amp plug could net a car owner about $400 year, whereas an 80-amp plug could net $4,000, he said.

The good news is that, unlike other alternative energy sources, such as hydrogen fuel, the infrastructure for electric cars is already there.

"The only thing you have to do is enhance it a little bit," said Victor Udo, manger of business planning and research at Pepco Holdings, a utility in Wilmington, Del., that is working with the V2G project to help put the idea into action.

To date, the V2G team successfully connected one prototype electric car to the grid and was able to charge the battery as well as draw energy from it. They are now working to do the same with four to six vehicles. Eventually they will work with local utility customers to test a fleet of 100 to 300 cars -- enough to supply a utility company with 3 megawatts of backup power.

In the future, electric vehicles could do more than provide backup energy. If just a quarter of the nation's cars were electric -- about 50 million cars -- the power capacity of those batteries would be equal to 700 gigawatts, the entire power production capacity in the United States today.

Sperm Power: New Tool for Nanobots

Sperm Power: New Tool for Nanobots

Watch and Learn
Scientists have taken the first steps in reproducing the biological engine that powers a sperm's tail and modified it for use in nano-sized devices. But will it work? No one can say for sure.

Scientists have taken the first steps in reproducing the biological engine that powers a

sperm's tail and modified it for use in nano-sized devices.

The tiny biological machine is something like a car engine that uses fuel to generate motion.

Only this machine -- composed of 10 carefully arranged enzymes -- runs on natural sugars, using them to produce an high-energy molecule called adenosine triphosphate, or ATP for short.

In the case of sperm, ATP energizes the tail. But it could also be used in nanorobots that do everything from activate drug-delivery pumps to manufacture missing enzymes necessary for healthy bodily functions.

"We're taking what sperm have already figured out how to do and using it for a nanotechnology application," said Alex Travis, assistant professor of reproductive biology at Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ithaca, NY.

The enzyme engine was particularly interesting to Travis and his team because, unlike most enzymes that like to stick to squishy cellular matter, these like to stick to the rigid, fibrous structure inside a sperm tail. This can be important for artificial applications.

Enzymes bend, twist and rotate as part of their normal functions. Many enzymes, put inside a manufactured nanobot, would not attach to the device properly. But the sperm tail enzymes naturally work on rigid surfaces; the trick is getting them to stick to manmade devices.

To do that, the researchers changed a part of the enzyme that lets it attach to the fibrous tail structure so that it would attach to nickel ions on a manufactured chip.

So far, they have attached three of the 10 enzymes -- two that are next to each other and one from the middle of the sequence. When attached, the enzymes activate and perform their normal function. If the scientists can get all 10 enzymes to work in sequence, they'll have their biological engine. Blood glucose naturally present in the body would be used as fuel.

On a working device, the enzymes would use the glucose to make ATP, which in turn would power mechanical functions or initiate chemical reactions for therapeutic reasons.

"I think what's really interesting is that it appears to work," said Regina Turner, assistant professor of large animal production at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine.

But all of the enzymes will need to work together to make the biological engine.

"He will need to show that he can do this with the entire pathway," said Turner.

And if that happens, it will be important to find a way to get the energy from the biological engine to the necessary parts of the nanodevice.

Because the researchers are focused exclusively on building the engine, said Travis, bioengineers will eventually need to solve the energy-delivery problem. 

The Year in Robots

The Year in Robots

In 2007, our artificially intelligent companions moved closer to replacing us on the battlefield, improving healthcare (on Earth and in space) and even befriending our children

 
METAL MAESTRO: Toyota's 4.9-foot (1.5-meter), 123.5-pound (56-kilogram) Violin-playing Robot holds its violin in place with its left hand and moves the bow with its right hand to produce music.

 
ROBOT RECONNAISSANCE: The rescue team at Utah's Crandall Canyon mine prepares to send a mobile robot down one of the seven boreholes drilled in an effort to locate six miners trapped in the collapsed mine 1,500 feet below.

 
ONE LUMP OR TWO?: Honda Motor Co.'s newly enhanced humanoid robot ASIMO performs tasks such as carrying a tray or pushing a cart while at the same time using an eye camera to detect the speed and direction of humans and other ASIMOs so that it can step back and yield right of way to others, thus avoiding collisions.

 
BFF?: Not exactly, but if you disguise a robot well enough, you can make a cockroach believe that it is one of the gang.

 
SMOOTH OPERATOR: The robotic M7 device, created by SRI International, weighs about 10 pounds and is about the same size as a human arm. It allowed surgeons to practice incisions and sutures under weightless conditions on a special six-inch square of multilayer material designed to resemble human skin.

Last week's announcement of Japan's "Robot of the Year" for 2007—a mechanical arm capable of grabbing 120 items-per-minute from a conveyor belt—marked an anticlimactic end to what has otherwise been a good year in the advancement of artificial intelligence.

The three Fanuc Ltd. assembly-line mechanical arms—which beat out competitors such as Fujitsu's 24-inch-tall (61-centimeter) dancing humanoid HOAP and Komatsu Ltd.'s tank-shaped, fire-extinguishing robot—won for their practicality; they are optimized to work efficiently and accurately on food and pharmaceutical manufacturing lines.

Still, 2007 offered plenty of other significant, if less heralded (and immediately useful), developments and pushed robotic technology to new levels, or at least promised to in the near future.

As part of NASA's plans to send peopled missions back to the moon (and then on to Mars), the space agency, in September, performed a series of tests to determine if robotic technology could be used to provide medical care for astronauts during extended spaceflights. On board a military C-9 aircraft flying in parabolic arcs over the Gulf of Mexico, four surgeons and four astronauts performed simulated surgery both by hand and using a robotic device developed by SRI International to determine if the robot's software can compensate for errors in movement caused by turbulence and varying gravitational conditions.

The U.S. Department of Defense continued its quest to develop autonomous robotic technology that will eventually take the place of human soldiers in battle. In November, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hosted its 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge, a competition that tested the driving prowess of experimental driverless autos. "Boss," an SUV put together by a team including gearheads from Carnegie Mellon University, General Motors Corporation, Caterpillar and Continental AG drove away with the $2 million grand prize. (The second- and third-place finishers were, respectively, built by groups at Stanford University and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.) Boss maintained an average speed of 14 miles per hour throughout the 55-mile course at the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, Calif., which was built to resemble an urban layout. The autonomous vehicles demonstrated their abilities by changing lanes, merging onto roadways amidst fast-moving traffic and traversing busy intersections—using only sensors, global positioning systems and computers.

During the tragedy at Utah's Crandall Canyon mine in August, when six miners and three rescuers perished in a mine collapse and subsequent rescue attempt, rescuers learned valuable lessons about the capabilities and limitations of robotic equipment. A robot crawler was sent 1,500 feet (457 meters) through a borehole into the mine, located about 120 miles (193 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City, after it crumbled due to a cave-in so powerful that it registered a magnitude of 3.9 on the Richter scale. Workers, handicapped by time constraints and the continued shifting of the mountain's mass, managed to get the crawler to the mine's floor but were bogged down by debris and unable retrieve the device, which remains trapped 52 feet (16 meters) below the mountain's surface.

Other robots helped us learn about ourselves. In November, University of California, San Diego (UCSD) researchers reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA that "current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for significant periods of time." QRIO, another two-foot- (61-centimeter-) humanoid was placed in UCSD's Early Childhood Education Center and programmed to wave, dance, sit and stand, among other functions. Children aged 18 to 24 months quickly warmed to the machine and began to treat it more like a peer than an object.

Earlier this month, Toyota unveiled the latest in its line of "partner robots": the aptly named Violin-playing Robot, which can hold the string instrument in place with its left hand and move the bow with its right hand to produce music. The roughly 5-foot, 123 lb. (1.5-meter, 56 kg) humanoid joins walking and rolling robots the company introduced in 2004, which are capable of playing the trumpet. Toyota rival Honda also this month introduced advancements to its humanoid, ASIMO (first introduced in 2005) , that allow it to perform tasks such as carrying a tray and pushing a cart while simultaneously employing an eye camera to detect the speed and direction of humans and other ASIMOs to avoid collisions. The new ASIMO also knows when its battery levels are low and will automatically return to its base to recharge.

When not serving tea, robots aided scientists in understanding insect behavior. Researchers at the Free University of Brussels (U.L.B.) in Belgium, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (E.P.F.L.) in Switzerland and the University of Rennes in France, along with other European educational institutions, reported in Science that they successfully introduced a few autonomous robots (boxy in design, but made to smell like the real deal) into cockroach communities. The robots were able to alter the collective decision-making process of the group and trigger new behavior patterns in the bugs. The findings show that it may be possible to use robots to study and control how groups of animals from insects to vertebrates interact.

And further proving there is no limit to what robotic technology can accomplish, a Web video recently surfaced featuring a mechanical device that can not only open a beer bottle but can follow that feat with a proper pour. (Note how the cup is held at an angle; many humans have yet to master this technique.)

This sampling merely scratches the surface of the past year's advances in robotics that whet the appetite for what's to come: Early next year, for instance, researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder will benchmark robotic devices to precisely mix and measure medications used in treatments such as chemotherapy. The robotic Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit are currently hunkering down in anticipation of the harsh Martian winter season but will soon resume their exploration of the Red Planet. And Scandanavian research firm Sintef is developing artificially intelligent equipment to help offshore oil and gas drilling platforms run more safely and efficiently.

In all, 2008 promises continued progress in the area of artificial intelligence, although it will still be a while before humankind reaches the point where it cannot live without the robots it has created.

Dead Serious

Dead Serious

Experts worry about lack of progress in efforts to reduce lifeless zone in the Gulf of Mexico

The water that tumbles out of the Mississippi River into the salty Gulf of Mexico has traveled thousands of miles. From its source in Minnesota, the river winds through 10 states on its journey to the ocean, collecting runoff from the Rocky Mountains, the Appalachian Mountains, and everywhere in between. The river flows through the fields of the Corn Belt, gathering fertilizer, and through cities, where sewage leaches into its currents.

 

MURKY WATERS. The latest map of the dead zone, created in summer 2007, shows the span of lifeless waters off the coast of Louisiana. Red and yellow highlight areas where oxygen levels are too low for fish and shrimp to survive. Nancy Rabalais, Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium

 

By the time the Mississippi empties into the Gulf, along the shores of Louisiana, it carries more than just water. Nutrients from both agricultural and urban runoff convert the river's outflow into a rich broth. Every summer in the Gulf, this enriched water encourages algae to grow in massive quantities, using up the oxygen that fish and other marine species need to survive. The result of this process: an area the size of Massachusetts that supports almost no life beyond algae and bacteria.

This 7,900-square-mile seasonal dead zone has been around since the 1970s, when scientists first began taking notice of the fish-depleted area. Now the Gulf of Mexico dead zone is the largest such zone in the United States and one of the largest in the world. In the summer of 2007, the dead zone covered the third-largest area since scientists started measuring it in the 1980s. But the problem was largely ignored until the '90s when 17 environmental groups threatened to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for not taking action on the problem. In response, the National Science and Technology Council published an assessment of the dead zone in 2000. The report outlined the problem and the steps lawmakers should take to reduce the size of the area. But the draft of a new action plan, released by the council in November, suggests that little progress has actually been made in the past 7 years.

Now the years of inaction are exacting a toll, scientists say. New research hints that a nutrient that had been largely ignored in the dead zone may, in fact, be driving the problem past the point of no return. What's more, much of the runoff that causes the dead zone comes from cornfields. And an increasing demand for corn, used to make ethanol, could mean more runoff, and a worsening of the habitat destruction in the Gulf.

Don Boesch, now president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science in Cambridge, was among the first scientists to take notice of the dead zone. After hearing anecdotal accounts of poor fishing in once-thriving sections of the Gulf, he decided to map these areas in the late 1970s.

"Contrary to what was thought at the time—that this dead zone area would be very patchy, would come and go—we found it was massive in size and pretty persistent over most of the summer," he says.

This means that every summer, numerous species' habitats disappear. It's been hard to quantify the effect on commercial fishing, though, says David Whitall of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring, Md.

Whitall recently studied the impact of the dead zone on brown shrimp, the primary catch in the Gulf. In the April 2007 Marine Pollution Bulletin, he and his colleagues showed that shrimpers catch fewer brown shrimp during years when the dead zone is largest.

"It's not so much a problem of shrimp dying as of shrimp moving" out of once-productive areas, he says.

But any decline in shrimp numbers can't be pinned entirely on the dead zone, Whitall says, because there are so many factors influencing marine populations. Overfishing and climate changes affect the shrimp populations as well.

In addition, relying on records from shrimpers to estimate whether shrimp are on the decline is inherently biased—any shrimper will quickly learn to avoid dead-zone areas, where he doesn't catch anything. And some scientists suggest that the "herding effect" of the dead zone may in fact help shrimpers.

"There are some areas, like the edges of the dead zone, where you might actually have a larger catch because of that herding effect," notes Boesch.

Though it's hard to find quantitative evidence that shows the destruction caused by the dead zone, most experts agree that such an area isn't good for the long-term health of the oceans. So scientists are focusing their efforts on figuring out how to bring the dead zone back to life.

That focus, over the past decade, was largely on monitoring and minimizing the nitrogen that runs into the Mississippi from fertilizer. Spread on fields, synthetic nitrogen fertilizers spur crop growth. But when they wash off the fields into water, fertilizers help algae bloom.

The 2000 report identified fertilizer, and specifically nitrogen, as the primary cause of the Gulf dead zone. But there's another nutrient that algae require: phosphorus. Only within the past few years, scientists say, has it become clear that phosphorus should be included in efforts to reduce nutrient runoff into the Mississippi.

Don Scavia of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor recently created a model to study the interplay between phosphorus and nitrogen in the dead zone. His simulation, published Dec. 1 in Environmental Science & Technology, showed that a dead zone can switch from being limited in size by how much nitrogen flows into it to being limited by its phosphorus content. He hypothesizes that such a switch is happening right now in the Gulf.

"Over the past 30 to 40 years," he says, "we've added so much nitrogen to the system that there's plenty of it around, and phosphorus is becoming limiting."

This doesn't mean that all efforts to monitor and control the dead zone should switch to phosphorus, he says, but that policy makers need to take both nitrogen and phosphorus into account. In many cases, the steps to control the nutrients are the same. About 75 percent of nitrogen and around 60 percent of phosphorus in the runoff comes from fertilizer, with the rest leaking into the rivers from urban sources.

Scavia says that controlling phosphorus alone probably would not alleviate the dead zone, and might even make it worse. Reducing phosphorus, he says, would clear up algal blooms close to the shore. This would allow nitrogen-laden water to flow farther out into the Gulf, where phosphorus exists naturally. Here, the vastness of the Gulf and the mixture of nitrogen and phosphorus would allow for an even larger dead zone than the coastal area permits.

"This has actually happened in the Neuse River in North Carolina and in the Pearl River in Hong Kong, where they controlled phosphorus and it made the problem move downstream and become worse," says Scavia.

While controlling only phosphorus would worsen the problem, controlling only nitrogen would be equally detrimental to the dead zone. Phosphorus, it turns out, is harder to get rid of than nitrogen once it's in the ocean.

When algae and other phytoplankton die, their phosphorus- and nitrogen-rich corpses sink to the bottom of the ocean. Much of the nitrogen is removed from the water by microbes that convert nitrogen compounds, like nitrate and nitrite, into nitrogen gas which makes its way up through the water and into the atmosphere. Phosphorus, however, accumulates in the sediments and water column, feeding future algae growth.

This means that high levels of phosphorus can lead to problems that remain long after phosphorus and nitrogen runoff is controlled. This struggle is playing out in the Baltic Sea right now, in an out-of-control dead zone.

"You've gotten into a vicious cycle," Boesch says. "The system there is so overloaded with phosphorus that there are tens of years of phosphorus available."

In addition to now being fingered for limiting the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, phosphorus has long been described as the limiting factor in freshwater systems, such as the Mississippi River itself. In rivers, cyanobacteria that get energy through photosynthesis, like plants, thrive. These bacteria process nitrogen from the atmosphere into the kind of nitrogen that feeds algal growth. Limiting phosphorus in these situations will improve not only the dead zone but the health of the Mississippi and the rivers that empty into it.

Most researchers agree that reducing both nitrogen and phosphorus is what needs to happen to shrink the dead zone.

"A lot of the management steps you would take to go after nitrogen would help with phosphorus too," points out Robert Howarth of Cornell University. "It's not like it's twice as much work to go after both."

These management steps include limiting fertilizer use on fields and requiring buffer zones and wetlands between agricultural fields and rivers, to catch nutrients. These steps have been suggested before, in the 2000 dead-zone assessment, but policy makers have not yet provided the money needed to put them into practice.

In a recent book, Scavia and colleagues reported on recently surveyed Iowa farmers who were asked whether they'd be willing to implement such changes.

"They would be happy, in fact they would prefer, to have a more diverse landscape with wetlands and conservation buffers," he says. "They would do that if the government would pay them to do that rather than pay them to grow corn. As long as money is coming through."

But right now, the most money comes from growing corn. Scientists worry that a recent increase in corn production to support the ethanol industry will soon be reflected in the size of the dead zone.

Corn, says Scavia, is grown in soil with tile drains. More nitrogen seeps into the river from cornfields than from fields growing other crops.

"Corn is really the leaky crop that causes most of the nitrogen problems in the Gulf," Scavia says. And this year, farmers grew 14 million more acres of corn than ever before. A report on the impact of biofuel production on U.S. water quality issued by the National Research Council raises concerns that this increase will lead to more nitrogen flowing down the Mississippi as well as to numerous other water-quality problems.

In an upcoming paper, Howarth and colleagues estimate that the conversion of soybean fields to cornfields to support the biofuel industry will mean an extra 117 million kilograms of nitrogen entering rivers across the country. Many of these rivers flow into the Mississippi. This 37 percent increase in nitrogen runoff, scientists hypothesize, will lead to an increase in the size of the Gulf's dead zone.

Howarth says action to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus pollution must be taken now, before the dead zone gets out of control.

"It may be," he says, "that once we have the political will to reduce the nutrients in the Gulf of Mexico, it will be harder to backtrack than it would have been to stop the nutrient flow in the first place."

With this urgency in mind, environmental lobbyists are pushing—so far, in vain—to get conservation measures into the next farm bill, the U.S. legislation that governs agricultural policy and is rewritten every few years. The next version of the bill, environmental groups hope, could set new guidelines for fertilizer use and allocate money to farmers who set aside land for wetlands and river buffer zones.

Boesch, who has followed the dead-zone research for decades, echoes the message of urgency, and says the new draft action plan is disappointingly timid.

"They're kind of backsliding on it rather than being more aggressive about it," he says. "I think we're not yet serious about making the commitments to deal with the problem." 

Invention Turns Toxic Waste into Electricity

Invention Turns Toxic Waste into Electricity

 
This fuel cell prototype uses pollution from coal and metal mines to generate electricity.

New technology could clean toxic messes from mines and create electricity at the same time.

Contaminated water seeping from coal and metal mines is a serious environmental hazard that endangers the safety of drinking water supplies and the health of plants and animals. This caustic pollution—loaded with metals such as arsenic, lead, copper, iron and cadmium—is currently difficult and costly to treat.

Environmental engineers at Pennsylvania State University are now developing a device that could both fight this environmental problem and provide a new source of energy.

The researchers tested a lab-scale version of their invention on fluids tainted with iron, similar to polluted water from mines. The device attacked the dissolved iron, removing electrons from it. This generated electricity while at the same time making the iron insoluble, thus efficiently pulling this contaminant from the water.

The iron that the device recovered could find use as a pigment for paints or other products, the researchers said. In principle, such a machine could also pull other metal contaminants from polluted water. "We are also working, in other research projects, on removal of arsenic and other contaminants," researcher Brian Dempsey said.

So far the device only generates a modest amount of energy. A fridge-sized version "might light up a small incandescent bulb," researcher Bruce Logan told LiveScience. Still, the researchers hope to significantly improve power output in future versions, as well as bring down costs. "It's an exciting start," Dempsey said.

The researchers detailed their findings in the Dec. 1 issue of the journal Environmental Science & Technology.