Good news from the month of February! Precipitation was above normal and that makes 3 months in a row with above normal precipitation. Snowfall was almost 6 inches above normal (in Wausau). We had 15.5 inches of snow but we never did have any big blizzard. The snowstorms were lighter but they were more frequent coming 3 to 4 inches at a time.

Combined with below normal temps and we had some of best snow conditions in long time. Snowmobilers rejoiced! Skiers and snowshoers (is that a word?) loved it as well. Temperatures were below normal for the first time in three months. Last year was very warm with most months above normal, but now 3 out of the last 6 months have been below normal (September, October, February). The coldest temp of the month was -16 which will probably end up being the coldest temperature of the Winter. Here are the official stats (for Wausau):

Average High: 25.6  (normal 28.1)

Average Low: 9.1  (normal 10.0)

Precipitation: 1.47 inches  (normal 0.92 inches)

Snowfall: 15.5 inches (normal 9.6 inches)

Highest Temperature: 38 on the 10th

Lowest Temperature: -16 on the 17th

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And now on to some of the most recent news about the transformation of transportation in the U.S. New technology promises to make driving more efficient, quiet and clean. It is starting with self-driving cars and electric vehicles. Self-driving cars!? If you haven’t been reading the weather blog recently or some of the more popular tech-news sites out there, you might be surprised that self-driving cars have logged millions of accident free miles on real highways in tests over the last couple of years. The “prevailing wisdom” is that there is no way a computer(software) can drive a car. The reality is much different. The ONLY thing preventing people from buying and safely using self-driving cars is cost, legal concerns, and attitudes. The “attitude” comes from the “free open road” part of the American psyche. Owning an automobile gives a person a degree of freedom, or at least it used to. In the modern day, owning a car can actually be a liability more than an asset. For people living in many urban areas, having a normal car might actually reduce freedom. Taxes, insurance, licenses, fees, maintenance, are growing every year and are a real pain in the you-know-what. If you could share a self-driving electric car with a few of your neighbors to make trips around town, you could be substantially more free. You would be lowering your impact on the environment as well – in a voluntary and peaceful manner (while avoiding traditional taxes/fees and arbitrary speeding tickets).

So what is the latest news? The Nissan Leaf is the latest car to get in on the action. Oxford University out-fitted the Leaf with some cameras and other sensors and it “went out for a spin”. Also, another reporter took a ride in a self-driving car and found the experience a lot better than the ”soul-crushing” effort most people put into their daily urban commute.

Another interesting electric vehicle story involved Tesla. A New York Times “reporter” tried to take the Tesla Model S on a long raod trip in an effort to test the stated range. The “reporter” ran out of juice before the end of the journey and basically and smeared Tesla about it. Tesla fired back, defending the performance of the auto. Tesla checked the data recorder on the car and it turns out that the “reporter” did not follow the instructions about saving electricity during the journey. The moral of the story is that EVs still cannot match the distance of fossil fuel vehicles (although they are getting close), but they are great cars – especially the Model S. There is not much reason, other than cost, that most urban commuters could not be using electric cars right now.

Have a nice Friday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy, Technology

Can I dust off the LED lighting topic once again? I am still using one of my LED bulbs I received 5 years ago so they do seem to stand the test of time. There has not been a revolution in lighting that I had hoped for a few years back, but that does not mean there has been no progress. LED lights are much more efficient than incandescents and could help the world to save a lot of energy, but engineering challenges and cost have gotten in the way.

What about that cost? When the first screw-in type LED bulbs were produced they retailed for $50. If you were going to light your house with these expensive bulbs, you were going to make a financial sacrifice and be an early adopter. Now I see this same type of light retailing for $20 to $40 on various websites. That is better, but it will still not tip the consumer scale. Not when you can get compact fluorescents for a couple of bucks (on sale) or incandescents for less than a dollar. Like most technologies, I suspect the price will continue to fall. I think I might start purchasing a few once they drop down closer to $10.

What about the engineering? It has proven tough to generate a more broad spectrum of light from LEDs. In their most fundamental state, LEDs produce just one wavelength (color) of light. Typically, one has to coat the LED with a different material in order to make the light look more natural, or one has to combine many different colored LEDs  in order to produce something similar to incandescents. Of course, covering the LEDs can reduce the brightness, so engineers have now looked toward fireflies for solutions to make LEDs brighter. It turns out that the specific pattern on the abdomen of fireflies enables a better transmission of light. If used with LEDs, we will be able to get more light with less energy. The engineers have shown 55% increased light extraction with the firefly pattern.

LED Light Bulb

On the cost side of things, a couple items of note. A Kickstarter campaign has begun to bring a new LED light design to market. A “Kickstarter campaign” is one where you can contribute/donate to the success of the project. This particular project claims to have created the most efficient LED bulbs. Now they need to raise more money to bring the bulb into wider production. No word on the cost yet. Efficiency is great, but the cost will be the key to its success. What usually helps to bring down cost is to reduce the number of components it takes to build something. That is what Ikon Semiconductor corporation hopes to do with LED bulbs. They showed off a chip at the Strategies in Light Conference that will combine several power components typically found in LED bulbs and provide a method of dimming.

Progress continues.

Have a pleasant Wednesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew

Posted under Alternative Energy, Technology

Posted under Education, Rainfall Reports, Science, snow, Technology

To all my bio-fuel supporting friends, sorry, but I still am not convinced that it is an effort we – as a society/economy – should pursue in a significant way (still good for niche areas though, as I have written before). A couple of recent studies have come to my attention which highlight some of the problems.

For those who support “big” biofuel for transportation needs in order to help blunt pollution & theoretical climate changes, solar power beats it out on a per-mile-driven basis. This is not too much of a surprise to me because the process of getting the sun’s energy into an electric vehicle is much simpler than the process of getting that same energy into a biofuel car.

Secondly, for those who are focused on health, the environment, and climate change, according to this study, producing large amounts of biofuels is probably bad for both. Theoretically, the best biofuels can do is make our existence carbon neutral. So even if we did convert 100% over to biofuels, negative health and environmental effects would still make it a bad strategy. Grain ethanol production in the U.S. also uses 40% percent of the corn crop that might otherwise be used to feed people. We have an obesity epidemic in the U.S. so maybe we do not need additional corn, but removing such a large chunk of the food supply does affect prices and limits what can be sent to areas of the world that do need emergency food supplies.

There is also the fact that solar power (and even wind power to a small extent) continues to make progress in efficiency gains. In essence, solar power has a much brighter future. By manipulating matter down the nanoscale, we can design solar panels with much higher efficiency in the future. It seems there is a new efficiency record about every other month. Just recently, researchers in Switzerland produced a thin film flexible polymer solar cell with a record efficiency of 20.4% (a record for that type of cell). On the more theoretical side of things, there are certain patterns of silicon or other solar cell material that will absorb more sunlight. A recent exercise in evolutionary computer algorithms produced some patterns that could be tried in the near future.

On the industrial/commercial side of things 1366 technologies (which I mentioned previously) is bucking the trend in the brutal solar panel market right now. They are scaling up their wafer-making process which uses molten silicon instead of silicon ingots. Their process could chop 50% off the cost of the silicon wafers that go into solar panels. This is great news, but it does not mean the price will come down that much for the end user. Remember that the biggest cost of getting solar power at your house is installation and regulations. The solar panels themselves are pretty cheap right now – historically speaking.

Solar Installation at Nellis AFB

As far as installed capacity is trending – is it still upward, thanks in part to the U.S. Military. Check out this solar array at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. This is the second big array the military has constructed. The other one is at Nellis Air Force base. Is the military preparing for energy disruptions or just helping the environment out and gaining some good PR? I am not sure, but it makes me want to pursue my own solar power as well. It would be nice to have back-up if the grid ever goes down.

At the “usage” end of alternative energy, batteries continue to improve and get bigger when needed, but there is some trouble with one big name company. Car makers Toyota and BMW collaborating to develop lithium air baterries (as IBM has been working on as well). Safe lithium air batteries could dramatically extend the range of electric viehicles as mentioned previously here. Seeing big auto names behind to pursuit gives me optimism – because they have deep pockets. In other good news for EV enthusiasts, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Scientists have developed a new solid electrolyte for lithium batteries that is less flammable and could potentially store 5 times the energy. Unfortunately we will have to wait a while to see if this breakthrough is something economical and makes it into mass production. For storing electricity from the alternative energy grid, a new mammoth battery is going into operation in Texas. One of the main problems with alternative energy it its intermittent nature. It is good to see some large batteries being tested. This one in Texas will store electricity from wind farms.

Now the distressing news from the alternative energy and EV scene – Project Better Place is scaling back its ambitous plans. They are pulling the plug on battery changing stations in the U.S. and Australia in order to focus on turning a profit in Denmark and Israel. I could see some people crying foul or “conspiracy” seeing two CEOs getting sacked in the past few months – including the founder of the company, but the fact is that in the U.S. and Australia, drivers have longer distances to cover. Denmark and Israel make more sense. Plus, a start-up company needs to eventually make money. The investors who pumped over 800 million into the company are not going to wait around forever.

Have a nice Thursday! Meteorologist Justin Loew

Posted under Alternative Energy, Technology

Oh, the pace of progress never seems to let up. I hope everyone who reads the blog is aware of how technology is reshaping our entire society, economy, and even the human species. I try to follow a few of the trends in order to keep everyone informed. I make sure to highlight the positive aspects of change, since many times we tend to only focus on negative things. However, it is still a scary world out there.

One of the main topics coming up recently is how robots and computers are at the precipice of taking most traditional and current human jobs. This time around, it is not like past technological revolutions when mechanization eliminated most manual work in agriculture, or when industrial robots took over most hard manual labor in factories. This time around robots and software could take over most jobs and there will probably not be enough new professions to take up the slack. Many people have theorized that our current recession in employment is due to technological progress. Computers and software are becoming so advanced that it will be more difficult for most human minds/bodies to compete. Take a look at Baxter from Rethink robotics. I highlighted this new manufacturing robot a couple months ago and now it is being rolled out into small businesses testing. If it works out (testing in a real environment can be tedious with unforeseen problems), it could replace most simple packaging and manufacturing jobs. The current price of the robot is $22,000, which means that it would be advantageous for businesses to replace anyone who makes over $10 per hour (when you factor in wages, benefits, taxes, regulations, etc…). That is a lot of people.

Baxter is of course just the beginning. Future robots that are connected to the Internet will have more knowledge at their disposal than any one human being could hope to acquire. (We will never keep up with Watson, who is now “going to college”.) Crowd-sourced wisdom from people will be a valuable aspect of such future robots, but sharing your wisdom/knowledge will only pay tiny fractions of what people earn in today’s world. See here for a good past blog post on this topic.

So what are we to do? Some people have suggested that the government should just take-over the economy and give everyone a fraction of what our future automated industries produce (a living salary in money/products/food)). I think that is a terrible idea, not only because true charity comes from the heart/individual, but also because human history is full of terrible and deadly episodes of centralized planning, and that type of plan can be de-humanizing. What kind-of meaningless life would it be to just sit around play games, eat, sleep, and watch TV everyday of your life. Only stopping to get your delivery of “living wage” stuff. Maybe that is good enough for some people. I would tend to think a better way forward would be the evolution of a voluntary (very important), open, and more collaborative future. A bottom up transition of the economy from competitive to collaborative. If maintaining a meaningful life into the future requires a continued evolution of what it means to be human. If we have to become more integrated with technology, it would be better than becoming obsolete, or living in a technological “living wage” semi-tyranny, in my opinion.

Have a good Monday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Technology

I am quite positive about the future of alternative energy because technological progress is currently on a torrid pace, but that doesn’t mean there are not a few major bumps in the road to be concerned with. I have mentioned before how the ongoing world-wide recession is causing cutbacks in government subsidies even as the price of solar panels are coming down. Private industry has its fair share of difficulty as well.

Recently, two large, respected, international companies, Bosch and Siemens, pulled out of a plan to turn much of north Africa in to a solar power “hot spot”. The initiative is called Desertec and still has plenty of backers, but it is a bad sign when the most high profile companies pull out. I suspect that the cost was too high or the potential profit was too low and therein lies the biggest roadblock to more alternative energy adoption. No it is NOT because of the intermittent nature of alternative sources – it is the cost. It is almost always the cost. If there was a guaranteed profit, even a very small percentage, Siemens and Bosch would still be in the project because there is a nice side effect of positive press to be gained by sticking with it.

Cost is definitely a problem here in the U.S. A recent study found that the cost of installing solar panels in the U.S. is almost TWICE what it is in Germany! The main reasons for the discrepancy – you guessed it – an intolerable tangle of federal, state, and local regulations. Another significant part of the excessive cost is the high price that installers charge to set-up/hook-up solar panels. I think it is a sad commentary about the U.S. – that Germany has the political and economic will to reduce regulations and cost for installing solar power whereas the U.S. does not. That doesn’t mean that the private sector is not giving it a try. Mosaic, based out of Oakland, is trying crowd-funding as a way to jump start small-scale solar projects. They are asking for $25 dollar donations which will be pooled for solar panel installations at apartment complexes, schools, and the like. I applaud the effort and suggest some larger donations from the “loudest” wealthy environmentalists (as I have done before). Very wealthy (some people would say “obscenely wealthy”) actors, politicians, and professors that continually back the policies to force ”the masses” to cut back on fossil fuels (and a comfortable living), should instead make a real sacrifice and give a lot more money to alternative energy projects. Instead of jet-setting around the world, wearing expensive clothes, sipping high-brow coffee, tapping out messages on an over-priced I-phone, and relaxing in their multi-million dollar mansions, they should be donating more money to projects like what Mosaic supports – that is – if they really cared about the environment and AGW. If they really cared, they could make a big difference. They might be poorer, but the natural environment would be a lot richer.

Solar panels near New York

On the technical side, there is still plenty of good news surrounding solar. Progress continues and we should see benefits in the way of lower price and efficiency gains year after year. One of the more dramatic advances recently was the new world record for solar concentrating multi-junction solar cell. The company Solar Junction has produced such a cell with 43.5 percent efficiency. What is even more positive is that this is not some development in a lab that is still years away from commercial applications. It is pretty much ready to go now. As far as storing the intermittent energy of solar cells (and wind turbines) new battery technology shows signs of progress. Stanford researchers are exploring sulphur-lithium batteries that could store 5 times as much energy as traditional lithium-ion batteries. Read more here about how they are using nanotechnology to achieve those ends.

In the mean time, before all these wondrous new technologies arrive, it looks like the U.S. could continue to help the world’s environment by continuing to use more natural gas in manufacturing and heavy industries. The cheaper and more efficient natural gas could draw more manufacturing back into the U.S., thus reducing the emissions from older more polluting factories in other parts of the world. And, believe it or not, there is still room to improve the ol’ reliable – the internal combustion engine. Achates Power is working on a multi-cylinder version of the Junker engine, which could be 50% or more efficient than current engines.

Have a good Thursday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy, Technology

The task of keeping up with technological change gets harder by the day. One human brain (mine) just can’t grasp the complexity and rapid progress. Just the other day, I was mentioning the robotic transformation of manufacturing, Anthony commented about how microcontrollers are easier than ever to embed into almost everything, and now Toyota and Lexus are introducing driver assistance technology that gets us ever closer to self-driving cars. Of course, as blog readers should know, Google has been sending their autonomous cars out on to the highways for over a year now and their record – in real traffic – in California! - is flawless. This is something I keep bringing up, but I am not sure too many people appreciate, how close the roads are to be taken over by “robots”. It is not a question of function. The electronics, the sensors, and the software are already here. Audi already has a car that parks itself (with video). The only thing keeping self-driving cars from hitting the road are cost, laws, regulation, and fear. People are fearful that the “robots” cannot drive as well. I am not too worried. If the Google car can drive thousands of miles through traffic without an accident, that is better than most humans. Heck, robots have been flying planes and driving trains for decades now. Boats should not be much of a problem either. When you really think about it, most driving is not very difficult. The situations that require sophisticated manuevering on the part of the driver are few and far between.

On the cost front, Audi is already shrinking the parts needed to incorporate self-driving technology into cars. It will be expensive at first, but not out of the reach of typical wealthy early-adopters.

On the regulation front, lawyers are wrangling over liability, legal, and safety issues, but I am unsure why self-driving cars should not be regulated like other mass transportation. There are plenty of automated trains around the world. Getting into a self-driving car would be just like getting into a miniature passenger rail car or bus. The door opens, you sit down, the vehicle goes to your destination. The only difference is the driver. Instead of a person (bus driver), there is a “bot”. For self-driving cars, just as in the case of a bus, the “riders” are not legally liable for anything relating to “driver” error or vehicle malfunction. It is the company that built the car and developed the “robot” driver that should be legally liable when the car causes trouble. This is unless, the driver “takes the wheel” for whatever reason. Right now the laws in Nevada, California, and Florida assume that self-driving cars are a human-machine combo and the driver is still liable for everything. Let me tell you this, when I get a self-driving car, there is no way I will be driving it. What would be the point? The point is to relieve yourself from the burden of driving. I would much rather be talking, working, sleeping, or partying while the bot drives.

Of course, besides cars, “bots” (software and machines) are showing up everywhere.

• There is a humanoid robot on the ISS.
• Plenty of new robots are showing up at this year’s CES.
• Bots run the Internet and financial markets for the most part.
• We have mostly autonomous military airplanes and new land based quadruped robots almost ready for action.
• Here is one of the fastest recent robots, modeled after a cockroach.
• Bots have even been proposed for lifeguard duty.

NASA’s humanoid robotic astronaut

While most of these inventions and uses for bots are done for “good” (except for the military applications – which are designed to help destroy things), one cannot help but get a little uneasy feeling about how fast it is all developing. When self-driving cars arrive, you will always be tracked as the cars will be maintaining a near constant connection to the internet and will have very advanced recording devices – essentially a “black box” for the car. This has implications for privacy and freedom. There are also concerns about safety as so many machines and devices become connected and autonomous. Will some of these be hacked and used for nefarious purposes? Could someone kill you by hacking into your self-driving car?

And then we come back to the issue of jobs. Some people speculate that people will find new areas of work once robots take over most of the mundane and physical work to make the human world go ’round, but I don’t think most people will have the skills or knowledge for advanced “futuristic” jobs. There is a chance that most people could be left behind, as portrayed in this very good short science fiction story about the future (with a happy ending).

In the end, I accept that things change.  Even my profession will likely be automated away. Standing in the way of progress is a good way to get steam rolled, so I figure the best thing to do is to guide progress and stay informed as best as I can so that the future is brighter, no matter how things evolve.

Have a good Thursday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Technology

I have complained more than a few times about how the natural landscape in the U.S. has succumbed to sprawl and industrialization in support of our “car culture”, so I was surprised to read an article about how the U.S. has NOT changed all that much since 1960. Bill Steigerwald recently took a trip around the country along the “Steinbeck highway” to see for himself whether or not things have changed. He claims that the country is still “America the mostly beautiful”. I would have to agree that one can see similar things that were seen back in 1960. Qualitatively, the freeways out in fly-over country (outside of the mega cities) are still four lanes like they were back in 1960. The National Parks are the same. You can still find regional differences in cuisine and lifestyle. However, quantitatively, things have definitely changed. The cities are much larger. You have to drive much farther and look harder to find wide open landscapes and unique things. Almost all of this expansion has been of the cookie-cutter-subdivision-strip mall-gas station variety. Chain restaurants and big box stores are everywhere. You have to search and go out of your way to find unique restaurants and shops. Back in 1960, the “uniqueness” was apparent. Today it is not. Not only that, but the traffic is much worse. Unless you are driving through the Great Plains or Desert Southwest, you will encounter traffic all times of the day on freeways all the way down to the smallest town road. There are other things that are much worse nowadays (trash, food insecurity) but we do a good job of hiding them.

Everyday in the USA

It is my opinion that things have changed significantly since 1960 and for the worse – from the perspective of a farm kid growing up in the Wisconsin countryside. I am amazed at all the people who don’t mind being in debt, living in an over-sized house, and spending most of their lives stuck in traffic commuting 50 miles or more on a mega (polluted) freeway. Even more amazing is that influential people in our society have been demanding more and more of the same in order to stimulate economic “growth”. (See this past blog post about the Federal Reserve imploring people to buy and build more houses). Someone else who has been a big proponent of building more ”stuff” in order to stimulate” growth” is nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman. His general theme/suggestion for many years has been to just print and borrow money to build new stuff and we will get ”growth”. If “growth” means a perpetuation of the environmentally unsustainable car-culture we have, then we have gotten ”growth” in spades – and it is crumbling. So it was a breath of fresh air to see such an influential economist to retract a bit. He has finally noticed that “things have changed”. Apparently he is now noticing the technological progress I have been blogging about for years and hopefully you – dear reader – are better prepared for (better than world-leading economists, anyway). The essential Krugman epiphany is that GDP is no longer a good metric of the well-being of the workforce. When everything is automated, creating more “industrial age” stuff, does not create any more “industrial age” jobs. Even worse, using printed or borrowed money to build more “stuff” only leaves us with more to maintain, a mountain of debt (16 trillion and counting in the U.S. alone), and a devalued currency. (For a more scathing critique of Krugman, see here). I am sure economists who have been advocating debt-fueled industrial age growth policies for the last couple of decades were well-intentioned but the results have been horrible (IMO), especially from and environmental perspective, and even from a traditional human social-fabric perspective.

At least the word is getting out. Automation, technological progress, and software advances will affect almost every “job” on the planet and sooner than most people think. I am certainly not immune and I blogged about it here (a very good read, IMO). Another good read is this recent in depth article from Wired about how robotics are going to change the world. It is a fairly optimistic read about how people will still find jobs even as robots come to fill our factories, hospitals, and homes. I am not so optimistic about people finding rewarding future careers in a manner that has occurred in past economic revolutions. The new jobs will require greater creative problem solving skills and a deeper knowledge of science that most of the labor force does not possess – not even me. But that dos not mean I am pessimistic about the future of the world in general. There is a good chance the near future world will have an overabundance of material wealth. I am optimistic about the welfare of individuals but apprehensive about how our technology will change us. In sci-fi terms, the future looks less like Star Fleet and more like the Borg.

Have a swell Thursday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Environment, Pollution, Technology

If you have kids that are interested in science of any type, hopefully they have a chance to be involved in something called Science Olympiad.  My son Douglas is involved through his high school and kids as young as 7th grade can take part.  It’s a great way for them to challenge their science skills and take part in some fun competiti0n.

The article below from Douglas gives you more insight.

Science in Today’s Youth: Science Olympiad

Douglas Schumacher

For nearly 30 years, the Science Olympiad organization has been helping to bring science to life, to show how science works, to emphasize problem solving aspects of science and the understanding of science concepts for students across the nation.  Through 26 high school and 24 middle school events, Science Olympiad provides a competitive basis for students to explore science.

I’m  currently on my high school’s second team and have competed at the middle school level last year and now the high school level.  Last year my favorite event was Meteorology, In which I placed 1st at an invitational, 3rd at regionals, and 5th at state.   This year so far our team competed in Boyceville.  One very interesting event I participated in dealt with glaciers and climatology.  I also was involved with outdoor geocaching.  It was challenging because it was raining and their was slush on the ground.  On a good note, I ended up getting 4th place!

The metorology event that I competed in last year was a test event in which you study about you topic , create some notes, and then, you guessed it, take a 50-minute test on the subject.   Other events, however, require a student to build some sort of contraption to complete a certain task, such as a box designed to insulate a beaker or a air-pressure powered bottle rocket.  No matter the case, Science Olympiad is a lot of fun.

If you would like to learn more about all the Science Olympiad does, visit their official website at http://soinc.org/.

Posted under Education, Science, Technology

Just a few days ago I was reminiscing about air travel in the past, how it was more comfortable, cheap, and convenient (but also wasteful from an environmental perspective). I was resigned to the fact that future air travel will not get better anytime soon, because the physics of flying and the high price of oil will not change much. However, all hope is not lost. I previously mentioned the Boeing 787 Dreamliner as one aircraft that will save a little on fuel consumption, but there is also hope to route planes better, thus saving time and energy. When Iridium Communications upgrades their sat-phone satellites in 2015 they will also have transponders aboard that will be able to track airplanes all over the globe. The tracking will be precise enough that planes will be able to fly very close to each other and thus share the most direct routes across the oceans or areas near the poles. This will shorten some long haul flights and help conserve a little more fuel.

Some other seemingly intractable aspects of our current industrial energy economy might also give way to small improvemnts. What about drilling? It takes a cetain amount of energy to get through hard rock in order to find oil, naural gas, or even drill for geo-thermal applications. There doesn’t sem to be much room for increasing efficiency. In steps Foro Energy with a proposal/process to use high powered lasers to drill through rock. This technology is still speculative, but does give some hope for the future.

The Salton Sea

What about deslaination of sea water? Many people are concerned about the future supply of fresh water. Even though billions of people live on the coasts around the world, right next to an essentially endless supply of water, they are still lacking. Why? Water has a high heat capacity. Whenever you work with water, whether heating or cooling, boiling or freezing, distilling or vaporizing, or just plain moving it around, it is an energy intensive sustance. Desalinating sea water is too expensive to be practical for most areas of the world. Things might get a little better though with continued technological progress. Researchers at the Institute of Physics in Beijing have discovered a new way to evaporate oil that could also work to make desalination of water more efficient.

For a little extra reading about the water woes in some areas of the world, check out this interesting article about history and future of the Salton Sea in southern California.

Have a good Tuesday! Meteorologist Justin Loew.

Posted under Alternative Energy, Pollution, Technology