It's a gas: the tank for preparing onion juice to be turned into biogas

(Credit: Gills Onions)

Bill and Steve Gill have gone from onion farmers to power producers.

Their company, Gills Onions of Southern California, on Friday will take the wraps off a system that converts up to 300,000 pounds a day of agriculture waste into electricity. At an event at its facility, Gills Onions will receive a check for $2.7 million from SoCal Gas, which offers incentives to customers that reduce natural gas consumption through on-site generation.

One of the main components of the system is an anaerobic digester that converts treated onion plant waste into biogas. That gas is then conditioned and turned into methane, the main component of natural gas. Then the natural gas is fed into a 600-kilowatt fuel cell from Fuel Cell Energy to make electricity.

Gills Onions estimates that the $9.5 million project will have a six-year investment pay back. Among the financial benefits are reducing its electricity bill by $700,000 a year and $400,000 annual savings from handling onion wastes, which used to be spread on their land. The project also received $499,000 from a state waste-to-energy research program.

The technologies to do this sort of waste-to-energy system have been available for some time. But the project, called the Advanced Energy Recovery System, required a group of engineers to assemble and test the pieces as a system based on onion wastes. An important breakthrough in the project was finding a fuel cell that can make electricity from natural gas.

"Many of the things we did took a leap of faith, since nobody knew anything about onion gas," said Steve Gill in the company newsletter.

The combination of products can generate electricity at any farms that generate a large amount of agricultural waste or at waste-water treatment facilities, said SoCal Gas Vice President Hal Snyder, who heads up the utility's research and development. "Any facility that ends up with a bioproduct that an anaerobic digester can work with would work," he said.

A fuel cell from Fuel Cell Energy that can convert methane into electricity.

(Credit: Gills Onions)

SoCal Gas is looking at other ways to generate biogas, including collecting "green waste" from homes and dairy farms. Eventually, methane produced at customers' premises could be fed into SoCal Gas' pipeline.

From an economic point of view, the technology is still relatively immature and requires a hefty up-front investment. But the general direction on cost is favorable, particularly when there are financial incentives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, Snyder said.

In addition to using its waste for energy, Gills Onions forecasts that it will eliminate the equivalent of 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.

Updated at 8:20 a.m. PT with corrected figure for the amount of onion waste generated per day.

Light for Life uses ultracapacitor technology.

(Credit: 5.11 Tactical)

Last year, 5.11 Tactical, which makes clothes and gear aimed at law enforcement officers (but sells to civilians), announced a new high-tech flashlight called Light for Life. Only recently, however, has it become available to order.

What's special about it? Well, the flashlight uses three LEDs, but its key component is Flashpoint Power technology, an ultracapacitor energy storage system from Ivus Energy Innovations.

Light for Life recharges in just 90 seconds and shines at 90 lumens for 90 minutes per charge. The flashlight has three modes: bright (270 peak lumens), standard (90 lumens), and strobe, which is good for dance parties or scaring the neighbors' dog and kids (OK, I'm kidding, but you get the picture).

According to 5.11 Tactical, the 50,000-hour LEDs never have to be replaced and the flashlight is engineered to "offer 10 years of maintenance-free service under typical conditions." (You can recharge it up 50,000 times or one time a day for 135 years.)

I got a chance to play around with the thing at a recent event, and I have to say I was pretty impressed. It's lighter (16 ounces) than it looks, and it feels very durable. The one question I asked was: what happens when the power goes out and you have to recharge the thing? Answer: it comes with a 12V DC automotive charger, so you can use your car to charge it up in the event of a power outage.

The only drawback: Light for Life costs a whopping $169.99. But 5.11 Tactical says that when you add up the cost of all those D batteries over the lifetime of a battery-powered police flashlight, it's still a deal. And then there's all that good karma you get for not chucking those batteries into the garbage or landfill. It's hard to put a price on that.

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The National Renewable Energy Lab and U.S. Department of Energy have launched a mapping tool on alternative fuels and vehicles.

Employing Google Maps, TransAtlas plots geographical locations of things like specific types of fuel stations and concentrations where certain types of alternative fuel vehicles are owned in abundance.

It plots points where production facilities and other infrastructure for alternative fuel transportation exist, as well as separate icons identifying projects under development.

The comprehensive tool allows users to turn layers on and off by checking boxes in a legend. It includes alternative fuels like hydrogen, liquefied natural gas, propane, compressed natural gas, E85, biodiesel, and electric charging stations

Layers are also used to see vehicle density for flex fuel, diesel, and hybrid electric vehicles, as well as production facilities for hydrogen and ethanol.

The TransAtlas lets you ask a specific site for more detailed information by hitting the query button and then clicking on a point of interest. One click can tell you the town where an ethanol production facility is located, what capacity it's operating at, and what kind of biomass it uses.

The tool's development was sponsored by the DOE's Vehicle Technologies Program, which includes the Clean Cities initiative, a program to encourage alternative fuel development and public/private partnerships on alternative fuel projects.

National Renewable Energy Lab's map showing hydrogen production facilities in the U.S.

(Credit: Google Maps)

Volkswagen has a test fleet of 20 plug-in Twin Drive Golfs on the road, but no word on an exact production date.

(Credit: Volkswagen)

Volkswagen may be late to the gate with hybrids and electric cars, but its recent partnership with Chinese automaker and lithium ion battery producer BYD shows that the German car company is a serious contender in the race to supply the masses with an electric car.

Volkswagen has already signed letters of intent with Sanyo and Toshiba as suppliers for electric batteries, and the company is currently exploring an arrangement with BYD to supply VW with lithium ion batteries for its upcoming plug-in and all electric vehicles, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal.

BYD is one of the largest manufacturers of lithium ion batteries. High demand and cost has made these batteries one of the road blocks to building affordable plug-in and electric vehicles.

However, the battery-maker-turned-car-manufacturer has been able to make stable and durable lithium ion batteries at half the cost of batteries produced in the west and Japan due to its safer, most cost-effective iron-phosphate-based lithium-ion technology.

The Department of Energy's proposed budget boosts research on energy efficiency and renewable energy sources but makes cuts in hydrogen fuel cell vehicles because the technology is many years from being practical.

The DOE published details of its $26.4 billion fiscal 2010 budget request on Thursday, and Energy Secretary Steven Chu held a news briefing to cover the highlights. (Click for a PDF of his presentation.)

"We asked ourselves, 'Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy?' The answer, we felt, was 'no,'" Chu said in a briefing, according to Energy & Environment Daily.

Fuel cells have been touted by politicians and people from the industry for many years. The major auto companies have hydrogen fuel cell development programs and lease a limited number of cars to people near the few hydrogen filling stations in the U.S.

But there are many technical challenges to making fuel cell vehicles broadly used, including compact storage, the distribution infrastructure, and the longevity of fuel cells.

The DOE will continue to fund research for stationary fuel cell applications, such as backup power on the power grid or at commercial facilities. Hydrogen can be captured from natural gas or other sources. A fuel cell makes electricity, generating only water vapor as a byproduct--what's considered zero emissions.

The National Hydrogen Association criticized the DOE funding decision, saying that there should be a range of different vehicle technologies.

Another funding area expected to be cut is the $200 million spent on deep-water oil and gas research, which Chu said that industry could fund on its own.

Chu also said that the DOE will seek to create eight "innovation hubs," which would be small research areas designed to attract more scientists into energy, according to a report in The New York Times.

Other proposed areas of investments are: electricity transmission infrastructure, plug-in electric and hybrid vehicles, nuclear energy, and so-called clean coal technologies to make coal power generation less polluting.

We had a random encounter with this hydrogen-powered F-Cell vehicle.

(Credit: CNET)

While out testing the very stylish Aston Martin DB9 Volante in the Santa Cruz Mountains recently, we ran across the car's opposite, a Mercedes-Benz F-Cell research car. We caught up with the F-Cell (easily) and followed it to a vista point, where we cornered its driver and started grilling him about the car. It's not often you see the future of the automobile out in the wild like this.

This F-Cell was from the first generation, built into Mercedes-Benz's A-class platform, a small vehicle that's not sold in the U.S. Its 5,000-psi hydrogen tank feeds a fuel cell that produces electricity, in turn powering an 87-horsepower electric motor.

The driver of the car was a Mercedes-Benz engineer stationed with the car in Palo Alto, California. The company maintains many test fleets. He had pulled into the parking lot not because he thought James Bond was on his tail, but to plug his laptop into the F-Cell and download diagnostic data. Mercedes-Benz has logged well over a million miles with these F-Cell cars, and every mile yields useful data about performance in the real world.

A clarification has been made to this story. See below for details.

Twenty years ago it appeared, for a moment, that all our energy problems could be solved. It was the announcement of cold fusion--nuclear energy like that which powers the sun--but at room temperature on a table top. It promised to be cheap, limitless, and clean. Cold fusion would end our dependence on the Middle East and stop those greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. It would change everything.

But then, just as quickly as it was announced, it was discredited. So thoroughly, that cold fusion became a catch phrase for junk science. Well, a funny thing happened on the way to oblivion--for many scientists today, cold fusion is hot again.

"We can yield the power of nuclear physics on a tabletop. The potential is unlimited. That is the most powerful energy source known to man," researcher Michael McKubre told "60 Minutes" correspondent Scott Pelley.

McKubre says he has seen that energy more than 50 times in cold fusion experiments he's doing at SRI International, a respected California lab that does extensive work for the government.

McKubre is an electrochemist who imagines, in 20 years, the creation of a clean nuclear battery. "For example, a laptop would come precharged with all of the energy that you would ever intend to use. You're now decoupled from your charger and the wall socket," he explained.

The same would go for cars. "The potential is for an energy source that would run your car for three, four years, for example. And you'd take it in for service every four years and they'd give you a new power supply," McKubre told Pelley.

"Power stations?" Pelley asked.

"You can imagine a one for one plug-in replacement for nuclear fuel rods. And the difference only would be that at the end of the lifetime of that fuel rod, you didn't have radioactive waste that needed to be disposed of," McKubre replied.

He showed "60 Minutes" just how simple the experiment looks; there are only three main ingredients. First, there is palladium, a metal in the platinum family. Second, one needs a kind of hydrogen called deuterium which is found in seawater.

"Deuterium is essentially unlimited. There is ten times as much energy in a gallon of sea water, from the deuterium contained within it, than there is in a gallon of gasoline," he explained.

The palladium is placed in water containing deuterium and the third ingredient is an electric current.

The experiment is wrapped in insulation and instruments. They're looking for what they call "excess heat." In other words, is more energy coming out than the electric current puts in?

No one knows exactly how excess heat would be generated, but McKubre showed "60 Minutes" what he thinks is happening.

(Credit: ONR)

In what it says is a "first of its kind" initiative, the U.S. Navy plans to launch sometime this spring an unmanned aerial vehicle for a 24-hour endurance flight carrying a 5-pound payload and powered entirely by a hydrogen-powered fuel cell.

Called the Ion Tiger, the UAV can travel farther and carry heavier loads than earlier battery-powered designs, according to the Office of Naval Research. It also boasts "stealthy characteristics" such as reduced noise, low heat signature, and zero emissions (PDF).

"This will really be a demonstration for a fuel cell system in a UAV application," ONR Program Manager Dr. Michele Anderson said. "That's something nobody can do right now."

Fuel cells convert hydrogen and oxygen into water in a pollution-free process to create an electrical current delivering up to double the efficiency of an internal combustion engine, researchers claim.

The Tiger will use a "500-watt polymer fuel cell with a high specific power system." Weight will be reduced using high-pressure lightweight hydrogen storage tanks. The UAV has already "demonstrated sound aerodynamics, high functionality, and low-heat and noise signatures under battery-powered tests," according to ONR.

This test will show how a surveillance drone can operate economically with less possibility of detection and still exceed the duration of previous flights seven-fold.

Collaborators include Protonex Technology and the University of Hawaii.

Mazda's new test vehicle uses a series hybrid powertrain.

(Credit: Mazda)

To further its research into new powertrain technology, Mazda began leasing a series hybrid vehicle with a hydrogen-fueled range extending engine to energy companies and local governments. This type of test leasing helps automakers gain useful data on how cars operate in a controlled setting, and ensures that the vehicles' drivers have hydrogen filling stations available.

Although the powertrain configuration is similar to that of the Chevrolet Volt, a series hybrid using an electric motor to power the wheels and a range-extending engine to generate electricity, Mazda puts its own twist on the system, with a hydrogen-burning rotary engine as a range extender. Mazda previously developed an RX-8 using a rotary engine that burned hydrogen, calling it the RX-8 Hydrogen RE. BMW has also explored burning hydrogen in an internal combustion engine with the Hydrogen 7.

Mazda's new vehicle is called the Premacy Hydrogen RE Hybrid, and is built on the five passenger Premacy platform. It has a 110 kilowatt motor to turn the wheels, which gets juice from a lithium ion battery pack. When the battery runs low, the rotary engine kicks in to generate electricity, drawing hydrogen from a 5,000 PSI tank. As configured, the Premacy Hydrogen RE Hybrid gets a range of 125 miles.

The car includes a dual fuel system, making it possible to use gasoline if no hydrogen is available.