Green Wombat

  Sydney Harbour Bridge 
  Originally uploaded by theFijian.

Here’s a potential source of electricity to help Wal-Mart (WMT) achieve its goal of using 100 percent renewable energy in its stores: its customers. Each step a person takes produces 64 watts of dissipated energy and scientists at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation are developing technology to “harvest” vibrational energy and feed it to the power grid or store it in batteries. For instance, CSIRO scientist Sam Behrens estimates that car and train traffic over the Sydney Harbour Bridge generates 6.6 megawatts of vibrational energy. “We could get enough power for 200 homes if we could capture just 10 percent of that energy,” Behrens told me during a visit this week to CSIRO’s Energy Centre in Newcastle. Transducers could be built into the bridge or attached to the exterior of skyscrapers to capture energy. Behrens has made a working model of how the technology works in a hallway at the Energy Centre. A strip of piezoelectric ceramic material has been laid under the floor. When I walk over that patch of floor, the energy from my feet is captured by the piezo, causing a needle to jump on a meter attached to the wall. Behrens also has coated a metal strip with piezoelectric material and when you move the strip the vibrational energy produced powers a small light. This is all early stage research and the key will be reducing the cost of materials like piezoelectric materials and developing the technology to connect vibrational energy to the power grid or store it. Behrens sees potential uses of vibration harvesting in everything from powering heavily trafficked places like airports and train stations to replacing batteries in mobile phones and laptops.

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Election Day was green day for the most part. Environmentalists helped oust California Congressman Richard Pombo, a
Republican property rights advocate who spent his seven terms trying to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act and other enviro laws. Pombo was
defeated, appropriately enough, by a wind energy consultant. Voters in
Washington, meanwhile, passed Initiative 937,
which requires the state’s utilities by 2020 to produce at least 15
percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources or meet that target by purchasing renewable energy credits. But Californians, ever the
contrarians, voted down a ballot measure backed by Silicon Valley
heavyweights that would have taxed oil companies $4 billion to fund
alternative energy research and programs. Big-time venture capitalists
and green tech evangelists Vinod Khosla and John Doerr along with
Google co-founder Larry Page spent millions to promote Proposition 87. Big Oil spent more, however, and in California elections are essentially
fought on television screens. Heavy rotation of endorsements from
former President Bill Clinton and Hollywood celebrities couldn’t
overcome political ads like this one from
anti-Prop 87 forces. (Sorry, I can’t show it to you on Green Wombat as
the embed function has been disabled.) Still, with Democrats now in
control of the House – and maybe the Senate – expect more action on
global warming and other environmental issues. Businesses already surfing the green wave will be ahead of the game; those who are not need to get in the water.

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I look at the face of renewable energy and it looks back at me with big brown eyes and says, "Moo."

Meet the cows of Blue Spruce Farm in Bridport, Vermont. Each of the 2,000 cows produces not only milk but 200 watts of power a day. Cow manure is fed into a anaerobic digester on the farm, where bacteria strip away pathogens and produce methane gas. The gas powers a generator that produces electricity, which is fed into the grid operated by Central Central Public Service, the local utility. Cows are king in Vermont and about 75 percent of the state’s agricultural revenue come from dairies. But cow poop releases methane, a particularly powerful greenhouse gas, and creates a huge waste management headache for dairies like Blue Spruce Farm, owned by the Audets family.  "We weren’t thinking of global warming when we dd this, we needed to do deal with the waste problem," says Marie Audets, a no-nonsense woman who has worked on farms most of her life, as she showed me and a group of environmental journalists around Blue Spruce Farm.

Vermont is not the only state experimenting with cow power – California is home to some 2 million cows and this month Pacific Gas & Electric signed a deal to buy methane gas from Microgy, a company that will build four digesters on Big Ag dairy farms. What’s different about Vermont cow power is that it’s connecting consumers to family farms that are struggling to cut costs as milk prices fall. CVPS customers who sign up for cow power pay a 4 cent kilowatt-hour premium, or about $5 to $20 more a month for their bovine-sourced electricity.

The Audets financed the methane digester shown above. It captures the methane that would be released into the atmosphere and turns it into electricity that Blue Spruce sells
to CVPS, effectively reducing the farm’s net power costs to zero. The digester’s byproduct is sterilized manure (shown at right), which is used as cow bedding instead of increasingly expensive sawdust. That saves the dairy as much as $100,000 annually. Cow power is another example of what’s good for the environment is often also good for the bottom line. The effort got a big boost Thursday when a local environmental liberal arts school, Green Mountain College, agreed to power its campus with cows. CVPS is working with four other farms to install methane digesters.

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With the election a few weeks away, a Who’s Who of Silicon Valley’s executive class is convening a “CEO Summit on Alternative Energy” Monday in San Jose. The confab is part of a campaign by a group called Silicon Valley Business Leaders for Alternative Energy to lobby Congress to reduce the United States’ dependence on imported oil.

Here’s what the group wants: federal incentives – read subsidies – to companies developing renewable energy technologies; policies to shield alt energy businesses from oil price flucations of the type that doomed the solar biz in the 1980s; promotion of flex-fuel cars capable of running on both gasoline and ethanol; and policies to encourage the development of plug-in flex-fuel hybrid electric cars and “practical” all-electric cars.

So far about 30 Silicon Valley CEOs – including the chiefs of Advanced Micro Devices, Juniper Networks, Palm and SanDisk – have signed the group’s open letter calling for such an agenda. Of course it goes without saying that Silicon Valley is experiencing a green energy boom, with big investments in biofuels and solar power on the line. Fair enough, given that Big Oil has certainly played the politics-and-tax-break game to its multibillion-dollar advantage for well high on a century.

Monday’s event at Novellus Systems will feature about 200 execs, academics, policy wonks and politicos like California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

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Pop quiz: What company is the biggest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the United States? a. Toyota b. Whole Foods c. Wells Fargo d. Halliburton.

And the green smiley face goes to …. Wells Fargo. The banking goliath has purchased 550 million kilowatt hours of electricity generated from renewable sources, according to a quarterly list released Tuesday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership program. Actually, Wells Fargo bought renewable energy certificates that will pay for 550 million kilowatt hours of wind energy, representing 42 percent of the bank’s electricity needs.

Green grocer Whole Foods came next, generating 463 million killowatt hours and 100 percent of its electricity needs from renewable energy sources like biomass, geothermal, small-hydro, solar and wind.

Given Whole Food’s alt corporate bent, that might not be too much of a shocker. But get this: The number one buyer of green energy in the nation are those hippies at the U.S. Airforce, which bought a billion kilowatt hours of electricity produced by biomass, geothermal and wind.

The EPA itself ranked No. 4, buying 100 percent of its electricity – representing about 330 million kilowatt hours – from renewable energy sources. The list of the top 25 green power buyers is here.

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