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.

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.