Archive for August, 2008

Green Car Components

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

There are dozens of credible companies rolling out next generation cars. From the GM Volt, now barely two years away, to the start-up Tesla Roadster, the list of companies aspiring to deliver the next generation car is growing almost as fast as the denizens of newly minted green journalists rushing to cover their progress. But what about the components?

Three interesting companies provide a encouraging glimpse into progress occurring upstream of the finished vehicle, all of them working on ways to dramatically improve the performance of the internal combustion engine.

In Camarillo, California, Transonic Combustion is developing an engine that can allow “operating conventional reciprocating piston gasoline engines at ultra-high compression ratios.” Through a combination of innovations; advanced combustion chamber geometries, advanced thermal management, precise ignition timing, “revolutionary” thermal management and electronic valves, Transonic is designing an engine that will deliver extremely high fuel efficiencies.  Also significant, if they are successful, will be the ability of their engine to operate on fuel blends, including biofuels, at efficiencies superior to what they deliver when fueling conventional engines.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the automotive capital of America, EcoMotors International is developing an engine that also aspires to deliver extremely high fuel efficiency.  On their website’s home page, EcoMotors has a fascinating animation that shows their engine in action.  In this design, the engine cylinders lie horizontally, and each cylinder essentially has two pistons, one moving backwards and one moving fowards.  These horizontal cylinders are constructed in pairs, so that when one of them is in an expansion stroke, the other one is in a compression stroke.  The crankshaft is placed between the cylinders, and four sets of connecting rods turn the engine, one from the back of each piston, and one from the side of each piston that faces the crankshaft.  Because every motion generated by the power stroke inside these cylinders is offset by a countermotion in this perfectly symmetrical design, far more of the power generated by the fuel combustion is passed on to the crankshaft, and far less material is necessary to construct the engine block.  EcoMotors is a very interesting company.
post resumes below image

The Zajac engine - using conventional pistons
with an external combustion chamber.

Returning to California, this time to San Jose, Zajac Motors is pioneering what is perhaps the most interesting twist yet on the internal combustion engine, if they can pull it off.  The Zajac engine has removed the combustion chamber from the cylinders altogether, relying on an external chamber to burn the fuel, then through a complex set of electronic valves, releasing the gas into cylinders dedicated to the expansion stroke, and oxygenating the external chamber with a set of smaller valves that are dedicated to providing the compression stroke.  If the Zajac engine works, it will also provide a leapfrog improvement to fuel efficiency, at the same time as the use of an external combustion chamber will allow far cleaner burning.

The automotive world is being transformed today at a pace not seen since the dawn of personal transportation over 100 years ago.

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Posted in Green Cars, Vehicles | 1 Comment »

Renewable Stock Indices

Friday, August 22nd, 2008

We are pleased to announce a new feature on EcoWorld’s Investment page, the proprietary stock indices compiled by Mark Henwood, Editor of the financial blog Camino Energy. Since January 2006, Henwood has compiled data on pure play publically traded renewable energy companies, and now manages five perpetually updated indices - Renewable Electricity, Solar, Biofuel, LED Lighting, and Fuel Cells. Featured below is the latest of Henwood’s weekly commentaries - we expect to bring you much more from this unique and very useful resource:

Solar and LED-Lighting rise sharply, BioFuel Energy highlights risk and drags Biofuels down (week ending 8/15). Emerging markets, EAFA, and commodities (DJP) fell while the US market S&P 500) was flat.

While Biofuels is the fourth largest strategy behind Renewable Electricity, Solar, and LED-Lighting it highlighted a all too familiar risk for energy producers. Many energy producers seek to reduce their risk associated with volatility in commodity prices by entering into hedging strategies.  The key point of these actives is to reduce risk, not profit from speculative positions.   After all, the largest, professionally managed financial institutions are proof even the pros get burned by speculation and I certainly don’t want any sustainable energy companies I investing in engaging in speculative postions.

Apparently, even engaging in hedging involves a certain amount of skill.  If management doesn’t get it right the hedging strategy can wipe out the value of a company faster than the worst operational decisions.   BioFuel Energy (BIOF) is a case in point.  On Tuesday the company opened at USD 2.60/share.   After reporting at 12:46 pm that it had insufficient current liquidity to cover USD 46 million in hedging losses on corn contracts, roughly equal to its market value, the stock started plunging, 64% to close at USD 0.94/share.  While the stock rebounded some late in the week, shareholders lost 38.5% of their value for the week.  Coming after Aventine’s (AVR) February problems with the not so safe auction rate securities, I hope management of biofuel companies devote enough attention to their financial dealings to avoid crises.

Mark Henwood is the founder of Camino Energy, an information provider specializing in globally traded sustainable energy stocks.

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Posted in Investment | 1 Comment »

Watch for the Wrecking Ball, Kaleefornya

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Do you get the impression Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has reached a level of flippant frustration in his efforts to “fix Kaleefornya?”

The latest budget impasse may be the final, insulting reality that blew away any illusion he had that the nation’s most populous state, and one of the world’s largest economies, can be rationally governed.

His recent executive order to reduce state employees’ pay to the federal minimum wage level, and to lay off thousands of part-time state employees, might be an expression of peevish exasperation, but it does strike at the heart of California’s chronic budget problem, namely bloated staffing and overpaid government employees.

Not surprisingly, his actions were greeted with howling protests from the various International Brotherhoods of Public Treasury Pirates, i.e., public-employee unions, as well as by the mutiny of the state’s controller, a Democrat.

The largest union has filed suit against the governor in an effort to reverse his decree, and thus demonstrate, once again, that unions control state government, not the governor or anyone else.

Because Schwarzenegger was rushed into the governorship on the shoulders of voters disgusted with his feckless predecessor, Gray Davis, whom they had abruptly fired in a recall election, it was reasonable for Schwarzenegger to believe he had a mandate to repair state government - returning it to some semblance of fiscal sanity and honest representative democracy.

To that effect, he correctly identified the state’s fundamental problems and, through four initiatives placed on the 2005 ballot, sought voter approval of government reforms to address those problems.

To control spending, he wanted a line-item veto on the budget, something California governors had until 1983. He wanted an independent panel of retired judges, rather than self-interested politicians, to determine legislative districts, which are now unscrupulously drawn to secure sinecures for Democrats and some Republicans.

He wanted to improve the quality of education by improving the quality of teachers, awarding tenure after five years rather than just two. He proposed prudent budgetary restraints that would trigger spending cuts when necessary.

His ballot initiative to halt the growth of the outrageous public-employee pension liability by converting these pensions to defined contribution plans - like those in the private sector - was withdrawn under heavy fire from the public-employee unions.

He also supported efforts to curtail the devious practice of public-employee unions to make political contributions without the express consent of their dues-paying members.

Yet all of his ballot initiatives were defeated, and today, with the current budget impasse, and the usual partisan floundering in the Legislature, polls indicate the majority of Californians blame the governor. It is understandable, then, that Schwarzenegger might become grumpy and disillusioned with his job.

The real problem Schwarzenegger failed to identify was the neurotic capriciousness of California voters - a character flaw that makes them wholly unreliable in a struggle of the magnitude he was willing to lead. In 2005, he was counting on them to support his reform initiatives. He was disappointed.

Now, California has another budget lingering in limbo because Democrats and Republicans, the Shiites and Sunnis of state politics, cannot agree on how to address the irresponsible level of state spending that leaves California billions of dollars in debt every year.

The Democrats want to increase taxes and keep spending, which will ensure that the state maintains its position as the highest-taxed state in the union. Most Republicans want to reduce spending and not increase taxes.

That the state is seriously in debt is due to the profligate, irresponsible levels of spending that were established well before Schwarzenegger became governor. In the three years before he came to office, California state government increased its spending by 36 percent - more than double the rate of inflation and of population growth over the same period.

The most-favored recipients of legislated largesse are the state’s elected officials and government employees - the engineers of legal larceny. Thanks to the insidious symbiosis between these partners in piggery, public pay, benefits, and staffing continue to exceed prudent levels.

To accommodate its more than 200,000 employees, state government is riddled with redundancy, inefficiency and unnecessary bureaucracy.

With many of these employees eligible for retirement soon, funding California’s generous public-employee pension plans will become an even greater burden for California taxpayers to bear. Unscrupulous pension padding by some public employees only increases that burden.

All of this is what Schwarzenegger has tried to confront, but neither he nor any governor will be able to fix Kaleefornya alone. Sometimes things must totally collapse before they can be rebuilt.

I guess that is what Californians are going to let happen. Watch out for the wrecking ball.

Author Randy Alcorn is a columnist with the Santa Maria Times, where this editorial originally appeared on August 17th, 2008.  Republished with permission.

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Posted in Politics, Public Sector Reform | 2 Comments »

Biofuel in Colombia

Monday, August 11th, 2008

When economic interests have precedence over common sense: Since April 2006 our lawyer, Dr. Jose Pablo Duran Gomez, sued the Colombian government, demanding for more research be carried out on the production and combustion of biofuels to better understand, anticipate and mitigate as far as possible, the mechanical, environmental, social, economic and public health effects that these biofuels have and will have. The phenomena associated with biofuels are not well understood and even worse, ignored or underestimated, which have lead to recent and strong pronouncements from organizations such as FAO, World Bank, UN, EU and a significant number of environmental and human rights organizations throughout the world.

Despite a large number of international studies demonstrating risks and dangers associated to the use of biofuels, added to those that appear every day worldwide, Judge Matilde Lemos Sanmartin, ex-fifth Administrative Judge of Bogota, said that “the evidence presented is insufficient,” and thus refused the request of more and deep studies, ignoring the precautionary principle and the legal mechanisms followed to obtain these studies, mandatory when the discussion is so important for the citizenry and the country, what can be applied to many other Latin American countries.

It sounds like she does not read newspapers or hear the news. Curiously, our demand was the last judgement signed by Lemos Sanmartin before being promoted to Judge of the Administrative Tribunal in the Arauca Department.

In Colombia there were only 2 studies on 8 automobiles, which anyway show that ethanol harms some components, especially in older carburetor cars, more than a half of the colombian vehicle fleet.

It is ironic that while in countries like Germany, large automobile manufacturers, have decided to reduce the proportion of ethanol blending from 10% to 7% because of the damage it can cause to their vehicles and have postponed until 2009 the usage of ethanol, in Colombia the government is trying to accelerate the process to force an increase in the mixture, raising the minimum to 20% by 2012 and starting with 12% in the period 2009-2010. There are no vehicles in Colombia that can withstand these mixtures, and even if the new cars are made with the required specifications, nothing is said about the possible mechanical damage to nearly 5 million vehicles currently circulating in the country, which demonstrates improvisation and irresponsibility about the topic.

By the other hand, the Health Secretary of Bogotá reported for 2007 an increase of more than 1700 cases of acute respiratory illness in children under the age of 5 years old, only in this city, with respect to 2006. These cared-for cases are linked, probably, to the increase in the concentration of tropospheric ozone caused by the higher volatility of gasoline when it is mixed with ethanol, which leads to a greater amount of volatile organic compounds, VOCs, in the atmosphere, which due to photochemical reactions, produce this and other pollutants hazardous to health, such as ozone, nitrogen oxides and acetaldehyde.

This increase, about 6% compared to 2006, is surely much higher taking into account that many of those affected children have no access to health care system and therefore these cases of morbidity and mortality are not recorded. Moreover, is also necessary to include other risk groups such as elders and those already suffering lung disease, throughout the country; this increase should be carefully evaluated, global warming and climate change can not be the unique and magical explanations for these phenomena, the colombian government must do everything that is feasible and humanly possible to address this situation.

The increase in food prices, of which Colombia is no an exception although the government affirms otherwise, is only the visible tip of the iceberg, perhaps the most painful of the problems that if not widely studied, monitored and controlled, can lead in the nearby to very serious consequences as has happened in Malaysia, the third CO2 donor in the world due, in large percentage, to african palm monoculture.

Nothing is mentioned by the colombian media about the imposition of an environmental quality stamp by the European Union to palm oil exportations from Colombia due to the negative environmental effects caused by the clearing and burning carried out to sow sugar cane and african palm, low-paid work in harsh conditions, the forced displacement and crimes committed in relation to the appropriating of farmlands, with the only exception of a paid notice in which the stamp is presented like a generous gift for all of us from palm oil sowers.

Unfortunately, there are many more unwanted consequences; in the medium and long term we can expect more forced displacement and killing of peasants, changes in the use of farmlands, desertification, pollution of soils and water, economic and technological dependency, impoverishment of large population groups, concentration of farmlands in the hands of large economic groups and corporations, severe ecological damage due to intensive use of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, to name just a few unwanted results of this “boom.”

Ethanol contains a third less energy than gasoline, so vehicles travel less kilometers per gallon, however around 800 gallons of water are needed to produce one of ethanol. The search for new energy sources is necessary but we can not simply change some pollutants for others, affording the risk of creating more serious problems than those to be resolved; all efforts to fully understand the whole consequences that the production and usage of this biofuels are necessary and urgent.

We will not relent in our efforts to demand that ethanol and oil palm production be carried out with human and social sense, and not only commercial objectives like what are happening right now in Colombia. Biofuels should be seen as a temporary and partial solution, not as a total remedy. We do not consider acceptable nor secure the omission of serious and conclusive studies in order to protect economic interests that hardly benefit persons other than the owners of this profitable business; we will appeal to all possible instances in Colombia and abroad to force that precautionary principle be applied in order to protect ourselves and future generations of irreparable damage which could result prohibitively expensive in terms of environment and public health.

C. Fernando Marquez M.
Executive Director
Colombian Society of Motorists S.C.A.
http://www.sca.com.co

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Posted in Biofuel, Ethanol | 1 Comment »