Race for alternative energy hots up
Japan car goes with the flow - on water
Straits Times 15 Jun 08;
The race for alternative fuels has become all the more urgent as oil prices soar in world markets, leading to protests and strikes in many countries. A look at the latest developments in three key areas of what may turn out to be the new frontier in energy usage.
Tokyo - Tired of petrol prices rising daily at the pump?
A Japanese company has invented an electric-powered and environmentally-friendly car that it says runs solely on water.
Genepax unveiled the car in the western city of Osaka on Thursday, saying that a litre of any kind of water - rain, river or sea - was all you needed to get the engine going for about an hour at a speed of 80km.
'The car will continue to run as long as you have a bottle of water to top up from time to time,' Genepax's chief executive officer Kiyoshi Hirasawa told TV Tokyo.
'It does not require you to build up an infrastructure to recharge your batteries, which is usually the case for most electric cars,' he added.
Once the water is poured into the tank at the back of the car, a generator breaks it down and uses it to create electrical power, TV Tokyo said.
Whether the car makes it into showrooms remains to be seen. Genepax said it had just applied for a patent and is hoping to collaborate with Japanese car manufacturers.
Most big automakers, meanwhile, are working on fuel cell cars that run on hydrogen and emit - not consume - water.
Hydrogen technology has been around for decades, but serious study of its use in cars is relatively new.
General Motors (GM) and Honda, like most other carmakers developing the technology, mix hydrogen gas with oxygen from the air in a device called a fuel cell to create electricity which drives electric motors.
Proponents note that hydrogen vehicles emit no greenhouses gases, unlike petrol-powered cars. They have a greater range than today's electric cars and can be refuelled faster than a battery can be charged.
Several car makers are also testing plug-in hybrids which could allow owners to plug the vehicle's battery into a standard wall outlet to recharge it. GM is developing such a vehicle - the Chevrolet Volt - which it hopes to launch in 2010.
And Toyota, the world's top maker of petrol-electric hybrids, announced on Wednesday that it would introduce a plug-in hybrid with next-generation lithium-ion batteries by 2010.
Lithium-ion batteries, commonly used in laptops and cellphones, can store more energy in smaller packages and are seen as crucial for extending the cruising distance of purely electric vehicles.
Reuters, Los Angeles Times, AP
California to get clean energy from 'sunflowers'
Straits Times 15 Jun 08;
The race for alternative fuels has become all the more urgent as oil prices soar in world markets, leading to protests and strikes in many countries. A look at the latest developments in three key areas of what may turn out to be the new frontier in energy usage.
Dimona (Israel) - On the scorched floor of Israel's Negev Desert blooms a field of 1,640 robotic mirrors that behave like sunflowers.
Slightly larger than ping pong tables and guided by a computer, the mirrors, called 'heliostats', turn imperceptibly to follow the sun and focus its rays on a water boiler at the top of a 60m tower.
Water inside the boiler turns to steam, which powers a turbine and produces electricity. The steam is then captured and cooled naturally so that the water, scarce in the desert, can be reused.
This futuristic assembly is Mr Arnold Goldman's scale model and testing ground for five larger solar fields his company plans to build in the Mojave Desert in California to supply as much as 900MW of clean energy to Californians over the next decade.
Mr Goldman, a 65-year-old Israeli entrepreneur, built the world's leading solar thermal power company, Luz International, in the 1980s, then watched it go bankrupt in 1991 as oil prices dropped.
Now he is a player again, and his comeback illustrates the extent to which thermal solar power is regaining favour with policymakers and investors.
His new company, California-based BrightSource Energy, signed a deal in April to deliver at least 500MW of solar energy to Pacific Gas and Electric - the largest power-purchasing agreement in the history of solar power.
As fossil fuels become more expensive, solar power is being sought after as a clean, renewable source of electricity. But harnessing the sun's rays has proved expensive and often inefficient.
BrightSource's chief executive officer John Woolard estimated that the new technology could cut the costs associated with solar energy by 30 per cent to 50 per cent.
The heliostats improve on previous designs and are cheaper to build and operate, he said. They also achieve a higher concentration of sunlight, higher temperatures - up to 537 deg C - and higher steam pressure.
'This is the highest performing, lowest cost solar thermal energy system in the world today,' Mr Goldman said at the inauguration of the pilot solar field on Thursday.
Los Angeles Times, AP
