Gas from Iran

The Dawn reports that India may opt out of the Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipe line and instead opt for Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India as the prefered route. Clearly this is the 'quid-pro-quo' that is being spoken about by the US polititians. Appears that the great game and coercive energy politics is the way to go. I dont see the sense it makes from the Indian perspective, given the potential for nuclear generation.

D.E.S.I Power

Desipower is an innovative company focused on Alternative power generation in biomass rich rural areas across india.The brain child of Dr.H.N.Sharan the innovation is in the business model that involves local people in the process and thus provides employment and energy where it is most required. They already have aboue 30 plants across india including a 500 KW biomass based plant in Karnataka. More details are available here.

Shape of things to come - Dynamic pricing

Power companies in north america are now offering power at different rates based on load and peak demand. It is cheaper to consume power at off peak hours. This has led to gadgets that chanrge their internal batteries when the tarrif is lower and let you use it normally. The device, called GridPoint Protect, is the size of a small file cabinet and connects to the circuitbreaker panel. (The company also offers a lower-capacity version designed for homes, which costs $10,000.) A built-in computer powered by a Pentium chip will make intelligent purchase decisions, buying when prices are low, then storing the electricity for later use. That will make it possible to run your company during the workday with cheaper electricity that you purchased at 3 A.M.
Sounds familiar ? Every indian who can afford it has a UPS that does pretty much the same except that there is no diffrential tarrif and hence no intelligence required for the system.

sunlight concentrator from MIT

MIT reports that they have a new technique to concenterate sunlight using holograms. The main limitation of solar power right now is cost, because the crystalline silicon used to make most solar photovoltaic (PV) cells is very expensive. One approach to overcoming this cost factor is to concentrate light from the sun using mirrors or lenses, thereby reducing the total area of silicon needed to produce a given amount of electricity. But traditional light concentrators are bulky and unattractive -- less than ideal for use on suburban rooftops. Read more here.

The rise of the mutant radioactive wolves

An interesting fallout (no pun intended :) of the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown accident has been the return of abundant wild life to the area. The BBC reports that wolves and bears seem to have returned in large numbers. The article notes that The animals are radioactive but otherwise healthy !!! Life seems to have found a way.. though the idea of a mutant radioactive russian wolf may be too attractive for Hollywood to passover.

Limiting factors: Lunar Exploration

The US has announced ambitions plans to create a lunar outpost that will be a waystation in the exploration of Mars. Some details are here.
The crucial questions are how will they power it and where is the water. Human activity is constrained by the available water. The power source will have to be solar energy, but the moon has a peculiar problem in that except for the poles there are 14 days of sunlight followed by 14 days of darkness. The lunar "day" is 672 hours with 336 hours of sunlight followed by a 336 hour "night". Designing these solar power systems will be a magnificent challenge. The good bit is that the spin-off's of the technologies thus developed can be applied on planet earth to enhance our solar harvest..

The mathematics of energy

The physical universe is a lossy place. Most energy conversions are terribly wasteful in the scale the universe works on. The earth is a solar driven planet and probably consumes 0.0000000000001 % (I made up this number and it is probably an overestimate by a factor of a few billion) of the sun's output to function as a living planet. As small bits of self organized carbon living in a micro-energy system within this lossy macro-energy regime we don't have the luxury of using a fraction of the harvested energy and dispensing with the rest.

The key issues hindering PV adoption today are the conversion efficiencies and hence cost per watt. After all with the possible exception of geo-thermal energy, it can be argued that all forms of energy in this planet (Coal, Oil, Wind, Tidal, Solar et al) are derivatives of solar energy. All we are trying to do is to use the solar energy directly rather than wait for millions of years for the trees to grow, get converted to coal and burn it to produce electricity. I guess the term 'investment efficacy' will be appropriate in this context as the PV index which needs to be raised. The theme of this monograph will therefore be on strategies on raising the investment efficacy of PV and the downstream applications or what is more appropriately the solar application eco-system. Generation of energy is not an end in itself. There is a specific function that the energy is used for. With PV, Lighting seems to be by far the biggest application.Let me start by defining three basic rules of play.

1. The investment efficacy of any electrical system is a sum of all the efficacies at play.
2. Efficacy of a system can be raised by either a physics solution or a financial solution.
3. There are many ways to skin the cat. (More on this aspect in a future followup)

Having defined the basic universe in terms of its physics, the facts and the possible solutions to this problem can be stated and analyzed as below.

Level 1:
A BOM for a typical power system has

1. PV modules - 12- 15 % efficiency in conversion of radiant energy to electricity.
2. Charge controllers - 60 % efficiency in regulating and charging battery with input current.
3. Battery bank - 80 % efficiency in charge and discharge cycles
4. Inverter (optional) - 60 - 85 % efficiency depending power factor
5. Wires, switches and connectors - 95 % efficiency in conduction

As per convention, the average solar constant at sea level is about 1kW/m^2.
The typical setup illustrated above will generate the following

Assuming a system operating voltage of 12 V and a PV collector of 1 m^2

Output at PV module = 15% of 1 KW = 150 W
Output at Charge controller = 60 % of 150Wp = 90W
Output at battery terminals = 80 % of 90Wp = 72 W
Output at device (wire load) = 95 % of 72 Wp = 68.5W

In the collection and utilization of a potential of 1KW the average figure of usable electricity appears to be 69W ! The above calculation is simplistic and illustrates a typical rather than a best case. However it illustrates the pain point of PV, material science. With a start of chain efficiency of 15 % this is the best we can do.

The next factor is how efficiently the power thus gathered is used in a lighting context

6. Device efficiency - Incandescent - 5- 10 % , fluorescent - 40- 50 %, LED - 40 - 80 % (colour dependent)

so output of usable light = 6.9 W (Incandescent), 34.5 W (Fluorescent), 55.2 W (LED lamps)

There is no shortage of energy in this world, just shortage of good technologies to boost yields in harvesting and usage. If the best technologies in each of these areas are applied the following will be numbers

Level 2:
The efficiencies described below are possible with today's technology and not just speculation

1. PV modules - 30 - 50 %
2. Charge controllers - 95 %
3. Battery bank - 90 %
4. Inverter (optional) - 90 %
5. Wires, switches and connectors - 98%
6. Device efficiency - 85 % (assuming solid state LED lighting)

The same 1 m^2 harvest of solar energy will now yield 320.5 W of usable lighting. (More actually as we dont need inversion for LED lighting, however we can leave it at this for sake of an apples to apples comparison).

55.2W vs 320.5W !! A 580 % increase in system efficiency. And this is only 32 % total system efficiency (when measured against how much energy we are grabbing from the incident sunlight) which probably compares favorably with an IC engine.

When the efficiency of the system has potential for such dramatic rise, it is clear that an equal and opposite effect will influence the costing of such systems. PV at even 50 % of today's costs will increase adoption by about 10 times. So the effect can be self sustaining.

As this simplistic model demonstrated there is a lot more than can be squeezed out of PV today that can spur adoption. What is required seems to be a concerted effort to increase the efficiencies of all the components in the PV chain including the devices that consume the power. The smart money on PV should logically go after investments in efficiency optimization rather than something totally new. Raising downstream efficiency even in the lamps equates to using less PV per function. As the PV industry competes for raw material with much higher value products (like CPU's or memory chips) the less used for a given application, the better its salability.

VOSPAD - The benchmark for home LED's

Several years ago a german lighting designer started with the doing his pad up with LED's. The results are easier seen than described. Ofcourse LED's have come a long way since this and it is possible to better this with todays devices and reduce the cost. The site itself can be accessed here.

LRC elevator LED lighting

The LRC at NY (also the oldest technical collage in the US) has been testing LED based elevator lighting. The high intensity fixtures used now have a life span of 40,000 hours and consume 45 % less power than the existing lights. LRC hopes to commercialize the design soon.

Jean Paul Freyssinier, an LRC research assistant professor says “LEDs are an ideal light source for elevators because their rugged design can withstand the vibrations and motions of the cabin,” The six LED downlights required a total of 165 watts of electricity, compared with 300 watts for the original incandescent downlights, for an energy savings of 45 percent. The illuminance levels inside the elevator cabin were similar between each type of downlight. As an added benefit, the LED fixtures are expected to last 40,000 hours, or more than four years being on all day, every day. Compared with traditional incandescent fixtures in elevators, which operate between 1,500 and 2,500 hours, LEDs can provide cost savings for replacement and maintenance, says Freyssinier. And because LEDs typically do not fail outright (their light output slowly decreases instead), maintenance crews can plan for relamping, rather than having to respond to lamp failures as they occur.

A survey conducted inside the original and LED-modified elevators showed that passengers ranked the low-profile LED installation as consistently better in terms of visibility, comfort, color and attractiveness of the light.

Business Gyan

All pioneering businesses try to understand what the consumer wants and will pay for. In my own case we have taken opinions from various people who come to us or we meet. While some of the suggestions and feedback have been invaluble, bulk of the feedback is not based on their understanding of what we are actually doing or trying to do. IMHO it is probably a better idea to discard all but the most pertinent suggestions at the risk of discarding some genuine insights. Two quotes that capture this in a nutshell are below

Henry ford:
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse."

Alice (actually Scott Adams who has taught me more management than any MBA course via Dlibert):

What the customers want is better products for free.

Clean water from cow dung- Slingshot

Everyone knows that Dean Kamen is a real creative guy (remember the Segway) who is often far ahead ofthe rest of the pack. A new initiative by him in collaboration with Iqbal Quadir (of Grameen phone fame) aims to provide clean water from cow dung. The solution is a combination of a power plant powered by biomass (cow dung is one of the things that it can burn) and a water purifier powered by it. Trials are on in Bangladesh and the device seems to have an economic model as well.
As ever the innovation is in the execution. Quadir is also a visionary who buys into distributed power as a kind of democratic principle. Some quotes below.
Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.

"Isn't that better for democracy?" Quadir asks. "We see a shortage of democracy in the world, and we are surprised. If you strengthen the economic hands of people, you will foster real democracy."

Nanomaterials for clean Loo's

Even the most ardent environmentalist wants a clean bathroom and toiled irrespective of the actual process of getting a modern washroom clean. The plethora of chemicals and detergents used, the amount of piped water used are some of the constituents of your toilet cleaning power bills. Looks like the solution is around the corner.

Best Syndication reports:
Researchers from University of New South Wales, Australia, are working on developing a coating that may make cleaning bathrooms less of a chore.

The lead researchers Professor Rose Amal and Professor Michael Brungs of the ARC Centre for Functional Nanomaterials, are hoping to apply a coating of tiny particles of titanium dioxide to keep the toilets clean. Currently the titanium dioxide is being used on outdoor items like self-cleaning windows.

How it works is that ultraviolet light below a specific wavelength causes electrons to excite and this gives the effects of oxidation. This oxidation disinfects better than commercial bleach. It makes it better for sanitation as it is continually cleaning instead of waiting for the janitor.

To further keep the bathroom clean, nanoparticles kill microbes and remove organic compounds. The titanium dioxide contains ‘superhydrophilicity’ which makes it so liquid droplets do not form on the surface. It makes the liquid run off and washes as it drips off.

The researchers are faced with one dilemma for making the titanium dioxide coating to work indoors. The coating is activated by ultraviolet sunlight, and they need to be able to activate the titanium dioxide with indoor lighting. In order to make it work indoors, they are trying to modify the chemical compound by adding other elements like iron or nitrogen so it can use light of a longer wavelength.


Looks like all bathrooms will now have titanium surfaces with UV LED's initiating the cleanup based on occupancy.

Lighting Manufactures for a free and open market.

Patent issues in the LED space have been contentions and have been covered in this blog on several occasions. While genuine innovations can and should be protected, it is emerging that the Patent office is not qulafied to either understand or issue patents in this field. Color Kinetics and other such companies are constantly trying to patent broad concepts that are a kind of theft from the commons due to tons of prior art. An industry alliance has now be formed to take on this menace and protect real innovations from such predatory practices. Such practices will bring in GPL type licenses in this field as well. More details can be had here.
Previous posts that covered patent issues are
Patent Pending
Open standards, patents and society
Patents killing science ?
Small companies fight for a foothold in white LED sector

The art of war : Strategies on energy conservation

Sun Tzu who wrote the "The art of war" starts off by saying that the best general is one who can avoid the war in the first place. Hardly surprising that he was from China. Looks like the Chinese are still blessed with thinkers of the same mould, when you look at the energy conservation stratergies they have adopted. While they are investing heavily in power generation, they are following it up with increasing efficiency in consumption, starting with Lighting.

Silicon Valley's Robert C. Walker observes :

"China will be the first country to adopt the solid-state lighting revolution," Walker says. "You're going to see China first, the rest of Asia second, Europe third and the U.S. last in adopting that technology."

China's government has pressing reasons for embracing solid-state lighting, which in the West is still a fringe technology. Prime among them is the fact that LEDs will consume roughly 50% to 80% less energy than conventional (incandescent and fluorescent) lights. Rapid economic growth is already outstripping China's ability to supply energy. According to Wu Ling, the dynamic former medical doctor who directs the China Solid-State Lighting Alliance, a Beijing nonprofit organization that develops strategy for the government, 12% of electricity currently goes to lighting. Wu estimates that if over the next ten years LEDs were to take 30% of China's lighting market, then the saving would be 58 billion kilowatt-hours per year. She points out that that is almost as much as the yearly output of the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest power plant, under construction at a cost of $24 billion.

"Faced with a great shortage of energy, the government will push solid-state lighting," Wu says. And in China when the mandarins want something to happen, they have all sorts of ways of making sure that it does. Top-down strategies include financing, both direct and indirect. Wu expects Beijing's next five-year plan, to be announced at the end of October, to contain a major increase in spending on solid-state lighting R&D at Chinese universities and national institutes (up from the $17 million spent since the project began in January 2003). Wu estimates that $725 million has thus far been invested in China's domestic solid-state lighting industry. Some of this is private investment, but industry insiders believe much of the money has come from government banks in the form of soft loans to LED startups. Regulations--in both positive and negative forms--are another powerful lever. For example, officials can mandate that LEDs be used for certain applications, such as the illumination of tourist landmarks like Beijing's Tiananmen Square. Or, where the codes haven't caught up with technology, authorities can turn a blind eye to early adoption. Our conversations with the renewable energy bodies in India are encouraging but fall short of any real help :)

The Chinese government has also outlawed all non-LED based portable lighting in the mining industry as LED's can save lives dues to reliability.
All this makes one wonder why other developing countries haven't thought this through. Billions of dollars are borrowed and earmarked for power generation. Entire riparian ecosystems and cultures are destroyed to make way for these projects only to waste the power due to lack of vision. Sometimes i wonder if working toward a macro strategy is only possible in enlightened authoritarian setups. The yin yang juxtaposition is most clearly visible between the Asian giants India and china in such matters. Some sort of "Zen and the art of electric lighting". Way to go China!

Political Economics

Why does this ring so true ? ;-)

The primary requisite for any new tax law is for it to exempt enough voters to win the next election.

Look who is talking

The US president, in this annual address to the nation, has called for a reduction in US conusmption of imported oil. The light at the end of the tunnel is apparently something called 'better technology' which will make the oil economy thing of the past. Pardon my cynicism. Some initiatives seem to include

A six-year goal for making the alternative fuel ethanol practical and competitive, and vowed to fund additional research into ways to make ethanol not just from the commonly used corn but also from wood-chips or grasses.

The goal, he said, is to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

Critics doubted Bush ever really severed his ties from the oil industry and were skeptical he would put the kind of effort into conservation and alternative-fuel research they say is needed. His previous energy initiatives have had little impact on prices or supplies.

This is like Al Capone making a speech favouring prohibition. The president's connections to the oil industry are well known. While the ethanol factor looks good on paper, fact of the matter is that corn ethanol is a petrochemical based industry and not really renewable like Jethropa oil et al. Some of these factors have been explored here and here.

Open standards, patents and society

Our constant endeavors to create luminary products bring us in contact with others in the space who constantly harp on patents, registered designs and IP accumulation as the key to building value. While we will do what we have to do to grow the company a deeper look at the IP regime and information revolution that make all this necessary is called for.

The structure of a free market economy is fundamentally geared toward demand side. The supply side exists to predict and position functional, economical, socially gratifying products to meet this demand. This implies a surplus economy (enough capital for multiple entities to work at different approaches to the same problem) high purchasing power in the catchment. It also implies the ability to identify or create a need, design, execute ,test and distribute the same choreographed with a marketing blitz and awareness campaign. To me this is sociology at its finest. I sometimes think Kavin Care (of sachet shampoo fame) has better practicing sociologists than the JNU !

In such an economic eco-system abundant and cheap sources of power are a given. So is depth of market and geographical spread. All these factors are more or less natural and could have been found in the Souks, Santhai, Bazaars world over for millennia. The modern twist, a child of the industrial revolution, is the patent or exclusivity right that was created to protect the investments of innovators from the assault of the me-too manufacturers. As mechanized manufacture destroyed the artisan system of manufacture, some other institution had to enter the economy to substitute for the trade secret mechanism provided by the Guild system and to induce capital into the system especially in expensive stuff like open ended domain R&D. The competitive advantage of nations and corporations can be measured in what they are willing to gamble on creating a 'better mouse trap'. As the better mouse trap kills off the current mouse trap (and destroys somebody's business and investment) the system is a race to the bottom unless some protection is granted to the innovator. Hence a patent is a very socialist tool invented to protect innovation from less encumbered capital and in the end social progress in the technological mode.

The key obviously is to protect only true innovation and not create a tool that can be exploited cynically to profit off the innovations of others. This seems to be the current state of affairs due to the complete undermining of the US patent system (and the others as well) by a professional IPR lobby. The recent fiasco with the blackberry demonstrates how the granting of patents for things like software concepts, business models, life forms is retrogade and represents the victory of cowboy capital over the conventional socially bound capital. The GNU movement was all about this. It was indeed prophetic of Richard Stallman to predict this logjam decades earlier. While capital is the engine of civilization, the social context is its foundation. All information cannot be treated as equally patentable and prior art should be well researched before the grant of a patent. The qualitative definition of innovation will continue to dog patents, but ridiculous stuff can easily be culled. Also it is important to have open standards to balance the effect of patents. But for Linux, Microsoft will be much stronger today. We will have more blackberry fiascos.

Fortunately the space that we work in does have a lot of room for patents but mostly in the semiconductor material area (think gallium nitrate level of innovation) and the packaging area. The good part is that the luminary space has enough prior art to keep all but the most sound patents out (though people have tried to patent even heat sinking of LED's in luminaries, which is incidentally a mandatory requirement as per the lamp manufacturers specs :) There will be some genuine innovations in the luminary categorization space as LED's allow new forms of lighting to be conceived by their special characteristics. So while a stable and fair patent regime can genuinely stroke innovation, it is a lot better to have none instead of a flawed system that does the opposite.

Solar telecom solutions

One of the silent revolutions that has been taking place is the penetration of solar PV solutions for the police force. All state police forces have their own wireless radio network that is supposed to work across the state. The same is true of the state owned transport corporations etc. These bodies typically have their own repeating stations to re-transmit the signals across the state. These repeater stations are typically on top of natural elevations (devarayanadurga is a good example near tumkur) where grid power may or may not be available. Further the unreliability of grid power in such locations forces autonomous power generation.
What all this is leading too is that the cops are switching to Solar/Diesel based systems to run the stations. From the information that we have it appears to be very successful and they have to use the DG only during the worst of the monsoons to augment the solar setup. Admirable given the red tape in the system.

Limiting factors: 2nd level factors that no one thinks of

The advent of evacuated glass tube technology in Solar thermal installations got me thinking on the factors that motivated this change from copper. The real reasons for this are actually quite simple. The cost of copper. Copper has become so expensive that companies are looking at any options that can replace it. This got me thinking of how vital copper is and how our entire electrical infrastructure is completely dependant on this element. It appears that most of the industrial processes as well as installations will come to a standstill without copper.
The scientific americal has the following to say
Copper is used in everything from automobiles to ordnance. Copper allows electricity to be generated, transported and conducted to the various outlets in a modern home. Copper is also relatively scarce compared to other metals like iron or aluminum that make up a good portion of the earth itself. So copper serves as an excellent metallic bellwether for potential future resource scarcity, according to a group of researchers who compiled data on its extraction, use, recycling and discard to estimate whether there is enough copper available to make a developed standard of living available to all the world's people. The short answer is: no.


Read the rest here.

London Hospital gets LED floor & wall

A picture tells a thousand words. The tech specs can be found here.