Category Archives: Energy

What do HMNS, Superman, Stargate and steampunk have in common? Find out on May 25 at Comicpalooza

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If you’ve been to the Wiess Energy Hall recently, you’ll remember the energy music video that starts off with “Energy is all around us.” Energy is all around us. It’s in the news every day. It’s also a prominent feature in sci-fi, comics and steampunk.

For more than 45 years, we’ve had a certain Scottish engineer talk about the need to power his engines. The mighty Starship Enterprise was propelled across the galaxy by warping space around it using a matter-antimatter reaction. (Antimatter has the same mass as matter but is oppositely charged — positron to electron and antiproton to proton).

We currently use antimatter in Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans. While an antimatter reaction can give us 9×10^16 J/kg (note: dynamite is about 4.6×10^6 J/kg and a nuclear reactor is 5.6 x 10^9 J/kg ), it’s hard to bring into existence and even harder to keep around. In 2011, CERN was able to get about 300 anti-hydrogen atoms to hang around for about 17 minutes. While far less time than Dan Brown had it around for, it’s still a great achievement — especially since you can’t hold antimatter in a container made only of matter. You have to use a combination of electric and magnetic fields to make sure it does not go “boom.” NASA is looking into this as a propulsion system for interstellar transportation (possibly because rocket scientists grew up watching Star Trek), but it’s still far in the future.

Some of us have a fond memory of Rodney McKay yelling about the zero point module (ZPM) not having enough power to protect the city for long. (If you just got that reference, smile, because you are a nerd.) To get even more nerdy, there is such a thing as zero point energy. It is the least amount of energy a quantum system may have, or the energy produced when all is at rest. This is because of the wave-like properties of matter.  It’s also the reason that liquid helium will not freeze.

Is there a way to harvest all this background energy? Unfortunately, not yet. Because of the zero point in the minimum amount of energy the system can have, if you were able to take it away, the amount of energy would drop below its limits. In Stargate, they get around this by containing microuniverses in a handheld containment vessel and harvest the zero point energy from them (what happens when the ZPM runs out of energy? Is that universe dead?).

Sooper dpoper man

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s a solar-powered man!

Superman, one of the most iconic and archetypal characters, receives his power from our yellow sun (and in Miller’s Batman Returns, he can take it from sunflowers as well). Because he uses green fuel, he can lift cars, leap buildings, be directed by Zack Snyder, and get Amy Adams. If only this were true for everyone who goes green. *Sigh.*

It is nice to have a superhero, even from the ’40s, that is looking toward the eventual infrastructure shift to renewables. Just as Superman’s war against falsehood and injustice has yet to be completed, we still have to wait for the switch. Unlike fighting against Doomsday and General Zod, we can do things to help speed the switch over to renewables.The easiest thing is to use less energy. If you’re more adventurous, you could look into the tax rebate programs for buying solar panels.

Steampunk is perhaps the most focused on energy. It’s in their very name. “Steampunk” is a sub genre that focuses on having mechanisms only powered by steam. While most steampunks look back either to Victorian times (call ‘em Vickies) or to the post-apocalypse, we are still in a steam age.

Almost all of our electricity is steam-powered. Coal, natural gas plants, and nuclear power plants all create electricity by turning water into steam and having that steam turn a piece of metal around a magnet (albeit on a large scale).

It can be exciting to see how you would come up with a steam driven alternative to a lot of modern technology. How would you construct a large airliner if it has no electronics and could only rely on hydraulics? Personally, I always hope for a dirigible-like air ship in which to battle sky pirates, but that may just be me.

An institution that you may readily associate with both a comic convention and energy is the Houston Museum of Natural Science. Museums may have a reputation of being dusty old cabinets of curiosities, but not us. So drop by our booth at Comicpalooza on May 25 and see what we’re up to.

Everybody wants you: Why gas is so important and how you can drive down gas prices

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people-walking

What’s transparent, powerful, and something that we use in our everyday lives? Nope, it’s not the government, (though some people may think they control it). No, it’s not the Internet, although we’ll see in the coming years how the government changes that.

I’m talking about gasoline. Gasoline is a transparent liquid containing mainly hydrogen and carbon, and, when burning, produces mainly carbon dioxide and water. Americans use it every day to get to and from work and home, and to run all the errands of our daily lives.

Gasoline was one of the byproducts sloughed off at the beginning of the oil industry; back in the early days, kerosene was king. During the 19th century, kerosene replaced whale oil as the preferred fuel for lights, but as the automobile became popular and the internal combustion engine became common, gasoline became the preferred product of crude oil.  In the end, gasoline beat out hydrogen, coal, and ethanol as THE fuel source for the automobile.

Today America uses over 360 million gallons of gasoline a day. That means on average we each use more than a gallon of gasoline every day.

Why is gasoline the fuel of choice? The quick and useless answer is because it’s what we have. A lot of other fuels (hydrogen, coal, natural gas, ethanol, wood, etc) were tried, but gasoline proved to be easy to use, relatively easy to create, and energy rich. A gallon of gasoline contains about 132 megajoules (MJ) or 13 kilowatt hours. Ethanol is about 121 MJ/gallon.

What about coal?  Coal isn’t measured in gallons because it’s a solid, but 1 pound of coal contains 16 MJ (where a pound of gasoline is 22 MJ). So we use gasoline because it’s useful.

As we all watch the price of gasoline creep up and up, we all start to worry about it. When I first started driving, gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon. These days we see it jump past $4. Gasoline, which comes from crude oil, is a limited commodity. There is only so much on the market (84 million barrels of crude oil a day). Out of each barrel (42 gallons) of crude oil, 19 gallons of gasoline is made.

Out of each gallon of gasoline, about 11 percent of the cost goes straight to state and federal taxes. Eighteen percent goes into refining the crude oil into gasoline. The lion’s share (62 percent) goes into the cost of getting the crude oil.

Saying all that, the price of gasoline is still important. In fact, a lot of our fellow citizens thought it was one of the major issues in the election, even though the President has little power over the cost.

What can we do to drive the price down? There are many corporations trying to find alternative ways to make gasoline. We know coal can be converted to gasoline. In fact, we know a couple of processes that work. Why are we not using them? As with most things like this, the answer is in the economics. If you have the plant in place, it’s a very expensive process. If you don’t have a plant in place, it takes years to build one.  Hydrocarbons, like gasoline, can be created by feeding algae plastics, but that’s a bleeding edge technology and not near production yet. We might even be able to pull hydrocarbons from the air, like a good magician. British scientists have come up with a way to take carbon out of the carbon dioxide in the air, combine it with hydrogen, and BAM! make gasoline. But all that’s in the future.

What can we do to lower the price today? Simple: Buy less of it. Because there is a larger supply of gasoline available, the price will go down to reflect the change in the supply and the demand. Plan out your errands ahead of time so you can do them all at the same time and in an efficient driving manner. Use your legs and the nice weather (while we have it) and walk places instead of driving. Are there grocery stores in your neighborhood? Or a bookstore? Walk around and find out. Find out more ways to use less gasoline at ECC.hmns.org.

Add it up: Doing the math on electric cars

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Editor’s note: The opinions expressed by our contributing staff writers are their own and do not necessarily represent the opinions of the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

Electric cars are a popular idea. You see them in movies, hear about them in songs, and especially get to know them via inventive commercials. They claim that they produce no pollution, unlike their dinosaur automobiles with the internal combustion engines. But are they as green as they claim to be? (Note: For this blog I’ll be talking about pure electric cars, not hybrids.)

Doing the math on electric cars

A normal gasoline-using car produces pollutants as a result of converting fuel into movement. An electric car uses stored electricity to propel the vehicle. But how much pollution was created while creating the electricity? To compare the two, we’ll have to find some way to make gasoline and electricity equivalent. Fortunately, we can convert both to one unit: joules. While you might want to wear a jewel, a joule will help you get work done. A joule (abbreviated by “J” ) is a unit of energy. It’s the equivalent of applying 1 ampere through a resistance of 1 ohm for 1 second, or the force of 1 Newton over 1 meter.

A gallon of gasoline contains about 1,300,000,000 joules. One kilowatt of electricity contains 36,000,000 joules. So 1 gallon of gas produces about 36 kilowatt hours.

Burning a gallon of gasoline to move your car produces about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide. One kilowatt hour can produce different amounts of carbon dioxide, depending on what energy source was used to make it. In the United States, much of our electricity (about 42 percent) comes from coal-fired power plants. One kilogram of coal can produce 2 kilowatt hours and 2.93 kilograms of carbon dioxide. That’s about 3.3 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour, which means that 1 gallon of gas’ equivalent in electricity produces 118 pounds of carbon dioxide if all the electricity is made from coal-fired power plants. From this information, it seems that the internal combustion engine outperforms the electric, but not all electricity comes from coal.

While the majority of our electrical generation comes from coal-fired power plants, there are other energy sources. Thirteen percent of our electricity comes from renewables such as wind and solar power, which produce no carbon dioxide. Nuclear power gives us 19 percent of our electricity and produces no carbon dioxide, either. Using this division of power sources, the amount of carbon dioxide produced making electricity for an electric car has been reduced from 118 pounds to just 8. But what about natural gas?

Natural Gas is measured by the MMBTu (one million British thermal units), which is about 1,000 cubic feet (1 mcf). One mcf of natural gas produces 122 pounds of carbon dioxide and can produce about 29 kilowatt hours. Are you still with me? This means that natural gas produces about 4 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. So when we add that back into the mix, our electric car is producing about 9 pounds of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour. A gallon of gas is about 36 kilowatt hours and produces 20 lbs of carbon dioxide, or about half a pound of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour.

Does that mean that electric cars produce more carbon dioxide than ones that run on gas? Maybe, maybe not. All those numbers are based on the national average of the energy mix. If renewables provide more electricity in your area, the amount of carbon will decrease. If you get your electricity from an all-renewable company, then you’re producing no carbon. Also, this blog has only addressed the amount of carbon dioxide produced directly by energy sources. It has not included all the other pollutants produced. It has not included the entire life cycle of the energy source. For example, a nuclear reactor produces no carbon dioxide, but mining uranium is a very energy intense project. Wind turbines produce no carbon dioxide while creating electricity, but carbon dioxide is produced when they are built.

The amount of carbon dioxide produced by electric cars can be brought down easily, where the amount produced by internal combustion engines can not. yo could switch the source of electricity. You could take stored electricity and use it for you car. Because our grid is a stupid grid and not a smart grid electricity is put on the grid as needed. If there is a moment with high wind generation and a high need for electricity, then the amount of carbon produced decreases. If the wind stops blowing and the need is still there, then the more traditional sources kick in and the amount of carbon produced goes right back up.

So while an electric car, on average, may currently produce more carbon dioxide than a gas-powered car, depending or your location and your electric provider, your electric car may be producing no carbon dioxide. Also, while there is little hope to improve the internal combustion engine to eliminate the production of carbon dioxide, researchers hope to eventually eliminate the carbon produced by an electric car. So “Let’s take a ride in an electric car/To the west side in an electric car/How can you deny an electric car/Won’t you take a ride with me/Come on and take a ride with me!”

Taking only what we need: What The Borrowers can teach us about energy conservation

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Movies are always a great go-to conversation starter. Everyone has their favorite films and comfort movies to turn to when they’re down. But while you can generally get a group of friends to agree on whether a movie is well-made, it can be harder to get people to agree on a film they all want to see.

While my own taste skews toward the unique, the unusual and the unknown, there are some movies (and movie studios) that I go to again and again. It’s even better when I can take a good film and apply it to a real issue, like The Secret World of Arrietty, by Studio Ghibli, based on Mary Norton’s 1952 Carnegie Medal-winner The Borrowers. The award-winning Borrowers series (The Borrowers Afield, The Borrowers Afloat, The Borrowers Aloft, and The Borrowers Avenged) has been around for some time and has been continually adapted for the big and small screens, with the latest coming from the BBC this year and starring Stephen Fry.

For those unfamiliar, The Borrowers are a family of little people who live in between the walls and under the floorboards of the houses of us big folk. They are able to keep up a pretty enjoyable lifestyle by going out and “borrowing” things from the big people. They take only what they need, never enough to be noticed, and avoid contact with the big people. (In the books and films, Arrietty, the young, fearless daughter, has problems following that all-important final rule.)

Learning about energy conservation from The BorrowersWhile it’s probably not a good idea to “borrow” energy like the borrowers do (with no intention of returning or reimbursing what’s “borrowed”) the little guys do have a few insights into energy conservation.

Because the borrowers don’t live in a world designed for them, they are forced to plan out what they need and what they use. A borrower’s expedition into a vast big person’s house can be dangerous, so to minimize the risk, they plan ahead.

In contrast, big people like us seem to have an overabundance of everything and don’t tend to notice if a sugar cube or two is gone. And unfortunately, we like to treat energy the same way. We leave lights on in offices and homes. We leave computers running for days at a time. We plug in electronics that drain power even when they’re off. When it comes to energy use, big people need to think more like the borrowers.

First, we have to make a plan for what we need. There are a number of great places for energy literacy. A great place to start is our own Wiess Energy Hall and our Energy Conservation Club. Other places to borrow some energy literacy are the National Energy Education Development Project (NEED) and the Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration (EIA).

After you get a grip on what you need, you can figure out how much time, energy, and money you’ll need to get it. But before you resort to borrowing, there are some great resources for watching your spending. Turn off the lights and the fan when you leave a room. Unplug appliances that are energy vampires, such as the TV, video game systems, cell phone chargers, and coffee pots. Get a power strip and plug all the vampire appliances into it, so you only have one button to turn on and off.

When the borrowers borrow, they don’t take anything that will missed. You can do the same with energy rebates. There are incentives to help with renewable energies and getting energy-efficient equipment.

The borrowers live happy little lives. Apart from the dangers presented by the big people, they seem to want for nothing. They are able to use their intelligence and thriftiness to survive, and we should do the same.

You can learn more about energy conservation this Saturday, Oct. 20, by joining HMNS at Energy Day 2012, hosted Downtown at Hermann Square. Located in front of City Hall, Hermann Square will be bustling from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. with family-friendly fun and games, food and live music — all for free!