Photo: Sauter Carbon Offset Design

As you may have heard me say before, it’s hip to be green.  Well that has taken on new meaning with the emergence of more eco-friendly yachts.  Finally, you don’t have to feel guilty while cruising around in your oceanic palace that costs more than Central America’s collective GDP.  Even a medium-sized yacht (so weak) can rip through several hundred liters of diesel hourly.  Not to mention the electricity needed to power the jacuzzi(s) and sauna(s) would be enough to light up Mozambique for weeks.

But fear not noble sea dwellers!  Paracas Yachts 158 foot model, aptly named the Paracas 158, attempts to address both these pesky energy issues.  It should be capable of running all of its refrigeration, air-conditioning, lights and more for over a week.  I’d break down the engineering for you, if I understood it.  Basically, uses the water it passes over to generate power to run the engines and charge lithium-ion batteries (it’s really all about lithium these days, isn’t it?).  Bottomline: an afternoon at sea can charge the batteries, and you’re only ultimately sacrificing 3-5% in speed- yacht racers take heed.  All this for for a paltry 22 mil.

Now if you really tryin’ to ball hard, maybe the 256 ft Ark Angel (so baller it requires italics) from Bali based company Sauter Carbon Offset Design (pictured above) is the watercraft for you.  It uses the same giant pendulum technology they put in super tall buildings to keep them from swaying.  It costs $100 million, and with the aid of a giant kite it can cut the emissions in half.  Commercial vehicles, like refrigerated cargo ships are also trying to hop on this green boating revolution bandwagon (trademark pending).  K I’m out of space, thanks for reading!

Get more in the April 30^th-May 6^th edition of The Economist

Photo Credit: Konrad Summers

A long commute to work isn’t just time consuming (not to mention frustrating!), it’s bad for the environment, but a new Superbus being created by Dutch developers at the Delft University of Technology aims to cut down your commute. An added bonus? The prototype looks like a cross between the Batmobile and a stretch limo.

Featuring gull-wing doors and 50-feet chassis, the Superbus boasts a top speed of 155 mph and is capable of carrying 23 passengers. The goal of the six-wheel Superbus is to merge the flexibility and convenience of traveling by car with the comfort and speed of traveling by rail.

“The strength to the concept is that the Superbus can drive everywhere where a normal bus can drive. It has adjustable height, rear-wheel steering and a turning circle of roughly 10 meters,” says general manager of the ambitious project Wubbo Ockels. Ockels adds that he and his co-developers are imagining a network of “super tracks” (basically dedicated two-line highways connecting cities) running alongside traditional road networks, so the Superbus could switch between the two according to the passengers’ destination.

“At the moment we have a prototype,” Ockels says, referring to the electric vehicle which was recently on display at the 2011 World Exhibition of the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) in Dubai. “The next phase is an industrial prototype and the third level is the actual implementation.”

Ockels and his team began the project—which uses technology developed in Formula One racing and the aerospace industry—in 2004 and it has cost a whopping $19 million to date. Ockels is hopeful that Dubai’s “visions of sustainability” will result in a pilot project and says a production model would be significantly less expensive ($2.9 million). If the Superbus becomes a reality you can bet it will make green news headlines.

Read more at CNN.com.

Photo: Mercedes-Benz

Hybrid cars are nothing new.  In fact, Toyota has now sold more than 2 million models of its revolutionarily Prius since 1997-its best seller in Japan.  Toyota’s luxury division, Lexus, recently unveiled a fleet of seven new hybrid models and the company expects hybrids to account for a fifth of it’s sales in Europe.  The demand for lower emissions vehicles has other luxury brands scrambling to get their own models into production.  Ian Robertson, marketing director of BMW notes “society and governments want to move towards zero emissions from cars.”

In ten years up to 80% of premium cars will be by hybrid engines.  At least that’s the vision of Carl-Peter Forst, CEO of Tata motors, which owns Land Rover and Jaguar.  But as luxury brands are becoming keen on hybrids, volume-car companies have their sights locked on the electric market.  Mr. Robertson speculates, “we’ll see batteries advance more in five years than they have in the last 100 years.”  Good news for consumers who want to be able to drive down the block and have enough range on their whip to make it back home.

Hybirds, whateva.  Electics cars, those are aight.  But what about fuel-cells?  That’s right, I’m talkin’ bout hydrogen.  And Thomas Weber, Daimler’s director of research and development knows what I’m sayin’.  He says they’ve managed to reduce the price of fuel-cells systems enough so that whenever Germany, or maybe even California, set up the world’s first hydrogen filling stations, they’ll be ready to roll.  What’s more, he reckons that it wouldn’t even cost more than a network of electrical charging stations.

More in the March 12^th-18^th issue of The Economist

Photo Credit: Sven

Coupled with skyrocketing fuel charges, the levies on carbon-spouting planes to be imposed under the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) have airlines worrying about the cost of not going green. All airlines operating in the EU will be expected to cut emissions to three percent below the average annual figure for the period between 2004 and 2006 from 2012, and by an additional two percentage points in 2013.

Further emissions will require trading in additional permits, and this bit of green news has prompted airlines like Lufthansa, Ryanair and Easyjet to begin talks with Solena, an American producer of aviation biofuels. Earlier this year it was reported that Australian airline Quantas is working to build a commercial-scale aviation biofuel plant on the outskirts of Sydney with the same company. Solena is currently hard at work building a similar plant in London. The plant is slated to produce around 16m gallons of biofuel a year from 2014.

So why has Solena been at the forefront of green news lately? The company has avoided some of the problems that have plagues production of crop-based varieties by making biofuels from waste. Aviation biofuels will need to meet a laundry list of technical and commercial specifications: they must fit a lot of energy into a small volume, remain liquid at -50°, come in chemically identical form all over the globe and mix well with (and improve or at least match) the efficiency of those fuels.

Aviation biofuel technology isn’t cheap, but the industry is beginning to view biofuels as a way to get around tighter environmental regulation, bad PR and rising fuel costs.

Read more about biofuels at The Economist.

Photo Credit: Chris McKenna

Once revolutionary, hybrid cars like the Prius are now ubiquitous, and the latest in green news has railway engines adopting that same technology. Everyone now knows that the Prius saves fuel—when the driver breaks, the car stores the lost kinetic energy in the battery, to be used later when the driver hits the accelerator—but it took Toyota 13 years to sell the Prius to customers as the technology of the future.  The builders of railway engines are the latest to be convinced of the Prius principle.

Following in the footsteps of carmakers, builders of railway engines are trying to combine internal-combustion engines and electric motors to save fuel. Says Peter Rieger of MTU, a German engine-builder, “Development is so advanced now, that we use it, too.” The key difference is that locomotive-builders have had to construct their hybrid engines as packages able to replace the original motors of existing machines, while the carmakers were able to design new vehicles (like the Prius) around their new technology.

Japan, like with cars, is leading the way in green news. After a three-year trial, privately owned railway company JR East recently announced plans to introduce ten diesel-battery hybrid railcars. The system—the first fleet of hybrid diesel multiple units—is predicted to reduce fuel consumption by 10% and also to be a great deal quieter.

Although the European car industry was slow to catch on to hybrid technology, the same cannot be said about the European rail industry. For example, MTU has developed a hybrid engine-gear package able to simply replace a conventional motor. MTU’s engineers added an electric motor and a special gearbox to combine the output of both engines; all of the components are built into a frame, which fits into the space occupied by the old engine.

Hybrid trains do encounter the same problem as hybrid cars: the added weight of the batteries. This doesn’t pose as much of an issue for locomotives, however, as they need a certain amount of weight in order to cling to the rails. According to Klaus Hiller, who is in charge of hybrid locomotive technology at the German branch of Alston, the batteries still need to be light because locomotives are meant to carry the weight of people, not of batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries, which have made their way into the latest generation of electric cars, may provide a solution to the weight problem. These batteries aren’t without faults, however. They last about five to seven years—compared with a train’s average life of 30 years—and some question whether they are tough enough for the rails. As a result, Alston is trying out nickel-cadmium batteries while GE is testing sodium and iron-chloride batteries.

Emission regulations for railways have been tightened recently in Europe and are poised to become stricter still, so this problem is sure to remain at the forefront of green news. From 2012, diesel trains will have to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides by 39% and of soot by 88%, and hybrids might be the only way to do so.

Read more about hybrid locomotives at The Economist.

Photo Credit: Alexandre Duret-Lutz

Tyson Foods is the largest meat company in the world, and animal fat is their waste product. Instead of selling their animal fat to producers of cosmetics, soaps, and animal food, they are partnering with Syntroleum Corporation and turning their animal fat waste into renewable fuel, this is some green news to smile about.

In order to turn the animal fat into fuel, the fats are hydrogenated producing a pure but synthetic hydrocarbon, which is chemically identical to diesel. In addition to the fact that it is renewable and made from waste, the diesel derived from animal fat does not contain the harmful compounds that petroleum has, like benzene, which is an airborne carcinogen when burned. The renewable diesel also produces 58 to 80 percent lower greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum diesel.

Other raw materials are being made into renewable fuel as well, however animal fat has an advantage over these other materials. Animal fat is cheaper than vegetable oil to refine and to purchase, and the animal fat used is non-edible so it doesn’t divert any sort of food into energy like soybean-based biodiesel does. Hopefully we will see animal fat being used to replace some of the diesel supply!

to read more click HERE

Photo Credit: Ashton Teske

San Franciscans have done it again.

The city has done well to maintain its place in the vanguard of the environmental movement and is home to some of the world’s most innovative environmental legislation and initiatives. This time, the San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors President, David Chiu, is proposing that by 2010, 20% percent of trips taken in San Francisco should be done by bike, which is more than double the current rate.

Chiu’s inspiration for a bike-friendly San Francisco transpired from a recent trip to the Netherlands, where alternative transportation policies are successfully promoted. While there is a huge fraction of the Dutch population who own automobiles, they don’t drive their cars each and every time they leave home.

Are San Franciscans ready to exchange their four-wheels for two? Perhaps we should address the fact that there are certain advantages in the Netherlands, (notably a flat landscape), that are contrary to the many undulating hills covering San Francisco. Chiu and the team from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition have thought this through, however, and are proposing a campaign called “Connecting the City.” The plan envisions building a series of separated bike ways that create physical barriers between vehicles and bicycles. In addressing the hills, the plan also talks of creating automated ”bike lifts” to help cyclists up steep hills and of building an over-water bike bridge to connect Fort Mason and the Marina Green.

Clearly, implementing this project would require some serious funding and dramatic changes to major traffic passages. While the cost of the project has not yet been determined, the city already has plans to spend about $25 million over the next five years, to build new bike lanes and add more on-street bike parking. The benefits of the 20% goal would be improved health for our city dwellers and major decrease in emissions from traffic congestion. With this new plan, urban cycling would not only become  safer and easier, but would be absolutely mainstream. The morning and evening rush hour of cyclists would start to replicate what can be seen in the Netherlands- not only the young, ultra-fit athletes in spandex we are accustomed to seeing today, but people of all ages using bicycles for everyday transportation.

To read more, click here.

Photo by Steven Depolo

In an effort to lighten up rush hour, remind people their cities could be a little friendlier, and make a statement about preserving the Earth, sit back and relax in a small park. That is, a metered parking space that has been transformed into an ephemeral green oasis. Just don’t forget to pay the meter.

This is what urban designers, bike advocates, shop owners, and artists have been doing all over the country. Take any parking space, feed the meter. Cover the asphalt with sod or Astroturf. Border your park with as many potted trees, plants, and flowers as you can find. Leave room for beach chairs or park benches. And wait.

The pictures, from Los Angeles to Oakland, show a subtle yet significant result of this kind of parking. Suddenly, the street is not an ocean of pavement, a vast and unfriendly urban environment. Suddenly, there is room for people, not just cars.

The social impact these parks have is clear. Cafes and bookstores become more inviting, the space between the sidewalk and the street becomes more clearly defined. It’s remarkable that things have come this far- that our cities have become so car-centric that we need a few creative renegades to remind us that people, not cars, are what matters. But it’s a cool, light-hearted reminder- and it’s fun.

Photo Credit: GE

This fall, drivers will start to see two new electric vehicles on the road.  The Nissan Leaf and Chevrolet Volt are in a position to gain popularity and kickstart the conversion to electric vehicles.  To help the process and make steps towards sustainability, General Electric just announced plans to purchase 25,000 electric vehicles for its extensive fleet.

GE has a global fleet of close to 35,000 vehicles and stands to make money off the deal while taking a step in the right direction.  Since GE manufactures some of the infrastructure (charging stations, home kits) it would only make sense that they have some electric fleet vehicles.  The initial purchase will be 12,000 vehicles with a pledge to convert half of their global fleet by 2015.  The Chevrolet Volt will be the first main order, with other vehicles being bought as manufacturers offer more electric options.

This is the largest electric vehicle commitment ever made.  With purchases like this, and the positive PR that comes with it, it can give the manufacturers more money to develop the technology and offer more electric options for the general public.  Let’s just hope that more companies follow suit.

To read the whole article, click here.  Or check out GE’s Electric Car Video Series here.

Photo Credit: Nissan

What’s this? A fully electric car that is affordable, runs like a gas-powered automobile, and looks relatively normal? I don’t believe it…

Well, believe it! Nissan is set to release one of its newest models, the Leaf, in December. The leaf is a fully electric car that will soon be available to mainstream consumers. Not only is it electric, it is the first fully-electric vehicle released by a major auto-maker.

The Leaf is a front-wheel drive vehicle with five doors and fits five passengers. It can reach a speed of 90 miles per hour and has a range of 100 miles per charge depending on conditions and other variables. To charge the vehicle, you simply plug it in and wait for it to finish. It will take about 8 hours to fully charge the battery, and will likely be done overnight. As infrastructure grows, Nissan expects charging stations to develop and eventually flourish. Furthermore, the vehicle will come with a portable trickle charger that can be used for low-volume charges in emergency situations.

The Leaf will be listed at $32,720; however benefits from states and the federal government make it even more affordable. Some states are constructing free charging stations along their highways to accommodate the new vehicles. Other perks include a $7,500 federal tax credit, $2,500 dollar cash rebate if you live in Tennessee, and a $3,000 home charging unit from the Department of Energy.

With 20,000 Leafs reserved, the first fully-electric car made by a major auto-maker seems to be off to a good start. Hopefully other companies will see the benefits of producing such a vehicle, and follow in Nissan’s innovative footsteps.

To find out more, click here.