Super-powered battery breakthrough claimed by US team Researchers claim their technology could shrink the size of batteries by 10 times while offering the same power A cross-section of the battery reveals the 3D-design of the research project's anodes and cathodes 17 April 2013 A new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles. The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful. It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech. However, safety issues still remain. Details of the research are published in the journal Nature Communications [ http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v4/n4/full/ncomms2747.html ]. [...] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22191650
Heavy equipment operators at an oil sands mine near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada. Jerry Cleveland / The Denver Post
A first-hand report from an anonymous worker on Canada's controversial oil pipelines
April 26, 2013 4:25 PM ET
Editor's Note: In recent months, many climate activists have focused their efforts on Canada's tar sands [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands ] and the companies set on extracting fossil fuels from them. With the debate raging louder than ever, Rolling Stone is in contact with one of the workers helping to build a pipeline to bring oil from the tar sands to the U.S. Read on for that anonymous correspondent's first dispatch from one of the world's most controversial jobs.
There's something in the air in Fort McMurray, Alberta – and it's not just fumes from the massive oil sands processing plants north of town. Spend enough time here, and you'll pick up the pungent scents of machismo and money.
This is the heart of Canada's controversial tar sands operation. If all goes as planned, this region will soon be sending its bitumen – the sticky, black petroleum byproduct colloquially known as "tar" – down the Keystone XL Pipeline. President Obama has yet to give the contentious project the green light, but work in the oil sands shows no sign of slowing down any time soon.
The region has 80,000 permanent residents, and hosts about 40,000 temporary workers at any given time – welders, pipefitters, heavy equipment operators, technicians, engineers and other hired hands who pass through Fort McMurray as the work ebbs and flows. I joined them this winter when, after hearing stories about Fort Mac for years, I signed on to help build a massive pipeline (not the Keystone XL). I was eager to see the tar sands for myself, experience life in Fort Mac firsthand – and, let's be honest, I wanted to make some oil money, too. I'm writing this story anonymously to protect my friends, my colleagues and myself.
Much of the work here relies on ice roads and freezing temperatures, so when spring comes, the work ends. The obvious irony is that the carbon economy itself is very likely contributing to the early springs, late winters and wacky weather that keeps interrupting our work.
Few in northern Alberta seemed to notice when thousands gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest the Keystone project in February. Instead, everyone was talking about the southern extension project coming up later this year, and the 14,000 jobs it would bring.
The recent rupture of an Exxon pipeline in Arkansas, spilling tens of thousands of Canadian crude, made some noise here. But most chalked it up to "bad timing" –folks are quick to point out that the pipeline in question was installed in the 1940s, and my foreman assured us that Exxon would "make sure everyone is taken care of." The prevailing logic seems to be that if you throw enough money at a problem, it'll go away.
People come from all over Canada to cash-in at "Fort McMoney." Entry-level laborers can make $400 or $500 a day after wages and the generous union-sanctioned living allowance. Even so, employers are constantly struggling to fill positions. There is simply too much work, and not enough people to do it.
Everyone here seems to have money – even the local McDonald's pays $14 an hour to start – but few people act like it. Eighty-six percent of Fort McMurray households reported incomes over $100,000 last year, and a whopping 25 percent of households brought in more than $250,000. Still, you don't see a lot of luxury cars or designer clothing up here. Instead, the local status symbol involves a massive 4x4 truck and lots of toys in the garage.
Despite all the money in town – or maybe because of it – Fort McMurray has plenty of problems. Figures from 2007 show the city had 215 percent more drug offences, 117 percent more impaired drivers, and 89 percent more assaults than the provincial average. I've seen enough during my short time here to know that booze, blow and bar fights remain common. It's easy to spot the company trucks as they sit in parking lots outside bars for hours every night; I wasn't on the job for a full week before my first coworker was fired for alleged DWI.
Most people go out to bullshit, drink beer and watch hockey – but the combination of alcohol and amped-up testosterone can be toxic. Some of the younger guys (and, yes, a few of the older ones, too) like to fight, so bumping into the wrong person or looking at someone the wrong way can be all it takes to send fists flying.
Cocaine isn't hard to find – all you have to do is walk into a bar and ask, "Where I can get some coke?" and someone will likely have the answer. There's no need to whisper in this town; you might as well be asking "Where's the rest room?" or "Who's playing tonight?"
You don't even need to go inside to get your fix. Drugs are readily available on the sidewalk at one rather notorious convenience store, and dealers sit in their vehicles outside grocery stores and tire shops in the middle of the afternoon.
Most oil sands jobs require pre-employment drug testing, so detox kits are readily available for those who need to, you know, study for the test. But every oil company has a different policy: Some let you use previous test results if you're coming directly from another job, while others are more diligent, and insist new hires take a fresh one. You're essentially good to go (and free to do whatever you want in the little time you have off) after your initial test, unless your employer requires re-tests every so often. I myself never did take a drug test, but I was one of the few who managed to slip through the cracks.
One of the big oil companies, Suncor Energy, tried to introduce random drug testing last year, but the labor union stepped in, saying random tests violate workers' rights. The judge agreed, but Suncor maintains random tests would increase workplace safety, and notes that three of its seven worksite fatalities since 2000 involved drugs or alcohol.
If you get into an accident on the job – whether you cut your finger or back your truck into something – you have to take another drug test. (The unions don't contest this one.) As a result, a lot of accidents go unreported, since many workers would rather suck up their injuries than risk flunking the pee test and losing their job. The slip-ups that do get reported are written up and become fodder for the next day's pre-shift meeting.
Each workday begins at 6:45 a.m. with the daily safety meeting. The foreman opens with what we refer to as his comedy routine, reading incident reports from the day before while we snicker at the stupidity involved. (A typical incident might have someone cutting a finger and needing stitches because they weren't following procedure; my favorite was when someone in a company truck rear-ended a company bus.) We all laugh about it, but safety is a major issue in this line of work, and we all know the dangers. We've had a few close calls ourselves, and another pipeline project made news in March after someone on the test crew made a simple rookie mistake and wound up dead.
Work starts immediately after the morning meeting, and we do our respective tasks until 5 p.m. on a good day – later on a bad day. The days can be long, tedious, and cold – the mercury dips below -20 F in the winter – but the paychecks are worth it. People work a variety of shifts depending on what they do for which company; I myself work six days a week, sometimes seven. Days off are for catching up on sleep and/or nursing hangovers.
My crew is a mix of fresh-faced younger guys and older, well-seasoned vets. Female workers are rare, but not unheard of. Meanwhile, everyone seems to have a plan, whether it's "work a few months, then take a few months off," or "work 'til this job's done, then head to the next."
Broken marriages are one of the oil boom's many casualties. Sometimes women come here with their husbands, only to leave a few months later. The long hours and Fort Mac lifestyle aren't for everyone. One company newsletter quoted an employee saying it was his goal to "outlive both of my ex-wives."
Many couples come here on what's known as "The Five-Year Plan." Take, for example, a husband and wife team from Manitoba: They're both in their forties and have a nice house back home, but they rented an apartment in Fort Mac a few years ago in hopes of accelerating their retirement. Here, they both make more than $200,000 a year – she drives an enormous, Tonka-like truck that hauls 245 metric tons of bitumen at a time, and he's a shift supervisor – and their respective salaries are far more than what they could ever earn in Manitoba, combined. Like many others, they plan to do this for five years, then cash out. Whether they stick to that schedule remains to be seen. It's easy to get addicted to the money, and lots of five-year plans turn to 10-year plans in Fort Mac.
No one on my crew plans on being here for the long haul. After months of early mornings, long days and northern isolation, we're all itching to go home – or maybe to Vegas to blow off some steam. Fort Mac isn't really home for any of us. It's a paycheck, and a nice, big one at that. Whether working here is the right thing to do for the environment, well, that's a whole other question.
Environmental organization 350.org [ http://350.org/ ]'s name was inspired by the growing threat of climate change from rising CO2 levels. Scientists have argued that atmospheric CO2 levels must be reduced to 350 ppm [ http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2008/TargetCO2_20080407.pdf ] to prevent disruptive climate change.
Scripps recently launched a Keeling Curve Twitter account [ https://twitter.com/Keeling_curve ] to provide daily updates on CO2 measurements from Mauna Loa.
When I saw “Pandora’s Promise [ http://pandoraspromise.com/ ],” I didn’t believe a word of it. I served as a submarine nuclear engineering officer for my four-year stint in the Navy years ago. I qualified as an Engineering Officer of the Watch (a guy who’s in charge of the plant and its other technicians during four-hour shifts) on two different sub reactors. I know the truth about reactors, and the movie replaces it with the demonstrably false Nuclear Dream, a just-so mythical story claiming that nukes are safe, clean and cheap.
Then when I viewed the video interview [ http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/23/jim-hansen-presses-the-climate-case-for-nuclear-energy/ ] of climate scientist Dr. James Hansen conducted by the movie’s producers, I got mad. Here is an esteemed academic telling us that the next generation of nuclear plants is passively safe, so we should build some. But how does he know? He’s not an expert on nuclear power; outside of climate science, he’s just another person with an opinion.
The movie also illustrates that none of its five layman “converts” to pro-nuke views knows enough about nuclear plants or other energy solutions to evaluate them fairly. They only know the Nuclear Dream.
For instance, author Stewart Brand [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand ] tells us that thinking even 10,000 years in the future is “science fiction,” so we should just forget about sequestering long-lived waste for 240,000 years. That’s fatally irresponsible.
Now to the Hansen video. Untrained and inexperienced in nuclear engineering, he nevertheless claims that so-called Generation III reactors will be passively safe. If electrical power is lost, they will simply cool down on their own. Maybe. Maybe not.
Worse yet, no one ever built a demonstration AP1000 nuke plant to prove they really are passively safe. Small demo plants often reveal design errors that can then be corrected before full-size plants are built. Without one, we’re investing $24 billion without knowing whether these four plants will ever work as promised. How rational is that?
Last, the ultimate inherently safe reactors the nuclear industry wants to build are the same liquid sodium fast breeder reactors that can explode or melt down. Good luck with that.
So I urge you, don’t believe “Pandora’s Promise,” James Hansen, or the nuclear industry. Their views are false, one-sided, and so contrary to reality that it is fair for me (now a Ph.D. social psychologist and journalist) to call them delusions — shared, motivated distortions of reality.
I have a Ph.D. in physics, which included nuclear physics courses, but I have never imagined that this training makes me expert on nuclear power. Therefore I consult regularly with some of the top nuclear power experts in the world. When I write something about nuclear power, it is based on good science, which cannot be said of the piece by Miller that you published.
I discuss the potential contributions of nuclear power in a paper that I am writing now. Miller did get one thing right: I am motivated — by a love of the life on our planet and a desire to pass that on to future generations.
When you accept the opinions of nuclear experts at face value, you neglect to read the evidence. Truth comes only from evidence, not expert opinions, because experts disagree. So your view is anti-scientific. Your experts believe in the Nuclear Dream, a motivated delusion that nuclear power is safe and cheap. They ignore the evidence I provided.
It is clear that the Generation III AP1000 reactor has not been proved passively safe, because nobody ever built a prototype, which is contrary to the decades-long precedent in nuke construction. It's easy to see that a plant designed to go without power for three days was not designed to withstand the eleven-day power outage at Fukushima.
Moreover, the "inherently safe"reactors the nuclear industry ultimately wants to build, sodium-cooled fast breeder reactors, are clearly not safe. "Fast Breeder Reactors," by Waltar and Reynolds, 1981, gives convincing evidence that liquid-sodium reactors melt and may explode. You can read safety chapters from its 2012 update, "Fast Spectrum Reactors," on Amazon.
You say my review doesn't follow "good science," yet I cited evidence, including a Neils Bohr calculation. You cited none. I was trained as a nuclear engineering officer. You weren't.
Unless you can prove with evidence that what I said is untrue, then you have no standing in this discussion. Outside of climate science, you're just another guy with an unsubstantiated opinion.
Dr. John Miller @NuclearReporter Aug. 16, 2013 at 3:29 p.m.
Luis Zavala, left, and Jose Gazo install SolarCity photovoltaic panels on the roof of a house in San Leandro, Calif. Thor Swift for The New York Times
Lyndon Rive, a founder of SolarCity, said he wanted to do "something that could solve some of the environmental challenges we're facing." Thor Swift for The New York Times
Jeffery Leeds at home in El Granada, Calif., said the solar panels were a mistake. Thor Swift for The New York Times
By DIANE CARDWELL and JULIE CRESWELL Published: January 3, 2014
The first inklings of the idea came to Elon Musk and a cousin in an R.V. heading to the Burning Man festival in 2004.
Solar energy, they agreed, could be big.
But not even Mr. Musk, the billionaire behind the Tesla electric car, could have foreseen the solar power craze that is sweeping Wall Street. He and his cousins Peter and Lyndon Rive are riding a wave of exuberance over the industry and their young business, SolarCity.
The company — the nation’s largest provider of rooftop solar systems, with more than 80,000 customers — has not made a dime. And, frankly, no one quite seems to know when, or if, it will.
But SolarCity has captured investors’ imaginations and become a potent symbol of a stock market ascent that makes the vertigo-inducing heights of Twitter seem tame. SolarCity’s share price, which closed at $59.27 on Friday, has soared more than sevenfold since it went public, and the company, which did not exist eight years ago, is valued at roughly $4.9 billion.
Depending on whom you talk to, the rise of SolarCity and similar companies is either a sure sign that solar power is finally having its day or that yet another mania has gripped the markets. Two other companies, SunPower and SunEdison, have also exploded in value. In all, an estimated $13 billion was invested in solar projects in 2013, a tenfold increase since 2007, according to GTM Research, which tracks the industry.
Solar companies have had the wind at their backs lately. The broad stock market is coming off its best year since 1997 — the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index rose nearly 30 percent in 2013 — and the shares of many young companies have leaped from one high to another.
But few have been hotter than SolarCity, in part thanks to the Musk mystique surrounding Tesla Motors, itself a market darling.
This much is certain: The stock market has been very good to Mr. Musk, 42. On paper, his wealth quadrupled in 2013, to more than $5.5 billion, reflecting his stakes in SolarCity and Tesla. As chairman of SolarCity, he has little day-to-day involvement in the company.
“It’s the easiest job I have, that’s for sure,” Mr. Musk said in a telephone interview. “Most of what I do is show up to hear the good news.”
Still, SolarCity and its ilk face formidable challenges. It is trying to outrun rivals in a race to transform the power industry. Utilities are furiously working to undo the incentives that have fueled the solar industry’s growth. A generous federal tax credit is set to shrink in a few years. It has attracted the attention of regulators, who have questioned the way it values the rooftop systems.
And, because of its stock price, it must continue to feed Wall Street’s appetite.
“The market expects them to grow really rapidly for a while — there’s no other way that that price makes sense,” said Shayle Kann of GTM Research.
But there have been signs of growing pains. In interviews, former employees describe a high-pressure environment that went into hyper-drive when the company went public in December 2012. Complaints to the Better Business Bureau of misleading marketing and flawed installations, along with negative reviews on social media forums like Yelp, appear to be rising.
SolarCity says its employees as well as most of its customers are happy, and that its ratings have remained high. But the bad reviews have attracted the attention of Peter Rive, one of SolarCity’s co-founders and its chief operations officer. He regularly responds to the criticisms on Yelp.
“Any negative review that we get, be it through Yelp or through our own customer satisfaction survey, I take very seriously,” Mr. Rive, 39, said, adding that nothing he had seen indicated that service was deteriorating, despite the rapid growth. He delves into complaints, he said, “just because it bugs me — every single time somebody has a negative review I want to understand” the root cause of the problem.
SolarCity is not the first venture for the Rive brothers nor for Mr. Musk, who made a fortune as a co-founder of PayPal. The Rives were working at a computer services company that Lyndon Rive had started with another brother, but he was getting antsy.
“I wanted something that would be long-lasting,” Mr. Rive, 36, said. “And something that could solve some of the environmental challenges we’re facing.”
Mr. Musk suggested he look into solar.
The Rives, and a handful of others, decided not to simply sell solar systems. Instead, they pioneered a way to sell the energy itself, making SolarCity almost like a newfangled utility.
SolarCity and competitors like Sunrun, Sungevity and Vivint install rooftop systems for little to no upfront payment and then sell the electricity for prices below what customers pay utilities. Though greeted with skepticism at first, the service has proved appealing to customers who want solar power but do not have the cash to buy a system outright.
SolarCity will not predict when it will make a profit. In fact, executives argue that the losses are a good thing. “Losing more money means we’re investing more capital and creating more value,” Robert Kelly, SolarCity’s chief financial officer, said.
But as the company tries to expand and show robust growth, signs of customer dissatisfaction have emerged.
“This is the biggest homeowner’s mistake I have ever made,” said Jeffrey Leeds of El Grenada, Calif. With an electric bill running up to $450 a month, Mr. Leeds turned to SolarCity in 2012.
But last fall, he owed his utility $1,300 — more than double what he expected. SolarCity told him he must have used more energy, but Mr. Leeds said “absolutely nothing” had changed about the way his family lived.
SolarCity and Mr. Leeds agree that his overall costs were lower, but disagree on how much. Mr. Leeds said he saved $200, the company said about $575.
Regardless, he said, “that’s not the sort of money I thought I would be saving.”
SolarCity said Mr. Leeds’s case was unusual, affected by a complex design, a persnickety inspector and unusually foggy weather. Most customers are satisfied, it said; the rate of complaints has remained steady even though the company now signs up a new customer about every three minutes of the workday. Executives see little standing between them and the one million customers they want to reach in four years.
As a result, Mr. Musk says the company’s stock price is too low.
“People do not understand the magnitude of the business,” he said. “It’s really very, very significant.”
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