Green Wombat

Powering Fuel-Cell Cars With Hydrogen Pellets

photo: PNNL
Will the car of the future be powered by hydrogen pellets? Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, are investigating the feasibility of using the chemical compound ammonia borane to store hydrogen. When heated, ammonia borane releases hydrogen gas that could, theoretically, be used in automotive fuel cells. PNNL scientists say an ammonia borane pellet weighing three-quarters of a gram can contain as much as 1.8 liters of hydrogen (for the metrically challenged, that's about half a gallon). The range of fuel-cell cars currently under development by Ford (F), General Motors (GM), Honda (HMC) and Toyota (TM) is limited by the amount of hydrogen that can be stored in bulky on-board tanks. Pop in a handful of hydrogen pellets into a small onboard reactor that would control the release of hydrogen, the thinking goes, and your fuel-cell car would have the range and performance of a conventional vehicle. "It’s somewhat hypothetical but we think it's something potentially doable," PNNL staff scientist Donald Camaioni told Green Wombat on Thursday. Presumbably such a reactor could also be used to generate electricty for home and commercial use as well.

The research is in its earliest stages, and the prospect of a hydrogen-pellet powered car is many years away, if ever. Camaioni says he and his colleagues have managed to release hydrogen from ammonia borane in the laboratory but two big challenges need to be overcome. One is figuring out how to control the release of hydrogen from ammonia borane through varying the temperature of a reactor. The other is to develop a system that can reprocess the spent pellets for reuse. "Right now there isn’t a well known way to do that cost- effectively, he says. Of course, if a hydrogen-pellet fueled vehicle is to be a carbon-free car, a no-emissions way of powering the reactor must be found as well.

IBM Moves into Carbon Consulting

With its Big Green initiative, IBM is parlaying its computing, data and networking expertise into environmental services. Green Wombat last week chatted with Peter Williams of the company's Big Green Innovations group, and Drew Clark of its Venture Capital Group, about Big Blue's burgeoning environmental business.

The company has its hand in everything from designing Stockholm's congestion traffic pricing system to deploying weather forecasting systems to help utilities better manage the electricity grid and make more efficient use of renewable energy like wind power. It's also creating data networks to monitor water quality and building better membranes for desalinization plants.

But Green Wombat was particularly intrigued by IBM's (IBM) move to add carbon consulting to its huge global business consulting operation. "We’re working with customers that want to take carbon out of their supply chain," says Williams, the CTO for IBM's Big Green Innovations group. "It’s like taking waste out of supply chain. We have a very large capability for computer modeling and we allow companies to optimize supply chains to take out carbon."

Demand for such services is being driven by competitive pressures to be seen as green as well as by all-but-inevitable caps on greenhouse gas emissions. IBM itself faces such pressures. "We had to submit a bid the other day where the customer requested the carbon content of our computers," says Williams, who works at IBM's offices in the Bay Area suburb of Danville.

Adds Clark, who is director of strategic insights at IBM's Venture Capital Group in Silicon Valley: "It becomes a competitiveness issue when everyone else is doing it and you look like the ogre of the block if you don't." He says the pressure is particularly intense in Silicon Valley, where companies like Google (GOOG), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW) increasingly compete on carbon. "There’s incredible pressure to toe the line here and be more proactive by reducing the carbon content in product design or whatever you do."

The presents an opportunity for IBM to help clients calculate their carbon footprint and then re-engineer their manufacturing processes, supply chains and other systems to minimize their contributions to global warming. The goal is to manage carbon just as a company would manage the cost of electricity, raw materials or any other aspect of its business.

Williams says the biggest demand for carbon consulting currently comes from retail and consumer goods companies under the gun from consumers to be green as well as by the pressure Wal-Mart's (WMT) is putting on its suppliers to make their products more environmentally friendly.

"There are some humongous pitfalls in working out carbon footprints," notes Williams. "There is no agreed protocol for calculating carbon footprints. You’re going to have people make all kinds of claims." He says figuring out the carbon content of transportation and packaging is comparatively easy while calculating the carbon content of an individual product "is a tough nut to crack."

Says Clark: "We think the added value is being able to integrate carbon accounting with the rest of your business. You manage your supply chain to a set of parameters and one of those is carbon. And of course as you get carbon trading coming in, businesses want to know what their carbon position is."

"We see it as a huge growth area," he adds.

Applied Material's Solar Machine

photos: Applied Materials
It's been almost a year since Applied Materials - the Silicon Valley company that is the world's biggest manufacturer of the machines that make computer chips and flat-screen video displays - announced it was jumping into the booming solar energy business. It was a natural fit - most solar technology is silicon based and the Applied (AMAT) machines that churn out video displays can, with a few modifications, produce thin-film solar panels. And tools used to make the chips in your laptop can be reconfigured to make wafers for solar cells. Applied's move into the solar market promises to lower the cost of solar electricity. How? By standardizing and improving the solar manufacturing process, much as the company did for the semiconductor industry, allowing companies like Intel (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to produce ever-cheaper chips that made laptops and mobile phones mass commodities.

So Green Wombat recently headed down the 101 to pay a visit to Charlie Gay, a solar industry veteran who runs Applied's Solar Business Group, for a Year One update and to take a look at the company's big metal. An avuncular exec, Gay began his solar career more than three decades ago at Boeing subsidiary Spectrolab. He subsequently joined Arco Solar and worked at its various incarnations and later served as director of the U.S. government's National Renewable Energy Laboratory. He recently chaired solar-cell maker SunPower's (SPWR) advisory board.

“Things are growing very rapidly, both for the solar industry as well as for Applied,” says Gay at the company’s Santa Clara campus. In the first quarter of the year the company forecast its solar business would sign $200 million in contracts in 2007. By the second quarter, it raised that estimate to $400 million, and last week during the third quarter earnings call, CEO Mike Splinter upped the ante to more than $600 million.

The reason for the optimism is Applied’s growing thin-film solar business. So far this year it has signed contracts to build thin-film production lines for half a dozen solar companies in Europe and India. Unlike traditional solar panels, thin-film manufacturing involves depositing photovoltaic materials on large and slender pieces of glass or flexible material. Though not as efficient at converting photons into electrons as standard solar cells, the promise of thin-film is that will be cheaper to produce. (Unlike thin-film solar startups like Nanosolar, which are developing  next-generation technology based on copper indium gallium diselenide, or CIGS, Applied's clients use an older amorphous silicon-based process.) "What we've done is lay out production lines for thin-film solar," says Gay. "One advantage we bring is integrating the tools with the production process in a solar factory." The aim is to cut the cost per watt of solar electricity by designing smooth-running and efficient factories.

Over at another Applied building I don a lab coat, booties and safety glasses - not quite the full-on bunny suit - and Teresa Trowbridge, an Applied senior manager in the solar group, takes me on a tour of the massive clean room where Applied builds its equally massive flat-panel manufacturing machines (photo above).  Sheets of glass as large as 7 by 8 feet (2.2 by 2.5 meters) are fed into the AKT Gen 8.5 and layers of semiconductors and circuitry are applied.  Once the machines are tweaked to handle thicker thin-film glass and a couple of other mechanical changes are made, they can use the same process to produce solar panels. 

CIGS thin-film would seem to threaten Applied's silicon-based thin-film market. But Gay says CIGS thin-film processes still use layers of amorphous silicon - layers that can be deposited by Applied machines. "It grows our market," he says of efforts by startups like Nanosolar and Miasole. Applied also makes tools that can be used in the production of crystalline silicon wafers for traditional solar panels. The company has not yet done any big wafer deals but Gay hinted that some may be in offing. "There's a real renaissance of solar," he says.

Sun's Green Data Center

photo: sun
Two weeks after the U.S Environmental Protection Agency warned that server farms could double their energy consumption over the next five years, Sun Microsystems today unveils a green data center that has resulted in a dramatic decline in electricity use. Deploying new server technology and state-of-the-art cooling systems, Sun (SUNW) consolidated its Silicon Valley data centers, halving the square footage while cutting power consumption nearly 61 percent. Although Sun reduced the number of servers from 2,177 to 1,240, computing power increased 456 percent, according to the company.

Last week Sun gave Green Wombat a sneak peak at its Santa Clara campus's next-generation data center.  Through virtualization - enabling one server to do the work of multiple machines - Sun slashed the number of computers in the data center and the heat they generate. Sun has invested in smart cooling technology to reduce the considerable energy the typically goes to cool  hot-running servers. For instance, in one data center room on the Santa Clara campus, servers are arrayed in long black pods called hot aisles. Hot air from the machines blows into the interior of the closed pod where it is captured by heat exchangers. (The visual effect of the stark white room and rows of black server pods is something of a cross between 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Borg.) In a traditional data center, each server rack might consume much as 2,000 watts and produce a lot of heat, says Dean Nelson, Sun's director of global lab and data center design services. The hot aisle server racks in contrast need just a fraction of that power. He points to displays in each rack that monitor the temperature of individual servers, allowing the network to distribute cooling where it's needed. As we head toward the exit, the noise level drops as the cooling system has been automatically turned off in those pods where servers aren't operating. "In a traditional data center the air conditioning would be blasting the entire center all day long," says Nelson.

If all this is good for the environment and contributes to the fight against global warming - the consolidation will eliminate 4,100 tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the company - it's even better for Sun's bottom line. By shrinking the square footage needed to house its servers, Sun avoided spending $9.3 million on new construction. Company executives say the investment in the new data center will pay for itself within three years. And by taking a load off the electricity grid, Sun earned a $1 million incentive payment from local utility Silicon Valley Power. Sun has also opened green data centers in India and the U.K.

Of course, the server and software company also hopes to sell its eco-data center solution and is launching "Eco Ready" services to assess and improve a data center's energy efficiency. "We're dealing with a lot of the same things as our customers," says David Douglas, Sun's vice president for eco responsibility. The company faces competition from IBM (IBM), Dell (DELL) and Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), all of which are increasingly marketing the energy-efficiency of their servers.

Douglas says Sun is continuing to explore other ways to further green its data centers. For instance, the polluting diesel back-up generators that most data centers rely on might be replaced by fuel cells - Sun's Silicon Valley neighbor Fujitsu last week began using a fuel-cell generator to power its data center - or converted to run on biodiesel. "They could be used in an emergency or during peak demand to take some of the load off the grid," he says.