Pacific Standard July-August 2013 Cover

How Gallium Nitride Could Help Power the World

May 23, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
gallium-nitride

Umesh Mishra thinks day in and day out about power conversion—the trillions of adjustments in voltage, frequency, and current made daily to deliver electricity from wall outlets to computers, TVs, virtually any electronic device. And he thinks about the gadgets that do the converting, mostly built using silicon. Collectively, those converters waste nearly as much power in the form of heat as all the energy produced by all the renewable sources in the United States. On average, silicon-based converters are only 90 percent energy-efficient. The 10 percent that is lost dissipates as heat ... Read More

More like this: Business & Economics, May-June 2013
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The Deluge Continues

April 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
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East Africa’s largest economy is about to become a major oil producer, according to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. The U.K. oil giant Tullow estimates that Kenya’s Great Rift Valley area—known as the "Cradle of Mankind" due to the discovery there of the earliest known human remains—could yield 10 billion barrels of oil, enough to supply the country for three centuries. Production remains years away; officials first hope to build a $5 billion network of pipelines to the nation’s Indian Ocean coast in order to facilitate shipping to, notably, China, India, and other Asian countries. With ... Read More

More like this: Environment, The 101
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Germany Unplugs Nuclear Power, Doesn’t Plug in Anything Else

April 2, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment

Two years after deciding to phase out nuclear power, Germany's government just reported that it is still producing more energy than it needs. Europe's largest economy has suffered no shortfalls in electricity supply and quadrupled its energy exports to neighbors compared to 2010—before the phase-out. That's according to Germany's state statistical service. Before the drawdown, German nuclear plants represented 20-25 percent of the country's electricity supply. Solar and wind alternatives, meanwhile, are not yet online in sufficient force to take up the shortfall. The lights, however, have ... Read More

More like this: The 101
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The Energy Debate We Aren’t Having

March 5, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
Anti-fracking activists hold a rally outside a Democratic Party policy summit in New York in August 2012 to express their opposition to fracking to Governor Andrew Cuomo. (PHOTO: ALLAN TANNENBAUM/NEWSCOM)

BY RIGHTS, the events of 2012 should not have happened: for the seventh straight year Americans reduced their oil consumption, while for the first year since 1859, the U.S. increased oil production by more than 800,000 barrels a day. For 40 years Americans have fretted about our increasing thirst for oil, declining production, and consequent reliance on oil imports. Suddenly all that has been reversed. Inspired by high fuel prices for oil and gas, and new applications of fracking, (see “The Deluge” ) a drilling boom spans the country. Last year was really a dual victory: for ... Read More

More like this: Environment, March-April 2013
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The Deluge

March 4, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
(PHOTO: CHRISTOPH MORLINGHAUS)

OIL SEEPING TO THE SURFACE of the lazy Kern River, just north of Bakersfield, California, first caught James Elwood’s attention in 1899. The state was in the midst of an oil boom, and Elwood wanted in on the action. He rounded up a few relatives, got some picks and shovels, chose a patch of sun-baked earth near the river seep, and started digging. Forty-odd feet down, they switched to an auger, and punched down another couple of dozen feet. Oil—trapped in the stone’s pores for millions of years—began oozing into the crude well. The strike made the front page of the local ... Read More

More like this: Environment, March-April 2013
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Why We Should Drop the ‘Mad Max’ Metaphors

February 18, 2013 • By • Leave a Comment
A rare still from 'Mad Max: Fury Road,' with Tom Hardy in the role of Max Rockatansky

Here’s a drinking game: Sit down with some friends and talk about modern life and fossil fuels—supply, demand, embargoes, carbon, cars, batteries, whatever—and see how long it takes for someone to mention Mad Max. Ever since 1979, when an Australian ER doctor named George Miller and his friend James McCausland released a bootstrapped film about a bunch of gnarly drifters driving around looking for gasoline after the apocalypse, Mad Max has become the cultural reference point for fossil fuel depletion and the dystopia that ensues when “people don’t believe in heroes anymore.” ... Read More

More like this: Culture
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Why Can’t Obama Articulate His Energy Strategy?

October 31, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
energysources

When President Obama says his energy strategy is “all of the above,” I cringe. The statement is hardly inaccurate: pushing every kind of energy from nuclear to natural gas and oil to solar, wind, energy efficiency, and grid upgrades is exactly what he’s done during his term. What I dislike is that the president is missing an opportunity to tie all the stuff he’s doing into a grander strategy to decrease carbon emissions, give Americans control over their energy spending, and sustain long-term economic growth. “All of the above,” is using a lame-ish crutch where Obama could be ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Social Networks Degrade Political Thinking

October 24, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Plenty of research suggests having a strong, supportive social network has a positive impact on one’s health and well-being. But with an election approaching, it’s worth noting that this sort of interconnectedness apparently has a dark side. It seems to make us less-sophisticated thinkers, at least in the realm of politics and policy. That’s the conclusion of a study recently published in the journal Political Psychology. Researchers Elif Erisen and Cengiz Erisen conclude close-knit networks of friends and acquaintances apparently create “social bubbles,” which can limit “how ... Read More

More like this: Findings, Politics
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Could the Smart Grid Finally Do Some Good for Consumers?

September 26, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment
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Americans shop for viciously for bargains, whether it’s getting plane tickets from discount web sites or driving across town to save 30 cents on a tank of gas. But when it comes to electricity, we’ve been simply writing checks for the bills we receive at the end of the month. Few of us know how much we pay for a kilowatt hour, or how many kilowatt hours we use—or what a kilowatt hour actually is. Since the 1920s, Americans have paid flat regulated prices per hour for electricity. But de-regulated wholesale electricity prices now gyrate extravagantly from nearly zero at night to as ... Read More

More like this: Environment
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Plentiful Natural Gas, Get It While It’s Cold

September 10, 2012 • By • Leave a Comment

Back in May Bruce Dorminey outlined the potential benefits of tapping methane hydrates—a “frozen combo of methane gas and water”—as a major, and frack-free, source of natural gas that could provide beaucoup energy without as much of the climate-changing collateral emissions of oil and coal. The hydrates are usually found in deep, cold water or in permafrost, the challenges of working there being a key reason hydrates have been a pretty much untapped bonanza. Untapped, but not unknown. In 1982 the United States launched a program to study hydrates; a 1995 survey estimated the ... Read More

More like this: Environment, The 101
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