Thanks Graphite

Green Thursday - TGIT Thank Graphite It's Thursday

We are always blaming the sixth element Carbon for all of the world's woes. Today I will thank this basis of life element for it's contributions. We all know diamonds are a girl's best friend and diamond is pure carbon. Gabe, one of the first subscribers to my blog, knows just how expensive that glistening form of carbon is, as he prepares to ask his beloved's hand in marriage While I could opine at length on diamonds is is the other forms of carbon that do have a great possibility for our great green world.

Carbon might give us the world fastest microelectronic devices. A single atomic layer of carbon or Graphene as they call it may provide the world with super fast chips that perform well independent of the temperature they operate at. http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=4L35OEZ4NNYU4QSNDLSCKHA?articleID=206905544

Graphite is also used as a lubricant and as part of a composite material made from carbon fibre that will be used on the very expensive and high performing Tesla electric car as a light weight super strong material. In these forms as graphite carbon actually saves energy by lowering friction as a lubricant or lowering the mass of the vehicle and therefore improving the energy efficiency of the vehicle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite

Some good news from the National Renewable Energy lab. They have developed a photovoltaic cell on flexible substrates that is 19.9% efficient. Here is the press release from the NREL

NREL Thin-Film Solar Cell Achieves Record Efficiency
The prospect for alternatives to crystalline silicon solar cells brightened considerably on Monday, when DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) announced that it has created a thin-film solar cell with a record efficiency. NREL created the solar cell from thin films of semiconducting materials made from alloys of cadmium, indium, copper, and selenium, or CIGS. The cell achieved a record thin-film conversion efficiency of 19.9%, that is, the cell is able to convert 19.9% of the sunlight hitting it into electricity. Although solar cells have been built with much higher efficiencies using expensive processes a multiple layers of semiconductors, the more common crystalline silicon solar cells have achieved at most efficiencies of 20.3%, which is quite close to the NREL achievement with the thin-film CIGS solar cell. CIGS solar cells involve applying a thin film of semiconductor material to an inexpensive substrate such as glass, plastic, flexible foil, or stainless steel. See the NREL press release.

The news is always filled with doom and gloom and the British based El BBCera (the most anti US news organizations in the western world) has reported that in Britain they had this day called E Day or energy day in order to attempt electricity savings by the public at large. Sadly no electricity at all was saved despite the publicity. They claim the day was colder than normal and this might have caused an increase in electricity usage. Just goes to show 60 million Britons cannot change a light bulb. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7270218.stm

The word of the day is acrid or bitter tasting or smelling. It's root is from the latin word acer for sharp. The feeble attempt in the UK on E Day proves that they are not the sharpest tools in the shed.

acrid \AK-rid\, adjective:1. Sharp and harsh, or bitter to the taste or smell; pungent.
2. Caustic in language or tone; bitter.
There was burning jet fuel everywhere. Acrid, black smoke billowed across the water.-- Simon Worrall, "The Night the Sea Burnt", Independent, July 6, 1997
He rips off another match, lights it, and uses it to light another cigarette. He shakes out the match, takes a puff, letting the acrid, unfiltered taste burn the back of his throat. Kris Rusch, Hitler's Angel
The goal of sequencing the human gene set has been the subject of acrid debate among biologists.
Philip J. Hilts, "Head of Gene Map Threatens to Quit", New York Times, April 9, 1992
Paz's outspoken criticism of Cuba's brand of socialism placed him increasingly at odds with his colleagues. It led to a prolonged, sometimes acrid feud between him and the more left-leaning Fuentes.--
"Octavio Paz Mexico's Literary Giant, Dead at 84", New York Times, April 21, 1998
Acrid comes from Latin acer, "sharp."

Thank Gandhi

Green Thursday TGIT – Thank Gandhi It’s Thursday

This week’s blog is about a co-worker named Sudhir. Sudhir is originally from India and that is why I am thanking Gandhi for this week’s episode. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi Sudhir and I were talking at the water fountain about energy and the environment. Unlike me who only blogs about energy, Sudhir has taken action. He has put his money toward being green. He has installed a 4.2 kilowatt PV system on his roof of his home in Redwood City California. The 4.2 kilowatts is the gross capacity expressed in direct current (DC). The capacity expressed in alternating current (AC) is 3.8 kilowatts. The system became operational last August and ever since Sudhir has been a self generator of electricity. PG&E our local utility has installed a smart meter at Sudhir’s home that measure energy consumption or generation in both peak and off-peak periods. Peak period energy is much more valuable than off-peak energy so the utility credits Sudhir much more money when his system is generating power at 2 pm of a weekday when the grid is experiencing peak demand. At midnight on a Sunday, electricity has much less value.

As solar radiation is at it’s peak in the early afternoon Sudhir has actually generated more power during the peak periods than his home has consumed during the same peak period. Over the past six months Sudhir has spun his meter backward by some 480 kilowatt hours during peak electric demand periods. During off-peak periods over the past six months Sudhir has bought 4,275 kilowatt hours from the utility. Sudhir is a well off person with a rather large home for the bay area having some 3,000 square feet of living space in his house. His mother as well as his wife and kids live in this home. He instructed them all to run the dryer and dishwasher in off-peak periods so that his PV system is generating the maximum amount of energy to the grid during peak periods and he is therefore receiving the maximum credit from PG&E. The energy he buys during off-peak periods is much less expensive and so it makes economic sense to shift his power load to off-peak periods.

Sudhir is also a smart investor. He has calculated that his after tax rate of return for the system based on a 25 year life and modest inflation rate of 3% in PG&Es’s electric tariff, he should enjoy a 7.3% internal rate of return. This is better than 11% before tax and given the low risk of his investment he has invested wisely. It is quite likely the PG&E tariff will increase far faster than 3% per year and his rate of return will correspondingly increase with higher inflation rates.

Our friends from across the pond at BP have an interesting web link that helps folks determine the quantity of energy they can generate from photovoltaic systems. BP produces and sells such systems. All one has to do is set the size of the system and provide your ZIP Code and viola the BP calculator gives you the expected net generation of the system. http://www.bp.com/solarsavings.do?categoryId=8052

Yahoo had this article that a diesel BMW 5 series had better gas mileage than a Prius on a 545 mile trip from London to Geneva. Well any good thermodynamics student would have predicted this. First diesel has more energy content per gallon than gasoline. This is because diesel has a higher specific gravity than gasoline and there are more pounds of diesel in a gallon than there are of petrol (the English word in the article for gasoline). Diesel engines are also more efficient than gasoline engines and on the 545 mile highway trip from London to Geneva the Prius would hardly have used it hybrid battery system except to stop a few times for food, fuel and going to the restroom. Diesel has 130,000 BTU/gal (US) versus 115,000 BTU/gal (US) for petrol. This equals 155,880 BTU/gal (UK) for diesel an 137,890 BTU/gal (UK) for petrol. The BMW got 41.9 MPG and the Prius got 41 MPG on the 545 mile trip. Therefore the BMW consumed 13.01 gallons (UK) of diesel or some 2,027,556 BTUs while the Prius consumed 13.29 gallons (UK) of petrol or some 1,832,928 BTUs. The Prius is the winner on the basis of lower real energy consumption for the trip

The word of the day is acerbic or sharp in temper. I have become acerbic ever since I learned that the Wall Street Bonks gave their brokers over $30 billion in bonuses two months ago and now the Feds have to bail them out. acerbic \uh-SUR-bik\, adjective:Sharp, biting, or acid in temper, expression, or tone. But more than that, he is a social critic, and an efficient one, acerbic and devastating.-- Benoit Aubin, "Quebec's King of Comedy", Maclean's, August 27, 2001Since I started out as a writer many years ago, I have built a reputation as an acerbic, mean-spirited observer of the human condition.-- Joe Queenan, My Goodness: A Cynic's Short-Lived Search for SainthoodJoey gained a reputation as a smart aleck adept at delivering acerbic one-liners.-- "Joseph Heller, Author of 'Catch-22,' Dies at 76", New York Times, December 14, 1999Acerbic comes from Latin acerbus, "bitter, sour, severe, harsh."Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for acerbic

Thank Gadolinium

Green Thursday TGIT Thank Gadolinium It's ThursdayBet you folks think I made up the word Gadolinium. I did not! it is one of the elements in the periodic table. It's symbol is Gd and it has atomic number 64. Kind of like client number 9 it is a powerful element but going away. It is a rare earth and its big use was in phosphors for tube TVs. This use will go by the way of the buggy whip. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GadoliniumUnfortunately this week I cannot chat for too long as my wife had a full knee replacement surgery. This is a revision to the first full knee replacement as the kind surgeon named Dr. Woolf botched the first one. He thought he was Gadolinium but he was nowhere close and my poor wife is paying the price for his mistakes.Enough about knees let's talk energy and about our friend the lightest metal in the periodic table. before you non chemical type shout aluminum, the lightest metal is Lithium. The Economist had a very useful and complete article on lithium batteries and there hope for improving vehicle efficiency by hybrid drive systems. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10789409This article is well worth reading and provides additional information on the research being done to make Lithium Ion batteries nor ignite.Oil prices exceeded $110 a barrel this week and premium gasoline is almost $4 a gallon here in Northern California. The subprime crisis will have all the yuppies driving subcompacts and this is good for the country.Sam Bodman our Energy Secretary has to be the dumbest chemical engineering graduate as he is still on the celulosic ethanol band wagon. At least the Romans had fuel while Nero played his fiddle. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeroActually the fiddle was only invented 1,000 years later than the fire in Rome so he was not playing his fiddle he was fiddling the books or something like that. The word of the day is rodomontade a synonym for pomposity and pomposity did not come from Pompeii the other Italian city that suffered a disaster. The governor of the great empire state was a master of rodomontade and the mover of mountains until he hit unlucky number nine.
rodomontade \rod-uh-muhn-TADE; roh-duh-; -TAHD\, noun:Vain boasting; empty bluster; pretentious, bragging speech; rant.
These are rejoinders born out of a need to deflate a balloon filled with what others view as pomposity or rodomontade.-- Corey Mesler, "Dispatch #1: Buying the Bookstore (The Early Days)", ForeWord, August 2000
The very absurdity of some of his later claims (inventors of jazz, originators of swing) . . . has made him an easy target in a way far beyond anything generated by that other (and in some ways quite similar) master of rodomontade, Jelly Roll Morton.-- Richard M. Sudhalter, Lost Chords
. . .the me-me-me rodomontade of macho rap.-- Nicholas Barber, "In the very bleak midwinter", Independent, January 7, 1996
But what he said -- that if any official came to his house to requisition his pistol, he'd better shoot straight -- was more rodomontade than a call to arms or hatred.-- William F. Buckley Jr., "What does Clinton have in mind?", National Review, May 29, 1995
Rodomontade comes from Italian rodomontada, from Rodomonte, a great yet boastful warrior king in Italian epics of the late 15th - early 16th centuries. At root the name means "roller-away of mountains," from the Italian dialect rodare, "to roll away" (from Latin rota, "wheel") + Italian monte, "mountain" (from Latin mons).

Generating electricity

Green Thursday TGIT – Thank Generators It’s Thursday


Today we get to discuss the essence of electricity. We have several ways of generating electricity but all except photovoltaic rely on the movement of a coil through a magnetic field. We can thank a very smart Brit named Michael Faraday http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Faraday for the vast majority of the electricity in the world. It was he who came up with the notion of electromagnetism. The movement or propulsion of the coil through the magnetic field needs some engine that extracts work out of a fuel or potential energy source and converts this to electricity. There was news yesterday that the US Park Service purposely caused a man made flood in the Colorado River by releasing a vast quantity of water from Glen Canyon. http://www.abc4.com/content/features/story.aspx?content_id=1f8d2661-7915-4718-ab63-1a129641bdf3 The quantity of water released was at a rate of 41,000 cubic feet per second and will be for a duration of three days. This is equal to 307,254 gallons per second. The potential energy of 1,000 gallons of water at a height of 300 feet is approximately one kilowatt hour. The Glen Canyon Dam is 710 feet high http://3dparks.wr.usgs.gov/glencanyon/html/glen1860.htm So releasing 307,254 gallons per second for three days with a height of 710 feet equals 188,482,014 kilowatt hours of released potential energy. This amount of energy seems ginormous but in fact it is not. In the same three days the USA consumed 62 million barrels of oil with the chemical potential energy of some 101.7 billion kilowatt hours or some 540 times more energy than the energy released in the man made flood.

Back to old Mike Faraday and his electro motive force EMF. We can generate electricity by raising steam at a high pressure and then allowing the steam to expand through a turbine that spins a coil in a magnetic field. We can do this by burning coal or by having a Nucular heat source, Note I am misspelling nuclear on purpose to allow President Bush to follow this blog. Actually GW is not the only president to mispronounce nuclear the left wingers from Berkeley have compiled a list of famous people who could not pronounce this word correctly http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/nucular.html No doubt we will have to rely on more nucular generators in the future for our electricity.

I kind of like a generator that has been developed to extract electricity out of flowing rivers rather than building dams. This article from the Economist http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=8951908&story_id=10715508 was sent to me by Alan from Australia. In the future we perhaps won’t have Glen Canyon Dams and three day floods and we will still be able to extract energy out hydroelectric sources. A fool in the US Department of Energy may ask that this device will not work in Australia as they are down under and the Coriolis effect is reversed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coriolis_effect
Please tell our hard working civil servant that gravity is still one of the fundamental forces in the southern hemisphere and that is why blokes in the out back do not free fall to the Antartic.

Thanks to Faraday we have wind, hydroelectric, thermal solar, coal, natural gas, wood, oil, tidal and even nucular generators.
The word of the day is rara avis or Latin for a rare bird or a unique person or thing. No doubt Michael Faraday was a rara avis and this mispronunciation of nuclear is not.

rara avis \RAIR-uh-AY-vis\, noun;plural rara avises \RAIR-uh-AY-vuh-suhz\ or rarae aves \RAIR-ee-AY-veez\:A rare or unique person or thing.
He was, after all, that rara avis, a Jewish Catholic priest with a wife and children.-- Jeremy Sams, "Lorenzo the magnificent", Independent, May 16, 2000
"First of all," Arthur said, "Jack is that rara avis among Ivy League radicals, a birthright member of the proletariat."-- Charles McCarry, Lucky Bastard
Rara avis. You'd have to go far and wide to find someone like that, especially in these times.-- Andrew Holleran, In September, the Light Changes
Rara avis is Latin for "rare bird."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for rara avis

Germanium

Green Thermo Thursday TGIT – Thank Germanium It’s Thursday

Today I hard time choosing which G word we would thank. It was a toss up between Gallium and Germanium. These two elements represent the two rivalries on the European Continent – Germany and France. Both were equally deserving of today’s top billing so I simply had to ask my carpool which to highlight and given the Teutonic nature of the carpool the French were once again defeated. What do European powers have to do with green energy and thermo? Actually news from Belgium will shine the light on this. IMEC a Belgium based research organization has developed a photovoltaic PV cell that is 24.7% efficient in converting solar radiation into electricity. The cell is based on Gallium Arsinide circuitry on a Germanium substrate. http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=I2ELSSWHW0RQCQSNDLSCKHA?articleID=206801636

The founders of the European Union are very happy as this proves that Germany and France can for once get along and have some positive synergy. Wikipedia give some interesting information on Germanium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanium The folks from Gaul should note that germanium can spontaneously extend whiskers that migrate into neighboring areas, kind of like the wehrmacht http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wehrmacht . It is kind of interesting that the Latin root for Gallium and France has something to do with roosters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallium of course it was not until American English developed some 2,000 years later that the French were once again associated with poultry.

The problem with germanium and gallium is that these are not abundant elements like silicon. While they may make more efficient PV cells it will be hard to compete on price with silicon based PV cells that can be fabricated from this much more abundant element. Silicon PV cells are typically 15% efficient so they too are much better at converting sunlight into energy than photosynthesis that is 0.1% efficient.

Last week I opined on liposuction. Well youtube has a video of a very fat cat from Australia http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNnWky3Gu6g There are many ways to skin a cat but could this cat be the answer to the global energy problem?

Talking about fat cats Sir Richard Branson has entered the renewable fuel effort by having his test pilots fly a 747 jumbo jet from London to Amsterdam partial on bio-fuel made from coconut oil. http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080224/britain_biofuel_flight.html This was a publicity stunt and will actually do more to the world than good. Wiki tells us that a 747 jumbo jet weighs 395,000 pounds empty http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_boeing_747_weigh and it uses about 20,000 pounds of fuel an hour. The approximately 250 mile flight from London to Amsterdam takes about 45 minutes and some 15,000 pounds of fuel were gobbled up for this publicity stunt. Sir Richard would have done a lot better if gave the coconuts to a local zoo so that the apes could have had some fun trying to crack their shells.

There is some good thermodynamic news on using a biomass for something useful. Beet juice can be used to help roads from freezing in the winter. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,331739,00.html We all learned about solutes causing freezing point depression of water. This is great news for motorists and the department of transport as beet juice will not corrode metals like salt. I would have called this product beetheat but it was named geomelt instead.

The word of the day is fallible meaning prone to make mistakes. Sir Richard had proved he is also fallible as his Extra Virgin Coconut Oil relies on fallible experimentation.

Word of the Day
Thursday February 28, 2008

Today's Word | Yesterday's Word | Previous Words | Subscribe for Free | Help

fallible \FAL-uh-bul\, adjective:
1. Liable to make a mistake.
2. Liable to be inaccurate or erroneous.

But human beings are fallible. We know we all make mistakes.
-- Robert S. McNamara, "et al.", Argument Without End

Jack Kerouac was neither a demon nor a saint but a fallible, notably gentle, deeply conflicted and finally self-destructive person whose dream from childhood was to be a writer.
-- Morris Dickstein, "Beyond Beat", New York Times, August 9, 1998

On the other hand, mathematics does not rely on evidence from fallible experimentation, but it is built on infallible logic.
-- Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma

Fallible derives from Medieval Latin fallibilis, from Latin fallere, "to deceive." It is related to fail, false (from falsum, the past participle of fallere), fallacy ("a false notion"), fault (from Old French falte, from fallere), and faucet (from Old Provençal falsar, "to falsify, to create a fault in, to bore through," from fallere).

Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for fallible

Liposuction of fat and the energy crisis

Green Thursday TGIT – Thank Gasoline It’s Thursday

Today I will answer Mark’s question whether liposuction of fat could help the energy crisis. Mark is a fairly new TT reader so he did not get the blog from about a year ago that if we had 10 pounds of fat lipoed from our body we would be able to manufacture about 1.5 gallons of bio-diesel from the 10 pounds of fat. We of course would need about 1 pound of methanol to react with the fat to produce the bio-diesel and that methanol would likely come from natural gas so the operation so to speak would need to rely on some fossil fuel.


Oil prices have again reached $100 per barrel and gasoline will be more expensive when the heavy driving season starts in April. The heavy driving season is actually year round known so it should be renamed the extra heavy driving season. So how much gasoline is wasted carrying around us over weight Americans. I came upon an Australian web site http://www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/HV/366.pdf that discusses improved fuel efficiency of vehicles by reducing the mass of the vehicle. The boys downunder tell us that reducing a vehicle’s mass by 100 kg improves the fuel efficiency by 1 liter per 100 km. For us yanks reducing the vehicle mass by 220 pounds will lower the fuel consumption by 0.2638 gallons per 62.5 miles. We should have converted to the metric system but we got to the moon on the old imperial system. So going back to the average yank that is 10 pounds overweight we would save 2.3 gallons per year of gasoline in vehicle (driving 12,000 miles per year) if we shed the 10 pounds of fat. Therefore we use more fuel in a year to move the added mass than we could yield in bio-fuel from the fat we carry. Loosing weight would be a win win situation both for our bodies and our vehicles. It would also be good for our health to loose weight. CNN reported yeaterday that being overweight increases the incidence of strokes in women http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/conditions/02/20/obesity.strokes.ap/index.html I am pretty sure the same can be said about men. The scary thing from this article is that in California your chances of surviving the stroke are better if you have it on a weekday versus a weekend. Yes I am sure I can control when I will have stroke???? Maybe they should tell the neurologists to leave the golf course on a Sunday and make their way to the ER?

The US government has pulled out of FutureGen the demonstration plant to gasify coal and produce electricity. It took the department of entropy five years to make the decision that this was an expensive boondoggle. When I was told about the idea back in 2003 when I was the Manager of Sustainable Development at Bechtel, it took me about 5 seconds to come to this conclusion. If you are going to gasify coal you should use the synthesis gas you produce to synthesize valuable chemicals and not run this gas that has only one quarter the BTUs per cubic foot through a turbine. Turbines prefer high BTU gas. Anyway I am glad that the DOE did not take as long as Rip Van Winkel to wake up, and thankfully the Ambien CR wore off after five years http://www.ambiencr.com/About_AMBIEN_CR/ambien-information.aspx Not to be outdone for stupidity by the Feds, the lone stars of Texas now want their own coal fired power plant with CO2 sequestration http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/usclimateenvironmentenergycoal&printer=1 Yes this branch of the dividians knows what WACO stands for (We Ain’t Coming Out) and that is what they will do with the CO2 when they sequester it, they can say it Ain’t Never Coming Out.

The word of the day is to relegate which can mean to send into exile or banish and that is what them Texans are going to do with CO2


relegate \REL-uh-gayt\, transitive verb:1. To assign to an inferior position, place, or condition.2. To assign to an appropriate category or class.3. To assign or refer (a matter or task, for example) to another for appropriate action.4. To send into exile; to banish.
Employment discrimination locked them out of better paying jobs and relegated them to menial occupations.-- Dennis C. Dickerson, Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young Jr.
Worse, the party that had come to mean power itself had been relegated to a minority in the Congress as well, and lost a key governorship.-- Geoffrey Mohan, "Mexico Power Shift", Newsday, July 4, 2000
The EPA, meanwhile, has been developing new rules that essentially would relegate agricultural runoff to the same category as pollution from concentrated sources such as factories and sewage plants.-- John Lancaster, "For Big Hog Farms, Big Subsidies", Washington Post, August 17, 2001
Their daily care was relegated to Donato, the dozen servants, and a succession of governesses.-- Tag Gallagher, The Adventures of Roberto Rossellini
The history of ideas can't be done without actually applying ideas; and unless we agree to relegate the writing of our history to Martians, we have to admit that a history of points of view -- which may well be religions -- can't be done without favoring at least one point of view.-- William R. Everdell, "Joyful Noises", New York Times, December 26, 1999
When, in the minority of Carlos II., the regent mother, Maria Anna of Austria, made her German Jesuit confessor Nithard inquisitor-general, it required a popular uprising to get rid of him and relegate him to Rome, for he was speedily becoming the real ruler of Spain.-- Henry Charles Lea, "The Decadence of Spain", Atlantic Monthly, July 1898
Relegate is from the past participle of Latin relegare, "to send away, to remove, to put aside, to reject," from re- + legare, "to send with a commission or charge."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for relegate

What happened in Vegas

The big news from the great state of California is that we the people used 100 million less gallons of gasoline in 2007 than we did in 2006. Great news on the surface but given our “official population” of some 36 million men woman and children we only saved about 3 gallons per person. Wes still used some 15.8 billion gallons of gasoline in the golden state http://www.news10.net/display_story.aspx?storyid=38234 This equals 438 gallons per person per year. Each gallon of gasoline has 115,000 BTU lower heating value and there are 3.96 BTU in a kilocalorie (a food Calorie) so if we multiply the energy content of the gasoline and convert this to a Calories per person we get very close to 40,000 Calories per day of gasoline used per person in California. This is the ultimate Mega-Meal diet of some 20 times the recommended food intake. This simple analysis shows why the ethanol lobby has lied to us that we can use this wonderful spirit for automotive fuel. The stock analysts have finally come round to what I have said for year that Ethanol as a fuel is a myth http://blogs.moneycentral.msn.com/topstocks/archive/2008/02/10/ethanol-myth-blasted-in-new-science-mag.aspx This stock analyst is very bearish on two stocks Pacific Ethanol PEIX which is well of its highs (it now has a hangover after the buzz) and Biofuel Energy BIOF a recent IPO that is now sleeping in the gutter in a drunken stupor. I have opined frequently that ethanol should be enjoyed in moderation as a drink. Talking of the lack of fluids on the planet, Lake Mead could dry up by 2021 http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,330591,00.html This is not good news for Vegas as they have the motto “What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas” I guess they never heard of evaporation?

I did promise to opine on Lithium the lightest of metals and perhaps the greatest hope for hybrid vehicles. A down and out stock called Valence Technologies VLNC that has been trying for more than 15 years to compete in lithium ion batteries for phones and PDAs has finally realized their technology using phosphate based cores for lithium ion batteries may have some hope in the auto arena. The big problem with standard lithium ion batteries is that the batteries can catch alight and the problem arises from the cobalt oxide core http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/robotics/2007-03-15-batteries_N.htm If Valence has indeed solved the safety problem as they claim, they could get a lift in their stock price. The value of lithium ion batteries to transportation is enormous as it is the only battery technology with a 99% efficient charge discharge efficiency. Most other battery systems such as lead acid, or nickel metal hydride have a charge discharge efficiency of less than 75%. Some researches are looking into making lithium ion batteries with cores of silicon nanowires and this too is a possible method to overcome the fire hazard of lithium batteries. http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/v3/n1/full/nnano.2007.411.html;jsessionid=C58C405D0F0C274FEBE27CC09617CA96

Burning Play Stations are in the news again http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,329530,00.html a schoolboy in Detroit way hurt when his Play Station overheated in his pocket. No doubt this was a lithium battery problem.



The word of the day is amative or being disposed to love. Today is Valentines Day and best wishes to all readers of TT for a day in which you like those lithium batteries need to be fully charged but be careful not to get burned.

Word of the DayThursday February 14, 2008
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amative \AM-uh-tiv\, adjective:Pertaining to or disposed to love, especially sexual love; full of love; amorous.
Theoretically, any given left-kisser should meet more right-kissers and, over an amative lifetime, or even good year in junior high, be subtly pressured to shift to the right in order to land a wet one -- or just avoid a broken nose. No?-- Donald G. McNeil Jr., "Pucker Up, Sweetie, and Tilt Right", New York Times, February 13, 2003
In the spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of another nap even more often than it does to amative imaginings, Tennyson to the contrary notwithstanding.-- "Touch of Spring Fever Makes Whole World Kin", Science News, May 23, 1931
Well, poetry has been erotic, or amative, or something of that sort -- at least a vast deal of it has -- ever since it stopped being epic.-- Helen Deutsch, "Death, desire and translation: on the poetry of Propertius", TriQuarterly, March 22, 1993
Amative comes from Medieval Latin amativus, "capable of love," from the past participle of Latin amare, "to love."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for