This talk, taped last Fall at the Woods Energy seminar, is Marine Energy Technology 101. It explains in simple terms the types of energy that we can harness from the ocean, and discusses the latest technologies in wave power extraction and tidal current devices.
I've since embarked on a tidal energy project in collaboration with Julie Young, a turbine and propeller engineer at Princeton University. We are planning to create a design optimization tool for tidal turbines, and our guess is they will look quite different from the tidal turbines you see in this talk. Will keep you posted!

Roz Naylor argued in her interview with us last year that a push for biofuels in the US or Europe may have significant consequences globally. Naturally, countries that rely on food crops that can either be used to generate biofuels, or are being supplanted by biofuels crops, can be negatively affected. Case in point is the so-called tortilla crisis, that is, the highly increased prices for corn after strong support of corn-based ethanol that impact large populations in Mexico and elsewhere for which corn is a staple food.

As I type this I'm listening to my colleague Ilan Kroo, professor in Aerodynamics at Stanford University and a world renowned airplane designer. The topic of his lecture is Sustainable Aviation: Future Air Transportation and the Environment.
A few blogs ago I gave some current numbers on the efficiency of air travel vs car travel. A Boeing 737 with 75% occupancy gives about 80 miles/gallon for each passenger. This compares favorably to a car, but then, we would not drive across the Atlantic.

President Obama's administration certainly sees the energy future of the US different than the last administration. Overall, this is very good news. A few years ago, when I first starting looking seriously at the US energy policies and proposals, I was not very confident about our chances to create a sustainable energy future. I'm much more optimistic now. Of course, this is a day to be optimistic and a day to believe in what we can accomplish if we just put our talents to it. At the same time, it's also the day to start looking more carefully at the proposals. There's much work to be done and the devil is, as always, in the details.

If you're anything like me, your head has been scratched many times in the last year because of the price of crude oil. When I started at Stanford in 2001, both gas and oil prices (15US$/barrel) were low. Much too low to encourage rapid development of greener alternatives for transport or electricity production. My colleagues and I certainly expected (and hoped!) that the oil price would go up in the years following. Global demand was clearly increasing, with most of the demand rise caused by growing economies in China and India. But none of us had anticipated the very sharp increases between mid 2006 and mid 2008, with the extraordinary peak of $145US just this last summer.

Figure 1. Schematic of an Enhanced Geothermal System. Shown are the injector and producer wells, and man-made fractures in the rock at depth between the wells. The injected fluid is pushed from injector to producer all the while picking up heat from the rock.

Check out FirstLook for an attractive interactive display of wind and solar resource data at http://firstlook.3tiergroup.com/ .

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just published its long awaited
World Energy Outlook 2008 .
A highly recommended read.

A quick first summary with more analysis to come:

The current financial crisis could well lead to a growing worldwide petroleum shortage in the short to medium term. The crisis has lead to a decrease in crude oil prices (see our stats in the left column of the page). Oil companies are therefore not making the profits hoped for and some have started cutting or delaying new projects.
IEA expects that oil prices will bounce back up to around 100 dollars per barrel in 2010.

Hawaii's Parker Ranch is one of the largest cattle ranches in the US, and one of the few that also ranches the sun and wind. Parker ranch uses solar and wind energy for their water pumping systems. We talked with Michael "Corky" Bryan, who has the fascinating title of "Vice President of Livestock". To him, this is just a fancy title for a cowboy. Corky shows us around the solar and wind ranch. If footage is a little shaky at times it is because we did a lot of the talking in his large white pickup truck, of course.