Tag: carbon

The Next Heat Pump Frontier? NYC Apartment Windows

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“There’s a massive difference in the amount of heat that our system is putting out when a user asks for heat to be comfortable versus a radiator which dumps tons of extra heat into the room,” says Vince Romanin, CEO of Gradient. “If they’re able to set that temperature on a per-room basis, not a per-building basis, you end up—because you’re only heating and cooling the rooms needed—with about 20 percent less energy use.”

The New York City Housing Authority says that residents are overall happy with the units, especially the ability to control temperatures. In the summer, a heat pump reverses to work like an air-conditioning unit. So people who’ve never had AC suddenly have a clean, efficient device that both heats and cools. “The heat pumps allow NYCHA to move away from natural-gas-based steam heating systems and are also two to six times as energy efficient as these systems,” says Shaan Mavani, chief asset and capital management officer of the Housing Authority.

With these heat pumps, New York is inverting the usual pattern for new energy technology, which is usually too expensive for regular people to afford. “It’s relatively cheap, relatively simple technology that’s plug-and-play, that works in the 100-year-old public-housing brick building,” says climate economist Gernot Wagner of the Columbia Business School. “It’s the rich who are supposed to be early adopters of the new, sexy, top-of-the-line climate tech.”

Gradient’s all-weather heat pump, meant to operate in colder climates, is set to be priced at $3,800 later this year. That’d be offset by a growing number of state and federal rebates and tax credits that encourage decarbonization. With a full-on heat pump system working through ducting in a fancy person’s home, you’re looking at the costs of potentially having to upgrade your electric system to handle the additional power demand, whereas a smaller window version just plugs into the wall. Actually installing a heat pump isn’t much different from installing a typical AC unit, usually taking about a day, but the technician will need some special training to do it. (In general, the US is desperately short of the skilled workers available to install enough heat pumps and other green tech to decarbonize fast enough.) By contrast, you can install a window-sill heat pump in under an hour, Gradient says.

One of the hurdles for urban apartment dwellers is the potential for an operational cost shift: If the landlord had been paying for a central steam heating system, and the renter is now running a heat pump on their own unit’s electricity, their bills may increase. Some 90 percent of the New York City Housing Authority’s residents live in buildings that are “master metered” anyway, meaning they don’t pay individual electric bills. For the remaining 10 percent, the NYCHA will likely introduce a utility allowance to ensure that the switch to a heat pump doesn’t increase expenses. At the same time, as residents make that switch, the agency will save on the costs associated with repairing the existing heating distribution systems. “The heat pumps obviate the need for these investments,” says Mavani.

What the NYCHA has embarked on is a plan that other metropolises could copy for switching their own multifamily buildings to heat pumps. “That said, every city has a different mix of building typologies, local codes, heating and cooling needs, and construction and utility costs,” says Mavani. “Hopefully, based on the experience in New York, other multifamily building owners—whether public or private—will have better data points to support their own decisionmaking.”

Heat pumps will only get cheaper from here. Unlike stagnant fossil-fuel heating techniques, heat pumps are a technology that’s evolving, getting more and more efficient at extracting heat from outdoor air and moving it inside. “Heat pumps are the classic example of a technology that over time will only get better, will only get cheaper,” says Wagner. “We know where we need to go. We have to electrify buildings; we have to get off gas and oil heat especially. This is the way to do that.”

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March 29, 2024
Get Ready to Eat Pond Plants

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If you ever watch a duck float across a pond, gobbling up the vegetation coating the surface, that bird is way ahead of its time. The buoyant greenery is azolla, a tiny fern that grows like crazy, doubling its biomass as quickly as every two days to conquer small bodies of water. The duck doesn’t know it—and who could blame it, really—but azolla may soon spread across human civilization, becoming food for people and livestock, fertilizer for crops, and even biofuel.

“I’m not out here saying everybody should go eat this stuff right away,” says research technologist Daniel Winstead, who’s studying azolla at Penn State. “There’s a lot of work that needs to be done. But boy, it’s got so much potential.”

The main reason you wouldn’t want to go scoop some azolla out of a pond and eat it duck-style is, first of all, yuck. But also, previously studied species of azolla are typically high in polyphenols, a family of compounds found in many types of plant. In small quantities, polyphenols act as antioxidants, meaning they help remove certain harmful substances from the body. But in azolla quantities, polyphenols may interfere with the body’s ability to absorb nutrients. At such levels, not only are they not nutritious, they’re anti-nutritious.

But there’s a species—Carolina azolla, native to the southeastern United States—that doesn’t have this drawback. Testing for polyphenolic content, Winstead found this azolla to have much, much lower levels than other species, actually more in line with the mainstay fruits and vegetables Americans eat. And when Winstead prepared Carolina azolla in three different ways—fermentation, boiling, and pressure cooking—he found this reduced the polyphenolic content still further, by 62, 88, and 92 percent, respectively. (According to chefs, azolla is “crisp and juicy,” tasting “somewhat of earth, metal, minerals, mushrooms, moss, and grass.”)

This, Winstead believes, could be the key to making azolla a common food worldwide. “You could use those cooking methods on these other species of azolla from Asia,” says Winstead, who described the findings in a recent paper. “That would reduce polyphenol content to a level that was not limiting.”

Compared to other vegetables, Carolina azolla is high in zinc, manganese, iron, calcium, and potassium, and is relatively high in protein (though has less than a grain like barley). And that’s from wild azolla. “Wheat, rice, barley, soybeans—all these things have been domesticated and cultivated, choosing for attributes like nutrition,” says Winstead. “So just imagine if people did that for azolla, if you could create an azolla strain that creates a whole bunch of precursors for biodiesel. You could create another one that creates tons of protein.”

Again, Winstead isn’t suggesting that anyone go out and harvest their local pond for azolla. But with further research, azolla has the potential to become a more extensively cultivated crop, especially if scientists can breed it to express even more nutrients. They’ll also need to further vet the plant to make sure it isn’t toxic in other ways. “I think there is a real possibility for its use as a foodstuff in the future, provided there is extensive research on possible toxin content due to their symbiotic cyanobacteria,” says Winstead. “Corn is currently used as biofuel, livestock feed, and a foodstuff, and I think azolla holds a similar potential.”

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March 11, 2024
The Newest Breakthrough That Could Revolutionize Energy

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Research on superstructure carbons (SCC) introduces a novel method of using carbon more effectively in energy storage and conversion, offering potential environmental benefits and performance enhancements over traditional materials. With emphasis on customizability and efficiency, SCCs could revolutionize carbon-based energy solutions, pending further investigation into their practical application and economic viability.

There’s a lot of research about moving away from carbon as an energy source, but what if instead the carbon that is being used is applied to its full capacity?

The importance of carbon as an energy source is not to be downplayed. Unfortunately, the reliance on these carbon-based materials has proven to be disastrous for the environment, especially in the quantities they are consumed on a global basis. Therefore, alternative means have to be researched. Superstructure carbons (SCC) are a possible way to use carbons in a more efficient and “green” way that can exceed the current performance and longevity of the standard materials in energy storage and conversion devices.

Research Findings and the Potential of SCCs

Researchers recently published the findings in Energy Materials and Devices.

SCCs are multifaceted in both their construction and performance but also in their concept as a whole. It starts with the fact that they are, indeed, carbons. While this might not seem like a step to reduce overall carbon dependency, it is a way to make the carbons being used more intentionally with more direct functions that can lead to better performance and functionality.

“This unique category satisfies the particular functional demands of high-performance devices and surpasses the rigid structure of traditional carbons,” said Debin Kong, researcher and author of the study.

Each characteristic displayed in an integral part in ensuring the function of the SCC can be used to improve upon traditional carbon materials used in energy storage and conversion devices. Credit: Debin Kong, Tsinghua University

SSCs are carbon-based materials that are built precisely for the material it’s interfacing with, whether that’s a lithium-ion (Li) battery, lithium sulfide (LiS) battery, or a metal-air battery.

There are three main characteristics of these SCCs presented by researchers for successful development and implementation: precisely customized pores, freely adjusted frameworks, and highly coupled interfaces.

Technical Advantages and Future Directions

Having precisely customized pores has the advantage of improved surface utilization and mass transfer over traditional carbon materials. Using a porous carbon as part of the active material in energy-storage devices (like batteries) can improve metrics such as the specific capacity of the material. The specific capacity is the amount of an electrical charge that can be delivered to the material per gram of the material’s weight. Freely adjusted frameworks are crucial to allow for rapid electron transfer between the inner workings of the materials, including the carbon unit and electrode. Finally, highly coupled interfaces allow for an additional improvement in electron transfer, which is a significant element in improving the overall function and performance of a battery. Interfaces that work well together allow for electrochemical reactions to occur more easily and without issues such as aggregation, or the formation of clusters of nanoparticles.

“Overall, the concept of SSCs shows a way to solve the problems faced by current carbons, which is important to the practical applications of advanced carbons and their relevant high-performance energy-related devices in the future,” said Kong.

Researchers aren’t aiming to just improve carbon-based active materials with this review, but are looking to create new highs for carbon structures. Performance breakthroughs are an ultimate goal, aiming to shatter bottlenecks in the performance of energy conversion and storage. However, there are always difficulties to consider and wrinkles to iron out with further research.

The most important thing to consider is that different devices have different needs. Li, LiS, and metal-air batteries are likely to all have a different relationship with SCCs that needs to be fully fleshed out to ensure suitability and compatibility. Additionally, the cost and performance of SCCs need to be examined before it becomes a practical and widespread solution. This can include refining the preparation process and the precursors needed to lower the cost and simplify production. Another point that needs further research is the overall understanding of the carbon microstructure and its structural evolution depending on the carbon precursor used.

Reference: “Superstructured carbon materials: design and energy applications” by Debin Kong, Wei Lv, Ruliang Liu, Yan-Bing He, Dingcai Wu, Feng Li, Ruowen Fu, Quan-Hong Yang and Feiyu Kang, Energy, Materials, and Devices.
DOI: 10.26599/EMD.2023.9370017

Debin Kong, Wei Lv, Yanbing He, and Feiyu Kang of the Shenzhen Giem Graphene Center and Engineering Laboratory for Functionalized Carbon Materials at Tsinghua University with Debin Kong also of the College of New Energy at China University of Petroleum, Ruliang Liu, Dingcai Wu, and Ruowen Fu of the Materials Science Institute at Sun Yat-sen University, Feng Li of the Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Quan-Hong Yang of the Nanoyang Group at the School of Chemical Engineering and Technology at Tianjin University all contributed to this research.

The National Basic Research Program of China, the National Nature Science Foundation of China, and the Taishan Scholar Project of Shandong Province made this research possible.

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February 29, 2024
These States Are Basically Begging You to Get a Heat Pump

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Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch.

Nine states have signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030. (“Shipments” here means systems manufactured, a proxy for how many are actually sold.) By 2040, these states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island—are aiming for 90 percent of those shipments to be heat pumps.

“It’s a really strong signal from states that they’re committed to accelerating this transition to zero-emissions residential buildings,” says Emily Levin, senior policy adviser at the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), an association of air-quality agencies, which facilitated the agreement. The states will collaborate, for instance, in pursuing federal funding, developing standards for the rollout of heat pumps, and laying out an overarching plan “with priority actions to support widespread electrification of residential buildings.”

Instead of burning planet-warming natural gas, a heat pump warms a building by transferring heat from the outdoor air into the interior space. Run it in the opposite direction, and it can cool the inside of a building—a heat pump is both a heater and AC unit. Because the system is electric, it can run off a grid increasingly powered by renewables like wind and solar. Even if you have to run a heat pump with electricity from fossil-fuel power plants, it’s much more efficient than a furnace, because it’s moving heat instead of creating it.

A heat pump can save an average American household over $550 a year, according to one estimate. They’ve gotten so efficient that even when it’s freezing out, they can still extract warmth from the air to heat a home. You can even install a heat pump system that also warms your water. “We really need consumers to move away from dirty to clean heat, and we really want to get the message out that heat pumps are really the way to go,” says Serena McIlwain, Maryland’s secretary of the environment. “We have homeowners who are getting ready to replace their furnaces, and if they’re not aware, they are not going to replace it with a heat pump.”

The coalition’s announcement comes just months after the federal government doubled down on its own commitment to heat pumps, announcing $169 million in funding for the domestic production of the systems. That money comes from 2022’s Inflation Reduction Act, which also provides an American household with thousands of dollars in rebates or tax credits to switch to a heat pump.

These states are aiming to further collaborate with those heat pump manufacturers by tracking sales and overall progress, sending a signal to the industry to ramp up production to meet the ensuing demand. They’ll also collaborate with each other on research and generally share information, working toward the best strategies for realizing the transition from gas to electric. Basically, they’re pursuing a sort of standardization of the policies and regulations for getting more heat pumps built, bought, and installed, which other states outside of the coalition might eventually tap into.

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February 7, 2024