New Florence. New Renaissance.

Tesla’s Megapacks in Alaska

Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula has historically relied on gas turbines to distribute power to the community up to four months out of the year. To reduce the community’s reliance on fossil fuels to power the turbines, Homer Electric installed 37 Tesla Megapacks, providing grid stability even in freezing temperatures.

Electrek

 

Creative uses of captured C02

The WSJ describes how captured CO2 will yield useful daily products including vodka

Air Company, a Brooklyn-based startup, uses photosynthesis-inspired technology to create vodka distilled from CO2-derived products. It first creates hydrogen from water using a process known as electrolysis, before feeding it into a reactor alongside CO2 captured from ethanol plants in the Northeast, the company says. The gases then go over a catalyst, says Stafford Sheehan, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer. The resulting mixture of ethanol and water is distilled into vodka, Dr. Sheehan says. The company estimates that producing one liter of vodka takes a pound of CO2 out of the air.

More on Air Company and plans beyond vodka

 

Synthetic Biology for Carbon-Negative Chemicals

Acetone and isopropanol have a combined market value of over $10 billion (£7.4 billion). They are widely used as industrial solvents and to make plastics, including acrylic glass and polypropylene. However, they depend on fossil fuel-derived hydrocarbons, resulting in significant carbon emissions during their production.

Michael Jewett’s lab at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, working with LanzaTech, a carbon-capture company based in the same state, used synthetic biology to develop the first sustainable and scalable carbon-negative approach for producing acetone and isopropanol.

Chemistry World

Video on computational synthetic biology at Northwestern U

Covering canals with solar panels

The project involves covering several open water canal segments in Stanislaus County with solar panels to test whether the concept could result in a reduction of water evaporation, improve water quality through reduced vegetative growth and generate renewable electricity in a state aiming to decarbonize by 2030.

The Hill

 

ML catalogs global solar farms

"Colleagues and I have now published in the journal Nature the first global inventory of large solar energy generating facilities. “Large” in this case refers to facilities that generate at least 10 kilowatts when the sun is at its peak (a typical small residential rooftop installation has a capacity of around 5 kilowatts).

We built a machine learning system to detect these facilities in satellite imagery and then deployed the system on over 550 terabytes of imagery using several human lifetimes of computing.

We searched almost half of Earth’s land surface area, filtering out remote areas far from human populations. In total we detected 68,661 solar facilities. Using the area of these facilities, and controlling for the uncertainty in our machine learning system, we obtain a global estimate of 423 gigawatts of installed generating capacity at the end of 2018. This is very close to the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) estimate of 420 GW for the same period."

Singularity Hub

The global journeys of spice

Aramco World has a nice series around the global travels of 6 spices - ginger, cumin, cloves, nutmeg, pepper and cinnamon

Finding Shackleton’s Endurance

National Geo has greenlit an epic documentary detailing the successful search and discovery of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s sunken Endurance ship near Antarctica, helmed by British historian Dan Snow.

The doc will chart the successful search by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust for famed explorer Shackleton’s shipwrecked Endurance, which sank in 1915 near Antarctica.

Led by Polar Geographer Dr. John Shears and Marine Archaeologist Mensun Bound aboard the South African icebreaker Agulhas II, a crew of scientists and archaeologists teamed with filmmakers and Snow to document the events in real time leading up to the discovery.

Dateline

Here is a preview courtesy of the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust

More West Coast on East Coast

Recent Instagram galleries (with 10 photos each) of recent weekend trips along the West Coast of Florida

Gasparilla 2022

Rail landmarks

The bridges of Channel A

New Port Richey

Tampa International Airport – flying objects

Views from Tampa Convention Center

Pizza keeps evolving

For over 30 years, the chicken tikka masala pie at Zante Pizza & Indian Cuisine in San Francisco, California, has blurred the line of whose cuisine is it anyway, with a new breed of pizza entrepreneurs like Hapa Pizza in Beaverton, Oregon, and Anzalone Pizza in Boise, Idaho, using their Asian culinary heritages to present Vietnamese pho and Thai panang curry on pizza.

While pizza continues to morph and bend beyond pizza itself, lending its essence to pizza-flavored snacks (see: Combos, Cheez-Its, Goldfish Crackers, and Pretz), its crux is that pizza adapts to where it is—from Tokyo-style marinara to São Paulo’s move away from their staid white-tablecloth, fork-and-knife, pizza-for-dinner-only status. Or the offerings of Old Forge, Pennsylvania’s self-proclaimed “pizza capital of the world,” where, in a town of 9,000 people, rectangular pan pizzas are not called pies but “trays,” and there are no slices, just cuts.

Taste

Below is more on how pizza has evolved over the centuries

Shark Month: SAP.iO Foundries Sustainability Startups

I have said a few times that the arguments around renewable fuels – solar and wind in particular – have hijacked the Sustainability conversation. Lots of good has been delivered around Circular Economy thinking. The US EPA defines a circular economy as one which “reduces material use, redesigns materials to be less resource intensive, and recaptures “waste” as a resource to manufacture new materials and products.”

So, it was a fascinating journey in the last month talking to entrepreneurs, literally around the world, who are putting their heads down and showcasing plenty of success stories. My conversations with each are linked below.

• Ashley Etling of Limeloop talked about her reusable, smart packaging to help in today’s exploding eCommerce deliveries

• Giacomo Franchini of Italy based SupplHi presented on sustainability, sourcing and other elements of complex industrial B2B supply chains they support

• Carlos Oliveira of Chile based Algramo presented a different way to package and consume CPG products resulting in reduced plastic pollution, bite size economics and other benefits.

• Wilhelm Myrer of Norway based Empower talked about his blockchain tech to provide traceability and accountability for the circular economy. Norway, btw, is leading the world in circular economy thinking. 97% of their plastic bottles are recycled. Most other countries are barely at 10%. That is as impressive as the country's dominant performance in the recent Winter Olympics. 

• Matthew Wright of Specright presented on the huge payback from precise specifications in products, formulas and packaging

These conversations were facilitated by Kange Kaneene of SAP.iO Foundries. Her group represents SAP’s startup programs, including accelerators, that enable startups that can deliver value to SAP customers. Impressive in 4 years they have helped over 370 startups across 10 locations. All these startups were part of their Sustainability cohort. My conversation with her is here

Like I said – inspiring. Small firms, Big dreams, Tangible results that are helping the world.