Out West, and Everywhere

One big story today on NPR’s “Morning Edition” was THIS, headed “Study finds Western megadrought is worst in 1,200 years.” Some reservoirs are at one-third their once-normal levels. Related, HERE: New green building codes stall rebuilding efforts after Colorado wildfire.”

They reminded me of two things:

The first is the 2019 book Water Connections by Jim Rousmaniere, who enjoyed researching it mostly here in New England and writing it after a journalism career that ended as editor of the Keene Sentinel in New Hampshire. It is subtitled “What Fresh Water Means to Us, What We Mean to Water.” His interest in fresh water began in earnest in the 1960s Peace Corps when he worked on irrigation canals in rural India.

The second is the 1943 World War II movie “Sahara,” which I got through interlibrary loan and watched last week. A ragtag Allied tank crew of nine led by U.S. Army Sgt. Joe Gunn (Humphrey Bogart) learns of a sizable German infantry outfit approaching in that vast desert. Asked about fuel or food, Gunn replies over a cigarette, “What worries me is water.”

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Forget Carbon Fuels and Forget Lithium: In a letter to the weekend edition of the Berkshire Eagle, Timothy Wright urges investment in zinc-based battery tech to get more out of clean, renewable energy resources.

Among other things, the Pittsfield resident says, iron-air energy storage systems using zinc will be cheaper in the United States than those using lithium owing to zinc’s abundance here. Because these systems can deliver energy “continuously for 100 hours” they can “make generating electricity from fossil fuel unnecessary.”

A “pilot plant” currently in construction in Minnesota, he says, may show the practicality of the technology, and related “cutting-edge technologies … are being developed here in Massachusetts.” “Now is the time,” Wright concludes, “to integrate energy storage technology as part of the plan to satisfy our energy needs for the near future.”

Eagle subscribers can read the letter HERE. Wright may have got some of his info HERE.

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Energetic Western MA

Forget solar and forget wind. Mark Maynard looks happy wearing a white helmet with the words Flooid Power under the company’s circular logo in blue.  Their story leads the Business section of yesterday’s Springfield Republican under the headline “Inventor conjures energy out of thin air.”

“As far as renewable energy goes, this is the Corvette and those things are Model T’s,” he says, relegating solar and wind power to the dust bin of history. Maynard is director of research at Flooid Power Systems, based in Easthampton, Massachusetts.

Flooid, the substance, is a kind of non-edible Jello at the heart of the invention. The company’s test site is “deep in the woods far from the nearest road” elsewhere in western Massachusetts.

The potentially world-changing system involves a 125-foot tower and super-efficient cascading air compressors and heat pumps that turn western Massachusetts air into electricity. Air bubbles lift Flooid to the top of the tower in one pipe; gravity makes it descend through another pipe. Somewhere, refrigeration plays a part.

Maynard and equally cheerful company president Ben Swartz say air compression, refrigeration and hydroelectrics combine to make their collection of components a power plant. In theory. Testing is mostly complete, with development to follow.

”There’s an enormous amount of energy right here in the air,” Maynard tells reporter Patrick Johnson. “People don’t realize it.”

Producing no waste, Maynard says, and taking up far less space and at far less cost per kilowatt than any current system, it can provide continuous energy anywhere, Johnson writes.

A temporary hurdle may be the state Department of Energy’s definition of renewable energy as being derived from wind, solar or biomass.

Subscribers to the newspaper or masslive.com may read the story HERE.

— Mark Channing Miller