Rich and red when ripe, they’re great for munching off the bush while hiking in the uplands, or for making jam for breakfast.

(Image: `Ōhelo bush full of berries. Credit: Francis T.P. Zee, ARS.)

These relatives of cranberries, Vaccinium reticulatum, can be sweet, or sour, or bland. There are multiple varieties that grow in the uplands of most of the islands.

They are also attractive compact shrubs with foliage that ranges from red and orange to green.

Researchers have now done the work to select tasty, attractive cultivars for both fruit collecting and ornamental uses.

In a press release, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said it is the first cultivar of its kind to be released, and that one of the key reasons is to provide a viable stock that will help reduce pressure on wild native environments.

“As people scour the landscape to harvest this delectable berry for use in jam, jelly and pie filling, they unfortunately disrupt the fragile habitats where this plant grows,” the release said. (The release says the plant is limited to Maui and Hawai’i uplands, but it’s also found on other islands.)

Horticulturist Francis T.P. Zee, of the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service’s Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hilo, led the work, in collaboration with other ARS folks, including Amy Strauss, and Claire Arakawa, and interested individuals at the University of Hawaii, Big Island Candies, and the Big Island Association of Nurserymen.

They used wild-collected seed to grow many plants, then collected the one best suited for fruit production. They named that cultivar “Kilauea. They also used tissue culture and cuttings to develop potted plants suitable for such uses as bonsai.

For an extensive discussion of the procedures and progress, see this University of Hawai’i Cooperative Extension Service report.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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These are the folks that were offering a $10 million prize for the company that could develop a four seat car that can get 100 miles to the gallon, with a design people would buy.

We have given their project a fair amount of coverage at RaisingIslands. You can search our archives for those stories. Here is our piece on the finalists.

They did a lots of testing and calculating. They decided, unfortunately, to split the prize–only half would go to the four seater, and the other half would be so split between two-seaters with side-by-side seating and tandem seating.

They gave one of the latter to a teardrop-shaped thing that is very aerodynamic and unlikely to go mainstream, the Li-ion Motors “Wave II.” And the other went to a covered motorcycle with training wheels that deploy at slow speed, the Peraves X-Tracer “E-Tracer.”

Sigh. Both are electric, which is cool. Both got in the neighborhood of the equivalent of 200 miles to the gallon, which is way cool. But these things are not going to move us into the brave new energy future. Neither will be the family car.

Which was the point, we thought, of the X-Prize competition.

Finally, we have the $5 million main class winner. This would be the one that would rock the world, right?

Sorry.

The prize went to Edison2′s Very Light Car, which has detached wheels, like a go-cart with cowlings. It got 102 miles to the gallon with a quarter-liter, 40-horse engine running 85 percent ethanol and the rest gasoline.

Chances are, you are not going to drive this thing to the supermarket, or use it to carpool the kids to school.

Progressive Insurance is to be congratulated for the effort, which brought a lot of attention to the field of energy efficient vehicles, and did credit to the company.

We kind of wish they’d stuck with the original plan, which we understood to be a goal of providing the world with a vision of an automobile that was hyper-efficient, and wouldn’t look so much like a kit car in someone’s garage.

The efficiency of the electric models is tantalizing, and one wonders whether an electric four seater with traditional styling might have actually met the requirements of the X-Prize.

Ó Jan TenBruggencate

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(Image: The US in blue and China in red. The bars show total national energy use, but check out the dotted lines. On a per-capita basis US use has dropped slightly and China’s has risen in the past decade, but we still use more than three times the energy per capita. Credit: International Energy Agency.)

China actually disputes that it’s the new leader, but it concedes that it’s close.

The International Energy Agency puts China’s consumption at an oil equivalent of 2.25 billion tons of oil for 2009, compared to the U.S. figure of 2.17 billion tons. China insists it’s only at 2.13 billion tons and growing. (Okay, so they’ll pass the U.S. this year.)

But let’s be clear. China has many times the United States population, and its per capita use is not only dramatically lower than America’s, but lower than that of most of the world’s industrialized nations. It’s also significantly lower than Hawai’i's per capital use, as we’ll see later.

China has on the order of 1.3 billion people, while the U.S. has a little more than 300 million. A billion makes a difference. (Hawai’i is at 1.3 million)

What’s scary is that China’s economy is growing rapidly, and that the International Energy Agency figures that its growth could even have been higher:

“China’s demand today would be even higher still if the government had not made such progress in reducing the energy intensity (the energy input per dollar of output) of its economy. It has also very quickly become one of the world’s leaders in renewable energy, particularly wind power and solar energy, and paved the way for a big expansion of nuclear power,” the agency said.

On a per capita basis, China’s residents use 1,484 kilograms of oil, while in the U.S. we use 7,766. That’s right. We use more than five times as much per capita. These data come from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators.

How are we doing in Hawai’i? Well, we live in one of the highest energy-use nations in the world, but Hawai’i ranks 49^th among the states and the District of Columbia in per capita energy use.

The U.S. average, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is 326 million Btu (British thermal units). The residents of the highest-consuming state, Wyoming, use 1 billion Btu, with Alaska running a close second at 945 million.

Hawai’i is down with 220 million, about two-thirds the national average.

Here is the Energy Information Administration page on Hawai’i energy use.

Where do we use all this energy. A lot of it is flying to and from the Mainland, and flying inter-island.

“Due in large part to heavy jet-fuel use by military installations and commercial airlines, the transportation sector is the leading energy-consuming sector, accounting for over one-half of the State’s total energy consumption,” the EIA says.

How does that compare with China’s use? Using the conversion rate of 41,800 Btu per kilogram to obtain the oil equivalent, our 220 million Btu works out to 5,263 kilograms of oil.

Hawai’i residents thus use 3.5 times the amount of energy used by China residents.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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There are now three major international players ready to begin feeding ecars onto Hawaiian roads. The three are Israel’s Project Better Place, Korean CT&T cars and Japan’s Nissan.

(Image: Nissan’s Leaf, for which you can now start placing orders. Credit: Nissan USA.)

And that’s not counting the domestic cars, like Chevy’s upcoming Volt, the state’s small fleet of golf-carty GEM cars, and of course, the Tesla Roadster, of which a half dozen are already silently cruising our byways.

Yesterday, Nissan unveiled an agreement with the state of Hawai’i to develop a charging infrastructure for electric cars, including its Leaf electric car. Nissan in May announced that Hawai’i would be one of its roll-out states for the Leaf, which could be selling in the Islands as early January 2011. (But, yeah, those dates do tend to slide.)

You can reserve a Leaf effective today (9/1/10) at this site.

Also in May, the South Korean auto manufacturer CT&T announced it would build a manufacturing plant in Honolulu to produce its ecar. One model is a small pickup truck, which shows that CT&T has an understanding of the Hawai’i market.

Here’s what they look like.

Project Better Place has a unique approach, which includes a charging grid powered by renewables. You’d own the car, and Better Place would manage the batteries. It has been working with the state since 2008.

Is there a demand for all this interest? Forbes just ran an article about Maui entrepreneur David Noon, who does electric car conversions—switching perfectly good automobiles from gas to electric power for the folks who just can’t wait for the revolution.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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Researchers who have deployed thousands of drifting buoys in the oceans are predicting that every major ocean has a vast debris field, like the Pacific’s “Great Garbage Patch.”

This massive region of the Pacific is filled with the refuse of humanity, much of it plastic. Bottle caps, toothbrushes, fishing nets, cigarette lighters, and uncountable shards, slabs and specks of unidentifiable plastic, colored blue and red, white and yellow, brown and black, green and aqua. It is a toxic rainbow hat threatens marine life in many ways.

Nikolai Maximenko, an oceanographer and senior researcher with the University of Hawai’i's International Pacific Research Center, is co-author of a report in Science on a vast study by researchers from the Sea Education Association, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and University of Hawaii at Mānoa.

That team, working with plankton nets deployed from a sailboat, located the Atlantic’s version of the Garbage Patch—a patch that is predicted by Maximenko’s computer model of how converging currents cause oceanic trash to collect in specific regions.

“The study is so exciting because it validates the computer model we’ve developed using more than 15,000 trajectories of drifting buoys,” Maximenko said.

“The purpose of the model is to track long-living objects that float on the ocean surface. Our model has already successfully reproduced the location of the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch.’ That now the debris in the North Atlantic collects mostly where our model predicts is further evidence that plastic moves in a similar way that drifters do. We can now expect that our model will be very useful in coordinating debris detection and clean up operations.”

The cool thing about the model is that it explains where the debris can be found, but also why it ends up there, said Sea Education Association researcher Kara Lavender Law, the lead author of the Science paper.

“Not only does this important data set provide the first rigorous scientific estimate of the extent and amount of floating plastic at an ocean-basin scale, but the data also confirm that basic ocean physics explains why the plastic accumulates in this region so far from shore,” Law said.

Now that the Pacific and Atlantic Garbage Patches are located, are there more? Maximenko’s model suggests there ought to be similar patches in the south Atlantic, the South Pacific and the South Indian Ocean. All are in remote parts of those oceans where ship traffic is light. That may explain why they haven’t yet been found.

But if they exist they also may simply have a lot less trash in them, since the Southern Hemisphere produces less plastic trash than the Northern Hemisphere.

For more information see NOAA’s page on marine trash, or see here for more about Maximenko’s model.

The paper: Kara Lavender Law, Skye Morét-Ferguson, Nikolai A. Maximenko, Giora Proskurowski, Emily E. Peacock, Jan Hafner, and Christopher M. Reddy: Plastic accumulation in the North Atlantic subtropical gyre, Published Online August 19, 2010, Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1192321.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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(Image: The University of Hawai’i's Hurricane Cannon, within the “windborne debris test facility” inside Diamond Head Crater. Credit: Ian Robertson.)

They will use it to test the ability of Hawai’i structures to withstand the kinds of forces generated by hurricanes. The first test is scheduled today (Aug. 19, 2010)

Anyone who has seen the power of items driven by hurricane winds knows what that’s about. Entire roofs skating through the air like a Frisbee. Sheets of corrugated roofing whizzing across the landscape at shoulder level. Stuff embedded in solid walls.

The cannon is the work of Mānoa professors Ian Robertson and H. Ronald Riggs of the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. Their device, which looks like nothing so much as a giant potato gun, was constructed with support of Hawai’i State Civil Defense.

It will fire nine-foot two-by-fours at up to 80 miles an hour.

It’s not the first such cannon to be developed. Some of the early work in the field was performed at the Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Among their findings was that a “2 × 4 in. plank perforates the face shell of unreinforced concrete masonry at about 65 mph.”

One target of the Hawai’i research will be the kinds of wall systems proposed for safe rooms. These are armored rooms that can be built into a home, where residents can be sheltered from the kinds of flying debris that would readily smash through windows and plywood walls.

Safe rooms on Kauai, where the community has recent experience with hurricanes Iwa and Iniki, qualify homes for property tax breaks.

The goal of the Hurricane Cannon with respect to safe rooms is to work with structural engineer Gary Chock of Martin & Chock to help develop economical designs for safe rooms that can be used in Hawai’i homes.

Another goal is to publicize the cannon, in hopes its work will help convince people to build safe rooms.

“By informing residents of Hawaii about the potential threat of windborne debris during future hurricanes, it is hoped that this facility will encourage retrofit of existing homes through the addition of opening protection or saferooms. Residents without such protection or whose homes do not have hurricane connectors, will be encouraged to evacuate to state designated shelters,” said a fact sheet issued by Robertson.

“Windblown debris is a major risk to life and limb as well as to property damage during strong-wind events. Ian and Gary are perfectly suited by education and practical experience to study this critical element of public safety,” said C. S. Papacostas, professor and chair of the University of Hawai’i Civil & Environmental Engineering Department.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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(Image: The University of Hawai’i's Hurricane Cannon, within the “windborne debris test facility” inside Diamond Head Crater. Credit: Ian Robertson.)

They will use it to test the ability of Hawai’i structures to withstand the kinds of forces generated by hurricanes. The first test is scheduled today (Aug. 19, 2010)

Anyone who has seen the power of items driven by hurricane winds knows what that’s about. Entire roofs skating through the air like a Frisbee. Sheets of corrugated roofing whizzing across the landscape at shoulder level. Stuff embedded in solid walls.

The cannon is the work of Mānoa professors Ian Robertson and H. Ronald Riggs of the Civil & Environmental Engineering Department. Their device, which looks like nothing so much as a giant potato gun, was constructed with support of Hawai’i State Civil Defense.

It will fire nine-foot two-by-fours at up to 80 miles an hour.

It’s not the first such cannon to be developed. Some of the early work in the field was performed at the Texas Tech University at Lubbock. Among their findings was that a “2 × 4 in. plank perforates the face shell of unreinforced concrete masonry at about 65 mph.”

One target of the Hawai’i research will be the kinds of wall systems proposed for safe rooms. These are armored rooms that can be built into a home, where residents can be sheltered from the kinds of flying debris that would readily smash through windows and plywood walls.

Safe rooms on Kauai, where the community has recent experience with hurricanes Iwa and Iniki, qualify homes for property tax breaks.

The goal of the Hurricane Cannon with respect to safe rooms is to work with structural engineer Gary Chock of Martin & Chock to help develop economical designs for safe rooms that can be used in Hawai’i homes.

Another goal is to publicize the cannon, in hopes its work will help convince people to build safe rooms.

“By informing residents of Hawaii about the potential threat of windborne debris during future hurricanes, it is hoped that this facility will encourage retrofit of existing homes through the addition of opening protection or saferooms. Residents without such protection or whose homes do not have hurricane connectors, will be encouraged to evacuate to state designated shelters,” said a fact sheet issued by Robertson.

“Windblown debris is a major risk to life and limb as well as to property damage during strong-wind events. Ian and Gary are perfectly suited by education and practical experience to study this critical element of public safety,” said C. S. Papacostas, professor and chair of the University of Hawai’i Civil & Environmental Engineering Department.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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It suggests that the color of the water has an impact on storm formation. Greener, more storms. Darker blue, less storm activity.

Entirely bizarre, it seems, until you read further. And then it makes a lot of sense.

Here is the American Geophysical Union’s press release on the paper, “How ocean color can steer Pacific tropical cyclones,” by Anand Gnanadesikan, Gabriel A. Vecchi, Whit G. Anderson, and Robert Hallberg, all of the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory , and Kerry Emanuelof the Dept. of Earth, Atmosphere and Planetary Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA.

Here’s the upshot of this: The ocean’s color is affected by how much plant life is in it, and the amount of green chlorophyll impacts how far the sunlight penetrates.

Less chlorophyll, and the sunlight goes deep, heating a lot of the ocean at various depth. More chlorophyll, and the sun penetrates not far, heating up only the surface areas, and making the surface water hotter than it otherwise would be.

What it means is that suddenly the already problematic business of storm forecasting gets even trickier, or, as the paper says, “our results suggest that climate modelers wishing to make statements about tropical cyclones need to be extremely careful in describing the physics of the upper ocean.”

In the past, there have been suggestions that a warmer global climate could increase water temperatures, making storms more frequent and stronger. But very recent research suggests that the amount of plant life in the oceans may be crashing, arguing under Gnanadesikan paper for fewer storms.

For more on this research, see our immediately previous post at Raising Islands.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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The oceans are humanity’s great dump. Our plastic bottles, pesticides, industrial chemicals and so much more end up polluting the oceans. Just look at any storm drain in the Islands that’s marked with a fish and a warning that anything dumped on the street flows to the sea.

Increasingly, climate change is also polluting the oceans. There have been plenty of reports of increased ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, threats to heat-intolerant coral reefs, the acidification of the oceans.

But a new threat is in many ways even darker. Phytoplankton, the tiny forms of plantlife that are base of the marine food web, have declined 40 percent in the past 60 years, according to a new study.

Here are a couple of reports on the Nature article that prompted the concern. NatureNews. Reuters.

It is still not clear what the most important causes of this decline are—it could be secondary to warming and acidification, which in turn are linked to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It could be something entirely different.

And it isn’t entirely clear what the impacts might be, although one impact of reduced productivity is poorer fisheries. Fisheries are being hammered from many directions. Rising temperatures, overfishing, acidification and the rest are just some of them.

The conservative Heartland Institute sought to downplay the research with a series of off-point studies. Those studies argue that increased carbon dioxide ought to increase phytoplankton growth, and therefore there’s no problem.

That’s a little like arguing that driving at 100 miles an hour is better for the environment than 50 because it gets you there faster. The faster part is true, but it’s irrelevant to the environment part.

The key issue here is that, as Heartland correctly says, this is just one study. Other researchers will follow up and determine whether its conclusions are valid.

If so, it ain’t good.

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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But in many applications, pools of algae-rich water represent another kind of green: major financial investment, and significant financial reward. Often skewed more to the cost than the profit side.

Hawai’i is a hotbed of algae research, and much of that work is aimed at squeezing valuable biofuel out of the waterborne plants. But we’re still some distance from being able to full your car, or your electric generating plant, with algae-based biofuel.

“Many years of both basic and applied science and engineering will likely be needed to achieve affordable, scalable, and sustainable algal-based fuels,” says a new U.S. Department of Energy report reviewing the status of a lot of the research. It’s the National Algal Biofuels Technology roadmap.

Still, whodathunk pond scum would generate so much interest?

The report repeatedly cites Hawai’i as one of the places with lots of potential for this use.

First there’s sunlight: “A significant portion of the United States is suitable for algae production from the standpoint of having adequate solar radiation (with parts of Hawaii, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Florida being most promising).”

Then water: “Areas with higher annual average precipitation (more than 40 inches), represented by specific regions of Hawaii, the Northwest, and the Southeast, are desirable for algae production from the standpoint of long-term availability and sustainability of water supply.”

Although, of course, these can work against each other. Hawai’i is also cited as a place with high evaporation rates.

We are credited with a long growing season, and our water tends not to spend a significant part of the year in its solid form.

So, the Islands can readily grow this stuff. Why would we want to? Well, in the post-petroleum energy picture, there are all kinds of players, but there is still a strong role for liquid fuels. Oil is a stunningly dense form of energy storage, appropriate for things like running aircraft. Nobody’s yet figured out how to stuff enough batteries into a 767 to power it across an ocean.

What’s cool about algae as a source of oil? The study says: “1) high per-acre productivity, 2) non-food based feedstock resources, 3) use of otherwise non-productive, non-arable land, 4) utilization of a wide variety of water sources (fresh, brackish, saline, marine, produced, and wastewater), 5) production of both biofuels and valuable co-products, and 6) potential recycling of CO2 and other nutrient waste streams.”

The latter is why Hawai’i BioEnergy put its test facility next to a power plant on Kaua’i. It could use the carbon dioxide from the power plant exhaust as food for the algae. See Hawaii BioEnergy here.

That’s just one of several algae biofuel experiments in the state, and they’re represented on all the major islands.

There’s HR BioPetroleum, a partner of Royal Dutch Shell, through their joint venture Cellana on the Big Island. And here.

Meanwhile, HR Biopetroleum has signed an agreement for a Maui algae biofuel facility with partners Alexander & Baldwin, Hawaiian Electric and Maui Electric.

And there’s Phycal on O’ahu. More on why Phycal picked Hawaii here.

It’s still all experimental. As the Department of Energy report says, “a scalable, sustainable and commercially viable system has yet to emerge.”

© Jan TenBruggencate 2010

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