I stumbled on this article about a spin-off from MIT using solar power to create hydrogen. I think it's a great idea, one that I'd like to have working in my house, but it's not as simple as having a storage tank and a solar panel.

To me this requires some fundamental changes in how we power devices. Whether it's a car, a generator, or my house, I need an easy way to not only produce the power and store it, in this case using hydrogen, but then easily consume it as well.

In a house that means that I need some power generator that can automatically take me off the grid, or reduce my usage, and use this power in my house. In a car, this means a way to get from this storage mechanism into my car.

I'm all for this idea, and I'd really like to get something like this working. I could envision this as a way to power our barn, or heat water, but automatically burning off the hydrogen to produce power or heat (or both) and then using that in standard appliances.

I envision some 2 tank system, one that is getting filled, and one that's being used. Some type of small controller that determines which is which, manages the load, etc. This could work, but I think it means a re-engineering of how we consume power in a residential situation.

Phantom power, also called Vampire power, is power that's used by electronic devices even though they're powered off. I've also heard it's a big deal with various chargers being plugged into sockets, but their corresponding devices not being attached. For example, a cell phone charger left plugged into a wall should use power (and generate heat) even when the cell phone isn't plugged into it.

My son is a part of some high school groups that advocate peace and environmental awareness. He heard about this at school and came home to leave us this note:

It was pretty funny, and we agreed to work with him and unplug things in the kitchen we weren't using. However it's a pain and I decided to take my Kill-a-Watt and do some investigating. I was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Cell phone charger - My T-Mobile G-1 has a mini-USB plug, so most every charger works with it, including my wife's Blackberry chargers. I measured the load of a few chargers at rest, no cell phone plugged in, and they showed 0 watts (W).

I checked the blender, the electric kettle, and the toaster, all showing 0W when not being run.

This somewhat goes against the advice that I've heard, and even passed on before. I have some longer term tests across a few hours running to see if things change, but for now, it appears to me that the nuisance of unplugging and managing small devices isn't worth the trouble.

A Better close up as well:

I have read quite a bit about Vampire energy over the last year, and it seemed like leaving your XBOX, laptop, etc, plugged in was a bad idea. Based on a few things I have read, it seemed that I was losing a few dollars a day from having my various adapters plugged into the wall, but not into my devices.

A couple months ago I decided to finally get a Kill-a-Watt and start some testing of my own. I've been gathering data and recording various notes in Excel and am almost ready to write up some detailed testing along with the costs of things, but I did notice a couple very interesting items.

With a couple of cell phone chargers disconnected from the phones, I plugged them into the Kill-a-Watt and found that they didn't draw any measureable power. Now the Kill-A-Watt might not be measuring this, but if it's < 1watt draw, that means not a lot of power being used. Even at 1 watt, across 24 hours that's 24 watt-hours, and a $0.10/kw, that's 1 penny every 4 days, or about $0.08/month. Not a lot of power.

I also tested my laptop charger, thinking that might be an issue. After all, I disconnect at times, but leave the adapter plugged in. Was there a significant amount of vampire power being used?

No. That also drew 0 watts according to my measurements.

The XBOX 360 was a different story, pulling a steady 2 watts after it was shut down. That's still a fairly insignificant amount of power, not enough to get me to unplug anything on a regular basis.

I've got more testing to do, and more measurements to make as well as some number crunching to evaluate power usage here at the ranch, but from what I've seen of a few IT related devices, they're pretty skimpy on vampire power.

We use a lot of power in our computing infrastructure. And while I’m mindful of the concerns over safety, environment, etc., I think nuclear power should be part of the solution moving forward in the US. I can’t speak for other countries, but having worked in a plant here in the US, I’m comfortable with it.

I found this article about a number of companies filing applications for licenses for new plants. Apparently there have been 17 companies looking to build 26 new plants. I’m guessing a number of them are on existing nuclear sites, which often had been “approved” but not licensed for financed for another plant. One of the plants I worked at, the North Anna plant in Virginia, actually had been approved for 4 reactors, 2 were built, a 3rd barely started and stopped after Three Mile Island.

I’m sorry there aren’t plants in Colorado being started, especially with our good geological sites here, but at least there are quite a few being considered. I think we’re definitely a better site than Florida!

I think part of the key here is building better designs, simpler, with more cookie cutter technologies. That lowers costs, and it makes it easier for people to be trained to work on these plants. All 4 of the reactors I’d worked near had lots of one-off stuff in them, which i inefficient, and arguably not as safe.

The next few energy updates won’t talk nuclear, so I thought I’d get this out here in the blog. We need more power, and given the fact I love my computers, I want it to be stable, plentiful, and cheap!

I'm a data guy, so it makes sense for me to think about tracking my data here at home. Recently I acquired two new devices, both of which I'll use in my Energy Updates here in the future.

The first was a Kill-a-watt, which is a device for measuring the power usage of appliances. I've been wanting to get one and finally decided to do it a few weeks ago. The plan is to test the power consumption of various things here, both while in use and idle, and then do some comparisons to publish. It makes me really wonder what the payback might be in unplugging things as well as switching to more efficient devices. Look for an update in April.

The second is a weather station. We've considered installing a windmill, and even though my neighbor has one, I'm not sure what the wind speed is on our property. So I have a La Crosse station that will connect via USB to my desktop and log the weather and wind here at the ranch. I'll likely get this into the update in June.

When I was in graduate school I wanted an internship for the summer to get some experience and get ready for the real world. I looked around a bunch of opportunities, applied, and got some interviews. One of these was with Virginia Power, which had been bought by Dominion Resources just prior to my interview. I grew up with Virginia Power, it was still logo’d everywhere, so that’s how I thought of them.

In any case, this was before most places had web sites, the Internet was still mostly text-based (Archie, Gopher, etc.) and so I went to the local library to do some research. I looked up a bunch of articles on the company. In one article, I saw a note about how some of the larger industrial companies in the Richmond, VA area were working with Virginia Power to build cogeneration plants. They were using waste heat, usually steam, to produce some electricity onsite. Virginia Power supplied and maintained the generators and the company lowered their electric bill a bit by producing some power onsite.

This idea for cogeneration at restaurants makes a bunch of sense and it’s a similar idea. a small engine that can use waste vegetable oil to produce power. It can save the restaurant power, and the costs of having oil removed. And it’s local, potentially giving them power in an emergency as well.

Is it green? It’s better than a diesel generator, but it’s probably less efficient and more polluting than a larger, more central plant. Or it is? There is a decent loss in sending electricity across transmission lines, perhaps as high as 7%. So if that’s the case than is this 10% worse from a pollution standpoint? I’d like to see some research done on this to make some sense of what the carbon cost is.

From a cost standpoint, if you can lease one for $450 and save about $800, that’s interesting.