The research is based on an agreement GM and the ABB Group signed three months before the first Chevy Volt rolled off the lot, which was in December. The carmaker and the Swiss-based engineering firm are considering options that range from energy storage to powering bicycles.

A Chevy Volt battery is hooked up to an ABB inverter in the ABB lab on Centennial Campus.

ABB provides power and automation technologies to utilities and industrial customers worldwide. The firm concentrates on renewable energy and supplies wind and solar energy generators with electrical equipment and services. Its North American headquarters is in Cary and the R&D projects with the Chevy Volt batteries are conducted in the ABB lab on Centennial Campus. ABB employs about 500 in the Research Triangle area and 1,500 in North Carolina.

A first step in the research is combining a Chevy Volt battery with a commercially available ABB inverter, a device that exchanges direct current from the battery into alternating current used to transmit electricity on the grid.

The next step is hooking up several of the batteries to the inverter, said Sandeep Bala, an R&D engineer in the ABB lab.

“There’s a lot of work to do yet,” Bala said during a tour of the lab. “What the cost is, what the business case is.”

The learning curve will be steep, Pablo Valencia, the senior manager GM has assigned to the project, agreed. It’s not even known when it’s worth reconfiguring the battery, Valencia said.

The T-shaped lithium-ion battery consists of several cells and is built into the bottom of the Chevy Volt’s passenger cabin, with the cross bar being located under the back seat. The battery can power the car for about 40 miles in the city and has to be recharged. That’s the plug-in electric portion of the car. The Volt also has a gasoline tank to go another 300 miles. That’s the hybrid portion of the car.

The two power sources make the Chevy Volt the most fuel-efficient car on the market with a fuel economy of 90 miles per gallon to 95 mpg on the highway, according to the Edmunds.com review.

Battery cell above rear tire powers an e-bike.

How long it takes before a battery becomes available for reuse only time will tell. GM’s warranty on the battery is for eight years or 100,000 miles and after 10 years, the Volt’s battery retains about 70 percent of its capacity. But GM and ABB intend to figure out where else the batteries can be used once they come out of the cars.

One idea is to break down the battery and use single cells to power electric motors on bicycles.

Another is to use the batteries as storage – for renewable energy or as backup for electric outages. Renewable energy is dependent on the sun and the wind, which follow their own schedule. But stored in batteries, renewable energy would be available to flatten peaks and valleys in power consumption and allow utilities to run their power plants more evenly, and therefore more efficiently.

“The utilities love that,” Valencia said.

Power customers might like a backup system during power outages. The engineers estimated that 33 Chevy Volt batteries have enough storage capacity to power up to 50 homes for about four hours during a power outage.

Originally published 3/24/11:

Saying Jim Miller likes to bike is an understatement.

The 55-year-old facility engineering manager at Research Triangle International said he rides his Cannondale road bike to and from work every day of the year, including winter.

“I’ve biked when it’s 15 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and I’ve biked when it’s 105,” Miller said.

He estimates that he’s cycled between thirty and forty thousand miles between work and errands in the last three years. So naturally, each year Miller pledges to participate in the RTP SmartCommute Challenge.

The 5^th annual challenge, which runs from April 1^st to June 1^st, encourages residents and employees in Wake, Orange and Durham counties to explore alternative modes of transit to work. In addition to biking, popular options include walking, carpooling, taking the bus, and telecommuting.

“Telecommuting is the most popular SmartCommute alternative in the region,” said James Lim, director of RTP programs at the Research Triangle Foundation.

Lim helps coordinate SmartCommute. He said one of the major benefits of taking the challenge is reducing the number of vehicle miles traveled.  Along with this comes improved air quality, which includes reductions in CO₂, mono-nitrogen oxides (NOx), and volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

Lim and his colleagues on the SmartCommute committee have established two goals for this year’s challenge: trying to save around 18,000 gallons of gasoline and trying to recruit 12,500 pledges. He said last year’s goal of 10,000 pledges was met and surpassed.

But to talk the talk, Lim feels he must walk the walk, literally. He plans to jog seven miles to the RTF headquarters from Durham each morning over the course of the two months.

“Now that I’m saying this in print,” Lim said. “I have to do it.”

He also carpools with another Foundation coworker. It’s important that employers are supportive of their staffs’ efforts to join the challenge, he said. Some companies have flexible starting and leaving times for those who bike or walk; others issue carpool parking passes closer to the building.

Darren Danko, the information technology director at RTF, is an avid SmartCommute cyclist as well, though admittedly he’s not as hardcore as Miller.

“I’ll bike whenever it’s 60 degrees or above,” Danko joked. His 3.2-mile ride from Durham takes him about 20 to 25 minutes on his aged, 10-speed Schwinn street bike.

Danko also opts for eco-friendly transit even after the challenge is over.

“It’s important to let people know that there are other alternative ways to get to work,” he said. “People need to get off their butts and do some exercise.”

According to past survey data, 75 percent of SmartCommuters elect to maintain the challenge after it comes to an end, Lim said.

Their efforts aren’t without incentive. Lim’s committee sponsors a SmartCommute Challenge awards ceremony each summer wherein companies and employees who participate are honored for their achievement. Two grand prizes of $750 are handed out to a pair of individuals who distinguish themselves.

This year there are two prize pools: one for new pledges trying green transit for the first time and one for veterans who continue to reduce their carbon footprints to work.

SmartCommute is co-sponsored by GoTriangle, a regional collaborative of transit providers. Research Triangle-based corporations like IBM, Cisco and Miller’s RTI also donate to the program.

Miller bikes twelve miles from his home in Chapel Hill to RTI’s headquarters in Research Triangle Park, a 24-mile roundtrip per day. He said it takes him about 45 minutes each way. Over the course of last year’s challenge, Miller rode more than 612 miles. It’s a part of who he is.

“I biked a lot when I was in my early twenties,” he said. “And I started again after I divorced 13 years ago.” His biggest ride was a coast-to-coast excursion in 2003.

He doesn’t see any downside to leaving the car in the garage. The only the cycling becomes a problem, he said, is during right turns at intersections with drivers jetting out behind him.

“I’ve only been hit by a car one time,” Miller said. “No accident, though. They just hit me in my arm with their side view mirror.”

Wayne Flournoy, president of Entex Technologies

A few weeks ago, I reported on water quality expert Kenneth Reckhow’s concern that we will be unable to achieve water quality standards set by states in response to the Clean Water Act. Municipal water treatment plants have been improved “to the limits of technology,” he said, and additional cleanup was going to have to happen with somewhat unlikely changes like limiting development, changing farming practices, and prohibiting lawn fertilizers.

Last week, I had the opportunity to discuss the challenges of cleaning wastewater from the perspective of an entrepreneur who has been working with municipalities and industry to improve treatment plant performance. Wayne Flournoy is cofounder and president of Entex Technologies, a Chapel Hill company that designs systems for upgrading wastewater treatment plants or for new plants.

Flournoy gave me a quick and revealing introduction to the history of wastewater treatment. Essentially, every system designed since the British began treating water in the nineteenth century uses some form of microorganism or “beneficial biomass” to clean contaminants out of water. Those contaminants are primarily carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus, which Flournoy pointed out are nutrients in agriculture or horticulture but contaminants when they run off into water.

Typical treatment plants grow the waste-eating microorganisms in aerated tanks, settle them out, and concentrate them into what Flournoy calls “ a slurry of microorganisms or beneficial biomass.”

Wastewater treatment module using bioweb, a substrate that looks like a soccer goal, is able to clean more contaminants from water than traditional systems.

If you can enable your system to sustain a larger mass of “biology,” your system will be more efficient. That’s what Entex does. It provides two substrates that allow more of the beneficial microorganisms to grow and that allow them to stay in the treatment tanks longer. One, BioWeb, is a fabric that looks much like a soccer net, which Entex licenses from its manufacturer, and the other, BioPortz, is a floating medium that looks a lot like rotelle pasta. It’s all about “creating an environment that the right kind of biology likes,” said Flournoy. He added, “The real magic is . . . in manipulating the microbial environment to maximize the beneficial biology while minimizing the nuisance organisms.”

Systems designed with these media can host more biomass and therefore process more wastewater in the same amount of space. They can also provide enhanced levels of treatment, that is, getting a greater percentage of the contaminants out.

Aside from potentially doubling the amount of waste a plant can handle, it turns out that the ability Entex technology to keep the microorganisms in the treatment tanks longer has some additional benefits. Flournoy told me about an Owens-Corning plant in Ohio that needed to remove color dyes from its wastewater, and about a pilot project in Durham for removing a class of drugs called endocrine disruptors that arrived in sewage. These and other pharmaceutical compounds often arrive in treatment plants after being flushed or washed down the drains in households–sometimes as part of human waste and sometimes in as a result of efforts to dispose of surplus drugs.

Entex Technologies showcases FlowTex and other products at the 2009 Water Environment Federation Technical Exhibition and Conference

In both cases–the color dyes and the pharmaceuticals–the ability to keep the biomass sludge in the tanks for longer periods of time helped accomplish the goals. The Durham project, done in collaboration with Duke engineering professors Andrew Shuler and Claudia Gunsch and funded by the North Carolina Biotechnology Center, is important as greater attention is paid to pharmaceutical byproducts that arrive in our water treatment plants. Traditional technology does not remove those compounds. At the moment, they are not regulated, but Flournoy said, “I have no doubt that that will become an issue.”

I asked Flournoy what was the next big thing in wastewater treatment. His response was an echo of Kenneth Reckhow’s statement that we’ve reached “the limits of technology” on wastewater treatment. “To reach low levels of nitrogen,” Flournoy said, “you can’t do it all biologically.” Entex has exclusive rights to a cloth filter that they are marketing in a product called FlowTex for even more thorough removal of contaminants. It’s part of Entex’s plan to grow into a bigger company poised to handle evolving challenges in water treatment.

Entex was incorporated in 2004 and has eight employees, all with a science or engineering background. In October, it was named one of 25 North Carolina Companies to Watch by CED.

An array using high-concentration photovoltaics from Semprius, Inc.

A year or so ago, Joseph Carr found himself on an elevator with a man wearing a Siemens polo shirt. Having once worked for a division of Siemens, Carr introduced himself as the CEO of Semprius, Inc., a company that makes very high-efficiency solar modules. At the end of a fourteen-floor ascent, the two men exchanged business cards. Within months, Semprius and Siemens announced a joint development agreement.

Yes, a true “elevator pitch” success story.

The Siemens joint venture was just one highlight in a busy year for Semprius, which also received federal stimulus funding from the Department of Energy to commercialize its product and in October was named one of 25 North Carolina Companies to Watch.

I knew when I arranged to interview Carr that Semprius made solar photovoltaic panels, but I wasn’t sure what made the Semprius product different from the Japanese-made modules we installed on our roof in Durham about five years ago. Carr brought me up to date with a fascinating and lucid explanation of the world of high-concentration photovoltaics.

To begin with, the entire surface of your typical domestic rooftop panel is some sort of semiconductor—most likely silicone, or possibly cadmium telluride, Carr said. Sunlight hits the surface and creates electricity that is routed to inverters for use in the house or on the grid.

This is different from high-concentration photovoltaics, in which lenses or mirrors concentrate the sunlight onto smaller bits of semiconductor beneath the optics.

Most high-concentration systems, Carr explained, involve semiconductors of just one square centimeter covered by lenses that are nine to ten inches square, which magnify the sunlight 500 to 600 times. But Semprius, Carr said, creates semiconductors that are about the size of a dot you’d make with a ballpoint pen, so the lenses that cover them need only be about three-quarters of an inch per side. These little lenses concentrate the light 1100 times. “In other words, we’re putting 1100 suns onto our semiconductors,” Carr told me.

Traditional photovoltaic panels vs. high-concentration models in which lenses focus the sunlight on smaller semiconductors. Illustration courtesy of Semprius, Inc.

Semprius panels achieve additional efficiency because the design of the lens allows 96 percent optical throughput and because the tiny semiconductors don’t heat up the way even one-square-centimeter cells would. This means no thermal management is required in the system, and cells that run cool last longer.

This is all made possible with “micro-transfer printing technology.” First, a foundry “grows” semiconductors to the company’s specifications on a special substrate material. For the next step, Carr suggested that I imagine not a roller printing press but instead something that more resembles a Gutenberg press or even a rubber stamp that lifts hundreds or even thousands of the tiny semiconductors from the substrate and then “prints” or stamps them down onto electronics-grade ceramic. This step is done at Semprius headquarters near Research Triangle Park.

Once the active layer is lifted, the substrate can be reused, further reducing costs. (Typically, the substrate is shipped as part of the semiconductor.)

This technology, which is licensed from the University of Illinois, could be used in a wide range of applications, including computer and television displays or solid state lighting. In fact, when Semprius was formed (the name stands for semiconductor printing), the principals had not yet decided which application to target. They decided on solar only after evaluating a number of other product applications, and they are looking to license out the technology for those other uses.

While the core microprinting technology is fully automated, Carr told me, the company is still hand-assembling the modules. The federal stimulus money is to help scale up manufacturing so that the company can “contribute to the energy needs of the country,” he said.

Although these solar panels are way more efficient than the ones we installed on our house, high-concentration solar technology is not intended for domestic rooftop use. That’s because the lenses that concentrate the sunlight must follow the sun. The arrays are on the ground on trackers, mechanical devices that follow the sun throughout the day and the seasons. The development deal with Siemens is to deploy that company’s control mechanisms to predict where the sun will be with great accuracy.

Joseph Carr, CEO of Semprius, Inc.

Semprius solar technology is already being tested by several utility companies, by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, by Sandia National Laboratories, and in a handful of European locations. Carr said that there is a huge interest in this sort of technology in developing countries, where microgrids using Semprius arrays could bring clean electricity to locations not currently served by utilities.

“We’re going to make a very big difference in the world,” he said.

RTI water quality scientist Kenneth Reckhow says we may have trouble achieving mandated water quality standards without making major lifestyle changes.

What happens if we are unable to achieve federally mandated water quality standards in our lakes, rivers, and bays?

In 1972, Congress enacted the Clean Water Act (also referred to as the 1972 Amendments to the Federal Water Pollution Control Act) governing water pollution in the U.S. Among other things, the Clean Water Act regulates the release of pollutants into surface waters. Individual states determine water quality standards for bodies of water within their borders.

Now, a water quality scientist at RTI International is concerned that these water quality standards are unattainable in certain major bodies of water, including Falls Lake, a lake that is valued for recreation as well as being Raleigh’s municipal water source.

Kenneth Reckhow, Ph.D., says that it will be difficult for water bodies like Falls Lake or the Chesapeake Bay to meet current water quality standards without huge changes in lifestyle. He is currently serving as chair of the National Academies Committee on the Evaluation of Chesapeake Bay Program Implementation for Nutrient Reduction to Improve Water Quality. This post gives him a firsthand look at the challenges we face in achieving mandated water quality standards.

According to Reckhow, we’ve done everything expected to reduce pollution from “point sources” such as the approximately 600 wastewater treatment plants in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. They have been “improved to the limit of technology,” he says, and further changes would be costly for perhaps little additional return.

“But we still have a long way to go to reduce nitrogen or phosphorus loading,” in the Chesapeake Bay and other water bodies, Reckhow says. That’s because those pollutants also arrive in our lakes, rivers, and bays from “nonpoint sources” in the watershed: agricultural fields, feedlots, stormwater drainage from urban areas, and lawn fertilizers. In the case of Falls Lake, Reckhow also notes that nutrients contained in the agricultural soils that were flooded to create the lake could still possibly be emerging into the water.

The effects of these pollutants range from annoying to dangerous. Nitrogen and phosphorus, ingredients in fertilizers, cause excessive algae growth, which in turn can deplete oxygen needed by fish and shellfish. Fish kills can result. Some algal blooms are toxic, causing potential threats to mammals up the food chain, including humans. Also, affected water can become discolored or cloudy and take on odors, impacting recreational activities like swimming and boating.

Measures to control nonpoint pollution are expensive and often imposed on communities that don’t directly benefit from the body of water being protected. For instance, New York state is required by the Environmental Protection Agency to produce a plan to reduce its contributions to Chesapeake Bay pollution. Not surprisingly, local officials in affected jurisdictions are balking at measures they believe would be “exorbitantly costly.”

And here in North Carolina, the state’s Environmental Management Commission has drafted regulations to clean up Falls Lake that may financially impact Durham and other upstream communities more than Raleigh, whose drinking water comes from the polluted lake.

Reckhow believes that our current urban/suburban lifestyle doesn’t mesh with the water quality needed to support desirable uses like recreational fishing, and he says that achieving mandated water quality may require such drastic measures as banning lawns and restricting agriculture within a watershed, limiting development, or even “moving people out of the watershed.”

Given the improbability that we will halt development or curtail agricultural activities in watersheds, Reckhow believes it is unlikely that we can achieve mandated water quality standards in many of our major U.S. water bodies. To him, an important question is what we gain by partial compliance: does a 70 percent reduction in pollution equal a 70 percent gain in water quality benefits? Not necessarily, says Reckhow, and that’s where computer modeling and analysis, his academic specialties, can help support decisionmaking.

“Do we say we want blue crabs and oysters badly enough that we curtail development and forego our manicured lawns?” Learning what measures might lead us to even partially achieve water quality goals is something he believes we need to engage in “earlier rather than later.”

Reckhow joined RTI International in October as chief scientist for the Water and Ecosystem Management Program. His hiring signals an emphasis at RTI in expanding its capabilities in water resource management, and he is serving as a thought leader and principal investigator there. He is currently involved in around a dozen projects and proposals.

Previously, he was a professor in Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment for 30 years and was director of the University of North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute. He is a widely cited expert on the development, evaluation and application of models and other assessment techniques for managing water quality.

Jim Trainham

Calls for Congress to boost federal funding for clean energy research are getting louder and Jim Trainham, executive director of the newly formed Research Triangle Solar Fuels Institute, is jockeying for a position in the chorus.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, N.C. State University and RTI International formed the solar fuels institute this summer to give the Research Triangle Park area its due as an energy research hub.

“There’s a lot of expertise here,” Trainham said Tuesday during a presentation at the Triangle Area Research Directors Council.

From its four parents, the solar fuels institute got experts in chemistry, electrical engineering, material sciences and nanotechnology and a lofty goal: Tapping the sun to make liquid fuel. (Watch a Q&A with Trainham here.)

The technology to meet the goal could be developed in less than a decade, Trainham suggested at TARDC. The big question is how to pay for the research and development.

In the past 30 years, federal funding for energy research has dropped about 80 percent to $5 billion annually. That’s a fraction of the about $30 billion available for health research and the about $80 billion available for defense research per year.

Federal expenditures on energy R&D, 1980 to 2009

With much of the $35 billion in stimulus research money distributed and a deficit looming, Trainham isn’t the only one worried Congress will revert to neglecting federal funding for energy research.

In June, the American Energy Innovation Council, a group of top business executives that includes Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, released a proposal to develop new, inexpensive clean-energy sources that would increase federal funding for energy research to $16 billion per year. In October, scholars from three think tanks, the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Breakthrough Institute, released a white paper that proposes to innovate clean-energy technology with the help of $25 billion in annual federal funding.

The solar fuels center has run commercials in the Washington, D.C., area to reinforce the message of the two proposals and give members of Congress an idea where some of the additional funding might go.

Trainham has also tried to get energy companies interested in partnering and investing in North Carolina’s Research Triangle. In September, he attended the World Energy Congress in Montreal, Canada, and was one of five speakers on a panel that discussed energy for transport issues.

The solar fuels institute has yet to secure industry commitments, but it has attracted interest among foreign governments. This week, a group of diplomats from 15 countries, including Bahrain, Australia and India, is visiting North Carolina to better understand the state’s green energy innovations and smart-grid technologies.

The U.S. government is paying less attention, Trainham told TARDC members. “Capitol Hill ignores the hidden costs of oil and gasoline.”

The $2.76 that a gallon of gasoline costs on average at the pump is misleading, Trainham said. The true cost for a gallon of gas is about $10.

How does he figure that? He includes taxpayers’ costs to secure the 53 percent of its refined oil that the U.S. has to import, including protecting the Persian Gulf – origin of much of the imported oil – and the loss of U.S. jobs and federal and state revenues due to the imports.

Considering oil’s hidden costs, paying to replace oil is a good deal, according to Trainham. “The greenness comes for fun.”

Cover of the Adventures Among Ants, by Dr. Mark W. Moffett.

Not many scientists beg perfect strangers to eat the species they study. But that’s just what “Doctor Bugs” did when visiting tourist-magnet ruins in Cambodia. Dr. Mark W. Moffett proffered a dish of scrumptious crackers topped with herbs and, um, plump ant larvae to passersby — at times literally pleading with them to try it. It’s just one of the ways the world-famed ecologist, and Smithsonian Institution research associate, gets people to stop and notice the trillions of ants that share our world.

Moffett’s comedic showman personality was on display in full force on Tuesday night as he entertained an auditorium full of people at the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences with stories about ants. And boy does he have stories. There’s the time he snaked a small camera attached to a long cable into a nest of weaver ants, capturing engaging footage of the ants at work… the camera pushed farther and farther past hundreds of ants, until ants swarmed the other end of the cable and overran him. The footage ended abruptly with audio of Moffett yelping in pain. Then there’s the time he stepped barefoot on a pair of ant forceps in his camp and spent the day worrying he’d been bitten by a poisonous snake, a fair concern considering there was a nest within a foot of his hammock. And let’s not forget the time he actually did sit on the world’s most poisonous snake in South America, too engrossed with photographing ants to notice.”If you must sit on a poisonous snake, sit closest to their head,” Moffett deadpanned to the crowd. “It’s the best way. It’s the only way.”

National Geographic cartoon of Moffet squatting on a pit viper.

More often, Moffett’s stories are about the ants themselves — their diverse ways of sensing the world, interacting, and divvying up labor to achieve survival goals efficiently. Moffett’s high-energy slide show was centered around promoting his new book, Adventures Among Ants: A Global Safari With a Cast of Trillions, published by the University of California Press.

“Ants differ from us in that the individual doesn’t matter, it’s all about what’s good for the group,” Moffett said. But they’re colonies are a lot like our cities, he went on to explain, drawing analogies between small cities/small ant colonies and large cities/large ant colonies. In smaller colonies, where there is less specialization of labor, each ant has to be a jack-of-all-trades and perform a variety of tasks.”They have their toolboxes built-in to their faces,” Moffett said, flashing a picture of a type of trap-jaw ant with extra long pitch-fork tipped jaws. It uses the long levers to pick up struggling prey and carry it safely back to the nest. But a much smaller, second pair of jaws tucked closer to its mouth allows it to eat.

Larger colonies, like our larger cities, tend to have more job specialization, Moffett said. Scientists can often tell what role they play by their size. Sometimes the largest ants of the same species outweigh the smallest ones by 500 times. The goliath ants are often used to deliver the death blow (a sting, or a bite) in battles with other ants or interlopers, and even act as “school busses,” allowing smaller ants in their colony to hitch rides. “Basically, it’s more energy efficient for the colony if the smaller ants ride on the bigger ants,” Moffett explained.

Leaf cutter ants cooperate to bring leaf fragments to their underground nests, where "gardener" ants cultivate a fungus upon the decaying vegetation. The colony harvests and eats the fungus. (Photo by Dr. Mark W. Moffett)

He also talked about various ways that ants work together, like the free-diving ants in Borneo that live in pitcher plants. They fetch crickets out of the water pooling in a pitcher’s basin, then haul it to the lip of the pitcher where they stash it and have a feast. The crickets are often too large for the pitcher plants to digest, he explained, so the ants are doing the plant a favor by saving it from experiencing an overdose of acid as the cricket decays. “They’re basically antacids for the plant,” Moffett joked.”But they also must have the strongest toes in the world to carry these large crickets up the slope of the pitcher plant, which is made so that insects will fall into its trap.” Ants also form chains to create living bridges that they use to cross from one tree to another high amid the canopies of rainforest trees, hundreds of feet from the forest floor. And some ants will sacrifice themselves to fill “pot holes” along highways the colony uses to move things to and from their nest. Then there are the leaf cutter ants, which divvy up leaf harvesting and fungus cultivating duties like nobody’s business (see photo at right).

Moffett’s photographs have been widely published and he often contributes work to National Geographic magazine. He searches for images that tell a story within their frames, he said, like the one he took of a battle between two ant species that shows a Goliath ant fending off attacks from smaller ants, with the carnage of warfare in the background: headless ants frozen mid-stride, and ants with their torso’s chopped in two and legs torn asunder. He encouraged the kids in the audience to “not lose that weird point of view you have when young,” because it can be valuable to being a scientist. He credits his own path to biology and entomology with reading too many Jane Goodall adventure books when younger, and climbing too many trees.

Moffett’s talk deftly distilled insights about ant ecology and social interactions into anecdotes that enthralled kids and adults like me who are in touch with their inner kids. If you missed his talk, you did miss out — but don’t sweat it, you can always order the book.

MORE MOFFET, LINKS:
Moffett on NPR’s Fresh Air; June 17, 2010
The hidden world of ants, Smithsonian Magazine; July 2009

It’s much harder to prove it.

It may require data that’s not available or collaboration across scientific disciplines with very different views of the world, disciplines such as chemistry, urban planning and epidemiology, for example.

To overcome some of the hurdles, more than 80 researchers and politicians gathered this week at a two-day conference the Research Triangle Environmental Health Collaborative called in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

Thomas Burke. (Photo by Will Kirk, Johns Hopkins University Gazette)

Among the speakers at the conference: Paul Anastas, the father of green chemistry, whom Pres. Barak Obama appointed assistant administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development; Thomas Burke, associate chair of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; and Hal Zenick, director of the EPA’s National Human Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory in RTP.

“The seeds are here,” Burke said, scanning the conference participants. “The right people are here in this group.”

The conference location reflected the concentration of environmental health research brainpower in RTP, home to the EPA’s main air pollution research and regulation center and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Also, RTI International has looked into environmental factors of diseases, particularly in poor countries, for nearly half of the 50 years the RTP-based research institute has existed.

The timing of the conference was also poignant. While the participants at the RTP conference worked on a roadmap to identify and abolish environmental disease triggers, researchers from the Children’s Hospital in Boston released results of a study that illustrated the hopes and frustrations of their colleagues in RTP.

One of the first of its kind, the study showed that air pollution in an area is a strong predictor for the prevalence of diabetes among people living in the area. The higher the exposure, the stronger the relationship.

Left, a map of diabetes prevalence. Right, a map of soot prevalence. (October issue of Diabetes Care)

The conclusion was based on data from the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Census. The researchers at Children’s Hospital Boston took county-by-county EPA data of what is called PM2.5, tiny particles and droplets that are the main components of haze, smoke and motor vehicle exhaust. They combined the PM2.5 data with CDC data of where people with adult-onset diabetes live. And then, they made sure the study outcome wasn’t skewed by other known risk factors such as obesity and ethnicity.

Even soot levels below EPA safety limits were linked to diabetes prevalence, according to the study.

What the study couldn’t prove was that the particles, which are small enough to reach the deepest regions of the lungs, caused diabetes. To do so, the researchers would have needed data they didn’t have, results from blood or urine tests, for example, to see whether people who were exposed to more particulates were also more likely to show precursors of diabetes, such as inflammation or insulin resistance.

These individual test results are frequently hard to come by, researchers at the RTP environmental health summit suggested. That’s why they recommended that North Carolina establish a biomonitoring program with blood and urine tests to measure individual exposures to key contaminants.

Other recommendations from conference participants included:

• Form research teams that from the beginning of a research project are made up of scientists from different disciplines to make sure data are generated following common goals.
• Crowdsource data, particularly in cases where very little information is available. Example: The interaction of lifestyles and foods in the worldwide obesity epidemic.
• Involve doctors, nurses and community advocates in environmental health research and training.

Read all recommendations from the conference here.

More coverage of the conference here.

Ken Cook

A mother’s womb is a protective cocoon, but it is also where humans for the first time encounter the world that awaits them after birth. This encounter happens through sound and touch and through the exchange of blood between mother and child. About 300 quarts of blood from the mother bring nutrient and oxygen to the developing child every day.

The blood also delivers industrial pollutants like dioxins, consumer products chemicals like flame retardants and chemicals that come from pesticides, according to a study by the Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based consumer advocacy group. The study tested samples of umbilical cord blood from 10 babies born in August and September 2004 in U.S. hospitals for 413 toxins and environmental pollutants.

On Tuesday, Ken Cook, co-founder and president of the Environmental Working Group, presented the results of the 10 Americans study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as part of the N.C. Science Festival.

The pollution in people by the numbers:

The placenta doesn’t filter out industrial toxins and environmental pollutants

The 10 babies couldn’t have inhaled, digested or absorbed the chemicals by being exposed to them in the air, water, food or personal care products. Their exposure was in the womb, where no blood brain barrier protected their developing brains.

The test results showed that the 10 cord blood samples contained:

• 287 toxins and chemical pollutants, 200 on average per sample.
• 28 waste products, such as dioxins and furans, chemicals that come out of smoke stacks.
• 47 consumer product ingredients, such as flame retardants from furniture and clothing, teflon chemicals and pesticides.
• 212 industrial chemicals and breakdown products from pesticides that have been banned for 30 years or longer.

The mere presence of a toxin doesn’t automatically mean it is doing damage, but the 10 Americans study findings raise concern, Cook said, because of the chemicals found:

• 134 have shown to cause cancer in lab animals or people.
• 151 are associated with causing birth defects.
• 154 are endocrine disruptors, they interfere with the body’s hormonal system and produce adverse developmental, reproductive, neurological, and immune effects.
• 186 are linked to infertility.
• 130 are immune system toxins.
• 158 are neurotoxins.

Low doses and unusual health trends

The concentrations of the chemicals in the samples were low, just parts per billion. In pancakes, 1 ppb is like one pancake in a stack of pancakes 4,000 miles high.

• Mercury: 0.07 ppb to 2.3 ppb.
• Polyaromatic hydrocarbons, pollutants from burning gasoline and garbage that can increase the risk of cancer: 217 ppb to 384 ppb.
• DDT and other pesticides that were banned 30 or more years ago: 8.72 ppb to 35 ppb
• PCBs, banned since 1976: 2.99 ppb to 19.7 ppb.

But concentrations of active ingredients in medicines are also low and the medicines have positive and negative effects. As Cook quipped, 30 ppb of tadalafil in Cialis can promote conception, 0.035 ppb of two female hormones in NuvaRing can prevent conception and 30 ppb paroxetine hydrochloride in Paxil can help you “chill out either way.”

It’s not clear how damaging the industrial pollutants, pesticides and consumer product chemicals on the market are to human health. But epigenetics, research that looks at how environmental factors activate or turn off disease-causing genes, is a hot area of science.

Meanwhile, rapid increases in some diseases in the past 30 years to 40 years are prompting Cook to ask, “What’s going on? We don’t evolve that quickly.”

• Acute lymphocitic leukemia in children has increased 84 percent.
• Childhood brain cancers have increased 57 percent.
• At 17.7 percent, the risk of cancer is highest in the U.S., but immigrants from lower-risk countries develop U.S. breast and prostate cancer risk rates within one generation.
• Breast development now happens about one year earlier in white girls and nearly two years earlier in black girls than 50 years ago.
• Autism spectrum disorder is the fastest growing developmental disorder in the U.S., with an annual growth rate of 10 percent to 17 percent. About 1 in 110 children have the disorder, the majority of them boys.
• The number of hypospadia cases, a birth defect of the urethra in boys, has doubled.

Suggestions to minimize exposure

It’s impossible to avoid exposure, Cook said. But he offered a list of suggestions to minimize exposure. Federal legislation that would require more testing of chemicals and make the test results public tops his list.

The suggestions include:

• Buy organic.
• Eat fish that is low in mercury.
• Filter tap water. Check out the Environmental Working Group’s National Drinking Water database. It includes quality reports for Durham, Raleigh and Cary.
• Use cast-iron and stainless steel cookware instead of nonstick products.
• Shop smart for personal care products, such as shampoos, cosmetics and toothpastes. Stay away from nail polish and dark hair dye and check out other products on the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database.

Watch a video of Cook making a similar presentation last year:

Part 1

Click here to view the embedded video.

Part 2

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dr. Robert Koger

Dr. Robert Koger is president and executive director of Advanced Energy, a nonprofit organization established by the North Carolina Utilities Commission in 1980 to forestall electrical rate increases by promoting energy conservation and alternative and renewable sources of electricity. Advanced Energy provides services that focus on energy efficiency for commercial and industrial markets, electric motors and drives, plug-in transportation, and applied building science.

Advanced Energy also operates NC GreenPower, a program funded through consumers’ voluntary contributions, designed to increase the amount of renewable energy put on the electric grid in North Carolina and to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.

This month, Dr. Koger assumes the chairmanship of Triangle Area Research Directors Council (TARDC), a group of science and technology leaders from local companies, nonprofits, and universities. The group meets over lunch monthly from September to May, to exchange ideas and information and to hear from guest speakers. TARDC’s first meeting under Dr. Koger’s leadership will be September 21, and the guest speaker will be Mr. Joe Freddoso, president and CEO of MCNC/NC STEM. Non-members of TARDC can attend the luncheons.

I recently asked Dr. Koger about the history of Advanced Energy and about his leadership of TARDC.

You were chairing the North Carolina Utilities Commission when it launched Advanced Energy as a nonprofit. What factors went into that decision?

During the 1970s and early 1980s, North Carolina was experiencing phenomenal growth in electric energy demand resulting from both population growth and greater energy use–particularly with homes and businesses installing air conditioning on a very wide-scale basis. Depending on your age, you may remember that very few homes had air conditioning in the 1950s and 1960s. I know my wife and I bought our first house in 1970 and installed air conditioning in it. It had been built in the 1940s.

As a consequence, North Carolina electric utilities (who had not had any rate increase cases for many, many years) started filing yearly large rate increase applications to support the construction of new generating plants and transmission lines needed to serve the growing electrical load (growth in electricity demand was averaging 10 to 12% a year). We would have hundreds and hundreds of people turn out at the public hearings held across the state to oppose the increases.

In the fall of 1979, I was returning from one such hearing in Reidsville that ended at about midnight. Several protestors had suggested placing more emphasis on renewable generation. Also, at that time, little was being done by utilities anywhere to assist their customers with any kind of energy efficiency practices. It occurred to me that we might dampen the need for new generation by looking at ways to conserve energy and also look at alternative ways to generate some of our power requirements. Hence, I thought we might want to propose the establishment of a non-profit corporation that all the state’s utilities (through a tiny surcharge on their customers) could contribute to in order to explore such opportunities. Having one such entity would avoid unnecessary duplication of effort that might result from asking each utility to explore these issues on its own.

My fellow commissioners supported the idea, and we established a hearing on the concept for the first week in January of 1980. Soon after the order was issued, Governor Hunt called me and said that he wanted to testify at the hearing in favor of the concept. In the two months prior to the hearing, I met with several groups at the Governor’s request, to explain the concept.

The Commission approved the concept after public hearings and receiving almost unanimous support for it, and the Alternative Energy Corp. was formed. The name was changed in 1997 to avoid confusion with our overall purpose. I think this was the first or maybe the second so-called “public benefit” fund formed within the U.S. Now a number of states have them.

Photo: Advanced Energy

Advanced Energy works as a global consultant for energy efficiency. Was it originally envisioned in that way or was the original mission to work within North Carolina?

Our original thought was that it would work only in North Carolina, and it remained that way for about the first 10 years. It was mainly a grant-giving organization during those years, with some projects being carried on by the staff.

I resigned from the Commission and assumed the leadership of Advanced Energy after the Corporation was about nine years old, when the first director left for a position in Oak Ridge.

The company had done a lot of good things and had gotten a good bit of favorable publicity for all that it had done. However, I thought we could do more by having more expertise on staff as opposed to trying to find outside contractors most of the time. So we made the transition, including establishing major laboratories to do testing and training.

Soon we were getting requests for assistance from entities in other states. The Commission approved our expanding beyond North Carolina. One reason was that we were able to expand our internal capabilities by hiring more experts, which then allowed us better resources to train younger workers that we were hiring. All this taken together meant that we could do more for our North Carolina utilities and their customers.

What are the most exciting developments Advanced Energy is pursuing?

Advanced Energy's Plug-In Hybrid Electric School Bus Media Event in Raleigh on May 17, 2007

That’s a very difficult question because we are involved in so many cutting-edge projects. We are heavily involved in the technical aspects of electric cars (plug-ins and all-electric), testing and locating charging stations, etc. In terms of electric motors, which use a huge amount of our overall energy, we have the only independent electric and drive motor test facility in North American and do a lot of testing of motors that are shipped into this country. We have done some testing of  “hub” motors that could theoretically be used to transform existing cars into “plug-ins.” We have also assisted other countries in setting up testing labs–most recently, South Korea.

We are working closely with the Department of Energy (DOE) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We are collaborating with the DOE and National Renewable Energy Laboratory on the preparation of the national standards for retrofits for houses by bringing together experts from around the country. For EPA, we are preparing the training manuals for their new Energy Star housing requirements taking effect in 2012.

Tell me about NC GreenPower.

We operate NC GreenPower as a separate company. We initiated this non-profit in 2002 at the request of the Utilities Commission, following a request from a legislative committee. I think NCGP has done a lot to lay the groundwork for more renewable generation in North Carolina, particularly, in terms of showing that renewables could be safely added to the grid.

You are assuming the leadership of TARDC this year. What has that organization meant to you?

I have been a member for several years. I am reminded of Claude McKinney’s comment (he was the designer and director of NCSU’s Centennial Campus) that “education is a contact sport.” He wanted the campus to be a place for research to be done by both industry and the university and he made sure that we were in “contact” by location of the building and by the formation of partnerships. And his vision is being carried on today.

I think TARDC serves some of the same purposes. It brings together people and helps all of us know what is going on in the Triangle and how we might benefit in some way from that knowledge.

For more information on participating in TARDC, please contact Cara Rousseau at tardc@rtp.org or 919.549.8181.