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.

Irva Hertz-Picciotto

Irva Hertz-Picciotto is a slight woman stepping squarely into a brawl: the controversy over rising autism rates.

That the rates have been rising is undisputed. In the 1980s, about 6 of 10,000 were believed to have an autistic disorder, according to a 2007 paper. Today, autism spectrum disorders affect about 40 in 10,000. That’s a 600 percent increase, but opinions differ over what’s causing the increase.

Many researchers see forms of autism as predominantly inherited disorders whose diagnoses have dramatically increased, because parents have become more aware of telltale signs and children get diagnosed earlier, more frequently and with less severe symptoms than 30 years ago.

Others like Hertz-Picciotto, a professor of public health sciences at the University of California at Davis, aren’t so sure genes are the only culprits. But lacking data, they have had little to go on beyond questioning inconsistencies. How, for example, can it be that one identical twin has an autistic disorder but the other doesn’t, even though they share the same genetic information?

Also, at least one-third of the increase in prevalence has not been explained by higher awareness and a broader definition of autistic disorders, Hertz-Picciotto said Monday during a presentation at the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences in Research Triangle Park.

Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Considering the rapid rise of not only autistic disorders, but also asthma, obesity, diabetes and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder among children, she wondered whether there is “possibly a common set of environmental exposures that provides a unifying explanation for increased incidences of these conditions in recent decades?”

She was fully aware posing the question might open her up to criticism. “This is a little bit of a hot-button issue,” she said.

How hot, she found out last year when she suggested researchers should look for environmental culprits responsible for the increase in the autism rate in California. Her comment was part of a press release UC Davis issued after the publication of an analysis she and UC Davis programmer Lora Delwiche wrote on the rise in autism and the role of age at diagnosis. (Criticism in response to the statement here and here.)

Hertz-Picciotto, who studied effects of environmental exposures during prenatal development while she taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1990s, has become well known for her autism research. As a member of the UC Davis MIND Institute, she has been involved in two groundbreaking autism studies known as the CHARGE study and the follow-up MARBLES study.

CHARGE, which stands for childhood autism risk from genetics and the environment, started enrollment in 2003 to fill some large knowledge gaps in autism research.

“We know something about genes, but not which ones are the important ones,” Hertz-Picciotto said. “We know very little about the environment.”

So far, the CHARGE study has produced the following clues:

• Mercury and polybrominated diphenyl ethers or PBDEs, which are used as flame retardants on drapes and furniture fabrics, don’t seem to elevate the risk, but some pesticides do. (The pesticide results have not been published yet.)
• Maternal nutrition seems to make some difference, especially prenatal folic acid. (Results have also not been published.)
• Air pollution, unplanned Cesarean deliveries, maternal diabetes, obesity and hypertension and maternal fevers may also increase the risk, but data collection is still under way.

Also, a study by other autism researchers suggested autism may be linked to maternal immune responses, such as inflammation and immune disorders. Up to 12 percent of the mothers of kids with autistic disorders produce specific antibodies to fetal brain antigens. Based on the immunological research results, Hertz-Picciotto suggested to investigate immunological toxins, not just neurotoxins.

The CHARGE and MARBLES studies are being conducted in California, a state with a rich epidemiological database of autistic disorder diagnoses. Researchers in Pennsylvania and Maryland participate in the CDC’s EARLI study, which follows 1,200 mothers of children with autism at the start of another pregnancy and documents the newborn child’s development through three years of age.

At UNC-CH, research involving fruit flies has advanced understanding of autism.

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.

Biofuel crops on a roadside near Raleigh. Photo: NCDOT

Sherrod heads NCDOT’s Roadside Environmental Unit, which is charged with keeping the state’s medians and roadsides safe and aesthetically pleasing. The unit is responsible for mowing, stormwater and erosion control, and the 25-year-old wildflower program. While many states have similar wildflower plantings, only two—North Carolina and Utah—have begun exploiting the potential of roadsides as a source of fuel.

The roadside biofuel project aims to answer two questions: whether it is feasible to grow biofuel crops on the state’s roadsides, where soil tends to be poor and compacted, and whether it is feasible to do so cost-effectively. Already, the first question has been answered. This year, Dr. Matthew Veal of N.C. State University extracted more than 100 gallons of canola oil from plants grown on four one-acre pilot sites across the state. This was mixed with conventional diesel to create what is known as B20, a blend of 20 percent biofuel and 80 percent conventional. Sherrod says that this mixture is used because diesel engines do not have to be modified in order to use it.

Canola being harvested from a pilot plot in June 2010. Photo: NCDOT

Canola seeds ready for extraction into biodiesel. Photo: NCDOT

Whether biofuel can be produced cost-effectively is the more challenging question. The initial pilot project was designed to test different subclimates and tillage regimes. But Sherrod says that farming small, disparately located plots is about as efficient as running to four different supermarkets across a county to shop the sales. They are now looking to scale up with larger plots that will allow them to farm more efficiently; at that point they can compare certain fixed costs. “We know what it costs to mow a mile,” he says. Now they would like to know what it costs to till, plant, and harvest a mile of crops.

As Sherrod points out, one way or another, large machines are going to be servicing these roadsides. “Our objective,” he says, “is for dollars of mowing to be reallocated to energy.” The same amount of money might be spent, but it would produce a tangible benefit in the form of biodiesel.

Knowing that corn-based ethanol has gotten a bit of a black eye in the renewable energy community in recent years, I asked Veal to talk me through the difference between ethanol and biodiesel. One argument against ethanol is characterized as “food versus fuel”: ethanol production would take large amounts of acreage currently used for food crops. The roadside biofuel program, though, would be using marginal lands, not North Carolina’s rich agricultural fields. (As an aside, Veal suggests that a largescale roadside biofuel program might also provide jobs for farmers.)

Another problem with ethanol is that of embedded energy—the amount of fuel that is used to plant, vertilize, harvest, and distill the product. Veal says that creating biodiesel is less energy-intensive than creating ethanol, because rather than using heat for distillation, the final product is created through a chemical reaction that requires less input of energy.

Canola oil being extracted from seeds. A simple chemical process will transform it into biodiesel that will be used in the NC Department of Transportation fleet. Photo: NCDOT

He uses a screw press to extract oil from the seeds once they are harvested, then mixes in some chemicals. In 24 hours, the oil has separated into biodiesel and glycerin that is reserved for other uses. Because heat is not used to create the product, very little energy is expended in its manufacture, compared to ethanol.

Veal brought the roadside biofuel idea to Sherrod after learning about Utah’s endeavor in a workshop. It has both state and federal funding and feeds into North Carolina’s renewable energy mandate. Surprisingly, other states are not so far following suit. “We’ve left all the other states in the dust,” says Sherrod.

More information on North Carolina’s roadside biodiesel project will be presented Thursday at a workshop sponsored by Triangle J Council of Governments at RTP Headquarters.

In 2003 the US Department of Agriculture created the Rural Energy for America Program (REAP, then known as “Section 9006”) to provide grants to farmers and rural small businesses to cover up to 25% of the total costs associated with purchasing and installing renewable energy systems and making energy efficiency improvements.

As with any government program however, there’s a tedious process to go through and paperwork to fill out before receiving the funds. One of the first steps in the process is having an independent professional engineer conduct an audit estimating the potential energy savings on the specific project that they’re applying for to receive grant money. Kurt Creamer, Ph.D., says that the “actual percentage energy savings, in some cases are quite phenomenal.”

That’s where Senergy Inc., the Apex-based company hired to conduct these energy audits, comes in. Kurt Creamer, PhD, president of Senergy, founded the company in 2003 in response to REAP while he was still enrolled in the Biological and Agricultural Engineering PhD program at North Carolina State University and working full-time at the school. Even though there was a new need for energy auditors, business remained relatively slow for a few years.

“In the early days farmers had to pay up front for the energy audits which were often times quite difficult for the farmers,” Creamer said. Business for Senergy spread solely through word-of-mouth and only those farmers that could afford to front the initial costs of an audit got on board for the first 5-6 years of the program.

But then, in 2008, the North Carolina Farm Bureau got involved. The Farm Bureau covers the costs of the audits up front so that the farmers are much more willing to go through the process of applying for the REAP grants. The program (and business for Senergy) skyrocketed. It’s “been a real boom to my business to have the Farm Bureau involved in the project,” Creamer said.

Senergy’s work

Senergy typically works with farmers in Eastern North Carolina specializing in grain farms, but has had the opportunity over the years to work with a variety of types of farms including tobacco farms, some on swine & poultry farms, and a handful of dairy farms, often times on some very nontraditional projects.

One particular project on a hog farm required comparing the energy efficiency of burning the dead hogs to composting them—composting is more energy efficient, in case you were wondering. Creamer has also worked on energy efficient organic dairy farm feed grinding systems, poultry barns, irrigation systems, and grain dryers. But he’s not just limited to working on energy efficiency projects. Kurt also works on some renewable energy projects, including one this fall where he’ll be working on a “project to look at the use of sweet potatoes in an anaerobic digester,” Creamer explained, that “could generate enough biogas from the sweet potatoes to meet the requirements of the farm.”

What’s next?

Creamer says that he would love to expand in several ways:

• Geographically: There is still plenty of opportunity to pursue this program in other parts of North Carolina and beyond
• Explore the energy needs of rural small businesses (outside of the farm base)
• Take on more renewable energy projects
• Improve his engineering methodologies

At the end of the day Creamer says he really enjoys the work he does and “it’s a really good program for the farmers, and a good program for the environment.”

What I wrote last month,

“I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.”

…was reinforced when I read the book itself: I don’t know anything about infrastructure. But after reading the book I can say I know a little bit, understand how much I don’t know, and realize how much more I’d like to know. I bet it was fun watching me as I was reading it, exclaiming on average five times per page “This is so cool”, and “Hey, this is neat” and “Wow, I had no idea!” and (rarely) “w00t! Here’s a tidbit I actually heard of before” and “Hey, I know where this is!” (as I lived in Raleigh for eleven years, I know the area well).

A few years ago, Scott was just as ignorant about infrastructure as most of us are. But then his curiousity got better of him and he started researching. He would start at his house in Raleigh and trace all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. Sometimes there would be a crew on his street digging into the asphalt and fixing something and he would approach them and ask questions. At other times he would figure out where the headquarters are and who to ask to talk to:

“What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.”

In a sense, this book is a memoir of curiosity as Scott describes his own adventures with a hard-hat, a modern Jean Valjean sloshing his way through the Raleigh sewers, test-driving the public transportation, and passing multiple security checks in order to enter the nearby nuclear plant.

But it is more than just a story of personal awe at modern engineering. Scott weaves in the explanations of the engineering and the underlying science, explains the history and the politics of the Raleigh infrastructure, the historical evolution of technologies underlying modern infrasturcture, and illustrates it by comparisons to other infrastructures: how does New York City does that, how did Philadelphia did it 50 years ago, how did London 500 years ago, how about Rome 2000 years ago?

“What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.”

And this brings me to the point where I start musing about stuff that the book leaves out. As I was reading, I was constantly hungry for more. I wanted more comparisons with other cities and countries and how they solved particular problems. I wanted more history. I wanted more science. I wanted more about political angles. But then, when I finished, I realized that a book I was hungry for would be a 10-tome encyclopic monograph and a complete flop. It is good that Scott has self-control and self-discipline as a writer to know exactly what to include and what to leave out. He provides an excellent Bibliography at the end for everyone who is interested in pursuing a particular interest further. His book’s homepage is a repository for some really cool links – just click on the infrastructure you are interested in (note that “Communications” is under construction, as it is in the real world – it is undergoing a revolution as we speak so it is hard to collect a list of ‘definitive’ resources – those are yet to be written):

What many readers will likely notice as they go through the book is that there is very little about the environmental impacts of various technologies used to ensure that cities function and citizens have all their needs met. And I think this was a good strategy. If Scott included this information, many readers and critics would focus entirely on the environmental bits (already available in so many other books, articles and blogs) and completely miss what the book is all about – the ingenuity needed to keep billions of people living in some kind of semblance of normal life and the interconnectedness that infrastructure imposes on the society, even on those who would want not to be interconnected:

“There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.”

My guess is, if there’s anyone out there who could possibly not like this book, it will be die-hard libertarians who fantasize about being self-sufficient in this over-populated, inter-connected world.

At several places in the book, Scott tries to define what infrastructure is. It is a network that provides a service to everyone. It has some kind of control center, a collection center or distribution center. It has a number of peripheral stations and nodes. And there are some kinds of channels that connect the central place to the outside stations and those stations to the final users – every household in town. There is also a lot of redundancy built into the system, e.g., if a water main breaks somewhere, you will still get your water but it will come to you via other pipes in surrounding streets, with zero interruption to your service.

Scott covers surveying of land, stormwater, freshwater, wastewater, roads, power, solid waste, communications (phone, broadcast media, internet) and transportation (e.g., public transportation, trains, airplanes). These are the kinds of things that are traditionally thought of as ‘infrastructure’. But aren’t there other such systems? I’d think security has the same center-spokes model of organization as well: police stations and sub-stations (distribution centers) that can send cops out wherever needed (distribution channels), with potential criminals brought to court (processing centers) and if found guilty placed in prison (collection center). Similarly with fire-departments. Ambulances are just the most peripheral tentacles of the health-care infrastructure. The local-county-state-federal political system is also a kind of infrastructure. So is the military. So is the postal system. So is the food industry and distribution.

Thinking about all of these other potential examples of infrastructure made me realize how many services that require complex infrastructure undergo cycles of centralization and decentralization. For transportation, everyone needed to have a horse. Later, it was centralized into ship, railroad, bus and airline infrastructures. But that was counteracted by the popularity of individually owned cars. And of course taxis were there all along. And as each decade and each country has its own slight moves towards or away from centralization, in the end a balance is struck in which both modes operate.

You raised your own chickens. Then you bought them from mega-farms. Now many, but not most citizens, are raising their own chickens again. It is not feasible – not enough square miles on the planet – for everyone to raise chickens any more. But having everyone fed factory chicken is not palatable to many, either. Thus, a new, uneasy balance.

Nowhere is this seen more obviously today as in Communications infrastructure. We are in the middle of a big decentralization movement, away from broadcast (radio, TV and yes, newspaper industry infrastructure with its printing presses, distribution centers and trucks) infrastructure that marked about half of 20th century, and forward into something more resembling the media ecosystem of the most of human history – everyone is both a sender and a reciever, except that instead of writing letters or assembling at a pub every evening, we can do this online. But internet is itself an infrastructure – a series of tubes network of cables and it is essential not to allow any centralized corporation to have any power over what passes through those cables and who gets to send and receive stuff this way.

Finally, as I was reading the book I was often wishing to see photographs of places or drawings of the engineering systems he describes. As good as Scott is at putting it in words, there were times when I really wanted to actually see how something looks like. And there were times when what I really wanted was something even more interactive, perhaps an online visualization of an infrastructure system that allows me to change parameters (e.g., amount of rainfall per minute) and see how that effects some output (e.g., rate of clearing water off the streets, or speed at which it is rushing through the pipes, or how it affects the water level of the receving river). That kind of stuff would make this really come to life to me.

Perhaps “On The Grid” will have an iPad edition in the future in which the text of the book is just a begining of the journey – links to other sources (e,g., solutions around the globe, historical sources), to images, videos, interractive visualizations and, why not, real games. After all, it is right here in Raleigh that IBM is designing a game that allows one to plan and build modern infrasctructure – CityOne. These two should talk to each other and make something magnificient like that.

Dr. Laura Jackson of the EPA's National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory (NHEERL), a unit of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development that is housed in Research Triangle Park.

Dr. Jackson and her colleagues in this RTP lab—more than 100 scientists—conduct research on ecosystem services, those benefits provided by the environment over and above the psychological benefits of being out in nature. These services can have tangible and measurable economic value.

For instance, in a normally functioning ecosystem, vegetation would take up nitrogen and phosphorus from animal waste and keep those nutrients from overburdening groundwater and streams. In last week’s example, when hogs were added to an ecosystem, they knocked it out of balance by depositing more nutrients than the vegetation could handle and by removing plants that could take up the nutrients and provide erosion control. The researchers at the Center for Environmental Farming Systems were developing countermeasures to keep the water clean near hog farming operations and restore ecosystem function.

In addition to cleaning water, vegetation can also scrub pollutants from the air, and the EPA’s Dr. Jackson and her colleagues are looking into the capacity of plantings near roads to filter pollutants from vehicles. Given the connection between tailpipe emissions and respiratory illnesses, this promises to be a fruitful area of research: imagine the cost savings on medication and lost work time if nature can help prevent illness.

Another example of an ecosystem service, Dr. Jackson said, is the ability of urban vegetation to mitigate the “heat-island” effect, reducing the risk of heat stress in vulnerable populations. (Think green roofs.) In this example, nature would not only alleviate illness but eliminate some of the need to burn fossil fuels for air conditioning.

It’s already obvious that ecosystem services can be an important public health tool, and we haven’t even gotten to the topic I called Dr. Jackson to discuss: Lyme disease.

Lyme is of growing concern in the Research Triangle region; more on that in a moment. It is also of particular interest to me, because I am a renegade Durhamite living in New York’s Hudson Valley. My new home is not only the hotbed of Lyme disease but one of the hotbeds of Lyme disease research. It’s almost child’s play to get Lyme disease here, and nearly any symptom that brings you to the doctor will result in blood tests for Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. They are that common.

At the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, where I am loosely affiliated as a science writer, Dr. Richard S. Ostfeld is leading a team studying the impact of biodiversity on Lyme and other tick-borne illnesses. Long-term research conducted by Ostfeld’s lab reveals that more people get Lyme disease when natural landscapes are fragmented by development and other human activities. Large carnivores who need lots of space are driven away, and white-footed mice, which carry the bacteria that causes Lyme, thrive in the absence of these predators.

Given my newfound geographical interest in Lyme, I was incredibly interested to hear that someone in the Triangle—my beat for this blog—is working on this same topic. Dr. Jackson talked to me about her research findings and about how the EPA is using research like hers to affect decision making.

Dr. Jackson initiated the Lyme research as part of her Ph.D. program in Ecology at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her primary research tool: satellite imagery upon which she plotted records of Lyme disease cases gleaned from existing state health department records. Using an off-the-shelf statistical program, she was able to identify the types of landscapes most associated with high rates of Lyme disease: places where the edges of forests intermixed with herbaceous cover such as lawn or pasture.

And these are the kinds of places where new neighborhoods are being developed, says Jackson. “It’s popular to build out towards ‘green fields’ or undeveloped land,” she says. “People want to be near forests.” On these edges, where deer, ticks, white-footed mice, and people all exist, it’s what she calls “a perfect environment” for the transmission of Lyme disease.

Figure from Hilborn E, Jackson L, Orme-Zavaleta J. 2010. Environment and Lyme Disease Risk. Pages 399-414 In: Holmgren, A. and G. Borg (eds.), Handbook of Disease Outbreaks: Prevention, Detection and Control. Nova Science Publishers: New York.

There is no vaccine against Lyme disease in humans; it can be treated with antibiotics, but people can get it many times if infected ticks bite them. Individuals can avoid the disease by dressing appropriately, using bug spray, and checking their skin for ticks. Education in these individual measures is one public health approach to disease prevention.

But to Dr. Jackson, a broader approach to risk is called for. One landowner on a forest edge can clear shrubs to discourage deer, or lay down a strip of wood chips as a buffer between forest and lawn, but unless all of the property owners along an edge do this, she says, the risk factors will remain for the entire nearby population. She believes that whole neighborhoods have to work in concert to reduce risk.

In addition, one goal is to “design out the risk” for Lyme and related diseases by making decisions about land use based on research findings. To that end, she and her EPA colleagues are partnering with Michigan State University’s Digital Watershed to create an online tool that will predict whether developing a particular landscape in a particular way will create a high or low risk for Lyme disease. It will become part of EPA’s online Environmental Decision Toolkit in the future. Using tools like this, it is possible that without spending an extra cent in development costs or public health money, neighborhoods could be designed that work with nature to reduce the risk of Lyme. That is the concept of ecosystem services at work.

Although Dr. Jackson’s original research focused on Maryland, it has implications for the Research Triangle area, where she grew up. “The tick is here,” she says, referring to the black-legged tick that carries the bacterium that causes Lyme. “And the disease is here.” As wildlife habitats are being converted for development, she says, we don’t have the expansive natural habitats that we used to have. Given the style of development happening in the Triangle, she says, “it’s not surprising that Lyme is here.”