Notes from a Low Country

 

     I was born and raised in The Netherlands. Not Holland. ‘Holland’ refers only to two of the twelve provinces. The Netherlands is a small country in Europe. It is a little over 41 thousand square kilometers (or 16 thousand miles). That means that you can get almost 17 times its size out of the state of Texas!
    A few hundred years ago the country was even smaller. It lies at the  western edge of Europe, where big rivers flow into the sea. Much of the country is very low land and has often flooded. In fact, most of the country is under sea level and the lowest point in The Netherlands is an amazing 7 meters (20 feet) below sea level! 

Even its name tells you a lot: ‘Nether’ means ‘low’: low lands.
    Some 700 years ago people decided to use windmills to help drain the land. Not only did they use windmills to pump water away from flooded lands, they also started using them to reclaim land. They built dikes around a low lying area and then used the windmills to pump the water to the other side of the dike, into a river.
    Only twenty years ago, the country added a whole new province to its size by reclaiming land from the sea. There used to be a large bay, the Zuiderzee. People built a huge dike to dam it off from the sea, and then started pumping water out of the bay until the land laid dry. The new province, called Flevoland, added 1,400 square kilometers to the little country!

    Many windmills are still standing throughout the country. Some are used for pumping water while others use the power of the wind to grind grain and other crops. There are many different types of mills. Sometimes the miller even lives inside the windmill. Can you image living in a house that is round or octagonal, that shakes and creaks in the wind?
    One spot in The Netherlands is especially famous for its beautifully preserved windmills. On a sunny day you can sometimes see 19 windmills happily turning their huge arms in the breeze. Not only do they still pump water away from the low-lying polder land, they also attract thousands of visitors who come to see the spectacular sight!

Nowadays, new wind mills generate power by harnessing the wind. The new type of windmill is altering the landscape but helping to generate power from a renewable resource. The amount of power generated by a new windmill depends on the strength of the wind and the number of days of wind per year. The average Dutch household uses 3.400 kWh per year. A smal 'wind park' (several windmill turbines together) produces 21.900 MWh, enough electricy for some 6,000 households!

BTW: Wooden shoes have been used in The Netherlands for hundreds of years. You can best compare them to rubber boots: they are handy to use when it is muddy in your yard, they keep your feet dry and they come off much easier than boots!
It is not true that everyone in The Netherlands wears wooden shoes: just some farmers or gardeners choose to use them. But they have become a tourism symbol for the small country!

Margriet Ruurs is the author of 27 books for children. Her book Children Around the World will be published by Kids Can Press in 2014.

Lightning Under the Hood: Part Two - The Battery Revolution

by L E Carmichael

Part One - Riker's Race

Every battery has the same basic components: the anode (negative electrode); the cathode (positive electrode); and the electrolyte. There's also a separator, which prevents electrons from traveling directly from anode to cathode within the battery chamber. Instead, they exit through a wire, traveling through a lightbulb or electric motor before re-entering the battery. According to legend, when Raymond Gaston Planté invented the first battery in 1860, he used a separator made from his wife's petticoat! 

Raymond Gaston Planté

Its lacier components notwithstanding, Planté's lead-acid battery was a major breakthrough. A writer in the June 11, 1881 edition of the New York Times said, “It is quite possible that the man who has taught us to put up electricity in bottles has accomplished greater things than any inventor who has yet appeared.”

As a power source for electric vehicles, however, early batteries had some problems. Because the electrolytes were liquid, they sometimes froze in cold weather (a problem Canadian drivers still struggle with!). Hot weather was just as bad, because the water portion of the electrolyte evaporated. This meant drivers had to "top up" their batteries on a regular basis. Charles Duryea (whose gas-powered cars lost to Andrew Riker in the 1896 race) once told The Horseless Age that “A set of batteries [is] worse to take care of than a hospital full of sick dogs.”

Planté's battery

Changes to battery housings have addressed a lot of these problems, as did the invention of the block heater!  Today's gasoline-powered cars still use Planté's lead-acid batteries as starting batteries, and they were the energy source of choice for hybrids and electrics for decades. After all, lead-acid batteries are cheap and durable.  However, there's not a lot of power relative to weight.  To address this problem, scientists had to tackle the guts of the battery - the chemical reactions that produced the flow of electrons.

One alternative chemistry that seemed promising involved replacing lead with another metal, nickel.  Nickel-cadmium batteries (NiCAD) had better energy density, which meant vehicles could be driven farther and faster before having to be recharged.  However, NiCAD batteries are highly toxic and difficult to recycle. They also have what's known as memory: if NiCADs are repeatedly discharged half-way, then recharged, they eventually "remember" this partial state of charge.  As a result, the battery's full capacity can no longer be used.

Charles Duryea

Nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries are less toxic and less prone to memory issues. However, they're also more expensive and take longer to recharge.  Before alternative vehicles could really start competing with gas-guzzlers, a completely new battery would have to be invented. But the key breakthrough had nothing to do with cars, and everything to do with portable electronics. 

Stay tuned for the final installment - From Cell Phones to Sports Cars! 

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For more information on battery chemistry, check out Battery University.

Green Power Beneath the Sea

Check out this cool video on deep-ocean hydrothermal power.

Solar Powered Building at Concordia University

Text and photo by Marie Powell

Buildings use a lot of energy. We only have to see a city at night to realize that. Harnessing the sun to power a skyscraper sounds like the stuff of science fiction - but in Montreal, it's becoming science fact.

Concordia University has been a leading researcher into renewable energy sources for at least 25 years. In December, 2008, it became the site of a unique 17-story building that gets its light and heat from solar power. It's called the John Molson School of Business (left), and it's the first of its kind. I saw this building first-hand in June, at a conference on the Concordia campus in downtown Montreal.

At the very top you can see the dark solar panels across the width of the building, called the solar facade. This facade provides provides both heat and electricity, and is known as a Photovoltaic/Thermal (PV/T) application.

On the Concordia website, there's a useful document explaining how the energy system works, complete with flow charts and close-up pictures of the panels (SBRN Demonstration Solar Project). According to this report, the solar panels take fresh air from outside and heat it as much as 20 degrees on sunny winter days, maximizing energy efficiency even in cold weather. That's important because, overall, buildings use about 30 percent of the secondary energy produced in Canada, such as natural gas and oil, and about half of its electricity. I wonder how much energy could be saved, if all of Canada's buildings got light and heat from solar power.

Many partners collaborated on this project, including Concordia's Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering Department, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan), and Conserval Engineering, a company that won a major Renewable Energy award for the PV/Thermal Solar Wall (this link shows an online video of the award.)

Here are some resources to check for more information:

"Concordia to head research into cold-climate solar power technologies" (Montreal Gazette, June 8 2006)

"Innovative Solar Technology Showcased in State-of-the-art Building," by Laura Nichol (NRCan website, March 2009)

"Le Quartier Concordia - John Molson School of Business," by Christopher Henry (Architecture Daily, July 2011)

SBRN Demonstration Solar Project (pdf document), Concordia website (www.bcee.concordia.ca)

Marie Powell is the author of Dragonflies are Amazing! (Scholastic Canada).