Green News: U.S. Patent Office loosens rules for green technology

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is trying to cast a wider net to catch more green-technology inventions.

The USPTO on Friday announced that it has changed the patent application process to attract more green technologies into an accelerated patent program.

The Green Technology Pilot program was created last December to encourage more inventors to apply for patents relating to green technology. If accepted, those patent petitions will get priority screening under the one-year trial program.

On Friday, the USPTO eliminated the need for green technology patent applications to comply with the classifications specified by the USPTO. The classifications requirement narrowed the definition of green technology more than is necessary, it found.

"This will permit more applications to qualify for the pilot program, thereby allowing more inventions related to green technologies to be advanced out of turn for examination and reviewed earlier," said David Kappos, undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and director of the USPTO, in a filing in the Federal Register.

The initial target was to have 3,000 patent petitions examined in the first year, with a goal of dramatically cutting down on the average review process of 30 months.

So far, there have been a total of 950 requests with only 342 request for accelerated review granted.

The green technology program is designed to encourage development of businesses with products that reduce use of fossil fuels and protect the environment. It's not yet clear how much commercial impact the expedited review process will have, experts told Scientific American earlier this month.

Often, green-tech products are incremental improvements on existing techniques from multiple fields, many of which are patented, they said. Still, accelerated examination of an invention could help entrepreneurs incubate green-tech companies faster.

According to a notice from the USPTO, Inventions are eligible for the program if they include discoveries related to renewable energy, more efficient use of energy resources, or reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Source: news.cnet.com

Wastewater-to-fertilizer plant captures nutrients

Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies later this week will dedicate a system that converts wastewater from sewage-treatment plants into fertilizer while recycling valuable phosphorus and nitrogen.

On Thursday, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) in Suffolk, Va., will host the official opening of the facility, the second commercial-scale plant to use Ostara's technology. Long-time clean water advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an investor in the company through his involvement with VantagePoint Venture Partners, will be a speaker at the event.

Ostara's reactors isolates nutrients from wastewater at sewage treatment plants to make fertilizer.

Because of environmental regulations, some wastewater treatment plants separate nutrients using bacteria to prevent them from being discharged into waterways. Ostara's technology can be added to these plants to convert the separated wastewater into a sellable product called Crystal Green, explained Ostara CEO Phillip Abrary.

Instead of treating that wastewater with chemicals and disposing of the solids, the HRSD facility has installed three vessels that take in wastewater and mix it with the saltmagnesium chloride. Water moves upward into the cone-shaped tank, called a fluidized bed reactor, which prevents the solid material from settling and causes crystals to form through a chemical reaction.

The white crystals are ammonium magnesium phosphate, which is sold as high-phosphate fertilizer pellets to nurseries, turf, and specialty agricultural companies. The technology, which can capture about 85 percent of the available nutrients, can also be used in plants where nutrient build-up is a problem, said Abrary.

In Virginia, these reactors will replace a process that relies on adding chemicals to the wastewater. The sale of fertilizer, handled by Ostara, will finance the sale of equipment and operations. Ostara's first facility in Oregon also purchased the equipment and projects a payback in five years, Abrary said.

Green News: U.S. unveils new push for more efficient cars, trucks

President Barack Obama unveiled a government push on Friday to boost auto fuel economy for model-year 2017 passenger vehicles and beyond, and introduce a truck efficiency target for the first time.

Obama's policy initiative was characterized by leading environmental groups as an especially welcome step in the wake of the BP Gulf Coast oil spill.

"I believe it's possible in the next 20 years for vehicles to use half the fuel and produce half the pollution that they do today," Obama said at a White House ceremony.

Separately, Canada announced similar steps for heavy trucks and hopes to propose a draft regulation within several months.

Cars and trucks account for more than 60 percent of U.S. oil consumption and more than 25 percent of domestic carbon pollution, environmental statistics show.

David Doniger, policy director for the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said tougher standards for cars and the first-ever efficiency goals for trucks will save consumers billions of dollars in fuel costs.

"These are important steps to cut our oil dependence and carbon pollution," Doniger said in a statement.

The new rules for passenger cars, sport utilities, pickups, and vans will be carried out by transportation and environmental regulators.

California, a leader in the effort to curb vehicle emissions, will play an important role in developing an efficiency framework for the rule that will run from 2017-25.

Green News: IBM to help people monitor energy use

IBM is hoping its new smart metering system can help homeowners learn to use energy more wisely.

Working with energy consultant Hildebrand, Big Blue has embarked on a new project designed to let people view their energy consumption in the home. Hildebrand's monitoring technology analyzes real-time electricity usage, even for individual appliances, to show folks just how much juice they're grabbing.

In a 30-month research project geared specifically for the U.K. and Bulgaria, Hildebrand installed small energy monitors at different homes in five European cities--Birmingham, Bristol, and Manchester in the U.K., and Plovdiv and Ivanovo in Bulgaria. Using IBM's software, the homeowners view online information that displays their electricity use, figures out the cost, and compares it with usage by other people.

"Giving citizens more information and better control over their energy use will cut down on costs and consumption as well as reduce their overall impact on the environment," Guido Bartels, General Manager of Energy and Utilities at IBM, said in a statement. "With this collaboration, we can demonstrate how smart and connected communities can be more energy conscious and, in turn, more sustainable."

Though the goal of the project is to help consumers make better decisions on how to manage their power needs, the study will also help researchers monitor the people themselves to measure their attitudes toward energy conservation.

On its end, IBM is supplying the Informix database software to grab the huge amount of data flowing through the system. The challenge is to capture time-series data, which are "pulses" of data that arrive at regular intervals. That can pose a problem for traditional databases, according to Hildebrand, but in initial tests, the Informix software proved up to the task.

"In the first proof-of-concept, we simulated 3 million homes sending readings once a minute and we were able to capture nearly 50,000 readings per second using only a quad-core, dual-processor Intel server," Clive Eisen, chief technology officer at Hildebrand, said in a statement. "In the second, we moved to a slightly larger server and found we could deliver analytics response times of between one and three seconds for a similar load. You don't need to understand the technical details--the point is that suddenly, energy monitoring for 3 million homes or more became a practical proposition."

This latest project is part of IBM's Smarter Planet program and follows the Smarter Building initiative to track and conserve energy use in buildings and factories.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/greentech

A Climate-Change Chameleon

"The climate world is divided into three: the climate atheists, the climate agnostics, and the climate evangelicals. I'm a climate agnostic."
A direct—some would say brash—man with a penetrating stare, it's hard to believe India's Environment and Forests Minister, Jairam Ramesh, is agnostic about anything. This is the man who dressed down Secretary of State Hillary Clinton last year when she pushed for India to adopt binding emissions targets. He was the first politician of a major nation to question the United Nations' claim that the Himalayan glaciers were melting at a rapid pace. And he's spearheaded his country's very own climate-change research institute—a direct challenge to the U.N.'s now-discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
That record makes Mr. Ramesh one of the few policy makers in the world in a position to push a new, more economically rational approach to climate change—and debate the politics of it, too. It helps that he isn't media-shy. And like many Indian men, Mr. Ramesh has a penchant for the dramatic: "You have unlimited time!" he tells me, hands outstretched, as we settle down to a chat in his darkened office, with a single spotlight shining on the minister himself.
India is a "high-growth, low-emission" economy, Mr. Ramesh explains. "We contribute only about 5% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, and even if we grow at 8% per year, by 2020, we would still be contributing only about 8% of world greenhouse gas emissions." He jabs at the air above his head to make his point, lowering it with each phrase: "So here is China at 23%, here is America at about 22%, and you have Russia at about 9% and India at 5%. So clearly about 45% of the emissions are coming from two countries. . . who don't want to do anything about it."

Source: climatechallengeindia.org