6 Scientists on the Cutting Edge of Energy and Environmental Research

Don Hammerstrom: Making Appliances Smarter

Donald J. Hammerstrom envisions a day when every electrical appliance is wise to what’s happening on the far side of the wall socket. The inexpensive device he and his Pacific Northwest National Laboratory colleagues in Richland, Wash., have developed, dubbed the Grid Friendly Appliance Controller, is designed to reduce reliance on backup generators and prevent power outages that can occur when the electrical grid suffers momentary capacity problems.

The controller, which he says could be built into a water heater, clothes dryer, or other energy¬-hungry appliance for $5 or less, recognizes when telltale fluctuations in the current flowing through the socket indicate that the grid is straining to meet demand. The controller’s response: briefly scale back the appliance’s electricity use. That move, if multiplied by many appliances in thousands of homes and buildings, would be enough to relieve the strain on the grid, potentially averting a blackout. The grid would also need less 24-7 standby capacity (read, wastefully idling generators) to buffer the occasional unexpected fluctuation in electrical supply or demand.

The appliance owner, meanwhile, wouldn’t need to do a thing. In a recent real-world trial, most consumers didn’t even observe a difference in how well their retrofitted appliances performed when the grid was strained. “It’s essentially unnoticed,” Hammerstrom says.

The next big step will be enticing manufacturers to build, and consumers to buy, smart appliances. Because each purchase would make energy cheaper and more reliable for all, utilities, appliance makers, and other groups would have to work together to persuade everyone to upgrade. –Ben Harder

Lisa Alvarez-Cohen: Removing Hazard from Waste

There are two kinds of storage tanks for hazardous waste, says Lisa Alvarez-Cohen, chair of the civil and environmental engineering department at the Univer¬sity of California–Berkeley: Those that leak and those that will leak.

The challenge, for scientists, is finding a way to clean up the mess. For decades, though, cleanup efforts at the hundreds of industrial sites where toxic waste from, say, Big Pharma plants is slowly seeping into the groundwater have been stymied by high costs and ineffective tools.

Alvarez-Cohen may have a tidy solution: making the toxins literally disappear. Using a technique called bioremediation, she is studying ways to manipulate naturally occurring microorganisms living in the soil so that they organically degrade toxins building up in aquifers and other water supplies. When prompted with the right stimulus, she has found, certain bacteria will “breathe in” toxic chemicals and breathe out nontoxic gases. “It’s really cool,” she says, “and it’s cost ¬effective.”

One of the first researchers to study how bacteria could be used to break down MTBEs, the now banned gasoline additive, Alvarez-Cohen is testing ways to biodegrade a range of what she calls “emerging contaminants,” from flame retard¬ants to the byproducts of wastewater disinfection.

In the future, thicker tanks may keep these new toxins, many of them known carcinogens, in their storage sites. But it’s only a matter of time, Alvarez-Cohen says, before a gasket fails or a pipe bursts: “It’s important for us to understand whether any chemical we’re going to release into the environment has the potential for biodegrading or not. And if it does, we need to know how.”  –Justin Ewers

Phil Hugenholtz and Falk Warnecke: From Termites to Biofuels

The concept is appealingly simple: Termites have specialized enzymes in their guts that digest wood and grass. Advanced biofuels, made from wood and grass, require enzymes to break down the starting material. At the moment, such enzymes are costly and, despite improvements, somewhat inefficient. Natural enzymes—termite enzymes—may offer a path to more efficient biofuels.
In 2007, Phil Hugenholtz (at left in photo) and Falk Warnecke of the Energy Department’s Joint Genome Institute in Walnut Creek, Calif., took a step in that direction with a paper in the journal Nature identifying more than 500 genes in termite guts associated with enzymes that break down wood’s main structural component, cellulose.