Ever the environmentalists, in this edition of Beaker Hill we preview Boston GreenFest 2008 (Friday and Saturday in City Hall Plaza) by examining some recent alternative energy breakthroughs that didn’t make it into the festival. 
So if you decide to head out to GreenFest, feel free to drop one or two of these stories to impress your friends. Mention that you read it on Bostonist and you’ll win a free shirt! (Not really.)
We start today with a study published in the journal Angewandte Chemie out of the Boston College lab of Dunwei Wang that could be a step towards the emissions-free “hydrogen economy.” To this point, the cost and lack of storage capacity have relegated hydrogen fuel to the dustbin of “things politicians bring up in speeches to sound like experts.” But the BC group has produced a 2-dimensional network of titanium and silicon wires, called a nanonet, which addresses the infrastructure issues plaguing hydrogen power. The nanonet helps to split water into molecules of hydrogen and oxygen, and can store or release the hydrogen fuel depending on the temperature. Undoubtedly the process required to produce the nets costs a small fortune (or even a large one), but we appear to be taking baby steps in the right direction.
Moving from one politically-driven pipe dream to another, we peek in at Cambridge-based Mascoma Corporation, which is currently working on a way to make ethanol fuel more viable and less of a payoff to electorally-important corn farmers. (Apologies to any Iowa-born Bostonians we may have offended.) Mascoma’s goal is to produce ethanol “from non-food biomass wood, straws, fuel energy crops, paper pulp and other agricultural waste products,” and to further this lofty mission, they have developed a strain of bacteria which converts plant-based sugars into ethanol. The bacteria improve upon the currently-used yeast in two ways: they can convert all of the sugars produced from breaking down plant matter into fuel, while the yeast can only use glucose, and they work at a higher temperature, requiring fewer costly enzymes to break down the biomass into the sugars necessary for the process. Eventually, Mascoma aims to eliminate the enzymes altogether and create one superbug that breaks down the plant matter by itself and then turns it into ethanol. For now, this “semi-super” critter will have to do, and you can read about its vitals at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“But all of these technologies are so expensive!” you exclaim. “Show me something cheap that works, right now!” Glad you asked, dear reader, because our final story comes from an enterprising group of Harvard students and alumni that have produced a fuel cell made (essentially) of a bucket, agricultural waste, and another group of bacteria happily gorging themselves in a useful fashion. Operating as the startup Lebone, the company is about to begin a pilot project in Africa, where the fuel cells will be used to power LED lighting (a great need when “emergency health workers, if operating at all, are trying to stitch up wounds and perform surgeries by candlelight”). While not particularly efficient—about one square meter of fuel cell is necessary to charge a cell phone—it is a vast improvement for many villagers, who no longer have to depend on unstable governments to provide the infrastructure necessary for electricity.
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