Dreamforce: Neil Young shows off his green machine

Legendary rocker Neil Young made a special appearance during Salesforce.com's Dreamforce conference keynote address. He didn't mention cloud computing, but talked about his 1959 Mark IV Lincoln Continental.

Neil Young and Marc Benioff

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Young has spent more than $100,000 to green his 5,000-pound "Thinkin' Lincoln" former gas hog. "It's a piece of America art," said Young, who is an avid car collector. He hopes to get the equivalent of 100 miles per gallon and take the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize. "We are over halfway there (to 100 mph) with this car," he said.

"We took Ford, GM, and Chrysler and instead of having them in one building, we have it on the Internet. We are always getting input from our huge virtual shop," Young said.

Young has focused his green car efforts on the electric grid, which he said can support 180 million vehicles and compressed natural gas. Young is working with Johnathan Goodwin, who has expertise in turning big cars into green cars. The car can run on electricity for short runs and on compressed natural gas for longer trips. A generator recharges the battery when it is using alternative fuels.

The engine is a 150-kilowatt electric motor that produces the equivalent of 500 horsepower. The car cruises at 80 mph and can reach speeds of 160 mph, Goodwin said. "It's essentially like a train. We use one motor to push it down the road, with a range of 80 to 100 miles." A generator, that produces 75 kilowatts, comes on automatically to power a rotary engine that runs on compressed natural gas and refuels the batteries.

"We want to eliminate roadside refueling and take distribution out of the loop," Young said. The energy generated by the car could be used to power several houses or power tools from a car, he added. Information is available at the LincVolt Web site.

The LincVolt 1959 Lincoln Continental

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Check out the video from The Wichita Eagle, featuring Goodwin, who developed the hybrid technology and Neil Young.

See also: Neil Young on gas guzzlers: Long may you run

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Coming 2009 ...

Sun + Water = Fuel

With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy.

By Kevin Bullis

Leaf envy: MIT chemist Daniel Nocera has mimicked the step in photosynthesis in which green plants split water.  Credit: Christopher Harting

MULTIMEDIA   Daniel Nocera describes the challenges of artificial photosynthesis in a talk given before his recent advance.

"I'm going to show you something I haven't showed anybody yet," said Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, speaking this May to an auditorium filled with scientists and U.S. government energy officials. He asked the house manager to lower the lights. Then he started a video. "Can you see that?" he asked excitedly, pointing to the bubbles rising from a strip of material immersed in water. "Oxygen is pouring off of this electrode." Then he added, somewhat cryptically, "This is the future. We've got the leaf."

What Nocera was demonstrating was a reaction that generates oxygen from water much as green plants do during photosynthesis--an achievement that could have profound implications for the energy debate. Carried out with the help of a catalyst he developed, the reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And efficiently generating hydrogen from water, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there's no cost-effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels so that it can be used at night or during cloudy days.

Solar power has a unique potential to generate vast amounts of clean energy that doesn't contribute to global warming. But without a cheap means to store this energy, solar power can't replace fossil fuels on a large scale. In Nocera's scenario, sunlight would split water to produce versatile, easy-to-store hydrogen fuel that could later be burned in an internal-combustion generator or recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell. Even more ambitious, the reaction could be used to split seawater; in that case, running the hydrogen through a fuel cell would yield fresh water as well as electricity.

Storing energy from the sun by mimicking photosynthesis is something scientists have been trying to do since the early 1970s. In particular, they have tried to replicate the way green plants break down water. Chemists, of course, can already split water. But the process has required high temperatures, harsh alkaline solutions, or rare and expensive catalysts such as platinum. What Nocera has devised is an inexpensive catalyst that produces oxygen from water at room temperature and without caustic chemicals--the same benign conditions found in plants. Several other promising catalysts, including another that Nocera developed, could be used to complete the process and produce hydrogen gas.

Nocera sees two ways to take advantage of his breakthrough. In the first, a conventional solar panel would capture sunlight to produce electricity; in turn, that electricity would power a device called an electrolyzer, which would use his catalysts to split water. The second approach would employ a system that more closely mimics the structure of a leaf. The catalysts would be deployed side by side with special dye molecules designed to absorb sunlight; the energy captured by the dyes would drive the water-splitting reaction. Either way, solar energy would be converted into hydrogen fuel that could be easily stored and used at night--or whenever it's needed.

Nocera's audacious claims for the importance of his advance are the kind that academic chemists are usually loath to make in front of their peers. Indeed, a number of experts have questioned how well his system can be scaled up and how economical it will be. But Nocera shows no signs of backing down. "With this discovery, I totally change the dialogue," he told the audience in May. "All of the old arguments go out the window."

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