On November 25th the Toyota Executive Engineer for Environmental Engineering was killed when his personal experimental aerobatic aircraft crashed near the coast in southern California.

Dave Hermance has been called the Toyota hybrid guru by HybridCars.com. He described his role for Toyota in an interview in 2004, when he helped launch the Prius in America:

I am the native English speaker who presents hybrid technologies so folks can better understand it. The father of Toyota’s hybrid technology is a fellow in Japan by the name of Dr. Yaegashi. I’m kind of his stepson, if you will. There have been other phrasings, but I’m the American face of Toyota’s hybrid technology.

He will be missed. The plane he was flying was a Russian-made Interavia E-3. More information about the incident is available from Flight:

News reports stated that the aircraft, flying in an area where pilots typically practice aerobatics, failed to pull out of what appeared to be a loop, crashing vertically into the water around 400m (1,320ft) offshore. Reports also stated that an object, thought to be an unopened parachute, trailed the aircraft.

Based on a similar fatal E-3 crash in 2002 off the coast of Florida, investigators are likely to focus in on whether object was a parachute or the E-3’s canopy.

The Flight article also mentions that “Hermance gave evidence in front of the US House committee on renewable fuels, urging an end to the USA’s reliance on oil.” Speaking of reliance on oil…

In 2000, an Interavia E-3 with the same FAA registry was damaged when it made an emergency landing in a Watsonville field after running out of fuel, the Los Angeles Times reported.

Google is in the news for some energy innovation:

these asphalt acres are getting their day in the sun, with search giant Google joining other companies in planting groves of pole-mounted solar panels between the rows of Saabs and SUVs, generating clean power and providing a little shade at the same time.

Google’s Mountain View, California, headquarters is getting a 1.6-megawatt solar system — enough to power about 1,000 homes — that will feed about 30 percent of the complex’s power demand.

I like the fact that someone realized that stringing together small arrays on roof-tops makes sense but should not be the limit, especially when you look out over a sea of perfectly flat parking spaces. I also thought of at least two benefits beyond those mentioned in the article:

1. Shading the asphalt and cars, which reduces wear from the sun and may even provide some shelter from rain. How dumb are we as a civilization to park cars on black asphalt and then run cooling systems to compensate, when harvesting the sun would achieve the same result with additional benefits?
2. Emergency-backup source of energy for business continuity.

The 10 Famous Monkeys* in Science page is hilarious. It also has some neat insights, including the description of a risk management approach by the US government in the 1950s:

Never send a man to do a female monkey’s job. That was the logic of the U.s. Army’s Medical Research and Development Department in 1959 when they wanted to gauge the body’s physical response to space travel. Instead of relying on fit, able-bodied Americans, researchers there turned to two highly patriotic gals named Baker (a squirrel monkey) and Able (a rhesus monkey). On May 28, the monkeys steeled their nerves, entered the nose cone of a Jupiter AM-18 missile, and embarked on a suborbital mission into space. It would take two more years before a human male, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, had the guts to attempt the same thing.

I also thought the Koko and Nim Chimpsky entries were funny, but you have to read number 10. Power supplies are such a drain…

A california company has announced plans to build more giant 2-ton bio-diesel reactors, elsewhere in the world:

SAN DIEGO, CALIF. (BUSINESS WIRE) Nov. 13, 2006 — Green Star Products, Inc. (US OTC: GSPI) today announced that it has signed an agreement with De Beers Fuel Limited of South Africa to build 90 biodiesel reactors.

Each of the biodiesel reactors will be capable of producing 10 million gallons of biodiesel each year for a total production capacity of 900,000,000 gallons per year when operating at full capacity, which is 4 times greater than the entire U.S. output in 2006.

A photo of the reactor is here. Green Star also just announced a US$140 million contract with Vietnam.

Incidentally, the Green Star site claims they build these giant reactors so their biodiesel plants will emit almost zero net Global Warming Gases. Coupled with the reduction from engine emissions, that seems to add up to a big total reduction:

It is an established fact that the use of biodiesel fuel in diesel engines will reduce CO(2) Global Warming Gases (by 78% on a life cycle basis)