Tower Generates 600% More Electricity Than Traditional Wind Turbines. The Sheerwind wind turbine promises to produce 6 times the electrical power than traditional wind turbines.
Appropriate Tech Encyclopedia. Plastic can convert heat into electricity. A new study has found that certain types of plastic can be semi-metals.
(Photo: Ida L. Flanagan) Plastic does not normally conduct electricity. This is why regular electrical wires are covered with plastic, so that we don’t get a shock when we touch them. However, it turns out that special forms of plastic polymers can actually conduct electricity in the same way that metals can. Some polymers share certain properties with metals, but they behave differently.
Scientists from Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Belgium and Australia have now taken a closer look at these semi-metallic polymers. There is typically a heat loss of 50 percent from traditional energy sources. Electricity from the marshes. An unexpected source of new, clean energy has been found: the Plant-Microbial Fuel Cell that can generate electricity from the natural interaction between living plant roots and soil bacteria.
The technique already works on a small scale and will soon be applied in larger marshland areas throughout the world. On 23 November, researcher Marjolein Helder will defend her PhD research on generating electricity via plants at Wageningen University, part of Wageningen UR. A 'Green' Gold Rush? Calif. Firm Turns Trash To Gas. Hide captionEnergy Of The Future?
California company Sierra Energy is testing out a reactor that turns garbage — like these wood chips, metal fragments and plastics — into synthetic gas that can then be turned into a low-carbon diesel fuel. Christopher Joyce/NPR. New Wave Energy wants to put power plants in the sky. Harvesting power from the wind and the sun is nothing new.
We've seen flying wind turbines and solar power plants that aim to provide clean renewable energy. Inside a network operator: How solar changed the game. We’ve been hearing a lot about the solar revolution recently: from the largest generators and utilities in the US, the entire German power industry, from the world’s biggest solar companies, and from leading energy analysts from the likes of Macquarie Group, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and Citigroup who track the implications for listed electricity and energy technology assets around the world.
The basic synopsis is that the arrival of rooftop solar as a cheaper alternative to grid based power – as is now the case in more than 100 countries, including Australia – is changing the nature of the energy game forever. Last week, at the Solar 2013 conference in Melbourne, we got a rare insight into how this is happening in Australia – from the point of view of one of the major network operators. Energex already has installed 212,000 systems and is still adding them at 3,000 a month. Landfill gas helps Palo Alto go carbon neutral. Can London run on its own fat? Gross but true: when residual fat, oil, or grease from restaurants and food manufacturers is poured down the drain, it coagulates into globs known as “fatbergs” that can clog sewage systems.
Thames Water, which handles much of London’s wastewater, spends up to £12 million a year removing as many as 40,000 fatbergs from the 66,500 miles of sewer pipe it oversees. Natural Gas From Cows? Argentine Scientists Tap Methane In Bovine Burps. By Maximiliano Rizzi BUENOS AIRES (Reuters) - Argentine scientists have found a way to transform the gas created by the bovine digestive system into fuel, an innovation that could curb greenhouse gases that cause global warming.
Using a system of valves and pumps, the experimental technique developed by Argentina's National Institute of Agricultural Technology (INTA) channels the digestive gases from bovine stomach cavities through a tube and into a tank. The gases - which otherwise are commonly known as burps, or "eruptos" in Spanish - are then processed to separate methane from other gases such as carbon dioxide. Methane is the main component of natural gas, used to fuel everything from cars to power plants.
Artificial Photosynthesis System as efficient as plants and can reduce CO2 levels. A group at Panasonic has developed the Artificial Photosynthesis System, which produces organic materials with a world-leading efficiency in terms of solar energy conversion.
The recently achieved efficiency, 0.2%, is on a par with that for real plants used in biomass energy. Artificial photosynthesis is a technology that uses sunlight to produce oxygen and organic substances from water and carbon dioxide, like plants do. As an ideal technology that could solve both global warming and energy issues, artificial photosynthesis is currently being researched worldwide. Supressed Technology. SKWID harnesses the power of both the wind and the tide. There are already a wide variety of renewable energy systems that harness the power of the wind, along with some that generate power via the flow of ocean currents.
According to Japanese engineering firm MODEC (Mitsui Ocean Development & Engineering Co.), however, its soon-to-be-tested SKWID system will be the first one to do both. SKWID stands for Savonius Keel and Wind Turbine Darrieus. Europe joins race to store energy at the bottom of the ocean. "Imagine opening a hatch in a submarine under water. The water will flow into the submarine with enormous force. It is precisely this energy potential we want to utilize. " This is how German engineer Rainer Schramm describes his idea for storing energy under the sea. World's largest fat-burning power station to burn blubber from London sewers. East London is set to play host to the world's biggest power station to run solely on fat, which will provide a much-needed use for the discarded fat which can block the city's sewer system.
The station will generate 130 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power about 39,000 houses. The power station is to be built in Beckton, East London, where some 75 GWh (58 percent) of the output will be sent directly to the nearby Beckton sewage works, run by Thames Water, as well as a local desalination plant brought online during droughts and emergencies. The rest of the energy will be fed into the national grid. MIT maps solar potential of Cambridge, Massachusetts with record accuracy.
MIT researchers have developed a new technique that can be used to accurately predict the annual yield of a photovoltaic solar array located anywhere on the planet, taking into account local climate, panel orientation, and obstructions from nearby buildings. As a proof of concept, the scientists have mapped out the 17,000 rooftops of Cambridge, Massachusetts and created a user-friendly web interface that residents can use to look up their homes and get an accurate projection of the cost and return on investment of placing a PV panel over their heads. View all Introducing ... the Solar System.
ThermoElectrics. Solar/Wind Power. Energy Storage. Grid Tech. Could New York run on renewable energy alone? Three times now, Mark Jacobson has gone out on the same limb. In 2009 he and co-author Mark Delucchi published a cover story in Scientific American that showed how the entire world could get all of its energy — fuel as well as electricity — from wind, water and solar sources by 2030. No coal or oil, no nuclear or natural gas. The tale sounded infeasible — except that Jacobson, from Stanford University, and Delucchi, from the University of California, Davis, calculated just how many hydroelectric dams, wave-energy systems, wind turbines, solar power plants and rooftop photovoltaic installations the world would need to run itself completely on renewable energy.The article sparked a spirited debate on our web site, and it also sparked a larger debate between forward-looking energy planners and those who would rather preserve the status quo.
The duo went on to publish a detailed study in the journal Energy Policy that also called out numbers for a U.S. strategy. What if we never run out of oil? As the great research ship Chikyu left Shimizu in January to mine the explosive ice beneath the Philippine Sea, chances are good that not one of the scientists aboard realized they might be closing the door on Winston Churchill’s world.
Their lack of knowledge is unsurprising; beyond the ranks of petroleum-industry historians, Churchill’s outsize role in the history of energy is insufficiently appreciated. Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911. With characteristic vigor and verve, he set about modernizing the Royal Navy, jewel of the empire. The revamped fleet, he proclaimed, should be fueled with oil, rather than coal — a decision that continues to reverberate in the present.
Burning a pound of fuel oil produces about twice as much energy as burning a pound of coal. Churchill’s proposal led to emphatic dispute. The Emerging Climate Technology Consensus. Solar panels could destroy U.S. utilities, according to U.S. utilities. Solar power and other distributed renewable energy technologies could lay waste to U.S. power utilities and burn the utility business model, which has remained virtually unchanged for a century, to the ground.
Over-Unity. Nanotech. Fusion. BioFuel. Hydropower from Reuse. Tesla Technology: 5 Bladeless Turbines About To Revolutionize Energy Production. Tesla Technology: 5 Bladeless Turbines About To Revolutionize Energy Production www.endalldisease.com “Every home in America can run on wind energy. Solar Power To Be Sold For Less Than Coal. Clean Power Published on February 3rd, 2013 | by Nicholas Brown. MIT Researchers are Printing Solar Cells on Sheets of Paper Published on August 20, 2011 by admin · No Comments Geek.com Solar power is a great alternative energy source, but it’s unfortunately a rather expensive one. SunPowerPort. How I built an electricity producing wind turbine. Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my hobby far away from the sky-wrecking light pollution found near cities of any real size. Installing a Solar Energy System. Like many of you reading this article, I am fairly new to the realization that our future may not turn out the way we originally planned.
A little over two years ago, after the financial turmoil set in, I began to wake up from my comfortable, relatively uncomplicated life and take a closer look at what was going on around me. Home - solarcentury. National Clean Energy Project. Update! 15 PowerPoint Slides That Shook the Earth : Greentech Media. If you attend enough cleantech events or are pitched by enough startups, you start to see the same few PowerPoint slides over and over again. Greentech Media. Solar energy giants discovering Ontario. Nuclear Fusion - Coming Soon ? Greencajun.com. Greentech Media: Green Light » Blog Archive » Alberta’s governme. Solar Incentives: Could Ontario Be the Next Germany? - Renewable.
Bloom Energy Revealed on 60 Minutes! : Greentech Media. Why Bill Gates is wrong. US military's SPIDERS microgrid uses 90% renewables in first test. A silicon sprinkle for electric cars. Peak Opportunities. This graph of the day shows baseload generation may be redundant soon. The Problem of Growth. Methane hydrates.