Published on July 28th, 2008
Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.
Rising fuel costs have spurred some pretty wacky ideas. One that maybe isn’t so crazy is harvesting solar power from space. While the idea isn’t new—NASA and The US Department of Energy studied it throughout the 1970s—the time has come when it might not be too expensive to start pursuing it.
Pravna Mehta, the director of India operations for Space Island Group, a company working to develop solar satellites, thinks space energy has excellent potential. According to his vision, satellites would electromagnetically beam solar energy to ground-based receivers, where the energy would be converted to electricity and transferred to power grids.
Since satellites in high Earth orbits are unaffected by earth’s shadows, the energy would be available every day without fail.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 28th, 2008
Coming on the heels of the inauguration of the world’s first commercial scale tidal power turbine, Electricite de France (EDF) has announced that it plans to build a pilot tidal turbine system. The plan calls for 3 to 6 turbines to be built with capacities between 4 and 6 MW by 2011.
The location of the site (off Paimpol in Brittany) was chosen due to the extremely strong currents in the area.
While the recently installed SeaGen tidal power system in Ireland was certainly revolutionary, the French plan is as well. France alone has 80% of the potential in Europe for generating electricity from tidal currents—enough to theoretically create 10 million MWh per year.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 28th, 2008
R&D magazine covers the newest, nerdiest gear from inventors and scientists. The R&D 100 awards are hailed as the “Oscars of Invention” by the Chicago Tribune. The prestigious award helps push the most promising inventions into the market. Other winners include specialized microscopes and super-hydrophobic coatings.
EMCORE is the proud producer of inverted metamorphic (IMM) solar cells, which are already used on land and in space. The IMM technology recently made an in-orbit efficiency record of 33%. EMCORE is a reputable and successful semiconductor company. Their solar technology has been on my radar for a while now.
Developed in conjunction with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and the Vehicle Systems Directorate of the US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), the IMM design is comprised of a novel combination of compound semiconductors that enables a superior response to the solar spectrum as compared to conventional multi-junction architecture. Due to its unique design, the IMM cell is approximately one fifteenth the thickness of the conventional multi-junction solar cell and will enable a new class of extremely lightweight, high-efficiency, and flexible solar arrays for space applications. (via news release) Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 27th, 2008
Armed with a survey that found that 63% of college applicants would use a college’s environmental commitment as a reason to choose to go to school there, the Princeton Review has added a “green rating” to its college rating system. EcoAmerica partnered with the Princeton Review on the study of students’ attitudes about the environment.
The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a member organization of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada working to create a sustainable future, is helping to lead an effort to raise higher education’s green score. According to today’s New York Times, colleges are doing the following things in their race to be the greenest campus:
- Setting dates by which they will be carbon-neutral
- Hiring sustainability coordinators
- Buying green power through offsets
In a contest sponsored by the EPA, athletic conferences competed to see who could by the most green power and the ivy leagues won, with a combined 221.6 million kilowatt hours for the past quarter. However, colleges and universities are lagging behind in accomplishing more substantive actions.
“….some higher education officials worry that campuses are taking easy steps to win the label rather than doing the kind of unglamorous work — replacing air exchange systems, for example — that would actually reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases. Some campuses are changing little more than their press releases. ‘I don’t think we really have the tools to quantifiably test who’s doing the best and who’s not,’ says David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College. “It becomes a publicity hype type of thing.’”
Universities are dragging their feet in doing the kind of infrastructure improvements that would really move the needle, like:
- Converting to alternative energy
- Changing over to hybrid fleets
- Retrofitting old buildings for efficiency
- Composting their food waste
- Offering sustainability throughout the curriculum
Let’s hope they can ramp up their efforts.
Image Credit: New York Times
Published on July 25th, 2008
We’ve all heard of the Information Superhighway; Now it’s time to welcome the Wind Power Superhighway.
In what is purported to be the largest investment in clean, renewable energy in US history, Texas has been given preliminary approval for a $4.9 billion plan to build transmission lines to carry wind power from West Texas to urban areas such as Dallas.
Texas is already the national leader in wind power, but the new transmission lines will make sure wind energy is used to its fullest potential, since most of Texas’ wind power is produced in windy West Texas. The new plan won’t directly create new turbines, but it will add enough transmission lines to move 18,000 megawatts. That’s enough energy to power 4 million homes.
The superhighway won’t just help facilitate the spread of wind power; supporters think it will also create jobs, lower energy costs, and reduce pollution.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 23rd, 2008
The town of Rock Port, in Missouri, is another of the growing number of towns and cities laying claim to be powered entirely by a renewable energy. And though the small town only boasts a population of 1,300, it is the first community in the United States to be powered entirely by wind power.
“That’s something to be very proud of, especially in a rural area like this - that we’re doing our part for the environment,” said Jim Crawford, a natural resource engineer at the University of Missouri Extension in Columbia.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 21st, 2008
Solar power means more than solar panels. These days it can also mean collectors, towers, dyes, oh my! Here’s a guide to (most of) the different kinds of solar technologies that are out there today.
First, the basics: Anything that uses solar energy as a source of power is solar-powered. Simple, right? Well let’s not forget that the sun gives us more than a whole spectrum of light, it also gives us heat. Both are used for a wide variety of applications, not just electricity.
1. Solar Thermal
Solar thermal technologies use heat. Cleantechnica has already introduced solar thermal. The cheapest, easiest, and most financially sound solar investment you can make for a house is to install a solar thermal collector. It collects solar energy to provide warm water or warm air for your house, even in the far north. On a larger scale, mirrors can be used to focus heat from the sun to boil water and turn a turbine. Generating electricity with this method is called Concentrated Solar Power (CSP). Large scale CSP projects are already underway in deserts around the globe, and in some places they are invigorating the economy.
The cool thing about CSP is that it overcomes one of the major problems with renewable energy. It used to be true that solar farms stopped producing energy as soon as the sun went down. No longer. Heat is much easier and cheaper to store than electricity, so you can save it for the hours or days when the sun doesn’t shine. Power towers and molten salt are just two methods of producing solar power whenever we need it. Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 20th, 2008
As ethanol from corn comes under fire due to rising corn prices, attention is turning to other ethanol sources. Plans are in the works to build a plant in northwest Indiana which would make ethanol from municipal waste. Approval of the plant was announced by the Lake County Solid Waste Management Board in January 2007.
And Chicago’s WBEZ reported this week that Indiana Ethanol Power is now ready to go with its plan. The technology, developed by James Titmas at GeneSyst, would produce 20 million gallons of fuel-grade ethanol and other products each year.
According to Biofuels Digest, several cities, including New York, NY and Bridgeton, NJ, are on the verge of implementing such plants. Diverting municipal waste from landfills to make fuel-grade ethanol sounds like a win-win for everyone. And locating ethanol refineries near cities makes sense, because that’s where the mounds of garbage are. So what’s the holdup in Indiana? According to Indiana Ethanol Power’s Zig Resiak:
“Municipalities are very comfortable with putting it in the back of a truck and letting it go into a landfill. They don’t think about it twice. But for us to come in and say we’re going to take it cheaper and save you millions of dollars a year on your tipping fee, that’s different and that’s kind of scary, and they want to take a good, strong look at that.”
Sounds like a leadership vacuum. We hope that Indiana and Illinois (and Chicago and Gary) can get it together and follow the example of Edmonton, CA which just signed an agreement to begin production. The plant will initially produce 36 million litres of biofuels per year and reduce Alberta’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 6 million tons over the next 25 years, which is the equivalent of removing 12,000 cars from the road.
Related Posts:
New Carbon-Negative Community Loves their Waste
First Sustainable Ethanol to Mass Market?
Published on July 17th, 2008
Earlier today, I had the opportunity to visit Intersolar US, the United States’ premier exhibition for solar technology. I learned about a variety of products that are revolutionizing the solar industry, and one of the most interesting was Paradigma’s AquaSystem.
The Aqua solar heating system, first introduced in 2004, works like an additional boiler with a selectable temperature. It is the only solar heating product on the market that can be connected to an existing heating system without any modification. Additionally, the AquaSystem does not require frost protection agents in the winter, as it is protected with warm water if temperatures drop below a certain level.
Read the rest of this entry »
Published on July 17th, 2008
One of the reasons that I am so enthusiastic about nuclear fission technology is that it provides humans with the ability to accomplish tasks that would be impossible with any other power source.
As a former submarine engineer, I never fail to marvel at the fact that a volume of fuel small enough to fit under my office desk could power a ship for 15-30 years without even taking a breath. Trying to compare nuclear capabilities with wind or solar power is like trying to compare Michael Jordan in his prime to a bench warmer on an elementary school basketball team.
Read the rest of this entry »
