CleanTechnica

“I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.”

You might recognize the opening line of “Substitute” by The Who. There’s no substitute for having money when it comes to pushing wind and solar development in the United States.

The concept of replacing fossil fuels with “free” alternative energy from the breeze and sun is great, but without money, it’s just a dream.

Here comes the silver spoon, a trust fund called EarthEra Renewable Energy Trust. It’s like having a rich dad.

The fund, run by NextEra Energy Resources, the largest wind and solar energy producer in the U.S., invests proceeds from renewable energy purchases by businesses and consumers into the construction of new wind and solar projects in the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »

Experts call energy efficiency the low-hanging fruit, because it’s cheaper to cut power use than create new energy from fossil fuels like coal.

But our creature comforts — like iPods, cell phones, PCs and plasma TVs — are sucking the life out of advances in energy efficiency around the world, the International Energy Agency says.

In other words, too much fruit is rotting on the vine.

The IEA says in a new “Gigawatts and Gadgets” report that electricity consumption from power-hungry electronics could cause household energy use to triple by 2030. That means increased greenhouse gases from electric generation, and increased electric bills for creating that power. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s wrong with wind power and solar energy and right with coal?

Well, coal can burn around the clock, as long as you have enough of it. But the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time. Sure, you can store power in batteries, but how much?

How about enough to power an LED streetlight, without wires, that is sure to turn on every night?

There’s a French company called Windela that has crossed a streetlight with a vertical-axis wind turbine and a solar panel. It charges up during the day, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. At night, it shines.

It also can work as a Wi-Fi relay, similar to a solar streetlight known as Starsight. Imagine it: Wi-Fi, light at night, no coal required. Read the rest of this entry »

From Hawaii, U.S.A. to Limpopo, South Africa and everywhere in between, the push is on to convert coal-fired power plants to burn biomass.  Just in the past few days, FirstEnergy announced plans to convert one of its coal plants into one of the largest biomass plants in the U.S.  As if this full frontal assault wasn’t enough, a major conference is set in July to explore the full potential for converting coal plants to biomass co-firing.  That could bring an eventual end to coal mining operations like the one pictured above, but the question is: where’s all that biomass going to come from?

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US Scientists have revealed how natural gas locked up in frozen water crystals could provide massive amounts of energy, and claim that it could even be totally emissions-free.

The astonishing claim was made by Tim Collett of the United States Geological Survey at last weeks national meeting of the American Chemical Society. Collett told the gathering that, to the naked eye, clathrate hydrate (CH) looks like everyday ice but, as well as being partly made of water, the molecules are also organised into “cages”, which trap individual molecules of methane.

Remarkably, a new method of extracting the methane and ’swapping’ it with carbon dioxide could turn the substance into a revolutionary carbon-neutral fossil fuel.

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Vinegar can clean windows, kill weeds, and even cure the common cold.  Now a team of scientists at the University of Leeds is studying how vinegar could clean up sites contaminated by chromium compounds discharged from old textile factories, smelters, and tanneries.  As a source of chromium contamination, coal mining could also benefit from a dose of vinegar - or would that really make a difference?

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Energy efficiency is low hanging fruit in the clean energy movement.  Low-grade waste heat may not have the allure of shiny solar panels or a row of wind turbines, but it presents an opportunity that is too good for Michael Newell, CEO of Ener-G-Rotors to pass up. The company is developing a product that generates electricity from low-grade waste heat.

“We are making electricity from a free fuel and not using a fossil fuel,” Michael Newell said this week in an interview with TriplePundit. “Every kilowatt you are generating from our system is a kilowatt you don’t need from fossil fuels.” Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for a green job and wondering where they are? Well, as job hunters flood the usual suspects — such as solar and wind companies — with mountains of applications, you might have better luck finding your dream job in a more unexpected sector.

That’s the advice from Amy Vernetti, a managing director at headhunting firm Taylor Winfield. She says many of the green jobs are coming from areas that probably don’t leap to mind when you think of cleantech, such as companies developing fuel additives and air-filtration technologies. “These are hidden gems in the market,” she says, adding that some of them are “hiring like crazy.”

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Yes, chocolate is oh-so tasty and good. And we’ve heard that there may be health benefits to consuming the stuff in doses. You can power a truck with it. You can even promote peace with it. But can a byproduct from the process actually help coal burn cleaner?

Lindt USA and a New Hampshire utility are running tests to find out, the Associated Press reports. The chocolate maker and Public Service of New Hampshire mixed cocoa bean shells with coal Tuesday at the utility’s Schiller Station plant in Portsmouth to see how the mixture burned. The test used 18 tons of shells, in a ratio of 33 parts coal to one part cocoa.

The goal, Lindt and the utility said, is to see if the mixture produces a cleaner burn than just coal.

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The bucket-wheel excavator has long scoured the lignite fields of western Germany, erasing whole villages and leaving a trail of bad soil and salty water.

With all sorts of claims being made about clean energy and clean tech, it is more than a mere academic exercise to explore what those terms really mean. One way of defining something is by defining what it is not. For example, the large bucket-wheel excavators like those used in the open-cast lignite mines of western Germany are not clean tech. And here’s why…

At 300 feet tall and 600 feet long, the largest bucket wheel excavators are the biggest land vehicles ever made. Though they only dig at a maximum of 0.37 mph, these machines move 240,000 cubic meters of material daily, about as much as a football field dug to 100 feet deep.

Because they continuously dig, transport, and dump material twenty-four hours a day these machines require 16 megawatts of externally supplied electricity; and there are twenty-two currently in use in the four open-cast lignite mines in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. 

Bucket wheel excavators have been working these lignite fields since 1933, playing an instrumental role in fueling the Hitler machine with coal-based synfuel. Over the years, the mining activities have scarred the land and created massive canyons, reaching up to 500 metres deep and over 10 Km wide (see a 360 degree panorama of the lignite coal mine in Garzweiler). Continued…