South Korea yesterday announced plans to invest a staggering Won107,000bn ($85bn) on ‘green growth’ industries over the next five years.  The government predicts the unprecedented cash-injection, around 2 per cent of the country’s entire gross domestic product, will create up to 1.8 MILLION new jobs in renewable energy and environmentally-friendly projects.

In a presidential statement, the country’s leader, Lee Myung-bak, said that the so-called Green New Deal will significantly boost growth and jobs in an effort to ride out the economic slump.

“The aim is for South Korea to become the world’s seventh most competitive country by 2020 in terms of energy efficiency and ability to adapt to climate change,” he said.

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Concept incorporates vertical-axis wind turbines directly into transmission towers already dotting the landscape.

Three Frenchmen, architects Nic­ola Delon and Julien Choppin, along with engineer Raphaël Ménard, believe they have stumbled upon a scalable design that would not only allow wind turbines to work in virtually any landscape, they believe it avoids some of the aesthetic hurdles normally facing large wind farms. The Wind-it concept would fuse vertical-axis wind turbines directly into new or existing electricity transmission infrastructure.

The team estimates that if a third of France’s high-voltage electricity towers were renovated with turbines, they could rival the power generation of two nuclear reactors, or about 5 percent of the country’s energy needs.

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It’s “not supposed to do that,” but it is: salt has revealed a previously undiscovered talent for stretching.  The startling revelation was made by researchers from Sandia National Laboratories and the University of Pittsburgh, using a powerful Interfacial Force Microscope.  The discovery of stretchable properties in salt could lead to the development of more efficient desalination technology, and it could also provide more insight into the potential for alternative fuels to contribute to smog formation.

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Along with colleagues, his team has developed a method to selectively “breed” a viral family to bind to specific minerals. In other words, they are developing viri that can find and bind to a chosen mineral in a sludge pile!

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Is the world ready for another ambitious ocean power program?

Blue Energy Canada Inc. and World Energy Research are moving quickly in that direction.  After signing a memorandum of understanding last month, the two companies just announced a formal agreement to build a 200 megawatt, half-billion dollar commercial tidal power project based on Blue Energy’s Davis Tidal Turbine.  Meanwhile, DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has been quietly working the other end of the scale to develop buoy-sized ocean power generating equipment.

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If hexavalent chromium doesn’t ring a bell, think chrome, the stuff that puts the shine on everything from bathroom faucets to motorcycles.

If that still doesn’t help, maybe Erin Brockovich does.  In the 1990’s, the former legal clerk fought to expose hexavalent chromium contamination in drinking water, in the small California town of Hinkley.  The result was a record-breaking settlement and a major motion picture.  Fast forward to April 2009, and the U.S. military is adding a new chapter to the Brockovich book.  The Department of Defense has issued a formal memo requiring an aggressive across-the-board reduction in the military’s use of hexavalent chromium, otherwise known as chromium 6.

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While cleantech investment appears to be on the rebound, it’s clear the recession isn’t over yet. Mark Jensen, managing partner for the venture capital services group at Deloitte & Touche, said Wednesday that about half of the largest venture-capital firms expect to reduce their overall investments in the next few years in response to the recession.

But venture-capital firms expect cleantech to fare better than most other categories. According to the Deloitte survey, a whopping 95 percent said they plan to either increase or maintain their level of cleantech investment, with 63 percent anticipating more investment and 32 percent expecting to invest the same amount as they do now.

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Solar venture investments hit a three-year low in the second quarter, the Cleantech Group said Wednesday. According to Brian Fan, senior director of research for the group, solar startups in North America, Europe, China and India raised a total of only $113.8 million for the quarter, which is down 7 percent from $365.7 million in the first quarter and down 86 percent from $834.7 million in the year-ago quarter.

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As stimulus funding leads some industry insiders to think of Washington as “the new Wall Street” for green energy, some investment experts say they’re concerned about the government’s new role. “I worry about the government as a dealmaker in this space,” said Tom Bratkovitch, director of LP Capital Advisors, a consulting firm for private-equity investors, at a Thomson Reuters conference in Palo Alto, Calif., this week. “I just don’t know if the government is the best one to make decisions in this space.”

After all, the federal government has supported some technologies that have not panned out, while missing some that have ultimately been successful. The government also has a reputation for moving slowly – though the Department of Energy certainly is trying hard to get stimulus money out as quickly as possible – and the applications for the grants and loan guarantees can be extremely time-consuming.

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