By all accounts, aviation is the most carbon-intensive form of transportation we use. But when you’ve got a million-pound aircraft, slipping the surly bonds of Earth isn’t an easy task . Engineers are constantly working to make aircraft more fuel efficient and more environmentally friendly, and several new technological innovations may finally make the future of flight a sustainable one.
We may be about to see a radically new technology in thermal energy storage. Researchers at MIT have been been working on ways to store the sun’s energy in chemical bonds. These developments in this “heat battery” or a “solar fuel,” are due to the addition of carbon nano technology.
Mount Diablo Unified School District has awarded a 30-year contract to SunPower to execute America’s largest school district solar power system. SunPower is responsible for the design, installation and maintenance of the solar power systems which will staggered across 51 schools in the district. The power system, with a capacity … [continued]
The ultimate form of the ‘recycle, reuse’ concept: Landfill mining. Digging up landfills for extracting solid waste and recycling the usable materials and converting the organic material into usable fuel. A Belgian company Advanced Plasma Power is planning to extract a 16.5 million tonnes of solid waste from a landfill … [continued]
The world of tire recycling is expanding with dizzying speed, and now we can add Lehigh Technologies’s deep freeze to the mix. The company has come up with a new tire recycling process that produces a fine powder instead of the crumbs and nuggets produced by conventional recycling. [social_buttons] As … [continued]
In another indication of its popularity; the New York legislature just voted an astounding 192-0 to offer municipal financing for clean energy improvements on homes and businesses through Property Assessed Clean Energy or PACE programs, backed by Federal bonds. [social_buttons] Just in time to apply to the Department of Energy … [continued]
This is staggering. In just over six months; Sonoma County’s Energy Independence Program has received 375 applications for more than $17 million worth of solar loans. Since Sonoma County went live with its PACE model of solar funding in March; applications have been pouring in daily, and the county intends to make loans indefinitely by packaging them as bonds.
“There is no end in sight,” said Amy Bolten, a county spokeswoman. “We think our program is just getting going.” And this is in addition to the county’s already very high solar adoption:
Nano carbon Graphene is already being produced in decidedly non-nano quantities by Ohio-based Angstron. Yet the atom-thick nano-material was discovered so recently that researchers are still in the process of discovering what to use it for. [social_buttons] Graphene is an extremely low density material, almost an atomic-scale chicken wire made … [continued]
Vice President Joe Biden just revealed a plan to make Berkeley First available nationwide. Yesterday at his Middle Class Task Force meeting Biden proposed the way to make solar roofs easy for everyone to afford with virtually free solar panels. If you now pay your current electricity bill and own … [continued]
Blacklight Power has signed a contract with Akridge in Maryland, marking the sixth utility to sign up for a mysterious form of energy that defies quantum physics. The company claims that it can create energy by lowering the energy level of hydrogen atoms to below their “ground” state. Most scientists … [continued]
