Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.
The wind turbines that recently went up on Louis Brooks’s ranch are twice as high as the Statue of Liberty, with blades as wide as the wingspan of a jumbo jet. More important from his point of view, he is paid $500 a month apiece to permit 78 of them on his land, with 76 more on the way.“That’s just money you’re hearing,” he said as they hummed in a brisk breeze recently.
This month, 69-year-old Japanese sailor Ken-ichi Horie will attempt to captain the world’s most advanced wave-powered boat 4,350 miles from Hawaii to Japan. If all goes as planned, he’ll set the first Guinness world record for the longest distance traveled by a wave-powered boat and, along the way, show off the greenest nautical propulsion system since the sail.
The energy from sunlight falling on only 9 percent of California’s Mojave Desert could power all of the United States’ electricity needs if the energy could be efficiently harvested, according to some estimates. Unfortunately, current-generation solar cell technologies are too expensive and inefficient for wide-scale commercial applications.A team of Northwestern University researchers has developed a new anode coating strategy that significantly enhances the efficiency of solar energy power conversion. A paper about the work, which focuses on “engineering” organic material-electrode interfaces in bulk-heterojunction organic solar cells, is published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Climate change leads to snakes on a plane
Burmese pythons—an invasive species in south Florida—could find comfortable climatic conditions in roughly a third of the United States according to new “climate maps” developed by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Although other factors such as type of food available and suitable shelter also play a role, Burmese pythons and other giant constrictor snakes have shown themselves to be highly adaptable to new environments.
US energy company Tenaska announced Tuesday a proposal for a new 600-megawatt, coal-fired power plant in Texas that would be the first to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions underground.
The privately held company proposed a site near Sweetwater, Texas, where its plan would capture up to 90 percent of the carbon dioxide (CO2) that would otherwise enter the atmosphere.The carbon dioxide would be sold for use in oil production in the Permian Basin, resulting in geologic storage.
Tenaska filed a request for a state permit for the plant, whose cost was estimated at three billion dollars, but said a final decision to proceed would be made in 2009 depending on incentives, costs and prices for electricity and CO2.
Most of us are worried about increasing amounts of greenhouse gases in the air – and if you aren’t yet concerned about this, you should be. However, now there is a reason for hope: researchers from the Los Alamos National Laboratory have just announced a groundbreaking new project called Green Freedom, which will extract CO2 from the air and convert it into fuel to power cars and airplanes. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! Not only will this remove some of the greenhouse gas currently in our atmosphere, but it will prevent future CO2 from being added to our air, by providing a new renewable form of fuel to power our lives.
Solar Power Lights up the Future
He predicted the fall of the Soviet Union. He predicted the explosive spread of the Internet and wireless access.Now futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil is part of distinguished panel of engineers that says solar power will scale up to produce all the energy needs of Earth’s people in 20 years.
There is 10,000 times more sunlight than we need to meet 100 percent of our energy needs, he says, and the technology needed for collecting and storing it is about to emerge as the field of solar energy is going to advance exponentially in accordance with Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns. That law yields a doubling of price performance in information technologies every year.
Plants trees and algae do it. Even some bacteria and moss do it, but scientists have had a difficult time developing methods to turn sunlight into useful fuel. Now, Penn State researchers have a proof-of-concept device that can split water and produce recoverable hydrogen.“This is a proof-of-concept system that is very inefficient. But ultimately, catalytic systems with 10 to 15 percent solar conversion efficiency might be achievable,” says Thomas E. Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics. “If this could be realized, water photolysis would provide a clean source of hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight.”
Tags: architecture, co2, futrism, solar power, solar sunday, windpower
Burmese Pythons
h, great, of all the other things I have to worry about regarding climate change and global warming, now I have to worry about the proliferation of Pythons slithering into my house!
Cara
Green Tallahassee
http://greentallahassee.blogspot.com