Light Cue 23

Solar Sunday is my weekly roundup of renewable energy and energy efficiency news from around the web.

ETC goes LED

After long speculation about whether entertainment-lighting leader ETC would enter the LED market, the company has announced their acquisition of the Selador™ product line from Selador co-founders Rob Gerlach and Novella Smith.

“We didn’t want to make a ‘me too’ RGB or RGBA product that didn’t provide the kind of significant innovation in lighting we strive for,” says ETC CEO Fred Foster. “With its exclusive x7 Color System™, the Selador product line produces a far superior quality of color and light to anything that we had seen before in LEDs. We also benefit from the brainpower of Selador LED experts Novella and Rob – great people who will join our ETC team.”

The Sun turns CO2 into Fuel

Powered only by natural sunlight, an array of nanotubes is able to convert a mixture of carbon dioxide and water vapour into natural gas at unprecedented rates.

Such devices offer a new way to take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into fuel or other chemicals to cut the effect of fossil fuel emissions on global climate, says Craig Grimes, from Pennsylvania State University, whose team came up with the device.

Although other research groups have developed methods for converting carbon dioxide into organic compounds like methane, often using titanium-dioxide nanoparticles as catalysts, they have needed ultraviolet light to power the reactions.

The researchers’ breakthrough has been to develop a method that works with the wider range of visible frequencies within sunlight.

Cell Phones Go Solar

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. recently unveiled its new, innovative solar powered full-touch screen phone, the “Blue Earth.” The Blue Earth phone is also part of “The Blue Earth Dream: Eco-living with SAMSUNG mobile,” an environmental initiative by the company to reduce its CO2 emissions, eliminate its use of hazardous substances and encourage cell phone recycling.

The phone is made from a recycled plastic prodct called PCM, which is made from water bottles. The packaging for Blue Earth is designed to be small and light, is made from recycled paper and comes with a 5-star energy efficient charger that uses standby power lower than 0.03W. The phone and charger are also free from harmful substances such as brominated flame retardants, beryllium and phthalates.

No Heating Required

Judd Blunk’s house is like a womb. Although the temperature outside is in the 20s, his triple-pane windows overlooking the Fox River feel warm from inside.

Because there is no furnace, the rooms are quiet. The only sound in the kitchen is the hum of a refrigerator, which along with other appliances, helps supply heat to the airtight 2,300-square-foot Batavia, Ill., home.

Blunk is part of a small movement of engineers and homeowners who are taking President Barack Obama’s vision of building energy-efficient homes to another level. They are inspired by “passive houses” in Germany that are so well-insulated and energy-efficient they eliminate the need for a conventional heating system.

Such design could be the future as Americans become more concerned with shrinking their carbon footprints and look at ways to avoid volatile energy prices.

Butterfly Effect

THE light-scattering structures that make butterfly wings so striking could be used to make cheaper, more efficient solar cells.

In dye-sensitised solar cells a dye coating on a titanium dioxide surface forms a “photoanode” that absorbs photons and pumps out electrons. To improve their efficiency, Di Zhang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and colleagues borrowed the light-absorbing properties of the wings of the Paris peacock butterfly.

After soaking samples of the wing in a titanium-containing solution, they processed it to produce a titanium dioxide deposit that reproduced the wing’s honeycomb structure (Chemistry of Materials, DOI: 10.1021/cm702458p). When this was used to make a photoanode, the resulting cell’s efficiency was 10 per cent higher than normal.