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11.20.09- K.R. Sridhar: Power to the People, with Bloom Energy
Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridhar is a man with a mission to change the world. A former NASA advisor who developed technologies to sustain life on Mars, this earnest scientist is now harnessing his visionary skills and a large team of engineers to solve the energy crisis. His ambitious goal? To revolutionize the energy industry, just like cell phones revolutionized the communications industry. His team is developing high efficiency fuel cells to provide a global distributed system of electricity supply at low cost. Read More 11.19.09- A Gesture from the Invisible Hand
It's common, for example, to hear well-intentioned people insist that the market, as a matter of course, will respond to restricted fossil fuel production by channeling investment funds either in more effective means of producing fossil fuels, on the one hand, or new energy sources on the other. Read More 11.18.09- Cow dung to power more Dutch homes
Manure from cows at a nearby dairy farm will be fermented along with grass and food industry residues, and the biogas released during the process will be used as fuel for the thermal plant's gas turbines. The heat generated will be distributed to around 1,100 homes in the area around Leeuwarden in the north of the Netherlands, the plant's operator Essent said in a statement. Firms in Europe and elsewhere have been investing in biogas plants and this is the second of its scale running on cow manure in the Netherlands. It follows another plant that Essent opened in January. Read More 11.17.09- China Corners Rare Earths Market
China supplies at least 95 percent of the world's rare earths - 17 chemical elements with hard-to-pronounce names such as praseodymium and yttrium - essential for a wide range of high-tech devices and green technologies. Read More 11.16.09- Could This Lump Power the Planet?
It doesn't look like much from the outside - just a drab, 10-story building on the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco. But as I'm walking across the parking lot on a sunny day in October I can't help thinking that someday I might be telling my grandchildren about the time I came to this lab and met Edward Moses and saw the technology that was about to change the world. Read More 11.14.09- Ridgeblade Wind Power Generator Wins Dutch Postcode Lottery Green Award
But the Ridgeblade Wind Generator is not as simple as it looks. The secret to its win of the 2009 Postcode Lottery Green Challenge is the unique design of the Ridgeblade's rotor and its blades, that capture mild breezes and winds coming from any direction and quietly harnesses their power for energy use. That's why the Ridgeblade took a group of aeronautical engineers to design it. Read More 12.13.09- The Blood Sucking Vampires of Wall Street
Wall Street is up to its old tricks again One year later, one of the key excesses that led our consumer-based economy into an historic downturn is being abused in the exact same way that got us $147-a-barrel oil last summer. Worse, many in the media are again getting the facts wrong on oil prices and demand - as if the oil and gasoline price explosion of 2005-2008 never happened - as one look at last week's oil report will verify. Forget what Cambridge Energy Research Associates reported on Oct. 13. By its calculations oil demand actually peaked in 2005 among the industrialized members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation, while in the U.S. alone oil usage has dropped by 2 million barrels a day compared with 2005. But remember these facts: As of this writing, U.S. supplies of refined distillates, including diesel, heating oil, and aviation fuel, are at a 25-year high. We have 29.56 million more barrels of oil in our inventories than we had the same week a year ago, and refined gasoline on hand is up 16.37 million barrels for the same period. And this does not include the 125 million barrels of oil that the Secretary General of OPEC says are being held offshore in tankers. Read More 11.12.09- Single-Celled Fuel -Is it a Solution to the World's Energy Problem?
These single-celled organisms are the biggest success story in history, and by sheer numbers they still kick the hell out of all us higher animals (and not just when they're making us sick) while still retaining cellular complexity that the even more numerous viruses lack. They've been touted as a solution for everything from the energy problem to pollution. Read More 11.11.09- Warren Buffett's Big Railroad Buy is also a Huge Bet on Coal
11.10.09- Nano-Solar Power -Will it Be the Next Revolutionary Technology?
Considering that the Sun already provides all the Earth's organic energy in one form or another, it seems a shame we can't make the machines use it too. Solar panels have never quite cracked the power:cost ratio that would make them standard, and it turns out all the "add more expensive elements to raise efficiency" strategies are better at the expensive than the efficient bit. Read More 11.09.09- Alternative Energy Storage Methods
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11.07.09- Shame on the Big, Centralized, World Government Deniers
Szandor Blestman
I had nothing better to do the other day and was browsing through some blogs and some news stories. I was surprised to see so many people still vehemently arguing about the reality of climate change and insisting that something needs to be done about it. Many pointed to this graph and that graph, this scientist and that scientist, this study and that study, this piece of propaganda and that piece of propaganda, and then cried about how arguing about climate change was going to lead us down the path to mankind's destruction. Both sides of the debate claim the other side is lying. Both sides present arguments that may be considered convincing to some. But there was something I noticed about those who argue that climate change is man made. Many of them have taken to calling those who argue against them "climate change deniers."
Let's make this clear. I am not a "climate change denier." I agree that climate change exists. I just disagree that mankind has a major impact on it. In fact, I will point out that climate change has existed for millennia. Looking back on the geologic record there is much evidence that climate change existed long before humans walked the earth. Read More
11.06.09- Betting on a Metal-Air Battery Breakthrough
Tyler Hamilton
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| Liquid salt: This image shows ionic liquids (the blue globules) in a beaker of mineral oil. Credit: John Wilkes |
A spinoff from Arizona State University says it can develop a metal-air battery that dramatically outperforms the best lithium-ion batteries on the market, and now it has the funding it needs to prove it.
The U.S. Department of Energy last week awarded a $5.13-million research grant to Scottsdale, AZ-based Fluidic Energy toward development of a metal-air battery that relies on ionic liquids, instead of an aqueous solution, as its electrolyte.
The company aims to build a Metal-Air Ionic Liquid battery that has up to 11 times the energy density of the top lithium-ion technologies for less than one-third the cost. Cody Friesen, a professor of materials science at Arizona State and founder of Fluidic Energy, says the use of ionic liquids overcomes many of the problems that have held back metal-air batteries in the past. "I'm not claiming we have it yet, but if we do succeed, it really does change the way we think about storage," says Friesen, who was named one of Technology Review's top innovators under 35 in 2009. Read More
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It's been a long road, but we've finally reached the point in these essays at which it's possible to start talking about some of the consequences of the primary economic fact of our time, the arrival of geological limits to increasing fossil fuel production. That's as challenging a topic to discuss as it will be to live through, because it cannot be understood effectively from within the presuppositions that structure most of today's economic thinking.
AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A plant that converts cow dung into energy for homes opened in the Netherlands Friday.
BEIJING - As resource-hungry China scours the world for crude oil and natural gas supplies, it has managed to corner the global market for a group of obscure metals used to make iPods, wind farms and electric cars.
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Lab are betting $3.5 billion in taxpayer money on a tiny pellet that could produce an endless supply of safe, clean energy. For some, that's hard to swallow.
Ridgeblade® is the kind of invention that looks so obvious, so natural, and so simple, anyone could have invented it. In all that's been dedicated to the exploration of wind energy, no one
saw this elegant, natural, and efficient solution to "micro-wind" or
home energy creation. 
Wall Street is taking much of its federal money and using it to again speculate in the oil market. That's bad for everybody
We've always known that the Sun supplies us with more energy than we could ever need, if only we could harness it properly. Suggested solar strategies have ranged from the Bond-ian (the JAXA orbital solar collector) to the workmanlike (the constant improvement of solar-panel efficiency), and now we can add a gooier option: bacteria.
If the Sage of Omaha is truly an oracle of future returns and a leading indicator for where the market is going, it's hard not to think that U.S. carbon emissions will continue to grow apace and that the budding green revolution will be more bang than bucks.
Nanotech has fueled the imaginations of science-fictioners for years, with world-changing and ending inventions in equal measure. But the real strength of this molecular machinery is how it can upgrade existing concepts, and this time it's solar power's turn. Two trendy technologies and one potentially revolutionary application.
A brief diversion