Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Friday, October 2, 2009
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Africa town gets hydro boost
NuPlanet, the company behind a 7 megawatts hydro project supplying the town of Bethlehem, said such plants are unlikely to contribute much to the country's overall power
Documentary soars with condors
A solar car for Cambodia
Painted bright yellow, the technology packed vehicle looks like a golf buggy.
Lemurs for lunch causes eco woes
Recycling electrical vans launched
U.N. optimistic pre-climate talks
Crane boosts tree top studies
"No Impact Man" cuts the power
Crane boosts tree top studies
Trabant green revival in Frankfurt
Roof garden blossoms in NYC
India's river of death Report
Cold war foes team up in arctic
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
First hydrogen-powered aircraft takes to the air
“We have improved the performance capabilities and efficiency of the fuel cell to such an extent that a piloted aircraft is now able to take off using it,” said Johann-Dietrich Woerner from the German Aerospace Centre (DLR).
“This enables us to demonstrate the true potential of this technology, also and perhaps specifically for applications in the aerospace sector,” he said.
Developed by the DLR, Lange Aviation, BASF Fuel Cells and Denmark’s Serenergy, the Antares DLR-H2 motor glider has a range of 750 kilometres and can fly for five hours.
The system uses hydrogen as its fuel, and this is converted into electrical energy in a direct, electrochemical reaction with oxygen in the ambient air, without any combustion occurring.
The only by-product is water, and if the hydrogen fuel is produced using renewable energy sources, then the motor glider is genuinely CO2-free, the DLR said.
“Although the fuel cell may still be a long way from becoming the primary energy source for the propulsion of commercial aircraft, it does already constitute an interesting and important alternative to existing energy systems as a form of reliable on-board power supply,” the DLR said. —AFP
Monday, June 8, 2009
Just 4 years to save the Earth! What have you done with
Only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action that could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth.
Soaring carbon emissions are already causing ice-cap melting and threaten to trigger global flooding, widespread species loss and major disruptions of weather patterns in the near future. "We cannot afford to put off change any longer," said Hansen at the eve of the new president swearing in. "We have to get on a new path within this new administration. We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the world. America must take the lead."
Hansen said current carbon levels in the atmosphere were already too high to prevent runaway greenhouse warming. Yet the levels are still rising despite all the efforts of politicians and scientists.
Only the US now had the political muscle to lead the world and halt the rise, Hansen said. Having refused to recognise that global warming posed any risk at all over the past eight years, the US now had to take a lead as the world's greatest carbon emitter and the planet's largest economy. Cap-and-trade schemes, in which emission permits are bought and sold, have failed, he said, and must now be replaced by a carbon tax that will imposed on all producers of fossil fuels. At the same time, there must be a moratorium on new power plants that burn coal - the world's worst carbon emitter.
Hansen - head of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies and winner of the WWF's top conservation award - first warned Earth was in danger from climate change in 1988 and has been the victim of several unsuccessful attempts by the White House administration of George Bush to silence his views.
Hansen's institute monitors temperature fluctuations at thousands of sites round the world, data that has led him to conclude that most estimates of sea level rises triggered by rising atmospheric temperatures are too low and too conservative. For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says a rise of between 20cm and 60cm can be expected by the end of the century.
However, Hansen said feedbacks in the climate system are already accelerating ice melt and are threatening to lead to the collapse of ice sheets. Sea-level rises will therefore be far greater - a claim backed last week by a group of British, Danish and Finnish scientists who said studies of past variations in climate indicate that a far more likely figure for sea-level rise will be about 1.4 metres, enough to cause devastating flooding of many of the world's major cities and of low-lying areas of Holland, Bangladesh and other nations.
As a result of his fears about sea-level rise, Hansen said he had pressed both Britain's Royal Society and the US National Academy of Sciences to carry out an urgent investigation of the state of the planet's ice-caps. However, nothing had come of his proposals. The first task of Obama's new climate office should therefore be to order such a probe "as a matter of urgency", Hansen added.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
AIR FRANCE FLIGHT - AF447 SEARCH UPDATES
The oil debris found in the sea believed to be from the missing planeAerial view of the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, northeast of Brazil. The flight had last emitted a series of failure signals near this island, around which search missions are concentrated.
A Brazilian search team on the mission
The kins of the bereaved still donot know what to believe or hope for ! !
Sunday, May 3, 2009
MMC to up electric car output
The Nikkei business daily said Mitsubishi would lift its production target for i-Miev cars to 20,000 as well as more than double lithium ion battery output.
The green business of pig poop
Eighteen Swedish farmers and the 130,000 tonnes of excrement produced at their farms each year are part of a pilot bio-gas project in which methane gas is extracted from the pig by-product before it is put out in the fields as fertilizer.
Once infrastructure is in place, methane gas will be pumped to a purifying installation via a network of underground pipes and turned into bio-gas.
According to the project managers, the amount of energy they expect to be developed in the first phase lasting two years and using 130,000 tonnes of excrement, will be the equivalent of 2.1 million liters of petrol that is enough to run 30 trucks, 30 busses and 250 cars per year.
(SOUNDBITE)(Swedish) PIG FARMER GUNNAR JOHANSSON: "I have a lot of fertilizer from all my pigs and if one could create gas and fuel for cars and buses from my fertilizer I thought it would be a great idea. That is why I got interested you see."
(SOUNDBITE)(Swedish) BIOGAS BRALANDA PROJECT MANAGER KARIN STENLUND: "No one has done this before. We see an enormous interest from all of Sweden, today we have a visit from Scotland and we have inquiries from different parts of the world as well. And what is unique is that everyone else has been thinking in the opposite way, to move the fertilizer to a big plant. And then you drive away all profit and environmental gains on the way there."
"We haven't been thinking like this. That this could be a source of fuel, not gasoline, but still to power buses and cars. We simply haven't understood the potential until now. So we are taking this with us to other places exporting the knowledge."
(SOUNDBITE)(Swedish) PIG FARMER GUNNAR JOHANSSON: "There is steaming methane from wells and mounds of fertilizer around here all the time. And if we can extract that and make fuel out of it… That would be brilliant both for the environment and for my wallet I hope."
"Well I hope that I will be able to make loads of money. I hope that I will become a proper oil sheikh…"
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Japan's hybrid battle
Toyota's third generation Prius, due out in May in Japan, is reportedly to sell for around $21,000, with Honda's month-old hybrid Insight a key factor in price.
Dan Sloan reports
Artichokes To Produce Clean Fuel In Northern Greece
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Prefectural officials in the northern city of Kozani yesterday heralded the launch of a pilot program to produce biomass fuel from wild artichokes in a bid to reduce dependence on local power production from highly polluting low-grade lignite.
The wild artichoke is a high-yield perennial crop that can be cultivated without pesticides and would diversify the energy mix of the Public Power Corporation (PPC), which runs lignite-fueled power plants in the area, officials told a press conference.
PPC would pay producers the market value of the biomass fuel they yield, the officials said, adding that producers would also be entitled to a state subsidy. Local producers are to have priority but the opportunity to join the program, for which cultivation costs will be covered during the first two years, will be extended to other producers.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Reducing Computer Power Consumption
"Computation is inherently a power consuming process. Every time a transistor performs a calculation in your computer, you generate a little bit of heat. Want to add two plus two? That will cost you some energy," said lead researcher Charlie Tennett in explaining the teams new approach. "But what we realized was, that this is a two way street. What happens if, instead of adding two plus two, you take four and break it up into two twos?"
The heart of the IBM researchers breakthrough is the observation that if "computing" costs energy then "uncomputing" can be used to generate energy. "By performing a computation, copying the answer, and then unperforming the computation, we only consume power during the copying procees" says Dr. Tennett. "Since that copying doesn't consume much energy we get huge efficiencies in power consumption."
As a demonstration of this breakthrough, Dr. Tennett showed a prototype computer built by team members John Swolin and Barbara Shareal. "We took an ordinary laptop and changed its programming. Every time we execute a program on the computer, the program copies over the answer and then does the same program, but running backward. We then hooked up our laptop to a power meter, and watched, in amazement, as almost all of the power consumed by the program was fed back into the electrical system when we ran the program backward!"
The team believes that there is a great potential for the use of their technology even in fields outside of computation. "Think of all the vast amounts of computation that has been performed over the last few decades," dreams Dr. Tennett, "if we could just undo all of those computations, we could easily ween America off of its oil addition."
Friday, March 13, 2009
Brief Wind Bursts Propel Spain to 40% Wind Power Generation
High winds blew through northwest Spain in early March, generating 11,180 MW in that region alone.
On average, Spain derives about 11.5 percent of its overall energy from wind turbines, according to this story.
When the high winds came through, the turbines were spinning at 69% of their maximum theoretical potential.
By 2010 Spain has set a goal of obtaining 30 percent of its electricity from renewable resources.
At 16,000 MW, Spain produces the third-most wind power in the world, behind the United States (25,000 MW) and Germany (24,000 MW).
With the lagging economy, some economists predict U.S. wind turbine additions to fall behind.
Coal Plants May Add Solar Thermal Power
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), along with utilities, is studying whether it makes sense to add solar power to existing power plants in order to help cut greenhouse gas emissions. EPRI will collaborate with Tri-State Generation & Transmission Association Inc. and Progress Energy to evaluate the addition of solar thermal energy production to Tri-State’s power plants in Prewitt, N.M., and Roxboro, N.C., according to a press release.
EPRI is also considering the addition of solar thermal energy systems to natural-gas fired power plants owned by Dynergy Inc. and NV Energy. Those plants are in Kingman, Ariz., and Las Vegas.
The utilities would construct fields of mirrors, placed adjacent to power plants, that would focus the sun’s heat and boil water into steam, which would be integrated into the steam cycle of the fossil-fueled power plant, thus either reducing the burning of fossil fuel or increasing power production.
Monday, February 9, 2009
New technology purifies exhaust gas from diesel engines
and unburned hydrocarbons.
A new four-year project at Risø DTU (Danish Technical University) is developing an effective method for purifying flue gases, especially exhaust gases, from diesel engines. Existing solutions to air pollution require the installation of particulate filters and either an SCR catalyst (selective catalytic reduction), a nitrogen oxides (NOx) absorber or recirculation of the exhaust gas. This leads to additional expenditure when modifying diesel vehicles to be less polluting.
Electrochemical flue gas purification has a number of advantages over existing filters making it attractive to target this research at the car industry. Purification of carbon particles, toxic nitrogen oxides (NOX) and unburned hydrocarbons from the exhaust can all happen in the same filter unit.
Another advantage of using electrochemical methods is that it is not necessary to add other substances to the fuel. In addition, the filter can be produced without the use of precious metals. The current SCR technology typically uses the nitrogen-containing urea as a reducing agent to remove NOx from the exhaust.
The purification of exhaust gas will therefore be conducted independently of the engine operation. This technology could lead to significant fuel savings compared with leading alternative technologies. The technology could also be applied in the purification of flue gas from power plants, and possibly in the shipping industry.
