Solar Air Conditioners…..

Reminds me of the Steven Wright joke: For my birthday I got a humidifier and a dehumidifier. I put them in the same room and let them fight it out. …

Chromasun is using the common sense idea that the hottest parts of the day are the best times to collect solar power. You then utilize the thermal energy to chill the air; offsetting energy the energy used by air conditioners at peak load hours

Green Technology Daily

Since their founding in 2008 Chromasun has worked toward developing solar collectors that use reflectors concentrate the suns rays up to 25 times.

“Solar driven air-conditioning systems can dramatically reduce peak grid demand and significantly improve building environmental performance,” said Jens Ove Albertsen from VKR Holdings, in an announcement about the investment. “Because of our investments in solar thermal, VKR has good insight into what many solar companies are doing to address cooling. It is with this perspective that I believe Chromasun is the company to watch in this space.”

Hey America! You’re doing it wrong!!!!

We'd Rather Roll in Ours, Thanks

European countries are utilizing “waste-to-energy” incineration facilities to reduce energy costs and reliance on oil and gas. This has the added benefit of cleaning up the environment, diminishing the use of landfills and cutting carbon dioxide emissions. There are 400 plants in operation across Europe. The countries of Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands have the most plants in operation and under construction.

According the the NY Times, “The facilities run so cleanly that many times more dioxin is now released from home fireplaces and backyard barbecues than from incineration.”

Denmark uses these plants in it’s 98 municipalities, providing energy for 5.5 million people and now considers waste a viable alternative fuel source.

Also from the NY Times article:

By contrast, no new waste-to-energy plants are being planned or built in the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency says — even though the federal government and 24 states now classify waste that is burned this way for energy as a renewable fuel, in many cases eligible for subsidies. There are only 87 trash-burning power plants in the United States, a country of more than 300 million people, and almost all were built at least 15 years ago.

The environmentalists and the NIMBYs are going to have to educate themselves and accept the fact that we can’t keep hoping that the average American will suddenly wake up and accept responsibility for the amount of trash they produce. That approach has done little to curb smoking, over eating, selling rotten mortgages and etc.

If we truly want to consider every environmentally friendly option, it comes down to this or reducing waste by government regulation on business and consumers.

Green Energy Myth Busting

Reports from European Climate Foundation (ECF) (link to PDF) and Price WaterhouseCooper (link to PDF) suggest that Europe’s energy needs can be at least 80% fulfilled with currently available Alternative and Green Energy Sources.

The reports agreed that commonly held conventional wisdom about zero carbon energy supplies was often incorrect including:
- renewable energy is always more costly (false)
- systems are unstable and unreliable (false)
- in order to use zero carbon systems, technological breakthroughs must occur first (false)

What has to be abandoned in order for this approach to work is the idea that there is a “one size fits all” solution to energy needs and energy production. Instead each geographic area should find the technology that suits their region, and utilize any available technological diversification to achieve the best results.

So, Europe has a plan. Relatively inexpensive, clean energy that can improve each nation’s long-term security and prosperity. Where is the American plan?

A link to the Executive Summary (pdf)

Making Gasoline from the Sun

From Portfolio.com

SunDrop Fuels from Louisville, Colorado,says it has perfected a solar-energy technology capable of producing 100 million gallons of synthetic gasoline annually from corn stalks and wood chips.

“We want to use the sun to make renewable fuel,” said Wayne Simmons, Sundrop’s CEO. “We’re going to convert the sun’s energy into liquid fuel using concentrated solar power to gasify biomass, then convert the biomass into gasoline or diesel.”

The new technology has the potential to revolutionize the biofuels industry, experts say, because it removes one of the long-term cost hurdles to creating fuel from organic waste.

The company blasts organic materials, such as wood chips and straw, with superhigh temperatures gathered from sunshine. The heat tears the material apart on a molecular level, adds the sun’s heat energy in the thermo-chemical reaction, and creates a synthetic gas that can be formed into gasoline or diesel fuel.

7 ways microbes may solve our energy woes

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34213126/ns/technology_and_science-future_of_energy/

Microscopic organisms — archaea, bacteria and fungi — have the potential to reshape the world’s power supply. Microbes could provide a vast energy resource that is as efficient and portable as coal, oil and natural gas, said Bruce Rittmann, director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute.

Some microbial processes, such as using yeast to turn plant sugars into ethanol, already account for a few percent of the energy mix, noted Arnold Demain, a microbial biologist at Drew University in Madison, N.J. Other processes, such as using bacteria to derive electricity from fuel cells, are still in the research and development stage but show potential for deployment a few years down the road.

Microbes, but not the ethanol making kind, or even the actual-sized kind.

Improvements in Wind Turbines Could Increase Wind Power Potential Threefold

Last month, a 2.5 year study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory showed that America could generate 20% percent of its power just with wind by 2024, thanks to improvements in wind turbines over the last decade and a half. The technical study of future high-penetration wind scenarios was designed to analyze the economic, operational, and technical implications of shifting 20 percent or more of the Eastern Interconnection’s electrical load to wind energy by the year 2024.

“Twenty percent wind is an ambitious goal, but this study shows that there are multiple scenarios through which it can be achieved,” said David Corbus, NREL project manager for the study. “Whether we’re talking about using land-based wind in the Midwest, offshore wind in the East or any combination of wind power resources, any plausible scenario requires transmission infrastructure upgrades and we need to start planning for that immediately.”

http://www.nrel.gov/news/press/2010/801.html

A further assessment of onshore wind energy potential from the American Wind Energy Association, found that the U.S. could produce almost 37 million gigawatt-hours yearly.

The ultimate potential is up to 30 times higher according to Tom Kenworthy, CAP’s Senior Fellow based in Colorado

Solar cells made through oil-and-water ‘self-assembly’

BBC Science News

Researchers have demonstrated a simple, cheap way to create self-assembling electronic devices using a property crucial to salad dressings.

It uses the fact that oil- and water-based liquids do not mix, forming devices from components that align along the boundary between the two.

The idea joins a raft of approaches toward self-assembly, but lends itself particularly well to small components.

The work is reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Crucially, it could allow the large-scale assembly of high-quality electronic components on materials of just about any type, in contrast to “inkjet printed” electronics or some previous self-assembly techniques.

Microbes: the future of energy

From MSNBC an overview of a few ways our tiny, tiny friends are being explored as useful tools in the drive to create clean, sustainable energy.

Microscopic organisms — archaea, bacteria and fungi — have the potential to reshape the world’s power supply. Microbes could provide a vast energy resource that is as efficient and portable as coal, oil and natural gas, said Bruce Rittmann, director of the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at Arizona State University’s Biodesign Institute.

Some microbial processes, such as using yeast to turn plant sugars into ethanol, already account for a few percent of the energy mix, noted Arnold Demain, a microbial biologist at Drew University in Madison, N.J. Other processes, such as using bacteria to derive electricity from fuel cells, are still in the research and development stage but show potential for deployment a few years down the road.

Of course, if you want your kids to take an interest, you can always tell them about the “Electric Fart Machine” at Pennsylvania State University that turns CO2 into methane for easy storage.

Solar cell breaks efficiency record. CNet News

From CNet

Boeing-Spectrolab has developed a solar cell that can convert almost 41 percent of the sunlight that strikes it into electricity, the latest step in trying to drop the cost of solar power.

Potentially, the solar cell could bring the cost of solar power down to around $3 a watt, after installation costs and other expenses are factored in, over the life of the panel. The new cost information comes from Boeing, whose Spectrolab unit supplies searchlights and solar simulators, and the Department of Energy, which sponsored the project. Current silicon solar cells provide electricity at about $8 a watt, before government rebates. The goal is to bring it to $1 a watt without rebates or incentives.

NY Times: Space Solar Plant is a Go!

NY Times Energy and Enviroment

California approved a utility contract with Solaren for the nation’s first space-based solar power plant last Thursday. The project is slated to be turned on in 2016.

“At the conceptual level, the advantages of space-based systems are significant,” said Michael Peevey, president of the California Public Utilities Commission, during a hearing on Thursday. “This technology would offer around-the-clock access to clean renewable energy, and while there’s no doubt this project has many hurdles to overcome, both regulatory and technological, it’s hard to argue with the audacity of the project.”

The plan is to deploy an inflatable Mylar mirror one kilometer in diameter which will collect and concentrate sunlight on a smaller mirror. The mirror will,  in turn will focus the rays on photovoltaic modules.  The modules will convert the collected energy into radio frequency waves, which would be beamed to a station on the ground. Here the process would be reversed, transforming radio waves back into electricity.

The developers acknowledge that putting a solar power plant in space will cost a few billion dollars more than an earth based photovoltaic farm generating the equivalent amount of electricity.