30Jan

Solar powered homes that will compete in Solar Decathlon Europe 2012

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Solar powered homes that will compete in Solar Decathlon Europe 2012

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Environmentally friendly homes can reduce inhabitants’ carbon footprints, save resources and lead the way for others to live the same way. Most of us, however, have been living in homes that are pretty standard, in that they don’t help us reduce our carbon footprints. The US Department of Energy has been trying to further green living in terms of homes and has been organizing the Solar Decathlon for a while now. The international competition is a biennial event that challenges 20 college teams to come up with conceptual homes that utilize solar energy. The teams get to work on site, detailing their prefabricated houses for 10 days in a bid to take home the Solar Decathlon title. 2012’s competition is set to begin and we’re eager to see who wins the coveted prize.

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30Jan

Think Ink for Increased Efficiency

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solar ink

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One dollar per watt: that’s the mark the solar industry is hoping to hit in order to become cost-competitive with conventional energies.

One dollar per watt: that’s the mark the solar industry is hoping to hit in order to become cost-competitive with conventional energies. In a bid to reach this magic number in the next two years, various Asian manufacturers are striving to reduce costs by increasing volume production. An alternative direction that will benefit the industry in the long term is to target increased efficiencies primarily through new manufacturing processes, new higher-quality materials for metallization and changing the structure of the cell. Nanotechnology companies have developed these new materials and processes that enable manufacturers to both increase quality and lower-cost production, bringing the era of solar grid parity closer than ever before.

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28Jan

Zero Energy Home helps say goodbye to energy bills forever

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Zero Energy Home helps say goodbye to energy bills forever

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Denver-based New Town Builders have created a net zero energy house that has been designed to save a lot of energy and help preserve precious resource. The Zero Energy Home will leave eco lovers in a state of complete amazement as it takes energy efficiency to an all new scale.

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28Jan

First Solar-Powered Electric Car Charging Stations Open in Sofia, Bulgaria

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First Solar-Powered Electric Car Charging Stations Open in Sofia, Bulgaria

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This month, A1 Co., Ltd. and BIES Ltd. opened the first set of solar-powered electric car charging stations across Sofia, Bulgaria. Built as simple structures, each station simply uses solar panels to collect solar energy and a special module for electric cars to connect to the batteries. While the number of electric cars in Bulgaria are still very few, according to experts, a boom in the purchase of electric vehicles is expected this year — particularly due special incentives that will be given by the Bulgarian government.

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27Jan

Microbubbles Enable More Efficient Production Of Algae Biofuels

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Microbubbles Enable More Efficient Production Of Algae Biofuels

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Algae biofuel is one of the most promising alternative fuels on the market – so far we’ve seen cars and even planes adapted to run on it. The main drawback thus far has been high production costs and energy usage – until now. Using a new “cost-effective harvesting method” featuring microbubbles, a team from the University of Sheffield believe they have found a way to make algae a more commercially viable fuel source.

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25Jan

What’s Next: Low cost wind turbines for the developing world

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What's Next Low cost wind turbines for the developing world

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As we know it

In the present era, the renewable energy realm has a share of about 19 percent in worldwide electricity generation. Now, for the uninitiated, this may seem to be a paltry figure, but if we go by statistical expansion, the ongoing phase is certainly propitious for sustainable output. As a matter of fact, total power capacity from renewable sources momentously exceeded the world capacity of nuclear power for the first time in 2011. In this regard, the major progression was actually witnessed in the case of wind power, with a whopping increment from 6.1 GW in 1996 to more than 200 GW by 2011.

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25Jan

Italy/France’s 100 percent solar home entry for the 2012 Solar Decathlon

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Italy France's 100 percent solar home entry for the 2012 Solar Decathlon

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Italy and France have joined forces to create the “Astonyshine” 100 percent solar home concept as part of the 2012 Solar Decathlon Europe. The international competition is open to universities from around the globe and promotes research into the development of efficient housing. Astonyshine is a modern reinterpretation of the classic Mediterranean villa, and is the result of the combined efforts from Polytechnic of Bari (Italy), University of Ferrara (Italy), Ecole Nationale Superieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais (France) and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (France).

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23Jan

Energy-Efficient Ant-Snake Robots to the Rescue!

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Researchers from Georgia Tech University are working along two parallel tracks to develop energy-efficient robots based on the teamwork of ants and the movement of snakes. Envisioned for use in developing search-and-rescue robots, the technology could also be adapted to swell the ranks of robots with green jobs, for example in designing and fabricating solar cells, performing environmental monitoring or remediation, or subbing in for humans to perform potentially dangerous work such as wind turbine maintenance.

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20Jan

Tûranor PlanetSolar: World’s Largest Solar Ship About to Complete Trip Around the Globe

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Tûranor PlanetSolar World’s Largest Solar Ship About to Complete Trip Around the Globe

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The epic voyage of the Tûranor PlanetSolar – the world’s largest solar-powered boat – will soon come to a close as the ship closes in on its final stretch. The Swiss vessel is a full-bore high-tech solar harvesting machine whose deck is covered in 537 square meters of photovoltaic panels. The array produced enough energy for the boat to navigate the entire circumference of the Earth without any other means of energy. The Tûranor PlanetSolar is currently set to depart Abu Dhabi en route to their final port in Morocco – the same place the expedition launched on September 27th, 2010. The journey has come full circle in more than one respect, as it was not too long ago the only way to navigate the earth was by harnessing renewable energy with sails.

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19Jan

HydroSpin uses water flow inside the pipes to generate electricity

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HydroSpin uses water flow inside the pipes to generate electricity

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There is an exponentially increasing demand for clean water especially in those places, which do not have efficient electric supply like remote locations or big, crowded cities where water pipes are running under the ground. This urgent need of online monitoring is not met by the alternatives such as solar panels and other renewable energies. Although, hydroelectricity, i.e. energy production by water has been a successful accomplishment in the past, the markets are still void of efficient products. As a solution to this problem, an Israeli company HydroSpin Monitoring Solutions Ltd. has successfully developed a micro-generator known as Hydrospin that produces energy by monitoring the water flow inside the distribution pipes.

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