Flying a kite has often been considered child’s play, but a group of inventors think the concept could be used to make wind energy cheaper and more reliable than ever before, potentially revolutionizing wind power forever.
energyNOW! correspondent Josh Zepps met the innovators working to turn the idea of flying a kite into an airborne wind turbine that’s lighter and more powerful than traditional wind turbines. The full video is available below:
Canada’s hydropower industry has plans to invest up to $70 billion on hydro-electric projects across the country in the next 10 to 15 years, increasing its hydro-electric resources – to a truly staggering 88,500 MW.
Most of the additional projects are in provinces with abundant precipitation that is likely to increase in a warming future, making them ideal for hydropower. Hydro-electric power is much cleaner in cold climates than in warm ones, because methane emissions that are caused by rotting vegetation are lower in colder climates. Quebec is building another 4,570 MW, British Columbia: 3,341 MW, Labrador: 3,074 MW and Manitoba: 2,380 MW.
Orbiting solar power stations have been a continuous source of debate for decades – someone always brings up the idea of power plants IN SPACE and it always gets shot down as being unfeasible. (What’s not realistic about having energy beamed down from space? Come on.) But because Star Trek has been part of our collective consciousness for the past 50 years (or maybe it’s just me), someone always goes back to the idea of space lasers providing clean energy. (more…)
At double the size of China’s Three Gorges Dam, the 40 GW Grand Inga hydropower project, to be built on the Congo River under an agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa, will be the world’s largest by a wide margin. It will increase Africa’s electricity generating capacity by one-third.
But as IPS News reports, as is unfortunately typical with many big-push style projects in the developing world, the local people will likely get little of the electricity produced by the Grand Inga.
Instead, the power transmission lines are expected to go towards mining and industrial facilities, towards the big cities in South Africa and Egypt, as well as possibly being exported to Europe.
The sun’s abundant energy, if harvested in space, could provide a cost-effective way to meet global power needs in as little as 30 years with seed money from governments, according to a study by an international scientific group.
Orbiting power plants capable of collecting solar energy and beaming it to Earth appear “technically feasible” within a decade or two based on technologies now in the laboratory, a study group of the Paris-headquartered International Academy of Astronautics said.
Such a project may be able to achieve economic viability in 30 years or less, it said, without laying out a road map or proposing a specific architecture.
A reader actually shared news about this project with me over 2 months ago, but due to the steady stream of so many interesting cleantech stories, other responsibilities, and the fact that the shared page was in French and I had to learn French first (ok, just used Google Translate), it took me a while to get to it. The project is a “gigantic” (for tidal power) project off the coast of Paimpol-Bréhat in Brittany, France. It is a project of Irish tidal technology specialist OpenHydro and the large French utility company EDF.
The project will eventually include four 2-MW tital turbines from OpenHydro. The turbines are being installed 35 meters (115 feet) deep. They are 22 meters (72 feet) high and weigh 850 tonnes.
Despite relying on imported sources for 97% of its energy needs, South Korea’s been slow to tap into and develop its wind power resources. That appears to be changing. The South Korean government announced that it will invest 10.2 trillion won (US$9 billion) in building a 2.5 gigawatt (GW) offshore wind farm, the largest in the world.
Located offshore of South Korea’s southwestern coast, the offshore wind farm will be built in three phases by South Korean companies led by Korea Electric Power, the country’s largest electric utility. The first is a 100 megawatt demonstration phase to be completed by 2014. Wind turbines with capacities ranging from 3 MW to 7 MW will be erected mainly off the coast of Jeollabukdo and Jeollanamdo provinces in three stages at a projected cost of 400 billion won (~US$353 million).
A massive new renewable energy project is being planned in Morocco that will combine hydropower and wind power in one single location — a world’s first, at least at this scale. The 1 gigawatt project will double the existing hydropower capacity of Morocco.
A Dutch artist is aiming to create an artificial leaf in the Sahara Desert that can grow a layer of ice on its underside.
‘Sunglacier’, as the project has been dubbed, will feature a 200m2 surface covered in photovoltaic solar cells, which will power cooling condensers on the underside of the elm leaf-shaped structure to soak up humidity from the desert air and turn it into ice.
Ap Verheggen, the artist behind the project, hopes it will encourage people to believe that the impossible is possible when it comes to dealing with climate change.
Last year, Facebook was scrutinized by its users for using coal to supply the energy for its massive data centers. The company responded by reminding the public that power for its newest data center would come from multiple sources, including renewables, and would be one of the most energy efficient in the world.
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