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.
The premise of value investing is to buy securities whose shares appear underpriced by some form of analysis. Warren Buffett is the strategy’s greatest adherent and also its greatest success story.
In the past six weeks, Buffett’s MidAmerican Energy Holdings Company has been on a renewable-energy investment spree, buying up the $2 billion Topaz Solar Farm, in Southern California; a 49 percent interest in the $1.8 billion Agua Caliente solar project, in Arizona; and, last week, another wind project acquisition in Illinois, which brings the company’s wind power portfolio to $6 billion.
Landfills are a necessary component of contemporary life. According to the US EPA, the average person in the U.S. produces nearly 1,130 pounds (513 kilograms) of waste per year, and the vast majority of that ends up in landfills. Much of that trash decomposes, and releases methane and CO2, both of which are greenhouse gasses. However, methane is also a gas which can be used as a fuel, and increasingly, landfills are beginning to realize this is an energy resource and are making use of it.
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.
According to a study conducted by ICF, a consulting firm for the US Department of Defense, surplus land at four military bases in the Mojave desert in California could be capable of producing up to 7 Gigawatts of solar power. These bases include, the Edwards Air Force base, Fort Erwin, China Lake and Twenty-nine Palms. Some 37,873 acres of land is available for setting these solar power plants, without impacting the space needs of the military for its ongoing operational needs or for potential future needs. The type of solar power plant to be installed, whether silicon flat panels or solar concentrators, has not yet been determined. If the go-ahead happens, power plant construction could commence by 2015.
An aquatic “bicycle pump” is set to take to the seas and turn wave power into clean electricity after being acquired by green energy company Ecotricity. The Searaser device, which pumps saltwater to an onshore generator, has been tested in prototype and praised by ministers.
Searaser uses the rise and fall of a large float to pressurise water, but unlike other wave power technologies does not generate the electricity in the hostile environment of the ocean. “If you put any device in the sea, it will get engulfed in storms, so it all has to be totally sealed,” said inventor Alvin Smith. “Water and electricity don’t mix – and sea water is particularly corrosive – so most other devices are very expensive to manufacture and maintain.” The technology means the salt water and electricity-generating equipment never meet, and is done routinely in Japan.
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.
A Swedish firm myFC has created an instant mobile charger, dubbed the PowerTrekk, which makes use of water to produce power for your smartphones. PowerTrekk mixes water with a chemical powder called sodium silicide to generate hydrogen gas that can power your cells through the fuel cell technology. The PowerTrekk was put on display at CES 2012.
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.
Renewable energy generated between 665 and 673 terawatt-hours of electricity in the EU in 2010. With total energy consumption of between 3,115 and 3,175 terawatt-hours, this means that clean energy supplied about 21% of all the EU electricity used in 2010.
In an effective rebuttal to those who constantly pooh-pooh renewable energy capacity as “just nameplate capacity”, the figures were released in terawatt-hours of electricity actually produced and consumed in a year, since power generation is the bottom line for any form of electricity.
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