Sustainable and renewable energy sources has been the main source of various efforts on both designing as well as scientific levels. Over the years, the development in this field has been subtly pushing forward to more feasible as well as practical applications in offices, homes and also small outdoor efforts. The Solar Pod featured today, however, takes a step forward towards more commercial applications with an architectural twist. The pod came forward while working for greener solutions in context of not domestic but rather public gatherings which requires a certain degree of sophistication united to functional utility of stored renewable power. To bring alive such dreams and amalgamate futuristic power technologies to a greener aesthetic context, the Solar Pod brings forth a metallic flower facade lined inside with thin film solar collectors which symbolically holds forth the fruit for effective future replacement of fossil fuels.
Ascent Solar Technologies develops innovative, lightweight, flexible, thin-film solar photovoltaic modules (that’s a mouthful, I know — read it again). Ascent’s flexible CIGS solar panels are so innovative they were named one of TIME’s are designed to integrate with limitless applications, transforming unused surface area into a source of clean, renewable energy.50 Best Inventions of 2011, one of only six “green” inventions to make the list this year. The list is featured in the November 28, 2011 issue of TIME (which, somehow, is already online… oh, old media, how you amuse me).
Apple, ranked the least green of the big tech companies earlier this year, is moving quietly to repair its reputation by switching its vast east coast data centre from coal to solar power.
Local officials in North Carolina say the company is preparing to build a solar farm adjacent to its $1bn data centre in Maiden.
The facility could help Apple recover from a Greenpeace report earlier this year which said its cloud-computing operations – run from centres such as the one in North Carolina – were heavily reliant on dirty energy such as coal.
The World Bank approved $297 million in loans to Morocco to support construction and operation of Morocco’s 500-megawatt (MW) Ouarzazate Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) plant, one of several large scale solar power projects in various stages of planning or development across the solar energy rich Middle East-North Africa region.
Upon completion, the Ouarzazate parabolic trough CSP plant would be one of the largest CSP plants in the world. A group of seven international lenders has committed $1.435 billion dollars to build and develop the project. Ouarzazate is seen as a key milestone for Morocco’s national Solar Power Plan, which was launched in 2009 with the goal of deploying 2000 MW of solar power generation capacity by 2020.
by Martin LaMonica
Facebook’s state-of-the-art data center houses awesome amounts of computing power, but the biggest technical challenge has been the air handlers.
The company said today that its Prineville, Ore., data center received LEED gold certification from the U.S. Green Building Council. The power usage effectiveness (PUE) rating varies between 1.06 and 1.1, making it a data center that consumes about half what a building simply built to code would use.
Apple Inc. has a number of patents, a couple of them really seem to be interesting. These were filed recently in February 2011. Apple is doing research in methods, which help in harnessing the solar energy to run all the portable devices. Five of these patents have been covered in this article. The first one is regarding assembling integrated circuit. The second one is about various methods to use the sunlight in-order to illuminate the display screen. The next patent is about the display screen, which is light sensitive. The fourth patent is to make all the Apple devices made in the future, to be grease and fingerprint resistant. The last patent is about integrating solar energy for all media players. Have a look:
Living skyscrapers? Not quite. While organic solar cells are one of several types of photovoltaics currently being explored, Scientific American reports that work is being done that could lead to windows acting as solar panels, by using a compound very similar to chlorophyll.
Chlorophyll, as we all remember from elementary school, is the green chemical in leaves that turns water and carbon dioxide to oxygen and glucose with the use of sunlight (through a horrible cycle learned once in bio class and then forgotten forever). A chemist by the name of Michael Graetzel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology thinks he can use it to build a better solar cell.
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.
The world’s largest social networking site recently announced plans to utilize more renewable energy to power it’s new Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
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.