A device for simultaneously converting the sun’s light and heat into electricity

Researchers have demonstrated a new mechanism for converting both sunlight and heat into electricity.

A new type of device that uses both heat and light from the sun should be more efficient than conventional solar cells, which convert only the light into electricity.

The device relies on a physical principle discovered and demonstrated by researchers at Stanford University. In their prototype, the energy in sunlight excites electrons in an electrode, and heat from the sun coaxes the excited electrons to jump across a vacuum into another electrode, generating an electrical current. The device could be designed to send waste heat to a steam engine and convert 50 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity–a huge improvement over conventional solar cells. Read the rest of this entry »

Five Reasons Why Green Tech Has Such a Tough Time In America

The U.S. has long been a leader in green technologies. It has also long been a leader in fumbling that lead. Look at the historical record:

• Charles Brush built what is considered the first automatic wind turbine for generating electricity. The turbine, built in 1888 in Ohio, had a 50-foot diameter and 144 blades. The industry has since trimmed turbines down to three blades. It has also gone overseas. While the U.S. has more installed wind capacity than anyone else, the only top U.S. wind manufacturer remains General Electric: they got into the business by buying the wind division of disgraced, defunct Enron. One of the most promising U.S. startups is Nordic Windpower, located in Berkeley by way of Sweden. Read the rest of this entry »

The German Solar Experiment

The government sets a premium price on solar and other alternative power sources. The policy offers lessons in ways to encourage the use of renewable energy. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar’s Great Leap Forward

Suntech CEO Zhengrong Shi made China a powerhouse in photovoltaic technology–and became a billionaire in the process. His next ambition: to make solar power as cheap as conventional electricity.

To see the future of solar power, take an hour-long train ride inland from Shanghai and then a horn-blaring cab trek through the smog of Wuxi, a fast-growing Chinese city of five million. After winding through an industrial park, you will arrive at the front door of Suntech Power, a company that in the few years since its founding has become the world’s largest maker of crystalline-silicon solar panels. Read the rest of this entry »

A Simpler Route to Plastic Solar Cells

A new method will reduce the cost and complexity of manufacturing.

A simplified process for printing polymer solar cells could further reduce the costs of making the plastic photovoltaics. The method, which has been demonstrated on a large-area, roll-to-roll printing system, eliminates steps in the manufacturing process. If it can be applied to a wide range of polymer materials, it could lead to a fast and cheap way to make plastic solar cells for such applications as portable electronics, photovoltaics integrated into building materials, and smart fabrics. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar panels are cheap enough to become a major component of green energy

The United States has supported research into photovoltaics for almost 40 years, recently with a 30 percent investment tax credit. Japan instituted incentives in the 1990s, when photovoltaics cost at least five times as much as residential electricity. In the new millennium, Germany instituted incentives an order of magnitude larger. Read the rest of this entry »

Light-Trapping Nanoparticles boost solar power’s prospects

In 1995, finishing her undergraduate degree in physics, Kylie Catchpole decided to take a risk on a field that was nearly moribund: photovoltaics. “There was a sense that I might have difficulty ever being employed,” she recalls. But her gamble paid off. In 2006 Catchpole, then a postdoc, discovered something that opened the door to making thin-film solar cells significantly more efficient at converting light into electricity. It’s an advance that could help make solar power more competitive with fossil fuels. Read the rest of this entry »

Green Concrete: Storing carbon dioxide in cement

Making cement for concrete involves heating pulverized limestone, clay, and sand to 1,450 °C with a fuel such as coal or natural gas. The process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: making one metric ton of commonly used Portland cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of it. The 2.8 billion metric tons of cement produced worldwide in 2009 contributed about 5 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based startup Novacem, is trying to eliminate those emissions with a cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide than is released during its manufacture. It locks away as much as 100 kilograms of the greenhouse gas per ton. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar Fuel

Designing the perfect renewable fuel.

When Noubar Afeyan, the CEO of Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA, set out to invent the ideal renewable fuel, he decided to eliminate the middleman. Biofuels ultimately come from carbon dioxide and water, so why persist in making them from biomass–corn or switchgrass or algae? “What we wanted to know,” Afeyan says, “is could we engineer a system that could convert carbon dioxide directly into any fuel that we wanted?” Read the rest of this entry »

Solar-Powered Desalination

Saudi Arabia’s newest purification plant will use state-of-the-art solar technology.

Saudi Arabia meets much of its drinking water needs by removing salt and other minerals from seawater. Now the country plans to use one of its most abundant resources to counter its fresh-water shortage: sunshine. Saudi Arabia’s national research agency, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST), is building what will be the world’s largest solar-powered desalination plant in the city of Al-Khafji. Read the rest of this entry »

Federal funds could help 15 gigawatts of solar projects

A massive $1.37 billion loan guarantee that the U.S. Department of Energy granted to Brightsource Energy last week could help clear the way for over 15 gigawatts of solar projects in California, and could be the key to launching a new solar thermal industry in the United States. Read the rest of this entry »

Wave Energy Scales Up: Tidal projects will generate 1.2 GW

Scotland hopes to ride the next renewable energy wave. Site leases for several big wave and tidal power projects were awarded last week by the U.K. government, concluding a two-year bidding process that elicited strong interest from major utilities and energy entrepreneurs. The awards open the way for six wave energy projects and four tidal energy systems around Scotland’s Orkney Islands that could collectively generate up to 1.2 gigawatts, exceeding the U.K.’s 700-megawatt target for the bidding round. This is an immense scale for an industry that so far has installed only pilot projects involving a handful of small devices. Read the rest of this entry »

Gasifying Biomass with Sunlight

A solar-driven process could yield far more fuel than conventional biomass production.

Sundrop Fuels, a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims. Read the rest of this entry »

Bloom Reveals New Fuel Cells

Its 100-kilowatt modules have been sold to Google, eBay, and Walmart.

The up-to-now secretive startup Bloom Energy took the wraps off its technology this week, unveiling a fuel-cell system that the company claims can run on a variety of fuels and pay for itself in three to five years via lower energy bills. Read the rest of this entry »

Biofuels from Saltwater Crops

A research project will make jet fuel without wasting fresh water or farmland.

A project in the Middle East aims to make jet fuel from saltwater-tolerant crops grown in the desert. Researchers at the Masdar Institute in the United Arab Emirates are starting a two-square-kilometer demonstration farm that will combine fish and shrimp farming with the cultivation of mangrove trees and salicornia, a plant with oil-rich seeds that can be converted into fuel. Read the rest of this entry »

Cheaper Solar, Without Better Cells

Costs could drop 30 percent with other improvements.

Dow Chemical readies easy-to-install solar roofs

Dow Chemical is moving full speed ahead to develop roof shingles embedded with photovoltaic cells. To facilitate the move, the U.S. Department of Energy has backed Dow’s efforts with a $17.8 million tax credit that will help the company launch an initial market test of the product later this year.

In October 2009, the chemical giant unveiled its product, which can be nailed to a roof like ordinary shingles by roofers without the help of specially trained solar installers or electricians. The solar shingles will cost 30 to 40 percent less than other solar-embedded building materials and 10 percent less than the combined costs of conventional roofing materials and rack-mounted solar panels, according to company officials. Read the rest of this entry »

A New Way to Make Useful Chemicals from CO2

A copper-based catalyst helps turn the gas into antifreeze and household cleaners.

When it’s exposed to the elements, the surface of copper turns green because it reacts with oxygen. But now scientists have discovered a copper-based material with a surprising property: it reacts with carbon dioxide in air rather than oxygen. Though the reaction is not a practical way to remove large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it does provide an alternative new route, using a cheap, nonpetroleum feedstock, to make useful chemicals. Read the rest of this entry »

Rising Sun: India’s Solar Power Initiatives Are Shining Brighter

Farooq Abdullah, India’s Union minister for new and renewable energy, is a busy man these days. Over the past few months, as the Copenhagen climate summit neared, he has been speaking at seminar after seminar on renewable energy which, most of the time, have been on solar energy. He has also been inaugurating projects, from the launch of a new solar lantern to the commissioning of a solar steam system at a temple kitchen to cook food for 20,000 pilgrims each day. All over India, solar power has found its day in the sun. Read the rest of this entry »

A Pivot Irrigator With a Difference

Developed by a Pune-based engineer, the solar machine saves energy and time while irrigating large stretches of land.

When rains failed all of a sudden last year after having started on a promising note in June, the researchers at the National Research Centre for Onion and Garlic in Rajgurunagar went into a tizzy.

The soy bean crop that had been planted in 4.5 acres of land at the center was at risk of failure. What came to their rescue was a solar-powered pivot irrigator, developed by Pune-based Padmakar Kelkar, an engineer by profession and an entrepreneur by choice. Kelkar’s innovation saved the entire soy bean crop that was almost on the verge of getting wiped out. Read the rest of this entry »

Commercializing Garbage to Ethanol

Startup Coskata has opened a “semi-commercial” ethanol plant to demonstrate its technology.

A startup that is developing a process to convert a wide range of materials, including wood chips and garbage, into ethanol has moved a step closer to commercializing the technology. Today Coskata, located in Warrenville, IL, is unveiling what it calls a “semi-commercial” plant that will be used to demonstrate that its technology can work at a commercial scale. Read the rest of this entry »

Natural Gas Changes the Energy Map

Vast amounts of the clean-burning fossil fuel have been discovered in shale deposits, setting off a gas rush. But how it will affect our energy use is still uncertain.

The first sign that there’s something unusual about the flat black rocks strewn across the shore of Lake Erie comes when Gary Lash smashes two of them together. They break easily and fall into shards that give off the faint odor of hydrocarbons, similar to the smell of kerosene. But for Lash, a geologist and professor at nearby SUNY Fredonia, smashing the rocks is a simple trick designed to catch the attention of a visitor. The black outcroppings that protrude from the nearby bluff onto the narrow beach are what really interest him. Read the rest of this entry »

Electron-beam emitters could save millions of tons of C02 emissions

Electron-beam emitters that are one-hundreth the size and cost of conventional electron emitters could usher in a wide array of new uses for the devices that could dramatically cut the energy use of industrial processes. Advanced Electron Beams (AEB), a Wilmington, MA, startup, has developed a small, low-powered electron emitter that is the size of a microwave oven, compared to the conference-room equipment now needed for electron-beam processes.

“We think AEB is the most cutting-edge industrial-efficiency technology that we’ve seen in the 10 years we’ve been doing clean-tech investing,” says Charles McDermott of RockPort Capital Partners. In August, RockPort and several other venture capital firms announced the investment of $14.2 million in AEB. Read the rest of this entry »

Biofuel from Sewage

Qteros forms a partnership to use sewage as a feedstock for making ethanol.

These days, more and more companies are finding that sewage is a veritable “black gold.” In recent years, sewage sludge has been mined for electricity, fertilizer, fish food, and gasoline. Now two companies have partnered up to turn sewage into ethanol. While others have worked to produce ethanol from municipal solid waste, sewage from wastewater has been a relatively unmined ethanol source. Read the rest of this entry »

GE Grabs Gearless Wind Turbines

New direct-drive turbines promise to lower the cost of offshore wind energy.

With a new purchase, GE is betting on an early-stage turbine technology that could make offshore wind farms cheaper to maintain. The acquisition of ScanWind, based in Trondheim, Norway, has also secured GE a foothold in the growing offshore wind energy market.

Instead of gearboxes, ScanWind uses a novel direct-drive generator technology in its 3.5-megawatt turbines. This makes the turbines more reliable, the company says, by cutting downtime and repair costs–an especially important consideration for turbines offshore, where it’s more expensive to send technicians for maintenance. ScanWind has been testing the turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003. Read the rest of this entry »

A novel gasification process for low-quality coal

The industrial boomtown of Dongguan in southeast China’s Pearl River Delta could soon host one of the country’s most sophisticated power plants, one that uses an unconventional coal-gasification technology to make the dirtiest coal behave like clean-burning natural gas. Its developers, Atlanta-based utility Southern Company and Houston-based engineering firm KBR, announced the licensing deal with Dongguan Power and Chemical Company this month. Read the rest of this entry »

Thin-Film Solar Startup Debuts With $4 Billion in Contracts

A startup with a secret recipe for printing cheap solar cells on aluminum foil debuted today, in what could end up a milestone for the industry.

Nanosolar’s technology consists of sandwiches of copper, indium, gallium and selenide (CIGS) that are 100 times thinner than the silicon solar cells that dominate the solar photovoltaics market. Its potential convinced Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to back the company as angel investors in its early days. Read the rest of this entry »

Gasoline from Vinegar

A process that converts acids from garbage into fuel gets a boost.

A company that has developed a process for converting organic waste and other biomass into gasoline–Terrabon, based in Houston–recently announced a partnership with Waste Management, the giant garbage-collection and -disposal company based in Houston. The partnership could help Terrabon bring its technology to market.

Amid a profusion of new biofuels technologies, this one stands out because it will be relatively easy to scale up for producing millions of gallons of fuel, says James McMillan, the biochemical process R&D group manager at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, CO, who is not connected to the company. Read the rest of this entry »

Mixing Solar with Coal to Cut Costs

A new strategy could reduce coal plant emissions and cut the cost of solar power.

A project that will add solar power to a coal-fired power plant could reduce the amount of coal required to generate electricity and dramatically cut the cost of solar power.

The approach, announced by Abengoa Solar, based in Lakewood, CO, and Xcel Energy, Colorado’s largest electrical utility, would make it easier for utilities in sunny states like California to meet impending state renewable-energy requirements. Read the rest of this entry »

Researcher Pushes Enormous Floating Solar Islands

Creating cheap, clean energy is a huge problem.

So, how’s this for a big solution: Swiss researcher Thomas Hinderling wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power.

He’s the CEO of the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, a privately held R&D company, and he’s already received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility in that country. Read the rest of this entry »

Ecuador Regreens the Galápagos

The islands that inspired Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution are being loved to death. Every year, more than 140,000 tourists descend on the isolated archipelago to ogle its cactus-studded scenery and bizarre wildlife. And amid the blue-footed boobies and giant tortoises sits a handful of towns whose population has tripled to nearly 30,000 in the past two decades. To support all those people, 10 million gallons of diesel fuel and gasoline are shipped to the Galápagos annually, a fifth of which is used just to generate electricity. Read the rest of this entry »

Cleaning Coal

Converting coal to natural gas is our best strategy for limiting carbon dioxide emissions today.

The hot investments these days involve renewable-energy technologies that promise to generate electricity completely free of emissions, along with biofuels that promise to end global demand for coal and petroleum. Unfortunately, these technologies are not economically, technically, or logistically ready to be adopted on a large scale. Renewable energy will ultimately be a critical element of a more sustainable world. But if we have any hope of winning the battle against climate change, we must also focus on solutions that can have a bigger impact faster.

Burning coal is the single largest source of globalgreenhouse-gas emissions, and coal is not going to go away anytime soon. It is by far our largest energy resource–Illinois alone has more British thermal units (BTUs) of coal than Saudi Arabia and Kuwait combined have BTUs of oil. Coal now meets 50 percent of U.S. electricity needs, and its use in countries such as China and India is growing. Clearly, we need to find a way to use coal without generating harmful emissions, as an interim solution to one of the biggest threats to society. Read the rest of this entry »

Solar Industry: No Breakthroughs Needed

The solar industry says incremental advances have made transformational technologies unnecessary

The federal government is behind the times when it comes to making decisions about advancing the solar industry, according to several solar-industry experts. This has led, they argue, to a misplaced emphasis on research into futuristic new technologies, rather than support for scaling up existing ones. That was the prevailing opinion at a symposium last week put together by the National Academies in Washington, DC, on the topic of scaling up the solar industry.

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Less May Be More for Wind Turbines

Nordic Windpower’s two-bladed rotors depart from conventional wind-power design

One of the first R&D grants to a renewable-energy developer from the economic-stimulus funds approved by Congress this spring could have a dramatic impact on the design of wind turbines. The $16 million loan guarantee offered by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to Berkeley, CA-based Nordic Windpower will accelerate commercialization of the company’s Swedish-designed, two-bladed wind turbines, marking the first utility-scale alternative to the industry’s dominant three-bladed design in over a decade.

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Cheaper Solar Thermal Power

A simpler design could reduce the cost of solar power generated by concentrating sunlight on Stirling engines.

Stirling Energy Systems (SES), based in Phoenix, has decreased the complexity and cost of its technology for converting the heat in sunlight into electricity, allowing for high-volume production. It will begin building very large solar-power plants using its equipment as soon as next year.

The company is currently building a 1.5-megawatt, 60-unit demonstration plant that will use the company’s latest design. Stirling expects to finish that project by the end of the year. It also has contracts with two California utilities to supply a total of 800 megawatts of solar power in Southern California. The first of the plants that will supply this power could be built starting the middle of next year, pending government permits and loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

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Thin-film solar cells on flexible steel sheets

Xunlight, a startup in Toledo, Ohio, has developed a way to make large, flexible solar panels. It has developed a roll-to-roll manufacturing technique that forms thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells on thin sheets of stainless steel. Each solar module is about one meter wide and five and a half meters long.

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Time-Lapse Videos of Massive Change on Earth

Over the past decade, the number of people on Earth shot up by more than 13 percent, to nearly 6.8 billion people. To make room for all the hungry, breeding, CO2-emitting bodies on our small planet, we’ve ravaged Earth’s surface with staggering feats of deforestation, irrigation and urbanization — and NASA satellites have captured it all. Here are a few videos, compiled from images posted on NASA’s Earth Observatory, of some of the most impressive conquests of man over environment.

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Converting Garbage into Fuel

Waste Management, a large waste company, gives technology for gasifying trash a boost.

Waste gasification, a process for converting garbage into fuel and electricity without incinerating it, may be a step closer to large-scale commercialization. Last week, Houston’s Waste Management, a major garbage-collection and -disposal company, announced a joint venture with InEnTec, a startup based in Richland, WA, to commercialize InEnTec’s plasma-gasification technology.

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How To Make a Solar Cell with Donuts and Tea

DonutholesDonuts and tea are the main ingredients in a MacGyver-style do-it-yourself solar cell, explained step-by-step in this video.

“It turns out these delicious little things contain everything we need to make a simple solar cell,” said Blake Farrow, a Canadian scientist who filmed the video while visiting Prashant Kamat’s lab at the University of Notre Dame.

Powdered sugar contains titanium dioxide nanoparticles, a substance that is also used in paint. When that powder is coated with an organic dye, like the colorful chemicals in pasionfruit tea, it can be used as the light-absorbing layer of a photovoltaic device.
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Most People Think Global Warming Won’t Affect Them

An interesting new study confirms a long-held suspicion of politicians and, more importantly, anyone working in the field of climate change awareness: Americans are only worried about global warming abstractly.

As the chart at the left illustrates, the things people are most concerned with when it comes to global warming (climate change, as we prefer to say) are as far removed from the individual as possible—including “Future Generations of People” and “Plant and Animal Species.” Practically speaking, this helps explain why we’ve been so slow to act on agressive climate change legislation, and why we’re so easily distracted from the topic as soon as anything (like a collapsing economy) comes up.

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How Painting Rooftops Could Slow Climate Change

Here’s a stat that might blow your mind: “Painting 100 square feet of roof space white offsets the effect of one ton of CO2 emissions.” So say a team of scientists from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, who contend that the simple act of painting roof tops, parking lots, and other dark surfaces a lighter shade could have a dramatic impact on emissions and, by extension, climate change. How much of an impact? Enough to delay the effects of global warming for 11 years. There’s an economic incentive too: the scientist argue that the emissions savings are equivalent to $1 trillion. Read some thoughtful commentary on the idea over at Infrastructurist, who are championing its shovel-readiness, and wondering where the money for this in the stimulus bill is.

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Don’t Buy Green

Trying to limit your environmental impact? Buying “eco-friendly” stuff doesn’t help.

Before attending trade shows flogging “green” products, I set my B.S. detector to 11. That habit was reinforced recently, when I attended a small show in New York, featuring the big boys of consumer electronics—Nokia, Sony, Samsung, and the like. I came to a stand offering green credit cards, which award one ton of carbon offsets for every $1000 you spend. That may sound good, but I had to ask: How does that conversion rate compare to regular cards that give you cash or frequently flier miles? How much value are you getting for your money?

“1 ton.”

But what’s that ton worth? How much does it cost?

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Think solar power is all about photovoltaic panels? Solar thermal could power the entire country—and the technology has been tested

The Other Solar

Solar technology is nothing new. For literal millennia, humans have been harnessing the sun’s rays for energy. Over the past few decades, the dream of a solar-powered future has mostly conjured up images of rooftops covered by photovoltaic panels, turning every house into a mini power plant. But a somewhat lower-tech and much older solar solution could well prove to offer the biggest gains in carbon-free energy production. I’m talking about concentrated solar power, or as many call it, “solar thermal.”

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Plastic Made From Corn

In the 19th century, kerosene—the fuel that lit the lamps of the world—was made from whale oil. But whales were becoming harder and harder come by, presaging a tenuous future for the world’s kerosene lamps. Fortuitously, a geologist named Abraham Gesner invented a way to distill kerosene from petroleum, which most people considered a useless, if abundant, substance. Today, we make most of our plastics from petroleum byproducts, and, in an interesting reversal, that resource is now in short supply. We are faced with a choice: either give up plastics altogether or find a different way to make them. Enter Ingeo, a plastic that is made from plants.
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More AC Power from Solar Panels: DC-to-AC inverters to extract more juice from solar panels

Startup Enphase Energy is shrinking DC-to-AC inverters to extract more juice from solar panels.

There’s more to solar power than blue glassy panels shimmering on rooftops. Just as important are the inverters that convert DC power created by the solar panels into grid-ready AC power. Typically, all the panels in a rooftop PV system are connected to one large inverter mounted on the side of a house.

Startup Enphase Energy of Petaluma, CA, is now making the first micro-inverters. These smaller inverters can be bolted to the racking under each solar panel, to convert DC power into AC for each panel individually. The company claims that the devices will increase a PV system’s efficiency by 5 to 25 percent and decrease the cost of solar power.
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Quantum leap in LED lighting

QD Vision is using its quantum dots in LED lighting to produce more pleasing white light.

Seth Coe-Sullivan flicks the switches on two desk lamps, and even from across the conference room, it’s immediately obvious which light the chief technology officer of QD Vision is there to brag about. The light coming from the lamp on the left is a harsh bluish white. The lamp on the right casts a warmer, more yellow glow. Coe-Sullivan holds a hand under each lamp. The hand under the bluish light looks pale and sickly; the other looks darker and healthier. The harsher light lacks wavelengths in the red end of the spectrum, so there’s no light to illuminate the reddish tinge that blood provides to human skin.

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Biomass as Electricity is efficient than Biomass as Fuel

Biofuels vs. Biomass Electricity

Findings show that turning biomass into electricity is more beneficial than turning it into transportation fuels.

A study published today in Science concludes that, on average, using biomass to produce electricity is 80 percent more efficient than transforming the biomass into biofuel. In addition, the electricity option would be twice as effective at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. The results imply that investment in an ethanol infrastructure, even if based on more efficient cellulosic processes, may prove misguided. The study was done by a collaboration between researchers at Stanford University, the Carnegie Institute of Science, and the University of California, Merced.

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MIT Chemist’s “Solar Fuel” – A breakthrough technology for clean source of fuel

Sun + Water = Fuel

Tidal-Power System Hits Record Output

Marine Current Turbines’ SeaGen system quadruples the world tidal-turbine power record.

Tidal-power developments by British firms show this renewable power technology achieving impressive scale and continued design innovation. Bristol-based Marine Current Turbines (MCT) revealed last month that its SeaGen dual-turbine system achieved full power operation of 1.2 megawatts. MCT’s power peak is four times the global record for a tidal-stream system set by the company in 2004, according to U.K.-based renewables journal REFocus, and 30 times more than the output from the tidal turbines pumping electricity in New York’s East River.

To see these concepts in action, check out the animation below and Tidal Energy’s.Watch animation >>

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Segway is trying to reinvent urban transportation with Rickshaw!

GM and Segway Develop Rickshaw Prototype

GM and Segway have teamed up to develop a new prototype vehicle as part of their efforts to “reinvent the automobile,” the companies say, but it’s not clear that their new vehicle will do better than the original Segway personal transport. 

Unlike the original self-balancing two-wheeler, the new vehicle will be enclosed and designed to transport two people seated side by side, rather than one person standing up. It will also be equipped with GPS, wireless technology, and sensors, which could eventually allow an onboard computer to take over some driving tasks.

Watch Video >>

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Breakthrough in LED production

Light-emitting diodes will transform the business of illumination, especially with new production breakthroughs

“INCANDESCENT” might well describe the rage of those who prefer traditional light bulbs to their low-energy alternatives. This week, the European Commission formally adopted new regulations that will phase such bulbs out in Europe by 2012. America will do so by 2014. Some countries, such as Australia, Brazil and Switzerland, have got rid of them already. When a voluntary agreement came into force in Britain, at the start of the year, people rushed out to buy the last 100-watt light bulbs. Next to go are lower-wattage bulbs.

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