Energy
There's a disturbing, though funny to outsiders, trend sweeping green conscious corporations on the coasts of the United States - flurries of emails between indignant employees talking about how long their cars have been plugged in.
Though subsidies and public relations campaigns for electric cars are everywhere to be found, improvements in batteries have been absent for decades. Unless we want acid rain to come roaring back, there needs to be an improvement. Electric car companies are not going to spearhead the research, they are enjoying their 1950s-style "planned obsolescence" and have no…
Tobacco is a high-density crop that is mowed several times throughout its cycle and that can be a good thing, because it can produce as much as 160 tons of fresh biomass per hectare.
Biomass that is suitable for producing bioethanol. Smoking cigarettes is bad but renewable energy is good, tobacco just needs some help from science.
For a recent study, tobacco plants of the Virginia Gold and Havana commercial cultivars were genetically modified to increase their production of starch and sugars, which contributes to the increase in ethanol production. Traditional tobacco growing allows the…
Growing agave and other carefully chosen plants amid photovoltaic panels could allow solar farms not only to collect sunlight for electricity but also to produce crops for biofuels, at least according to computer models.
This co-location approach could be useful in sunny, arid regions such as the southwestern United States where water is scarce, said Sujith Ravi, who is conducting postdoctoral research with professors David Lobell and Chris Field, both on faculty in environmental Earth system science and senior fellows at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and was lead author on…
James Lovelock, the Godfather of Global Warming, says we are doomed and the only recourse left is to retreat to climate-controlled cities. Others claim we can solve the problem if we just shut off all of the power plants. Others contend we simply need to stop building them.
First world academic arguments are fine for people who already have air conditioning. As has been argued in the past, we don't have a climate change problem or a water problem or a food problem, we only have an energy one. Clean energy - not the idealized and politically-motivated lobbyist-driven subsidies propping up…
Russia has control over energy supplies and distribution systems in Ukraine and that means they control energy supplies in Western Europe.
It's made a lot of Russians rich and prevents Europe from taking any meaningful stance on Russian aggression in Crimea. Solar power subsidies are not going to be much help if Russia shuts off the power.
But if the Obama administration relaxed U.S. energy export regulations it could diminish Russia's economic leverage over Ukraine and therefore Europe. That would give America more leverage than a few words and putting sanctions on Vladimir Putin's friends.…
Spit-powered, micro-sized microbial fuel cells produce enough energy to run on-chip applications, according to a paper in
Asia Materials.
Microbial fuel cells create energy when bacteria break down organic material producing a charge that is transferred to the anode. Bruce Logan, Professor Environmental Engineering at Penn State, has studied microbial fuel cells for more than ten years and usually looks to wastewater as a source for both the organic material and the bacteria to create either electricity or hydrogen, but says these tiny machines are a bit different.
One possible application…
Oregon State University chemists have discovered how to use the sun as more than just a way to harvest passive energy - they can use it to directly produce the solar energy materials that make energy harvesting possible.
This breakthrough by chemical engineers at Oregon State University could soon reduce the cost of solar energy, speed production processes, use environmentally benign materials, and make the sun almost a "one-stop shop" that produces both the materials for solar devices and the eternal energy to power them.
Writing in RSC Advances, they say the work is based on the use…
Countries are looking for fossil fuel alternatives that can get somewhere near the density of gasoline but with less impact on the global ecosystem. Among the most promising contenders for mainstream alternative energy production, especially on alternative science media sites like Science 2.0, is hydrogen – but that increasingly appears to be an unlikely candidate.
Low energy conversion efficiency weakens the case for hydrogen as a commercial fuel. Hydrogen requires one-too-many conversions to be as efficient as electricity (water to hydrogen to electricity), as opposed to a simple fuel to…
As long as mandates and subsidies continue, wind turbines will continue to be part of the alternative energy mix.
That means going beyond hype and potential and focusing on physical design, such as spacing and orienting individual turbines to maximize their efficiency and minimize any "wake effects," where the swooping blades of one reduces the energy in the wind available for the following turbine.
Many considerations go into the design of a wind farm. Political and social considerations factor into the choice of sites but after that, ideal turbine arrangement will…
In America, labor unions primarily donate money to the Democratic party and in return they want more union jobs. Recent history has been a bit of a concern. The President stalled approval of the Keystone XL, overriding both his supporters in science and in labor to do so and instead siding with environmentalists. Meanwhile, subsidies and mandates for solar power and wind have contributed little to the union work force.
Natural gas, primarily opposed by Democrats, has caused greenhouse gas emissions to drop and so energy, the largest contributor to CO2, is back at early 1990s levels. Coal,…