Energy
The global economic turmoil has started having an impact on the wind energy industry in Europe. Some companies are cutting down forecasts and production for 2009 and the market is showing the first signs of slowdown.
The current economic situation is slowly affecting the wind energy industry, remarks Frost Sullivan Research Analyst Gouri Nambudripad. "We are going to see a slowing down of the double-digit growth rates that were witnessed in the past few years. Some market players are reducing their aggressive production and development targets and this is going to trickle down the supply…
New ways of squeezing out greater efficiency from solar photovoltaic cells are emerging from computer simulations and lab tests conducted by a team of physicists and engineers at MIT.
This project, along with other research work going on now in solar cells, has the potential to get costs down "so that it becomes competitive with grid electricity," said Peter Bermel, a postdoctoral researcher in MIT's physics department who has been working on the project. While no single project is likely to achieve that goal, he said, this work is "the kind of science that needs to be explored in order to…
Slow-moving ocean and river currents could be a new, reliable and affordable alternative energy source. A University of Michigan engineer has made a machine that works like a fish to turn potentially destructive vibrations in fluid flows into clean, renewable power.
The machine is called VIVACE. A paper on it is published in the current issue of the quarterly Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering.
VIVACE is the first known device that could harness energy from most of the water currents around the globe because it works in flows moving slower than 2 knots (about 2 miles per…
Lithium-ion batteries don't get a lot of respect these days, what with everyone talking about magical future batteries that are cheaper and won't make you Prius owners cause acid rain. They're everywhere still and they provide portable devices that require a lot of energy, such as mobile telephones, digital cameras, and notebook computers, with power. However, their capacity, and thus the running time of the devices, remain somewhat limited - a notebook computer usually runs only about two hours.
The reason is the relatively small capacity of the graphite anode in those batteries to…
by Diane Banegas, National Science Foundation
Researchers at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities are studying a remarkable species of bacteria, Geobacter sulfurreducens, that produces electric current when attached to a graphite electrode or other conductive surface.
Geobacter's current capability already has been harnessed in so-called "microbial fuel cells" that use bacteria to convert wastewater organic compounds into electricity. Daniel Bond, a microbiologist at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and his team have demonstrated the same phenomenon can be harnessed for use in…
One of the biggest threats to today's farmlands is the loss of soil organic carbon (SOC) and soil organic matter (SOM) from poor land-management practices. The presence of these materials is essential as they do everything from providing plants with proper nutrients to filtering harmful chemical compounds to the prevention of soil erosion. Sustainable management practices for crop residues are critical for maintaining soil productivity, but being able to measure a loss in the quality of soil can be difficult.
In an article published in the Soil Science Society of America Journal, a team of…
ashley |
Imagine a future for ice cubes that burn, it may sounds impossible but gas hydrates are an alternate energy source said to put every other fossil fuel to shame.
Gas Hydrates are an ice-like solid composed from the bonding of water and natural gas molecules. The lattice-structure traps gas particles (mostly methane) within the ice. Hydrates form under the low temperatures and high pressures of the ocean floor, usually at depths greater than 500 meters and are primarily found to occur within sedimentary deposits along continental shelves and also beneath Arctic permafrost. The exact amount and…
Engineers and entrepreneurs are rushing to explore alternative sources of efficient and renewable energy in New Jersey and elsewhere in the country. A Rutgers School of Business—Camden professor has strong words of caution as projects involving wind farms and photovoltaic cells proliferate.
With the electric-power industry poised for its most dramatic changes in decades, too little thought is being devoted to coordinating these piecemeal initiatives, warns Richard Michelfelder in a recent edition of The Electricity Journal, the leading policy journal for the electric industry.
The…
Construction of new coal-fired power plants in the United States is in danger of coming to a standstill, partly due to the high cost of the requirement, whether existing or anticipated, to capture all emissions of carbon dioxide, an important greenhouse gas. But an MIT analysis suggests an intermediate step that could get construction moving again, allowing the nation to fend off growing electricity shortages using our most-abundant, least-expensive fuel while also reducing emissions.
Instead of capturing all of its CO2 emissions, plants could capture a significant fraction of those emissions…
Petroleum is the feedstock for many products in the chemical industry but it is becoming increasingly expensive. Renewable raw materials are an alternative but we quickly learned that, despite the beliefs of activists in the 1980s and 1990s, fuel from food was not a good idea.
Thanks to white industrial biotechnology, chemical substances can also be derived from waste products generated by the food industry, leftover biomass from agriculture and forestry, and residual materials. Researchers of the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology IGB in Stuttgart are…