Energy

Biofuels were all the rage in the 1990s, with Vice-President Al Gore declaring them the Holy Grail of fossil fuel replacement.    Unfortunately, no quality science agreed with that assessment yet they have been passed into law anyway by anti-science politicians who saw a way to please part of the voter base. The concern then became, once mandates and subsidies were in place, of course, that not only would biofuels not be better for the environment and people, they may be worse.    A new memorandum  from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and the Climate and…

Ashwani Kumar and Vijay Rani Kumar Energy Plantation Demonstration Project Center Department of Biotechnology Project Department of Botany, University of Rajasthan, Jaipur - 302004. India. Phone: 00 91 141 654100 Fax: 00 91 141 565905 Email: msku4@hotmail.com ABSTRACT : At the global level, according to recent estimates by FAO the annual tropical deforestation rate for the decade 1981 to 1990 was about 15.4 million ha (Mha). According to the latest data published in 1994 for the assessment period 1989-1991, the total area under forests is 64.01 Mha accounting for 19.5 percent of India's…

Metabolic engineering and production of next generation bio fuels. Ashwani Kumar , Alexander von Humboldt Fellow Department of Botany, Univeristy of Rajasthan, Jaipur 302004 India Email: akbiotechnology214@gmail.com Phone 0141 2654100. Mobile: 94161663610 Abstract: Metabolic engineering offers several possibilities of obtaining desired metabolites from unutilized or underutilized sources of biofuel. Wold oil reserves are 1.1. trillion barrels and biotechnology shall play important role in developing next generation biofuel . Last 20 years have seen record high crude oil prices (>$148/…

Without question nanotechnology is a key component in our energy future.   In recent years, developers have been investigating light-harvesting thin film solar panels made from nanotechnology and promoting efficiency metrics which they say make the technology marketable but a researcher has challenged recent "charge" measurements for increasing solar panel efficiency. While we need to invest in the future, we need to make sure there is no hype that promises to increase efficiencies in thin film panels. Offering a less expensive, smaller solution than traditional panels, Prof. Eran…

Icon for Cosmic Embryo: Erupting star V838 Monocerotis We have more than enough renewable energy sources to keep every person on earth moving over its surface as much as they might want. For an esoteric example: “On an average day, 60 million square kilometers (23 million square miles) of tropical seas absorb an amount of solar radiation equal in heat content to about 250 billion barrels of oil” (NREL, 2010) (cf. (Bregman et al., 1995)), let alone considering terrestrially falling sunlight, whereas we consume “only” 0.085 billion barrels of oil per day worldwide (NationMaster.com, 2011a). So…

Creating environmental protection trade barriers would likely result in a global catastrophe, a war bigger than World War I and World War II combined.  This is what most of us have been led to believe.  However a true examination of an energy and trade policy must break out the winners and losers within the domestic political arena.  By doing so, the rationale for a policy, conscious or otherwise, become more clear, allowing an independent legislator to make a better decision based upon facts.  Are not legislators, judges of the public interest, appointed by the people,…

In an ideal energy future, man-made solar cells would mimic much of the functionality of efficient plant life.   Currently solar cell technology is expensive and a maintenance headache but Purdue researchers are working a new type of solar cell that uses carbon nanotubes and DNA to come closer to plant life that can be durable enough for commercials use, Their design exploits the unusual electrical properties of structures called single-wall carbon nanotubes, using them as "molecular wires in light harvesting cells," said  Jong Hyun Choi, an assistant professor of mechanical…

 New York State would achieve significant cost savings, while also creating opportunities to generate revenue with state owned assets by shifting to Real Time Pricing. Furthermore, the state may act as an innovator by helping to mature developing technologies which would facilitate the adoption of real time pricing for residential constituents. It is believed that the complete migration of all New York customers to RTP is inevitable in the future. Real-time pricing (RTP) is a rate class where customers pay for the electricity they consume based on wholesale hourly market prices. RTP…

In all of the excitement about 'renewable' energy that can replace fossil fuels, we look to the future - algae, seaweed, switchgrass, we have articles on practically every new idea - but forget to look to the past, like in wood. Unlike 50 years ago, we now know how to make wood truly renewable (the Christmas tree industry was a wonderfully efficient proof of concept) and, say researchers at Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology UMSICHT in Oberhausen, Germany, with modern techniques wood is comparable to natural gas in efficiency of heat supply. The…

Metabolic engineering may rescue our energy future. A new strain of yeast that is more efficient at fermenting galactose might make red seaweed a viable future biofuel. Producers of biofuels made from terrestrial biomass crops have had difficulty breaking down recalcitrant fibers and extracting fermentable sugars. The harsh pretreatment processes used to release the sugars also resulted in toxic byproducts, inhibiting subsequent microbial fermentation. But perhaps marine biomass can be more easily degraded to fermentable sugars, leading to production rates and range of distribution higher…