Energy

A new way to store methane could speed the development of cleaner-burning natural gas-powered cars that don't require the high pressures or cold temperatures of today's compressed or liquefied natural gas vehicles. Natural gas is cleaner-burning than gasoline, and today there are more than 150,000 compressed natural gas (CNG) vehicles on the road in the U.S., most of them trucks and buses. But until manufacturers can find a way to pack more methane into a tank at lower pressures and temperatures, allowing for a greater driving range and less hassle at the pump, passenger cars are unlikely to…

Though activists want to retreat into the past and have less energy available for the public (which will impact the poor) a more progressive approach is to look to science and the future - but that will only work if there are stable policies in place. Oddly, this progressive thinking is coming from energy corporations rather than environmentalists. A group of electricity corporations are creating a picture of a future high-tech energy mix that would help nations meet climate-related CO2 reduction pledges and the expanding demand for electricity. In a report for the upcoming world climate…

Burning a candle could be all it takes to make an inexpensive but powerful electric car battery, according to new research published in Electrochimica Acta. The research reveals that candle soot could be used to power the kind of lithium ion battery used in plug-in hybrid electric cars. The authors of the study, from the Indian Institute of Technology in Hyderabad, India, say their discovery opens up the possibilities to use carbon in more powerful batteries, driving down the costs of portable power. Lithium ion batteries power many devices, from smartphones and digital cameras all the way up…

In Australian homes, reliable hot water supplies for taking showers or bathing the kids are taken for granted. But this has a significant cost – conventional hot water heaters can account for up to 30% of household energy use and can be significant carbon emitters. One alternative is solar hot water, which can supply more than 90% of household hot water and reduce energy bills by 50-85%, as well as lowering carbon emissions. Unfortunately, it is likely that households are not getting the most from their solar hot water systems. In Australia and overseas, there is evidence that the potential…

A few years ago, I couldn’t read an energy bill beyond the charge levied. I couldn’t tell you how energy was measured, or ultimately how its use related to making my life better or worse, let alone how it affected broader society and the planet. I resolved to change this. I studied energy and sustainability at university, and have gone on to teach there. Throughout this time my wife and I have made many changes to how we use energy at home. Yet when we decided to take a closer look into our electricity bill, we were surprised by what we found. There are three of us in our household now,…

In a radio interview , Prime Minister Tony Abbott raised what he described as the “potential health impacts” of wind farms. Yesterday’s article in The Australian by Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonjhelm highlighted some very good points about wind turbine noise and its effect on people living near them. People are complaining of a range of health related problems and are attributing them to wind turbines. The question is: what is the cause of these health problems? Many blame the production of infrasound from wind turbines, yet this has not been proven to date. What is needed is new,…

If you are a hunter and accidentally shoot an endangered eagle, you could go to jail and you will certainly have a criminal record. If you are a wind turbine company, you kill 100 eagles a year and pay a token fine.  An estimated 75 to 110 golden eagles die at a wind-power generation operation in Altamont, California each year. That is about one eagle for every 8 megawatts of energy produced yet no one is in Federal prison.  Why the favoritism? The latter is an alternative energy darling of the US government. But if we care about birds and not partisan rationalizations, there is…

When government scientists determined that there would be negligible environmental impact due to the Keystone XL pipeline, another 400 miles of new, safer pipeline in an area where 20,000 miles of older pipeline already existed were not going to ruin the ecology, President Barack Obama ordered them to study it again. But that was not the only instance of scientization of politics - seeking to rationalize political beliefs for special interest groups by claiming they are evidence-based. As supporters and opponents of the proposed pipeline testified at public hearings in Nebraska…

Methane has 23X the short term warming impact of CO2 but, it was noted by environmentalists when they used to advocate for natural gas, methane is very short-lived and the amount released due to natural gas usage is negligible. Yet now the Environmental Protection Agency is looking for ways to punish the booming natural gas industry and they are citing methane as a problem. Well, it's election season and the last thing they want is recognition that the free market caused American CO2 emissions to plummet - back to mid-1990s levels (and the situation for coal miners is even worse, those…

It's an old joke: Practical nuclear fusion power plants are just 30 years away -- and always will be. Maybe sooner, this time. Advances in magnet technology have led researchers at MIT to propose a new design for a practical compact tokamak fusion reactor that might be realized in as little as a decade, they say. Practical fusion power, should it ever happen, could offer a nearly inexhaustible energy resource. The key is new commercially available superconductors, rare-earth barium copper oxide (REBCO) superconducting tapes, to produce high-magnetic field coils "just ripples through the…