A new GreenBiz Cafe video is now on YouTube. Take a look:

We have just seen widespread protests aginst the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act.

Proponents of these Acts claim that they want to encourage creativity by protecting the rights of authors, artists and musicians.

But copyright law is not about protecting authors, artists and musicians. It is, and always has been, all about protecting the income of publishers.

When printing presses arrived in England in the late 16th century, they created an industry. Printers soon wanted to prevent others from competing by printing the same books that they had published. So they convinced the government to bring in the Licencing Act of 1662, which gave a group of printers, called the Stationers’ Company, a near monopoly. The Licencing Act eventually lapsed and was replaced by the Statute of Anne in 1710. The Statute gave copyrights to authors, as well as printers, but it was of little benefit to them because they had to assign the copyright to a printer in order to get their work published.

Some printers and publishers have grown rich from their control of the transfer of the work of authors, artists and musicians to paper and plastic . But the age of mechanical publication has passed. Digital distribution does not need monopolistic publishers. The Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect Intellectual Property Act.are merely attempts to maintain the old, dinosaur monopolies.

If it is beyond our wit to find some way, other than outdated copyright laws, to reward creativity, it would still be better to abolish copyright entirely than strive to keep it alive. Wouldn’t it be better to allow everyone in the world free access to all books rather than prop up a system which makes publishers rich, just so that the author might receive a pittance?

As Thomas Jefferson wrote: "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them … incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation."

In the Mechanical Age, governments encouraged free access to ideas through public libraries. We should be building the digital equivalent – not arguing about how to protect dinosaurs.

The U.S. Electric Power Research Institute is currently testing a turbine designed for generating hydroelectricity with significantly reduced fish mortality.

The turbine, designed by Alden Laboratories, aims to provide safer passage for fish migrating downstream. Current methods of protecting fish, such as bypasses and non-generating spills, are estimated to reduce the amount of hydroelectic power produced by as much as 8,500 megawatt hours per annum  in the United States alone.

Instead of the six or more blades common in older turbine designs, the Alden turbine has only three blades, reducing the chance that fish will be struck by a blade. The blades also have a semi-round edge, which pushes enough water in front of the spinning blades to move the fish out of their path. The Alden turbine has no gaps between the blades and turns slower than conventional turbines, which means tha it has less impact on fish. Up to 98% of fish survive passing through the Alden turbine compared ith 80 to 85% with a traditional turbine.

The Electric Power Research Institute is deploying the Alden Turbine at the School Street – Brookfield Renewable Power  Project in Cohoes, New York for three years of testing.

Scientists from  MIT and RWTH Aachen University in Germany, have developed a computer program to calculate the efficiency of various layouts of heliostats, and tested it using the details of a real-life CSP plant, the PS10 plant outside Seville, Spain.

The researchers found that the most efficient arrangement is a spiral with the heliostats arranged to resemble a sunflower, each mirror being angled at 137° to its neighbour.

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Tony Fadell, who led the team which designed the first eighteen generations of  the iPod and the first three iPhones, has come up with the Nest thermostat for air conditioning systems.

As you might expect, it looks a lot better and is much easier to use than current thermostats – and it also has some very smart energy-saving software.

Solid-state batteries store energy in thin, solid film, rather than in a liquid like conventional lithium ion batteries. They are much lighter than standard batteries and, unlike standard lithium ion gatteries, they are not prone to catch fire when they are stressed.

One company working on developing solid state lithium ion batteries is Sakti3 Inc, a spin off company from the University of Michigan, which has attracted investment from Khosla Ventures and General Motoirs. The company is converting equipment used to make potato chip bags, which consist of thin films of solid material, to make its batteries without have to develop and scale up a whole new technology.

Sakti3 is aiming to achieve double the energy density of liquid batteries. This would make consumer electronics more affordable but the main potential market is for electric vehicles. The total battery power consumption of all U.S. comsumer electronics is 2.4 terrawatt hours per annum. If the entire world vehicle fleet was electric, it would need 4,700 terrawatt hours of battery capacity per annum.

The company’s CEO, Professor Anne-Marie Sastry, described her company’s philosophy and approach in this talk:

Molecular Solar Ltd, a company spun out of the UK’s University of Warwick, has demonstrated a record voltage of more than 4 volts from organic photovoltaic solar cells.

Being able to achieve 4 volts means that low cost organic PV cells could be used for built-in charging of handheld electronic devices, such as mobile phones and GPS systems.

Dr Ross Hatton, Molecular Solar’s Research Director said that “This is an important advance. We are now very close to having highly flexible organic photovoltaic cells that will be capable of delivering electrical energy at a voltage suitable for recharging lithium ion batteries that are widely used in portable consumer electronics. Remarkably, this high voltage is achieved using a cell with only 4 junctions.’’

A team of researchers at the University of Notre Dame has made a major advance toward creating an inexpensive "solar paint" that uses semiconducting nanoparticles to produce energy.

The team coated nano-sized particles of titanium dioxide with either cadmium sulfide or cadmium selenide. The particles were then suspended in a water-alcohol mixture to create a paste. When the paste was brushed onto a transparent conducting material and exposed to light, it created electricity.

The paint is only about 1% efficient in converting light into electricity but  it can be made cheaply in large quantities.

The research team believes that the paint, which they have named "Sun-Believable", has the potential to play a significant role in meeting future energy needs.

Sony has demonstrated a battery that breaks down paper to generate electricity. The technology was inspired by the way in which termites get energy by breaking down wood.

The paper is put into water containing the enzyme cellulase, which breaks down the paper to glucose sugar. The sugar is then processed by additional enzymes and oxygen to produce hydrogen ions and electrons, which provide the fuel for the battery.

Yuichi Tokita, senior researcher at Sony’s Advanced Material Research Lab, said that "this is still at the very early stages of its development, but when you imagine the possibilities that this technology could deliver, it becomes very exciting indeed."

According to new research led by chemist Xiaoyang Zhu at the University of Texas at Austin, the efficiency of conventional solar cells could be significantly increased by making use of a quantum "shadow state" in an organic plastic semiconductor material.

The maximum theoretical efficiency of the silicon solar cells in use today is approximately 31%, because much of the sun’s energy hitting the cell is too high to be turned into usable electricity. That energy, in the form of "hot electrons," is lost as heat.

Zhu and his team previously demonstrated that those hot electrons could theoretically be captured using semiconductor nanocrystals but the actual implementation of a technology to do this would be very difficult and would require highly focused sunlight..

The researchers have now discovered that, in the organic plastic semiconductor pentacene, a photon produces a dark quantum "shadow state" from which two electrons can be efficiently captured to generate more energy. Exploiting that mechanism could increase solar cell efficiency to 44% using a low-cost plastic semiconductor without the need for focusing the solar beam.