Former Intel CEO and Chairman and Time’s Man of the Year in 1997, Andy Grove, is known for his ability to sense when larger circumstances require changes in a company or an industry — and what those changes should be.

"The drumbeat of the electrical transportation is accelerating like nothing I’ve ever seen in my life," Grove said. "The most important thing I would like to do is light that almost half-assumed truth up in neon lights. Electricity in transportation has to be done. It is urgent. It is important that everything else is secondary," Grove said.

Grove says the fledgling plug-in hybrid movement offers parallels to the Homebrew Computer Club from the mid-1970s that helped electronic hobbyists in northern California set the stage for personal computers. "The personal computer … went to individuals first before it went to corporations." Grove said. The same thing is happening with electric cars. "The corporations are sitting, wishing this whole friggin’ thing to go away. Which is exactly what the computer companies’ attitude was to personal computers."

Grove says that America’s 80 million low-mileage pickups, sport utility vehicles and vans on the road now could be retrofitted to make them capable of running on both gasoline and electric power and advocates conversion shops to spread the technology in the way that personal computers spread. Greg Martin, a spokesman for General Motors responded  "We strongly discourage consumers from retrofitting vehicles" and pointed out that  any changes to the engine would void the warranty.

While acknowledging that the shift to electric transportation will be a daunting challenge Grove notes that Detroit’s automakers were able to quickly retool their plants to supply the war effort during World War II.

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Data storage in the United States accounts for about 1.5% of all electricity consumed - more than all of the television sets and almost as much as 6 million household. It is one of the fastest growing areas of power consumption, predicted to overtake aviation in greenhouse gas production if present trends continue.

Internally, computers run on direct current. Every computer which is connected to the power grid has to convert the AC current from the grid to DC. The heat loss in this conversion can account for as much as a third of the total power consumption of a server.

The reason that AC is supplied is because it is easier to transmit over long distances. DC requires thick copper cables or bars; whereas AC can be transmitted over relatively light wires.

It would clearly be much more efficient if the conversion to DC was done centrally for a data centre and the individual servers drew DC power, rather than each having to do the conversion independently.

But the proposition becomes many times more attractive when we realise that on-site renewable electricity sources, like wind and solar, generate DC power; so there is no need for conversion at all.

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In announcing plans for the UK to spend £100 billion pounds ($au207 billion) on renewable energy over the next 12 years, British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, said "This is a green revolution in the making. It will be a tenfold increase on our current deployment of renewables, and a 300% increase on our existing plans: the most dramatic change in our energy policy since the advent of nuclear power."

The comprehensive, 289-page strategy calls for the installation of seven million solar panels; a 90 per cent increase in the use of ground source heat pumps, 3,500 onshore wind turbines and 7,000 offshore generating around a third of the UK’s electricity and biomass power plants fueled by waste and timber capable of providing six per cent of electricity.

The strategy also outlines how the government plans to remove all of the planning and technical barriers that have hampered renewable energy projects to date. The Ministry of Defence has already been instructed to drop its opposition to wind farms.

The Government expects that the strategy will create 160,000 green-collar jobs and reduce carbon emissions by 20 million tonnes per annum by 2020. In the longer term, the UK is aiming for zero carbon emissions from power generation by 2050.

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Pratt & Whitney has developed a jet engine that is significantly cheaper to run, more efficient and less polluting than current engines. The "geared turbofan" engine burns 12 to 15 percent less fuel than other jet engines and cuts carbon dioxide emissions by 1,500 tons per engine per year.

Current jet engines have fans that suck air into the combustion chamber, where it is compressed, mixed with fuel, and ignited. The resulting gas blows through a turbine, generating thrust. This is inefficient because the fan is connected directly to the engine and, so, turns at the same speed as the turbine. But fans work best at low speed, while turbines work best at high speed.

The new Pratt & Whitney engine has a gearbox that lets the fan and turbine spin independently. The fan is larger and spins at one-third the speed of the turbine. This creates a quieter, more powerful engine which uses less fuel, emits less carbon dioxide and costs less to maintain.

"It’s technology like that geared turbofan that’s going to drive fuel efficiency forward for this industry in the short and medium term," says Earnest Arvi of the Arvi Group. "Alternative fuels show great potential, but they’re decades away."

The engine is expected to be in regular service by 2013.

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Mazda Corporation has announced that it will begin testing the world’s first hydrogen hybrid cars with a dual-fuel system, enabling the use of either hydrogen or petrol, on public roads in Japan this year.

Mazda will display its Premacy Hydrogen RE Hybrid minivan and RX-8 Hydrogen RE at the G8 Hoddaido Toyako Summit in July. The next step will be commercial leasing in Japan during this fiscal year.

Mazda claims that the hybrid system will give the minivan a range of 200 kilometres using hydrogen fuel.

The vehicle will also incorporate plant-derived materials in its interior plastics and seat covers.

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GlaxoSmithKline, the world’s second largest pharmaceutical company, which has spent a fortune researching cancer, has announced that it is making most of its information available to the research community for free.

Glaxo’s logic is that academics and small companies to do pioneering work — identifying new targets for medications, discovering early warning signs and figuring out the underlying biological malfunctions that cause cancer. It is only when those groundbreaking studies have been done that large corporations can step into the picture and create new products.

The information, which is available through the National Cancer Institute’s CaBIG website (cabig.nci.nih.gov), is related to 300 different sets of cells taken from breast, prostate, lung and ovarian cancer tissues.

 
Another contribution to open source has come from Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum which has become the first museum in the world to release publicly held historical photographs for free access on Flickr (www.flickr.com) under a Creative Commons licence. About 8,000 photographs are being released in coming weeks.

The Library of Congress, the Brooklyn Museum and the Smithsonian have announced that they will also be contributing photos to the commons collection.

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The Dutch Government has announced that it will invest 7.5 billion euros ($12.25 billion Australian dollars) in energy supply between now and 2011 with priority given to renewable energy, energy saving and CO2 reduction. About 4 billion euros ($6.5 billion) of the 7.5 billion euros will be invested in renewable energy. Just over 1 billion euros ($1.65 billion) will be spent on energy conservation and 1 billion euros on reducing CO2 emissions.

The Dutch investment highlights the lack of commitment by the Australian Government which plans to spend just $150 million on renewable energy research and development, $500 on clean coal and another $500 million, after 2011, on developing a low-emission vehicle. The Netherlands has a slightly smaller population and a slightly lower GDP than Australia.

The Dutch Government plans to work together with market parties and knowledge institutes to stimulate the use of wind at sea, biofuels and small-scale decentralized technologies to generate power.  The Government will investigate options including generating electricity from the disparity between fresh and salt water, the cultivation of algae for the production of biofuels and building an "energy island" in the North Sea to generate power from tides and wind.

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At the end of last year, China’s installed base of wind power totaled just over 6 gigawatts. This led in April to  the current Five Year Plan being revised to increase the target for 2010 from 5 gigawatts to 10 gigawatts. Experts now believe that China has already exceeded 10 gigawatts capacity and could achieve between 20 and 27 gigawatts by 2010 and as much as 100 gigawatts by 2020.

The key to China’s potential is Inner Mongolia. Although there is only 170 MW currently online in the region, a further 960 MW is under construction and approximately 4 GW in the planning stage. Inner Mongolia has an area of 1,200 million square kilometres, about 12% of China’s total landmass, and a population of approximately 24 million. It has about 40% of China’s wind power generation potential. Such a large wind resource in such a sparsely developed and populated region is expected give China an advantage in exploiting this potential capacity compared to other top wind nations - such as Germany, Spain and India - which have much higher population densities.

Australia, with about 6.5 times the area of Inner Mongolia, generates less than one gigawatt of its electricity from wind power.

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Innovalight, a start-up company in California, plans to produce a liquid "silicon nanomaterial" using "quantum dots" which can be printed using the same roll-to-roll printing technology used for printing on paper.

This means it will be able to put the ink on flexible surfaces like clothing and portable chargers. At the same time, the company claims that there will be cost savings over traditional silicon products because their process uses less silicon and has a more efficient manufacturing process as well as some unique optical advantages.

Innovalight says that by controlling the sizes of the dots (from 2 to 10 nanometers) the company can tailor what part of the light spectrum is absorbed. This allows capture of everything from infrared to ultraviolet and the visible spectrum in between which is not possible with conventional technology.

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The Nikkei business daily has reported that Mitsubhishi Motors Corp will tie up with France’s PSA Peugeot Citroen in the production of electric vehicles, supplying technology and next-generation batteries.

Mitsubishi Motors is planning to commercialise a pure electric vehicle by 2010.

Mitsubhishi will supply Peugeot with technology relating to the conversion of electricity into drive power and the prevention of batteries from overheating. It will also supply lithium-ion batteries, which can store more energy in smaller packages and are seen as crucial for extending the cruising distance of purely electric vehicles.

The two automakers may also look at forming a joint venture to build electric vehicles.

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