The first shipment of "green energy" wine has arrived in Dublin Port from France.

Fair Wind Wine Ltd used a sailing ship to transport exclusive French wines on traditional wine routes from Languedoc to Ireland. The company plans to expand its sailing ship service to Britain, Denmark and Canada, Wherever possible within France, the wine is transported on traditional canal boats.

"By transporting the wine by ship instead of using trucks, you are talking about cutting the carbon emissions by a factor of five," Frederic Albert, President of Fair Wind Wine, the group of wine makers behind the ships, said. "I want this to be green and cheap. The way oil prices are going, I think we will have a very competitive mode of transport and competitive prices."

The company initially rented a schooner, the Kathleen & May, for the voyage to Dublin but it is in the process of building a number of vessels for the different routes.

The Kathleen & May

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 The apparent reluctance of the major motorcycle manufacturers to risk their existing markets by innovating is hurting their sales - Japanese motorcycle production was down by 44.1% in May compared to last year - and has opened the way for small, innovative manufacturers, using components readily available from China and elsewhere, to capture market share.

In the United States, the Zero X Electric Motorcycle has been in production since April. An entirely new design, its 300-plus component parts were engineered from the ground up, sourced from manufacturers around the world and assembled in the Santa Cruz in Northern California.

Zero is already setting up a second production line to meet demand and expects to sell about 500 motorcycles next year.
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Worldwide, there are already more than 7,000 desalination plants filtering salt from seawater.

The majority of these desalination plants use polyamide membranes to separate the salt from seawater. But seawater harbours a variety of organisms that can form a thick film over the membranes and clog the filter. So, the desalination plants use chlorine to disinfect incoming water before it is sent through membranes. The problem is that chlorine destroys the membranes. So the desalination industry adds another step - the seawater is treated with chlorine to kill the organisms, dechorinated so it won’t harm the membranes, then re-chorinated before it enters the drinking-water supply.

Now researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Virginia Polytechnic Institute have engineered a chlorine-tolerant membrane that filters out salt just as well as many existing membranes. The researchers say that such a membrane would eliminate expensive steps in the desalination process.

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University of Georgia researchers have developed a new technology that promises to dramatically increase the yield of ethanol from readily available non-food crops, including the waste from corn and sugarcane harvests, weeds such as bermudagrass, switchgrass and napiergrass and even garden waste.

The new technology features a fast, mild, acid-free pretreatment process that increases the amount of simple sugars released from inexpensive biomass for conversion to ethanol by at least 10 times.

Currently, woody biomass requires soaking under high pressure and temperatures in expensive, environmentally aggressive alkalis or acids before it is subjected to enzymes that digest it, producing simple sugars. The harsh pretreatment solutions must then be removed and disposed of.

The University of Georgia technology eliminates the expense of harsh pretreatment chemicals and their disposal. The technology is available for licensing from the University of Georgia Research Foundation.

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At our GreenBiz Café meeting on 28th July 2008, industry expert Zaidee Jackson, talked about how printing affects our carbon footprint and why choosing a green printer makes a difference.

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Energy efficiency and flexible lighting applications have long been the promise of organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs). The technology hasn’t lived up to its promise, however, because in typical OLEDs, most light is trapped inside the bulb and only 20 percent of the light generated is released.

Researchers at the University of Michigan and Princeton University have designed an OLED that boosts illumination by 60 percent using a combination of an organic grid working in tandem with small micro lenses that guide the trapped light out of the device. In OLEDs, white light is generated by using electricity to send an electron into nanometer-thick layers of organic materials. Typically, the light in the substrate is internally reflected and runs parallel and not perpendicular - but the light needs to travel in a perpendicular direction to escape. In the new devices, the grids refract the trapped light into dome-shaped micro lenses which send the light off in a vertical orientation.

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The Beijing Olympic Village is now home to one of the world’s first photovoltaic/thermal hybrid building systems.

Mounted on the roof of one of the central buildings, which will be a service centre for athletes during the Olympics, the system produces both electricity and heat energy from the same surface area, generating 200-300 per cent more energy than a conventional photovoltaic system.  It combines air heating technology with photovoltaics to create a total energy solution in which the payback period is reduced and the CO2 displacement is maximized.

The panels also act as a racking system to the photovoltaic modules; removing the heat from the back of the modules and channeling it into the facility’s traditional heating system.   

The project was done by the SolarWall division of  Conserval Engineering, a Canadian company, working in partnership with Natural Resources Canada and the Olympic Village developer.

The building also has a conventional SolarWall air heating system, which is integrated into the architecturally unique front facade.

Beijing Olympic Village Athletes Service Centre

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Shell Oil is funding a feasibility study into adding lime to seawater as a cost-effective way to fight global warming by sequestering large amounts of carbon dioxide in the world’s oceans.

Adding lime to seawater increases its alkalinity, thereby increasing the ocean’s capacity to absorb CO2. The process actually generates CO2 emissions but, according to Tim Kruger, a consultant with Corven, the company running the trial, it sequesters twice as much as it produces, making the process ‘carbon negative’.

Corven believes that the process will be cost-effective if it is carried out in an area which is rich in limestone and has large energy resources. "Australia’s Nullarbor Plain would be a prime location for this process, as it has 10 000km3 of limestone and soaks up roughly 20MJ/m2 of solar irradiation every day," said Kruger.

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Bulky and obtrusive rack-mounted solar panels may soon be a thing of the past.

Solar panel makers are scrambling to come up with neater and cleaner products that will overcome the aesthetic objections of home owners to traditional solar panels. Solar panels are being built into different kinds of roof tiles, being hidden in walls and lining the tops of patio awnings.

American manufacturer, SunPower Corp is making solar panels designed to replace with both standard roof tiles and curved, Spanish-style clay tiles. Half of SunCorp’s products are being sold in Europe.

Integrated solar tiles on houses in England
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Researchers at Purdue University in Indiana have reported that they have succeeded in overcoming a major obstacle in the production of low-cost LEDs.

LEDs are far more efficient and have a much longer life than traditional incandescent lights. However, current LEDs are also much more expensive to produce. One of the major factors in the cost of production is the need to use sapphire as the substrate for blue LEDS and, consequently, for the blue component of white solid state lighting.

The Purdue researchers have solved this problem by developing a technique to create LEDs on low-cost, metal-coated silicon wafers. The silicon substrate has a built-in reflective layer of zirconium nitride which reflects light that would otherwise be lost. Ordinarily, zirconium nitride is unstable in the presence of silicon but the Purdue researchers solved this problem by placing an insulating layer of aluminum nitride between the silicon substrate and the zirconium nitride.

They expect affordable solid-sate lights to be on the market within two years.

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