Hyundai Motor has announced that it plans to commercially produce its first hydrogen fuel-cell car starting in 2012. The fuel-cell vehicle would come three years after Hyundai introduces its first petrol-electric hybrid Avante compact car in 2009.

Hyundai has previously announced that a lithium-ion powered hybrid version of the Sonata sedan is planned for the United States market in 2010 and a hybrid version of its compact Avante sedan will be on sale in 2009, but the Avante will not be available in the U.S. The company has already produced about 2,800 of the compact Avante hybrids as part of various pilot projects.

Hyundai plans to be producing half a million hybrids a year by 2018.

Hyundai Sonata Hybrid

Hyundai Avante Hybrid

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The Financial Times has obtained a draft of the International Energy Agency’s annual report, which states that the rate of output from the world’s biggest oil fields is declining at 9.1 per cent a year. This is the first such authoritative study of oil reserves, which most oil producing countries keep secret.

The International Energy Agency, which represents the major energy consuming countries - the United States, Europe, Japan and South Korea - forcasts that meeting the demand of developing countries, like China and India, will require a further investment of $360 billion a year until 2030 to develop new reserves. But even with this investment, world output will decline at 6.4 per cent a year.

The report says that "current energy trends are not sustainable and that a better balance must be found between the three Es – energy security, economic development and protection of the environment. Energy is part of many environmental problems, including climate change, and must be part of the solution."

Ralph Sims, a senior analyst at the International Energy Agency said that "the IEA’s message is very clear: We can’t keep doing what we’re doing. What we need to do now is start to change, to move forward to new energy sources and increase the uptake of energy efficiency. We should err on the cautious side. It’s stupid to ignore what the vast majority of science is saying, just in case science is right."

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China’s dirty and dangerous coal mining industry cost the country a hidden $250 billion last year in lost and damaged lives, wasted energy and environmental devastation, according to a survey by experts from the coal heartland of Shanxi province, Peking University, the Chinese government’s top energy think-tank and the Chinese Center for Disease Control.

Last year nearly 3,800 miners died in explosions, flooding and other underground accidents. Although that marked a 20 percent decrease from 2006, it is still the most dangerous mining industry in the world. Each tonne of coal produced means 2.5 tonnes of water are polluted, while coal mining waste makes up some 40 percent of the country’s solid industrial waste.

The key problems identified by the report are government regulations that distort prices and weak oversight that allows miners to get cheap land, dodge safety and environment laws and ship their coal in dirty, dangerously overloaded trucks.

China is the world’s biggest producer and consumer of coal. Demand is growing so fast that its miners have to produce an extra 200 million tonnes a year to keep up - the equivalent of the entire coal mining industry of a major producing coal country like Indonesia.

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“Conventional” nuclear fusion reactors work by fusing deuterium and tritium to produce helium-4, a neutron and enormous heat and radiation. The heat is used to boil water and the resulting steam drives a turbine.

Several experimental nuclear fusion reactors based on this principle have been built but none has yet produced more power than it has consumed. The project leading the effort to produce commercial fusion power is the ITER project by an international consortium led by the European Union and based in Cadarache in southern France. The ITER project anticipates its first net power generation will be by 2038 with a commercial power plant by 2050.

The difficulty with these reactors is containing the heat and radiation which they produce. In effect, what they are trying to do is explode a hydrogen bomb, contain the radiation and capture the heat in order to boil water.

An alternative fusion process is based on helium-3 (He-3). When He-3 is fused, it produces a stream of protons and very little heat or radiation. An alternative process fuses helium-3 with deuterium. This produces helium-4 and a stream of protons. Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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In a conventional nuclear reactor the input fuel is uranium-235 (U-235) which is part of a much larger mass of uranium - mostly U-238. This U-235 is progressively “burned” over about three years to yield a lot of heat. This fission of U-235 causes some of the U-238 to turn into plutonium-239, which behaves almost identically to U-235. So, some of the U-235 effectively renews itself by producing Pu-239 from the otherwise waste U-238.

In a “breeder reactor”, the reactor is configured to "breed" more Pu-239 than it consumes; so that the system can run indefinitely – in a sense, making the process “renewable”. However, there does need to be steady input of reprocessing activity to separate the fissile plutonium from the uranium and other materials. This is fairly expensive but basically straightforward and well-proven. 

As well as uranium and plutonium, thorium can be used as a nuclear fuel. The process is similar to, but more efficient than, a uranium breeder reactor.

The process is normally started with a radioactive material such as U-233, U-235 or PU-239. The thorium absorbs neutrons from the seed material and then decays, “breeding” U-233, which is an excellent reactor fuel.

Thorium has several advantages over uranium as a reactor fuel. Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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The University of New South Wales’ ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence has created the first silicon solar cell to achieve the milestone of 25 per cent efficiency.

The UNSW ARC Photovoltaic Centre of Excellence already held the world record of 24.7 per cent for silicon solar cell efficiency. Now the team led by Professors Martin Green and Stuart Wenham and widened their lead on the rest of the world.

Professor Green said the jump in performance leading to the milestone resulted from new knowledge about the composition of sunlight. "Improvements in understanding atmospheric effects upon the colour content of sunlight led to a revision of the standard spectrum in April. The new spectrum has a higher energy content both down the blue end of the spectrum and at the opposite red end with, dare I say it, relatively less green." he said.

The new world mark in converting incident sunlight into electricity is one of six world records claimed by UNSW for its silicon solar technologies.

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Most data centres operate at temperatures between 20 and 22°C - some keep temperatures as low as 13°C. But according to large data centre operators, including Google, much higher temperatures with big savings in air conditioning, are acceptable.

“The guidance we give to data centre operators is to raise the thermostat,” said Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google. “We’d recommend looking at going to 80 degrees (26°C).”

According to Sun Microsystems, data centres can save about 8 percent in energy costs for every degree centigrade increase in their baseline temperature. But they warn that increasing the baseline temperature may leave less time to recover if there is a cooling failure, so having reliable equipment is essential.

Intel recently conducted a 10-month test to evaluate the impact of using only outside air to cool a high-density data centre in New Mexico, where the temperature ranged from 18°C to as high as 33°C. Intel said it found “no consistent increase” in failure rates due to the greater variation in temperature and humidity.

Another Intel study at a data centre in Oregon found that there is a diminishing return as temperatures increase because, while power consumption for air conditioning decreases, power used by the fans within the servers increases. The study concluded that the "sweet spot" was between 26°C and 29°C.

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Harvard physicists, led by Eric Mazur, have stumbled on a new material, called black silicon that could have a major impact on digital photography, night vision and solar cells.

The researchers shone an exceptionally powerful laser light on a silicon wafer and also applied sulfur hexafluoride, a gas used by the semiconductor industry to make etchings for circuits. As a result, the silicon wafer looked black to the naked eye. But when the material was examined with an electron microscope, the surface appeared covered with a forest of ultra-tiny spikes.

At first, the researchers had no idea what they had stumbled onto but black silicon has since been found to have extreme sensitivity to light - 100 to 500 times as sensitivity to light as conventional silicon detectors. The material has the ability to detect infrared light that is invisible to the current generation of silicon detectors.

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The Independent newspaper has reported that "top economists and United Nations leaders are working on a "Green New Deal" to create millions of jobs, revive the world economy, slash poverty and avert environmental disaster".

The ambitious plan, which the paper says will be formally launched in London next week, will call on world leaders, including the new US President, to promote a massive redirection of investment away from the speculation that has caused the bursting “financial and housing bubbles” and into job-creating programmes to restore the natural systems that underpin the world economy.

The Green Economy Initiative, which will be spearheaded by the United Nations Environment Programme, draws its inspiration from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which ended the 1930s depression and helped set up the world economy for the unprecedented growth of the second half of the 20th century.
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The Mayor of Lomdon has launched a "Green Theatre Initiative", saying that that “the power of the theatre industry to set an example in the fight against climate change is immense”.

The Plan highlights a number of benefits to going green, firstly by allowing theatres to lead the way by “showing our audiences and other theatre industries what is possible.”  It points out the energy and money that can be saved, noting that a simple step such as ensuring that stage lights are only turned on half an hour before a performance would collectively save London theatres £100,000 a year in energy costs, and that such changes can be made without sacrificing artistic integrity.

In addition to a newsletter and information on its website, the Green Theatre Initiative will develop a database of sources where theatres can find funding and tax breaks for adopting green initiatives, and a compilation of proven methods that theatres can use to go green.

The Initiative was the idea of Gideon Banner, an actor known for performing with the Blue Man Group, so we can’t resist including a sample of their work.

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