Researchers at the Lane Ag Center in Oklahoma have published a paper which recommends using waste watermelons as feedstock for biofuels.

About 20% of watermelons are not sent to market because of blemishes or unusual shapes.

The researchers concluded that watermelon juice would have to be concentrated 2.5 to 3 times if it was to be used as the sole biofuel feedstock, but watermelon juice could easily be used to dilute other feedstocks and provide a nitrogen supplement to them.

Watermelons are only one of a range of unusual feedstocks, including various vegetable oils, whey and even beer, now being used to produce bioenergy.

One company using farm waste to produce bioenergy is Gills Onions.

Gills Onions has farms throughout California which send their product to a packaging plant where they are skinned, sliced and diced. About 40% on the onion material is wasted.

Gills Onions is now using this waste product as the feedstock for generating electricity. The company invested $9 million to set up the system based on two fuel cells powered by methane from the onion waste but received more than $3 million in government incentives and is saving $700,000 a year in electricity costs and $400,000 a year in waste disposal costs.

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Creative Water Solutions, a company in Minnesota, says that it has developed a system for keeping swimming pools clean while drastically reducing the use of chlorine and other harsh chemicals.

The patented treatment system uses sphagnum moss to inhibit the formation of bacterial colonies called biofilms. Chlorine kills free-floating bacteria but biofilms absorb the chemical, requiring ever-greater doses to keep a pool clean. Using the moss reduces the amount of chlorine needed by about two-thirds.

The company is already selling its treatment for backyard swimming pools and is undertaking its first large-scale commercial test this summer at a public aquatic complex in St. Paul.

Creative Water Solutions is currently importing the sphagnum moss from New Zealand where it is harvested commercially for germinating orchids.

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Solar Roadways, an Idaho company, has been given a $100,000 grant by the US Department of Transport to develop a prototype "solar roadway" panel.

The company is proposing to develop a 12′ (3.6 metre) square panel covered with super-tough solar cells whcih would be laid on top of a roadway.

The solar roadway panels would also incorporate low-power LED lane markers and speed and other road signs which would not only be visible at night, but could easily be changed to suit the traffic conditions. In addition, because the roadways would be designed to tansmit power, the road network could become an intelligent power grid.

The company estimates that, if all of the asphalt road and parking lot surfaces in the United States were covered with its solar roadway panels, they would produce enough electricity to meet the needs of the entire world. Doing this would need five billion panels which the company estimates will cost about $7,000 each - that’s $35,000,000,000,000 plus installation!

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Researchers at two institutions have proposed different ways in which the use of ultracapacitors could boost the efficiency and reduce the cost of hybrid vehicles.

According to estimates by researchers at Argonne National Laboratory in Illonois, ultracapacitors could lower the cost of the battery packs in plug-in hybrid vehicles by hundreds, or even thousands of dollars, by halving the size of the packs that are needed.

The cost of the batteries is the main the reason why hybrids cost thousands of dollars more than conventional vehicles. This is especially true of plug-in hybrids, which rely on large battery packs to supply the power during short trips. In addition, batteries degrade over time. To compensate for this, vehicle manufacturers oversize them to ensure that they continue to provide enough power throughout the life of the vehicle.

On the other hand, ultracapacitors, which don’t rely on chemical reactions to store energy, don’t degrade significantly over the life of a car. But they store much less energy than batteries. The Argonne National Laboratory’s proposal is to use both ultracapacitors and batteries. This would protect batteries from intense bursts of power, such as those needed for acceleration, thereby extending the life of the batteries and ensuring that the car could accelerate just as well at the end of its life as at the beginning. Click here to read the rest of this entry.

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A team of researchers, led by Professor Martin Green, Research Director of the ARC Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence at  the University of New South Wales, have claimed the highest efficiency for solar power ever recorded.

The team has achieved 43% of sunlight converted into electricity at the research stage. The UNSW team combined a cell developed locally with cells supplied by two US groups to demonstrate a multi-cell combination that has set the new benchmark.

Professor Green said that "because sunlight is made up of many colours of different energy, ranging from the high energy ultraviolet to the low energy infrared, a combination of solar cells of different materials can convert sunlight more efficiently than any single cell".

The team used its five-cell combination to convert 43% of the sunlight hitting it into electricity, improving on the previous world record of 42.7% held by the University of Delaware.

Last year, Professor Green’s ARC Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence team set a world record of 25 per cent efficiency for an individual solar cell.

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Aurora Biofuels, a California company, says it has cultivated a strain of algae that doubles the production of biodiesel by absorbing more than twice as much carbon dioxide as conventional strains.

Normally, algae absorb more carbon dioxide in low light and decrease the amount absorbed as the light gets brighter during the day. By a process of screening and selection, Aurora has bred a strain of algae that can ingest carbon dioxide regardless of the intensity of sunlight.

Aurora’s process uses salt water in open ponds. The algae feed on carbon dioxide and Aurora says that its algae will sequester 90 percent of the CO2 fed into their environment. It is therefore aiming to convert the carbon dioxide waste from producers, such as power utilities and cement plants, into the feedstock for biodiesel. It says that it can be price competitive with oil when it is around $US60 to $US100 a barrel.

In terms of land space, Aurora says that its algae are 25 times more productive than sugar-based fuels and 70 to 100 time more productive than agricultural crops, such as soy. In addition, algae can be grown on land which is not suitable for  crops.

The company is scaling its technology for industrial production and expects to complete an 8-hectare (20-acre) demonstration plant in 2010 and achieve full commercial production in 2012.

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Entech Solar, a Texas company with solar projects in more than twenty countries, has has completed a preliminary design review and prototype of its next-generation concentrating solar panel, the ThermaVolt II, which combines concentrating photovoltaic and thermal technologies. The company says its product delivers four to five times the amount of energy of traditional photovoltaic systems and costs less to produce.

The ThermaVolt II uses proprietary arched Fresnel lenses to  concentrate sunlight about 20 times onto the solar cells, saving about 95% of the relatively expensive silicon cell material.

Normally, this would cause the PV arrays to can get extremely hot. This energy is usually wasted but the ThermaVolt system uses the heat to deliver power and heating from the same unit.

The panels are designed to be picked up and installed by workers in the same fashion as traditional flat-plate PV panels and are made to standard flat-plate dimensions which are easily compatible with existing trackers in the marketplace.

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Researchers at Ceramatec Inc, a Utah company, have created a small ceramic disk battery which they say will deliver a continuous flow of five kilowatts of electricity over four hours and can be recharged daily for more than ten years.

The new battery runs on sodium-sulphur - a composition that normally operates as a battery at temperatures greater than 300°C. Ceramatec’s new battery runs at less than 90°C. The secret is a thin ceramic membrane that is sandwiched between the sodium and sulfur. Only positive sodium ions can pass through, leaving electrons to create a useful electrical current.

Ceramatec says that batteries will be ready for market testing in 2011, and will sell for about $US2,000.

According to Daniel Nocera, Professor of Energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who sits on Ceramatec’s advisory board, “These batteries switch the whole dialogue to renewables, They will turn us away from dumb technology, circa 1900 - a 110-year-old approach - and turn us forward.”

Professor Nocera sees the new battery technology as making local power generation and storage, from sources such as solar and wind, practical. He believes that this could take the pressure off the power grid and save tens of billions of dollars needed to upgrade the grid and make it "smart".

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In an interview on the American Charlie Rose television show, Elon Musk, head of Tesla Motors, has described the company’s plans following the success of its Roadster sports car.

Tesla has already previewed its Model S, an electric sedan that Tesla says will carry seven passengers and provide more cargo space than any other sedan currently on the market. The Model S will be available in the United States in 2011 for about $US50,000. Tesla expects to sell about 20,000 sedans a year.

The Roadster, which is claimed to be the fastest mass market sports car in the world, sells aound 1,000 units a year at about $US100,000 each.

The Model S sedan will be followed by an electric SUV which Tesla plans to sell for less than $US30,000.

At the same time, the company is working with Daimler on an electric version of the Smart car. Daimler is a major shareholder in Tesla Motors.

Elon Musk was a co-founder of PayPal which he sold to eBay. He is also the founder and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies, which has signed an agreement with NASA to ship cargo to the International Space Station, and chairman of a company called Solar City that installs solar panels.

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A Canadian company, General Fusion, claims that it can build a relatively low-tech prototype nuclear fusion power plant within the next decade for less than a billion dollars.

For decades, billions of dollars have been spent on research into ways of building a practical fusion reactor for electricity production. The major problem is creating a controllable fusion reaction that gives off more energy than is needed to trigger it and most scientists believe that achieving this will take several more decades and cost tens billions of dollars.

General Fusion’s approach involves building a metal sphere about three metres in diameter filled with a liquid lead-lithium mixture. This liquid is spun to open up a vertical cylindrical cavity in the center of the sphere. Two magnetized plasma rings composed of deuterium-tritium fuel are then injected into each end of the cavity and merge in the centre.

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