Shale-gas drilling involving hydraulic fracturing has been increasingly used in the United States and Canada.

A new documentary called Gasland focuses on the impact that the natural gas extraction process has on communities and the environment.

The Solar PowerFlower is a portable concentrated photovoltaic power generator intended for agricultural use.

It was designed by Jason Halpern, co-founder of PowerFlower Solar, who began developing the technology while still a student at the University of Pennsylvania.

The Plumas and Sierra Counties in California are testing a smart grid using the television broadcasting system’s "white space".

"White space" is the part of the broadcast spectrum left vacant when television broadcasting is switched from analogue to digital. It can transmit data significantly faster than the current standard Internet Wi-Fi, and can be broadcast for extended distances and through obstacles – making it ideal for use in smart grid communications.

The Plumas and Sierra Counties are located in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and present some very technical challenges with respect to wireless coverage – making them a good test site for the technology.

The smart grid trial is being conducted by Spectrum Bridge, which has a database which dynamically assigns white space frequences to prevent interfernce with TV broadcasts, Google which is providing power metering and control software and the local electricity and telecommunications utility.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Associate Professor Yang Shao-Horn, in collaboration with Professor Paula Hammond, have found that using carbon nanotubes for one of the battery’s electrodes produced up to a tenfold increase in the amount of power that a lithiun-ion battery could deliver from a given weight of material.

In the new battery electrode, carbon nanotubes are "electrostatically self-assembled" into a tightly bound structure that is porous at the nanometer scale. The carbon nanotubes have many oxygen groups on their surfaces, which can store a large number of lithium ions. This enables carbon nanotubes to serve as the positive electrode in lithium batteries.

Carbon nanotubes are a form of pure carbon in which sheets of carbon atoms are rolled up into tiny tubes. Normally, carbon nanotubes on a surface tend to clump together in bundles, leaving few exposed surfaces to undergo reactions. The "electrostatic self-assembly" process incorporates organic molecules on the nanotubes and they assemble in a way that has a many exposed surfaces.

The new batteries have some of the advantages of both capacitors and conventional lithium batteries. Like capacitors, they can produce very high power outputs in short bursts – but the energy output for a given weight of the new electrode material is five times greater than for conventional capacitors. Like conventional batteries, they can provide lower power steadily for long periods – but the total power delivery rate with the new batteries is10  times that of lithium-ion batteries

In addition to their high power output, the carbon nanotube electrodes showed very good stability over time. After 1,000 cycles of charging and discharging a test battery, there was no detectable change in the material’s performance.

Spain has overtaken the US as the biggest solar electricity generator in the world.

The opening of the new La Florida solar plant at Alvarado, Badajoz, in the west of the country, takes Spain’s solar output to 432 megawatts, compared with the US output of 422 megawatts.

The La Florida plant produces 50 megawatts of power with a parabolic trough system covering 550,000 square metres.

Protermosolar, the association that represents Spain’s solar energy sector, says that within a year another 600 megawatts will have come on-stream and that by 2013 solar capacity will have reached 2,500 megawatts..

Spain is also one of the world’s leading producers of wind power, with windfarms producing around 20,000 megawatts of electricity, and the third largest producer of hydro-electricity, after China and the US.

The media is fond of quoting claims that the internet will soon be using more power than the airline industry, that it will consume half of all the electricity produced or that two Google searches release as much CO₂ as boiling a kettle of water.

The Google search myth arose from a Times article in January 2009 which said that "a typical search generates about 7g of CO₂. Boiling a kettle generates about 15g". Urs Hölzle, Google’s Senior Vice President Operations, posted a response saying the typical search actually releases only 0.2 grams of CO₂ – that’s 75 searches per kettle. The Times has since published a "clarification" but the original figure still gets quoted.

On the broader issue, the amazing estimates of the amount of electricity that the internet supposedly uses stem from a 1999 article in Forbes magazine revealingly titled "Dig More Coal – the PCs Are Coming". The article claimed that the internet was then accounting for 8% of all electricity use with the total used by all computers (including the internet) amounting to 13%. Highly detailed studies by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory show that he actual figures at that time were less than 1% for the internet and about 3% for all computers.
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Four men from the remote village of Licapa in Peru have decided to combat global warming by painting the Andes white.

In the last 35 years, rising temperatures have reduced the size of glaciers in the Peruvian Andes by 22%. The hope is that the whitewash will reflect heat away and stop the glaciers melting.

Peruvian Andes (by Martin St-Amant via Wikimedia)

As eccentric as it may seem, the whitewashing project was selected as one of the top proposals in the World Bank’s "100 Ideas to Save the Planet" competition held last year. As a result, Eduardo Gold, who proposed the scheme, secured £135,000 ($au 227,000) to carry it out. The funds are being used to paint about 70 hectares on three mountain peaks.

The team is using an environmentally friendly paint, based on an old Peruvian formula. It contains lime, egg whites and water.

Researchers at Purdue University have developed a new highly efficient technique for making hydrogen fuel cells suitable for vehicles. The technology has the potential to be twice as effective as current fuel cells at around half the temperature and much lower pressure.

The process uses ammonia borane, a high hydrogen-content powdered chemical and combines two hydrogen generating processes — hydrolysis and thermolysis — to achieve conditions appropriate for use in vehicles.

Currently hydrogen fuel cells run at pressures of aound 5,000 psi. Hydrolysis alone requires a catalyst to turn hydrogen into energy, and thermolysis requires a temperature of 170°C to function. By combining hydrolysis and thermolysis processes, and introducing ammonia borane into the reaction, the required temperature is lowered to about 85°C and the pressure requirements lower to 200 psi.

The researchers believe that, if this technology can be scaled up, it would be the perfect reaction to generate electricity for hydrogen fuel cell vehicles and small appliances. As well as scaling up the process, the researchers are working on ways to recycle the ammonia borane used in the reaction and return it to its original state.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory has developed a new air conditioning process with the potential of using 50 to 90 percent less energy than the best current units.

The process uses a unique combination of membranes, evaporative cooling and liquid desiccants. It uses the desiccant (highly concentrated aqueous salt solutions of lithium chloride or calcium chloride) to create dry air using heat and then uses evaporative cooling to make the dry air cold.

Engineers have known for decades the value of desiccants in air conditioning but, because of the complexity of desiccant cooling systems, they have traditionally only been used in industrial drying processes. To create a device simple enough for easy installation and maintenance, the NREL engineers used thin membranes that simplify the process of integrating air flow, desiccants and evaporative cooling. The air is cooled and dried from a hot-humid condition to a cold and dry condition all in one step.

Because the system uses salt solutions rather than refrigerants, there are no harmful chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) or hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs).

The air conditioner uses very little electricity and can be powered by natural gas or solar electricity and will work in all climates.

For years, we have been warned that low-lying coral island states will be drowned by rising sea levels. Now the first analysis of the data broadly suggests the opposite – most have remained stable, while some have even grown, despite rising sea levels, over the last 60 years.

Nanumea Atoll, Tuvalu (NASA image)

Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji used historical aerial photos and high-resolution satellite images to study changes in the land surface of 27 Pacific islands over the last 60 years. Local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres during that time but just four of the islands have diminished in size.

Tuvalu, which stands just 4.5 metres out of the Pacific, has been widely predicted to be one of the first islands to drown in the rising seas. Yet Arthur Webb and Paul Kench found that seven islands in one of its nine atolls have spread by more than 3 per cent on average since the 1950s. One island, Funamanu, gained 0.44 hectares, or nearly 30 per cent of its previous area. In the neighbouring Republic of Kiribati, the three major urbanised islands – Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai – have increased by 30 per cent.

The reason is that low-lying Pacific islands are made of coral debris. This is eroded from the reefs that typically circle the islands and pushed up onto the islands by winds, waves and currents. Because the corals are alive, they provide a continuous supply of material. Structures linking islands can boost growth by trapping sediment that would otherwise get lost to the ocean. For example, when hurricane Bebe hit Tuvalu in 1972 it deposited 140 hectares of debris, increasing the area of the main island by 10 per cent.
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