Monthly Archives: August 2010
Atlantis Resources Corporation has unveiled the largest and most powerful tidal power turbine ever built. It is due for installation at a dedicated berth at the European Marine Energy Centre, located in Orkney, Scotland later this summer. Despatching 1 megawatt of predictable power at a water velocity of 2.65m/s, the turbine is designed for harsh weather and rough, open ocean environments such as those found off the Scottish coast. The turbine has an 18 meter rotor diameter, weighs 130 tonnes and stands at a height of 22.5 meters. The giant turbine is expected to be environmentally benign due to a … Continue Reading
In what is hopefully a sign that the finance industry may be beginning to realise the real potential of investing in clean energy rather than manuactured financial derivatives, Goldman Sachs, through its subsidiary Cogentrix, is to build a 30-megawatt solar power plant near Alamosa, in southern Colorado. The plant is expected to be the largest concentrating photovoltaic facility in the world. The plant will use Amonix concentrating solar PV technology which uses lenses to focus sunlight on small multi-junction solar cells. The sunlight is concentrated up to 500 times so that much less semiconductor material is needed. The multi-junction solar … Continue Reading
The Chinese government has ordered over 2,087 firms in high-polluting and energy-intensive industries to shut down outdated plant by the end of September. Companies that fail to do so risk having bank loans frozen, approvals for new projects and land purchases refused and their electricity cut off. Companies effected produce steel, coal, cement, aluminium, glass and other materials and include plants owned by China’s biggest steel maker, Hebei Iron and Steel Group, and the nation’s biggest aluminium maker, Aluminum Corp of China. The reason for the dramatic action is that China’s average energy consumption per unit of gross domestic product … Continue Reading
Unmanned, solar-powered vehicles have arrived in Kiev, Ukraine, after setting out from Belgrade on a three-month journey to Beijing. Their journey can be tracked live at viac.vislab.it/ The vehicles from the Italian VisLab are unmanned, run on electrical power and are partly powered by solar energy. They intend to bring goods packed in Italy to Shanghai on an intercontinental route with no human intervention and without using traditional fuel for the first time in history.
In a study published in Applied Physics Letters, a team of scientists at the University of Toronto demonstrated that nickel can work just as well as gold for electrical contacts in colloidal quantum dot solar cells. Quantum dot solar cells are already economical, as the dots themselves are nanoscale bits of a semiconductor material, created using low-cost chemical reactions. Until now, the current produced by those dots has been collected via gold electrical contacts. The Toronto researchers have shown that nickel contacts can work just as well with a cost reduction of between 40 and 80%. In another study in … Continue Reading
A policy paper on the eating of insects is being formally considered by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Professor Arnold van Huis, an entomologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands and the author of the paper, says eating insects has advantages: "There is a meat crisis," he said. "The world population will grow from six billion now to nine billion by 2050 and we know people are consuming more meat. Twenty years ago the average was 20kg, it is now 50kg, and will be 80kg in 20 years. If we continue like this we will need another Earth…Most … Continue Reading
Researchers led by Boris Worm, a marine biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, have published a paper in the journal Nature showing that marine phytoplankton have declined substantially in the world’s oceans over the past century. Phytoplankton are the basis of the entire marine food chain. They produce around half of the oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and drive the ‘biological pump’ that fixes 100 million tonnes of atmospheric carbon dioxide a day into organic material, which eventually sinks to the ocean floor. The scientists found that the average global phytoplankton concentration in the upper ocean currently declines by around … Continue Reading
The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has published a report detailing ten indicators which "we would unambiguously expect them to increase or decrease if the world were warming." In a warming world, we would expect the following indicators to increase: land surface air temperature sea-surface temperature marine air temperature sea level tropospheric temperature ocean heat content and specific humidity. Conversely, we would expect the following indicators to decline: snow cover sea-ice extent glacier mass and stratospheric temperatures. Datasets and interactive graphs showing that all of the indicators show global warming are at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2009-time-series/
British company Wind Power Limited has unveiled the design of a new vertical axis wind turbine intended for large-scale offshore power generation. The design is seen as having the potential of becoming the basis for the next generation of offshore wind turbines as it does not have the same weight constraints as a normal wind turbine and the blades do not suffer weight induced fatigue. It is half the height of an equivalent horizontal‐axis turbine and is more stable because its weight is concentrated at the base of the structure. The design is the result of a feasibility study, called … Continue Reading
Videos
Renewables News- Dysol Aiming to Print Storage with Solar CellsAustralia's Dyesol Limited has acquired an equity stake in Printed Power Pte Ltd, a spinoff company of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Printed Power is focussing on integrating dye solar cell technology with printed storage and power management systems to … Continue Reading → […]
- CSIRO Printer Makes 10m of Solar Cells a MinuteCSIRO researchers have built a gigantic printer that spits out solar cells at a rate of about ten metres a minute. The printer system uses existing technology to embed polymer solar cells (also known as organic solar cells) in thin … Continue Reading → […]
- New Aussie Technology to Clean Polluted WaterScientists from Deakin University, together with French colleagues, say that they have manufactured a lightweight and reusable material that can absorb up to 33 times its weight in a wide range of spilt oils, chemical solvents and dyes, while repelling … Continue Reading → […]
- Dysol Aiming to Print Storage with Solar Cells
