The Green Optimistic

Today, the commercially available devices powered by fuel cells are still pretty pricey. But Kyoto-based Aquafairy has presented a new range of affordable fuel cells for portable electronic devices.

Europe’s largest solar plant (an area as large as 120 football pitches) will go online in Italy later this year. Located in northeastern Italy, in the province of Rovigo, the plant will generate 72 megawatts and will take up 850,000 square metres.

China has recently discovered major deposits of combustible ice on the tundra of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. According to the researchers, this new source of low-emission fuel could power China for 90 years.

Sundrop Fuels, a Louisville, CO, -based company has developed a method of using concentrated solar power to heat the biomass to 1200 or 1300 ºC, and even produce syngas more efficiently than the standard technology, which uses only 30 to 35 percent of the biomass.

People tend to think electric cars will be more expensive and unaffordable than their petrol/diesel relatives. Furthermore, people usually expect high maintenance costs, because of the batteries.

Usually, plastic bottles, (aka PETs) are recycled by mechanical technologies, and they get several other uses afterwards: carpets, sweaters, etc. They don’t ever return to their original water bottle use.It is possible to chemically recycle PETs, but the method has been so far very expensive and the industry doesn’t want that option.

The world’s first commercial wireless EV has been introduced on Tuesday in South Korea at a theme park in Seoul. It’s called the “On-Line Electric Vehicle” (OLEV), and it gets its energy from cables underneath the surface of the road. The car doesn’t make any contact with the road, all the energy is transferred by magnetic induction.

If you want to produce electricity using a river near your home, the best way you can do it is to build a small-scale hydroelectric generator. Often called as a low-impact hydro, micro-hydro or run-of-stream hydro generator, this system is not very hard to build.

Trying to imitate the plants and the way they produce energy when hit by light, Prof. Nathan Nelson of Tel Aviv University’s Department of Biochemistry discovered a complex membrane protein and founded a new model for developing “green energy”, having this membrane at its core.

Today, the auto field is dominated by vehicles running on electricity or other alternative sources of energy but there is a team from the BBC1 science program “Bang Goes the Theory” who believe that coffee too is a good fuel. They have converted a 1998 Volkswagen Scirocco to run coffee granules, reaching a top speed of 60mph.

Thermopower waves are a phenomenon that happens when powerful waves of energy shoot through carbon nanotube wires, creating electricity. The researchers from MIT are responsible for this discovery, thus opening a new area of rare energy research.

A group of scientists at the Yale University have created a new type of magnetic, lead-free solder that could be used to manufacture electronics more efficiently and cheaply.

Researchers concluded that the release of just a fraction of the methane held in the East Siberian Arctic Shelf sediments could lead to a sudden warming of the climate.

China is planning to reduce its carbon footprint by 40-45% from the 2005 level and until 2020 to generate 15% of its electricity from low-carbon technologies. According to Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, a national program consisting of billions of dollars of investments in solar, wind and nuclear energy would be launched very soon.

Nobody would have ever though that Central and Eastern Europe would have the technology or financial resources to build a super car or a zero emission vehicle. This is why we are now astonished as the Hungarian company called Antro developed a hybrid car that is also able to run on solar power.

MIT chemist Dan Nocera claims that with just one bottle of drinking water and four hours of sunlight, he can generate 30 KWh of electric energy, being enough to power an entire home. This process consist in a a cobalt-based catalyst that uses solar energy to split water and produce hydrogen.

1366 Technologies, a company based in Lexington, MA, shows how a new manufacturing process can make silicon solar cells 80 percent cheaper. The company dreams that within 10 years they will be able to improve the technology so as the solar cells built by them to compete with coal in price.

Javad Rafiee, a doctoral student in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute developed a new method of ultra-efficient hydrogen storage based on graphene.

While giant auto manufacturers spend millions to build electric vehicles, a Japanese family decided to open a family-run business in their garage-workshop and to build eco-friendly electric cars by hand.

Ford recently disclosed their long term plan coming to align with governmental laws related with fuel efficiency: by 2020, at least 25% of Ford’s new cars will be either electric or hybrid vehicles. In North America, 7 of 10 vehicles will be gasoline-electric hybrids, such as the current Fusion hybrid version.