The Green Optimistic

The workers say that the newly installed solar panels will save about 200 tons of CO2 in just 2 weeks (the equivalent of 70 tons of oil). It’s just nice. In fact, the Vatican is the only place I don’t think these expensive things will get stolen. The project is estimated to about $1.5 million.

Toshiba has developed an advanced type of Lithium-Ion batteries, the SCiB (Super Charge ion Battery). They say it has the capacity of charging within 5 minutes at 90% of its capacity, and it is being able to bear 5000 to 6000 charges until it starts losing capacity. They used the battery to demonstrate these on a laptop.

Some recent partnership between UK university researchers and Corus Colours, also a UK-based firm, brought to the surface a promise of future commercialization of cheap dye-based solar panels.

Since the idea of economy started in humanity’s mind, everybody wants to reduce the expenses, mostly on energy dependence. Nowadays, when hybrid cars and, generally, electric vehicles are starting to play a huge role in car industry, and electric technology is starting to get cheaper yearly, there still are scientists that get inspired by the old explosion engine principles, albeit they are being used for more than a hundred years and their power source is mainly based on fossil fuel.

This spring, Boeing announced a flight powered by fuel cells, only that the take-off was powered by a Li-Ion battery. This autumn, on Sept. 30, the Germans did it from head to toe by using only hydrogen! Wow!

San Jose’s West Coast Green conference from last week had a point of attraction: the world’s first fuel-less car, made by Magnetic Air Car. They even say it will be produced beginning with 2010.

MIT researchers discovered the solution to a problem put 100 years ago by Ludwig Prandtl. It refers to the situation when, for example, a car accelerates up and down a hill, then slows to follow a turn, and the airflow around it cannot keep up and separates from it. This aerodynamic phenomena creates an additional drag, slowing the car, and forcing you to push harder on the pedal, consuming more gas.

Professor Rongija Tao, from Temple University, invented a device that, applied to the vehicle’s fuel line, near the injectors, creates an electric field that reduces the fuel’s viscosity, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine, leading to better combustion and increased fuel efficiency as much as 20%.