After the European success held by Dacia Sandero, meet Dacia Hamster. You read right, Hamster (in German the word refers to the action of gathering, storing - you get the idea). It was about time someone developed a cheap hybrid car that, although new, doesn't exceed the money of a regular car and has the CO2 emissions of a Prius.
We've been hearing all the time that one company or another has developed a system "aimed for disaster-stricken areas," to provide electricity for the people's basic needs. Now is the time for such a technology, after the massacre of Japan's earthquake and tsunami.
According to the company, the solar power plant will produce clean energy for thousands of residents of the Tibetan Plateau (Chek Kang village in the Sangri County, Shannan Prefecture). Measuring around 4,000 meters above sea level, this project is considered to become one of the highest altitude solar power plants on Earth.
The big problem with nowadays' batteries is that they charge and discharge slowly. They can be made to charge and discharge faster at the price of their shortened lifetime, but that's not a solution at all. Supercapacitors may offer fast charge/discharge rates, but their capacity is just not very high. A hybrid of these two would be perfect.
The Scottish Government is about to approve the world's largest tidal power project that will be built in the Sound of Islay. According to ScottishPower Renewables, the project is expected to cost about £40 million ($65 million) and will be capable of generating enough energy to power around 5,000 homes.
The cattle growing activity has been associated for some time with increased greenhouse gas emissions, such as nitrous oxide. Grazed pastures have been studied and their increased nitrous oxide emissions have been proven to be reduced by biochar, which can sequester the embodied carbon in the soil and alters soil nitrogen transformations in a beneficial way.
Following the turmoil that the Fukushima nuclear plant has started since this time last week, Uygar Ozesmi, Greenpeace's Mediterranean director combats Turkey's plans for building new nuclear power plants in his country, reasoning that the construction site is only a few miles away from fault lines, where high-magnitude quakes could occur at any time.
Can you believe that generating hydrogen from urine is the dream of a lifetime for some? A newly-invented catalyst can help electrolyze the urine and extract the hydrogen from it much more efficiently than from water.
A new type of container for hydrogen gas has been developed by a team of Lawrence Berkeley Lab researchers. The inventors say it can store much more hydrogen than older versions, like pressurized tanks or those storing the gas inside some kinds of metallic molecular chains.
San Diego-based 350Green plans to build 66 electric-vehicle charging stations in Pennsylvania, mostly around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. As the company said, the $2.6 million project announced last week will be finished by the middle of 2012. It is also scaled to accommodate around 33,000 EVs.
