Tag: alternative energy

Stick it where the sun shines:

A Swiss entrepreneur says his thin-film solar panels will provide power more cheaply than fossil fules within five years: Even though solar technology has made significant gains since the 1970s when it cost $100 per watt (now it’s $3 to $4 per watt), that sweet spot of beating out fossil fuels is $1 per watt. …

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The fire down below

The surface of our planet is nice and cool. (A little too cool, this time of year.) But not all that far beneath us, it’s anything but. In fact, says Chris Marone, Penn State professor of geosciences, enough heat emanates from the interior of the planet to make 200 cups of hot coffee per hour …

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Mining the Earth’s heat

We don’t hear a lot about geothermal energy in discussions of alternative, environmentally friendly energy sources, but maybe that’s about to change: A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth’s …

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Restore the prairie…

…to something like its natural state, and reap a benefit: turns out the best feed material for creating ethanol isn’t monoculture crops like wheat or corn, but mixtures of native prairie grasses and other flowering plants. Easier to grow, too, obviously.

This sounds very promising:

From Scientific American: Researchers at the University of Minnesota have developed a new, carbon-neutral way to convert vegetable-based fuels to syngas, a breakthrough that could allow producers to power hydrogen fuel cells or create a replacement for America’s dwindling supplies of natural gas, all without relying on fossil fuels. Read the rest. (Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

Turning anything to oil

Imagine a process that can turn any kind of organic waste into high-grade oil. It sounds too good to be true. But that’s the promise of the thermal depolymerization process (TDP), outlined in the May issue of the respected popular science magazine Discover (from which most of the following information is drawn). Naturally occurring oil …

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Future energy sources

A lot of attention in Canada has been focused recently on the Kyoto Agreement to limit the emission of greenhouse gases. But scientifically, the goal for preventing possibly catastrophic global warming has been set far higher than Kyoto’s modest reductions. An article in the November 1 issue of Science sets out the challenges. Entitled “Advanced …

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Fuel cells

In twenty years, will you still be driving a car with an internal combustion engine? Not if the future unfolds the way auto industry experts expect it to. The car of 2020, it seems increasingly likely, will be fueled with methanol or hydrogen and driven by an electric motor powered by fuel cells–most likely, fuel …

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Wind power

Even in the years when we don’t have much in the way of crops around these parts, we always have wind–which got me thinking, isn’t it a shame there’s no way to farm the wind? (It’s not a new notion; after all, even the Bible says, in Hosea 8:7, “They sow the wind and reap …

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Alternative fuels

Having written about fossil fuels, it behooves me to also write about alternatives, lest I neglect my environmental duty. Besides, I have all these left-over notes … We use fossil fuels primarily for power generation and transportation. Huge strides have been made in reducing emissions, but scrubbers and catalytic converters don’t change the fact that …

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Fusion

Nuclear fusion as an electrical power source is rather like some people’s plans for after they win the lottery. They’re sure it’s coming, and they’re sure it’s going to be great, but somehow it never seems to happen. Actually, that’s not a very fair comparison, because nuclear fusion really does seem to be on the …

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