NewNergy

Pretty soon, though, the biggest contribution we can make as individuals to reducing carbon footprint may not be a Prius in the driveway. Instead, it’ll be a Honda in the basement.

Last year Climate Energy in Medfield ran a demonstration project in sixteen Massachusetts homes, replacing their gas-fired forced-hot-air heating systems with a new high-efficiency “freewatt” system featuring a Honda MCHP (Micro-CHP) unit. CHP stands for “Combined Heat and Power.” The unit is a small generator that takes advantage of heat thrown off generating electricity to provide a second home heating source.

The results were impressive. Using the same amount of gas (or in some cases a bit less), the homeowners were able to both heat their homes and dramatically cut their electrical bills. When home electrical use was low, the owners had the pleasure of actually seeing the electrical meter run backwards.

More from here - A Breakthrough in Home Energy Conservation

Labels: electricity, homes

Toyota Motor Corp plans to provide, for the third year in a row, home-use fuel cell cogeneration units as part of a government project to verify the practical use of CO2-reducing stationary fuel cells.

The municipal-gas-fueled 1-kW home-use fuel cell cogeneration units—which generate electricity and capture waste heat for household heating—are to play a role in the continuing Large-Scale Stationary Fuel Cell Demonstration Project of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Twenty-four of the units will be provided to project participant Toho Gas Co., Ltd. (Toho), which will install them in homes in three central-Japan prefectures (Aichi, Gifu and Mie) to collect data toward commercialization. The government project, which was originally scheduled to conclude on March 31, 2008, is now expected to run until the end of March 2009.

Full report here - Home-Use Fuel Cell Cogeneration Project

Labels: co2, electricity, homes

Texas instruments announced a new line of microcontrollers today that it claims offers a breakthrough in performance while requiring a miniscule amount of power. The microcontrollers are from the MSP430F5xx family and offer up to 25MHz of performance with as 160 µA/MHz of power needed.

The controllers will enable portable devices to have longer battery life, additional memory, and on-chip peripherals. The peripherals include things like RF, USB, encryption and LCD interfaces. TI says that the microcontroller will be seen in devices like consumer electronics, home automation, and more.

More from here - Texas Instruments Introduces Breakthrough Microcontrollers

Labels: batteries, computers, conservation, electricity

Toyota Motor Corp plans to provide, for the third year in a row, home-use fuel cell cogeneration units as part of a government project to verify the practical use of CO2-reducing stationary fuel cells.

The municipal-gas-fueled 1-kW home-use fuel cell cogeneration units—which generate electricity and capture waste heat for household heating—are to play a role in the continuing Large-Scale Stationary Fuel Cell Demonstration Project of Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Twenty-four of the units will be provided to project participant Toho Gas Co., Ltd. (Toho), which will install them in homes in three central-Japan prefectures (Aichi, Gifu and Mie) to collect data toward commercialization. The government project, which was originally scheduled to conclude on March 31, 2008, is now expected to run until the end of March 2009.

More from here - Home-Use Fuel Cell Cogeneration Project

Labels: co2, electricity, fuel-cells

A new combination of nano and solar technology has made it possible for solar electric generation to be cheaper than burning coal. Nanosolar, Inc. has developed a way to produce a type of ink that absorbs solar radiation and converts into electric current. Photovoltaic (PV) sheets are produced by a machine similar to a printing press, which rolls out the PV ink onto sheets approximately the width of aluminum foil. These PV sheets can be produced at a rate of hundreds of feet per minute.

More from here

Labels: coal, costs, electricity, solar

Whenone of the world’s mightiest corporations throws everything it’s got at a project, and when it shreds its rule book in the process, the results are likely to be impressive. Still, even for General Motors, the Volt is a reach. If it meets specifications, it will charge up overnight from any standard electrical socket. It will go 40 miles on a charge. Then a small gasoline engine will ignite. The engine’s sole job will be to drive a generator, whose sole job will be to maintain the battery’s charge—not to drive the wheels, which will never see anything but electricity. In generator mode, the car will drive hundreds of miles on a tank of gas, at about 50 miles per gallon. But about three-fourths of Americans commute less than 40 miles a day, so on most days most Volt drivers would use no gas at all.

Because it will have both an electric and a gasoline motor on board, the Volt will be a hybrid. But it will be like no hybrid on the road today. Existing hybrids are gasoline-powered cars, with an electric assist to improve the gas mileage. The Volt will be an electric-powered car, with a gasoline assist to increase the battery’s range.

Source: Electro-Shock Therapy

Labels: autos, electric-cars, electricity, hybrids

The E-Zip 2008 Trailz is an electric bike by Currie Technologies. This electric bike is quite inexpensive -- compared with $700 up to $3000 for other bikes.

Using the electric motor on this bike is simple -- once you've started pedaling, you can turn the throttle, and the motor kicks in, giving you an immediate boost. The range of a fully-charged battery is about 10 miles -- and this could be made to something like 30-40 miles with some modifications or depending on the type of activity you use it for.

If you use this bike for a commute that is 20 miles or less, this could be an ideal alternative transport mechanism for you. It was easy to achieve speeds of 25 mph while pedaling lightly.

So while bike is heavy and lithium-ion batteries would be nice, it's certainly an inexpensive way to enter the world of electric biking.

More from here

Labels: electric-cars, electricity

Vitamin B-2 revealed as secret ingredient in process capable of generating usable electricity from common bacteria

Researchers have this week revealed that they have unlocked one of the secrets surrounding certain strains of bacteria that are capable of generating electricity, in a breakthrough that could one day allow power plants to generate renewable energy from pools of bacteria.

Scientists have long known that Shewanella bacteria, which are commonly found in soil and water, are capable of converting simple organic compounds, such as lactic acid, into electricity. However, until now they have been unsure as to what drives the process.

Now researchers at the University of Minnesota's BioTechnology Institute claim to have come up with the answer after observing that by increasing vitamin B-2 levels the bacteria produced more power.

The researchers found that bacteria growing on electrodes naturally produced the vitamin B-2, which was able to carry electrons from the living cells to the electrodes. Consequently, rates of electricity production from the bacteria increased almost fivefold as the vitamin accumulated.

Labels: biotechnology, electricity

Professor Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Tech has harnessed the power of nanowires to come up with materials that can convert kinetic energy into electrical current. The professor's main idea is to make clothing woven from these fibres that would allow your body's natural motion to power any electrical device you may be carrying.

His idea is for a shirt but there's no reason why it would have to be the human body's movement. Campers could harness electrical energy by the motion of the wind blowing on their tents or by trailing a kite made of these fibres.

The nanowires work on the piezoelectric effect which describes a property whereby materials create electric potential under physical stress. So far, Zhong Lin Wang has measured four millivolts from a 1cm fibre but he predicts that a metre square of such fabric could generate up to 80 milliwatts of power.

More from here

Labels: electricity, human-powered

The SUNRGI solar system uses a special lens to magnify sunlight more than 1,600 times to produce a very bright, powerful, focused spot of light

A new patents pending solar energy system will soon make it possible to produce electricity at a wholesale cost of 5 cents per kWh (kilowatt hour).

This price is competitive with the wholesale cost of producing electricity using fossil fuels and a fraction of the current cost of solar energy.

XCPV (Xtreme Concentrated Photovoltaics), a system that concentrates the equivalent of more than 1,600 times the sun s energy onto the world s most efficient solar cells, was announced today by SUNRGI, a solar energy system designer and developer, at the National Energy Marketers Association s 11th Annual Global Energy Forum in Washington, DC.

The technology will enable power companies, businesses, and residents to produce electricity from solar energy at a lower cost than ever before

Ref: SunRGI, see also this article

Labels: electricity, solar

Solar power, the holy grail of renewable energy, has always faced the problem of how to store the energy captured from the sun’s rays so that demand for electricity can be met at night or whenever the sun is not shining. The difficulty is that electricity is hard to store. Batteries are not up to efficiently storing energy on a large scale.

The idea is to capture the sun’s heat. Heat, unlike electric current, is something that industry knows how to store cost-effectively. Solar thermal systems are built to gather heat from the sun, boil water into steam, spin a turbine and make power, as existing solar thermal power plants do — but not immediately. The heat would be stored for hours or even days, like water behind a dam.

Ausra, of Palo Alto, Calif., is making components for plants to which thermal storage could be added, if the cost were justified by higher prices after sunset or for production that could be realistically promised even if the weather forecast was iffy. Ausra uses Fresnel lenses, which have a short focal length but focus light intensely, to heat miles of black-painted pipe with a fluid inside. A competitor a step behind in signing contracts, but with major corporate backing, plans a slightly different technique in which adding storage seems almost trivial. It is a “power tower,” a little bit like a water tank on stilts surrounded by hundreds of mirrors that tilt on two axes, one to follow the sun across the sky in the course of the day and the other in the course of the year. In the tower and in a tank below are tens of thousands of gallons of molten salt that can be heated to very high temperatures and not reach high pressure.

Labels: electricity, solar

Electricity is usually made using nuclear power by heating steam to rotate turbines that generate electricity. Now, materials that directly convert radiation into electricity could produce a new era of spacecraft and even Earth-based vehicles powered by high-powered nuclear batteries, say US researchers.

Beginning in the 1960s, the US and Soviet Union used thermoelectric materials that convert heat into electricity to power spacecraft using nuclear fission or decaying radioactive material. Dispensing with the steam and turbines makes those systems smaller and less complicated. But thermoelectric materials have very low efficiency. Now US researchers say they have developed highly efficient materials that can convert the radiation, not heat, from nuclear materials and reactions into electricity.

More from here

Labels: electricity

Cut Your Energy Bill in Half, or How I Saved Over $500 this Winter

The author of this blog reports that he saved an astonishing 500+ $ previous bills, by following these "secrets":

1. Replaced all lights with CFLs - Every one. The light is the same. They hardly burn out.
2. Better management of phantom loads (things that are “on” even when “off”, for instance anything with a remote control, a clock, cell phone chargers, printers, monitors, etc.)
3. Switching to natural gas appliances
4. Buying Energy Star appliances - As you replace your old appliances, pay a little bit more for ones with the “Energy Star” label. They are more efficient and save more money in the run.
5. Buy a window air conditioner, instead of central AC
6. Efficient management of the refrigerator, such as turn off the ice maker at suitable times.

Read the full post from here @ Solar Kismet

Labels: conservation, costs, electricity

Sugar-fuelled battery soon to juice up portable electronics

New technology uses any sugar source from soft drinks to tree sap for fuel

Liz Tay (PC World) 26/03/2007

Fuel cell technology that is currently in development boasts the ability of extracting energy from virtually any sugar source to power portable electronics like cellular phones, laptops, and sensors. The new technology is expected to be biodegradable, environmentally friendly and more energy efficient than current options, providing a green alternative to current Lithium-ion batteries.

The cell operates at room temperature and uses enzymes to oxidize sugars, hence generating electricity. So far, researchers have run the batteries on glucose, flat soft drinks, sweetened drink mixes and tree sap.

Read the full news story from here @ Computer World, Australia

Labels: batteries, efficiency, electricity, inventions

Geothermal Energy Data, Stats

Geothermal power generation capacity worldwide rose from 7,972.7 MW in 2000 to 8,933 MW in 2005, with 8,035 MW running. This is about 0.2% of the total world installed power generating capacity.

Labels: electricity, geothermal

In Quest for Cleaner Energy, Texas City Touts Plug-In Car

AUSTIN, Texas -- Austin city Mayor Will Wynn is pushing a new version of the electric car called the plug-in, which runs almost entirely on electricity and has a big rechargeable battery. Mayor Wynn envisions the parked electric cars plugging into a network operated by the city's utility, which would then use the powerful car batteries as a big storage system from which to draw power

Source: WSJ

Labels: electric-cars, electricity

Going green: Local schools, city find new energy initiatives can pay

Click-2-Listen
March 10, 2007

A major university with a $13.5 million electric bill switches to windpower, saving $2 million a year while helping save the atmosphere.

Baylor University just signed a 10-year contract with WPS Energy of Wisconsin to buy power that will be generated mostly from Texas wind turbines, starting in 2008.

Read more from this news report @ Wacotrib

Labels: electricity, wind

Bright idea: Consumers attracted to energy savings of compact fluorescent lamps

ERIC SHACKLETON
March 10, 2007

Excerpts:

1. Compact fluorescents provide high energy efficiency
2. Nova Scotia's energy minister says the province plans to give retailers four or five years to prepare for a ban on incandescent light bulbs
3. Project Porchlight, a campaign organized by a not-for-profit energy conservation group, is working to deliver one CFL bulb to every household in Canada.
4. the PL bulbs, also called CFLs, have a longer life and will save the buyer money.
5. CFLs are also environmentally friendly because less energy is used.

More from this news report @ Brooks Alberta Business News

Labels: conservation, efficiency, electricity, environment, homes, lighting

Houston Area Power Plant Runs Entirely on Biodiesel

08 Mar 2007

Oak Ridge North, Texas [via RenewableEnergyAccess.com]

Biofuels Power Corp. has begun producing and selling electricity into the ERCOT Power Grid from its biodiesel powered generating plant in Oak Ridge North, Texas, which is run entirely on biodiesel.

Biofuels Power plans to build a series of biodiesel powered electric generating plants to serve residential and industrial customers in the Houston Metropolitan area.

Read more from this report @ Renewable Energy Access

Labels: biodiesel, electricity