Nigeria May Give Brazil Access To Oil, Gas Deposits Under Hydropower Deal
August 31, 2010
Nigeria and Brazil to work together in two hydropower projects
Infiniti’s First Hybrid To Debut In Los Angeles
August 31, 2010
Production expected to start in 2011
Cape Wind Gets Key Green Light On State Permitting
August 31, 2010
Cape Wind project closer to construction
Kior Lands State Loan To Make ‘Biocrude’ From Wood
August 30, 2010
The $75 million loan will be used to build five plants in Mississippi to manufacture the biocrude
Plan Seeks 100 Pct Renewable Energy In Australia In Ten Years
August 30, 2010
Can Australia meet 100% of its energy needs through wind and solar?
Concrete CO2 reduction
August 30, 2010
When businesses trying to reduce their emissions talk about concrete results, they’re generally not being literal. But for a pair of Spanish companies, Tecnalia and the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), their recently patented technology will do almost exactly that: using the solid waste from thermal power plants in place of limestone.
In cement production, limestone is heated up with other materials like clay, releasing the carbon dioxide from limestone to create calcium oxide, or quicklime. It’s this quicklime that is ultimately mixed with other materials and ground with gypsum to form cement.
By removing limestone from the process and replacing it with existing waste from thermal plants, which has been enhanced using nanomaterials, both energy and cement production benefit from recycling. The release linked above also boasts that the process reduces the energy required in the process by 50 per cent.
Of course, reducing the CO2 emissions from one industrial activity doesn’t exactly make the process emission-free. In Canada, despite our heavy use of hydro power, thermal power accounts for about 23 per cent of our total electricity production. Electricity production, in turn, is responsible for about 22 per cent of the country’s CO2 emissions.
Still, any technology that makes better use of the waste these plants are producing anyway makes sense in the short term. According to The Cement Association of Canada, the cement industry currently accounts for 1.4 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Everyone wants to see concrete results on our environmental record, because the future of our planet is heavy, heavy stuff.
German Govt Report Says Age Of Renewable Energy Achievable By 2050
August 30, 2010
Longer use of nuclear energy and increase in renewable energies can help Germany meet its goals
Full Story [The Wall Street Journal]
Big Brother is watching… your energy efficiency
August 27, 2010
There are plenty of ways to check your energy efficiency. In Ontario, for example, you can book a Home Energy Audit, saving up to $150 on the audit itself. The federal ecoENERGY program used to offer pre-retrofit evaluations that provided rebates on energy-efficient appliances, but the ecoENERGY Retrofit program was cancelled effective March 31, 2010. And, audits or no, you can always buy more efficient appliances and ensure that drafts and other gaps in your home’s insulation are taken care of.
Still if home audits are too costly, and you don’t like the idea of someone poking around your home, perhaps you’d be more interested in a plane taking infrared photos of your house. Live like you’re in 1984… in 2010!
All right, it’s not really as frightening as George Orwell’s dystopic vision of the future, but a Belgian company has successfully used thermal maps taken by a plane flying over Antwerp to measure the heat loss from houses’ roofs. It’s an unobtrusive way of measuring the amount of energy being lost by a house, and given our existing comfort with public satellite data like the kind found on Google Maps, it’s not hard to imagine that we might eventually be able to access this kind of image from the comfort of our computer. At the same time, it begs the question of just how public we want our energy consumption habits to be.
It might not be double plus good, but it’s certainly not bad either.
SDG&E Bolsters Its Renewable Portfolio With More Solar And Wind Energy From California
August 27, 2010
The Centinela Solar Energy facility will also help bring California a little closer to their 2020 renewable energy goal
M-m-m biomass
August 26, 2010
We don’t like generating biofuel from our food, but what about a worker whose food is our waste? That’s exactly what Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK has been doing with a sewage-scavenging robot that metabolizes waste in its artificial gut.
The robot, the Ecobot III, can survive by itself for up to seven days by consuming organic material for its microbial fuel cells (MFCs), bio-electrochemical devices that use bacteria to break down food and generate power. Since, unlike a human digestive system, this organic material could be anything, including sewage (the sewage that the Ecobot III is being fed has already been partially processed). When the waste needs to be expelled, it’s sent out of a gravity-fed peristaltic pump that squeezes unwanted matter out of a tube. That way, the robot’s processing system doesn’t become clogged by unused fuel.
It’s a little gross, but hey: Isn’t the future worth it?
But a robot that eats waste like animals eat food isn’t the only option for autonomous robots powered by biomass. As the New Scientist article linked above mentions, the U.S. military’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a similar robot powered by an internal combustion engine. Rather than digesting biomass, these robots would take in organic matter and burn it. Though, in an age where we’re increasingly concerned about greenhouse gases, and with a robot that could consume our waste, it seems odd to propose a new model that’s certainly going to release even more emissions.
Either way, the idea of tiny robots scurrying around and taking care of our waste, without so much as a finger lifted by their owners, is definitely appealing. A trash-removing robot powered by the very trash it removes? My apartment could probably use two.
