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Patent filing claims solar energy 'Breakthrough'

Fri, 10 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

McClatchy - By Greg Gordon - May. 10 (News Report) - WASHINGTON — In a U.S. patent application, a little-known Maryland inventor claims a stunning solar energy breakthrough that promises to end the planet’s reliance on fossil fuels at a fraction of the current cost – a transformation that also could blunt global warming.

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Does Shale Gas Production Alter Climate Change?

Sun, 05 May 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Forbes - By Ken Silverstein, Contributor - May. 05 (Opinion) - The shale gas industry has long thought that the Environmental Protection Agency may undercut its possibilities. But the regulator’s latest unveiling is now fueling the unconventional natural gas, noting that its heat-trapping emissions are much less than originally thought.

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Germany Doesn't Get Much Sun. How Did It Become a Leader in Solar Energy?

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

Mother Jones - By Andrew Curry - Apr. 02 (Special Report) - This story first appeared in Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It's been a long, dark winter in Germany. In fact, there hasn't been this little sun since people started tracking such things back in the early 1950s. Easter is around the corner, and the streets of Berlin are still covered in ice and snow. But spring will come, and when the snow finally melts, it will reveal the glossy black sheen of photovoltaic solar panels glinting from the North Sea to the Bavarian Alps. Solar panels line Germany's residential rooftops and top its low-slung barns. They sprout in orderly rows along train tracks and cover hills of coal mine tailings in what used to be East Germany. Old Soviet military bases, too polluted to use for anything else, have been turned into solar installations. Continue Reading ...

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The Coming Crash: Our Addiction to Endless Growth on a Finite Planet [With Photo Slideshow]

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Tara Lohan - Mar. 30 (Review) - If you want to understand how much energy costs, don't look at your electric bill; instead get a copy of the new book Energy: Overdevelopment and the Delusion of Endless Growth. This massive coffeetable book contains hundreds of arresting images showing the effects of our energy choices, including oil spills, nuclear accidents, massive solar arrays, tar sands mines, fracking operations, transmission lines, and more. The photos are complemented by essays from leading writers like Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Sandra Steingraber, Douglas Tompkins, Bill McKibben, Lester Brown and many others, which put into context our growing energy problems and what we can do about them.

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Solar-powered mobile health centre rolls into Cape Town

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By David Smith - Mar. 15 (News Report) - A solar truck equipped with remarkable range of facilities could revolutionise healthcare in rural parts of sub-Saharan Africa. At the back of the truck is a small soundproof booth with a chair, light and pair of headphones. Outside the door sits a "screening memory audiometer" with a laptop and printer. This is an ear clinic on wheels, designed to reach the far-flung corners of Africa. "Before they go to school, children are tested so we know their specific needs," says Kea' Modimoeng, of Samsung, unveiling the $250,000 (£168,000) vehicle in Cape Town, South Africa, this week.

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Jobs report: the energy connection to growth

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - Mar. 09 (News Analysis) - Growth in the energy sector is one of many factors contributing to a healthy jobs report. Unconventional oil and gas production have created more than 1 million jobs with 800,000 more expected by 2015. ...

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Hydrogen's energy promise improves

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

BBC News - Mar. 01 (News Report) - Hydrogen produced from renewable resources is a promising source of clean energy, but the gas is difficult to handle and transport.

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Colourful 'solar glass' means entire buildings can generate clean power

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Adam Vaughan - Feb. 12 (News Report) - A solar power company capable of "printing" colourful glass that can generate electricity from the sun's energy announced a £2m funding boost on Tuesday . Oxford Photovoltaics , a spin-off from the University of Oxford, said the investment from clean-tech investors MTI Partners will help its solar glass, which can be dyed almost any colour, take a step closer to the commercial market. "What we say here is rather than attach [solar] photovoltaics to the building, why not make the building the photovoltaics?" Kevin Arthur, the company's founder and CEO, told the Guardian. "If you decide to build a building out of glass, then you've already decided to pay for the glass. If you add this, you're adding a very small extra cost. [The solar cell treatment] costs no more than 10% of the cost of the facade." These generally cost between £600 and £1,000 per square metre, meaning the new ...

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U.S. military gets serious about microgrids … which is more exciting than it sounds

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Grist - By David Roberts - Jan. 18 (Special Report) - The Department of Defense has bases in the U.S. and forward operating bases in theaters of war like Afghanistan. In both cases, providing reliable electricity, a strategic and tactical necessity for an increasingly wired military, is a challenge. One way

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Solar Industry Borrows a Page, and a Party, From Tupperware

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Diane Cardwell - Dec. 01 (News) - Solar parties, like Tupperware parties, are being used by solar companies to sell their products to neighbors of homeowners who have installed the arrays.

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Won Direction

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Bill Maher - Nov. 21 (Comedy News) - New Rule: Now that he's been reelected, President Obama must get back at all those right wing hacks who tried to paint him as an angry black man pushing a liberal agenda by becoming an angry black man who's pushing a liberal agenda.

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Indian blackout held no fear for small hamlet where the power stayed on

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Helen Pidd - Sep. 10 (Special Report) - In rural Rajasthan, Gram Power's solar-powered microgrid kept the lights working and the buttermilk churning.

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Pictures: 10 High-Tech, Green City Solutions for Beating the Heat

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 00:00:00 -0700

National Geographic - By Wong Maye-E - Jul. 26 (Special Report) - The centerpiece of Gardens by the Bay is a glass atrium that houses approximately 220,000 types of vegetation, or 80 percent of the world’s plant species, according to Singapore's National Parks Board. Outside the menagerie of plants is a grove of 18 “su

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Green Blog: A Hybrid Approach to Solar Power

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Matthew L. Wald - Jun. 22 (Opinion) - When photovoltaic cells make electricity from sunlight, they collect a lot of heat along the way. And they don’t work as well warm as they do cold.

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Romney’s Solar Flareout

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Robert Farley - Jun. 02 (Fact Check) - An ad from the Romney campaign strains facts to make its point that federal grants and loans to green-energy companies were improperly steered to Obama's political backers, and that federal money was wasted on failing companies that are now laying off employees.

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Romney misses a mark on Solyndra claim

Sat, 02 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Matthew Daly - Jun. 02 (Fact Check) - Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has revived charges about the failed solar company Solyndra as he assails President Barack Obama' green energy policy. But he didn't get the story completely straight when he accused the administration of favoring "cronies." Solyndra, the first renewable energy company to receive a federal loan under the 2009 stimulus law, went bankrupt last year and laid off its 1,100 workers, leaving taxpayers on the hook for more than $500 million.

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Around the World on Solar Power

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By By BETTINA WASSENER - May. 03 (News Report) - Turanor PlanetSolar is expected to dock on Friday in Monaco, ending its 19-month journey.

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New solar cells are more efficient

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Photonics Spectra - By Laura Marshall - Apr. 17 (News Report) - The new hybrid cell absorbs red as well as blue light to boost the electrical current. A typical solar cell generates a single electron for each photon captured. But by adding the organic semiconductor pentacene, the solar cells can generate two electrons for every photon from the blue light spectrum. This could enable the cells to capture 44 percent of the incoming solar energy.

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Renewables Are a Reality: How We Can Ditch Fossil Fuels Without Any Help From Congress

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Fen Montaigne - Feb. 21 (Special Report) - In an interview with Yale Environment 360 senior editor Fen Montaigne, Lovins discusses how business and society can pull off this transformation even if the U.S. Congress keeps failing to act, why climate change need not even enter the discussion, and why the oil industry will ultimately forego fossil fuels and jump aboard the green bandwagon. “One system is dying and others are struggling to be born,” says Lovins. “It’s a very exciting time.”

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Building a better suntrap: A novel approach to solar power may help to improve its efficiency

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Economist - By (From The Print Edition) - Dec. 31 (Special Report) - Peter Bermel of MIT and his colleagues think they have found a way round the usual solar power difficulties. As they describe in Nanoscale Research Letters, they have invented a way of concentrating the energy in the sun’s rays without the need for mirrors. It is, quite literally, a suntrap.

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Bill Clinton: Solar and wind energy are "both cheaper than nuclear right now."

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Louis Jacobson - Nov. 11 (Fact Check) - During a Nov. 8, 2011, appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, former President Bill Clinton touted the prospects for adopting renewable energy. "Solar energy and wind energy ... would already be competitive with coal if you had to pay the extraneous costs of coal -- the health care costs and other things. And ... wind within two years and solar within five will be competitive in price with coal. They're both cheaper than nuclear right now."

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Here Comes The Sun

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Paul Krugman - Nov. 06 (Opinion) - We are, or at least we should be, on the cusp of an energy transformation, driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power. That’s right, solar power. If that surprises you, if you still think of solar power as some kind of hippie fantasy, blame our fossilized political system, in which fossil fuel producers have both powerful political allies and a powerful propaganda machine that denigrates alternatives.

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Virus-templated self-assembled single-walled carbon nanotubes for highly efficient electron collection in photovoltaic devices

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Nature - By Xiangnan Dang, Hyunjung Yi, Moon-Ho Ham, Jifa Qi, Dong Soo Yun, Rebecca Ladewski, Michael S. Strano, Paula T. Hammond , Angela M. Belcher - Sep. 19 (Special Report) - we report the synthesis of single-walled carbon nanotube–TiO2 nanocrystal core–shell nanocomposites using a genetically engineered M13 virus as a template. By using the nanocomposites as photoanodes in dye-sensitized solar cells, we demonstrate that even small fractions of nanotubes improve the power conversion efficiency by increasing the electron collection efficiency.

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How a 13-Year-Old Revolutionized Solar Cell Efficiency

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

solar.calfinder.com - Aug. 26 (Special Report) - “Collecting sunlight is key to the survival of a tree. Leaves are the solar panels of trees, collecting sunlight for photosynthesis. Collecting the most sunlight is the difference between life and death.”

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Nissan works on recharging Leaf with solar power

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Yuri Kageyama - Jul. 11 (News Report) - ... electricity is generated through 488 solar cells installed on the roof of the Nissan headquarters building ....Four batteries from the Leaf ... store the electricity generated from the solar cells, which is enough to fully charge 1,800 Leaf vehicles a year

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