Energy Trends

On completion in early 2013, the Macarthur wind farm will be the largest wind farm in the southern hemisphere, said AGL.

Electricity Week

destinyland writes "Today MIT reveals a swarm of autonomous floating robots that can digest an oil spill. The 16-foot robots drag a nanowire mesh that acts like a conveyor belt to soak up surface oil ''like paper towels soak up water,'' absorbing 20 times its weight and then harmlessly ''digesting'' the oil by burning it off. Powered by 21.5 square feet of solar panels, the ''Seaswarm'' robots run on the power of a lightbulb, and with just 100 watts ''could potentially clean continuously for weeks'' without human intervention, MIT announced. The swarm uses GPS data and communicates wirelessly to move as a coordinated group to ''corral, absorb and process'' oil spills, and MIT researchers estimate that a fleet of 5,000 could clean up a gulf-sized spill within one month." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot

Mayor Newsome''s thoughts about the future and the environment.

DIGG

Technology designed to help space exploration can be used to keep solar panels dust free and energy efficient, say US researchers.

ABC Energy

This rotating solar home was the seed for the ambitious Sonnenschiff Solar Development and the modern solar movement in Germany. The home takes full advantage of the sun by rotating with it, allowing daylight to course though its triple-pane windows and energize its large roof-mounted solar array and solar thermal pipes.

DIGG

Meridian Energy''s appeal against an Environment Court decision, which declined consents for an Otago wind farm, has been referred back to that court by the High Court.The wind farm proposed at the Project Hayes site on the Lammermoor...

NZ Herald electricity

Meridian Energy''s appeal against an Environment Court decision, which declined consents for an Otago wind farm, has been referred back to that court by the High Court.The wind farm proposed at the Project Hayes site on the Lammermoor...

NZ Herald electricity

Meridian Energy is taking a 50 per cent share in the development of a Victorian wind farm estimated to cost around $A1 billion ($1.26b).The state-owned electricity generator is a joint venture partner with Australian generator...

NZ Herald electricity

adeelarshad82 writes "Audi''s A8 luxury sedan will be the first vehicle with a factory integrated mobile hotspot when it ships this fall with an adapter capable of connecting up to eight devices via WiFi or Bluetooth. Audi integrates a WLAN module and antenna on the roof, using technology from chip-maker Marvell and Harman Automotive. The company says its WiFi software architecture is optimized for extremely low power consumption on battery-powered consumer electronics, enabling passengers to connect to the vehicle''s network without affecting the battery life of their connected devices. The Audi system, called the Marvell Mobile Hotspot, will support any combination of smartphones, tablets, laptops, digital cameras, and gaming devices." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot

Forget about traditional tri-blade wind turbines ? ultra-efficient turbine of the future will look completely different if Kyushu University professor Yuji Ohya has anything to say about it. Ohya recently unveiled the Wind Lens, a honeycomb-like structure that purportedly triples the amount of wind energy that can be produced by offshore turbines.

DIGG

A new study ranks the impacts that common foods have not just on climate change, but on the water pollution that leads to dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and other bodies of water. The takeaway: Carbs, such as pasta, are good. Cows are bad.

DIGG

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a Stanford news release: "Stanford engineers have figured out how to simultaneously use the light and heat of the sun to generate electricity in a way that could make solar power production more than twice as efficient as existing methods and potentially cheap enough to compete with oil. Unlike photovoltaic technology currently used in solar panels — which becomes less efficient as the temperature rises — the new process excels at higher temperatures. ... ''This is really a conceptual breakthrough, a new energy conversion process, not just a new material or a slightly different tweak,'' said Nick Melosh, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering, who led the research group. ''It is actually something fundamentally different about how you can harvest energy.'' And the materials needed to build a device to make the process work are cheap and easily available, meaning the power that comes from it will be affordable." The abstract for the researchers'' paper is available at Nature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot

In the future, we will look at these 885-foot-wide structures in the middle of the ocean and we won''t even blink. But, right now, I''m having a hard time imagining them spinning en masse at 20 revolutions per minute.

DIGG

AGL Energy had 52 MW wind underway; Origin Energy had cogen upgrade plans at Quarantine and Trust Power was to expand its Snowtown Wind farm. Geothermal and many more wind projects were planned

Electricity Week

Genesis Energy is pushing ahead with plans to build a wind farm near Masterton that could be one of the biggest in the country.Wind monitoring at Castle Hill pointed to potential generating capacity of up to 600MW, although the...

NZ Herald electricity

Google announced today that it will begin a 20-year Power Purchase Agreement for 114 megawatts of wind from an Iowa wind farm. The deal is the first for Google Energy, the company''s energy subsidiary launched earlier this year.

DIGG

Students at the Rochester Institute of technology have put together this WiFi hotspot. It gets its signal through a parabolic antenna pointed at a near by building and repeats it for use in the vicinity. They are using a 30W solar panel, along with a 1/4 horse power 90V DC motor to charge two 6V batteries.

DIGG

ColdWetDog writes "The Oil Drum (one of the best sites to discuss the technical details of the Macondo Blowout) is typically focused on ramifications of petroleum use, and in particular the Peak Oil theory. They run short guest articles from time to time on various aspects of energy use and policies. Today they have an interesting article on small nuclear reactors with a refreshing amount of technical detail concerning their construction, use, and fueling. The author''s major thesis: ''Pick up almost any book about nuclear energy and you will find that the prevailing wisdom is that nuclear plants must be very large in order to be competitive. This assumption is widely accepted, but, if its roots are understood, it can be effectively challenged. Recently, however, a growing body of plant designers, utility companies, government agencies, and financial players are recognizing that smaller plants can take advantage of greater opportunities to apply lessons learned, take advantage of the engineering and tooling savings possible with higher numbers of units, and better meet customer needs in terms of capacity additions and financing. The resulting systems are a welcome addition to the nuclear power plant menu, which has previously been limited to one size — extra large.''" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot

Yes, it''s true that making solar panels creates carbon dioxide, but over the life of a solar installation it produces on average of 30x less CO2.

DIGG

astroengine writes "NASA''s stockpile of the plutonium isotope Pu-238 is at a critical level, causing concern that there won''t be enough fuel for future deep space missions. Pellets of Pu-238 are used inside radioisotope thermoelectric generators (or RTGs) to generate electricity for space probes traveling beyond the orbit of Mars — solar energy is too weak for solar arrays at these distances. Blocked by a contract dispute with Russia to supply Pu-238 and the US Department of Energy that has not been granted funds to produce more of the isotope, NASA lacks enough of the radioisotope to fuel the future joint NASA-ESA mission to Europa. However, the head of the European Space Agency (ESA) has announced that they have plans to commence a new nuclear energy program to alleviate the situation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot