Category Archives: Alternative Energy
Turning street furniture green is indeed one of the smartest ways to have a city turn eco-friendly. Take these super-green seats for example. Designed by Voda Design, the Solar Bench doubles up as a street lamp too, and uses an overhead LED fixture to light up. Using solar panels integrated in the bench case, this piece works as an independent unit and can be placed and used just about anywhere. That’s not all. Using integrated power outlets, this solar powered bench and streetlight combined also works as a charging station for users to juice up their mobile phones, laptops and other portable devices with renewable juice from the sun!
[yankodesign]
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Trust Dubai to go extravagant. This time, the emirate is planning a 1 GW solar power project called the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, one of the biggest of its kind in the world. Sporting photovoltaic panels as well as concentrating solar power, this humongous solar power plant will take approximately 18 years to complete. With the dead-line set at 2030, the plant will be located on the outskirts of Dubai and will cover 48 square kilometers. Priced at $3.25 billion, this expensive project is a petty price to pay for an emirate that has built itself selling fossil fuels to the world.
[treehugger]
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Jails in Rwanda are now turning towards an eco-friendly way of powering up. Using the inmates’ poop, these jails are slowly turning away from fossil-fuel reliance and burning wood, and the move is indeed a favor to the environment. 75% energy requirements of about 14 prisons in the country will now use energy derived from human and animal waste. Using Biogas burners for the same, these prisons are setting a standard for those around the globe to follow suit, turning towards more sustainable energy sources. The Nsinda prison in particular has 8,000 inmates who fuel the facility with sewage from the 24 toilets along with cow dung. Currently, a part of the prison’s energy comes from burning wood, and the authorities hope to wipe out these practices completely in the near future.
[inhabitat]
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Charging stations for EVs have never looked better before. After spending hours working on developing flexible energy-harnessing materials, Pvilion has finally pulled the veil off its rendition of a solar-powered electric-vehicle charging station. The charging station was shown-off at Pflugerville, Texas, and uses a 1/8 inch panel flexed onto stainless steel sheets to create a stylish twisting form factor that’s eye-catching and aesthetically pleasing. Also, the design enables the station to provide electricity to the grid without a car needed, and these charging stations could soon show up at just every nook and corner of the urban world.
[inhabitat]
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Motorized window shades used today suck in energy from the grid. Instead, give the environment some respite and opt for these eco-friendly window shades developed by Somfy Systems, headquartered at New Jersey. These shades use solar energy kit instead to juice up consisting of a photovoltaic panel, Y’ harness connector, Ni-MH rechargeable battery and battery tube. The kit can be used for both new as well as existing WireFree window coverings and work perfectly fine in limited sunlight too, making these usable almost throughout the tear in most regions. Also, the solar panel is adjustable and can be turned to face the sun whenever required, though a little automation here would prove fruitful.
[discovery]
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Soon, you probably wouldn’t need to rely on just grid energy to power up your energy-hungry stuff. If all goes as planned, researchers could soon develop a way to pull out energy right out of the air, literally! Japanese firm DenGyo is currently working on a Microwave Regenerative Converter called the rectenna that could generate energy by simply placing it next to a microwave oven! The device, as per the company’s claims, uses spare energy that isn’t used to cook your food, and converts this into usable energy, generating up to 100W in the bargain. Well, all we can do for now, is hope that this turns into a full-fledged way to generate energy, and in future, microwaves could be put to better use than popping popcorn!
[ohgizmo]
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Who needs those environment-choking fossil fuels when you could plug in to paper and have your stuff powered up instead! Sony Corp recently pulled the veil off this bio battery that generates electricity by using paper as fuel. Using an enzyme to decompose paper into glucose which is then used to generate power, the battery uses cellulase produced by Denmark-based Novozymes to decompose cellulose. Generating up to 18Wh of electricity by decomposing an A4-sized paper, this sure seems to be a pretty awesome way to power up smaller gadgets and the like, without plugging them onto the grid.
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Wind turbines today don’t really exploit the energy of the winds to its fullest, simply due to the fact that these are closer to ground, away from the areas where the winds blow the hardest, up in the sky. KiteGen instead, puts wind-energy generators in the sky, using large wings (or kites) driven by avionic sensors located in a dome base that also houses an electric generator. The intelligent control systems automatically guide the kites in order to rotate the turbine and maximize torque enabling the kites to make full use of the winds.
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The sun’s rays are known to be more powerful up in space beyond the earth’s atmosphere and is an ideal place to generate energy from this abundant renewable source. And rightly so, researchers and scientists today are working on orbiting power plants that collect solar energy and beam it all back down to earth for our use. Also, given that the world’s slowly turning up into a cramped up heap of human life, space for extensive power plants soaking in the sun’s energy aren’t readily available, and using space power stations could be the simplest and most energy efficient answer to all of mankind’s power woes!
[Dailymail]
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We’ve seen poop-power before. Now, having human-waste perform yet another electricity-generating feat, the scientists at the University of West of England (UWE) in Bristol have successfully generated energy from urine. Pee generates electrons thanks to the anaerobic respiration of bacteria. These electrons when passed through an electrode generate electricity. A revolutionary breakthrough in these, we can’t help but imagine public urinals plugged on to systems that generate electricity from urine!
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Turning street furniture green is indeed one of the smartest ways to have a city turn eco-friendly. Take these super-green seats for example. Designed by Voda Design, the Solar Bench doubles up as a street lamp too, and uses an overhead LED fixture to light up. Using solar panels integrated in the bench case, this piece works as an independent unit and can be placed and used just about anywhere. That’s not all. Using integrated power outlets, this solar powered bench and streetlight combined also works as a charging station for users to juice up their mobile phones, laptops and other portable devices with renewable juice from the sun!
