Category Archives: Alternative Energy
Harvesting geothermal energy earlier was considered to be a waste of could-be-used water. To generate energy from the bosom of the earth requires a colossal amount of water, given that steam needs to be created in the first place. However, scientists at the University of Minnesota have been working on a pretty win-win mode of generating energy from the earth, using Co2 gas instead of water. To generate geothermal energy, two shafts are poked to the depths of the earth and high-pressure water is pumped down one, which heats up on the way down and comes back up the second shaft, heated enough to generate steam that turns the turbines. The scientists have been pondering the use of high-pressure Co2 instead, which could work in just about the same way!
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We haven’t had too much of green coming out from Turkey since quite a while now, and it isn’t surprising that we’re all too happy to get wind of the newest green venture by the Turks. Combining together wind, solar, and natural gas energy, Turkey will soon play home to a one-of-a-kind hybrid energy plant that will generate all the renewable energy it can around the clock, without depending solely on any of these energy sources, making it versatile. Equipment for the plant expected to sport a 508-megawatt capacity will be pooled in by GE. To be set up in Karaman, the plant will be developed by MetCap and will power up about 600,000 Turkish homes.
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After the recent Fukushima plant’s meltdown in Japan, the world is turning its nose away from nuclear energy it seems. Most of the attendees at the Gulf Environment Forum’s session on nuclear power thought of solar energy harvesting to be a better way to power up the future of the world. However, not everyone took the benefits of nuclear energy into consideration, given that disposing of nuclear waste is a downright pain in the backside for most countries unlike the ever-renewable and clean energy source, solar power. However, according to Deputy Director and Head of the Department for Nuclear Energy of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Alexander Bychkov, 60 countries around the world are currently considering nuclear energy.
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Solar power generation can be a downright pain when the sun decides to act crafty and hides behind clouds. And we all know just how useless a solar panel is during the night time. Well, things are about to change, or so we hope, with the Department of Energy funding the Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada with a whopping $737 million of loan guarantee, headed by rocket-scientists. The project aims to use 20,000 heliostats that will be focused on a single point, steaming up molten salt to 1,050 degrees Fahrenheit which will then be used to create steam that will, in turn, twist turbines and generate energy. Unlike solar panels, the system will store the energy generated in the daytime for use at night.
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We’ve had plastic being recycled into a bunch of stuff before. Now, the Dow Chemical Company has struck upon a way to create energy from recycled plastic! In a pilot test conducted, 96% of energy was recovered from incinerating 578 pounds of used plastic, the equivalent of 11.1 million Btu’s of natural gas, which was in turn used to power up the incinerator at one of Dow’s waste treatment facilities. In an attempt to show the world just how useful used plastic can be, when used as an energy source, the Dow Chemical Company has struck upon a revolutionary way to generate energy and put used plastic to rest in an eco-friendly way.
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It so turns out that biofuels aren’t all that green either, and with the aviation industry desperately trying to switch over to biofuel use, experts believe that the world’s better off with airplanes flying with fossil fuels. And all this comes down to the change in land use that occurs when developing biofuels. Biofuels, particularly those made from palm oil, are said to emit as much as 55 times greater emissions when grown on newly cleared areas and depending on the growing conditions, this could turn out to be ten times more polluting than burning an equal amount of fossil fuels.
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Generating wind energy in urban environments isn’t all that easy. Now we’ve seen a few vertical wind turbines before. Here’s yet another one that could help catch the every running winds for our electrical uses. Wind energy doesn’t necessarily have to stay limited to humongous wind turbines and wind farms, not when you have the IMPLUX system around. Designed by Varan Sureshan, the IMPLUX is basically an omni-directional turbine that uses the outer covering to direct the wind flow to an aerofoil propeller rotor. The rotor spins and electricity is generated! Owing to the circular shape of the IMPLUX, wind blowing in from just about any direction can be used to generate electricity, and is not restricted to just one wind direction.
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Scotland’s green energy project that aims to generate renewable energy from waves just got noticed by the U.K. government and was nominated for the NER300 fund by the European Commission, European Investment Bank, and member states of the European Union. The Pentland Orkney Wave Energy Resource (POWER) project proposes to place 24 wave energy converters from Pelamis Wave Power and 10 Oyster 3 wave energy converters from Aquamarine Power in the Orkneys, offshore Scotland. Hooking this one on to the Scottish electric grid could help generate about 28-megawatts of wave energy.
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With the environment depleting and degrading owing to constant stabs from fossil fuel use and with dependency on diminishing oil resources increasing, the world is moving towards renewable energy sources these days, mainly wind and solar energy, to power up. Global warming needs to be tackled and brought down, and to do so, the world needs to source at least 80% of the total electricity requirements from renewable energy sources by the year 2050. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that to achieve just that, world governments need to invest and pump in a lot more funding in the renewable energy sector and at the same time introduce policies that encourage cleaner energy use too.
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We’ve seen a host of solar-panel developments recently. Not too many of them match up to this new development by researchers from Boston College and MIT. The hybrid flat panel collects solar energy and heats water to generate thermal energy too. About 8 times more efficient than the usual solar thermoelectric generators developed before, this one’s a lot more cost effective too, making solar energy generation on a domestic scale more feasible. With this, hooking on to a solar thermoelectric system will soon be a domestic affair, without having to rely on company owned solar arrays.
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