Anaconda, a giant rubber "snake" that floats offshore and converts wave energy to electricity, is a step closer to commercialization. An 8-meter long, 1/25th scale version is currently undergoing tests in a large wave tank in Gosport, UK, and a full-size working version could be a reality in five years.

Harnessing the power of waves is an attractive proposition because they are much more energy dense than wind. But wave power remains the poor relation of the renewable energy sector due to the difficulties of cheaply operating machinery in the harsh marine environment. The world's first commercial wave farm only began operating last year, off the northern coast of Portugal.

A variety of other designs are in testing around the world, but none are as unusual as the Anaconda. The rubber snake is filled with freshwater – to help deter sea creatures from setting up a home inside – and sealed at both ends to create a semi-rigid balloon that floats at the sea's surface.

Wave pulse

The tube is anchored at one end and as waves wash along its length they exert pressure on the snake that is transmitted by the water inside. This forces Anaconda's walls to expand outwards into the wave troughs where they are under less pressure, forming "bulge waves" that travel along the Anaconda's length.

These waves are similar to those that pass through the human circulatory system and can be felt as the pulse in the wrist and neck, says Rod Rainey of Atkins Global, co-inventor of the Anaconda. When each bulge wave reaches the end of the snake it keeps a turbine spinning to generate electricity.

The snake is made from a rubber-based material similar to that used to make dracones – flexible containers that are filled with diesel or water and towed behind ships for quick and cheap transportation.

Other than the turbine, Anaconda has no moving parts and unlike other wave power devices it needs only one tether to the ocean floor. That lowers construction costs and reduces the need for maintenance – an expensive undertaking in offshore settings where corrosion and accessibility are problems, explains Rainey.

 

Des Crampton, CEO of Checkmate Seaenergy, the firm commercializing the flexible wave harvester, says a full-size Anaconda 200 meters long could generate enough energy to power 1000 average homes. "Anaconda captures more energy than all existing wave energy devices," he says.

Rainey and retired physicist Francis Farley began work on the concept in 2007, and tested mini Anacondas last year. The first full-size Anacondas could become operational in 2014.

from New Scientist …

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With more than 1.5 billion people online around the round, scientists estimate the carbon footprint of the internet is growing by more than 10 per cent each year.

Many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs as energy bills soar, while their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.

It is thought one site facing problems is video website YouTube. Although now the world's third-biggest website, it requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner.

Recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggest it could lose as much as £317m this year.

As the demand for electricity grows, the computer industry's carbon footprint is also increasing, although tracking the growth of its energy use is difficult, as internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

A study by Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested US data centers used 61bn kW of power in 2006 - enough to supply the UK for two months.

"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story... technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."

Urs Hölzle, Google's vice-president of operations, said it was struggling to contain energy costs despite developing its own data centers.

"You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he told The Guardian

"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."

Mr Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the internet as "overblown".

"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving."

To avoid future scenarios such as possible website failures and power cuts, the industry is attempting to combat the problem - introducing new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.

Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are replacing energy-consuming new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.

Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, said: "We found we can build more energy-efficient data centers with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."

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There’s a wonderful article in the current issue of Insight, the energy journal published by Platts, called “The Unbearable Lightness of Wind.”

  The author, Ross McCracken, tackles the question that nobody has posed yet – what are the economic consequences going to be of putting up all these wind turbines with government subsidies, mandates and “feed-in tariffs” that tell the utilities, “Buy it whatever it costs”?

“The conundrum,” McCracken writes, “lies in the fact that wind does not directly displace fossil fuel generating capacity, but will make this capacity less profitable to maintain.”

What’s likely to happen, McCracken argues, is that windmills – which generate electricity only 30 percent of the time – will replace some peaking power and some base-load power:

As wind provides neither baseload nor peaking plant it has no impact on reserve capacity. . . [I]t increases redundancy in peaking plants and reduces the profits of baseload generation; potentially good for consumers but bad for investment in non-intermittent sources of power, and presenting the risk of a decline in reserve capacity. . . . [P]eaking plants would be used much less and baseload plant would see sustained period of potential below cost prices – a particular nightmare for the nuclear industry.

So without contributing any reliable capacity, wind will nonetheless make nuclear, by far our most practical and reliable form of zero carbon energy, less profitable. Existing plants will be caught in a trap and new construction will be discouraged entirely. Already the British Nuclear Group is complaining that it can’t build any new reactors if they have to compete against subsidized wind farms. Anti-nuclear activists are turning handsprings, claiming joyously that wind is finally replacing nuclear. But that’s not what’s happening. Instead, nothing will be replacing existing capacity–namely, the coal burning plants that are one of the largest sources of carbon emissions–as demand increases in years ahead. That means carbon emissions won’t be meaningfully reduced, since coal plants will have to stay on line to provide backup.

 

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Streetlights were the first big users of electricity. Now, they are being re-engineered to improve efficiency, but at a cost that today's municipalities might have a tough time covering.  

San Jose, Calif., in the heart of Silicon Valley, is testing a concept called "adaptive lighting," in which streets can be made brighter, darker or even be illuminated with flashing strobes upon command. By summer, the city will have installed 125 streetlamps using LED technology, in one of the biggest urban tests of the science so far in the U.S. The city hopes to cut down on energy use, and, hopefully, lower its utility costs, by tapping LED lighting's greater flexibility.

The test in San Jose coincides with a broad push by federal and state agencies to modernize the nation's lighting infrastructure. Many homes and businesses have replaced incandescent bulbs with more efficient compact fluorescent lights. Now cities, faced with tighter budgets, are looking for ways to cut street-lighting costs and to reduce emissions from power plants.

Raley's supermarket in West Sacramento, Calif., recently had LED lights installed with funding from the Department of Energy.

But the cost savings will take time to materialize. Street and highway lights use about 2% of the nation's electricity, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Many cities have LED traffic signals, but because of the high cost of producing white light with LED, local governments have been reluctant to install them in streetlights. The effort is further complicated not only by strapped municipal coffers, but resistance from star-gazers and others who object to LEDs brighter glare.

LED, or light-emitting diodes, are electronic lights based on semiconductor technology. They use less energy and last longer than the sodium vapor-powered lights typically used in urban street lighting. LED technology has been around for decades, and is often found in electronic gadgets. It is used in streetlamps in some European cities.

Unlike regular streetlamps, LED lights can be programmed to respond to specific commands. For example, a city could dim the lighting on commercial strips after business hours, or turn up the lights after bars close, says Jim Helmer, director of San Jose's transportation department. Streets around Little League baseball diamonds could be made brighter as people walk to their cars, and then turned down afterward. By regulating the lights based on activity, the city hopes to cut down on "light spillage" -- city planners' term for light that shines where it isn't wanted, creating an urban nuisance.

San Jose expects to spend $150,000 to $200,000 on a pilot project in its Hillview North neighborhood, and it is seeking an additional $2 million in federal stimulus funds to enlarge the test.

The LED streetlights being tested in San Jose could save anywhere from 10% to 60% on energy use, depending on their brightness. The white LEDs will have a range of between one and 82 watts and will replace 55-watt, yellowish sodium-vapor lamps. The lights will be controlled under a system developed by energy-software company Echelon Corp. of San Jose, the general contractor in the pilot program. But for now, many cities see little financial advantage to switching their lighting systems.

It can cost $600 to install a single LED streetlight, compared with $200 for a sodium-vapor lamp. What's more, utilities often charge cities a flat rate based on the number of streetlamps they operate, regardless of use.

Currently, San Jose pays Pacific Gas and Electric Co., a unit of PG&E Corp., a flat rate for electricity, about $300,000 a month. The utility has proposed a new rate program that would lower costs for LED streetlights; the plan is awaiting review by state utility regulators. The Department of Energy has been funding lighting tests, such as a recent retrofit of a Raley's supermarket parking lot in West Sacramento, Calif., with 16 LED lamps and motion sensors. They run at 49 watts, unless they sense activity, when they power up to 149 watts. They could pay for themselves in energy savings in four to five years.

Fourteen miles east of San Jose on Mount Hamilton, the astronomers at the Lick Observatory have another concern: The bright white light of LEDs illuminate the night sky and obscure views of planets and stars. The scientists helped San Jose select its sodium lamps in the 1980s because the observatory can filter out yellow light. "Going to any other kind of lighting is detrimental," says Burt Jones, the observatory's assistant director.

But Dr. Jones says scientists are working with city officials to make LEDs benign, suggesting they dim after midnight or eliminate near-infrared and ultraviolet light from the LED color spectrum. "In those colors, the sky would still look dark to us," explains Dr. Jones.

from The WallStreet Journal

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Problem  Establishing local-scale power near end users ranks high on everyone's spec list for Grid 2.0. That's one reason Obama's stimulus plan contains a grant that will reimburse property owners for 30 percent of the cost of a solar energy system. But utilities—former monopolies, after all—are reluctant to give up control over their antique, accident-prone grid. And people with enough rooftop real estate to squeeze out serious juice balk at the hassle.

Solution  Create a new class of energy service providers that act as middlemen between power companies and large commercial facilities with big rooftops. For instance, SunEdison builds and maintains solar plants on the rooftops of operations like Wal-Mart, Whole Foods, and Kohl's in eight states. It's a win-win arrangement: Electric companies get a trusted partner in power generation, and businesses get green energy at a fixed, competitive rate—without additional investment. The secret sauce isn't photovoltaic panels; it's the networking gear, sensors, and software that let a SunEdison control room in California manage hundreds of solar sites cost-effectively. And that means it's suited for scaling up. Says Mark Culpepper, a veteran of Cisco Systems who is now CTO of SunEdison: "Generating power anywhere you can fit a panel totally changes the dynamic of the energy market."

from wired …

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Some biofuels cause more health problems than petrol and diesel, according to scientists who have calculated the health costs associated with different types of fuel.

The study shows that corn-based bioethanol, which is produced extensively in the US, has a higher combined environmental and health burden than conventional fuels. However, there are high hopes for the next generation of biofuels, which can be made from organic waste or plants grown on marginal land that is not used to grow foods. They have less than half the combined health and environmental costs of standard gasoline and a third of current biofuels.

The work adds to an increasing body of research raising concerns about the impact of modern corn-based biofuels. Several studies last year showed that growing corn to make ethanol biofuels was pushing up the price of food. Environmentalists have highlighted other problems such deforestation to clear land for growing crops to make the fuels. The UK government's renewable fuels advisors recommended slowing down the adoption of biofuels until better controls were in place to prevent inadvertent climate impacts.

Using computer models developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency, the researchers found the total environmental and health costs of gasoline are about 71 cents (50p) per gallon, while an equivalent amount of corn-ethanol fuel has associated costs of 72 cents to $1.45, depending on how it is produced.

The next generation of so-called cellulosic bioethanol fuels costs 19 cents to 32 cents, depending on the technology and type of raw materials used. These are experimental fuels made from woody crops that typically do not compete with conventional agriculture. The results are published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The dialogue so far on biofuels has been pretty much focused on greenhouse gases alone," said David Tilman, a professor at the department of ecology, evolution and behaviour at the University of Minnesota. "And yet we felt there were many other impacts that were positive or negative not being included. We wanted to expand the analysis from greenhouse gases to at least one other item and we chose health impacts."

The health problems caused by conventional fuels are well studied and stem from soot particles and other pollution produced when they are burned. With biofuels, the problems are caused by particles given off during their growth and manufacture.

"Corn requires nitrogen fertilizers and some of that comes on as ammonia, which is volatilized into the air," said Tilman. "The ammonia particles are charged and they attract fine dust particles. They stick together and form particles of the size of 2.5 micron and that has significant health impacts. Some of this gets blown by prevailing winds into areas of higher population density – that's where you have the large number of people having the health impact which raises the cost."

Health problems from biofuels and gasoline include increased cases of heart disease, respiratory symptoms, asthma, chronic bronchitis or premature death. The team has calculated the economic costs associated with these. "For the economy, it's the loss of good, productive workers who might otherwise have been able to contribute," said team member Jason Hill, an economist at the University of Minnesota's Institute on the Environment.

"These costs are not paid for by those who produce, sell and buy gasoline or ethanol. The public pays these costs," said Dr Stephen Polasky, an economist at the University of Minnesota, also part of the team.

A report published last year by Ed Gallagher, the head of the government's Renewable Fuels Agency, suggested that the introduction of biofuels to the UK should be slowed until more effective controls were in place to prevent the inadvertent rise in greenhouse gas emissions caused by, for example, the clearance of forests to make way for their production.

His report said that if the displacements were left unchecked, current targets for biofuel production could cause a global rise in greenhouse gas emissions and an increase in poverty in the poorest countries by 2020.

Gallagher also suggested the government should introduce incentives to promote the production of next-generation biofuels of the type studied by the Minnesota researchers. So-called cellulosic ethanol can be made from plants such as switchgrass or jatropha that can grow with very little fertilizer on poor land, but the technology to convert these plants into fuels is in its early stages.

Tilman said society needed to make the transition away from corn-based ethanol as soon as possible.

"We've gone one step further than the work that only looked at greenhouse gases and found some surprisingly large effects. Before we dedicate major resources to new biofuels, we should be trying to quantify other likely impacts to society – water quality, biodiversity and so on – and put all of those into our analysis." He hopes this will encourage society to make "a long-term commitment to the right biofuel".

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Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas.

10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR

With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss researcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling's company Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country. (Image: Centre Suisse d'Electronique et de Microtechnique)

9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON

Carbon capture and sequestration has a seductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil — so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.

It turns out, however, that it's not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth's crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could selectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gases going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.

That's where two classes of special cage-like molecules come into play, ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he'd made a new amine that seems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier -- and therefore, more cost effective.

Perhaps better still, Yaghi's lab's technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators — want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above. (Image: Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA)

8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL

On the federal and state levels, several historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills passed over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee's ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be settled). In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past.

7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR
In July, MIT chemist Daniel Nocera announced that he'd created a catalyst that could drop the cost of extracting the hydrogen and oxygen from water.

Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar's), the system could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.

"You've made your house into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT told Wired.com. "I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."

The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.

6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM

Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That's why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy.

Of course, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.

5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS

When most people think of harnessing the sun's power, they imagine a solar photovoltaic panel, which directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity.

Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first serious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource's Israeli demo plant is shown above. (Image: BrightSource)

4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE

President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promise of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focused on turning Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhouse. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White House.

That's because green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are serious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don't seem quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It's happened before, after all.

Back in the '70s, geopolitical events sent the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White House. The green tech industry collapsed.

History has given U.S. alternative energy research a second chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result. (Image: DOE)

3. SOLAR CELL PRODUCTION GETS BIG, GIGA(WATT)BIG

Every clean tech advocate's dream is a power-generating technology that could compete head-to-head with coal, the cheapest fossil fuel, on price alone. Nanosolar, one of a new generation of companies building solar panels out of cheap plastics, could be the first company to get there. Early this year, the company officially opened its one-gigawatt production facility, which is many times the size of most previous solar facilities.

Nanosolar, in other words, has found a process that can scale: it works as well in production as it does in the lab. That's the main reason that the company has picked up half-a-billion dollars in funding from investors like MDV's Erik Straser.

"[It's the] first time in industry a single tool with a 1GW throughput," Straser wrote in an e-mail. "It's a key part of how the company is achieving grid parity with coal."

2. PROJECT BETTER PLACE FINDS HOMES
Green technologies are dime a dozen, but a business model that could allow an entirely new, green infrastructure to be built is a rare thing.

Doing just that is the centerpiece of Sun Microsystems' SAP veteran Shai Agassi's vision for Project Better Place, a scheme that would distribute charging and swappable battery stations throughout smallish geographies like Israel, Hawaii and San Francisco. So far, there's very little steel in the ground, but in early December, the company's first charging location opened in Tel Aviv, Israel. Agassi's plan is one of several projects — like new biofuels rail terminals — that could create fundamentally new energy ecosystems.

Some of these systems, however, are actually throwbacks to earlier eras. As Peter Shulman, a historian of technology at Case Western Reserve University, likes to remind his students: in the early 20th century, before the Model T, one-third of all cars were electric. (Image: Joe Puglies/WIRED)

1. CALERA'S GREEN CEMENT DEMO PLANT OPENS

Cement? With all the whiz bang technologies in green technology, cement seems like an odd pick for our top clean technology of the year. But here's the reason: making cement — and many other materials — takes a lot of heat and that heat comes from fossil fuels.

Calera's technology, like that of many green chemistry companies, works more like Jell-O setting. By employing catalysis instead of heat, it reduces the energy cost per ton of cement. And in this process, CO2 is an input, not an output. So, instead of producing a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of cement made — as is the case with old-school Portland cement — half a ton of carbon dioxide can be sequestered.

With more than 2.3 billion tons of cement produced each year, reversing the carbon-balance of the world's cement would be a solution that's the scale of the world's climate change problem.

In August, the company opened its first demonstration site next to Dynegy's Moss Landing power plant in California, pictured here.

Taken from Wired …

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This is not a new technology for energy generation , infact this process is used to produce power in power stations where fossil fuels are burnt , coal fired power plant or diesel power plant for example. But in place of fossil fuels like coal or diesel , in this method solar heat is used to produce steam.

Have you seen solar water heater ?? well , Concentrated Solar Power Plant or CSP for short uses same method but in a larger scale to produce heated fluid which in terms , heats water flowing in heat exchanger device and generates steam which finally runs turbine ... the same way it is used at thermal power plants. This method of solar energy conversion is known as in-active or passive solar energy conversion , compared to active energy conversion like Photo Voltaic cells a.k.a. Solar Cells.

Well the roots of experiment lies at roman ages when , great inventor and scientist Archimedes used concentrated heat of sun with help of some kind of shiny metal and burn out the roman fleet !!! well its just a myth , but who knows may be it is true ... after all myths just don't got story in one night .. right ?? or another ancient example is tower of Alexandria .. just like its world famous library , the lighthouse of alexandria was also famous in ancient world and was considered as one of the seven wonders of ancient world. In that tower too they had used same concentration of heat concept.

So , inspired from ancient history , modern scientists developed whole new kind of technology to produce electricity , knows as Concentrated Solar Power or CSP for short. The basic working logic is pretty simple ... they use larger / small mirrors and concentrate heat of sun at one spot which contains some kind of liquid material ( synthetic oil or molten salt for example ) ... and then this liquid goes through heat exchanger mechanism with water and converts that water in to hight pressure steam which then runs steam turbine .. ( don't ask more details , as its whole new subject of study ) ...

Depending on design CSP is catagorized into three methods.




First one is , Tower Type , in which solar energy is concentrated in the tower placed between field of mirrors ,known as heliostats which follows movement of sun and keep their self in such a position that , they always reflect maximum solar radiation. The first CSP , Tower project in USA was Solar One ... at california which was among first generation of CSP plants . It was able to produce about 10MW electricity.






Second one is , known as Trought type , in which instead of heating single spot like in tower type , heat is concentrated on individual troughs passing though series of concave highly reflective mirrors. The CSP, Trought project in USA is built at , Nevada known as Nevada Solar One ... and another project is at Kremer Junction , California. Both CSP plants uses trought system.






Third type is , Disc Type, in which parabolic dish reflector is used which concentrates solar heat at its focal point where close cycle re-generative heat engine is placed. Which runs with help of heated fluid.The biggest system of this kind is placed near Canberra , Australia.

Out of all these 3 types , it has been said that , the Disc Type CSP system works more efficiently because of its compact and effective design.

The biggest challenge with these systems are , they require larger area of operation and clear sky of sunny weather. Also the fluid that they use for heating must be having great conductivity and heat storage capacity. And hence still researches are being done to improve performance of the whole system.

But , all these CSP systems have been proved that all these system can work very efficiently and effectively at lower cost. They gives us clean green energy that we have ever imagined , a better less polluted future.

May the force be with us ...

Last week our professor sent me a link of one web-site ... on that site they have posted speach of Barack Obama the president elect. , at Lansing , Missisippi about his vision of an american dream of energy as a part of his election campain !!!

By winning elections at Nov, '04 2008 ... democrate Barack Obama made history in the united states by becoming first black man ever as a president in history. I think he was a good candidate compared to John Mccain of republican ... Obama looks more down to earth person and he knows what people really need ... ( ow , i am not political analyist but this what i felt from his speaches ) , then his opponents ... and perhaps this is the reason why he won crown of president .... :p ...

But one thing that i liked more about him is his visions about energy ... he is more willing to increase govt. helping and resources for alternative energy production methods like solar cells or geo thermal energy ... he want to reduce dependance of USA on oil ...

He is planning to pump in about $150 billion to boost up efforts to make clean green energy ... he also want to put PHEV ( Plugin Hybrid Electic Vehicle ) on the roads on large numbers to reduce green gases ... more over large number of green collar jobs will be generated becase of these r&d and manufacturing ...

perhaps he is the first president who ever thought about making green energy as a national agenda and make country an oil independent ....

here is that site that our professor sent up to read / watch / listen ...


may the force be with us ...

Heyyyyy ... sori for being absent for long time ....i think , being social ... means lots of waste of time , and worst thing is we can't escape from people !!! anyways ... this time i am gonna blurp about alternative sources of energy ...

The sources of energy are divided in to two parts , renewable energy source and non-renewable energy source ... former one means , energy source which can be generated/retrieved after very short period of time , for example ... wind / water ... etc .. and later one means , energy source which can not be generated in short period of time , it can take millions of million years to get it again ... for example , coal / fossil fuels ...

Now like we know , these non-renewable fuels are making our earth the worst place to live , more over they are not gonna last for ever right ?? But these non-renewable sources are gonna be here for ever !!!! ... i mean , can you believe that , after couple of years we will not be having air ?? or water ?? or sun ?????? no .. right ?? ... so,in short they will be here till earth it self doesn't get explode in space ....... ( not yet the time for ,intergalactic travel for star wars lovers ... sigh sigh ?? )

In recent years , people really got aware about environment and clean energy .... researches are carried out worldwide and even governments are also getting involved in these researches ... and patriotism plays one of the driving factor !!! .... yup , many countries in this world want to get free from the clutches of OPEAC , and make their economy an " oil-free" economy ... because " oil " itself takes a bigger portion of national budget ... and European countries seem to be more serious about it then rest of the world !!!

We have plenty of renewable energy sources available for example ... WIND ...

Wind is used to drive wind mills , which runs wind turbines to produce electricity ... but major problem is , we can't place wind mill at our home right ?? for that we need plenty of open space .. ( this place is called "wind farm" ) .. and sufficient wind flow ... but main advantage is , its green energy ... means not a bit of pollution , no risk of any kind of hazard or side effects to humans !!!




here is screenshot of off shore wind farm at Delaware ...







another example is ... Water ...

Well, actually water has been used to produce electricity from many decades and it has proven to be the best source of clean energy ... but this sort of hydro electric plant requires massive space to store water ... a space to make reservoir ... and its the only problem ... and again advantages ?? ... same .. clean green energy ...


guess the name ?? ........... yaa.. its hoover dam !!!



another example is ... to use Power of Tides !!!

I bet most of us have never thought tide can be used to generate power !!! well , it is very true that some countries , having great seacoast are working to figure out to put this idea in a working plant ... for example ... france and russia !!! ... its a bit of same technology they use in panama canal to move ships !!!





the energy in which i am interest the most ....from SUN !!!

Sun .... it is vital part of civilizations from ancient times , sun is considered as an almighty god , weather its , Mayans or Egyptians or Indian or Roman civilization ... it gives life to every living thing on earth ... and perhaps the most researched field of alternative energy is solar cells .... Solar cells were originally developed for space expedition space crafts , because it is the only " known " form of energy to us in space ... ( others are still under research , like "dark matter " ) ... and now a days we have seen very good examples successful use of Solar Cells to produce electricity that can be used commercially !!! .... some countries like Germany are very aggressive for this technology development and implementation ...




And , as an engineer i see very bright future for this technology compared to any other alternative energy ... its mainly because it is relatively cheaper and easy to install ... yaaa ... we can't install wind mill at our rooftop .. but in case of solar cell , its possible to install sufficient number of panels to feed whole house ... and if more , then ... can even sell back produced power !!! ... also many states of USA , provides loan and subsidies for this kind of installations and many electric companies provide " net-metering " feature .... so i can say it has good future !!!


Another source is ... a bit of tale from science fiction ... energy from fuel cell !!!

Bacially in fuel cell, hydrogen and oxygen are used to produce electricity with help of special membrane ... ( ... i really liked that study in my class of alternative energy sources ) ... Just like solar cells , fuel cells were too developed initially for space crafts , but during last decade , there were attempts to make them work for our personal use too !!! we have even seen cars running from fuel cells from Honda, GM and Toyota !!! state like OHIO has invested lots of $$$$ for fuel cell companies and they even have one plant working at present !!!! and like all other alternative energy ... is clean green .. and by product is ???... just a steam of water !!!





Hmm ... i think this much information is enough for basic ... i just wanted to show you guys how we can change our world and make is world a more good place for coming generations !!!

May the force be with us ...

It was my first day of Alternative Energy Class of Spring '08 ... my professor showed us this "line" as a first introduction to Alternative Energies ... It was not just a simple line ... it mean lot more then that ... It says, we all are responsible for better future for next generation ... or can say for bad future ???

We all know that , the fossil fuels are about to end .. may be withing 20-30 years ... but before they end , we want to utilize them upto its maximum capacity ... we want our plants or factories or any other installations to work for 24 X 7 continuously , right ?? but we have never realized the consequences ...

Like we know , when we burn any fossil fuel , it generates "Green House Gases" , like CO2, these gases have one funny property ... they simply tend to store heat within their atom, so higher the gases higher the stored heat , well its good for plants to grow quickly but not good it these gases raised above certain limit ... it has been highest CO2 level measure at present time , and we have seen results , in form of drastic climate changes , or say increased frequency of tornadoes and their intensity .. ( its like , you can say , we are responsible less or more for Ike or gustav or katrina !!! , believe it or not , its very true ) or increased earth temperature and lots of others effects ...

We can not even think to live without electricity for a minute, right ?? have you ever thought from where it comes ?? its mainly from thermal power plants ... and as an electrical engineer i know , these plants have many effect of environment , in which , disposal of ash generated from combustion of coal is major problem ... ash is something that we can't easily get rid of , and so it effects our environment ... these plants also play major part in increasing CO2 and SO2 gases , the later one is responsible for "acid-rain" !!! ...

In developed countries like USA , they have thinner ozone layer compared to developing nations ... reason ?? again , these green house gases ... don't blame only industries , your car also emits these gases ... and it is the reason why we need to check UV index before we go out at beach .. right ?? because these Ozone , or O3 for short, gas acts as a filter for Ultra Violet rays that comes from sun ... but now this layer got thinner , it can't filter properly these UV rays ... you might be knowing that , these UV rays are deadly for humans if they remain in its contact for long time ... ( ...remember the day when you go out without suncream ?? )

Do you remember movie " Day after Tomorrow " ?? perhaps they have picturized the perfectly , what's gonna happen if we don't care about our deeds !!! obviously not so fast but it will happen for sure ... i guess , we have more chances of killing our self by making nature unstable then being destroyed by any asteroid from space !!!

As a resident of earth ... i DO CARE for her ... We always aware of our RIGHTS , but we never think of our DUTIES ... i personally believe that , saving earth ... saving our only home ... is our foremost duty ...

I want to write more about it ... may be some other time ....

May be force be with us ...