Archive for December, 2008
« Previous EntriesCool Earth Solar’s big balloons
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008Cool Earth Solar Concentrating Solar Cell Balloon
I wrote a little something about Cool Earth Solar over a year and a half ago, but lately there’s been some recent developments. To recap, the Cool Earth Solar concept is to make solar concentrators that are essentially big balloons. They are made of cheap plastic (basically consisting [...]
Greentechmedia: The year in Solar
Monday, December 29th, 2008If you want to read an indepth review of Solar power trends in 2008, head on over to Greentechmedia and check it out.
First commercial hydrokinetic turbine installed in Mississippi River
Thursday, December 25th, 2008Hydro Green Energy has installed the first commercial hydrokinetic turbine in the Mississippi River near Hastings, Minnesota. The hydrokinetic turbine, which essentially is a “wind turbine for the water” was positioned just downstream from a currently operating hydroelectric plant and dam. When the second planned hydrokinetic turbine is added, the 35 kilowatt [...]
Nanosolar vs. Solyndra – Thin Film Smackdown!
Tuesday, December 23rd, 2008Early this year, Solyndra started showing off its tubular thin film solar cells and announced a bunch of big contracts to boot. Now Nanosolar, the best known thin film maker, our apparently getting themselves in a bit of a snit over it. According to Greentechmedia, Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen wrote an article in his [...]
The LA Times reviews the 2010 Ford Fusion Hybrid
Sunday, December 21st, 2008 2010 Ford Fusion hybrid
The new Ford Fusion Hybrid is a mid to full size sedan that’s coming out in the first quarter of 2009. If you’re interested, you might want to check out this Ford Fusion Hybrid review in the LA Times. They got 52 miles per gallon in mixed city-highway driving.
Update: US [...]
Ecofont can save on printer ink
Thursday, December 18th, 2008Here’s something a little different – a Dutch company named Sprang has developed a new open source (meaning free, although a donation would be nice) font that they say uses 20% less printer ink. Their font has a bunch of tiny holes in it – the holes are too small to be seen, and [...]
Is First Solar at grid parity?
Tuesday, December 16th, 2008Mark Bachman, an equity analyst at Pacific Crest, feels that First Solar has hit grid parity with their 12.6 megawatt solar system installed for Sempra Generation. Grid parity is reached when a renewable energy system can produce electricity at or below the price for conventional power. According to Mr. Bachman, electricity generated by the [...]
Making biodiesel from coffee grounds
Friday, December 12th, 2008Researchers at the University of Nevada have come up with an inexpensive way to make biofuel out of used coffee grounds. In fact, they used Starbucks coffee to do it. Since used coffee grounds contain about 15 percent oil, and since the world produces over 16 billion pounds of coffee a year, there’s [...]
More bad news for the solar sector
Tuesday, December 9th, 2008Q-Cells, which is currently the world’s largest solar cell producer, cut its outlook today and said that its market would stay soft well into the next year. As a result of their profit warning, solar cell stocks were all hit hard today. The CEO of Q-Cells, Anton Milner said that they have recently [...]
New distributed computing project -CleanEnergy@home
Saturday, December 6th, 2008I’m reposting this news item from February because the project just went live. If you want to contribute to clean energy science, then check it out. I just downloaded and have activated the project on my computer – installation was very smooth – this is all part of the World Community Grid, which [...]
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