Archive for July, 2009
New Jersey adding 80 megawatts of solar power, one pole at a time
Thursday, July 30th, 2009New Jersey is making a bid to become the second most solar powered state in the US, and they’re doing it a little differently than most. PSE&G is spending $515 million to generate 80 megawatts of solar power, and about half of it will be generated from small solar panels on about 200,000 of the [...]
General Fusion raises $9M in venture financing
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 General Fusion’s magnetized target fusion core design
General Fusion, who I wrote about before, is a Canadian company that is taking a low cost mechanical approach to nuclear fusion. The General Fusion concept is to use sound waves to create shock waves in a sealed container that would be strong enough to fuse deuterium and [...]
UCLA researchers develop low cost solution based method for creating CIGS solar cells
Sunday, July 19th, 2009Researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a new way of creating CIGS (copper-indium-gallium-selinide) solar cells. This new method promises to substantially bring down the cost of producing CIGS solar cells. While CIGS cells haven’t yet achieved the efficiency of silicon based solar cells, ultimately they may [...]
SportTruck.com road tests the 2009 Chevy Silverado Hybrid
Sunday, July 19th, 2009If you need a pickup truck but are looking for much better gas mileage than you would normally get, you might be interested in getting one of the new 2009 Chevy Silverado Hybids. SportTruck.com has just road tested one of the Silverado Hybrids and had posted a very detailed review of it. The [...]
Nanosolar: No news is good news
Friday, July 10th, 2009Earth2Tech has noted that there hasn’t been much news from the thin film company Nanosolar lately. I haven’t seen much from Nanosolar either – they’re one of the companies I try to keep a close watch on. So Reuters decided to check it out and try to find out what was happening in [...]
Solar / natural gas power plant hybrids
Thursday, July 9th, 2009Investors Business Daily has an interesting article on power companies that are adding solar arrays to their natural gas plants. The result is a power plant that produces more clean power using less fossil fuel. Several case studies have shown that these hybrid power plants can save money, especially in a carbon tax environment. [...]
More info on Cash for Clunkers
Sunday, July 5th, 2009The Cash for Clunkers bill was signed into law just last week, and its off to a bit of a slow start. Final details of what’s now being called the Car Allowance Rebate System (CARS) won’t be available until July 24th, so if you’re planning on taking advantage of the new law, you might [...]
2010 Lexus HS 250h hybrid review
Saturday, July 4th, 2009if you’re thinking about getting a luxury hybrid, you definitely want to check out this Examiner.com review of the new Lexus 2010 HS 250h. The Lexus HS 250h is being billed as the world’s first dedicated luxury hybrid sedan on the market – that is, there is no equivalent non-hybrid version of this car. [...]
US hybrid sales up 5.2% over last June, and 3% of all cars sold
Friday, July 3rd, 2009The June ‘09 numbers are out, and they contain good news for hybrids. In an overall disappointing month for US car sales, hybrid sales increased 5.2% in units sold over June 2008. Overall, hybrids represented 3% of all vehicles sold, which makes the fourth straight month of increasing market share.
Green Car Congress has [...]
US Interior Department sets aside twenty four federal solar zones for study
Friday, July 3rd, 2009The US Department of Interior (DOI) announced this week that they have identified twenty four sites in the western United States to be considered for utility scale solar plants. The sites are all on Federal land administered by the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM). What’s interesting about this announcement is that all [...]