PAYERNE, Switzerland — At the pace of a fast bicycle, a solar-powered plane took to the skies for its maiden flight Wednesday, passing an important test on the way to a historic voyage around the world – a journey that would not use a drop of fuel.
The Solar Impulse lifted off from a military airport at a speed no faster than 28 mph (45 kph) after briefly accelerating down the runway. It slowly gained altitude above the green-and-beige fields and eventually faded into the horizon as villagers watched from the nearest hills.
Every so often there comes about a concept design that has potential to make big changes for a community or demographic. It's rare, and even rarer to see those designs come to fruition. However, the Solar Pebble hopes to be just such a design.
It is being touted by several green-minded gadget blogs as a "game changer." Inhabitat even says it has the potential to replace kerosene lamps, which are harsh on the environment and rather dangerous for users.
The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy's emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I'm proud to say that we got got the broad picture right, but the details are still tantalizing.
Ten 200 ton buoys—each measuring 150 feet by 40 feet—are being installed off the coast of Oregon to build America's first wave power farm. They'll power 400 homes by harnessing "the energy of wave motion." Worth $60 million?
Of course, of course. Clean, renewable energy is almost always worth it. The trouble with wave farms is that they haven't shown much success yet. They're currently about six times as costly as wind farms, are easily damaged by large waves, and the first ones didn't work out so well:
Building a home that is inexpensive and unique in same time is real challenge today. A perfect example how home can be built with less money is this house which is designed by architects Claire Helene Drouin and Jean Marie Sanchez.
The entire house is built with 15 recycled shipping containers. After it is finished, you would never notice that it is built from containers and it has a very fashionable design.
It doesn't look like much from the outside—just a drab, 10-story building on the campus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, about an hour's drive east of San Francisco. But as I'm walking across the parking lot on a sunny day in October I can't help thinking that someday I might be telling my grandchildren about the time I came to this lab and met Edward Moses and saw the technology that was about to change the world.
LONDON - The British government unveiled plans Monday to launch one of the world's most ambitious expansions of nuclear-power capacity, calling for the construction of 10 plants to help meet surging energy demands in the era of global warming.
After years of resistance to construction of nuclear-power plants, the British plan underscored how nations around the world are scrambling to find ways to generate more energy while slashing the emissions that cause climate change.
The Paper Battery Company: The Paper Battery Company is developing what you might imagine: paper-thin sheets of material that can store energy. The sheets can be molded into different shapes and layers, and since they’re made of cellulose, they are biodegradable and non-toxic. Right now the technology is more expensive than conventional batteries but the researchers are working on lower cost manufacturing techniques. Check out the video of the paper battery below.
Not quite as impressive on paper as the lithium-air battery we wrote about (which claimed 10x more energy storage than regular lithium-ion), but it might turn out to be easier to take out of the lab and bring to market.
ReVolt Technology, a company based in Staefa, Switzerland, claims that its Zinc-air battery can "store three times the energy of lithium ion batteries, by volume, while costing only half as much," and unlike other existing air batteries, this one would be rechargeable. It is planning to start by selling small ones for hearing aids and then progressively scale up to portable electronics and electric cars.
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