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.
COPENHAGEN - Danish police fired pepper spray and beat protesters with batons outside the U.N. climate conference Wednesday, as disputes inside left major issues unresolved just two days before world leaders hope to sign a historic agreement to fight global warming.
After a flurry of activity over the past several weeks, the Solar Impulse team have finally taken their first steps towards solar flight. The prototype of the aircraft designed to be the first to fly around the world powered only by the sun, has completed the first taxi tests down the runway at its home airport in Switzerland.
With the four electric motors running on sunlight, these first tests were slow, only getting up to about 10 knots. Initially the team used safety gear to protect the aircraft in case of a failure of the landing gear. But eventually the aircraft was able to taxi without the use of safety gear, just as it would for a normal takeoff.
We’ve seen some pretty energy efficient homes here at Inhabitat, but houses that actually give back to the grid seemed to be a thing of the future — until now. Swedish designers are currently constructing Villa Akarp, a residence that aims to combine energy conservation, energy recovery and energy generation technologies. If all goes as planned, the home will actually produce more energy than it uses and provide the excess to the grid.
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.
ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas.
Shop for Solar Panels
