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.
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.
At ground level, electric cars like GM's Chevrolet Volt -- due to be launched in November 2010 -- are pretty much everything the U.S. economy is banking on. The cars promise innovative engineering and a resurgence of the American auto industry. They mean an America that is manufacturing things rather than just bundling financial instruments. Cosmically, electric cars mean green technologies that will migrate to China, India, and Brazil, where they will allow for Western styles of personal freedom yet not threaten to overheat the earth.
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