Tag Archives: Alternative-Energy

Blog

The Energy Island

3 Comments

Combining multiple methods of alternative power generationThe Oil Drum Australia has a great post this week about tidal power construction all across the world, including the attractive ‘Energy Island’ concept pictured. The article talks about tidal, ocean current and wave projects from the UK, US, New Zealand, Taiwan and Canada, amongst many others. The UK could potentially derive 25% of its power just from wave energy, not to mention its huge resources of tidal power in the Severn Estuary and on the coasts of Scotland. Also discussed is OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), which creates power from the heat differential between warm surface water and cold deep water.

In other news, Oil has never been higher priced in history than it is today, at $102.08 a barrel. Looks like we’re going to need a lot of this alternative energy supply. One of the projects mentioned at the bottom of the Oil Drum article is for floating islands of power generation producing hydrogen to fuel passing ships. Neat.

[via The Oil Drum]

Blog

Making carbon-neutral fuel from air and water

2 Comments

CloudColors Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. says it has developed a practical method for producing fuel and organic chemicals using only air and water as raw materials. (Via PhysOrg.)

“Green Freedom,” as they’re calling the proposal, is a process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production through a new form of electrochemical separation. The new process can be integrated with existing technology to produce fuels and organic chemicals.

Of course, the process itself takes energy. Los Alamos’s proposal envisions using nuclear power, but notes that hydroelectric, wind, or solar power could also be used to ensure the process remains carbon-neutral. As a result, they say:

The primary environmental impact of the production facility is limited to the footprint of the plant. It uses non-hazardous materials for its feed and operation and has a small waste stream volume. In addition, unlike large-scale biofuel concepts, the Green Freedom system does not add pressure to agricultural capacity or use large tracts of land or farming resources for production.

F. Jeffrey Martin of the Laboratory’s Decisions Applications Division, principal investigator on the project, will be presenting talk on the subject at the Alternative Energy NOW conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on February 20.

The full nine-page concept paper is available online here in PDF format.

It’s almost like a recycling scheme for hydrocarbons: first you burn them, then you suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, recreate the hydrocarbons, and burn them again. Very intriguing and potentially transformational idea, if it pans out.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]energy, alternative energy, fuel, nuclear power[/tags]

Blog

Plane to fly around the world entirely via solar

The sustainable plane that wants to fly around the worldBertrand Piccard was the first person to fly around the world in a balloon, the longest flight ever. His new endeavour, the Solar Impulse, is even more ambitious. To highlight the need for sustainability, the project has a lofty goal:

“In a world depending on fossil energies, the Solar Impulse project is a paradox, almost a provocation: it aims to have an airplane take off and fly autonomously, day and night, propelled uniquely by solar energy, right round the world without fuel or pollution. An unachievable goal without pushing back the current technological limits in all fields…”

If we’re to make the targets that Gordon Brown set yesterday, we’ll be looking to projects like this for inspiration.
[via European Tribune, image by Bertrand Piccard]

Blog

Long-term energy solutions: Is nuclear our best option?

6 Comments

While we’re definitely big optimists here at Futurismic on alternative energies, there are downsides to most of what we consider clean energy.  Biofuels in their current incarnation pits the hunger of the poor against the hunger of our poor.  Solar is at the mercy of cloudy weather and efficiency concerns, while similar problems face wind power.  And coming from the Midwest United States, tidal power generators aren’t going to do me a lick of good.

The far-thinking people at the Long-Now Foundation had two very fascinating speakers back in September whose theory is that nuclear is the way to go.  They’re not your usual nuclear shills, either.  Gwyneth Cravens wan an anti-nuclear activist who marched against the bomb and against the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant on Long Island.  The other is an sustainable organic-farming, bee-keeping, nuclear expert at Sandia Labs called Dr. Richard Anderson.

Their point is that alternative energies are largely tied to the whims of nature, something not good enough to supply the baseload power for our energy needs.  They do bring up some scary thoughts on our current use of fossil fuels, and make comparisons to what we would consume using nuclear.  One fun tidbit is that all the nuclear waste that would be generated to provide power for the average American over the course of their life would fit inside a Coke can.  Give it a listen if you can, but at least read the blog summary.

Personally, I think nuclear’s the way to go, at least for the moment, although I definitely think wind and solar can and should be used to provide supplemental power.  Maybe someday we can move to completely clean energy, but that day hasn’t come yet.

(image via Operators Are Standing By)

Blog

Engineering plants for fun and profit – and bettering our future

Time was, genetic engineers were putting jellyfish genes in everything to see what crazy animals they could get to glow in the dark.  Now, however, they’re doing quite a bit more.  The journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a few articles on various uses for genetically modified plants.  Two papers discuss using trees to remove harmful chemicals from the atmosphere, the third identifies a way to modify the Chlamy (a green alga) to produce hydrogen.  It seems that algae may be the future of biofuels, after a report on using algae to produce a type of biodiesel.

(image via IRRI Images)