Head Blaze

• Plumbing the oceans – “This has the potential to become the biggest source of renewable energy in the world,” says Robert Cohen, who headed the US federal ocean thermal energy programme in the early 1970s.
• A superhard substance that is more slippery than Teflon could protect mechanical parts from wear and tear, and boost energy efficiency by reducing friction.
• Some musical shake, rattle and roll has led Belgian physicists to develop a new kind of levitation. It only works for tiny drops of liquid, but could provide a new way to handle biological or forensic samples without contaminating them.
• The University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Wausau, Wis., company have come up with a 37-inch, bullet and bomb-proof Humvee tire based on a polymeric web so cool looking there’s no need for hub caps.
• Researchers at Ohio State University have accidentally discovered a new solar cell material capable of absorbing all of the sun’s visible light energy.
• Fishermen in the village of Maruata, which is located on the Mexican Pacific coast 18 degrees north of the equator, have no electricity. But for the past 16 years they have been able to store their fish on ice: Seven ice makers, powered by nothing but the scorching sun, churn out a half ton of ice every day.
• Buckypapers outrun carbon nanotubes as they combine nano and textile technologies.
• A Californian company is developing a new technique for recycling carbon dioxide, or CO2, and turning it back into fuel.
• Cool Earth Solar’s design is unique in the solar energy world. The company uses an inflatable plastic thin-film balloon (solar concentrator) that, upon inflation, focuses sunlight onto a photovoltaic cell held at its focal point. The design produces 400 times the electricity that a solar cell would create without the company’s concentrator.
• The device, called the Glove and invented by two Stanford biologists, is used by the San Francisco 49ers during games and at practice for players’ health. But its applications are far broader: from treating stroke and heart attack victims to allowing soldiers to remain in the field longer under intense heat.

Here’s an interesting device to take advantage of those bumpy roads to generate electricity.

Bike Generator Harnesses Power From Bumps on the Road

TreeHugger has shown all kinds of generators for bicycles, but here is a novel approach that would do well where I ride. Industrial designer Deco Goodman takes advantage of our crumbling infrastructure and pothole-filled roads by installing a piezo-electric generator in a shock absorber built into the seat post. Every tooth-jarring bump now is a little bit softer as the energy is converted to electricity and stored in the battery.

Will this year be the turning point where governments finally realize we have to find and promote alternative energy sources?

Article: World’s biggest solar farm at centre of Portugal’s ambitious energy plan

From a distance the bizarre structures sprouting from the high Alentejo plain in eastern Portugal resemble a field of mechanical sunflowers. Each of the 2,520 giant solar panels is the size of a house and they are as technically sophisticated as a car. Their reflective heads tilt to the sky at a permanent 45 degrees as they track the sun through 240 degrees every day.

The world’s largest solar photovoltaic farm, generating electricity straight from sunlight, is taking shape near Moura, a small town in a thinly populated and impoverished region which boasts the most sunshine per square metre a year in Europe.

When fully commissioned later this year, the £250m farm set on abandoned state-owned land will be twice the size of any other similar project in the world, covering an area nearly twice the size of London’s Hyde park. It is expected to supply 45MW of electricity each year, enough to power 30,000 homes.

I love invention and especially when it’s something like this, it serves a purpose, sort of, and you have to be able to afford it. But the thing is it looks great and if I could afford it I would buy it in a second. Just think of all the ways you could use it. I’d like to have an entry hallway with this lining the walls and when guests enter the hall from the front door the overhead lights would extinguish and the walls would then glow. Continue Reading »

Progress…

Narrowly edging out the previous record set by Spectrolab late last year, two scientists at the University of Delaware have just created a new device that can convert 42.8% of the light striking it into electricity. The solar cell, built by Christina Honsberg and Allan Barnett, splits light into three components — high, medium and low energy light — and directs it to several different materials which can then extract electrons out of its photons.

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