Aug
5
The Hydrogen Economy Might Have Gotten Real Legs
August 5, 2008 | 4 Comments
I have been quite unimpressed by the “hydrogen economy” concept because of the difficulty in storing and transporting the smallest atom. I can live with the other attributes as careful engineering can cope. I still have reservations about regular folks handling such a volatile fuel. This is moderated by the reports out of MIT from [...]
Jul
29
A Compressed Air Energy Storage Reality Check
July 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
A guest author going by Libelle posted a piece titled “Compressed Air Energy Storage – How Viable Is It?” Sunday at TheOilDrum, Canada. It’s a top-flight review of the physics and explains the thermodynamics in a quaint, easy to grasp way.
Libelle suggests that raising the elevation of water might be more effective. From here on [...]
Jul
17
Picking on the Pickens Plan
July 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment
“Ah! Out with the sharp knives mates.” T. Boone Pickens has his idea of launching wind power so strongly made and out so fast that natural gas could be used for cars instead of some of the gasoline we’re using. Can it stand the test of close examination? Make no mistake; this Pickens fellow is [...]
Jul
16
Is This the Super Efficient Air Conditioner?
July 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Professor Marcelo Izquierdo from the Department of Thermal Engineering and Fluid Mechanics of the UC3M and researcher at the Instituto de Ciencias de la Construcción Eduardo Torroja (IETCC) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas is building a solar cooling system that unlike the existing machines on the market, uses an improved absorption mechanism capable [...]
Jul
4
It’s the 4th of July and the celebration is on for freedoms thought through and made real for the American portion of mankind now some 230 years on. There is a list of complaints about federal efforts to cut those freedoms back, but on the whole we’ve slipped but a little. The scary one though, [...]
Jun
20
Storing The Power Of The Wind
June 20, 2008 | 1 Comment
The wind blows at its own time and not necessarily when people need the power from the turbine. That makes energy storage for wind power production an important field. Wind turbines are going up at incredible rates worldwide and offer another problem besides the storage issue – the intermittentcy in very widely disbursed wind farms [...]
Jun
9
Get ‘Er ALL! And Then Use It
June 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A team of researchers at Boston College and Duke University have developed a highly engineered metamaterial capable of absorbing all of the light that strikes, to the point of a scientific standard of perfection. The metamaterial uses geometric surface features to capture the electric and magnetic properties of light in the shorter spectrum share of [...]
Jun
5
A Look Via California At Alternatives and Efficiency
June 5, 2008 | 3 Comments
The American Petroleum Institute who by their gracious effort to get a cross section of bloggers invited yours truly, to attend the Newsweek, Chevron, Woods Institute and Precourt Institute at Stanford University panel discussion. The disclosure is the API covered the travel and lodging, no big surprise, and I see they get a great deal [...]
Jun
3
Getting to the Best Source of Fuel
June 3, 2008 | 1 Comment
The ratio that matters, carbon to hydrogen, has a new technology for getting free hydrogen to combine with carbon to make fuels. To recap, wood has a carbon to hydrogen (C:H) ratio of 10 to 1 or wood has 10 carbon atoms for each hydrogen atom. Coal boosted the C:H ratio way up to 2 [...]
May
30
Catching the Light Fantastic
May 30, 2008 | Leave a Comment
In 2004 when the Los Alamos National Laboratory first measured an unusual effect of a photon impacting a silicon solar cell and releasing more than one electron the effect has been a item of great basic research curiosity. Normally a photon coming into a cell will cut loose an electron, and over a complete [...]
