Sep
17
Checking Up On Low Temperature Geothermal By Raser and United Technologies
September 17, 2008 | 1 Comment
Raser Technologies, a publicly traded (NYSE Arca: RZ) Utah company involved in low temperature geothermal installations and alternating current electric motors is back in the press release business. With a stock price of about $5.50 ranging from $4 to over $18 in the past year the company has the volatility to be interesting.
Barely a year [...]
Aug
20
Go Where the Heat Energy Is
August 20, 2008 | 1 Comment
The U.S. alone has an estimated 19,000 square miles of asphalt paved roads and parking lots. As essentially everyone can attest, asphalt is a great infrared absorber and being very dense holds a lot of heat thus toasting bare feet with slight sun and barely warm temperatures. Now 19K square miles is a lot of [...]
Aug
18
Renewables Grow Up From Being a Carrot to Carrying a Whip
August 18, 2008 | Leave a Comment
Congress can’t get the alternative energy credits renewed and on the books for the (I’ve lost count) time. By itself the missing tax credits will be a problem. But the price of coal, oil and natural gas will still be their own undoing as primary fuel sources.
It’s about the money. Alternatives such as solar thermal [...]
Aug
14
Following the Thermal Solar Money!
August 14, 2008 | 2 Comments
Ausra of Palo Alto, California, who builds utility-level solar thermal power, has raised $24.5 million in a third round of funding from returning investors Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Now a new investor KERN Partners, based in Alberta, Canada, has also joined the round. This announcement is just over a month 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
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
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 [...]
Mar
10
Solar Thermal Power Is Coming On Strong
March 10, 2008 | Leave a Comment
A review of the players in thermal based solar shows some surprising numbers and valuable innovation. The base design of a mirror focused on a black tube filled with an oil base working fluid, while old is still coming on strong. Two prototypes have started up and ten, yes ten, are in or [...]
