Energy consumption from a new perspective

Sweden’s Energy Aware Clock hangs on the wall and depicts a permanent visualization of your energy use. Every hour, it chimes to remind you to feel guilty about the size of your residence.

Just yesterday San Francisco saw the unveiling of the world’s first algae fuel-powered vehicle, dubbed the Algaeus. The plug-in hybrid car, which is a Prius tricked out with a nickel metal hydride battery and a plug, runs on green crude from Sapphire Energy — no modifications to the gasoline engine necessary. The set-up is so [...]

Juice of reject watermelons can be efficiently fermented into ethanol
Watermelon juice can be a valuable source of biofuel. Researchers have shown that the juice of reject watermelons can be efficiently fermented into ethanol.
 

The 2,000-megawatt complex similar to this will be built
in Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China by 2019

First Solar, a leading maker of solar panels, based in Tempe, AZ, has announcedthat it will build an enormous, 2,000 megawatt solar power plant in China, starting next year. Bloomberg reports that it will be the largest solar power plant in the [...]

PHEV
Nearly half of U.S. consumers are interested in buying a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, according to a survey released Tuesday by Boulder’s Pike Research.  According to Pike’s survey of 1,041 U.S. consumers, 48 percent said they would be “extremely” or “very” interested in buying a plug-in hybrid, or PHEV, with a 40-mile range on a [...]

The New Hairy Solar Panel

A new type of solar panel using human hair could provide the world with cheap, green electricity, believes its teenage inventor.
Milan Karki, 18, who comes from a village in rural Nepal, believes he has found the solution to the developing world’s energy needs.
The young inventor says hair is easy to use [...]

The Greener Home Competition
Fifty Longmont homeowners could get full-house makeovers.
But that wouldn’t mean new couches, matching drapes and fresh paint.
These makeovers would include installing solar panels, wind turbines and data-control centers to manage energy use and safety systems.
Englewood-based DaVinci Quest is putting together a global contest to invite teams to design environmentally friendly smart homes [...]

BioLogic FreeCharge
Apple devices are getting quite a bit of attention when it comes to renewable energy lately. Just yesterday we showed you the new solar power skin that is coming out later this month. But if you’re needing a charge on a cloudy day, there’s a solution coming out in a few months – you’ll [...]

Hey Baby, Let Me Suck Your Pool!

Debra Mitchell is a lead code compliance officer for the Village of Wellington. During the collapse of the housing market, the community was left with a large number of foreclosed homes.
Pointing out one example Mitchell said, “It has an unsanitary, abandoned swimming pool, stagnant swimming pool. There’s no electricity [...]

Giant Space Mirrors. Isn’t it worth a try to help reduce emissons.
Risky and unorthodox technologies such as giant space mirrors or capturing CO2 from the ambient air may be required backups to blunt the effects of climate change if emission reductions prove to be too little, too late, says a new report from the Royal [...]

Behold the blessings of technology:
After learning in class how breathalyzers work, Robert Clain and Miguel Salas assembled a fart detector from a sensitive hydrogen sulfide monitor, a thermometer and a microphone and wrote the software that would rate the emission. A “slight perturbance in the air” near the detector sets it to work measuring the [...]

Nano-ink could replace standard method of manufacturing solar cells
This is one powerful idea that would do away with massive solar panels. Solar cells could soon be spray painted onto the sides of buildings or rooftops with nanoparticles.
 

House on the Water
Our friends from formodesign sent us House on the Water, a self-sufficient house for nomadic life offshore. Designed as a rental house for people who want to be independent it’s available only through water. It is located by Navagio beach, NW coast of the Greek Zante island. (Pics)
 

Glamping
Europeans love touring churches and museums, but when it comes to vacations, Americans have always loved the great outdoors. Fishing, camping and just driving around are great American pastimes. (Pics)

Wind farm
Aggressive investments in 2008 helped the United States surpass Germany to become the world’s leader in wind power, according to a report recently released by the U.S. Department of Energy.
 

Scrubbing the surfaces could be a thing of the past after scientists discover new ’self-cleaning’ materials
Kitchen work tops that effectively clean themselves could become a reality thanks to a new range of “smart” materials, it was revealed today.
 

The Full Service Bike of the Future

This is the future of commuter bicycles according to Olympic cyclist Chris Boardman. It can count calories, play music, solar-power your motor uphill, and has a locking device with fingerprint recognition to prevent theft. It’s made of carbon fiber and the tires are puncture-proof. Of course, it doesn’t exist [...]

Green tech
What’s the next big thing to drive the Silicon Valley innovation engine? Don’t count on green tech anytime soon, at least according to two prominent investors here during a panel discussion focused on “Silicon Valley in the New Millennium.”
 

A project is taking shape that could offer an affordable means of reaching billions of tons of deep-lying coal deposits without causing irreparable harm to the environment.
Coal has become the ugly sister of power sources, condemned as old-fashioned, ultra-polluting and excessively costly to mine, given that we have exhausted the most easily accessible supplies.
 

MercuryHouseOne
Rome, Toulouse and Munich practice Architecture and Vision have designed a pod-like mobile living room with a Carrara marble shell. (Pics)
 

Eneloop Portable Solar
SANYO Electric Co., Ltd. (SANYO) announces that it is further expanding its highly acclaimed ‘eneloop universe’, a product series emphasizing a lifestyle valuing reusing resources, with stylish and trendy new products to be released this fall: the ‘eneloop portable solar’, a handy ready-to-use solar power generator. (Pics)
 

The Oyster concept for transforming wave power to onshore electricity.
A giant new machine called’ Oyster’ designed to harness the power of ocean waves and turn it into ‘green’ electricity is being installed on the seabed off the Atlantic shores of the Orkney Islands. In autumn 2009 it will undergo demonstration trials to prove whether its [...]

Molecular modeling of CO2 capture by an ionic liquid membrane.
Separating carbon dioxide from its polluting source, such as the flue gas from a coal-fired power plant, may soon become cleaner and more efficient.
 

The Shweeb
Finally: The Infrastructurist shows us the perfect mashup of a podcar with Velo-City: The Shweeb, a pedal-powered monorail that is “a direct response to the transportation needs of today and the future.” (Pics and video)
 

First a Pilot Project with 500 Homes
“Smart grid” is the new big thing in the world of green, and despite some fuzziness on the definition of what a smart grid actually is, an update to our energy grid to make it “smarter” and more efficient is definitely overdue. The city of Amsterdam is the latest [...]