Global consumption of natural gas will rival the use of coal and steal the market share from oil on the world market.
The “next defining energy trend” is poised to be natural gas as it increasingly becomes a primary global energy source, according to a report released today by GE.
Continue reading… “Natural gas is set to be the next big energy trend”
London’s subway will be supplying green energy to warm up more homes around the borough.
A new project announced by the Islington council will redirect the heat from a Northern Line of London’s subway to vent to homes across the city, giving homeowners a new way to get through the cold season. The project will deliver cheap heating to 500 homes around the area. It will not only be saving consumers money, but also the environment from 500 tons of CO2 emissions.
Continue reading… “Heat from subways to warm homes in London”
Train carrying coal to a power plant.
The Great Energy Shift is happening in spurts and is starting in places like Arizona and Mississippi instead of coming from legislation in Washington. Last week two two utilities faced decisions on whether to fight the future or embrace it.
Continue reading… “The death of coal in America”
Homeowners who aimed their panels toward the west, instead of the south, generated 2% more electricity over the course of a day.
Solar panels should face in the general direction of the sun. You would think that would be easy to do. But most installers of solar panels, especially the ones for homes, follow conventional wisdom handed down from architects, which holds that in the northern hemisphere, windows and solar panels should face south.
Continue reading… “Most solar panels are facing in the wrong direction: Study”
Off-grid solar
The off-grid clean energy market is booming. Sub-Saharan Africa is seeing 300 percent compound annual growth in off-grid lighting; Bangladesh is putting up 30,000 to 40,000 solar home systems every month; and d.light, a for-profit seller of solar lights, recently reached its1 millionth customer. (Video)
Continue reading… “Off-grid solar is the next big market in clean energy”
What are energy CEO’s thinking?
Grid-Scale Energy Storage in North America 2013: Applications, Technologies, and Suppliers, author Chet Lyons spoke with dozens of energy storage CEOs and summarized their thoughts in a recent report. Below is an excerpt of his 311-page report, highlighting eleven common threads shared by energy storage executives.
Continue reading… “11 major trends in mass energy storage”
Prieto Battery’s copper foam.
Power plants, wind farms, and smartphones all suffer from the same basic ailment — they lack cheap, reliable, long-life batteries to store large amounts of energy for when the sun goes down, the wind stops blowing, or the device is unplugged for a long time.
In 2007, officials from Berkeley, California shut off the electricity to an artists space known as the Shipyard. That action, which forced the artists there to seek a new way to power their flamethrowers, is the origin story of a company that now produces what it says is the world’s only carbon-negative power source.
Continue reading… “Carbon-negative energy now a reality”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJTl2oqaWPs[/youtube]
All of that electricity in a thunderstorm. All that lightning, all those kilojoules of power, just waiting to be harnessed, if only we knew how do it! Could we really harness the electricity from lightning?
Continue reading… “Will we ever be able to harness the power of lightning?”
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_joxrZ6vdYc[/youtube]
Gartner Research released a report in 2008 in which it identified the number one IT grand challenge as “Never having to manually recharge devices.” Physicist Hatem Zeine has invented what he believes to be the answer to this challenge. The Cota wireless power transmission system uses intelligently steered phased array antennas to focus a beam of microwaves on a receiver module – and only on that module. The inherently safe technology can deliver electrical power up to 30 feet from a central transmitter without any line-of-sight requirement and without interfering with other devices. The system is projected to hit the market in 2015.
Continue reading… “Cota charging system transmits power wirelessly at up to 30 feet”
What happened to biofuels?
Everybody was talking about biofuels a few years ago. Politicians in the U.S. saw corn ethenol as a path to “energy independence,” while greener folks preferred biodiesel made from waste cooking oil. Fans of biofuels said that these were supposed to be just a bridge to second-generation biofuels like cellulosic ethanol and algae biodiesel; these wouldn’t be made from food crops or limited feedstocks, and they would be much greener overall.
Continue reading… “What is the future for biofuels?”
Hybrid optoelectronic nanostructures with controlled variation in photoconduction properties.
University of Pennsylvania reasearchers have demonstrated a new mechanism for extracting energy from light, a finding that could improve technologies for generating electricity from solar energy and lead to more efficient optoelectronic devices used in communications.
Continue reading… “Researchers demonstrate new method for harvesting energy from light”
By delving into the futuring techniques of Futurist Thomas Frey, you’ll embark on an enlightening journey.
Learn More about this exciting program.