Carbon Footprints

Tech website Ars Technica has a story on Clean Energy 2030: Google’s plan to save the planet
The Google plan is nothing if not ambitious. To begin with, Google proposes a massive push toward energy efficiency, which will reduce electricity demand to 2008 levels (accounting for around 1,000 terawatt hours/year. It also calls for a complete [...]

Recently the US Republican’s used Paris Hilton in an ad campaign to imply that Democratic candidate Barack Obama was unfit to lead. Ms Hilton has filmed her own response where she espouses her own energy policy. She’s in favour of limited offshore drilling if it’s monitored closely by environmental groups and also in [...]

Click To Play
Boston based MIT has announced ‘Major discovery’ from MIT primed to unleash solar revolution.
In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.
Until now, [...]

News for Nerds website Slashdot is reporting Researchers Improve Solar Cell Performance.
Researchers at MIT have improved solar collectors using dyes. They just increased their performance results by a factor of 4. These paint-on materials can increase the power obtained from existing solar cells by a factor of over 40 without needing to track the [...]

You have to laugh sometimes. — DS

Technorati Tags: Alternative Energy, cape wind, funny, green power, hypocrites, Nantucket, offshore wind, rich people’s views, sad, The Daily Show, wind, wind farms, wind power

There’s a story over at Virginia Tech in the USA, Lamp lit by gravity wins Greener Gadget award, about an industrial design student there who has developed a gravity powered LED lamp called Gravia.
Clay Moulton of Springfield, Va., who received his master of science degree in architecture (concentration in industrial design) from the College of [...]

The New York Times is reporting Start-Up Sells Solar Panels at Lower-Than-Usual Cost.
Nanosolar, a heavily financed Silicon Valley start-up whose backers include Google’s co-founders, plans to announce Tuesday that it has begun selling its innovative solar panels, which are made using a technique that is being held out as the future of solar power manufacturing.
The [...]

And in today’s bad news corner the UK’s The Guardian has a story Millions of jobs at risk from climate change - U.N.. Clearly they don’t mean jobs at the UN. They point out what is fairly obvious, that climate change is impacting tourism and fisheries, but then acknowledge that;
At the same time, [...]

We’ve done quite a bit of work with large scale data centres over the last year so this article in CNN Money, Server farm goes solar, is opportune. Server farm, AISO.net has unveiled a fully solar powered data centre, powered by 120 solar panels located on two large sets of arrays on either side of [...]

Virginian power utility Dominion Power has been placing obstacle after obstacle in the path of a volunteer-constructed massive solar energy array built at the Performing Arts Theatre of Franklin Park, allowing 280Kw hours of power per day to go to waste for almost seven years. It’s simply a disgrace. You want to be [...]