Resources on Sustainable Energy
Construction will start next week on the £42 million Wave Hub marine energy project in South West England.
The Wave Hub, which will be located 10 miles off the north Cornwall coast, will serve as a test bed for wave energy devices by providing an electrical connection from the seabed at a depth of around 50 m to the national grid.
Initially, the Wave Hub will have four berths for wave energy devices up to a maximum capacity of 20 MW, but has the potential to scale up to 50 MW in the future.
Ocean Power Technologies has signed up to take the first berth when it becomes available to test the performance of its PowerBuoy wave energy converter.
The first devices are expected to be deployed in 2011, once the cabling and connectors have been constructed. Starting on Monday, civil engineers will drill ducts from Cornwall coast at Hayle to connect to the subsea cable and a new electricity substation on the site of a former nearby power station.
I agree that biofuel is a dead end, and in fact is perhaps worse than the disease. I will cross-post some recent articles I have found on biofuels and the scramble for African land (and land elsewhere...
Last week New Scientist reported that US emissions could be cut by more than 7 per cent if people changed their ways at home. Separate studies in US, Dutch and British homes have reported that 26 to 36 per cent of domestic energy use is "behavioural" – determined by the way we use machines, not the efficiency of the hardware itself.
This means that "machines designed to change humans", as the persuasive technology group of Stanford University, California, calls them, could save us huge amounts of energy and money.
Many projects are trying to make that happen, with two main motivations. One is to understand which facets of human nature can be manipulated to change behaviour. The other is to develop technical strategies to do so.
Graphene is an extremely low density material, almost an atomic-scale chicken wire made of carbon atoms and their bonds. It has been the focus of much research because of its exceptional electrical, mechanical and optical properties. It holds great promise in renewable energies.
Among the so far underutilized advantages Graphene offers are that it is fifty times stronger than steel, and it has five times the conductivity of copper, with only one quarter of the density.
The proposed changes will phase out the least efficient outdoor lighting products by the end of 2012, transitioning to new lighting products that are better for the environment and less costly to run. For example, new outdoor lights will be required to have a sensor that will turn them off during daylight hours, putting an end to wasteful streetlight operation during the day. New parking lot lights must be capable of being dimmed, which can cut their energy use in half.
The agreement also directs the US Department of Energy (DOE) to develop even better standards by 2013.
