Group items tagged

FREE is an organization devoted to social change that harmonizes environmental quality with responsible liberty and economic progress. They apply economics and scientific analysis to generate and explore alternative and innovative solutions to environmental problems.

As gas prices climb and electricity prices follow, people looking for alternatives are turning to the wind. The popularity of wind energy is growing, but the turbines themselves are shrinking in size and cost, making affordable, personal wind power a reality.

ON a strip of Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles, a futuristic experiment posing as an ordinary fuel station may be bringing the world one step closer to the hydrogen age. From the moment engineers started dreaming about hydrogen as an alternative to oil, they faced a nagging question: What should come first - the fuel-cell car or the hydrogen pump?

Solar energy can be utilized in various ways - to provide electricity, mechanical power, heat and lighting. Passive solar heating and cooling can save substantial electricity bills. Design of a building is very important for tapping passive solar energy. The building and windows are designed in such a way that they carefully balance their energy requirements without additional mechanical equipment. Solar benefits are utilized through windows and pumps, and fans are used minimally. Passive solar energy utilizes building constituents such as walls, floors, roofs, windows, exterior building elements and landscaping to control heat generated by sun. Solar heating designs try to trap and store thermal energy from sunlight directly. Passive cooling minimizes the effects of solar radiation through shading or generating air flows with convection ventilation.

Atlantic Canada's Bay of Fundy has some of the world's highest and most powerful tides. Every day, 100 billion tonnes of seawater surge in and out of the bay - a perfect source of clean, reusable alternative energy, if it can be properly harnessed. Tidal power isn't new, of course; small grain mills were powered by tides in Europe centuries ago. But tapping into the reliable, natural ebb-and-flow of water to generate electricity didn't begin until the 1960s.

2009 brings some new incentives for homeowners to adopt energy efficiency from both state and federal sources. The Wall Street Journal reported last week on several of these, including new provisions for tax credits in solar, small wind, and biomass stoves (those burning wood pellets or corn). In addition, this year, both solar and wind residential tax credits can be claimed against the alternative minimum tax. Improvements to weatherize your home could also qualify for an energy efficiency tax credit of up to $500. There are also new credits for upgrading your furnace, boilers, heat pumps, and water heaters. Read more at WSJ.com: http://tinyurl.com/93n535 Link to original post

Shin Abe doesn't find it odd that the picturesque little Japanese town of Kuzumaki, where he has lived all his life, generates some of its electricity with cow dung. Nor is the 15-year-old middle school student blown away by the vista of a dozen wind turbines spinning atop the forested peak of nearby Mt. Kamisodegawa. And it's old news to Abe that his school gets 25% of its power from an array of 420 solar panels located near the campus. "That's the way it's been," he shrugs. "It's natural." To Abe, it is. But the blase teen has grown up in an alternative universe - one that might be envisioned by Al Gore. That's because Kuzumaki (population 8,000) has over the past decade transformed itself into a living laboratory for the development of sustainable and diversified energy sources. "When I was growing up, all we had [to generate power] was oil," says Kazunori Fukasawaguchi, a Kuzumaki native who now serves in local government. "I never imagined this kind of change." (Read TIME's Top 10 Green Ideas of 2008.)

Growing concerns over climate change and energy security have kicked research on alternative energy sources into high gear. The list of options continues to expand, yet few papers have comprehensively reviewed them. And fewer still have weighed the pros and cons in as much depth as a new study published earlier this month in the journal, Energy & Environmental Science. The results are a mixed bag of logical conclusions and startling wake-up calls. The review pits twelve combinations of electric power generation and vehicular motivation against each other. It is a battle royal of nine electric power sources, three vehicle technologies, and two liquid fuel sources. It rates each combination based on eleven categories. And it was all compiled by one man, Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University.

An acupuncturist is a trained alternative health practitioner that uses acupuncture as a healing modality.

Russia's biggest hydro-power generator Rushydro is considering a four billion RUB investment in a tidal power plant in Murmansk Oblast, on the coast of the Barents Sea. The project plans could make the Kola Peninsula a leading Russian region on alternative energy. Rushydro now confirms that it is about to complete a feasibility study of the project and that the construction of the plant could eventually start next year, Murman.ru reports. The plant project is named the Northern Tidal Power Plant, and is to be built in the the Dolgaya-Vostochnaya Bay west of the Murmansk city.

Shortened workweeks, flextime, enforced time off; none of these are new concepts in today's workplace. But some U.S. state governments and organizations are turning to four-day workweeks and alternative work schedules as a way to combat the recession as well as cutting down on energy consumption. They're having varying degrees of success.

The world needs a "revolution" in science and technology to solve global warming, says Energy Secretary Steven Chu. Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, made the remarks in today's New York Times. The article was short on specifics, but Chu, former director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, said Nobel-level breakthroughs were needed in electric batteries, solar power and crops that could be turned into fuel. "Science and technology can generate much better choices," Chu, a long-time proponent of alternative energy development, told the newspaper. "It has, consistently, over hundreds and hundreds of years." Among the points he made:

Fast Company and New Scientist have reports predicting that cheap GaN based LED lights may soon make both ncandescent and compact fluorescent light globes obsolete - Better, Cheaper LEDs Ringing Death Knell of Fluorescent Bulbs. LED lighting has long been viewed as a superior alternative to compact flourescent bulbs. Although flourescents are more electrically efficient than old-fashioned incandescent bulbs, producing them requires a complex procedure that uses a little mercury--a big environmental and health no-no. Indeed many are questioning whether CFLs are actually an environmentally-friendly choice at all.

Investment in renewable energy has hit a lull as private-sector money is drying up, but the bulk of government funding has yet to arrive. There was $13.3 billion in new investments in clean energy -- the term used to describe alternative energy such as wind farms, solar power and biofuels facilities -- in the first three months of 2009, down 53%, from a year earlier, according to a report Thursday from research firm New Energy Finance Ltd. The drop came mostly in bank-based financing for building new projects, the report says, as the credit crunch has caught up with this once high-flying sector.

SOLAR cells are expensive, so it makes sense to use them efficiently. One way to do so is to concentrate sunlight onto them. That means a smaller area of cell can be used to convert a given amount of light into electricity. This, though, imposes another cost-that of the mirrors needed to do the concentrating. Traditionally these are large pieces of polished metal, steered by electric motors to keep the sun's rays focused on the cell. But now Cool Earth Solar of Livermore, California, has come up with what it hopes will be a better, cheaper alternative: balloons. Anyone who has children will be familiar with aluminised party balloons. Such balloons are made from metal-coated plastic. Cool Earth's insight was that if you coat only one half of a balloon, leaving the other transparent, the inner surface of the coated half will act as a concave mirror. Put a solar cell at the focus of that mirror and you have an inexpensive solar-energy collector.

An ICE (Instrumentation, Control, and Electrical) Systems Technician installs, maintains, and repairs the more advanced electronics in an alternate power system.

Der Spiegel has an interview with Boeing's "chief environmental strategist", Billy Glover, on prospects for biofuel use in air transport (he's very optimistic, but short on detail) - Algae Could 'Supply Entire World with Aviation Fuel'. SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Glover, given the current low price of oil, why would airlines still even be interested in biofuels? Glover: Indeed, the oil price has changed rapidly. But it has done that many times before and it will continue to do so. Even today, the highest operating expense for an airline is fuel. It remains a priority to find a way to mitigate that situation. That is why Boeing is trying to open up this avenue of alternative fuel. It can help that situation while having a better environmental performance at the same time.

Most people who work in this field would do engineering and mechanical tasks from the prior installation of wind turbines, its proper operation including the safety measures and precautionary alternatives that every consumer must follow, the maintenance and repair of such installations.