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When there is an aquarium present, anyone usually want a good air mattress pump. It is almost always found powering or perhaps close to the aquarium tank because it works well this way with the garden hose smaller in length.

A career as an energy auditor is becoming an increasingly important one as more and more people are looking to make their homes more energy-efficient.

Will support energy efficiency efforts nationwide that will create 87,000 jobs and cut energy bills for families Washington DC -- Vice President Joe Biden and Energy Secretary Chu today detailed an investment of nearly $8 billion in state and local weatherization and energy efficiency efforts as part of the President's American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. With an investment of about $5 billion through the Weatherization Assistance Program and about $3 billion for the State Energy Program, the Department of Energy will partner with state and local governments to put 87,000 Americans to work and save families hundreds of dollars per year on their energy bills. To jump-start job creation and weatherization work, the Department of Energy is releasing the first installment of the funding - about $780 million -- in the next few days. The Department will release additional funding over time as states demonstrate that they are using the funding effectively and responsibly to create jobs and cut energy use.

By office office office office office building green-and retrofitting existent buildings-the countries of North America could cut hothouse gas emissions by some-more than twenty-five percent North American homes, offices as good as alternative buildings minister an estimated 2. 2 billion tons of CO dioxide to a ambience each year-more than a single third of a continent's hothouse gas wickedness outlay. Simply constructing some-more energy-efficient buildings-and upgrading a insulation as good as windows in a existent ones-could save a whopping 1. 7 billion tons annually, says a brand brand new inform from a Montreal-based Commission for Environmental Cooperation( CEC), an general classification determined by Canada, Mexico as good as a U. S. underneath a North American Free Trade Agreement to residence continent-wide environmental issues.

The Age has an article on calls to power Australia using solar thermal power and geothermal power from the dead heart - Running on empty: deserts could solve energy crisis. DESERTS could generate enough renewable energy to power Australia, in the process creating unprecedented opportunities for its remote communities, a leading scientist says. Dr Barrie Pittock, a lead author with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former head of CSIRO's climate impact group, says deserts could also create a substantial clean energy export industry focused on Asia. He today will tell an Alice Springs deserts symposium that Australia is better placed to develop clean energy than almost any other nation, mainly due to its capacity for large-scale solar and geothermal power plants.

The IHT has a report on a plan by Matt Simmons and George Hart to build the world's largest wind farm in the gulf of Maine - Plans for the world's biggest wind farm. It is not the usual green suspect. But it hopes to build a 5-gigawatt, deep-water wind farm - the largest in the world, equal to the output from five nuclear plants. "It" is the Ocean Energy Institute, a tiny research organization founded by Matthew Simmons. An energy investment banker who specializes in oil and gas, Simmons was an energy adviser to President George W. Bush. His main partner, George Hart, is a physicist who consults for the Pentagon on the Strategic Defense Initiative, where he uses supercomputers for the mathematical modeling of complex systems. He also co-invented a laser used for eye surgery and semiconductor manufacturing.

Scientists have found that a polymer material is an excellent catalyst in a process to produce hydrogen fuel using sunlight and water. The material meets the basic requirements for an ideal catalyst -- including being abundant, easy to work with, and non-toxic -- and could help this "green" alternative-energy production method become mainstream. Creating hydrogen gas by splitting water (H2O) molecules with solar energy is a promising way of generating hydrogen fuel, which, by either being burned directly or used in fuel cells, can power many types of vehicles, including automobiles, buses, and even airplanes. The study's corresponding scientist is Xinchen Wang, a chemist affiliated with the Max-Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, and Fouzhou University in Fouzhou, China.

The technology can generate electricity in water flowing at a rate of less than one knot - about one mile an hour - meaning it could operate on most waterways and sea beds around the globe. Existing technologies which use water power, relying on the action of waves, tides or faster currents created by dams, are far more limited in where they can be used, and also cause greater obstructions when they are built in rivers or the sea. Turbines and water mills need an average current of five or six knots to operate efficiently, while most of the earth's currents are slower than three knots.

Olive stones can be turned into bioethanol, a renewable fuel that can be produced from plant matter and used as an alternative to petrol or diesel. This gives the olive processing industry an opportunity to make valuable use of 4 million tonnes of waste in olive stones it generates every year and sets a precedent for the recycling of waste products as fuels. Researchers from the Universities of Jaén and Granada in Spain show how this can be achieved in a study published in the latest edition of the Society of Chemical Industry's (SCI) Journal of Chemical Technology & Biotechnology.

Australian mining firms, hit by high fuel costs and falling commodity prices, could soon swap their diesel generators for 24-hour, solar-power systems, the head of a private renewable power firm said on Thursday. Mining firms are also worried about an emissions trading scheme set to begin in Australia in 2010, Steve Hollis, CEO of Sydney-based Lloyd Energy Storage, told Reuters in an interview.

Technology Review has an article on advances in wind turbine technology - Better Wind Turbines. ExRo Technologies, a startup based in Vancouver, BC, has developed a new kind of generator that's well suited to harvesting energy from wind. It could lower the cost of wind turbines while increasing their power output by 50 percent. The new generator runs efficiently over a wider range of conditions than conventional generators do. When the shaft running through an ordinary generator is turning at the optimal rate, more than 90 percent of its energy can be converted into electricity. But if it speeds up or slows down, the generator's efficiency drops dramatically. This isn't a problem in conventional power plants, where the turbines turn at a steady rate, fed by a constant supply of energy from coal or some other fuel. But wind speed can vary wildly. Turbine blades that change pitch to catch more or less wind can help, as can transmissions that mediate between the spinning blades and the generator shaft. But transmissions add both manufacturing and maintenance costs, and there's a limit to how much changing the blade angle can compensate for changing winds.

Swedish company Home Energy recently revealed an innovative wind turbine that spins in a spherical formation. Eschewing traditional rotors for a sleek orb structure, this beautiful rethinking of conventional wind turbine design utilizes the Venturi principle, which funnels wind within the turbine's blades. The resulting spherical wind turbine features increased efficiency and lower noise levels - making it ideal for small scale energy needs such as personal home use. Best of all it's called the Energy Ball: the fun name is an added bonus.

The Arctic Hotel in Ilulissat, Greenland, is a charming little place on the West Coast, but no one would ever confuse it for a Four Seasons - maybe a One Seasons. But when my wife and I walked back to our room after dinner the other night and turned down our dim hallway, the hall light went on. It was triggered by an energy-saving motion detector. Our toilet even had two different flushing powers depending on - how do I say this delicately - what exactly you're flushing. A two-gear toilet! I've never found any of this at an American hotel. Oh, if only we could be as energy efficient as Greenland!

Using the sun combined with nature's way of turning solar power into life-sustaining energy can be captured, artificially induced and could provide enough power in less than an hour to run the house, the car and bring on an era of true energy independence. The power of solar is not on the grand scale of collectors spread over square acres in the west desert, says Daniel Nocera, a widely cited chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is scheduled to speak at Utah State University this week.

We are familiar with the notion of getting an expert second opinion when an expert medical specialist has diagnosed life threatening circumstances. However a second opinion that is a bit more optimistic simply decreases the perceived odds of death somewhat - the dire initial prediction remains.

Al Gore has made a major speech in Washington this morning, setting out an ambitious goal for the USA to produce all of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2020. I thought I'd comment on the technical feasibility of the plan, and the underlying economics of such an endeavour.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was CEO of Intel, I had an unusual experience while visiting a customer. It was during a period of tight availability of microprocessors, our main product. This was not an unusual state of affairs. Supply and demand ebbed and flowed as the computer business had its ups and downs. Sometimes we had too many chips sitting in inventory; other times, like this one, we had too few. My main purpose in visiting was to reassure the customer that we were working hard to boost production and that relief was on the way.

Despite an unstable regulatory environment-renewable energy tax incentives are stalled in the senate, BLM policy has been inconsistent- the United States will surpass Germany to be the largest market for solar power in the world by 2011, according to a report by JP Morgan, cited in Greentech Media. By 2011, the US will have an installed capacity of 1.6 gigawatts (with 920 MW in California alone), surpassing Germany's expected capacity of 1.35 gigawatts. The third largest market by this time will be South Korea with 957 megawatts of capacity.

Congress' financial bailout included an increase and extension on tax credits for solar energy users, still mostly an option for the rich. Earlier this year, Vicki Eckels put a state-of-the-art solar power system on her house in Fort Lauderdale for $43,000. ''I feel good because I'm a clean energy producer.'' The federal government will reward her by knocking off $2,000 from her 2008 taxes. If she had waited until next year to install the system, her tax savings could have been $12,900, thanks to a provision hidden within the massive bailout Congress passed last week.

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?