Eco20/20

I don't know what's been happening lately with everybody, but it seems that more and more people are trying to charge their phones or iPhones or iPods using energy imported from human movement. Remember those movies presenting slaves hundreds of years ago spinning a huge wheel to provide the emperor with water and energy? They did not do it for fun, yet nowadays there are two recent mediatized inventions that caught my eye. Curiously enough, they are being developed by two telecom operators:

Researchers developing alternatives to fossil fuels are working with everything from algae to babassu oil to corn, but a California company says it can recycle carbon dioxide into fuel. Carbon Sciences claims it has developed a way of using the CO2 emitted during the combustion of coal, oil and other hydrocarbons to create transportation fuels like gasoline and jet fuel. Should Carbon Sciences - or any of the other firms working on similar projects - accomplish this on a large scale, it could bring a reduction in CO2 emissions as well as an abundant supply of renewable fuel.

The U.S. environmental movement is failing - by any measure, the state of the earth has never been more dire. What's needed, a leading environmentalist writes, is a new, inclusive green politics that challenges basic assumptions about consumerism and unlimited growth. by james gustave speth A specter is haunting American environmentalism - the specter of failure. All of us who have been part of the environmental movement in the United States must now face up to a deeply troubling paradox: Our environmental organizations have grown in strength and sophistication, but the environment has continued to go downhill, to the point that the prospect of a ruined planet is now very real. How could this have happened?

I must admit that I have been a bit nonplussed to see that the peak oil community seems to share the oil industry's dismissal of wind power as irrelevant and useless in the face of the currently energy challenge (maybe I am unfairly judging from a few individuals' comments, but it's definitely an existing undercurrent in the community). So, in reaction, let me put up here a few arguments that suggest that wind could play a major role in solving our current energy woes - not a silver bullet, but rather more than a side show. First, the "wind is too small to make a difference" argument: well, so was nuclear, until it got big enough. Wind is following the exact same growth trajectory [as shown below].

It looks more sleek and futuristic (or retro-futuristic, if you're much versed in vintage SF) than other prototypes, a creature more adapted to fictional outer space than to the oceans. But something about its bulbous main compartment led us to wonder if there is enough room inside for seasteaders to muck about with nation-building. Amidst all those noisy condensers and turbine generators and navigational gears, perhaps even inspired by them, they try to formulate the mechanics of a new micro-civilization, new identities and new cultural traditions.

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.

Scientists at the Ohio State Institute for Materials Research recently announced that they have developed a new hyper-efficient solar material that is able to capture light from every spectrum of the rainbow. Whereas most photovoltaics are limited to collecting energy from a small range of frequencies, the new material is able to absorb energy from all spectrums of visible light at once. The breakthrough development heralds a new breed of extremely efficient solar panels on the horizon.

A detailed new economic analysis "Energy Efficiency, Innovation, and Job Creation in California" finds: Over the past thirty-five years, innovative energy efficiency policies created 1.5 million additional fulltime jobs with a total payroll of over $45 billion. Looking forward, the report finds that if California improves energy efficiency by just 1 percent per year, proposed state climate policies will increase the Gross State Product (GSP) by approximately $76 billion, increase real household incomes by up to $48 billion and create as many as 403,000 new

A group of Spanish developers working for a company called Ecofasa just announced a new biofuel made up from trash. This isn't a biodiesel made from used frying oil; instead, it's made from general urban waste which is treated by bacteria. The result of that bacteria? Fatty acids that can be used to produce standard biodiesel. According to the company's CEO, the process is fully biologic, competes with no feedstock and is really sustainable. However, the process doesn't yield that much actual fuel: just one liter of biodiesel from 10 kg of trash. The project is now in a development phase, but Ecofasa said that a commercially viable model could be ready in three to four years.

- U.S. producers of solar power will no longer need federal subsidies within eight years because by then solar power will cost less than electricity generated by conventional power plants, industry players said this week. The U.S. government recently extended tax breaks for wind and solar producers for another eight years. They are set to expire in 2016.

Eastern Europeans and others seeking to use the current financial meltdown as an excuse to roll back climate commitment have failed (for now). The BBC reports: European Union leaders agreed to stick to their plan to cut greenhouse gases - despite a surprise demand by Poland and six other member states to drop them to ease the impact on industry struggling with the global credit crunch. Speaking at the end of a two-day summit, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said: "The deadline on climate change is so important that we cannot use the financial and economic crisis as a pretext for dropping it."

In a significant milestone in the deployment of flexible, printed photovoltaics, Konarka, a solar-cell startup based in Lowell, MA, has opened a commercial-scale factory, with the capacity to produce enough organic solar cells every year to generate one gigawatt of electricity, the equivalent of a large nuclear reactor. Organic solar cells could cut the cost of solar power by making use of inexpensive organic polymers rather than the expensive crystalline silicon used in most solar cells. What's more, the polymers can be processed using low-cost equipment such as ink-jet printers or coating equipment employed to make photographic film, which reduces both capital and manufacturing costs compared with conventional solar-cell manufacturing.

Not this week. As part of the Solar Power International conference here, big businesses such as equipment maker Applied Materials Inc. and solar cell manufacturer SunPower Corp. rented out bars and restaurants and shut down the streets to serve up free drinks and food to executives who partied through the night. "It's amazing, the euphoria in the industry right now," Victoria Hollick, vice president of Conserval Engineering Inc., said as a disc jockey played songs like "Good Times" and "Celebration." The solar industry has good reason to celebrate right now.

The Solar Electric Power Association (SEPA) has outlined four easy steps to a thirty fold increase in the size of the US solar power industry between 2009 and 2016, leading to over $230 billion worth of investment and the creation of 440,000 permanent jobs. The influential industry group laid out the plans at this week's Solar Power International conference in San Diego. The four key recommendations to achieve this goal are as follows:

Abu Dhabi has taken a 20% stake in the London Array - the £3bn project to build the world's largest offshore wind farm in the Thames estuary. Masdar, part of Abu Dhabi's multibillion-pound drive to develop green energy technologies, is buying part of the 50% stake in the project held by the German-based utility E.ON.

Product review Attic Insulation Cover Energy Guardian ESS

Save money and energy by unplugging your appliances

A major tidal energy project is being planned for waters off the coast of Northern Ireland and Scotland. ScottishPower has identified sites off the Antrim Coast, Pentland Firth and the Sound of Islay to test sea turbines which could power thousands of homes. They have been working on the Lanstrom device, which is said to be one of the world's most advanced tidal turbine.

BPA - Elliot Mainzer takes the key role in developing energy agency policy on climate change, planning and renewables As renewable energy becomes a bigger slice of the Northwest's energy pie, few institutions have as important a role to play as the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets electricity generated at 31 dams and a nuclear plant in the region. BPA's regionwide web of transmission lines delivers electrons generated at wind farms east of the Cascades to power-hungry consumers in the Willamette Valley. The agency's flexibility to modulate electricity production at dams on the Columbia allows utilities to safely feed their spiky supply of wind energy onto the grid.