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Plains Carbon Dioxide Reduction Partnership; Southeast Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership; and Southwest Regional Partnership for Carbon Sequestration - will conduct large volume tests for the storage of one million or more tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) in deep saline reservoirs. These projects will double the number of large-volume carbon storage demonstrations in operation worldwide.

One of the more aggressive developers is Ford, which has test vehicles on the road as part of its plan to bring electrified vehicles to market over the next four years. Although not alone in its drive to capture this potentially valuable market, Ford’s strategy and product range reflects the market sentiments; primarily that there is no silver bullet. To be successful requires a portfolio of technologies.

The purchase price of a two megawatt turbine has been pushed up from about $3 million to about $4.4 million as a result. The actual turbines represent from 20 to 50per cent of the final installed cost of any new wind farm, the rest being spent on site investigation, assessment and testing, as well as the installation and infrastructure costs required to connect to the grid, often from remote locations. ...Optimal sites require constant wind speeds of about eight to 10 metres per second. A wind capacity factor of about 35 per cent -- the amount of time the wind actually blows over a year -- is needed to make a site viable.

And that's not all. We reported recently on this site on the solar powered car making its way around the world. We also covered the concept of solar roads to capture usable energy. We even reported on a sail boat powered with a solar sail. Now the BBC reports   that the U.S. military has held a test run in Arizona of a UK-made solar plane, the Zephyr-6. The plane flew for more than three days, running at night on solar charged batteries. The more than 83 hour non-stop flight was the longest of any unmanned aircraft.

The latest effort comes not in some green hub like Portland, Oregon, but in the Persian Gulf, fuelled as much by oil wealth—and the need to find postpetroleum business models—as environmental zeal. Groundbreaking is scheduled for Saturday for Masdar City, a nearly self-contained mini-municipality designed for up to 50,000 people rising from the desert next to Abu Dhabi’s international airport and intended as a hub for academic and corporate research on nonpolluting energy technologies.

The nighttime experiment is meant to Illuminate the top spire of the mammoth steel structure to demmonstrate the use of the first wireless electricity transfer system in the World. The test is designed to transfer about 1200 watts of power at a range of 100 feet and will be a first of its kind use of a system Japanese scientists are developing to transmit power at distances they hope could reach 300 feet using a science that is based on magnetically coupled resonance.

StatoilHydro has decided to build the world’s first full scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, and test it over a two-year period offshore Karmøy. The The company is investing approximately 400 million NOK. Planned startup is autumn 2009.

The researchers, working under the banner of the Aurora Research Institute in Inuvik, N.W.T., plan to conduct 10 days of tests next month on Richards Island and the west side of Mallik Bay. The drill site itself, where a service rig is being set up, is about 65 kilometres west of Tuktoyaktuk and 130 kilometres north of Inuvik. About a kilometre underneath that rig is 113.3 billion cubic metres of methane, frozen in an ice-like state under about 600 metres of permafrost.