Homeowners this fall will be able to buy a wind turbine at hardware stores that tackles the small wind industry's bete noire: slow wind. WindTronics has developed a wind turbine sized for individual homes that it says can operate at speeds as low as 2 miles an hour. It will be sold for $4,500 as the Honeywell Wind Turbine... ... generate 2,000 kilowatt-hours in a year for a home with a very good--called Class 4--wind resource, according to the company. That's between 15 and 20 percent of the annual electricity consumption for the average U.S. home.

Some companies are trying to stake out a middle ground in wind power by making mid-size turbines big enough for a school or big-box retailer to use, but not so big that they require a convoy of trucks to be delivered.

Wind power is not the answer Steinberger now wants funding for a big pilot project. The idea is to link solar thermal power from Northern Africa to Europe via high-voltage undersea cables. The proposed 3- to 3.5-gigawatt power plant would cost an estimated $32 billion to build. Steinberger believes that 80 percent of Europe's energy needs could be met by solar thermal power plants in the Sahara by 2050.

Europe's largest onshore wind farm is set to be officially switched on by Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond. David MacKay, professor of natural philosophy at the University of Cambridge's department of physics, said Whitelee was a step towards targets to cut carbon emissions, but was only a start. He said: "To achieve the government target of a complete decarbonisation of our electricity supply system by 2030 we need to be talking about a 100-fold increase in wind farms in Britain and perhaps as much as a five-fold increase in nuclear power. "That's the scale of the building challenge we have if we're serious about getting off fossil fuels."

Shell will no longer invest in renewable technologies such as wind, solar and hydro power because they are not economic, the Anglo-Dutch oil company said today. It plans to invest more in biofuels which environmental groups blame for driving up food prices and deforestation.

The Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust commissioned a study last year to review electricity output from 21 small wind turbines in the state and the results were surprising: the data showed that the estimated production was about three times higher than the turbines' actual production.

In electrical applications, aluminum can do everything that copper can, but more efficiently and economically. Aluminum provides up to twice the conductivity per pound of copper (dependent on the specific alloy and application) at less than half the cost per pound (based upon current prices) for a 400% economic-efficiency advantage over copper.

Green Ocean Energy Ltd. has developed a wave power machine that attaches to an offshore wind turbine. The company says the economics of both machines are enhanced as infrastructure such as the foundation and cabling will now be shared.

B&Q's decision to face facts and withdraw its useless micro wind-turbines is baffling only because it has taken so long

..world's first high temperature superconductor (HTS) power transmission cable system in a commercial power grid. The 138,000-V (138-kV) system, which consists of three individual HTS power cable phases ..

Ocean Power Technologies, Inc (OPT) and Converteam Ltd. recently signed a Cooperation Agreement for the development of High Temperature Superconductor (HTS) Linear Generators for use in OPT's PowerBuoy wave energy converters. "HTS is a truly disruptive technology the advantages of which will radically change wave energy capture. Converteam is looking forward to working with OPT on this exciting and challenging new project." -- Derek Grieve, Technology Director, Converteam Ltd. The vision of the two companies is the direct conversion of the linear up and down motion of waves into electricity using OPT's PowerBuoy and Converteam's HTS linear generator. The proposed power take-off for the OPT PowerBuoy will employ Converteam's innovative and proprietary linear generator system with high temperature superconductors to provide the magnetic field.

Intel has begun pilot programs to test a home health laptop, application, and database system that puts patients remotely in sync with their health care providers. The Intel Health Guide, which includes a laptop for patients and an online interface for health care administrators, received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in July. Now Aetna, Scan Health Plan, Erickson Retirement Communities, and the Providence Medical Group in Oregon have each begun pilot programs to test how well the system works, or doesn't work, with their patients.

Intel plans to unveil a series of health care products aimed at the aging and chronically ill on November 11.

This afternoon a power outage in San Francisco affected the 365 Main St. data center. In the process of 6 cascading outages, one of the outages was not protected and reset systems in many of the colo facilities of that building. - DNS servers lost power and did not properly come back up. This has been resolved after about an hour of downtime and may have caused issues for many GNi customers that would appear as network issues

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.

taking advantage of energy-packed vortices that are formed when water flows past a cylindrical object, even at low speeds. Salmon and trout are known to leverage the force created by these naturally occurring water swirls so that they can swim upstream. A new mechanical device designed to economically harvest that energy and convert it into electricity could turn waterpower into a much larger part of the world's renewable-energy mix.

FloDesign Wind Turbine, a spin-off from the aerospace company FloDesign has developed a wind turbine that could generate electricity at half the cost of conventional turbines. The design circumvents the Betz limit.

Chemical reactions that pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it in the form of solid rock inside geological formations could offset billions of tons of carbon-dioxide emissions each year

Kline, a worldwide consulting and research firm, yesterday announced the launch of a new line of research studies called Kline FlashPoint. The first report, "Biodiesel: Helping to Solve the Oil Crisis, but at What Cost?" offers a strategic overview and assessment of the complex global biodiesel market and provides recommendations for companies that are evaluating their options for participation.

The biodiesel industry in Germany is nearing a state of collapse because of a tax increase that kicked in at the first of the year, according to a report on Reuters. Biodiesel refiners in Germany are only producing at 10 percent capacity, according to the Reuters story from a European biodiesel conference. That's down from 20 percent the year before.