Clean Energy Transition

When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this Swiss city on the Rhine, the engineers knew they had a problem. But the 3.4 magnitude tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground -- literally -- in the world's search for new sources of energy.

"We believe that energy efficiency represents a significant market opportunity for investors, as policy changes look set to force a structural shift in demand."

In the second quarter of 2007, the German-American solar technology company SolarWorld Group increased sales and earnings in the double digit range. Earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) went up by 32 percent

Spain -- the world's second leading producer of wind power -- has passed a new law allowing wind parks to be built off its coast. It is predicted that the offshore wind parks will generate between 2,000 and 3,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity by 2020.

A new version of the internal combustion engine, which could significantly cut gas consumption, might be surprisingly practical and easy to deploy, according to recent findings by researchers at MIT.

Germany's Schott Solar and Wacker Chemie AG have formed a joint venture to produce silicon wafers for solar cells, another sign of how the solar industry is consolidating. Under the deal, Wacker will supply purified silicon to Schott Wacker who will make wafers and sell them to Schott who will make the solar cells. The joint venture will also sell wafer to other solar cell makers.

Picture a liquid fuel that is derived from the same feedstocks as cellulosic ethanol (switchgrass, sugar cane, corn stover) but contains 50% more energetic content and is made via a process that uses 65% less energy.

SolFocus, a company spun off from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Park, is building arrays of solar panels around this honeycomb design. Each dish magnifies the light 500 times and focuses it on very high-efficiency cells.

A week after a slew of popular Web sites were knocked offline temporarily by a power outage in San Francisco, the data center for the Web sites has finally disclosed what went wrong. Basically, backup generators made by a Dutch company called Hitec failed to work, according to an update posted to the Web site of data center 365 Main. Here's what happened: transformer breakers at a San Francisco Pacific Gas & Electric power station unexpectedly opened, causing a power surge that cut off electricity to a portion of the city. (PG&E does not know why the breakers opened.) Three out of 10 of 365 Main's 2.1-megawatt backup generators failed to start up, cutting power to equipment of more than 40 percent of the data center's customers for up to 45 minutes.

A small team of engineers based in Cornwall, England, have made a breakthrough with the development of a turbine that they claim could solve the commercial viability of tidal power. Known as the Osprey turbine, the technology can be used to create electricity offshore at sea -- or in tidal rivers and inland waterways. The Osprey turbine is a vertical axis free flow device which produces power independently or as part of a larger system. Power output is expected to be from 1 kW up to 5 MW in a multiple system.