Solar power makes tiny village beam

This story shows the potential of distributed solar generation in un-developed, poverty stricken parts of the world. Just imagine it's potential in the technologically advanced West, with our acres of rooftops and paved parking lots that are just waiting for someone to slap a PV panel on them. It's interesting that solar power is somehow too expensive and unreliable for the US government to encourage it's use by Americans, but it is cheap and reliable enough to power a poor, tiny Indian village. The fact that convenience is worth more to us then a stable, clean power source that has no expiration date is an indictment of our attitude towards energy as a society.

[Link]

Different strokes

Here's a story about a study that denounces renewable energy as environmentally destructive. The study's author attacks wind, solar and biomass as destructive to the land, claiming that the amount of land we would have to "rape" in order to fulfill our energy demand from these sources is so huge that the natural environment would be destroyed. See the story here:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20070726/sc_livescience/studyrenewableenergynotgreen;_ylt=AnQAbNtukp4Q0G1eYF4Rwl2s0NUE

please post comments.

Hydrogen Hype

I've heard enough inaccurate statements about hydrogen as a "fuel" to warrant a Blog entry. For decades, hydrogen-philes have been touting the potential that hydrogen has as the fuel source of the future. After all, we can get hydrogen from water, and water is everywhere.

The problem is, getting the 2 H's from H2O requires energy, and that (usually) means electricity. So, the advocates say, we can use nuclear or some kind of renewable energy to make electricity to produce hydrogen, then fill our cars and homes with hydrogen fuel cells that convert hydrogen back to...well...electricity.

Critics of this idea point out the obvious: why not just skip the middle step (and all the inefficienies of the process) and power our society with electricity? Rather than investing trillions of dollars on new hydrogen dispensing infrastructure for a grand "hydrogen economy," let's invest billions on upgrading the existing grid, expanding wind and solar, and producing efficient batteries that can go further per kWh.

As one electric car entrepreneuer told me recently, the next big breakthrough in getting more miles out of electric cars is not battery technology, but transmission technology. In the same way that a car with a 5-speed transmission gets better gas milleage than one with 4-speed (given the same engine), improving transmission technology will get more miles from the same amount of energy.

Granted, hydrogen might be a preferable fuel for certain long-distance, aero-space, or military applications. But for the rest of us, it is less than ideal.

Most of us drive less than 40 miles per day, and electric cars with technology developed more than 10 years ago could go twice that on a single charge. So, the question is, why bother switching to hyrdogen as a primary fuel when, for a much smaller price tag and a $10 extension cord, we have all the infrastructure we need to transform the way our society gets around.

Tilting at Windmills

The Economist always has fantastic articles. I went back to pull up one of their articles from their cleantech issue last fall, and thought I would repost the link to their article on wind power.

More...

U.S. to Host Major Renewable Energy Event

Washington, DC [RenewableEnergyAccess.com]

The American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE) and the leading U.S. renewable energy trade associations announced that they will host The Trade Show at WIREC 2008, to be co-located with the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference (WIREC) which occurs March 4-6, 2008 in the Washington DC Convention Center.
WIREC 2008 is the third global ministerial level event on renewable energy, following on the Bonn Renewables 2004 and the Beijing 2005 global meetings. In an earlier on announcement in May about the event, Secretary Rice noted that, "diversifying our energy supplies is a key foreign policy objective of this Administration," and that, "renewable energy sources can go a long way toward breaking the 'addiction to oil' that President Bush cited in his 2006 State of the Union Address." [To read the full article, click here...]

VC-Backed Cellulosic Ethanol?

VentureBeat follows the VC-backed cleantech industry closely. This particular VentureBeat alert caught my eye because of the reported construction of a cellulosic ethanol plant.

Read on...