technologyreview.com: By Brittany Sauser

A large-scale tidal-power unit has started up in Northern Ireland.

The world’s first commercial tidal-power system has been connected to the National Grid in Northern Ireland. Built by the British tidal-energy company Marine Current Technologies (MCT), the 1.2-megawatt system consists of two submerged turbines that are harvesting energy from Strangford Lough’s tidal currents. The company expects that once the system, called SeaGen, is fully operational, it will be able to provide electricity to approximately one thousand homes.

The system is currently being tested and has briefly generated 150 kilowatts of power into the grid. But it has also damaged one of its rotors due to a failure in the control system when the rotor began turning too fast. Although the problem was a minor setback, the unit is not expected to start running continuously and at full capacity until November, says Peter Fraenkel, the technical director at MCT. [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Prachi Patel-Predd

Materials that change temperature in response to electric fields could keep computers–and kitchen fridges–cool.

Thin films of a new polymer developed at Penn State change temperature in response to changing electric fields. The Penn State researchers, who reported the new material in Science last week, say that it could lead to new technologies for cooling computer chips and to environmentally friendly refrigerators.

Changing the electric field rearranges the polymer’s atoms, changing its temperature; this is called the electrocaloric effect. In a cooling device, a voltage would be applied to the material, which would then be brought in contact with whatever it’s intended to cool. The material would heat up, passing its energy to a heat sink or releasing it into the atmosphere. Reducing the electric field would bring the polymer back to a low temperature so that it could be reused. [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Alexandra M. Goho

Frances Arnold is designing better enzymes for making biofuels from cellulose.

In December, President Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which calls for U.S. production of renewable fuels to reach 36 billion gallons a year–nearly five times current levels–by 2022. Of that total, cellulosic biofuels derived from sources such as agricultural waste, wood chips, and prairie grasses are supposed to account for 16 billion gallons. If the mandates are met, gasoline consumption should decline significantly, reducing both greenhouse-gas emissions and imports of foreign oil. [ read more ]

wired.com: By Chuck Squatriglia

Plug-in hybrids are a great way to ease our oil addiction and do something about global warming. But it’s taken 10 years for conventional hybrids like the iconic Toyota Prius to eke out almost 3 percent of the domestic market, and nothing suggests cars with cords will take hold any faster.

For that reason, plug-in advocates say, we’ve got to figure out how to start converting a sizable chunk of the nation’s 240 million cars into gas-electric hybrids you can plug into a wall socket. There’s a handful of companies venturing down this path, but they charge as much as 12 grand to do the job and the number of cars they’ve converted would fit inside a Toyota cargo ship with room to spare. [ read more ]

cnn.com: By Michael V. Copeland

Building the world’s first electric supercar was never going to be easy - even without the hubris, infighting, and mismanagement that nearly sent Tesla spinning off the road.

For Martin Eberhard, there were many obstacles on the path to building the ultimate electric sports car. There was the scientific challenge of creating a lithium ion battery pack stable enough to power a 2,650-pound vehicle. There was the belief that Americans would stick with their gas-guzzlers, no matter what the price of oil. And there was, of course, the considerable resistance in the venture capital community to funding heavy industry.

But for Eberhard, the ultimate indignity came in early June of this year. Just days before he was finally supposed to take possession of his Tesla Roadster, a gray beauty with orange racing stripes that he had devoted the past five years of his life to building, a technician who had been driving it on the 101 freeway relayed some bad news.

[ read more ]

huffingtonpost.com: Lloyd Alter

Why is everything running out at the same time? We did a series on Planet Green where we looked at why those basic things that we take for granted, like water, food and fuel are getting expensive and scarce, all at once.

Blame Earl Butz. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s Secretary of Agriculture brought in the Farm Bill that dramatically increased the amount of corn produced in America. He encouraged farmers to “get big or get out,” and to plant crops like corn “from fence row to fence row.” Further billions in subsidies to farmers encouraged production, and soon America was awash in cheap grain, and with it cheap meat. Food costs as a portion of the American diet dropped to the lowest level in history; we became corn. Michael Pollan writes: “If you eat industrially, you are made of corn. It holds together your McNuggets, it sweetens your soda pop, it fattens your meat, it is everywhere. It is fed to us in many forms, because it is cheap- a dollar buys you 875 calories in soda pop but only 170 in fruit juice. A McDonalds meal was analyzed as almost entirely corn.” [ read more ]

naturalnews.com: David Gutierrez

A new combination of nano and solar technology has made it possible for solar electric generation to be cheaper than burning coal. Nanosolar, Inc. has developed a way to produce a type of ink that absorbs solar radiation and converts into electric current. Photovoltaic (PV) sheets are produced by a machine similar to a printing press, which rolls out the PV ink onto sheets approximately the width of aluminum foil. These PV sheets can be produced at a rate of hundreds of feet per minute.

“It’s 100 times thinner than existing solar panels, and we can deposit the semiconductors 100 times faster,” said Nanosolar’s cofounder and chief executive officer, R. Martin Roscheisen. “It’s a combination that drives down costs dramatically.” [ read more ]

technologyreview.com: By Jennifer Chu

Physicist Marin Soljacic is working toward a world of wireless electricity.

In the late 19th century, the realization that electricity could be coaxed to light up a bulb prompted a mad dash to determine the best way to distribute it. At the head of the pack was inventor Nikola Tesla, who had a grand scheme to beam elec­tricity around the world. Having difficulty imagining a vast infrastructure of wires extending into every city, building, and room, Tesla figured that wireless was the way to go. He drew up plans for a tower, about 57 meters tall, that he claimed would transmit power to points kilometers away, and even started to build one on Long Island. Though his team did some tests, funding ran out before the tower was completed. The promise of airborne power faded rapidly as the industrial world proved willing to wire up. [ read more ]

blog.wired.com: By Alexander Lew

What do you get when you cross a bus with a train? A dual-mode vehicle that has the versatility of a bus, the speed of light rail and fuel economy vastly better than either.

Toyota and its truck-making subsidiary Hino Motors have signed on with Japan Rail Hokkaido to develop the vehicles, which carry 25 people and reportedly burn one-fourth the amount of diesel fuel required by conventional buses. Japan Rail started testing them about 18 months ago, and bringing Toyota aboard could speed up development and commercialization of what may be the mass transit vehicle of the future. [ read more ]

telegraph.co.uk: By Graham Tibbetts

Tidal power has been harnessed to generate electricity for Britain’s National Grid for the first time.

The move has been hailed as a milestone in the development of marine energy, which could provide up to a fifth of Britain’s electricity needs. It came when a single turbine on the Atlantic seabed off Orkney was connected to the National Grid on Monday morning. The area off the north of Scotland is regarded as potentially one of the best in the world for tidal power and has been described as the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy”. [ read more ]