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Archive for the 'green' Category

18 Jun

Tech picture of the day - 18th of June 2008

The wind/solar recharge Pod by Orange will be able to charge up to 100 mobile telephones per hour in this year’s Glastonbury festival [Smartplanet via Engadget]

12 Jun

Portugal’s impressive transition to renewable energy

Source: Guardian
With regions blessed by Europe’s highest solar radiation, Portugal is not leaving its energy issues to chance. Already having the currently largest photovoltaic energy farm in the world, another PV farm that is currently under construction in the Moura region will reach 45MW to power 30,000 homes.
But things are not stopping there, Portugal is [...]

09 May

Moving from IT to green tech entrepreneurship - Why?

Being an entrepreneur means continuously searching for new opportunities and trends that will pay off in the hopefully not so distant future. IT is the classic playground for risk capital opportunists, and has indeed paid off for some of them quite handsomely. Earth2tech has a list of 25 successful IT entrepreneurs that have now turned [...]

03 Apr

Road energy system collects solar energy to heat buildings

Source: Ooms Avenhorn
Think of this system as a massive heat exchanger. Pipes underneath the asphalt carry water that is heated during the day from solar energy and then stored underground for later use. When the weather turns cold, this very same heated water forms the basis for the heating of buildings.
You think it’s a joke? [...]

14 Mar

SoCal Edison builds 4.5 GW wind farm in California

The world is not short of plans for large zero emission energy production projects. ElectronRun has so far covered several solar projects or proposals worldwide -see links below. The Southwest states of the US are blessed with lots of sunshine, a fact that has recently led to several large solar project plans in this corner [...]

03 Mar

Are vertical greenhouses finally coming thanks to China?

Source: Knafo Klimor Architects
Vertical greenhouses we hear but vertical greenhouses we do not see. Maybe the urgent needs of China and a study by Knafo Klimor Architects of Israel is the perfect combination for the widespread use of a great concept.
The UN calculates that by 2010 about 50% of China’s population will reside in cities [...]

22 Feb

Energy harvesting - Part 2 - Is it really viable?

In part 1 of the series I discussed the practical difficulties for widespread energy harvesting adoption. In this second and last part, I will go through some ways that I believe would make widespread adoption easier and faster. The number of applications is huge and I would say that it is wise to divide them [...]

21 Feb

Energy harvesting - Part 1 - 5 obstacles to widespread use

A few days back I wrote about the Fluxxlab design proposal to harvest energy from revolving doors. Managing to install standalone energy producing devices is a significant event, much like when the first solar panels hit the market in the past. Therefore, I have decided to write a two part series, the first part is [...]

17 Feb

Are OTEC energy islands the answer to our energy needs?

Source: Telegraph
Big problems require large scale innovative solutions. ElectronRun has so far covered solar proposals for the energy needs of the EU and the US. Now OTEC artificial energy islands come as another large scale idea whose main energy source is water temperature differences. The idea is that when we have a difference of about [...]

12 Feb

Harvesting energy from revolving doors

Source: Fluxxlab
Remember the Matrix movie and the way humans became grown heat-producing plants to provide for their machine lords? The word “harvesting” gives me the crawls, but luckily harvesting in this world is for our own benefit and energy dependence. Interesting ideas so far are the energy harvesting from gym users or vibrations from trains [...]

05 Feb

IR radiation solar panel uses tiny antennas, has 80% efficiency

Source: Idaho National Laboratory
There is all sorts of ways to produce clean energy, but the smartest and cleanest of all is definitely solar panels. There is absolutely no moving parts, noise or intermediate materials. Just beautiful clean energy. The catch? Low efficiency that in reality is far from the theoretical 20%, high manufacturing costs and [...]

29 Jan

Skyfire brings the PC web surfing experience to smartphones (video)

Web surfing on mobile devices is a so far perenial problem and all kinds of indirect solutions are being used. Skyfire is a californian company that wants to make smartphone web surfing identical to that on a PC. Its software is free, currently in beta stage and supports embedded content like Flash 9, Quicktime and [...]

03 Jan

How solar energy could make the US energy independent

We have already written about Desertec and how it could change the energy scene in Europe. Now the January issue of Scientific American describes a project that aims even higher, by using solar energy to produce up to 3 terawatts of energy and cover 69% of US electricity and 35% of its total energy by [...]

31 Dec

The Tindo = solar powered bus = new hope!

We want to finish 2007 in a really positive note. It has been a year of black predictions for the environment but new forward looking people and technologies are promising to reverse that trend. The Tindo is such a wonderful project. It marries two clean technologies:

Electric motors driven by 11 onboard batteries.

Photovoltaic panels at the [...]

27 Dec

Good news, the US to switch to efficient light bulbs too

Saving energy is preferable to producing more of it, even if it is 100% green. Politicians have recently got the message and earlier this year EU leaders decided to follow Australia’s lead and stop the sale of incandescent light bulbs by 2010. Now the new US energy bill makes a similar move and 2012 will [...]

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