Category: Energy

South Dakota To Sport World’s Largest Windfarm

WindyAnother plan for a large wind power generation facility has arisen and this time it’s in a state that’s never been mentioned before on Things Are Good: South Dakota, USA. South Dakota is now considering a plan for creating the world’s largest windfarm!

Clipper Windpower of Carpinteria, Calif., intends to erect enough wind turbines in several South Dakota counties to produce up to 6,000 megawatts of electricity, said Bob Gates, the firm’s senior vice president of commercial operations.

That would be eight times larger than the biggest wind farm in the world, a 735-megawatt FPL Energy facility with 421 turbines stretching across three Texas counties.

More About Wonderful Algae

I love how algae can be used for almost anything. If the future is covered in algae, well, I’ll be the first to say that that’s a good thing.

Inhabitat has a post about how algae is being converted into crude biofuel.

The scientists involved in the LiveFuels project are focusing on specialized aspects of the algae-to-biocrude process. Some are breeding algae to find the best high-fat strains, others are refining the fat and oil extraction process and others still are developing cost-effective harvesting techniques. The biggest challenge is to make algae biocrude within a fraction of the time that nature’s biomass decomposition occurs and to do it economically, for less than $60 a barrel.

More Efficient Jet Travel

Princeton University is looking into the details of using biofuels in jet airplanes. The research team will examine what fuel mixture provides the best efficiency and how engines can be designed to better burn the fuels that they are bound to create.

Alternative energy sources, if designed appropriately, also could significantly reduce the amount of greenhouse gasses released in creating and burning jet fuel. According to the U.S. Department of Transportation, aviation is responsible for around 10 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions from transportation in the nation, or roughly 2.7 percent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions. The second research program, supported by NetJets, augments Dryer’s fundamental MURI work and brings in additional expertise from the Princeton Environmental Institute to develop “greener” alternative fuels.

Lights Out for Climate Change

Sydney turned of their lights earlier this year to raise awareness about climate change and now it appears that the idea is spreading. San Francisco will be powering down for an hour in the near future.

For one hour, on October 20, San Francisco will experience a partial blackout in an effort to raise awareness of climate change and to promote long-lasting energy saving.

Remember that you can save the planet everyday by conserving energy!

Algae is Gooey Power

I’m always impressed by what algae can do. It can be used to generate electricity, make us healthier, it can function as a biofuel, and can be used to clean the air. Algae can almost solve all the worlds problems!

Some enterprising researchers have found out that algae can also be tweaked to create a lot of hydrogen. Hydrogen produced by algae can then be used as a power source elsewhere.

Melis has created mutant algae that make better use of sunlight than their natural cousins do. This could increase the hydrogen that the algae produce by a factor of three. It would also boost the algae’s production of oil for biofuels.

The new finding will be important in maximizing the production of hydrogen in large-scale, commercial bioreactors. In a laboratory, Melis says, “[we make] low-density cultures and have thin bottles so that light penetrates from all sides.” Because of this, the cells use all the light falling on them. But in a commercial bioreactor, where dense algae cultures would be spread out in open ponds under the sun, the top layers of algae absorb all the sunlight but can only use a fraction of it.