The CBC has put online a short news report on a German town. Germany has been a pioneer in seeking to break the
addiction to fossil fuels. This clip is about one experiment using methane gas to produce power.
Environment
Accelerating Developments for Green Cars
A few car makers are actively trying to make our over-reliance on oil less of an issue. The most interesting one is the car made by Tesla motors.
Here is a quick round-up of recent announcements:
Toyota is thinking of making a ethanol-powered vehicle in the “near term” and is “pursing a plug-in hybrid vehicle” for the USA’s auto market.
“DaimlerChrysler has turned its popular teeny Smart car into an EV. The electric version of the Smartfortwo will be available for lease to 100 customers in Great Britain in November.”
A car made by Tesla Motors (who gets funding from Google founders and a Pay-Pal founder) has made and electric car that can accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in about four seconds.
Go green cars go!
Organic Farming Degree Offered
Washington State University has started accepting students for their organic farming degree program. This is a first in the USA, sure two other universities offer courses in organic farming, Colorado State and Michigan State, but offering a degree is new.
“WSU has high hopes for its new organic-agriculture major, both to attract new students and meet a growing demand for experts in organic farming. In the new Organic Agriculture Systems major, students will study subjects like weed science and entomology, work on the organic farm and can specialize further in areas such as organic farm economics.
The major, announced last month, drew a handful of students immediately; a university study predicts the program eventually will have about 40 people enrolled at any one time.”
A New Way to Produce Coal From Biomass
Good news from Germany!
Markus Antonietti from Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces has devised a chemical process that converts biomass like leaves, pine cones and other plant residue into wet coal (coal + water). Biomass goes into the autoclave, a kind of pressure cooker, water goes in, too, along with a citric acid catalyst. A chemical reaction takes place and coal is produced.
The single major by-product of the reaction is water, which can be filtered off. In contrast to other biomass techniques this reaction does not generate carbon dioxide. It also gives a higher energy product, which even smells acceptable.
We underestimated this when we started. We could calculate how much energy was stored in the sugar – in the leaf material. But the first time – as you see – we had a runaway reaction, which is obviously dangerous, so we need to carry it out under safe conditions.
-Markus Antonietti
See Solar Run
A solar cell absorbs a small range of light wavelengths based upon the density and width of silicon crystals. Light strikes the crystals and causes electrons to propagate along the network. We call this flow of electrons electricity.
More crystals of different widths in the network mean that more different wavelengths can be absorbed and more power can be generated. Adding different layers of crystals to absorb a wider range of wavelength is one way to increase the power, but the process to spread these crystals over a surface is very expensive and energy intensive.
Prism Solar Technologies is going a different path by splitting the incoming sunlight and concentrating specific wavelengths onto a variety of cells designed to collect those specific wavelengths, yielding 25% greater electricity yields. These concentrators and splitters are orders of magnitude cheaper to produce than solar cells and increase the power of each solar cell. Oh, by the way, the Prism splitter is clear.