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POPSTransparent Solar Cells Become Safer Previously, transparent solar cells used toxic liquids that were prone to evaporating. A new method uses safer and less-volatile ingredients. The result is a bit less efficient than opaque photovoltaics, but their transparency and their acceptance of a much wide incident angle of light means that things like windows and skylights can also be energy collectors. (Note - the picture is not of these new cells)
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POPSTurning Waste Coal into Diesel It looks like the end result of this, diesel fuel, is slightly less polluting than low-sulphur diesel fuel created from petroleum, but it still produces roughly the same amount of carbon dioxide. The positive aspects are that it provides a way to take "waste coal", the stuff that has not enough energy content to be useful in existing coal-burning applications, and transforms it into a fuel that can be used in cars or power-generation plants instead of petroleum-based fuel. I suppose if it's cost-effective, it's one more way to reduce our consumption of foreign oil, but the CO2 generation still irks me. Oh, well. I'll get over it. :-)
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POPSPower from Not-So-Hot Geothermal It would seem that this technology could also be used in the many places where we use water for cooling other things. Take the hot water from a power plant and run it through this generator before sending it to the cooling tower.
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POPSBiomass Fuels from Industrial Waste Sites I'm looking forward to seeing the results of this experiment. Can't use the brownfields to grow food crops, because industrial contaminants would be harmful to consumers. But, using these areas to grow fuel crops might work well, and could even lead to a gradual reduction in pollution. Hopefully, they're also looking at whether plowing these areas promotes a spread of contamination as a natural result of rain or irrigation runoff. Click through to read lots more at the Michigan State University site.
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POPSBiofuels is a false hope? An interesting article, but misleading with its statistics. For example, it uses the current measure of cropland acreage to project the potential yield of future ethanol harvests, but it ignores: 1 - biomass crops can grow well where food crops do not; 2 - biomass crops can yield other products in addition to ethanol; 3 - burning ethanol produces less CO2 than burning oil. Overall, I agree that it's a foolish path to replace food with fuel. However, I do believe that replacing some of our petroleum consumption with ethanol is a necessary part of a successul path forward, along with solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and other clean sources, and let's not forget improved efficiencies (e.g., low power lights and increased miles per gallon) and conservation. Click through for the rest of the original article for more details, including some good points about why recent comparisons of Brazil's ethanol program are not as relevant to the US as you might think.
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POPSHydrogen Fuel Cell Toy Car I bought one, and it works amazingly well. Use batteries or a solar panel to create hydrogen from water. With batteries, it takes about 30 seconds to "fill" the car, which then converts the hydrogen back to electricity and runs for over a minute.
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