Industrial Revolution 2

Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: A Dirt-Bag Fuel Cell

A simple microbial fuel cell could offer reliable power in the developing world.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009
By Kristina Grifantini
A startup that is striving to bring energy to countries that lack reliable power has developed a remarkably simple new microbial fuel-cell design: grain bags, stuffed with metal and dirt. Lebônê, a startup based at Harvard University, has already shown how to make fuel cells from buckets full of wastewater, with a graphite cloth as the anode and chicken wire as the cathode. In this setup, bacteria extract electrons from organic waste at the anode to generate small amounts of power–enough to charge, say, a flashlight or cell phone.

Here’s the article…

Technorati Tags:
Emerging Tech for Energy, Sustainable Energy

Technology Review:
The first prototype cell to use photonic crystals looks promising.

By Prachi Patel-Predd

Researchers at MIT have unveiled a new type of silicon solar cell that could be much more efficient and cost less than currently used solar cells. Materials science and engineering professor Lionel Kimerling and his colleagues presented results of the first device prototype at a recent meeting of the Materials Research Society in Boston.

The design combines a highly effective reflector on the back of a solar cell with an antireflective coating on the front. This helps trap red and near-infrared light, which can be used to make electricity, in the silicon. The research team is licensing similar technology to StarSolar, a startup in Cambridge, MA.

Here’s the rest of the article…

AFP:

France sets plan to double green share of electricity market

“Solar is the big one.”

PARIS (AFP) — France on Monday published details of plans to double the share of renewable sources in its electricity market to meet a 2020 EU objective.

Solar will spearhead the challenge to give renewables a 23-percent share of the electricity mix by 2020, compared with 10.3 percent in 2005, Ecology Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said, as he unveiled the 50-point plan.

“Solar is the big one,” said Borloo. “In industrial terms, and in terms of lower industrial costs, it’s there that we have the biggest capacity.”

He contended that solar energy would be competitive with other sources “around 2020.”

Here’s the article…

Architecture 2030 E-news:

“What’s Your 2030 IQ? Take the Quiz and Test Your Knowledge “

Editor’s Comment:

How many days per year of oil will the expanded off-shore drilling in the outer continental shelf give us (in a minimum of ten years per)?

How many nuclear power plants would we need to replace todays energy consumption (at a minimum of $6 billion per)?

Technorati Tags:
Climate Change, USA Drilling, Nuclear Power

Comment: Here is series of articles from the New York Times on issues around sustainable energy.

A Series – The Energy Challenge – NYTimes.com: “A SERIES
The Energy Challenge”

(Via A Series – The Energy Challenge – NYTimes.com.)