Industrial Revolution 2

GreenBeat 2009: Meet the Super Grid bankers | VentureBeat.

Tue, Jan 20, 2009

What we are about to present is called industrial symbiosis. It’s an application of the broad emerging field of industrial ecology, a hybrid of technological, Earth, economical and social sciences aimed at sustainable development and efficiency. At its core lies the biological analogy according to which facilities related to industry are regarded as inherent or embedded in the ecosystem.

The essential idea is this: The more an industrial complex resembles a biological system (from the material and energy flow point of view), the better and more effective it is.

Here’s the article…

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Industrial Ecology

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…

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Emerging Tech for Energy, Sustainable Energy

Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Dispelling Carbon Capture’s Scaling Myth

Dispelling Carbon Capture’s Scaling Myth
Pipelines needed to deploy CCS technology pose little impediment, according to an overlooked national lab study.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
By Peter Fairley

PNNL estimates that CO2 pipeline build (red or blue) will look slim compared with natural-gas pipeline growth (yellow). [Larger image]
Credit: PNNL
Critics of carbon capture and storage (CCS) often deride the scale of infrastructure required for CCS to make a meaningful dent in global carbon emissions–not just in equipment to capture emissions at power plants (and other “point” sources of CO2), but also in pipelines to move the captured CO2 to storage sites. But an overlooked recent study by t

Here’s the article…

GridPoint

Project Extends Xcel Energy and GridPoint Business Relationship

ARLINGTON, VA – Nov. 18, 2008 – GridPoint, Inc., a leading clean tech company whose smart grid software platform benefits electric utilities, consumers and the environment, announced today that Xcel Energy selected GridPoint’s software platform to control the flow of power between the grid and a NGK Insulators’ sodium-sulfur battery storing wind energy. When fully charged, the one-megawatt battery will hold approximately 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity, potentially powering 500 homes for over seven hours. This is the first U.S. application of the battery as a direct wind energy storage device.

The GridPoint Platform applies information technology to the electric grid to provide utilities with an intelligent network of distributed energy resources that controls load, stores energy and produces power. It will allow Xcel Energy to explore using real-time grid conditions and energy pricing to determine when the battery charges or discharges. Based on system regulation and pricing signals received by the software platform, the battery’s charging behavior will be adaptively controlled. When the demand for electricity is high, as an example, stored wind energy could be automatically discharged to the grid, supplementing the power flow. When demand is low, the software platform could issue commands for the battery to store the available energy. (more…)

Better Place:

21st Century Initiative in California Defines Roadmap for Sustainable Transportation, Green Job Growth and Opportunity to Reinvigorate Region’s Competitive Advantage

Better Place Announces Support of California Governor’s and SF Bay Area Mayors’ Commitments to Build Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure
San Francisco, Calif. (Nov 20, 2008)

– At a press conference held in San Francisco City Hall, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, along with the Mayors of San Francisco, San Jose and Oakland, joined together with the Bay Area Council, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, and Better Place of Palo Alto to announce a sweeping plan to reinvigorate the state and region’s competitive advantage in innovative technology through public-private investments in electric vehicles and other elements of “green” infrastructure. This new approach challenges conventional assumptions that economic and environmental recovery are at odds with each other, and aligns them, instead.

The group defined a vision for encouraging investment in green infrastructure as a means for boosting the state’s competitive advantage while reducing its dependence on oil for transportation and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The group believes that the move to a sustainable mobility model of electric vehicles fueled by renewable energy, beginning in the Bay area, will serve as an economic and environmental stimulus blueprint for the entire country, particularly the nation’s lagging automotive sector. (more…)