Industrial Revolution 2

GreenBeat 2009: Meet the Super Grid bankers | VentureBeat.

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

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…)

Electric Vehicle ReCharging Information Project: ”
Continental US
Electric Vehicle Recharging Infrastructure
Information Project”

(Via Electric Vehicle ReCharging Information Project.)

THE SMART GRID: INFRASTRUCTURE STRATEGY FOR THE LOW CARBON SOCIETY: “To accomplish this portfolio, the US needs a distributed infrastructure
strategy, namely a Smart Grid. With such a platform, a more diverse portfolio of solutions
can aid any country that seeks some measure of energy independence through development
of its domestic resources. There are new technologies available today, and in the near future,
that make these domestic renewable and distributed resources affordable and sustainable”

(Via THE SMART GRID: INFRASTRUCTURE STRATEGY FOR THE LOW CARBON SOCIETY.)

Technorati Tags:
Smart Grid, Power Grid