renewables
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Keystone ‘victory’ is nothing of the sort, say testy wonks
Enviros’ opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline has succeeded in delaying or possibly even deep-sixing a project that would have carried oil from the tar sands in Canada to refineries in Texas (and over a drinking water aquifer and the epicenter of a bunch of earthquakes). But not everyone is celebrating. Professional wet blanket Michael […]
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Evil mad scientists are clearly behind all energy innovations
Internet hilarity repository Cracked has a roundup of energy solutions that sound more like mad scientist plots. They go from "human body heat" all the way up to "giant invisible energy death ray," and they're pretty awesome. Here, for example, is an electric eel powering a Christmas tree! In perhaps the most uncreative vision of […]
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Solar and wave power solution: Fill the ocean with balls
Designer Phil Pauley wants to coat our oceans with floating solar cell-covered balls. Their buoyancy could also make them viable as a wave-power system. It's purely conceptual at this stage, and with good reason: Until recently, wave power hasn't fared well as an alternative energy. Anything that goes in the ocean is subject to immense […]
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New ‘fish-friendly’ turbine means way more hydro power
Every year, the U.S. forgoes 8,500 megawatts of electricity because operating our hydro power facilities at full capacity would turn an unacceptable number of migratory fish into Li'l Lisa Slurry. (That's the equivalent of almost nine nuclear reactors' worth of lost baseload power.) So scientists and utilities are understandably pumped about the Alden Fish-Friendly Turbine, […]
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Plane flies 200 miles in two hours on just electricity
Pipistrel-USA's Taurus G4 won the NASA's CAFE Green Flight Challenge (top prize $1.35 million!) by flying 200 miles in under two hours, using an amount of electricity equivalent to less than two gallons of gas. Google sponsored the competition, which is supposed to stimulate the “electric plane industry.” Who even knew there was an electric […]
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German state minister: The Kochs are ruining U.S. renewables
Ever wonder why Germany has a robust renewables economy, while the U.S. keeps claiming it's not achievable? Here's a theory from Franz Unterskeller, German state minister for the environment, climate, and energy:
We don't have the situation like you have in the U.S., where you have this Koch brothers.
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Coal energy drink keeps you going — until it all runs out
Brought to you by the comedians at the Renewable Energy Accountability Project.
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Here’s a win-win: Geothermal power can make lithium for electric vehicles
Existing geothermal power plants are powered by a hot brine from deep within the earth's crust, which is just lousy with dissolved minerals -- literally "half the periodic table," reports Scientific American. One of those elements is lithium, which can be extracted from the geothermal fluid that existing power plants in California's Salton Sea are already pulling out of the ground.
This is remarkable on many levels at once.
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Navy Secretary says getting off fossil fuels is just like ditching sail power
Ray Mabus, Secretary of the U.S. Navy, has a refreshing historical perspective on the Navy's efforts to end its dependence on our increasingly expensive and environmentally destructive supplies of oil. From a speech he recently gave at the National Clean Energy Summit 4.0:
In the 1850s, we went from sail to coal. In the early 19th century, we went from coal to oil, and in the 1950s, we pioneered nuclear.