Lifeboat Foundation

India just laid the foundations for what officials are claiming will be the world’s largest renewable energy park. The gigantic project, in the Kutch region of western Gujarat, will cover an area of 180, 000 acres — an area roughly the size of Singapore, as Agence France-Presse reports.

Once finished, the park will produce 30 gigawatts of electricity from both wind turbines and solar arrays, thereby cutting carbon dioxide emissions by up to 50 million tons per year. For perspective, the protagonists in the 1985 film “Back to the Future” needed to generate a staggering 1.21 gigawatts of power to activate their time machine — and this new facility will produce more than 24 times that figure.

“The hybrid renewable energy park will be largest in the world and generate 30, 000 megawatts of power,” prime minister Narendra Modi said during the park’s official inauguration, according to AFP.

Have you ever dreamed of building an actual house using your very own grown-up, sustainable version of LEGO? Meet Brikawood, the company making that dream a reality and transforming the modular home business.

Brikawood creates wooden bricks that interlock to create walls. This allows builders to assemble and disassemble an entire home without the use of glue, nails or screws. The wood-brick walls then get filled with wood shavings left over from the manufacturing of Brikawood bricks. These insulate both temperature and sound, which improve energy efficiency and peace of mind.

Continue reading “Take a look at these houses made out of wooden LEGO-like bricks” »

“During the summer disturbances in Washington, D.C., a top local military police officer asked the D.C. National Guard about deploying two military systems that seem to come out of science fiction. One, the Active Denial System (ADS), makes the target’s skin feel like it’s on fire. The other, called the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), directs intense sound in a narrow cone. The sound is so clear and so powerful that it was nicknamed “the voice of God.” I encountered both systems, one at Quantico, Virginia, the other in Falluja, Iraq. Here’s what I saw.”

DOD has two crowd control systems that are straight out of science fiction. One uses direct energy to create a burning sensation on exposed skin. The other is so loud that it sounds like the voice of God.

The money will go towards fuel cells powerful enough to fly a passenger plane.

The new batteries would be safer, more compact, and more energy-dense.

Hydropower has been around for more than a century, and is currently the nation’s largest source of clean, domestic, renewable electricity. What could its role look like in the year 2050?

Providing about 7 percent of the nation’s electricity, hydropower supports more than 143, 000 jobs in engineering, manufacturing, construction and utility operations and maintenance — all while improving the environment and strengthening our economy. Additionally, pumped-storage hydropower represents 97 percent of all energy storage in the United States, offering the flexibility and reliability the electricity grid needs to deliver affordable clean energy to American homes and businesses.

So what does the future of hydropower look like? To answer that question, over the past two years the Energy Department has collaborated with more than 300 experts from more than 150 hydropower industry companies, environmental organizations, state and federal governmental agencies, academic institutions, electric power system operators, research institutions and other stakeholders to explore how it could evolve in the coming decades.

BOEM is responsible for offshore renewable energy development in Federal waters. The program began in 2009, when the Department of the Interior (DOI) announced the final regulations for the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Renewable Energy Program, which was authorized by the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct). These regulations provide a framework for all of the activities needed to support production and transmission of energy from sources other than oil and natural gas. BOEM anticipates future development on the OCS from these general sources:

Offshore Wind Energy

Offshore wind is an abundant, domestic energy resource that is located close to major coastal load centers. It provides an efficient alternative to long-distance transmission or development of electricity generation in these land-constrained regions.

Did you know iron could burn? The combustion of iron powder seen here is taking place on an entirely smokeless, carbon free basis.

Tested in microgravity aboard ESA sounding rockets by a team from McGill University in Canada and Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, this technique has now been harnessed by Swinkels Family Brewers in the Netherlands, helping to free their brewing process from reliance on fossil fuels.

Continue reading “Iron’s in the Fire: Smokeless, Carbon Free Combustion” »

The advent of “big battery” technology addresses a key challenge for green energy – the intermittency of wind and solar.