Alternative Energy

• The Top 10 Green Energy Stories Today

  1. The Department of the Interior has given the green light to a power transmission line that is intended to bring power from Google, Inc.- backed offshore wind farms in the Northeast of the US to the mainland. Environmental impact studies will take 18 months to two years. The US, unlike Germany, so far has no offshore wind farms, and the US electricity grid needs to be re-done so as to bring power from such sources to consumers.2. Inexpensive natural gas is being preferred to coal in the US, so that coal electricity generation has fallen 19 percent in the…

• Japan Shuts Down Last Nuclear Plant - What Now?

  On 5 May Hokkaido Electric Power shut down the No. 3 reactor at the utility's Tomari Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in the Hokkaido village of Tomari, the last of Japan’s 54 NPPs that were still functioning after the crisis caused after the 11 March 2011 earthquake and subsequent tsunami that destroyed Tokyo Electric Power Company’s six reactor Fukushima Daiichi power complex.According to preliminary estimates, fiscal losses from the disaster and the subsequent shuttering of the NPPs are to over $300 billion and rising.The event is hardly insignificant, as Japan was without electricity from nuclear power for the first time in…

• Proof that the Solar Industry is on the Brink of a Huge Expansion

  A new report from the prominent global consulting firm McKinsey shows why solar photovoltaics have hit a tipping point.As the economics of solar PV continue to improve steadily and dramatically, McKinsey analysts conclude that the total “economic potential” of solar PV deployment could reach 600-1,000 gigawatts (1 million megawatts) by 2020.In the year 2000, the global demand for solar PV was 170 megawatts.That doesn’t mean 1 million megawatts will get developed by 2020; it’s just an estimate of the economic competitiveness of solar PV. When factoring in real-word limitations like the regulatory environment, availability of financing, and infrastructure capabilities, the…

• The US Solar Revolution: Sometimes Smaller is Bigger

  Solar, wind and geothermal power sources accounted for only around 1.5 percent of US energy consumption last year, but a number of factors are merging to make solar a more realistic option, from the failure of the first round of high-profile projects to the redirecting of government land for renewable power programs and the emerging trend of leasing solar energy systems to make them more affordable. It was to much fanfare on 4 May that the US unveiled its first large-scale solar power project on federal land in Clark County, Nevada. The project will produce enough energy to power some…

• Overcoming the Impossible: Developing Nuclear Fusion

  The ITER project, an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor,  seeks to do the possible with impractical tools. There is no doubt that humanity can accomplish fusion in a quick and dirty way by making a bomb, or run reactions that don’t produce useful amounts of energy outputs, but unlike fission the ability to run a steady state reaction that produces more energy than it takes to drive the reaction eludes us.The ITER effort is based on the tokamak, a donut looking thing that circulates fuel plasma around endlessly at temperatures and pressures that could get a net energy gain…

• South Africa to use Oceanic Currents for 24/7 Uninterrupted Renewable Energy

  Renewable power faces a number of hurdles in gaining wide-scale acceptance.The first is the world’s commitment to “traditional” power sources, in which trillions of dollars have been invested – coal, hydrocarbons, and for the past five decades, nuclear.This fixation leave many renewable energy projects starved for investment, though as oil prices continue to rise and technology improves, the picture is slowly changing.The final and perhaps most significant hurdle however, is renewable energy’s inability to provide uninterrupted electricity 24/7 – the wind doesn’t always blow, and the sun does not shine for 24 hours a day.There is a source of renewable…

• Uranium Stocks are Massively Undervalued

  Sell-offs in today’s increasingly volatile markets can be lethal to those psychologically and financially not prepared for such fluctuations, but for the prepared, it is simply more than an opportunity to buy assets at discounted prices. This is doubly true for sectors that are more volatile than the broad market and the major indices tend to be. And one such sector is uranium. The fundamental story behind uranium is simple: more nuclear reactors are coming online, and these reactors need uranium as fuel. Moreover, the Megatons to Megawatts arrangement, by which Russian nuclear warheads were downblended and sold to the…

• A Wealth of New Uranium Deposits Discovered around the World

  The Athabasca basin of Canada hosts some of the world’s largest and highest-grade uranium mines of similar aged rocks. Last week Fission Energy Corp. and its 50% joint venture partner ESO Uranium reported a significant anomalous radioactivity was encountered in the final hole of the companies’ Patterson Lake South property exploration program.Fission Energy Patterson Lake Uranium Prospect Property.The Fission exploration follows a find by Hathor Exploration Ltd.. But Fission has a much superior land holding and their find so close to Hathor, which is following the Hathor strike suggests that Fission may have the bulk of the uranium reserve.Uranium Core…

• Solar Cells that can be Painted or Printed Onto Materials

  Scientists at USC think they have the material made of nanocrystals that could be painted on surfaces for making a solar cell. If the team gets to commercial market, the projection is a pathway to cheap, stable solar cells made with a liquid ink that can be painted or printed onto clear surfaces. Richard L. Brutchey, assistant professor of chemistry at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences and USC postdoctoral researcher David H. Webber developed the new surface coating for the nanocrystals, which are made of the semiconductor cadmium selenide. Their research was featured as a “hot…

• New Nanotechnology That Turns Windows Into Transparent Solar Panels

  Our modern world is consuming energy at insatiable rates. The high-tech complexity of contemporary society has created a demand for energy resources that are both easily accessible and infinitely available, and unfortunately the energy sources of yesterday simply do not hold up to the rapid evolution of the times. Perhaps the major flaw in our previous approach to discovering a renewable energy source was not the narrowness, but the broadness of our scientific focus. Yesterday’s Energy Market looked towards monumentally visible energy sources like Oil, blindly clinging to the notion that material visibility equated to energetic abundance. However, the energy…