Whether or not you’re ready to heat your entire house using solar energy, there are some simple ways you can start going solar. Imagine how much you would save each month simply by using the sun for all your cooking needs? What you will want to look for are sun ovens, and they can satisfy all your cooking needs if so desired. You can purchase a solar cooking device for approximately one hundred dollars, and just give it about an hour or so and it is ready to go. As you can see, this is just one example of what you can do to take care of your cooking needs and save money.

If you want the luxury of a swimming pool or hot tub, you can have one that’s environmentally friendly if it’s solar powered. The traditional approach here has been with gas units or those powered by electricity. Accomplishing this is not terribly involved, and in fact you can purchase a kit to make the change from electric/gas to solar. So it is very clear that you can take advantage of the benefits of solar power to heat your pool or anything else.

Solar energy can easily be used with greenhouses to help your plants stay healthy and grow better. What you can also do is buy material that will protect the plants from extremes of outside weather changes. That approach will make it possible to grow the plants you like regardless of how low the temps drop.

A solar powered greenhouse can maintain an environment that’s warm all year round. You could even visit local nurseries to find out what they use. Growing food is another option that we are sure somebody does, and you will save even more with that.

Solar energy truly is your friend, and it is available for anyone with motivation to use it. Some people only decide to have a few solar power devices in and around their home, and that is fine too. There are also other means of alternative and renewable energy sources, so do not limit yourself in any way.

When you really look at it, solar energy and alternative energy are more popular because people are genuinely concerned about making a difference. It really does seem practical to use solar power because all the efforts are geared to making it more affordable rather than more costly. If you have been sitting on the fence with solar energy, then maybe you should take a closer look.

The Original Post is Located Here: Why Solar Energy Makes Good Sense

Airborne turbines like these depicted in this illustration could generate electricity from strong high-altitude winds. Credit: Ben Shepard, courtesy Sky WindPower

“There is a huge amount of energy available in high-altitude winds,” said researcher Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, Calif. “These winds blow much more strongly and steadily than near-surface winds, but you need to go get up miles to get a big advantage. Ideally, you would like to be up near the jet streams, around 30,000 feet.”

All told, if wind turbines miles above the planet were tethered to 10 percent of the world’s land, there is enough energy in these jet stream winds to meet world demand 100 times over, researchers said.

Jet streams are meandering belts of fast winds at altitudes between 20,000 and 50,000 feet. They shift seasonally, but are otherwise persistent features in the atmosphere. Jet stream winds are generally steadier and 10 times faster than wind near the ground, making them a potentially vast and dependable source of energy.

But how to capture the wind so high?

Kites and tethers
A number of technological schemes have been proposed to harvest energy from these high-altitude winds, including tethered, kite-like wind turbines lofted miles high. Up to 40 megawatts of electricity could be generated by current designs and transmitted to the ground via tether.

Using 28 years of weather data, the researchers developed the first-ever global survey of high-altitude wind energy.

“We found the highest wind power densities over Japan and eastern China, the eastern coast of the United States, southern Australia, and north eastern Africa,” said researcher Cristina Archer, an atmospheric scientist at California State University in Chico.

These specific areas generate roughly 10 kilowatts per square meter or more. “This is unthinkable near the ground, where even the best locations have usually less than one kilowatt per square meter,” Archer added.

The analysis also looked at some of the world’s largest cities: Tokyo, New York, Sao Paulo, Seoul and Mexico City. New York proved a prime location, as did the East Asian cities.

“For cities that are affected by polar jet streams such as Tokyo, Seoul and New York, the high-altitude resource is phenomenal,” Archer said. “New York, which has the highest average high-altitude wind power density of any U.S. city, has an average wind power density of up to 16 kilowatts per square meter.”

Tokyo and Seoul also have high wind power density, as they are both affected by the East Asian jet stream. Since Mexico City and Sao Paulo are located at tropical latitudes, they are rarely affected by the polar jet streams and only occasionally by the weaker sub-tropical jets. As a result they see lower wind power densities than the other three cities.

Issues remain
Another issue is whether implementing such devices on a wide scale could alter general air circulation patterns and thus impact local and global climate. Their simulations hint that if carried to unlikely extremes, blanketing the entire planet with such devices would cool the Earth’s surface, reduce precipitation and boost sea ice levels. However, if deployed at levels comparable to total global electricity demand, there seemed to be no detectable effect on the climate even after 70 years.

Also, fluctuating wind strength still presents a challenge when it comes to exploiting this energy source on a large scale, just as it does on the ground.

“While there is enough power in these high altitude winds to power all of modern civilization, at any specific location there are still times when the winds do not blow,” Caldeira said. Even over the best areas, the wind can be expected to fail about 5 percent of the time.

“This means that you either need back-up power, massive amounts of energy storage, or a continental or even global scale electricity grid to assure power availability,” he added. “So, while high-altitude wind may ultimately prove to be a major energy source, it requires substantial infrastructure.”

Archer told LiveScience she did not think high-altitude wind power would solve the entire planet’s energy needs by itself — “you don’t want something that’s not 100 percent reliable. But I am positive that it could play an important role.”

Archer and Caldeira detailed their findings online May 26 in the journal Energies.

By Charles Q. Choi, Special to LiveScience

The Original Post is Located Here: Miles-High Kites Could Generate Electricity

Jindo Uldolmok Tidal Power

A ceremony for the Jindo Uldolmok Tidal Power Plant was held in Uldolmok, an area off Jindo, an island in South Jeolla Province, according to the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs.

The plant, harnessing the fast tidal movement in the area, will initially generate enough electricity to power 430 households.

The construction, started in April 2005, took 12.5 billion won ($9.9 million) to complete, the ministry said. All the technologies applied to building it were locally developed.

“It’s not official, but to our knowledge, it is the second tidal power plant in the world, after the United Kingdom built a tidal power plant in 2008,” said an official at the ministry, requesting anonymity.

“Building a tidal power plant requires high technology, which we think only a few countries have obtained so far.”

According to the official, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has asked to partner with Korea on tidal power technology.

The Korean government believes the Uldolmok Tidal Power Plant is a big stride to achieving its goal of generating 5,260 gigawatt hours using tidal power by 2020.

To that end, the ministry plans to extend the facility capacity of the Uldolmok plant by 2013 to provide electricity for around 46,000 households.

The expanded plant will have a 90 megawatt capacity, 90 times what it now has, the ministry said.

If the extension is made, it will be the world’s biggest tidal power plant, according to the ministry. With the operation of the extended power plant, Korea can save 200,000 barrels of crude oil every year, the ministry said.

The ministry is also conducting feasibility surveys on the sea near Jindo for the site of two additional tidal power plants.

“Low-carbon green growth is a solution to the fast depletion of fossil fuel energy and climate change,” said Choi Jang-hyun, land vice minister, during the completion ceremony for the Uldolmok plant.

“That’s the reason we are focused on the development of the sea, which is rich in renewable energy sources,” he added. According to the ministry, Korea is also set to roll out its first wave power plant, equipped with 25.4 kilowatt capacity, in Sihwa, Gyeonggi Province by the second half of next year.

Udolmok was the historical stage for a famous sea battle between Korea and Japan during the Joseon Dynasty. Thirteen ships led by Admiral Yi Sun-sin defeated some 330 Japanese ships during the 1592-98 Imjin War, according to historical documents in Korea.

Yesterday’s ceremony was also attended by Park Jun-young, governor of South Jeolla Province, and 500 residents of Jindo. Korea imports 97 percent of its energy.

By Moon Gwang-lip

The Original Post is Located Here: Korea opens its first tidal power-generating plant

Scanning electron microscope image of typical titania nanotubes for a photocatalytic cell to produce hydrogen gas from water

A research team from Northeastern University and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has discovered, serendipitously, that a residue of a process used to build arrays of titania nanotubes-a residue that wasn’t even noticed before this-plays an important role in improving the performance of the nanotubes in solar cells that produce hydrogen gas from water. Their recently published results* indicate that by controlling the deposition of potassium on the surface of the nanotubes, engineers can achieve significant energy savings in a promising new alternate energy system.

Titania (or titanium dioxide) is a versatile chemical compound best known as a white pigment. It’s found in everything from paint to toothpastes and sunscreen lotions. Thirty-five years ago Akira Fujishima startled the electrochemical world by demonstrating that it also functioned as a photocatalyst, producing hydrogen gas from water, electricity and sunlight. In recent years, researchers have been exploring different ways to optimize the process and create a commercially viable technology that, essentially, transforms cheap sunlight into hydrogen, a pollution-free fuel that can be stored and shipped.

Increasing the available surface area is one way to boost a catalyst’s performance, so a team at Northeastern has been studying techniques to build tightly packed arrays of titania nanotubes, which have a very high surface to volume ratio. They also were interested in how best to incorporate carbon into the nanotubes, because carbon helps titania absorb light in the visible spectrum. (Pure titania absorbs in the ultraviolet region, and much of the ultraviolet is filtered by the atmosphere.)

This brought them to the NIST X-ray spectroscopy beamline at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS)**. The NIST facility uses X-rays that can be precisely tuned to measure chemical bonds of specific elements, and is at least 10 times more sensitive than commonly available laboratory instruments, allowing researchers to detect elements at extremely low concentrations. While making measurements of the carbon atoms, the team noticed spectroscopic data indicating that the titania nanotubes had small amounts of potassium ions strongly bound to the surface, evidently left by the fabrication process, which used potassium salts. This was the first time the potassium has ever been observed on titania nanotubes; previous measurements were not sensitive enough to detect it.

The result was mildly interesting, but became much more so when the research team compared the performance of the potassium-bearing nanotubes to similar arrays deliberately prepared without potassium. The former required only about one-third the electrical energy to produce the same amount of hydrogen as an equivalent array of potassium-free nanotubes. “The result was so exciting,” recalls Northeastern physicist Latika Menon, “that we got sidetracked from the carbon research.” Because it has such a strong effect at nearly undetectable concentrations, Menon says, potassium probably has played an unrecognized role in many experimental water-splitting cells that use titania nanotubes, because potassium hydroxide is commonly used in the cells. By controlling it, she says, hydrogen solar cell designers could use it to optimize performance.

* C. Richter, C. Jaye, E. Panaitescu, D.A. Fischer, L.H. Lewis, R.J. Willey and L. Menon. Effect of potassium adsorption on the photochemical properties of titania nanotube arrays. J. Mater. Chem., published online as an Advanced Article, March 27, 2009. DOI: 10.1039/b822501j

** The NSLS is part of the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory.

[relatedposts]

The Original Post is Located Here: Improving Performance of Nanotubes in Solar Cells that Produce Hydrogen Gas from Water

Swift Wind Turbine

The Swift Wind Turbine was developed by Renewable Devices in Scotland, and is the first quiet rooftop turbine that generates electricity by harnessing the power of the wind as a cost effective energy source for home, commercial, and industrial applications. The Swift generates an of average of 1,680 watts of immediate power, and can produce up to 20% of a home’s electricity with only 19 kph (12 mph) wind speeds. The Swift was designed to be environmentally sustainable in that it produces more energy in its lifetime of use than is used in the material and processes to manufacture it.

The Swift is without doubt, the quietest rooftop mount wind turbines manufactured to date. Traditional wind turbines generate some noise as the wind travels the length of the blade and also transmits unwanted vibration to the building or structure where it is mounted. The Swift, however, has been designed with an outer ring, which acts as a diffuser; so that as the wind travels down the blades, it is dispersed along the outer ring, eliminating the noise and vibration, keeping the turbine quiet. While there is some noise of course, it is less than 35 decibels (dB) at all wind speeds. To put that in context, a whisper is between 15-25dB, while normal home or background noises are measured at 40-60dB, and normal speech is measured at 65-70dB.

The Swift will be manufactured by the Michigan based Company Cascade Engineerings and is expected to generate about 2,000 kWh annual power in a good wind location. This figure should translate into about 20% of an average home power usage. If multiple units are used, then an even larger percentage of household energy can be produced. Since these units are roof mounted, commercial and industrial buildings can accommodate numerous rows of Swift wind turbines as an alternate energy source. Installation of a Swift wind turbine not only reduces the amount of electricity used from conventional means, but also reduces carbon emissions and lowers the electric bill.

Swift Wind Turbine

The Swift is also relatively small, with a ring/blade diameter of only 7-feet. Installation requires a clearance of only 2-feet from the roofline, keeping the unit with a low profile footprint. The small size, together with the quietness of energy production, enables the turbine to be used effectively in both urban and suburban settings. Another factor, which may encourage the use of a Swift wind turbine for community or business use in the U.S., is a 30% federal tax credit – the credit is 30 percent off the total project cost including installation expenses, whether it is for one turbine or ten.

The Swift is grid connected, with utilization of the electricity generated by the turbine before supplementation from the traditional electric supply. The electric power produced is 240VAC, with 60Hz output voltage, while the rated power output is 1.5W @ 14 m/s. The annual power supplied by one Swift is up to 2,000 kWh with at least 19kph (12 mph) wind supply. The manufacturer does provide a “wind estimator” on their website where potential users can determine if the wind turbine will work effectively in their location. Use of an anemometer or securing a detailed wind energy study will give more specific data for the proposed site.

The Swift has an estimated installed cost of about $10,000 – $12,000 each in the US, but there is an option to purchase the kit and “do it yourself” for around $8,500. The manufacturer states, “depending on the installed price, cost of electricity, average wind speed, and rebates available, the Swift Wind Turbine can pay for itself in as little as 3 years.” However, for most users a substantially longer time period will be required to recover the full cost.

[relatedposts]

The Original Post is Located Here: Swift Wind Turbine