Energy

Making Wind Viable: How To Reduce Power Losses Of Downstream Turbines

Wind energy is getting a lot of attention and a lot of money- it just isn't generating a lot of electricity yet, no matter what gets claimed in rosy projections. In the real world, they do quite poorly and building more of them doesn't fix it.  ...

Article - News Staff - May 22 2014 - 11:54pm

Straw From Oilseed: A New Source Of Biofuels

Bright yellow fields of oilseed rape are a common sight at this time of year but what lies beneath is a lot more exciting. Straw from crops such as wheat, barley, oats and oilseed rape is seen as a potential source of biomass for second generation biofuel ...

Article - News Staff - May 23 2014 - 10:33am

Is A Viable Hydrogen-Powered Car Finally On The Horizon?

Hydrogen as a fuel source sounds wonderful- its byproduct is water and it releases no CO2. The problem is that compressed hydrogen is scary while uncompressed hydrogen means hauling a container the size of a bus behind your car. Some people are okay with l ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 13 2014 - 3:02am

New Ohio Law Requires Wind Turbines To Be Built Farther From Homes

Wind energy advocates were pressing Ohio Governor John Kasich to use his line-item veto to remove what they called an anti-wind-energy provision from a tax-cutting budget bill – a requirement that new installations be built further away from property lines ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 16 2014 - 10:03pm

Net Energy, Not Just Minimizing Cost Of Production, Should Be Part Of Energy Analysis

Anti-nuclear activists have done everything they can to keep the best green energy available, out of America, continuing a successful blockade they got President Clinton to implement 20 years ago. Back then, they misstated the science and insisted any nuc ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 25 2014 - 8:42am

Getting Wind Turbines Out Of The 13th Century

Though wind farms are touted as a viable part of our clean energy future, those sleek turbines are made of a decidedly low-tech core material: balsa wood. Like other manufactured products that use sandwich panel construction to achieve a combination of li ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 25 2014 - 8:30pm

Geothermometer For Methane Formation Developed

Methane is a simple molecule, it consists of a carbon atom bound to four hydrogen atoms.  But it is the key component in the natural gas that has led to lower CO2 emissions in America and due to that it is getting some attention in global warming that was ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 27 2014 - 1:32pm

Lithium-Sulfur Batteries May Make Electric Cars Viable

If you own an electric car, you spend a lot of time thinking about where you will recharge it- and how long it will take. In Silicon Valley, where electric cars are the newest fad, charge rage is leading to lost productivity due to hostile emails about som ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2014 - 9:34pm

Solar Energy: How Do Plastic Solar Panels Work?

We all have some idea how solar panels work by now; a photovoltaic cell gets bombarded by photons from the sun, which knocks loose electrons that flow as electricity, hopefully while wasting as little energy in the form of heat as possible. Beyond that, i ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 1 2014 - 9:34am

Lithium-Ion Batteries Last 30 Percent Longer With A Silicon Sponge

Batteries are common in the devices we use- everything from electric cars to laptops. Unfortunately the last real breakthrough in battery technology was lithium-ion and it's been 25 years of not much since. We're no longer using a 386 PC but our ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 8 2014 - 8:35am