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GamesPosts Tagged: ‘solar power’
Island Power: El Hierro and Renewable Energy
by Ben Bowlin | July 21, 2011
Often called “The Meridian Island,” El Hierro is the smallest of the Canary Islands. It’s a haven for diving enthusiasts, and it may soon become the first island powered entirely by renewable energy. At a first glance, this might not seem like a big deal. After all, El Hierro is only about 107 square miles [...]
Isang Litrong Liwanag (in English, the phrase means “A Liter of Light”) is a Philippines-based organization aiming to build indoor lighting in one million homes throughout the country by 2012. Ambitious plans are par for the course when it comes to humanitarian efforts, but this group is a little bit different. They’re not installing electrical outlets or building [...]
Have you looked at the moon lately? It’s fascinating. And, if a certain Japanese construction firm has its way, it could also become the answer to Earth’s burgeoning energy crisis. Look, I know it might sound like I made this one up, but it’s true: The R&D group at Shimizu, one of Japan’s largest construction firms, [...]
Is our sun a musician? Yeah, it can bust out some tunes if you hand it an instrument — or devise a way to convert its rhythms and pulses into audible sound (discussed in this Space Music post). But what happens when this G-type main sequence star teams up with another musical heavyweight? Nope, I’m not talking about Jay-Z. We’re talking the Earth’s atmosphere.
Can I use a space mirror to melt my driveway ice?
by Robert Lamb | January 13, 2011
The roads of Atlanta will hopefully be thawed soon, but in contemplating an iced-over driveway, the inevitable question arises: Could I use a giant space mirror to concentrate sunlight down to melt my driveway free? In this post we’ll look at the Russian Znamya space mirror project, a plan for a Nazi super weapon, schemes to hack the planet and schemes to turn Mars into Arizona. But what about our driveways?
“TRON” Style Beam-propelled Solar Sailing
by Robert Lamb | December 6, 2010
The original movie “TRON” featured a breathtaking scene in which a Solar Sailer zips across the virtual world of the Grid on a beam of concentrated energy. The new film, “TRON: Legacy” will provide moviegoers with an updated vision of the vehicle (skip to 2:09 in the trailer) when it opens this week. The coolest part, however, is that this might become humanity’s actual means of traveling to other star systems.
Artificial Leaf Generates Electricity
by Sarah Dowdey | September 29, 2010
Sometimes nature is made to imitate art in startling ways. Consider the tree cathedral in Bergamo, Italy: 1,800 fir poles lashed together with chestnut and hazel branches to create a cathedral with five aisles. Eventually, 42 beeches will grow inside the startling mountainside structure designed by the late environmental artist Giuliano Mauri to celebrate the International Year of Biodiversity.
World’s Largest Solar Thermal Project Gets a Green Light
by Sarah Dowdey | September 20, 2010
Solar energy, long the linchpin of microgrids and home-energy production, is about to scale up big. In the past three weeks, the California Energy Commission has licensed solar projects with planned energy outputs totaling 1,500 megawatts annually. The biggest of these plants, the Blythe Solar Power Project, got its approval just this week. When the four-part project in the Mojave Desert is complete, it’s expected to produce 1,000 megawatts of energy — a stat that would make it the biggest solar producer in the world.
How large-scale energy storage works for solar and wind power plants
by Marshall Brain | August 27, 2010
One of the problems with solar power plants is the fact that they shut down at night. The same holds true of wind turbines when the wind stops blowing. We discussed this last week:
In theory, wind power would allow several coal-fired power plants to shut down, but since you can’t rely on wind-power, the coal fired plants need to be kept online and hot for when the wind dies.
To solve this problem, there needs to be a way to store power and send it out to the grid in a steady stream. One of the easier ways to do that with solar power is to store solar energy as heat, as demonstrated here…
What if you want to heat water to a higher temperature, like boiling, because you would like to use it to run an air conditioning system or a home heating system? (this page shows how a solar-powered air conditioner works). The best alternative currently available is an evacuated tube solar collector, like this…
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