Mother Earth News reports that a DIY homebrew car, “MAX Wins 800-mile Race, without Gas.”
The challenge was to drive from Berkeley to Las Vegas without using petroleum based fuel, and without buying any fuel directly. This is a step in the MAX team’s attempt to win the $10 million automotive X-Prize for a 100 MPG […]
BioPro automation YouTube
From the Freeways To Fuel website, linked from Green Tech Media coverage of the National Biodiesel Conference in San Francisco this month:
. . .we estimate that 10 million acres of non-traditional agronomic lands are available to grow about 1 billion million gallons of biodiesel feedstock on our country’s rights-of-way.
Daryl Hannah made news at […]
Here’s a direct link to the Instructables page for a thousand watt wind turbine project.
“We built a 1000 watt wind turbine to help charge the battery bank that powers our offgrid home. It’s a permanent magnet alternator, generating 3 phase ac, rectified to dc, and fed to a charge controller. The magnets spin with the […]
Do I win a prize for the most bizarre headline? While we’re digressing, what’s up with “Cardinals” as a football team name? I think it’s fine for Abner Doubleday and Cooperstown, but on the gridiron a tweety bird is like a boy named Sue. Now give me some more tofu.
First some good news for energy […]
This Sat-urday item (what I’m calling satellite and other green/off-grid tech news) is from Cory Doctorow’s Boing Boing post about LightLane, a concept device that paints bike lanes using portable lasers from the bicycle.
Quoting the Good Magazine blog post “Superb Idea: Bike Lane That Travels With You’:
“While ridership is increasing every year, bicycle safety remains […]
Yesterday, there was a Boing Boing post about Leno’s Garage and a video featuring a magnetic levitating wind turbine, which will be delivered to Ed Begley, Jr.’s house. Jay took great pride in his own larger wind turbine. He bragged: “Mine is bigger than Ed Begley’s.”
Oddly enough, perhaps due to the “carbon footprint” needed for […]
BBC reports that the SeaGen tidal power generation project has reached its full power goal in a system test on December 18th. A Belfast Telegraph article headline proudly proclaims its local achievement “Northern Ireland tidal turbine breaks world energy record”.
Also, a front page item on Digg links to a CleanTechnica blog post titled “SeaGen Shatters […]
This Slashdot post links to an American Chemical Society article about a report by researchers here in Nevada, published in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, about the impact of turning waste coffee grounds into biodiesel.
“The resulting coffee-based fuel — which actually smells like java — had a major advantage in being more stable […]
This Oregonian article about Ty Adams describes his conversion of a recreational vehicle into a sustainability demonstration.
“It runs on biodiesel, has solar panels for its electricity and hot water, a composting toilet and channels to catch rainwater.”
See Ty’s website at SolTrekker.org or watch his SolTrekker Intro video (also embedded below) and see the Portland TV […]
Great photos from the opening of Josh Tickell’s award winning documentary film, Fuel, may be seen at The Fuel Film website. The FAQ page introduces a variety of alternative energy methods and their advantages.
The trailer for Fuel’s previous incarnation as Fields of Fuel is no longer available, but unless I’m misunderemembering, the new one takes […]
In an email message titled “watch the two videos,” Geo. McCalip wrote:
“The Algae Bioreactor Video and the HDVG Video are about 2/3 of the way down the page.”
“http://www.valcent.net/s/Home.asp”
This Google Video of a 22 minute Bloomberg interview with the Valcent founder back in June might be more accessible to various media players.
The vertical growth bioreactors […]
A Kurzweil AI report (with photo) of an article from New Hampshire’s Union Leader tells of Segway (and more successful projects) inventor Dean Kamen’s new role in automobile manufacturing.
The Stirling cycle is an external combustion design, has safety, efficiency, and energy source flexibility advantages over traditional internal combustion engines. Stirlings aren’t as susceptible to altitude […]
The “raw solar” MIT project based on Washington state inventor Doug Wood’s designs has a revamped website and is moving forward with commercial deployment.
From their FAQ page:
“Because of the simplicity of the design, and use of widely available materials, the dish has a huge potential to address the energy problems of the rapidly developing third […]
Press coverage by The Auto Channel of the Santa Monica Alt Car Expo 2008. For city folk, plug-in hybrids are the most promising new technology concept. Battery chemistry is still under development with no clear winner yet for the standard energy storage solution. From the YouTube video description:
“Southern California Edison is doing things with wind, […]
Stefan Molyneux speech from 2006 with a libertarian take on pollution, energy and the like.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j27XJ0vjr0Y
I noticed this cool Stirling engine water pump a long time ago, but never got around to blogging about it. This external combustion motor is heated with a gas burner, but there are solar powered Stirling engines you can look at online, too. Built in 1895, it originally pumped water a hundred feet into the […]
An article about Extensive Garden Roofs on the Associated Construction Publications site describes the acceptance of green roofs in the construction industry for various reasons and the shift from “intensive” to “extensive” garden roofs.
Excerpt:
“. . .thicker and heavier “intensive” garden roofs are giving way to a lighter “extensive” system, which is designed to be more […]
A biodiesel research item about E Coli at Gas 2.0 linked from a front page Digg post led me to another Gas 2.0 story about a landscaper growing 22 acres of jatropha for biodiesel, with the expectation of saving half of the $24,000 per month formerly spent on diesel at the pump.
Looks like my “grow […]
The Culture of Permaculture blog has a couple of cool posts that caught my attention (via Google Alerts). One is a link to the World Food Garden site and the other is a link to the Permaculture: Quiet Revolution video.
[Update: The IPC 8 video seems to have gone missing. Fine. Let’s watch this cool BBC […]
Josh Tickell’s movie, Fields of Fuel, which promotes biodiesel over petroleum based fuel, won the audience prize at Sundance 2008 for the Best Documentary. The cast list includes Barbara Boxer, Richard Branson, Sheryl Crow, Laurie David, Larry David, James Gennaro, Larry Hagman, Woody Harrelson, Jay Inslee, Jack Johnson, Bud McFarlane, Willie Nelson, Director Josh Tickell, […]
From YouTube Description:
“Google is already investing $10 million into its RechargeIT plug-in vehicle program,and plans to make investments into green cars this summer through the plug-in program. The Google RechargeIT team also made this short video clip to explain what their 7-week drive test was all about.”
Researchers have done the math on how much CO2 would be offset by more reflective cityscapes.
Given the day of financial reckoning to come, only delayed a bit by GWB’s bailout (the largest since the Great Depression), maybe ”Get Out Of Town” would have been a more helpful headline for you. But enough of my obsessions.
White […]
Here’s a debate between Paul Ehrlich and George Carlin (even if they never met). But first, some background on why I embedded their respective YouTube videos.
My motivation for this blog about permaculture is “carbon neutral.” Do ignorant government politicians use pseudoscience to whip up bogus threats? All the time. But do corporations cover their ass […]
The Domestic Fuel article, “World’s Biggest Camelina Grower Fueling Biodiesel Production,” has much to say about the virtues of Camelina. Here is just one of them:
“Camelina does not take away from land currently being utilized for food production because it has the ability to grow on marginal land utilizing very little moisture.”
A recent BioDiesel Magazine article announced that researcher Zhiyou Wen, “assistant professor of biological engineering systems at Virginia Tech’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences,” has converted biodiesel byproduct “crude glycerin” into Omega-3 fatty acids using microalgae.
“After the fatty acids are produced, the algae can be used as animal feed. The animals are then consumed […]
“Why Changing Your Lightbulbs Doesn’t Matter,” a rant at EcoGeek by Hank Green, is also a front page item at Digg.
Internet sensation Hank Green’s personal site is more interesting than the usual boring resume page. And it links to his YouTube channel, where you can see proof of his sensationhood:
A commenter at Digg cited a […]
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore said he grew tobacco among other crops on the family farm in Carthage, Tennessee during summer vacations in his youth. Gore also likened what he views as today’s suppression of global warming evidence by Big Oil to the cover up long ago by Big Tobacco of the health risks […]
Last Thursday, Al Gore challenged the U.S. to stop using fossil fuels in ten years. He discussed his plan and the reactions to it Sunday on Meet The Press.
Wind power may be viewed as an indirect form of solar energy moving the atmosphere, but megawatt production (like the Pickens Plan) is restricted to select wind […]
Readers have asked (via email) for an off-grid-friendly fuel making how-to article.
A process that looks simple is found at kitchen-biodiesel.com. The “Automatic Alternative” shown below the animation is one of their sponsor’s systems.
Don’t take the abbreviated animated GIF thumbnail I made from images there as the whole process. Make sure to actually visit their site […]
Cassava is “Africa’s Food Security Crop” according to the World Bank.
A CNN report about Nigerian civil engineer, Dr Joseph Adelegan, and his projects to convert waste into useful commodities, describes his latest idea to recover energy from cassava processing waste, which in the past would be dumped untreated to pollute local water supplies.
Through innovative biogas […]
J. Kent Hastings
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