Wind power not as safe as we think?

Now before we start taking down our turbines, we have to realize that wind turbine failure is very uncommon. I’ll make the analogy to air travel. Many people are afraid to fly even though statistically its much more dangerous to travel by car. Statistics and probability do [...]

High-Altitude Wind

An article I just read mentioned this concept… its the first time i’ve heard of it. Apparently Google.org (Google’s philanthropic arm) is investing $10 million into a company (Makani Power, Inc.) with a proprietary design for harnessing high altitude wind.
The idea here is that with higher altitudes come much stronger winds.

Wind also becomes [...]

Article on CO2 and Temp correlations

This was on the word press homepage on sat afternoon. It has an article attached:
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/warming-trend-pdo-and-solar-correlate-better-than-co2/
This guy started the weather channel and shows with data that CO2 and temp changes do not correlate well (an R squared correlation of 0.44), but rather cycles in ocean, Pacific Decadel Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) correspond much [...]

Cooling in a drought

A story in today’s USA Today suggests problems in the south with lack of water and cooling of nukes.
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/drought/2008-01-24-drought-power_N.htm
In NJ we have a problem with cooling at the Oyster Creek plant. Two ways to use water – one is to cool directly, taking water from a source, heating it up and returning it (hopefully [...]

Pressure Exchangers?

I’ve been doing some research with desalination plants and keep getting references to a “Pressure Exchanger”.  Anyone ever heard of this?  It’s like a heat exchanger, but instead of transferring heat from one stream to another it transfers pressure.  If it does in fact exist, I feel like it could have important applications outside of [...]

Biofuel’s New Baby: Switchgrass

Credit: Image courtesy of USDA-ARS
I’ve always been skeptical about biofuel technology, mainly because its illogical to think that land and crops currently being used as food sources should be converted to ethanol production. More recent developments and findings with cellulosic crop-based fuels, however, have caught my eye.
Switchgrass has been getting more buzz [...]

Cars running on compressed air?

It looks like an Indian car company is trying to commercialize a car that uses a compressed air engine. They claim:

Costs about 1.50 Euros ($2.20) to refill the compressed air tank.
Can run for 125 miles before refueling.
Can reach speeds up to 68 MPH.

Looks pretty darn impressive.
What psi do you think would be needed in [...]

Kyoto is useless! it’s like buying few seconds

Signed in 1997 by most of developed and developing nations except USA and Australia. Here it was decided that the industrial nations should reduce their overall CO2 emissions in the period from 2008 to 2012 by about 20% below what they would otherwise have been. The question is “Is Kyoto protocol cost effective?”.
My answer is May [...]

Bloomberg and Microturbines

Does someone know what happened?   For awhile microturbines were having great difficulty getting implemented because of the high the pressure gas source it needs.  Even though the gas compressor was located next to the turbines, some fire departments were ruling that special permits were needed.  Recently the Mayor of NY came out with some ruling [...]

Condensor buffers

The Swedes have a patent for a steam engine which has a unique energy storage device in the condensor.  Apparently they have a material encased in a sphere which changes phase (and stores energy) at temperatures which must about about 100 degf.  This material freezes and thaws as the temp goes up and down, thereby [...]