newsdesk dot org (https://newsdesk.org/tag/energy/)
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have discovered a process that allows them to imitate photosynthesis—a potentially critical breakthrough in the search for clean, sustainable energy.
The California Owens Valley, the scene of decades of intense environmental hostilities and the subject of the famous Roman Polanski film “Chinatown,” once more finds itself at center stage. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, which turned Owens Lake into a dry wasteland and created one of the most prodigious polluters in America, wants to turn its lake bed into one of largest sources of solar power in America.
New thin-film technology could also be applied to other surfaces, turning buildings into power generators.
If successful, the process could prove instrumental in the vexing environmental challenge of dealing with landfill-hogging tires. In Europe alone, 325,000 tons of tires are buried in landfills each year.
Zotos International, Inc., of Geneva, N.Y., a company begun years ago as a maker of hair dyes, in July announced plans for a $7 million, 3.3 MW on-site wind power project, 30 percent of which is to be funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Raw sewage may become a new source of energy for the world. That’s right—electricity from poop.
Saudi Arabia has pushed forward in its efforts to turn seawater into drinkable water, re-launching the world’s largest floating desalination plant.
“We tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should somehow remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It’s time to let them grow up.”
Not many people have heard of Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, nor the Athabaskan Tar Sands. Not these days, anyway, with the Deepwater Horizon disaster spewing oil into the Gulf of Mexico. But in Fort Chipewyan, the ongoing effects of bitumen oil extraction continue as the top news of the day.
South Africa’s state-owned and fickle electrical grid is likely to come under intense pressure during the June 11-July 11 World Cup soccer tournament, as hundreds of thousands of fans pour into the country during the dead of the Southern Hemisphere winter.