Power

Solar power from photovoltaic cells are widely recognized as an integral part of a clean green future, and any development that can make these cells more efficient, no matter how small, assists in making this future a reality. A team of researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a surface treatment that boosts the light absorption of silicon photovoltaic cells by trapping light in three-dimensional structures and by making the surfaces self cleaning. Read More

Researchers at the University of Miami and at the Universities of Tokyo and Tohoku, Japan, have been able to prove the existence of a "spin battery" that could have significant benefits over chemical battery systems including being much faster, less expensive and using less energy. Read More

Educating children about power usage can be a difficult task. It’s not easy explaining the concept of electricity to a five year old, let alone the fact that we have to pay for it. This cute little pig might help to solve this problem and monitor television and game usage at the same time. Power Hog is a power-consumption meter design concept in the form of a green and silver piggy-bank. You simply plug the tail into the power outlet and the snout into the electric device, feed in some coins and this little piggy does the rest. When the Power Hog is connected the dollar sign glows green, it fades when there is sufficient credit and alerts you that money is running low by blinking red. Read More

Green energy comes in many guises these days, from wind-power to wave-power. One of the more compelling of the new kids on the eco-energy block is salinity power, which uses the concurrence of salt-water and freshwater in estuaries and marries it with the natural, effortless process of osmosis. Read More

The debate about the benefits of using Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) to fight against climate change is ongoing. One one hand there are reservations regarding suitable sequestration sites that provide sufficient security to store CO2 for centuries as well as the cost of implementing such a system, which could draw important funds away from the development of renewable energy technologies. On the other, we are still heavily reliant on burning fossil fuels to produce energy and this infrastructure can't be replaced overnight. CCS is obviously attractive to existing power generation companies as it allows them to keep hold of their existing infrastructure and for this reason, it is more than likely that CSS schemes will continue to gather momentum. So where to we can CO2 be stored? Scientists at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey have produced a new report that maps large rock formations in the United States that can also absorb CO2 and are exploring ways to speed up the CCS process. Read More

If you are looking to reduce your energy consumption, be it as a good green citizen or just to save those hard earned dollars, knowing how much energy you are using, where specifically it is being used and having the capability to monitor it is essential. To this end, Tendril, a Boulder Colorado based company that make hardware and software to monitor and control power usage of home electricity using devices, has unveiled Tendril Vantage Mobile. This is a mobile Web application designed to provide consumers with information on their home energy consumption. The application offers consumers a range of features including text message alerts, usage graphs and carbon footprint information and modeling. Read More

For the uninitiated, Twitter is a "microblogging" service that invites you to share what you're doing with the world in 140 characters or less - and it's currently taking the world by storm, with everyone from Scoble to Shaq on board. Its charm is that its usefulness is entirely open to interpretation - while many just don't get it (including Google's CEO), some use it purely for self-promotion, others to connect with their peers, others to tap breaking news long before mainstream media covers it, and then there's the subset of users that like to build or hack devices to use its API. Read on to meet six devices (of varying usefulness) that use Twitter to communicate with their human overlords. Read More

A new milestone for marine energy was achieved recently when UK based Wave and Tidal Technologies company Aquamarine Power Ltd signed a 1,000 MW (1 GW) Development Agreement with the renewable energy development division of Scottish and Southern Energy, Airtricity. Aquamarimes's Wave Power device, called Oyster, is a near shore hydroelectric wave power system. Still at the full scale prototype stage, the Oyster is based around a large movable buoyant barrier structure that is mounted on the seabed in depths of 10 – 12 m (33 – 40 ft) and pivots like a gate. Read More

Lasers, is there anything they can’t do? If they’re not shooting down UAVs, they’re fighting AIDS or bringing us the next generation of HDTVs. That’s all well and good, but when it comes to lasers there’s none bigger than the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California - an instrument capable of delivering 500 trillion watts of power in a 20-nanosecond burst which is now nearing completion. Its myriad uses will include providing fusion data for nuclear weapons simulations, probing the secrets of extrasolar planets and could even lead to the holy grail of energy production - practical fusion energy. Read More