Prism Solar Technologies in Highland, NY has innovated a breakthrough holographic thin-film (Holographic Planar Concentrator™) that makes possible a very parsimonious use of crystalline PV cells to counteract that problem for Northern regions.This brings the cost down to $1 a watt.

Each of their solar modules is actually made up of both crystalline PV and their unique holographic thin-film. The thin-film strips diffract both direct and reflected energy to the PV cell strips integrated between strips of thin-film. Solar modules made in this way are cheaper because they use 50-72% less silicon to make the same energy.(more from here)

Here are the advantages of Holographic Planar Concentrator™ (HPC) technology:

• Less silicon reduces cost per watt
• Passive tracking from holographic effect produces more energy from diffuse and reflected light.
• Cooler operation than conventional PV module, most unusable light passes through module without being turned into heat.
• Bifacial PV cells can increase module performance when mounted over a reflective surface.
• Lower embodied energy, the energy required to manufacture the HPC film is much less than that required to mine and process silicon.

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A Turkish technology firm in Edirne has produced fuel with boron through the use of nanotechnology.

NNT Nanotechnology and Boron Products General Manager Mehmet Can Arvas said the invention was a result of the need to find alternative energy resources amidst the increased threat caused by the world’s depleting fuel reserves.The new fuel is currently only being used as an ingredient of the gas or diesel used in fuel tanks but Arvas is hopeful that it will replace these carbon-based fuels once compatible engines are produced.

Arvas said vehicles using fuel containing boron would be able to travel 1,300 kilometers on the same amount of gas that a car using ordinary fuel would need in order to travel 1,000 kilometers. A reduction in pollution is another benefit of the new boron product, he added.

ERRA Incorporated, San Antonio, TX, USA has acquired all rights and patents to a breakthrough battery technology to be marketed as the YESS (that's "Your Energy Storage Solution") Battery from ERRA, Inc.

It appears the company is planning on launching its own electric car and has decided to re-invent the battery, specifically the nickel hydrogen (NiH2) cell similar to those used in satellites for the past 40 years. They say they have "acquired all rights and patents to a breakthrough battery technology" whose properties are said to include the ability to charge in 15 minutes, be cycled thousands of times and require no maintenance. With a cost said to be similar to lead acid and an energy density equivalent to lithium ion, ERRA believes it has a battery that will "largely displace" other chemistries. If it does manage to successfully maneuver the path from press statement to actual product, be prepared to see the YESS debut in the chassis of a refurbished Solectria Sunrise (specifically, this one). Company CEO Jim Hogarth played a part in the development of that car through his role at Boston Edison in the '90s and has never forgotten its promise of better efficiency through the use of lightweight materials. That presentation may be sooner rather than later as it is being reported that the company could be ready for production within nine months.

A team of Danish nanophysicists has developed a new method for manufacturing nanowires and believes the discovery will have great potential for the development of nanoelectronics and highly efficient solar cells.PhD student Peter Krogstrup, from the Nano-Science Center at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, developed the method during his dissertation.

Different materials capture energy from the sun in different and quite specific absorption areas.They have produced nanowires that contain two different semiconductors – GaInAs and InAs,which each have their own absorption area, they can collectively capture energy from a much wider area. We can therefore use more solar energy if we produce nanowires from the two superconductors and use them for solar cells.

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Sharp Corporation has achieved the world’s highest solar cell conversion efficiency of 35.8% using a triple-junction compound solar cell.

Unlike silicon-based solar cells, the most common type of solar cell in use today, the compound solar cell utilizes photo-absorption layers made from compounds consisting of two or more elements such as indium and gallium. Due to their high conversion efficiency, compound solar cells are used mainly on space satellites.

To boost the efficiency of triple-junction compound solar cells, it is important to improve the crystallinity (the regularity of the atomic arrangement) in each photo-absorption layer (the top, middle, and bottom layer). It is also crucial that the solar cell be composed of materials that can maximize the effective use of solar energy.

Conventionally, Ge (germanium) is used as the bottom layer due to its ease of manufacturing. However, in terms of performance, although Ge generates a large amount of current, the majority of the current is wasted, without being used effectively for electrical energy. The key to solving this problem was to form the bottom layer from InGaAs (indium gallium arsenide), a material with high light utilization efficiency. However, the process to make high-quality InGaAs with high crystallinity was difficult.

Sharp has now succeeded in forming an InGaAs layer with high crystallinity by using its proprietary technology for forming layers. As a result, the amount of wasted current has been minimized, and the conversion efficiency, which had been 31.5% in Sharp’s previous cells, has been successfully increased to 35.8%.

Sharp achieved this breakthrough as part of a research and development initiative promoted by Japan’s New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO)*3 on the theme of “R&D on Innovative Solar Cells”.

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Plasma is like a gas, but many of its atoms have been stripped of an electron or two. These positively charged atoms swim about in a crackling-hot sea of negatively charged loose electrons, making plasmas great electrical conductors.

Kong, technical lead for plasma processing at INL, has built a career of putting plasma to work. He's using it to mass-produce nanoparticles, a project that in August received $1 million in federal stimulus funding. He's also employing plasma to find ways to store hydrogen efficiently, and he'll soon start a project using plasma to convert natural gas, coal and heavy oil to gasoline and diesel.

Kong is also working with a large multinational chemical company to find better ways to store hydrogen.

Simply putting hydrogen in a tank to power a car or appliance is difficult, because the element is a gas at all but extremely low temperatures (its boiling point is -253 degrees Celsius). Tanks holding enough low-density hydrogen gas to power anything would have to be very large, in many cases prohibitively so. Hydrogen could be liquefied — either by compression or cooling — to bring tank size down, but this would require a great deal of energy and raise safety concerns, as elemental hydrogen is very reactive. Chemical storage — in which hydrogen is locked into more complex molecules, then released later after exposure to heat and/or catalysts — strikes many scientists as more practical. But current technologies for making such chemical hydrides are complicated and energy-intensive. Kong is using plasma in an attempt to revolutionize the production process.

The current method of making these complex chemical hydrides is a 13-step process.What they are working on is potentially a one- to two-step process.Eliminating so many steps involves tricky, difficult and unstable reactions, and Kong and his team are still working out the details.

To know about the technology click here

An Alaskan entrepreneur Bernie Karl has pioneered modern technology to tap into one of Earth's oldest energy resources: hot water.

His energy-generating machine lies on a flatbed truck and can be hooked up to oil and gas wells or other heat-emitting sources to generate electricity.Karl adds a branch connection to an oil or gas pipeline, and the process begins when he "hot taps" into waste water coming through the pipes. The hot water enters the tubes of an evaporator encased in a common refrigerant found in many air conditioning systems. As the hot water passes through the evaporator, it begins to boil the refrigerant in the casing surrounding the tubes. The heat given off by the boiling refrigerant then causes an attached turbine to spin, which jump-starts a generator, producing electrical power.Next, cooling water enters from another source, recondensing the vapor refrigerant into a liquid.A pump pushes the liquid refrigerant back to the evaporator, so the cycle can start again. The difference in temperatures drives the entire "binary system." This setup works exactly the opposite of a refrigerator.

His portable geothermal generator units cost from $350,000 to $375,000, each with the potential to generate enough power for 250 average American homes per year.

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Cereplast, Inc., manufacturer of proprietary bio-based sustainable plastics, announced that it has been developing a breakthrough technology to transform algae into bioplastics and intends to launch a new family of algae-based resins that will complement the company`s existing line of Compostables & Hybrid resins.

Cereplast algae-based resins could replace 50% or more of the petroleum content used in traditional plastic resins. Currently, Cereplast is using renewable material such as starches from corn, tapioca, wheat and potatoes and Ingeo PLA. Cereplast has initiated contact with several companies that plan to use algae to minimize the CO2 and NOX gases from polluting smoke-stack environments. Algae from a typical photo-bioreactor is harvested daily and may be treated as biomass, which can be used as biofuel or as a raw material source for biopolymer
feed stock. The company is also in direct communication with potential chemical conversion companies that could convert the algae biomass into viable monomers for further conversion into potential biopolymers.

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Scott Brusaw and his wife,Julie,co-owners of Sagle-based startup Solar Roadways,have come up with an idea to merge the nation's power grid with its system of highways and byways into an "electric road" that would power homes, businesses and vehicles.The Brusaws have drawn up plans for a road system built of 12-foot-by-12-foot solar panels rather than asphalt. The panels would draw energy from the sun to power surrounding homes and businesses, and provide the foundation for a new "smart" power grid.

The idea has a long way to go before it's on the ground, but the federal government is willing to give it a shot. Solar Roadways was recently awarded a $100,000 SBIR Phase 1 grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to build a prototype solar road panel for testing and demonstration. If it pans out, Brusaw said phase two could include an additional $750,000 over two years.

Brusaw estimates that one mile of solar roadway could supply a little less than one megawatt enough energy to power as many as 500 homes.

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One year ago the French company Alstom began a year-long US test of capturing CO2 from the water+carbon-dioxide mix created using their chilled-ammonia technology, in the smokestack of the Pleasant Prairie Power Plant in Wisconsin.

Last week the year’s results were announced. The years average CO2 capture rate was 90%, according to a joint announcement from the EPRI, We Energies and Alstom to the Society of Environmental Journalists.

The 12-month test was just completed after running 24 hours a day on a small sectioned-off portion of the smokestack; working on just 5% of the plants total emissions.

But the test is scalable, and the Electric Power Research Institute, the R&D arm of the utility industry, is optimistic that chilled-ammonia technology will work on a larger scale. It is one of several carbon-capture technologies under consideration as we move to a carbon constrained world.

Next, Alstom will work with AEP in Columbus, Ohio to test a scaled-up version of the technology at the Mountaineer power plant in West Virginia. That test takes the next step as well; not just capturing the carbon dioxide but burying it 8,000 feet beneath the plant site.

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Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory have been working for the past year and a half on a process to convert biomass, such straw or crop residue, into liquid fuels at a far higher efficiency than existing cellulosic ethanol technologies.

Rather than one single development, the technology--named bio-syntrolysis--ties together multiple processes, but it has electrolysis, or splitting water to make hydrogen, at is starting point. When combined with a carbon-free electricity source, the approach could deliver a carbon-neutral biofuel, according to models done at INL which has done research for decades in nuclear energy.

Bio-syntrolysis is one of a dizzying number of technologies being developed with the hopes of replacing gasoline, although none have successfully been done at scale. The key advantage is that bio-syntrolysis would extract far more energy from available biomass than existing methods, said research engineer Grant Hawkes. Using traditional ethanol-making techniques, about 35 percent of the carbon from wood chips or agricultural residue ends up in the liquid fuel. By contrast, the bio-syntrolysis method would convert more than 90 percent of that carbon into a fuel.

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A new treatment system for organic residues has been launched by CST Wastewater Solutions, promising to convert almost any organic residue or energy crop into biogas, valuable electricity or heat. CST Wastewater Solutions has partnered with Global Water Engineering (GWE) to supply the RAPTOR system, which stands for Rapid Treatment of Organic Residues.

A RAPTOR plant is a total solution, starting with logistics for handling the energy crop and ending with the production of biogas, green electricity or steam. In the RAPTOR process, the pre-treated and blended substrate slurry is transferred into a mixed digester that uses energy efficient and low maintenance mechanical mixing. The digester tank comes in sizes up to 12,000 m3. Optional extras include a foam breaker fan, a scum buster system and a bottom grit trap.

The digester tank is fully insulated, heated by recycling the digester content through a special heat exchanger.

The plant can handle:
• Food waste, such as market surplus, kitchen waste, off specification fruit and vegetables, and excess crops
• Agro-industry residues, like starch and sugar pulps, vegetable or potato waste.
• Industrial residues, such as brewery waste (spent grain), fruit processing waste, and paper mill sludge.
• Energy crops, for example corn (silage), various grasses, algae.

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Cambridge-based Joule Biotechnologies has designed a radical technology to mimic photosynthesis using bio-engineered micro-organisms to make ethanol fuel from carbon dioxide and sunlight. Because of the abundance of these raw materials, Joule Biotechnologies should be able to make ethanol economically, sustainably and at stable prices.

Their device, called SolarConverter doesn’t require fresh water and agricultural land like traditional biofuel production . The converter contains a mixture of brackish water, nutrients, and genetically engineered organisms. Carbon dioxide gas is fed into the mixture, and the device is designed to expose the organisms in the mixture to the sun. The organisms are photosynthetic, meaning that they absorb light energy and carbon dioxide to form compounds. Joule has engineered its organisms to secrete ethanol and hydrocarbons and chemicals.

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A European supermarket chain, Sainsbury's is going to open its first "people-powered" store at its new store in Gloucester, using technology which captures energy from vehicles to power its checkouts.

Whenever a vehicle passes over the "kinetic road plates" positioned in the car park, energy is captured which would otherwise be wasted. Sainsbury's will channel the energy back into the store, saving power that would normally be taken from the National Grid.

The kinetic road plates are expected to produce 30kW of green energy an hour, which is more than enough to power the store's checkouts. The system, pioneered for Sainsbury's by Peter Hughes of Highway Energy Systems, does not affect the car or fuel efficiency, and drivers feel no disturbance as they drive over the plates.

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At GE’s Global Research Center near Munich, Germany, scientists have developed a new waste heat recovery technology called ORegen — which is a device that converts waste heat from exhaust streams generated by equipment such as small gas turbines and industrial processes into usable electricity.This technology can help customers address the challenges of rising fuel costs and the increased demand for more efficient, environmentally friendly power systems and industrial plants.

They have modified Organic Rankine Cycles (ORC) - an old technology which can use lower heat input temperatures.Therefore, heat recovery now offers a great opportunity to conserve fuel by productively using waste energy to reduce overall plant energy consumption and simultaneously decrease CO2 emissions. For example, when an ORegen (Organic Regenerator) unit is joined to GE Oil & Gas’ PGT25 gas turbine, it can provide up to an additional 25 percent more power on top of the output of the turbine itself.

full article here

Washington, D.C.-based New Energy Technologies, Inc. announced about the development of new tinted transparent glass SolarWindows™ capable of generating electricity by coating glass surfaces with the world’s smallest known organic solar cells.

New Energy’s SolarWindow technology uses an organic solar array, - cells for which about one-quarter the size of a blade of grass - which achieves transparency through the creative use of conducting polymers which have the same desirable electrical properties as the world’s most commercially popular semiconductor, silicon. However, the technology also boasts a considerably better capacity to absorb optically photons from light, thereby generating electricity.

The company also aimed at harnessing the energy beneath the tires using MotionPower™ technology, similar to what is used to power hybrid vehicles. The difference is, instead of being installed in cars and trucks, it’s installed in the roadways, capturing the friction energy that is otherwise dissipated as heat.

full article here

Two British scientists, John Watt and Philip Michael, have launched technology that will convert the controversial tonnes of waste-ash from Britain's coal-fired power stations into valuable minerals useful to industries including cement, car and aviation manufacturers.The first plant for RockTron, which is now finished and on-line in Fiddlers Ferry coal-powered station in Cheshire, UK, will transform 800,000 tonnes of ash per year into five valuable minerals. It will also cut the cost of dumping the ash in land-fill sites.

The most significant of the so called eco-minerals are solid glass spheres called aluminio-silicates that could reduce CO2 emissions in cement making - one of the dirtiest processes - by an estimated 400,000 tonnes a year in Britain alone. Another by-product are hollow glass spheres that can be used by automotive and aviation industries to make lighter cars and planes.

A demonstration of microwave technology converting industrial waste and difficult-to-process natural resources into diesel, methane, carbon ash and other reusable hydrocarbons was run this week (4th May) by Global Resource Corp. The commercial prototype of the company's system, Patriot-1, is microwave technology that has an automated engineering process to provide a highly energy efficient, emission free way to convert a wide range of materials into energy.

The demonstration, conducted at the companys's research facility, transformed large amounts of scrap tires into diesel fuel, methane, pentane, butane, propane as well as combustible gases, and carbon ash. Patriot-1's technology can process other materials for the purpose of unlocking energy including; shale rock, tar sands, bituminous coal, heavy oil as well as the environmental hazards associated with municipal waste, tanker sludge, waste oil and dredged materials.


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The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory on Thursday said it has developed a smart charger controller designed specifically for charging cars at off-peak times to get the lowest price and ease strain on the grid.

If millions of drivers charged their electric cars during peak times,utilities could strain to meet the demand. In places where there is time-of-day electricity pricing, the PNNL's Smart Charger Controller uses Zigbee wireless networking to get price information and decide on the lowest price for charging.Using smart charging, a car owner could save $150 a year, said PNNL engineer Michael Kintner-Meyer. GM is preparing smart-charging technology to be part of the Chevy Volt electric car due in showrooms in late 2010.

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New solar thermal technology overcomes a major challenge facing solar power – how to store the sun's heat for use at night or on a rainy day.

In the high desert of southern Spain,the Mediterranean sun bounces off large arrays of precisely curved mirrors that cover an area as large as 70 soccer fields. These parabolic troughs follow the arc of the sun as it moves across the sky, concentrating the sun's rays onto pipes filled with a synthetic oil that can be heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. That super-heated oil is used to boil water to power steam turbines, or to pump excess heat into vats of salts, turning them a molten, lava-like consistency.

Engineers can use the molten salts to store the heat from solar radiation many hours after the sun goes down and then release it at will to drive turbines. That means solar thermal power can be used to generate electricity nearly round-the-clock.

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Apogee Power Inc. a Silicon Valley based clean tech battery research company announces the launch of its Nano-Technology Enhanced, Lithium cordless power tools and power tool replacement batteries. Apogee's patented LiCoO2 and C-LiFePO4 battery packs and cordless tools are the only cost effective green technology that can replace toxic NiCd and NiMh. While improving tool performance Apogee power tool replacement batteries are lighter weight, have longer useful life and provide more productivity per charge.

Apogee Power has been working under the radar for the past 6 years to develop a complete line of impact cordless power tools and battery packs which incorporate its Nano-Tech Ultra-Pulse Capacitor technology. This patented Ultra-Pulse Capacitor technology enhances the power and performance of lithium batteries. Apogee offers not only a line of tools but also a line of replacement batteries that can immediately replace NiCd, NiMh and Lead Acid batteries in cordless power tools, UPS systems, solar, wind and other alternative energy battery systems. The Apogee replacement batteries can be used on existing Nickel-Cadmium (NiCd) and Nickel Metal Hydride (NiMh) tools. These new battery packs can be charged using the existing NiCd and NiMh chargers. The consumer needs no additional equipment purchase.

Not only this technology 100% environmentally sound it offers better performance and significantly longer useful life.The Apogee Power line of Li-Ion (LiCoO2) and C-LiFePO4 tools and battery packs are designed for use in DIY, Semi-Professional, Professional and specialty cordless tools applications. Apogee has the highest efficiency Impact Wrench and Impact Driver tools available on the market today. The Apogee 14.8v Impact Wrench out performed all competitors' 18v tools and other widely known brands by 50% more lugs per charge. Apogee also has the only 12v impact wrench available. This new technology offers significant cost savings.

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