106 mpg 'Air Car'
Creates Buzz, Questions
by A. Pawlowski, CNN
You've heard of hybrids, electric cars
and vehicles that can run on vegetable oil. But of all the
contenders in the quest to produce the ultimate fuel-efficient car,
this could be the first one to let you say, "fill it up with air."
That's the idea behind the compressed air car, which backers say
could achieve a fuel economy of 106 miles per gallon.
Plenty of skepticism exists, but with many Americans trying to
escape sticker shock at the gas pump, the concept is generating
buzz.
The technology has been the focus of MDI, a European company founded
in 1991 by a French inventor and former race car engineer.
New York-based Zero Pollution Motors is the first firm to obtain a
license from MDI to produce the cars in the United States, pledging
to deliver the first models in 2010 at a price tag of less than
$18,000...
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Scotland Could Boost
Hydropower by 50 PCT - Study
ENN
Reuters, 2
September 2008 - Scotland has potential to raise hydropower capacity
by about a half, helping Britain cut greenhouse gas emissions to
mitigate
global
warming,
a new study showed on Tuesday.
The Scottish
government said the study by the Forum for
Renewable Energy
Development in Scotland showed there were still 657 megawatts of
financially viable small scale hydroelectricity schemes to exploit.
This equals around
half the amount of installed hydro capacity in Scotland and could
power about 600,000 homes, it said.
Britain's
hydropower industry is hunting for scarce locations to build dams
while the government focuses on wind and
nuclear
power
in its efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions...
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here
for the rest of the story.
Paintless Car Saves
Energy
Green Energy News
Energy can be saved in surprising
places, but let’s meander a bit first
If you own a new car, built in the last decade or so, take look
around the wheel wells or perhaps the door sills. You might see
pieces of clear plastic film adhered to the bodywork. If you have
them they’re put there by the manufacturer to protect the paint in
that area from scuff marks or stone chips. The plastic film is a lot
tougher than paint is.
That plastic film might make you wonder. If a stone resistant film
can be applied to a few small areas why not the same film to protect
a whole car? And why only in clear plastic? Why not in colors?
According Soliant, of Lancaster, South Carolina, the film could be
applied to whole cars and in an infinite number of color options,
including two-tones, metallics, pearlescents, special effects and
finishes including chrome and brushed chrome. Soliant says it can
match any color car makers throw at them. Cars wouldn’t have to be
painted, just a snazzy film applied, including graphics. Why don’t
the big car companies do this? Stubbornness. Slow to change. Huge
investments in assembly-line paint shops that they don’t want to
scrap...
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Mimicking Nature:
Power Generating Artificial Trees
Green Energy News
If there’s a problem with solar
energy, it’s that it takes up too much space, too much surface area,
too much real estate for the amount of power produced. For a solar
power plant to generate a significant amount of electricity –
perhaps hundreds of megawatts – to compete with a conventional power
plant vast acreage is needed. Land costs money; money that adds to
the cost of solar energy being generated. The cost, or value, of
real estate on which to build large solar systems may limit the
construction of large scale solar power plants to areas where real
estate is cheap, or to roof tops where a solar system’s footprint
can be only as large as the area of the building.
Manmade solar technologies need, mostly, direct sunlight to work
optimally, which is why they need so much space; Solar needs a
direct view of the daytime sky, as it were. Solar doesn’t work so
well in the shade.
But that’s manmade solar devices. Nature has its solar devices too,
we call them plants. While plants don’t convert sunlight to usable
electricity, they do use the energy in light to convert water and
air into cellulose, the structure of the plant. This is considerable
work in itself...
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