Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Six alternative and low-carbon energy companies were included in Technology Review’s list of the 50 most innovative companies in 2012. The six are solar power companies Suntech, Alta Devices and First Solar, wind power company Goldwind, battery maker Sakti3, and LanzaTech, which turns carbon monoxide emissions into fuel. Members of the list, also called the “TR50,” are chosen by editors of Technology Review, an independent media company owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Tuesday, 21 February 2012

New Energy Technologies, Inc. and the United States Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory have successfully created a 170-square centimeter module of the former’s see-through device. “Today’s achievement marks our SolarWindow’s ongoing progress in addressing an important hurdle to commercialization – scale-up,” said John A. Conklin, chief executive of New Energy Technologies.
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Tuesday, 21 February 2012

Inspired by the Romans and ancient Egyptians, engineers from Drexel University developed a “green” variety of Portland cement using some of the same materials and utilizing a similar method which could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 97 percent and cut costs by 40 percent as compared to ordinary Portland cement.
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Monday, 20 February 2012

A hybrid of temperate and tropical maize developed by scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign can be a potential contender in biofuel production, after findings indicated that ethanol produced from it could reach levels equal to or higher than those from current commercial maize hybrids. "Our maize hybrid, when grown using the same amount of fertilizer as commercial grain hybrids, produced 15-20 percent more biomass than the commercial hybrids," said Dr. Frederick Below,
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Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Molecular structures extracted from plants could become the key both for making electrons out of sunlight and hydrogen for fuel cells, a concept that’s continuously being explored by scientists. In an interview, biochemist Barry D. Bruce of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville told EcoSeedthat a key protein complex (or photosystem) in photosynthesis known as photosystem-I or PSI can be extracted and integrated in devices that either convert light into electricity or that produce hydrogen fuel
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Wednesday, 01 February 2012

A Dresden-based company is covering several bases in the organic solar cell niche with which it hopes to make an impact in the building-integrated photovoltaics market – and beyond. The company specializes in organic solar cells, photovoltaic devices that use thin layers of organic materials with semiconductor properties. In December last year they achieved a conversion efficiency of 9.8 percent for their product, as confirmed by the Fraunhofer ISE CalLab.
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Tuesday, 31 January 2012

Siemens A.G. said its solar partner Semprius has achieved a world record for photovoltaic module efficiency at 33.9 percent, and this early the industrial conglomerate said it has big plans. Semprius reportedly created a “high-concentrating photovoltaic” system which “bundles the sunlight on the modules with the aid of integrated lenses on small photovoltaic cells.” “Depending on the specific location and irradiation, the HCPV modules can deliver an energy output per square meter that is
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Tuesday, 24 January 2012

A trio of researchers for the University of Buffalo founded a new company, Optoelectronic Nanodevices L.L.C., to commercialize their technique of improving the efficiency of solar panels through the use of embedded solar dots. Though the idea of embedding quantum dots – nanoparticles of semi-conductor material – in solar cells is not new, the researchers claim to have been able to successfully use the theory to increase the efficiency of their solar cells to up to 45 percent.
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Wednesday, 18 January 2012

With more and more countries seeking to bring down their emissions by increasing the amount of biofuel in their fuel mix, the race is on to see which biomass feed stock can be the source of a sustainable biofuel industry. While ethanol is an established biofuel, it has come under criticism for using food-based feedstock such as corn and sugarcane. Advocates for the next generation of biofuel are lobbying for the use of non-food biomass, such as fibrous grasses as well as residue from the wood
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Tuesday, 17 January 2012

Aiming to stay ahead of rivals in making the better thin-film solar panel, First Solar Inc., the world’s largest thin-film solar company, has set a new world record for the most efficient panels made of cadmium telluride. The company announced yesterday that it produced a thin-film solar panel that can convert 14.4 percent of sunlight it absorbs to electricity.
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Wednesday, 11 January 2012

Imitating how the sunflower harvests energy from the sun would result in better energy generation – and less use of resources – for concentrating solar power plants, according to researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the RWTH Aachen University in Germany.
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Sunday, 08 January 2012

Researchers in Ohio have devised a biochemical fuel cell that can convert the sugars created by an insect during the digestion process into power. The researchers, led by Case Western Reserve University chemistry Professor Daniel Scherson, successfully implanted their biofuel cell into a group of cockroaches. Not only did the insects survive the procedure, but the fuel cells were able to generate around 0.2 volts of electricity.
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Wednesday, 04 January 2012

A new biofilter, which uses organic materials to control pollution, designed by researchers from North Carolina State University and West Virginia University could lower both the pollutant emissions and energy costs of the livestock sector.
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Wednesday, 04 January 2012

The United States Department of Energy awarded $5.7 million to energy-crop feedstock solutions developer Chromatin Inc. to develop “drop-in” biofuels, specifically new non-food varieties of sweet sorghum to be used as feedstock for transportation fuels.
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Tuesday, 03 January 2012

A Japanese chemical catalyst company, N.E. Chemcat Corp., has licensed electrocatalysts developed by scientists at the United States Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory that use less platinum for less costly fuel cells. The license includes the methods for making the catalyst and an apparatus design for its manufacture. The electrocatalyst consists of a palladium or a palladium alloy nanoparticle core covered with a monolayer platinum shell.
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Monday, 02 January 2012

The University of North Dakota’s Energy and Environmental Research Center is developing a gasification power system to produce energy from coffee-processing plant waste. Piloting at the Green Mountain Coffee Roasters with energy solutions company Wynntryst L.L.C. in Vermont, the center’s process uses waste stream – which includes coffee residues, plastic packaging, paper, cloth or burlap and plastic cups – to produce biogas.
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Wednesday, 21 December 2011

Every year, new and improved means to incorporating low-carbon technologies into our daily lives are being developed. While sun, wind and bioenergy are well-covered topics in EcoSeed, let’s look back at a few more technological trends and developments.
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Tuesday, 20 December 2011

A team of Swiss and United States scientists used an algal protein crucial to photosynthesis to develop a highly efficient photo-electrochemical cell to use sunlight for the splitting of water for hydrogen. Researchers at Empa’s Laboratory for High Performance Ceramics, in collaboration with the University of Basel and Argonne National Laboratory, devised a nano-bio PEC electrode consisting of iron oxide conjugated with a protein from blue-green algae called phycocyanin.
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Monday, 19 December 2011

Homeowners can now also monitor their solar roofs manufactured by SunPower Corp. remotely through their smartphones running on Android. The California-based company announced yesterday that it has included an application running on the Android mobile phone operating system in their SunPower Monitoring System suite.
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Wednesday, 14 December 2011

Engineers from Duke University developed a repository of more than 2,500 compounds with thermoelectric properties to help scientists create the next generation of power-producing materials.
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