The University of Colorado at Boulder has designed a hydrogen plant that uses an array of mirrors to focus sunlight onto a huge tower. The tower heats up to 1,350 °C – enough to liberate hydrogen from steam.
‘We have designed something here that is very different from other methods and frankly something that nobody thought was possible before,’ said lead scientist Professor Alan Weimer, from the University of Colorado at Boulder
‘Splitting water with sunlight is the Holy Grail of a sustainable hydrogen economy.
Hydrogen could be used as a fuel for road transport, distributed heat and power generation, and for energy storage.
This documentary, filmed in 2007, is an overview of the life and work of British Engineer John Searl: A man who in the 1960s made national headlines in England after constructing and publicly demonstrating flying saucers (aka Levity Disc Generators). Not only did Searl's devices defy gravity, but due to their superconductive properties and anomalous magnetic effects (aka Searl Effect) they were reported to produce anomalous energy outputs. Take the time to watch/inquire, and you can decide for yourself what to believe.
Not only does the financial structuring of the project seem sound, but the most important aspect is that it seems to be largely decentralized and focused on community investment. Centralization of renewable energy infrastructure is too inefficient/costly to be worth anyone's time.
On a recent visit to Thailand I was very impressed with the simplicity and fairness of their incentives for installing solar systems. I spoke with representatives who had invested in a solar farm about the existing system they had installed and future projects. Unlike many western countries where you need a degree in accounting to see how all the tax credits, feed in tariffs and other incentives work this is very straight forward.
In the latest round Thailand has announced plans for another 1,000 megawatts (MW) — or 1 gigawatt (GW) — of solar photovoltaic projects in the country. This is part of an overal goal of 3 GW by 2021. The incentive is based on a feed in Feed-in Tariff (FiT). Rates will be offered for 200 MW of rooftop solar and 800 MW of community-owned ground mounts. Systems will be guaranteed the new FiT payments for a 25-year period, instead of the previous 10 years. One of the most innovative aspects of this is the fairness in rolling out the plan. It is so everyone may benefit.
Fukushima, which has put a large swath of Japan off limits to human habitation, is a crisis that never ends, and whose remediation cost has reached war level. Everytime one of these things goes bad, it is a staggering disaster.
Here is the antipode to Fukushima. This is not a perfect solution perhaps because of its pristine location, but it is a far better future than carbon or nuclear energy.
In the wake of increasingly successful/irrefutable LENR experimentation/demonstrations over the past 20+ years, a big question still remains: ‘Where does the excess energy output come from?' Hopefully the article cited here can provide a partial answer to that question:
Researchers at Columbia University have conducted the first exhaustive study into kinetic energy harvesting — the harvesting of “free” energy from common human activities, such as walking, writing with a pencil, taking a book off a shelf, or opening a door. Surprisingly, except for those living the most sedentary lifestyles, we all move around enough that a kinetic energy harvester — such as a modified Fitbit or Nike FuelBand — could sustain a wireless network link with other devices, such as a laptop or smartphone.
Click on Image to Enlarge
Energy harvesting is expected to play a very important role in the future of wearable computing and the internet of things, where direct sources of power — such as batteries or solar power — are cumbersome, expensive, and unreliable. At its most basic, a kinetic/inertial energy harvester is a small box with a weight attached to a spring. When the spring moves, the mechanical energy is converted into electrical energy, usually by means of piezoelectrics or MEMS (microelectromechanical systems). If the spring moves with more force, or it bounces back and forth rapidly, more energy is produced.
