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Save Energy Star before it becomes a Black Hole
The U.S. government’s Energy Star program is in trouble. Despite all the media references it garners, the program is failing the American public and, without serious intervention, will collapse in on itself to become a black hole of irrelevance and wasted resources.
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The Energy Roadmap – Moving Toward Zero Energy Homes
The vision of ‘zero energy homes’ is to transform the residential built environment from a major consumer of energy, to a neutral, or net zero energy environment where the annual amount of energy produced and consumed is equal. More forward looking architects and energy system designers envision homes that are (annually) net producers of energy and able to push energy back into the grid, or fuel vehicles
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The power grid today is wasteful, costly, inefficient and dumb – and ill-equipped to address many pressing energy issues, from the need to focus on climate change and carbon cost, to the demand for high reliability. However, the advent of distributed generation, distributed storage, and distributed intelligence will change power infrastructure into an intelligent and more nimble power web.
“Smart grid technologies, like advanced metering infrastructure and demand response services, will enable the transformation of the current grid to a more reliable and intelligent power web,” said Ying Wu, Senior Analyst at Lux Research.
Looks like he has been reading GreenMonk.net!!!
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Coming Soon: Improved Lithium Ion Batteries?
A team led by Jaephil Cho at Hanyang University in Korea has now developed a new material for anodes, which could clear a path for a new generation of rechargeable batteries. As reported in the journal Angewandte Chemie, their new material involves three-dimensional, highly porous silicon structures.
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Solfocus, whose technology focuses 500x the normal strength of sunlight onto tiny bits of ultra-efficient (ultra-expensive) solar material has just released a new solar unit that it promises has “the highest energy density and energy yield of any photovoltaic system available today.”
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Micro Fuel Cells Get Closer to Replacing Batteries
In a recent study, a team of researchers has developed micro-sized direct methanol fuel cells (microDMFC) that achieve significantly improved fuel efficiency and maintain a good power density while operating at room temperature. The energy density (measured in watt-hours per liter) of the new fuel cells is 385 Wh/L, which is superior to lithium ions batteries’ value of 270 Wh/L.
The research, led by Dr. Steve Arscott at the Institute of Electronics, Microelectronics and Nanotechnology (IEMN) in France, working in collaboration with SHARP Corporation in Nara, Japan, is published in a recent issue of the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering, and a second study has been accepted to the Journal of Power Sources.
