Posts Tagged ‘Energy’
Fuels from the Sun
Thursday, January 14, 2010, 8:42 pm
Photon waves. (Wiki Commons)
The search for clean energy technologies is sparking a renewed effort to create fuels from sunlight-driven chemical reactions. Solar fuel technologies exist today but chemists across the nation are trying to figure out how to increase the efficiency of the reactions and create the next generation of photovoltaics.
About 100 faculty, students and visiting scientists gathered at the Univ. of North Carolina-Chapel Hill campus on Thursday to discuss advances in solar fuels research.
The event, organized by the Solar Energy Research Center, drew speakers from Johns Hopkins University, Cornell University, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. SERC itself is a consortium of UNC-CH, Duke, N.C. State University, N.C. Central University with RTI in Research Triangle Park. Read more…
Tomorrow’s free energy vision
Thursday, December 3, 2009, 9:54 pmEnergy woes are pervasive in the news and loom heavy in people’s minds these days. Even though grass-root supports exists for alternative energy development throughout the nation, significant and vast change is slow to gain inertia. So it was with interest and an open mind that I attended a lecture last Tuesday at Sigma Xi in Research Triangle Park where Alex Huang, director of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management Systems (FREEDM Systems), discussed what his group was working on to mitigate what he called “the looming energy crisis.” Read more…
Lovin’ the Numbers
Thursday, November 5, 2009, 8:56 amAfter a few minutes of listening to Amory B. Lovins you see that, at heart, he’s a numbers guy. He even counts the fruit yield from tropical trees growing inside his energy efficient greenhouse-warmth-capturing home in Colorado, and he fondly refers to the current batch as “banana crop number 32.”
Lovins is not your run-of-the-mill environmentalist. Far from it. He is a physicist who harbors a vision for lowering global greenhouse gas emissions by 3 to 4 percent annually — without government subsidies or policies — and he has a lengthy performance record of creating profits from sustainable business solutions that eviscerate conventional wisdom.
