Cross-posted from Clean Technica December 2nd, 2016 by Tina Casey The Energy Department is very excited about its California lithium project piggybacked onto a geothermal power plant, and with good reason. Lithium is the key ingredient in innumerable electronic devices, from portable gear on up to EVs and large scale lithium-ion energy storage systems. The problem is — or has …
Solar-panel roads to be built on four continents next year
Electric roads and sidewalks that can transmit the sun’s energy onto power grids may be coming to a city near you. Rugged solar panels, capable of withstanding the weight of an 18-wheeler truck, are now being built into road surfaces, after nearly five years of research and laboratory tests. A unit of Colas SA is constructing 100 outdoor test sites …
Plug & Play Microgrid Systems
October 17th, 2016 by Steve Hanley Originally published on Solar Love. On October 10th, ABB, a pioneer and world leader in microgrid technology, announced a new range of microgrid solutions to enhance and promote distributed power generation. These modular and scalable “plug and play” products are designed expressly to address the needs of remote areas that are not tied to the …
Bamboo – for buildings, bikes, and more!
By Aisha Abdelhamid, August 29th, 2016, originally published on GreenBuildingElements.com Bamboo is a truly remarkable green building material. It’s twice as strong as concrete and slightly stronger than steel. It’s also a renewable resource that needs little energy to grow, prevents soil erosion, provides biomass, offers wildlife refuge, and produces a healthy food supply for both wildlife and humans. Offering significant …
Enterprise software injected with machine learning for asset management, predicting traffic jams, redirecting deliveries and more
By Adit Singh, Cross-posted from ReCode.net Diego Schtutman / Shutterstock Born of the innovations of Big Data and possessed of a new net intelligence layer, self-learning software will have huge impacts on productivity across all departments of an enterprise.Imagine a set of smart sensors placed throughout a city that feed data to deep-learning systems. The systems then predict where traffic …
New tech words and acronyms
http://www.recode.net/2016/8/3/12346758/dao-ethereum-blockchain-naming DAO – Wikipedia says that a DAO is a “decentralized autonomous organization,” which means it’s kind of like a corporation based on the P2P principle. As for the organization that’s actually named “The DAO,” Wikipedia defines it as “a form of investor-directed venture capital fund.” Putting it all together in plain English, The DAO is akin to a crowd-sourced …
Small scale projects and Transport for London involvement give glimpse of new energy future
By Leo Johnson, cross-posted from the Evening Standard …For the past century there has been one dominant energy model, the centralised production and distribution of fossil fuel-based power through the grid. Then in the Sixties we had the dream of abundant nuclear power, centrally delivered and “too cheap to meter”. That dream of energy abundance may look far off but how …
NASA’s green aviation plan and next set of 5 concepts for exploration
By Tina Casey, Cross-posted from Clean Technica NASA announced last Friday that it is funding a new set of five cutting-edge “green” aviation concepts for two years of study and evaluation. If everything pans out for NASA’s green aviation plan, in a few years you could be flying in a plane with wings that shape-shift in flight. Pop the hood …
Steps to creating a Net Zero Energy (NZE) district
Cross-posted from RMI – 3 Aug 2016 Net zero energy (NZE) buildings—those that are responsible for the production of as much (or more) clean energy as they use annually—have been gaining momentum around the world. And now, there are even net zero energy districts being contemplated, like Fort Collins’s Fort ZED, Arizona State University, and UC Davis’s West Village. …
A rapid tech shift: adoption rate of LED lighting is on the way to save US $20/billion a year in electricity costs
“The rapid adoption of LEDs in lighting marks one of the fastest technology shifts in human history,” Goldman Sachs stated in a new report and is on track to save US citizens and businesses $20 billion a year in electricity costs within a decade. This would lower U.S. CO2 emissions by some 100 million metric tons a year. The rapid shift …