Energy

Whatever concerns energy and the ways to produce it goes here

Oil prices reach $120

Only two months after reaching $100, oil prices reached $120. As the AFP notes: ” Oil prices surged to new heights Monday, with Brent crude topping $120 a barrel for the first time since August 22, 2008″ It took very little time back to 2008 for oil prices to reach $140 once they had reached […]

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President Obama gets more serious on efficiency

CleanTechies often republishes blog posts from the Official White House blog. This enabled me to learn about a significant series of measures designed to help America cut its oil dependence and energy consumption. Indeed, new standards will enable future cars to cut their oil consumption (not by much though…). US households will also be able

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Worth an article – my March 2011 tweets

I have been committed since January 2007 to bring you each month a selection of the latest headlines and best researches on sustainable development, climate change and the world energy sector. However, I don’t blog as much as I would like to and generally write around 25 posts per month. But many more news are worth

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Cleantech : 2001-2010 and 2010-2020

Cleantechnica got another interesting article, this time on what the past ten years meant to cleantech and what the next ten years could bring. The occasion is given by Clean Edge’s market research. ” With growth rates like seen in the telephone industry (…) during comparable revolutions, clean energy options like solar and wind have

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A look at deaths per TWh by energy source

With all the agitation around the Fukushima catastrophe, I thought it would be interesting to put some facts and figures on the dangerosity of  energy sources, including oil, coal, natural gas, some renewable energy sources and nuclear… The global death rate for coal is 161 per TWh (15 in the United States), 36 for oil,

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Sustainability in action : helping my family

This weekend was the occasion for me to go and visit my family in Lorraine (Eastern France). This enabled me to help out my two uncles and their families cut their water and energy consumption. Indeed, I first helped one family install a rainwater harvesting system that will enable them to water their garden for

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EU backs away from 30% emissions target. Again !

We have previously seen here that the European Union could easily achieve a 30 percent reduction of greenhouse gases emissions by 2020 (compared to 1990 levels). This would make a lot of sense both environmentally and economically. Yet the European Commission kept earlier this month on clinging to the 20 percent reduction targets by 2020

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Generating electricity 40 to 50 % more efficiently

It’s a well known fact, the production of electricity via traditional coal and natural gas burning plants and in a lesser way nuclear reactors is vastly inefficient. But this might change soon thanks to scientific research. To Ecogeek : ” Researchers (…) are developing a new gas turbine to increase the efficiency of conventional electrical

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Solar power plants face problems in California

During my daily hours of ride in the trains to go and come back from the job I read books but also newspapers. This allowed me to read a great article in the New York Times about an unexpected problem with solar power plants in California. ” Just weeks after regulators approved the last of

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Solar film increases efficiency by 300%

To CleanTechnica, a new film developed by HyperSolar, a Californian company, could halve the costs of solar panels and boost their efficiency by 300 percent. The film would replace the sheet of glass currently used with solar PV panels. “With HyperSolar as the top layer, manufacturers can use significantly fewer solar cells in the production

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