Sustainable energy

Why I am now convinced by Desertec

Living now in Paris I am able to go easily to conferences. Yesterday I was attending to a conference given by Mr.Paul van Son and Dr. Oliver Steinmetz, the CEO of Desertec Industries and member of the supervisory board, respectively. Their enthusiasm and visionary ambitions are highly communicative. I now compare the Desertec project to …

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Twice the energy, half the emissions…

This is the title of the first article published on a new blog dedicated to energy issues launched Friday by the UK newspaper The Independent. Titled New Energy Future, it is already in my RSS aggregator and should be in yours too. The blog begins with a great albeit short video introduction by David JC …

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Cars waste 85 percent of the energy used

This is not news as we have seen it in Sustainable energy – without the hot air but some facts need reminders. The internal combustion engine – like incandescent light bulbs – is extremely inefficient. To GOOD : If you had to invent an efficient way to move (…), you could hardly do worse than …

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A huge solar farm on the Moon ?

Even if Japan has a sensible energy policy with energy efficiency and low carbon solutions, some of its companies have original ideas. Indeed after space-based solar, some are studying installing panels on the moon. The Shimizu Corporation is willing to put a 11,000 kilometers (6,800 miles) belt of solar panels to form the Luna Ring. …

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US electricity : more nuclear and less coal

Things are slowly but irresistibly changing in the United States. Wind power added ten gigawatts of capacity to the grids last year alone and coal is less and less used to generate electricity. Meanwhile, a nuclear renaissance may be under way in America as last month President Obama announced a $8.3 billion (6 billion euros) …

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An offshore wind energy boom in Europe

The European Wind Energy Association (EWEA) published its annual report and the results are encouraging as the offshore wind energy capacity grew by 54 percent in 2009 with 577 MW. The United Kingdom appears to be leading the sector as it installed more than half of the added capacity of the European Union. And this …

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Solar energy, a panacea for Africa

Solar energy is to me the panacea for Africa, a continent where 550 million people still lack electricity. With molten salts, concentrating solar could bring light to these populations during important parts of the night. Solar cookers could also help fighting deforestation by removing the need for fuelwood. Now an experiment run in Benin (West Africa) shows …

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A massive wind energy plan for UK

The United Kingdom has a most ambitious climate change mitigation plan as it is willing to cuts its emissions by 34 percent by 2020. This is further than the European Union which is willing to go as far as 30 percent. This week, Gordon Brown is due to unveil a £100 billion (110 billion euros …

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Keeping natural gas in pipelines, not air

This was the title of an article on Dot Earth, as I read the associated New York Times article in Le Figaro as this newspaper now proposes a selection of the best articles from the NYT. The article is about how natural gas – and methane – is leaking through the miles and miles of …

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Can we stop relying on fossil fuels by 2030 ?

Scientific American published in this month’s issue an article on how the world could completely stop relying on fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear) by 2030 and use only solar, wind and water energies. To make a long story short and after reading the various critics this is completely impossible. We can go …

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