Feature Channels: Energy

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The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) today announced it is providing $1.5 million to establish a Clean Energy Business Incubator Program (CEBIP) on the campus of Stony Brook University. The Long Island High Technology Incubator, Inc. (LIHTI, www.LIHTI.org), which will receive this funding over the next four years, will provide business support to accelerate the successful development of early-stage, clean energy technology companies on Long Island.

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Dead and deformed fish indicate selenium pollution from mountaintop coal mining is causing permanent damage to the environment and poses serious health risks, says a Wake Forest University biologist who will brief U.S. Senators on his research Feb. 23.

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A holistic approach to data centers could result in millions of dollars of savings and a far smaller carbon footprint for the ever-expanding universe of information technology.

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Solar arrays of the future may be more energy efficient and reliable, thanks to one Missouri researcher’s efforts to reconfigure the way panels are connected.

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Dalhousie engineering professor Larry Hughes suggests that Atlantic Canada is at severe risk to major changes in global oil trade due to the region's increasing dependence on international supplies of oil.

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Biologist Samuel Hazen is one of 100 researchers who published in Nature the genome of a grass seen as a promising feedstock for clean biofuels. Hazen’s lab is one of 10 developing Brachypodium to reduce use of imported oil and cut GHG. It’s the first of its family to have its DNA fully sequenced.

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Jeff Christian of the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided behind-the-scenes assistance for a segment on this Sunday’s “Extreme Makeover Home Edition” on ABC-TV that features the construction of two energy efficient buildings, including a house and a community center.

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The Minerals Metals & Materials Society (TMS) has been commissioned by the Department of Energy (DOE) Industrial Technologies Program (ITP) to lead a project consisting of a two-phased study into areas where new materials and processing breakthroughs can lead to transformational advances in energy efficiency, energy security, and reductions in carbon emissions.

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The University of New Hampshire and the State of New Hampshire have partnered to create the Green Launching Pad, an initiative that will bring new green technologies to the marketplace, help innovative clean technology companies succeed, and support the creation of “green” economy jobs in New Hampshire.

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RTI International has developed a revolutionary lighting technology that is more energy efficient than the common incandescent light bulb and does not contain mercury, making it environmentally safer than the compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulb.

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An advancement in hybrid electric vehicle technology is providing powerful benefits beyond transportation.

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What if the energy generated by Furman University students exercising in the fitness center could be harnessed and then converted into electricity to power the building? It’s no pipe dream, and the Class of 2010 plans to bring the technology to campus as its senior gift to Furman.

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An international team of researchers has identified a new theoretical approach that may one day make the synthesis of hydrogen fuel storage materials less complicated and improve the thermodynamics and reversibility of the system.

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A Baylor University researcher has used a new search method that he adapted for use on the seafloor to find a potentially massive source of hydrocarbon energy called methane hydrate, a frozen form of natural gas, in a portion of the Gulf of Mexico.

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MiserWare Inc. of Blacksburg, Va., founded by Kirk Cameron and Joseph Turner in 2007 to commercialize energy-saving technologies developed at Virginia Tech for PCs, laptops, and servers, is giving away software for PC Windows users.

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The Department of Energy announced today that 24 million hours of supercomputing time out of a total of 1.6 billion available hours at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories have been awarded to investigate materials for developing lithium air batteries, capable of powering a car for 500 miles on a single charge.

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Steve Martin, an Iowa State distinguished professor of materials science and engineering and an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory, is studying how new materials could be used to improve battery performance. And that could help create a cleaner energy future.

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With many companies investing heavily in algae-based biofuels, researchers from the University of Virginia's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering have found there are significant environmental hurdles to overcome before fuel production ramps up. They propose using wastewater as a solution to some of these challenges.

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A University of Delaware technology that could change the energy world is now on a roll. The University of Delaware has signed the first license for its vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology with AutoPort, Inc., a major vehicle processing and modification facility in New Castle, Del. Under the terms of the licensing agreement, AutoPort has been granted non-exclusive rights in the area of commercial fleet vehicles.

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A technology originally developed to increase lift in aircraft wings and simplify helicopter rotors may soon help reduce the cost of manufacturing and operating wind turbines used for generating electricity.

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Partnership will include academic, industrial and government partners to create a world-class research facility focused on renewable energy and education.

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ACORN-NS, Atlantic Canada Organization of Research Networks in Nova Scotia, and CANARIE Inc. have partnered to bullfrogpower their operations collocated at Dalhousie University in Halifax Nova Scotia, with 100 per cent clean, renewable energy through Bullfrog Power.

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Researchers from the Biotechnology Foundation Laboratories at Thomas Jefferson University have identified a way to increase the oil in tobacco plant leaves, which may be the next step in using the plants for biofuel. Their paper was published online in Plant Biotechnology Journal.

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Federal research dollars help South Dakota State University scientists build a first-of-its-kind microscope that could help develop better solar cells to convert sunlight to electricity.

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Sandia National Laboratories scientists have developed tiny glitter-sized photovoltaic cells that could revolutionize the way solar energy is collected and used.

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Sandia National Laboratories will use $4.2 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to modify and enhance its existing Battery Abuse Testing Laboratory (BATLab), with the goal of developing low-cost batteries for electric and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.

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If you've seen an Internet ad for capacitor-type power factor correction devices, you might be led to believe that using one can save you money on your residential electricity bill. A new NIST report explains why the devices actually provide no savings by discussing the underlying physics.

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PNAS study by USC geobiologists documents new behavior of metal-metabolizing bacteria, with implications for design of microbial fuel cells.

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A Soon-to-be graduate of Western Illinois University is one of lead researchers in market research project to foster new Russian market possibilities for Illinois ethanol producers. Ethanol co-product DDGS (distiller's dried grains with solubles) can provide high-protein feed product for Russian livestock.

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The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory has licensed two patents to Genesis Electronics, covering a compact power source that produces electricity from solar energy.

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Titanium dioxide can be converted into a material that absorbs sunlight and greatly increase the efficiency of solar energy cells. Coated particle fuel fabricated at ORNL, in cooperation with INL, General Atomics, and the Babcock & Wilcox Company, has set a world record for advanced high temperature gas-cooled reactor fuel. Electronic devices of the future may benefit from a fundamental discovery that allows researchers to customize the electronic properties of complex materials.

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A new, stimulus-funded research center at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory could help strengthen the very ‘fiber’ of America’s automotive and energy industries.

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The world's first permanent disposal site for spent nuclear fuel is being built on Finland's western shore.

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Oak Ridge National Laboratory has announced plans to conduct a series of deep energy retrofit research projects with the potential to improve the energy efficiency in selected homes by as much as 30 to 50 percent.

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Will a 15-year-old power plant that has survived bombings, embargoes, and blockades ever fulfill its mission to bring electricity to Palestine?

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Last year, the United States overtook Germany to become the largest producer of wind energy in the world. This capped a five year expansion of U.S. wind power during which capacity increased by about a third every year.

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A recent study concluded that 50 million U.S. acres of cropland and pasture could be used for the production of perennial grasses, such as switchgrass, for biofuel feedstock. Economically viable production of a perennial grass monoculture from which substantial quantities of biomass are removed annually is expected to require nitrogen fertilizer.

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In recent years, scientists have decoded the DNA of humans and a menagerie of creatures but none with genes as complex as a stalk of corn, the latest genome to be unraveled. A team of scientists led by The Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis published the completed corn genome in the Nov. 20 journal Science, an accomplishment that will speed efforts to develop better crop varieties to meet the world’s growing demands for food, livestock feed and fuel.

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A new center at the University of Michigan College of Engineering will enable fundamental research on low-temperature plasmas---ionized gases with vast potential for practical technological advancements in fields such as energy, lighting, microelectronics and medicine.

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Zeljka Pokrajcic, an engineer for WorleyParsons – Mineral and Metals Division, in Melbourne and doctoral candidate was selected by The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS) as the first recipient of the Vittorio de Nora Prize for Environmental Improvements in Metallurgical Industries.

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New report highlights campus leaders and their amazing projects to reduce energy consumption and forge the way to more sustainable future.

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Energy Secretary Steven Chu’s recently appointed advisor, Arun Majumdar, will make his first major appearance as the keynote speaker at the 2009 New York Advanced Energy Conference. Majumdar will deliver his remarks at the Hyatt Wind Watch in Hauppauge, New York, on Wednesday, November 18 at 11:30 am.

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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced plans to fund research at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) School of Engineering on technologies that would help reduce greenhouse gas emissions through the capture and permanent safe storage, or sequestration, of carbon dioxide (CO2). The project is in collaboration with Southern Company, the parent company of Alabama Power.

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New scientific discoveries are moving society toward the era of “personalized solar energy,” in which the focus of electricity production shifts from huge central generating stations to individuals in their own homes and communities. That's the topic of a report by an international expert on solar energy scheduled for the November 2 issue of ACS’ Inorganic Chemistry...

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Scientists in Washington, D.C. are reporting laboratory evidence supporting the possibility that some of Earth’s oil and natural gas may have formed in a way much different than the traditional process described in science textbooks. Their study is scheduled for Nov./Dec. issue of ACS’ Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly publication. Anurag Sharma and colleagues note that the traditional process…

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1) Fuel economy ratings for the new 2010 model year automobiles are posted at www.fueleconomy.gov, which ORNL maintains for the U.S. DOE and the U.S. EPA; 2) A team led by ORNL’s Nina Balke has moved closer to developing more rugged memory and logic devices; 3) Heavy trucks are less heavy but just as safe and rugged because of steel rail frames; 4) A new approach to crunching massive volumes of data uses neural networks like an artificial brain.

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Australian scientists are achieving the world's best production rates of oil from algae grown in open saline ponds, taking them a step closer to creating commercial quantities of clean biofuel for the future.

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Furman University has received a $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy that will allow the university to install an environmentally friendly geothermal heat pump system in a student housing complex. It is estimated the new system iwill save the university more than $2 million in energy costs over the next 20 years and substantially reduce its carbon footprint.

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Experts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (LRC) estimate that about half of the approximately 13 million streetlights in America have the opportunity to significantly reduce energy consumption by as much as 50 percent, translating to an annual savings of 1 billion kWh, and a reduction in power plant CO2 emissions of 546,000 tons per year.

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Converting sunlight to electricity might no longer mean large panels of photovoltaic cells atop flat surfaces like roofs.