The winners and losers in Tesla’s battery plan for the home. Tesla’s plans to use its new battery storage system to power homes will provide households with more opportunities to reduce bills. But it will also cause headaches for the electricity distribution companies.The company’s founder, Elon Musk, announced last week that it had developed the Powerwall batteries that could store electricity generated from solar panels. Read More here
3 May 2015, Climate News Network: US braces itself for even worse wildfire season. Years of drought and higher temperatures mean the chance of devastating wildfires in the southwest US is higher than ever − particularly in southern California. The firefighters are primed, hoses at the ready. May and June are often the peak months for forest fires in the southwest of the US, and the outlook for this year is grim. “I wish I could have some hope,” says Dr Wally Covington, director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at North Arizona University. “It’s just a terrible situation in southern California.” Read More here
April 21, 2015, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Caltech student fathers breakthrough in green chemistry. ….The baby in this metaphor is a catalyst that, unlike its cousins that pervade modern industry, is based not on precious metals like gold and platinum, but rather on something you can get out of a banana: potassium. The father (or perhaps more accurately if we ignore the gender problem, the mother) is a Caltech grad student named Anton Toutov, who reports that the delivery was long and difficult….This new technology is already capable of manufacturing chemicals used in pharmaceuticals, agriculture and cosmetics in a much more environmentally friendly way than traditional methods. The catalyst requires little or no processing with petrochemicals and operates at much lower temperatures than standard catalytic methods, both of which keep its carbon footprint tiny. It can reduce air pollution from certain kinds of transportation fuels and, unlike the precious-metal processes it replaces, it produces no toxic waste. But like a baby, its ultimate accomplishments may be yet to come. Read More here
12 February 2015, Climate News Network: Rice serves up double measure of biofuel and fodder. An inexpensive process developed in Japan will allow farmers to produce their own tractor fuel and cattle feed in one simple step. Japanese scientists have found a potential answer to the biofuel dilemma that if you grow crops for energy, you have to sacrifice crops for food. They report that they can now ferment rice to deliver ethanol, while making silage for cattle feed –and that it can all be done on the farm without need for any expensive off-site processes. Mitsuo Horita, of the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues write in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels that they used a process of solid-state fermentation known to temperate zone farmers everywhere: grass or cereal is harvested, compressed, sealed, and fermented in the absence of oxygen. Read More here