It was suggested many more times the energy in the updraft and downwind drag can be achieved with a maglev VAWT on top.

Thanks to treehugger.com and others for this.

Urbines. That’s what World Architecture News labels urban wind turbines; neat neologism.

Ben Coleman of Hamiltons Architects says that to optimise power, “integrate turbines into the design of tall buildings in such a way that the contours of the building envelope focus wind on to the turbine blades, much like the casing around a gas or water turbine.” They are doing this at Castle house, a 43 storey, 408 unit apartment building at Elephant and Castle in Southwark, London. “Three 9m wind turbines integrated into the top of the building are expected to generate sufficient power to drive the energy efficient lighting to the building, an integral part of the sustainable credentials for the building as a whole.”

Love that wind flow drawing.

::World Architecture News via ::Jetson Green

The Maglev Wind Turbine Power Plant contributes to the      reduction of pollution by eliminating our dependency of          fossil fueled power plants. Since carbon dioxide is absorbed  by trees, our Maglev Wind Turbine Power Plant can offset as much as 1,750,000 acres of forest. Another analogy used, is to equate the energy generated by our Power Plant to the amount generated by a barrel of oil. Maglev Wind Turbine Power Plant can generate the same amount of energy annually as 5,475,000 barrels of oil.

MAGLEV WIND TURBINE will offset emissions (pollution) from other regional sources of electricity. If we do not install our Power Plant and generate approximately 8.75 TWh of renewable energy annually, the same amount of energy generated from oil, coal or natural gas would create the following estimated emissions :

Please let me know if you’ve seen any other fancy new turbine designs, I want to do a HUGE investigation into emerging trends in this area!!!

This is the “LoopWing” wind turbine. It is soon to be unveiled in Japan’s Eco-Products 2006 Exhibition. The E1500 model turbine is aimed at homeowners, and it sports a unique wing design that operates with low vibration, and at wind speeds as low as 1.6 m/sec. The efficiency specs on the turbine are vague — “43% power performance at optimum wind speeds” is all published. :: LoopWing via Japan For Sustainability, via Treehugger.com

Science Daily — Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. “The process is simple,” said lead researcher and author Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”

See also: NanoSolar, SolarCity, the Sietch Community

So that leads us to…. y’know, I guess the intelligence required to hire a ridiculous percentage of P.H.D.s on the planet lends itself to the investing acumen required to, well… see the future. Its alot less hard than one might think.

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (along with brother Carl Page) are investors in Nanosolar, whose last round of financing netted them a cool 100 million. They specialize in thin-film solar cells. These thin-film solar cells are less efficient in harvesting the sun’s energy than traditional crystalline solar cells, but will cost-efficiently cover everything from your house, to your laptop, to window shades. Transparently. Which… if you hadn’t guessed, will rock. Alot.

“Nanosolar has a thin-film technology that it claims is 10 times as cost-efficient as traditional cells, and a printing-based manufacturing technique that it says will bring the price down to less than a dollar per watt, competitive with natural gas and peak electricity prices (see Redherring.com article: 10 Cleantech Companies to Watch: Nanosolar).”

Some stats from Nanosolar.com

March 2006: Nanosolar’s research and development team produces cells with world-record efficiency: the most efficient printed cell ever. NREL certifies these efficiencies achieved.

June 2006: Nanosolar secures $100,000,000 from a global group of top investors (the “largest greentech financing in 2006“). Nanosolar commences with its plan to build a factory with annual output of multiple 100MW’s. [More info]

August 2006: Nanosolar and Conergy announce a cooperation agreement. [More info]

January 2007: Nanosolar secures 647,0000 sqft of space for manufacturing. [More info]

March 2007: The U.S. Department of Energy selects Nanosolar among a stiffly competitive field of applicants and awards $20 million to the company. [More info]

March 2007: James McNicholas, Hitachi’s top finance executive, joins Nanosolar as Chief Financial Officer. [More info]

[* upon some further diging we find a little more proof. Elon Musk, by the way, is one of my freakin hero’s. from his Blog as Chairman of Tesla Motors:
Becoming Energy Positive
I should mention that Tesla Motors will be co-marketing sustainable energy products from other companies along with the car. For example, among other choices, we will be offering a modestly sized and priced solar panel from SolarCity, a photovoltaics company (where I am also the principal financier). This system can be installed on your roof in an out of the way location, because of its small size, or set up as a carport and will generate about 50 miles per day of electricity.]

As I said, more on Tesla Motors later. And I’m sure we’ll be keeping track of the dynamic duo of Sweet Elctric Car + Renewable Energy!

Enjoy.

http://www.peswiki.com/index.php/Congress:Top_100_Technologies_–_RD

A New Energy Congress prioritized listing of the very best energy technologies according to ten criteria, including: renewable, environmentally safe, affordable, credible, reliable, developed, and safe (among others). The New Energy Congress is an association for the purpose of reviewing the most promising claims to up-and-coming clean, renewable, affordable, reliable energy technologies, in order to come up with a weighted list of recommendations of the best technologies.

Technologies

“The Stirling engine makes solar power so much more efficiently than photovoltaic solar cells can,” said Robert Liden, chief administrative officer at Stirling Energy Systems Inc. (Phoenix). “That’s because the Stirling solar dish directly converts solar heat into mechanical energy, which turns an ac electrical generator.” The bottom line, he said, “is that large farms of Stirling solar dishes — say, 20,000-dish farms — could deliver cheap solar electricity that rivals what we pay for electricity today.”

Eventually, according to DOE estimates, an 11-square-mile farm of Stirling solar dishes could generate as much electricity as the Hoover Dam, and a 100 x 100-mile farm could supply all the daytime needs for electricity in the United States. By storing the energy in hydrogen fuel cells during the day, Stirling solar-dish farms could supply U.S. electrical-energy needs at night too, as well as enough juice for future fuel-cell-powered automobiles, the DOE believes.

Power today costs from about 3 cents to 12 cents per kilowatt-hour, depending upon the customer’s location and the time of day. The average is 6.6 cents/kW-hr for the industrial sector in 2004, according to DOE. In contrast, the Stirling solar-powered substations operate only during peak hours (daytime) but at potentially the same or less than the peak rates paid today — or “about 6.5 cents per kilowatt-hour during peak periods,” said Liden of Stirling Energy Systems.

A Sound Way to Turn Heat into Electricity

University of Utah physicists have developed small devices that turn heat into sound and then into electricity. The technology holds promise for changing waste heat into electricity, harnessing solar energy and cooling computers and radars.

“We are converting waste heat to electricity in an efficient, simple way by using sound,” says Orest Symko, a University of Utah physics professor who leads the effort. “It is a new source of renewable energy from waste heat.”

In the above photo, Symko demonstrates how heat can be converted into sound by using a blowtorch to heat a metallic screen inside a plastic tube, which then produces a loud tone, similar to when air is blown into a flute. Symko and his students are developing much smaller devices that not only convert heat to sound, but then use the sound to generate electricity.

Symko plans to test the devices within a year to produce electricity from waste heat at a military radar facility and at the university’s hot-water-generating plant.

Symko expects the devices could be used within two years as an alternative to photovoltaic cells for converting sunlight into electricity. The heat engines also could be used to cool laptop and other computers that generate more heat as their electronics grow more complex. And Symko foresees using the devices to generate electricity from heat that now is released from nuclear

power plant cooling towers.

reposted from : The Energy Blog

EPA’s steadfast refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions presents a risk of harm to Massachusetts that is both“actual” and “imminent,”

Peak Oil Blog Post

“‘Any reasonable form of cost for carbon dioxide would immediately make a whole suite of alternative generating technologies competitive to our very cost-effective fossil fuels,’ the Government’s adviser on the nuclear industry, Ziggy Switkowski, said in an interview this week. ‘And so nuclear would become more competitive, wind, solar, eventually geothermal … and then the market will decide where the investment funds should flow,’ he said.

‘The higher the price of carbon, the larger the ‘swing’ towards no or low-carbon intensity sources of electricity generation and, more importantly, away from coal-fired generation,’ says CommSec utilities analyst, Paul Johnston. …”

The real crux point will come as production costs and efficencies for these actually out-strip the cost-effectiveness of coal, while demand stays high because of increasing costs of getting power from the grid, public awareness and perceptions that global warming is real, and the beautiful fact that consumption is NOT going to see a sizeable or even significant decrease. In fact, my bet is that it will continue to grow steaduly and quickly for the forsee-able future. Gotta make it cleaner! And there’s so many options!

::
Customers to weigh bills against alternatives
from Alternative Energy News

‘And as utility rates end up being whatever they are, they’ll make some forms of technology more available.’

As power bills rose across the state this year, southern Illinois solar-panel technician Aur Beck fielded more calls than usual from people wanting to generate their own electricity at home. via Quad-City Times”