For the first time in the history of aviation, Boeing flew a manned fuel cell powered vehicle. Three test flights took place in February and March 2008 at the airfield in Ocana, south of Madrid, Spain. During the test flights, a two-seat Dimona motor-glider with a 16.3 meter wingspan was used as the airframe. You know what fuel cells are, right? You don’t? Ok. Fuel cells are devices that use hydrogen and oxygen as their input to produce electricity. That’s the most simple and the most reasonable explanation possible. Fuel cells are made of PEM membranes (proton exchange membranes), and their secondary output besides energy is water. So they gather the energy that is generated by joining hydrogen and oxygen (to produce water).

This experimental plane, that they have been working on for about five years, is a very light modified aircraft, with an electric engine and a regular propeller. The plane flew at an altitude of about 1km above sea level using a combination of battery power and fuel cell power. After reaching the cruise altitude and disconnecting the batteries, the pilot flew straight and level at a cruising speed of 100 kilometers per hour for approximately 20 minutes solely on power generated by the fuel cells. Although the takeoff required the use of a regular engine, it is still considered by many in the industry as a remarkable feat.

Still, Boeing said they don’t see this solution as a full replacement to the current regular engines, but they have plans to implement it as a backup/alternative energy solution in their future planes.

I’m sure Boeing didn’t ever plan to make the airplanes it makes today 50 years ago, and they surely aren’t going to be able to predict what they’ll do 20 years from now. Humanity didn’t ever dream to have video phones equipped with a GPS, camera device and video projector, but they are all now reality. The quality of life will surely change with the energy revolution that’s about to happed quietly in the following years. Unless we are all going to starve and use the petrol as primary source of fuel. And that will happen only because some say so.

What’s your opinion on this? Use the form below to make your thoughts count.

Still, a company called EFuel100 showed up with a product that replaces the gas pump from the oil station with your own gas pump. Their product, called MicroFueler, produces ethanol and is ready to be shipped beginning with the fourth quarter of this year.

They describe their product as “the world’s first portable, produce-where-you-consume, ethanol distiller. An easy to use, all-in-one unit. Just add the EFuel100 Feedstock Mix (EFuel100-FM, sugar and yeast) to the unit and press START–set it and forget it. In about 5-7 days, a tank full of Ethanol100 is ready to pump into your vehicle, using the built-in 50-ft retractable fueling hose. The MicroFueler is fully self-contained and self-monitoring. A convenient LCD display exhibits status and operating information. When pumping the ethanol, it operates just like a typical fuel pump at your local gas station. ”

So you can make your own ethanol with the materials from your own home if you have a source of sugar and yeast. You may power your gasoline car with it, because, they say, any gasoline car can burn ethanol safely. The prices start at about $9000, and there is a waiting line already.

Ethanol is a good solution in the short run, like some kind of a “patch” from oil dependence. But in the long run. we should rely on non-burnable power sources. And that’s not only my opinion.

What is your opinion? Use the form below to comment on this invention and what other power sources should be used instead.

This time, the British have projected a brand-new electric car that would ultimately compete with Tesla’s famous Roadster.

The car is called Lightning GT. It does the 60mph in 4 seconds (only 0.3s slower than the Roadster), and it is expected that the first prototypes will be unveiled by the end of 2008. The most interesting thing, though, behind this electric car is the battery.

Indeed, it is a Li-Ion battery, because this is now the trend, and Li-Ion technology as well as battery technology is still in its infancy, but a different type of Li-Ion: The manufacturers chose Nanosafe’s Li-ion cells using nano titanate structures instead of traditional graphite. That gives the GT an incredible 250-mile range, a full recharge time of only 10 minutes, and a life expectancy of 12 to 20 years, or 15,000 charge cycles before the battery performance drops significantly. They are made by Altairnano, who describe themselves as “an innovator and manufacturer of advanced novel, ceramic nanomaterials which are used in products that exhibit ground-breaking performance.”

So, nanotechnology has surely caught up much space in the eyes of battery manufacturers. These batteries are expensive for the moment, and the regular green optimistic cannot afford them. In fact, the most expensive thing in this car will probably be the battery, as for the rest it doesn’t have many moving parts like regular cars do. Still, there is place for development in the battery industry, and as time goes by, they will become much more cheaper, making them a serious candidate for the already growing oil, whose price keeps rising, making place for other technologies.

Maybe in 5 years most of us will be traveling in our electric cars, either converted ones or genuine electrics. We’ll then pollute less and plant more trees.

And that’s optimistic!

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The servers, routers, switches and other components of a network are designed to work with much larger quantities of data than they do daily, but they use just about the same amount of electricity whether they’re idle or busy.

Sergiu Nedevschi of the University of California in Berkeley, US, and his colleagues from Intel Research labs in Berkeley and in Seattle, found out a way to save about 50% of the energy that a network consumes , by delaying data flowing into it by just a few milliseconds, during which the network adapters and servers could pass into sleep mode, saving energy.

For networks that are less used, this “sleeping” technique is most efficient at night, when fewer data is transferred. Microsoft researchers from Redmont, on the other hand, found out a problem that arises: that users working at night, by reserving just a single live connection, they are keeping up the entire server. That’s the worst case scenario. The problem is resolved by routing an incoming request to an already busy server, and keeping the other ones to a sleep mode.

The sleeping approach is practical, but would not make a big difference in energy use in the United States, because “routers and switches consume a very tiny amount of the annual energy here,” says Suresh Singh of Portland State University in Oregon, US.

“However, the impact could be significant in developing countries like India,” Singh adds, where the networks are growing and the electricity supplies are small.

Microsoft tested this theory by applying it to its Windows Live Messenger, and found out they got a 30% reduction in energy consumption during the 45 days of testing.

Sergiu Nedevschi’s /Intel and the Microsoft research projects were presented in papers at the USENIX Networked Systems Design and Implementation conference.

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It is said that BMW has plans for making full electric vehicles, as new Californian laws force the cars manufacturers to have a significant electric vehicles offer for the market beginning with 2012. They plan to make Li-Ion powered car, with two seats (90% of the time only one is used in practice). The car will have an autonomy of at least 200 miles. BMW already has a tiny car model, Isetta, and rumours are that they will be producing the new electric car based on this one. Other news sources say that it will be co-branded with Smart.

Omolody, from Flickr, has already made some pictured predictions of how the new Isetta might look. One of them is shown above.

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This project, developed in Budapest, Hungary is a free magnetic energy generator and it’s ready for sale, as the video says. They have done this project in the past 19 years with extensive scientific and mathematical research. Though, the scientists succeeded to harness an unusual form of energy from magnetic fields. Watch the video!

Falx Air Vehicles, from Staffordshire, UK, will release commercially a tilt-rotor hybrid airplane by the end of 2009. The tilt-rotor concept is present in the aviation since the 1950’s, but there haven’t been any breakthroughs in this area yet. Still, Falx puts a 100hp combustion engine on it, a powerful solar array, and an electric engine which gives 240hp at its peak.

This type of aircraft has the benefits of a helicopter and the speed of a jet airplane. By using the hybrid concept they build it from, this air vehicle can achieve a performing consumption of only 10 liters of fuel per hour of flight.

In comparison, a regular helicopter uses approximately 170 liters of fuel per hour. The small ICE engine and the electric functionality of the aircraft, make it a perfect candidate for military stealth applications, since it has a reduced heat footprint and can be harder to detect.

The new electric - hybrid airplane will come in two versions: a one-seater and a two seater. The first will weigh 350kg and the second will weigh 405kg.

No information is yet available on the range, speed or flight ceiling of the Falx tilt-rotor craft, but tilt-rotors are well known for offering airspeed, range and flight ceilings much higher than comparable helicopters.

Falx is seeking investment in order to commercialize the platform, which it hopes to be fully certified and ready for the market by 2010. The company expects interest around police, military and paramedic circles but the platform also offers clear advantages to leisure aviators - a lot of large yacht owners will see the benefit of a long-range, highly fuel efficient aircraft that can operate off a helipad. In all, more than 52 variations of the design have been envisioned for support services and commercial applications.

This is a step further towards electric aviation. The next one will surely be cleaner and will apply to more faster air vehicles, making them harmless for the environment.

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The new battery has been developed on the basis of the so called fuel cells, which differ from ordinary batteries by substances for electrochemical reactions to come from outside. Such a battery life is unlimited (it works till it is provided with a substance for reaction, i.e. methanol, or hydrogen) and it needs no reloading like Li-Ion accumulators do. The world is currently revolving around finding better Li-Ion technologies, and at the same time fuel cells are taking up their space into the market.

One of the most important materials that the fuel cells are made from is a porous membrane with a catalyst, which participates in the fuel decomposition reaction and the production of the electric current. The narrower the membrane pores are, the larger the contacting area with the catalyst is, and the smaller the battery element might be. The New block membrane has been made by the Russian scientists using the “gradient porous matrix nanostructures”. Mr. Trusov believes the battery for a modern laptop should not weigh more than 100-150 grams. A thin multi-layer nanostructure used in the Russian scientists’ invention resolves the issue of high energy concentration density per unit volume. The specific power is 180 MW per square centimeter. Moreover, developers have done all there is to make the battery safe for users.

They even have a plant, in Dubna, that will produce 100 thousand battery units per year.

Ultimately, fuel cell technology is slowly but surely making its place in our lives. It is based on hydrogen. The source of hydrogen must come from a clean resource, and this MUST be water. Several methods of “painless” electrolysis (that means electrolysis that splits water with less energy than it produces by joining H and O) are known currently. There is also a trend that doesn’t like this “free” hydrogen-producing opportunity, because there is no oil involved in this, and they can’t accept that. Study more articles in the “Hydrogen Power” category from GreenOptimistic.com and you’ll find out how and why we should use water as our laptops’ energy source (in this case).

[via ecofriend]

The Sun’s light passes through the transparent plastic, heats up the water inside the black tubes, and then it’s passed on to the heating devices in your home, like in the schematics below. Words are not necessary, since an image values all of them:

An English company, IDC, has announced plans to mass-produce this inflatable solar panel and make it commercially available for less than 100 pounds ($200). The SolarStore panels, which inflate from a backpack into a 2 meter square, are designed to replace hot water heaters, one of the primary consumers of power in most households. This means that you could just heat water anytime you want using these instantly inflatable solar panels.

While other heating systems can take up to 20 years to cover their investment, this one covers itself in about 6 months. They are meant to be used in developing countries, where energy economy is really an issue (where isn’t energy an issue nowadays?)

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The French have also a word to put up in the hybrid cars competition. Now they modified their beloved Peugeot 307 to meet today’s stringent hybrid cars standards.