Installing offshore wind turbines is already a logistical nightmare to get all the components delivered to the proper site. But the biggest issue may be getting the workers to the worksite. For the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm off the east coast of England north of Norfolk, the workers are being housed on-site in a 137-room ferry during their 2-week on/2-week off rotations.

A former cruise ferry, the Regina Baltica, has now been repurposed to serve as a floating hotel for wind farm construction workers. Keeping the workers close at hand makes it possible to work in smaller windows of favorable weather, and reduces the amount of travel and transportation needed for them. It also reduces the stress on local towns which may not have the capacity to support 100+ workers at a time. The ship's accommodations include "amenities such as a coffee shop, restaurant, swimming pool, conference and meeting rooms, lounge areas and a sun deck."

image: CC BY-SA 3.0 by Erik Christensen/Wikimedia

via: NA Windpower

A low-cost, low-power, credit-card sized computer developed by a charitable foundation set up by some computer science instructors from Cambridge University. Their goal was to produce a very inexpensive, low-power computer that could be used by kids to learn programming. Now the first examples of the resulting low-cost credit-card sized computer are about to reach the market with a starting price as little as $25.

"The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming."

The Raspberry Pi is an ARM-based, SoC (system on a chip) computer that is just slightly too large to fit in an Altoids tin.  It will run several varieties of Linux operating system. Fedora Linux is its recommended distribution, and it will also support Debian and ArchLinux (some issues with Ubuntu and the ARM processor prevent Ubuntu from supporting it at this time).

The Raspberry Pi is capable of delivering BluRay quality display. The developers say that "graphics capabilities are roughly equivalent to Xbox 1 level of performance. Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics." It has ports for composite and DVI (using a cheap adapter for the DVI) video output.

Power to run the Raspberry Pi can come from a phone charger or even from 4 AA batteries. A 700 mA USB charger will be the power source for the Model B, and the Model A can get away with even lower power requirements (300 mA). At that low power level, solar powered options should be practical and not terribly expensive.

The Raspberry Pi comes in two models (A and B) with 128 MB and 256 MB of RAM and priced at $25 and $35 respectively. Lots more information and specifications are available in the Raspberry Pi FAQ. The Raspberry Pi will be available beginning at the end of February 2012.

image: via Raspberry Pi

Hat-tip to @chrissalzman for the heads-up

The USVI, much like other islands, currently depends heavily on imported fuel for their energy needs, making electricity cost almost $0.50/kWh for residents -- about five times more than residents of the continental U.S. The need for switching to renewable sources of energy is just as much economical as it is environmental for the islanders.

NREL wanted to come up with a realistic plan for reducing the USVI's dependence on fossil fuels, so they worked with the government, utilities and public and private groups to map out the territory's potential for different renewable energy and efficiency solutions. The organization came up with the following mix of efforts to get the islands to a 60 percent reduction:

• 2 percent biomass
• 3 percent landfill gas
• 3 percent solar
• 6 percent wind
• 8 percent waste-to-energy
• 38 percent energy efficiency

The USVI burns 2.6 million barrels of oil every year for electricity and water desalination. By 2025, if this plan comes together, that number could drop that number to just over 1 million barrels, creating a cheaper, homegrown electricity portfolio for the islands and a major slash in emissions.

via NREL

Image via Don Buchanan, USVI Energy Office

Currently, if you purchase an all-electric vehicle, you are eligible for a $7,500 tax credit that you receive when you file your taxes for that year, but this new rebate program would allow consumers to slash $10,000 off the top of the cost of an electric car, right at the time of purchase. That's a huge incentive for drivers who are on the fence and would likely support some large gains in sales of those vehicles.

Many of the first crop of mass market EVs are still in a price range that is just beyond what most consumers want to pay for a sedan or compact car, but with this rebate, the Chevy Volt would go from $41,000 to $31,000; the Nissan LEAF would go from $36,000 to $26,000 and the newest to hit the market, the Mitsubishi i, would drop to under $20,000. Those are prices that would be much more appealing to a wider base of consumers.

The rebate would apply to other alternativ-fuel vehicles, too, like natural gas, hydrogen fuel cell or other high-tech green vehicles.

Though it's hard to hold out hope for things like this to make it through a very tough Congress, it's pretty exciting to think of the impact a rebate would have on the EV market.

via Gas2.org

In New York, buildings account for two-thirds of the energy used by the city, a major reason that the city has pushed for retrofitting programs. This new map can help city officials know where to concentrate their improvements.

The model uses data from a few sources to arrive at the block by block totals:

• Data the city government gathered from utilities on zip-code level numbers on electricity, natural gas, fuel oil, and steam consumption in 2009,
• Data on how the energy was used (heating and cooling, water heating, lighting, etc.) from the U.S. Energy information Administration
• Information on the building floor areas of each of the city’s tax lots from the city government.

You can visit the fully interactive map here, where you can view the total yearly kWh used per block, total fuel use and total land area. Each block also has its own pie chart with the breakdown of how that energy use was distributed among space heating, space cooling, water heating and general electricity use.

via MIT Tech Review

Incandescent light bulbs are really little space heaters with a side benefit of producing some light. They are an old technology that is being phased out for many applications by more efficient alternatives. Now, in addition to the LEDs and CFLs, we can add ESL bulbs, which have started to reach the market, to the available technologies.

We've been watching for Electron Stimulated Luminescence (ESL) lighting technology for a few years. It is now commercially available with the introduction of the Vu1 bulb. ESL lighting uses an electron gun to stimulate a phosphor coated surface for illumination, much like an old CRT or television tube. The bulb is actually a vacuum, with no mercury (or anything else) inside it, so disposal and recycling is easier.

The Vu1 bulb has an expected lifespan of 11,000 hours, which can be 5 times that of an incandescent and close to that of a good CFL. It uses 19.5 watts to produce 500 lumens, so it falls in between CFL and incandescent in efficacy. The color-rendering index (CRI) of the ESL bulb is 90+, again falling between an average CFL with a CRI of 80 and an incandescent with a CRI of 100.

Street pricing for the Vu1 is about $15*. That’s more expensive than a CFL these days, but that’s in the range of what CFLs were a decade ago, and LEDs with this color quality aren't at this price level, either. For further information and a more subjective review of the light, you can read a longer review about the Vu1 light on my personal blog.

[Disclaimer: Vu1 provided the sample bulb to me at no charge for my review.]

[* Edited to add: After posting this yesterday, I got a call from William Smith, the chairman of Vu1. One thing he wanted to emphasize is that the company expects the price for this bulb to be less than $10 within 18 months, as production ramps up which is in the range of other dimmable bulbs.]

Geothermal energy is often overlooked as the "other" renewable energy. Capping geysers to harness their energy is difficult, and the sites where these resources exist are not widespread. But companies are exploring new methods of obtaining energy from geothermal sources by stimulating accessible geologic formations to generate hot water and steam for energy production.

A demonstration project being run by AltaRock Energy is underway in the Deschutes National Forest near Bend, Oregon to explore the viability of this technique. AltaRock is using "hot rocks" and an approach called Enhanced Geothermal Systems (EGS) for energy production. This process uses accessible geological formations which are hot enough to generate steam for power generation, but which are not naturally geysers. The system is meant to be closed-loop, with the water re-cooled and returned through the system, so that there is less impact on local water supply. However, the demonstration will use somewhere between 73 and 142 million gallons of water, so the company is also purchasing Deschutes River Conservancy mitigation credits to offset its water consumption during the project.

The process also calls for developing fracture zones in the rock, which may be too reminiscent of natural gas "fracking" for widespread acceptance of the technique. But, instead of an extraction process, the geothermal approach will be injecting water into the rocks. The proposed system is laid out in more detail on a poster presentation of the core concepts for the test project. According to the company, "EGS has the potential to provide as much as 10 percent of the nation's energy needs within the course of a generation."

via: Science Friday

Hydrazine is efficient, can be stored for long periods of time and is used widely in satellite and science and exploration missions, but it costs the agency in processing times and extreme operational hazards because of its highly corrosive and toxic nature. NASA is hoping that a new propellant technology can be found that eliminates those hurdles (i.e. saves money) and possibly even improves performance.

Through its Technology Demonstration Missions Program, the agency will be accepting proposals until April 30 and then giving out at least one award to the best among the submissions that could be worth up to $50 million.

via NASA

The pilot plant has been developed by the Fraunhofer Institute for Interfacial Engineering and Biotechnology and is located next to Stuttgart's wholesale produce market for easy access to food waste. The plant will make methane from the waste by using microorganisms to break down the food in a two-stage digestion process over a few days.

Because the food waste being fermented on any given day can be more or less acidic depending on what was tossed out, the pH levels have to be constantly monitored in order for the microorganisms to best do their thing. The waste is held in several tanks that feature a management system that monitors many parameters, including pH level. The software then calculates how many liters of which waste should be mixed together to feed to the microorganisms.

The plant produces about two-thirds methane and one-third carbon dioxide from the process, but nothing goes unused:  the filtrate water which contains nitrogen and phosphorous, and the carbon dioxide produced from the fermentation are both used to cultivate algae for another project, while the sludge left behind from the fermentation is sent to other institutes that are capable of making methane from it.

The pilot project has been funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and has partnerships with energy company Energie Baden-Württemberg, which is processing the biogas, and with Daimler, which is supplying natural gas-converted vehicles to run on the fuel.

via Gizmag

Tesla Motors has unveiled the prototype for their Model X, a larger, family-oriented vehicle (though not really a mini-van nor an SUV) that will be beginning production along with the Model S sedan. The body sits on the same battery-pack platform frame used for the Model S. The Model X does, in fact, look much like a taller, plumper version of the Model S in many respects.

The rear seats are accessed through gull-wing style doors (which the company calls Falcon Wings) that offer a large opening for back seat passengers and access to third row seating, which makes the Model X a seven-passenger vehicle.

Not unexpectedly, the focus from Tesla is on the performance of the vehicle (0 to 60 in under 5 seconds) rather than on range and economy. The Model X will have two battery options (60 kWh and 85 kWh) and three drive-train options (rear-wheel drive, all-wheel drive, and performance all-wheel drive). Tesla's announcement states that they expect to begin production in late 2013 and have deliveries begin in 2014.