Residential Solar Power News
Last week Scotland’s Energy Minister launched the Biomara research project to study the feasibility of microalgae and seaweed usage as alternative energy in the production of biofuels. This project aligns with the requests of having at least 10% of clean transport energy by 2020. The project is about $8 million (€6 million) worth.
MIT is hosting a sustainability summit as a cap to Earth Week. The summit will be entirely student-organized, and is entitled, “Discovering New Dimensions for Growth.” The Sustainability Summit will bring together students, business leaders, academics, sustainability activists, and public servants for a day of invited talks, panel discussions and opportunities for informal networking on the subject of how to face the opportunities and challenges of making the transition to a sustainable world.
The theme of the summit, “Discovering New Dimensions for Growth,” explores emerging solutions to the problems of unsustainable development. Current economic, political, and academic institutions, though highly interwoven, mainly work in isolation from each other. Students and practitioners of the field of sustainability are increasingly aware of the opportunities to collaborate to enhance their work on environmental, social, and economic endeavors. The goals are to restore natural systems, create a just and equitable social infrastructure, and revitalize the world’s economies - an incredible challenge that requires collaboration across many previously disparate fields.
We have been so focused on chemical storage systems lately, that some us forget other old, seemingly more efficient, mechanical batteries. Such a battery is the flywheel. Several successful experiments have been carried out in the last 50 years, and the flywheel’s applications ranged from acting as a UPS for a hospital to putting an entire train to movement and then to cruise speed, only by its power.