Inhabitat's Week In Green: solar panels, solar planes, solar trains
The Week in Green is a new item from our friends at Inhabitat, recapping the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us.
Solar power also took to the skies this week as the Solar Impulse plane made its first successful flight. And speaking of futuristic transportation, Minority Report-style podcars may be just around the corner if this solar powered urban transit system takes off. We were wowed by Finland's new all-electric supercar, which will be vying for the Progressive Auto X Prize this summer.
We also took a look at several innovative kid-friendly designs including an incredible Game Boy made from paper and a biometric baby monitoring alarm clock that lets parents monitor their babies' temperature and heart-rate remotely, as well as cue up lullabies from anywhere.
The past week also produced several promising developments from the realm of energy storage as Hitachi announced that it's developing lithium-ion batteries that last twice as long. And finally, meet BOB, a battery the size of a building that is capable of powering an entire town in Texas. The gigantic sodium sulfur backup battery can store up to 4 megawatts of power for up to 8 hours.
As a light sport aircraft enthusiast, I much rather put a gigantic solar panel on the hanger roof, and have a nice battery powered light electric plane.
I just see solar panels as still being at the stage of development that they are really only PRACTICAL (price + performance) for charging devices.
@Ducman69 It seems to me that that would be less of an investment risk too... whens the last time you heard of a hangar crashing?
@eko2 The beginning of your comment reminded me of Family Guy's theme.
bad a**ness to an extreme green level :D yea!!!
I'm still waiting for this green-fad to die so the real solutions; nuclear energy and fusion research, can come back to the spotlight
@JeremyBenthem Cost to build one nuclear plant is about 10 billion dollars with 10 billion dollars you could build 500 wind turbines (10mw each for 20 million dollars). One nuclear plant produces 100 MGW's 500 wind turbines produce 5000 MGW's
So when you say real energy solutions you mean the ones that cost us more money and produce less electricity that also hurt our environment with waste product that we dont know what to do with after the fact.
Or do you mean real energy solutions that do more for our dollar produces more electricity and more jobs engineering and manufacturing.
@jahaz118
Fact 1: "green jobs" are a myth. There is no net increase associated with the proliferation of green tech. (verified by authoritative sources in the EU after examining the impact that the green movement has had on their economy.)
Fact 2: The amount of energy that the Nuclear Power plant can produce out ways the value of installing 500 wind turbines (where the heck are you even going to put 500 wind turbines?). Nuclear power is safe, clean, sustainable, and cost effective.
@JeremyBenthem
It's not either/or. We can have new nuclear plants AND renewables.
@New Reformation
Fact #3: When you can't get the difference between "weighs" and "ways", people begin to question the credibility of your opinion.
@RioRyan
I would have edited it but Fact 4 prevented me from doing so.
Fact 4: Engadget needs an "edit" option for comments.
PS- Do you really discredit the entire substance of what someone says because they accidentally used a homonym? Be a bit more considerate.
@New Reformation The French receive 80% of their power from nuclear reactors and recycle all of their spent fuel in a single facility (in fact it has enough capacity for the rest of Europe as well), South Korea is about to implement this, so why shouldn't we?
Imagine filling your truck tanker with 100 gallons of gas, and only using 5 gallons of it. That is approximately our current US policy. We have over 50K tons of used fuel just sitting in storage facilities which would be enough to power the country for a decade.
Clearly nuclear power plants are reliable and safe now, just look at our Navy. These generators are small, powerful, and safe enough to be used in battle conditions in rough seas with thousands right nearby in close living quarters.
Somewhere along the line though, some ignorant hippies got the idea that nuclear power was "dirty".
@New Reformation I live in nebraska have you been here we have a lot of windy land or kansas. Each turbine would need about 600ft It might be safe and it might be cleaner than coal but you still have left over radioactive waste.
No nuclear doesn't produce more energy for the dollar. 10 billion dollars is just to build the place that doesn't include the fuel or the maintenance. If nuclear was more productive then it would be worth while.
@jahaz118 I don't know where you are getting your numbers from.
The only reason we don't have more nuclear facilities is due to ignorance and scare tactics used. People are afraid that they will have a Chernobyl in their back yard, and so selecting a city to build one in becomes impossibly cluttered by red tape and red necks worried about growing a third testicle.
@JeremyBenthem
Nuclear fusion technology is very different from the current nuclear fission we are using today. I agree with Jeremy. Fusion has enough potential to provide enough clean energy for everybody basically for free, it can provide plenty orders of magnitude more energy than a large number of wind turbines. Meltdowns and radioactive waste is also much less of a problem using fusion instead of fission.
@jahaz118
Where did you get the $10 billion number? modern facilities can be build with less than $2 billion, especially in countries where there isn't that much purely fear-based red-tape. And the whole waste thing is a joke. Sure it's not perfectly clean, but per unit of time, the volume of nuclear waste is microscopic versus the volume of pollution spewed out of coal and oil plants making the same amount of power, not to mention it is better contained. Plus you could build 100 of the latest generation plants and get less waste than all the 30-50 year old plants the US is using
Green energy may be the future but it's a long ways out.
@John52 Diesel does not have to be a future technology, and growing switchgrass (a MUCH MUCH higher and greener yield per acre than corn... *raises middle finger to the corn lobbyists and corrupt officials in Washington*) could very easily account for a nice 10% biodiesel blend into our current low sulphur diesel.
The Audi A3 and big VW Jetta wagon in TDI both return a great 42mpg, and diesels have a very long lifespan, which in itself is environmentally friendly. =)
I'd also like to see vehicles getting a tax credit NOT because they are hybrids, but based only on their fuel economy, including motorcycles. If you take a 55mpg Suzuki DL650 bike or 36mpg Toyota Yaris, you still got around twice the fuel economy of a 22mpg hybrid Tahoe.
I wish that baby monitor was out already.
Solar powered flashlight. WIN!
(non-electric) Trains are already so efficient it's not funny. A CSX train can haul tons of freight and get over 100MPG. My question is, why can't my car?
@New Reformation I Bet they have them, Just the gas industry would be pretty pissed if the auto industry started releasing them.
@New Reformation It's because of size. A nuclear reactor can power my car until it turns to dust, but it wouldn't be practical.
Enough of the green religious crap! enough with earth day and inefficient over priced power!
Enough with technology!
Solar Planes, Solar Trains, ...what about Solar Automobiles?
Green energy "dependency" may seem like it is far away (which it is), but it is so appealing to everyone (consumers and distributors) that these advances, although baby steps, will one day lead us to cleaner energy.
But as of now, what does a colorful, paper gameboy accomplish?
What about solar automobiles?
Interesting that one of the people commenting on inhabitat's site stated that a solar panel uses more energy to be created then it actually reclaims in its useful life. I'm trying to imagine how ridiculous this sounds.
I use, on average 16Kwh a day. Tack that on for 10 years and thats 58,400 Kwh! It really takes more than 58,400 Kwh of energy to make the solar panels to power a house under 2,000 square feet? That guy had to get his info from some reputable source such as Fox News.
Of course, he could have actually done a very minute amount of research to see the conservative estimate is actually a 5:1 ratio. That is, a solar panel produces 5 times the power it took to make it over its useful life:
http://www.solarbus.org/documents/pvpayback.pdf
Tired of climate denier, and anti-green luddites just poisoning the well.
@Bhima Foxnews.com has had numerous columns promoting nuclear power and wind farms. Foxnews has a very pro-business slant, but that includes promoting domestic fuel sources that create American jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign energy.
Believe it or not, conservatives very much enjoy the idea of a self-sufficient America and don't like sending hard earned American dollars to the middle-east and Venezuela.
That guy was biased and uninformed with his comment, but you don't appear immune from this weakness either. ;)
@Ducman69
Actually, in the context of what I said, there is no bias. The context of mis-information is absolutely true about Fox News especially in terms of Climate Change. Their most popular TV entertainers deny the overwhelming body of scientific evidence pointing to our involvement in climate change. Just because they get the idea of promoting domestic fuel sources doesn't mean they aren't the biggest culprit in poisoning the well in terms of the environment, energy and climate change. As the saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
Sorry, me comparing a person's obviously unfounded opinion to Fox News' incessant unfounded opinions is actually a perfectly comparable analogy.
@Bhima We do not fully understand climate change, and the science has been acknowledged to have been fabricated, not to mention the pure hypocrisy and monetary exploitation of "going green" by politicians like Al Gore, that use it as nothing but a false platform for their political and business ambitions.
Conservatives here in Texas have led the charge on carbon sequestration programs to be on the safe side (yes, we are leading the charge and also will soon complete the largest wind farm in North America), while still pointing out some of the holes in the current proposed theories that are as much religious as they are based on practical observable fact when it comes to cause and effect.
Fox news provides a conservative and pro-business slant, this is well known, but that is EXCELLENT as it appears to be the only outlet on popular media willing to bring to light the failures of the left which liberal slanted news refuses to like CBS, CNN, The New York Times, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, and others. Anyone with common sense would watch CNN at night and FOX earlier in the day to get a full report on the misdeeds of the right and left to form a balanced opinion.
@Ducman69
Not that I really wanted this to get as political as it has, I will leave you with this.
1)Though we don't know everything about climate change, just as we don't know everything about evolution yet, the general tenets of climate change are grounded in a mountain of evidence that is convincing enough that the same percentage of life scientists across the globe believe it to be as true as evolution. The honest debate among scientists are degrees in nature, they are not controversial like our MSM would have us (especially in America) believe.
2) No one with common sense would watch FOX news at all because all you have to do is a very small amount of research to show you that all their commentators are wrong on the majority of the subjects they talk about. Also, none of the alternative news you cited has anything "liberal" about them. The Wall Street Journal is not only pro business, its owned by Rupert Murdoch and has been getting less moderate as his influence grows larger over the editors. The other news sources are extremely moderate, save the 2 hours on MSNBC that have Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann--neither which I would argue are journalists, they are just commentators that sometimes have journalists on their shows. With that said, CNN, NYT and the LA times are moderate news organizations that rarely voice the concerns of liberal issues. Just examine all the news from these "liberal organizations" during the build up to the wars and now.
You don't get a balanced view of the world by getting your information from commentary only, which is what FOX and CNN are at this point.
If you want to real conservative news that isn't as fallacious as FOX and actually has some sense of intelligence read the Economist. If you want to watch actual liberal news that isn't just commentary but actually has some journalistic integrity watch Democracy Now.
/political thread
@Bhima
It's now called "climate change" because global warming is proving false.
The reason we don't know much of evolution is because it's false.
You say people who watch Fox lacks common sense, it's the people who watch MSNBC that lacks any common sense. MSNBC are the ones making up stories, they even would defend terrorists.