There’s been a few interesting green news items this week.
Lets take a look:
The Spanish Government has announced that they intend to put 1 million electric cars on their roads by 2014. This shows that the Spanish government is committed to actually doing something about their emissions and oil dependency.
Imagine if the Australian Rudd Government took a proper approach in addressing our fuel/emission problems here in Australia and committed to something similar.
But no in Australia we get a b***s**t commitment to subsiding Toyota to the tune of $70 million to build out dated and inefficient camry Parrallel Hybrids . Wow, what a commitment.! Hold the phone. Peter Garrets warming up for a dance on the PM’s desk to celebrate. Not good enough. 100% better than Howards efforts, but that’s not a great benchmark in green solutions.
More reading on Spanish efforts at Gas2.org
In other news MIT researches have found a new more efficient way to store energy from renewable sources.
Everyone is touting this as the next big thing for solar, but the reality is that it can be used for any renewable source like solar, wind , tidal etc. It a new method of splitting hydrogen out of water using a closed loop systems. Here’s some technical info from the CNET article.
The idea is to use the energy from solar photovoltaic panels (or another electricity source) to crack water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen gas. Those gases would be stored and used later in a fuel cell to make electricity when the sun is not shining.
The concept is a closed-loop system: running the hydrogen and water through the fuel cell creates water, which can be captured and used again.
and more..
The core scientific discovery was finding a way to break oxygen out of the water with a relatively inexpensive and benign material, Nocera said. The catalyst–made of a cobalt phosphate–can operate in plain water at atmospheric pressure, giving it more potential than existing methods, he said.
So basically it’s a cheaper, and more effective way to use electrolysis to extract hydrogen from water. It means that at night you will have the stored power of the days excess solar or wind power. You might also be able to use the stored hydrogen in your car. You use a small hydrogen fuel cell at night to pump the extra hydrogen into to generate the power.
I think that this is a major development. It annoys me that its being pimped as a solar solution ( where in fact they used grid power to run the tests). When really is a solution to effectively store ANY renewable energy.
I don’t know if it will happen soon though. I mean theoretically once you pay and install this system you will have cheap off-grid power and fuel for your car. I cant see a fully installed system being cheap given the companies that might loose out from this. Maybe the Chinese will get onboard to mass produce this one day. Also i wonder about safely storing hydrogen in your house but I’m sure that can be resolved.
More news to come
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