Owl Power Company has announced Vegawatt™, an innovative new cogeneration system for restaurants and food service facilities. Vegawatt™ uses waste vegetable oil from any food service operation as a fuel to generate on-site electricity and hot water, saving the restaurant thousands of dollars as well as providing a clean, renewable source of energy. Any food service location with fryers can use the Vegawatt™ system to save $800 monthly. It is a fully automated system that requires no intervention or maintenance by restaurant staff, no additional chemicals, and produces no liquid byproducts.
Sempra Generation, a subsidiary of Sempra Energy in San Diego, just took the wraps off a 10-megawatt solar farm in Nevada. That's small by industry standards, enough to light just 6,400 homes. But the ramifications are potentially huge. A veteran analyst has calculated that the facility can produce power at a cost of 7.5 cents a kilowatt-hour, less than the 9-cent benchmark for conventional electricity. If that's so, it marks a milestone that renewable fans have longed for: "grid parity," in which electricity from the sun, wind or other green sources can meet or beat the price performance of such carbon-based fuels as coal and natural gas. Original LA Times story.
The engineering company CH2M Hill is now joining hands with the U.S. Department of Energy to provide Internet solar maps of 25 American cities, using Google Earth technology to chart the precise solar potential of neighborhoods, literally rooftop by rooftop. The company has just finished mapping all of San Francisco, allowing residents to enter their address and take the solar measure of their own home. "People in San Francisco think we don't have any solar potential,' says Gavin Newsom, the city's deep-green mayor. "But the map shows we have a lot more sun than you'd believe." Time Magazine Source.
From Wired Science - Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas. Green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
Without a radically expanded and smarter electrical grid, wind and solar will remain niche power sources. To make use of clean energy, we'll need more transmission lines that can transport power from one region to another and connect energy-hungry cities with the remote areas where much of our renewable power is likely to be generated. We'll also need far smarter controls throughout the distribution system--technologies that can store extra electricity from wind farms in the batteries of plug-in hybrid cars, for example, or remotely turn power-hungry appliances on and off as the energy supply rises and falls. Watch a demonstration of General Electric's software system for the grid or read more in the MIT Technology Review
