Lucky for us, more and more eco-towers are popping up all the time. In fact, a symposium about greenscrapers called Mixed Greens: An International Survey of State-of-the-Art Sustainable Skyscraper Design just wrapped up last month in NYC.

Lucky for us, Jon Schroeder is on the case, and is bringing us the top ten green skyscrapers.

Or is there. We at EcoGeek have already reported on Petier devices, which extract electricity from hot surfaces. Unfortunately they're currently either too inefficient or too expensive to be practical.

But Oresk Symko, a physicist at the University of Utah has created a heat-to-electricity device that operates on a completely different principle. By converting the heat to sound waves, and then the sound waves to electricity using piezoelectric substances, Symko says that he can convert heat to electricity very efficiently.

Unfortunately, he doesn't tell us how efficiently, at least, not anywhere I could find. However, I do know that piezo-electric materials are very expensive, so I worry about the cost-effectiveness of the project.

But, if he can make it work, and cheaply, then his devices will likely be showing up everywhere from solar arrays to electric vehicle batteries.

Hat tip to David.  Via LiveScience

• A lot of people -­ and not just wind industry representatives, either ­- believe that wind energy is and will remain an increasingly crucial part of our national renewable energy portfolio. No one had anything particularly negative to say about nuclear or other non-c02-emitting power generation technologies, but all agreed that of those other options, none were as ready as wind power was to step up to the plate and work. (It takes years and years to bring a nuclear power plant online, for instance, and not nearly as long to build and permit wind turbines). The wind industry feels that its golden moment is now.
• The AWEA has set a really tough goal for itself and for the wind industry: to produce 20% of the U.S.' power by the year 2020. As good as that sounds, no one really knows how it's going to be accomplished. Panelist Bob Lukefahr, of BP¹s alternative fuels division, stressed the challenges: It will require "technology we haven't invented yet," he said, and entails "political and economic complexity this business has never faced before." For starters, they're going to have to figure out how to deliver all that energy; even if we had the turbines to do it right now, it would cost at least $60 billion to build the transmission lines to get that power onto the country's grid, according to AWEA President Randall Swisher.
  
• The future of the wind industry depends on the White House, and if the next few presidents we have aren't wind-friendly, wind will stay small for the long haul.

The good news is, there are plenty of states out there interested in having the wind industry set up shop in their regions. At Monday's confab alone, the mayor of Los Angeles and the governors of Montana and Iowa made nice to the assembled windustryites, and at least one congressman (D.C.'s own Jerry McNerney) and a senator (Tom Daschle) lent their support to the cause as a whole. In short, the industry is booming, consumer interest in renewable energy has never been higher, and the future ­ depending in part on what happens in the 2008 election ­ looks bright.

Blaise Aguera y Arcas presents a demo of Photosynth at the TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference. He shows how his new software links photos together spatially and hints at the value Photosynth adds to your photo collection. The demo  shows Photosynth creating amazing multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features just by scanning photos from Flickr. It creates a spatial map and places all photos of an object (such as Notre Dame, Paris) into a collage that is easy and intuitive to navigate.

While the spatial 3-D image collage is amazing, the information created when everyone’s photo tags are linked is even more amazing. Photosynth creates a dense information swarm around the objects it links together.

Photosynth is the brainchild of Blaise Aguera y Arcas, he also created Seadragon (acquired by Microsoft in 2006), the visualization technology that gives Photosynth its amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities.

Seadragon and Photosynth create an interface that will make working with text and images on a screen preferable to working with paper. With the exception of reading at the beach, I can’t see any advantage for paper. 

• There's an average of 6 grams of CO2 in 1 liter of soda.
• The majority of CO2 used in the soft drink industry is a byproduct of, get this, petroleum refineries.
• There are 300 million people in America.
• And freakiest of all, the average American drinks 56 gallons of soda per year.
  

Cows and pigs are one of the biggest contributors to global warming because methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2. Chickens alone produce about eight billion pounds of waste per year.

And then there's the whole "Omnivore's Dilemma." Should we choose to kill and eat other animals if we have a choice? Well, if these scientists have their way we'll be able to have our pork as well as our pig, and everyone will be happy. Oh...except the livestock industry.

Via TreeHugger and Reuters

This is not some futuristic city on the rise; Rizhao is just "a small, ordinary Chinese city with per capita incomes even lower than in most other cities in the region." Credit for solar energy's popularity goes to the government, which has undertaken a tremendous campaign for the use of these technologies. Instead of subsidizing the use of solar heaters (which they could not afford in any case), they invested in research and development to lower the cost of the appliances, putting them at price parity with their electric counterparts. At the cheaper price, the use of solar water heaters becomes a no-brainer, saving the average household $120 a year. In addition, the city now mandates solar heating installations be incorporated into all new buildings.

Renewable energy is really exciting to talk about because it's like the diet soda of energy -- we can still drink all the goop we want, but it hurts us just a little less. Well, the American Solar Energy Society's report this year tells us we ought to be drinking a lot less goop if we're serious about saving ourselves from CERTAIN DOOM.

OK, maybe those aren't their exact words. But the ASES says that energy efficiency is more important than all other kinds of renewable energy put together. Check out the report and some graphics here. Of particular interest is this projection of where our energy savings should come from if we want to hit a 60% -- or 80% -- reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.

The report states that using less electricity through smart design, awareness, etc. could reduce carbon emissions by up to  57 percent by 2030. We say, let's get started. Check out our efficiency category to see what's up there.

Via TreeHugger.

In 1931, not long before he died, the [Edison] told his friends Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

While the central government is clearly showing more interest in protecting the environment, local governments, eager to cut corners in the name of economics, are helping block the path to sustainable development. But the Xiamen protests, thousands of people strong, are the latest sign of people power in China, where tens of thousands of protests over tainted land and water are recorded every year, threatening the government's dream of a "harmonious society" while pointing the way forward for environmental action in a place that seriously needs some.

That local officials in Xiamen reportedly began blocking text messages too in an attempt to stem the protests, and that the protests continued apace, is an indication that, try as it might, China's authoritarian controls simply can't keep up with the power of cell phones blogs, bulletin boards, and the smartmobs they might create. (Local governments are getting into the SMS act themselves, using text messages to warn citizens of floods and even stop protests.)

Clearly, stopping protests just isn't possible the way it used to be. Between increasing countryside unrest (there may be nothing scarier to the government) and deadly pollution (China's rural cancer rate rose by 23 percent in the past two years, and more than 70 percent of the country's waterways and 90 percent of its underground water are contaminated ) something's gotta give.

Since the plant's not been completely scrapped, residents are still protesting, according to Reuters. And the more word spreads, the more likely it is that protests will continue elsewhere too. An large expansion of a chemical plant in the southeastern city of Quanzhou that produces paraxylene and other chemicals was announced in March, funded by China's No. 2 oil company, Sinopec, Saudi Aramco, and ExxonMobil Corp. Paraxylene is a key material in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) saturated polyester polymers -- the stuff of which the world's plastic bottles are made.

Modules in production work with the Toyota Prius, Highlander and RAV4 EV, Ford Escape Hybrid and Dodge Sprinter Hybrid. In the future they hope to integrate them with Teslas and upgrade to a 320-watt module, up from 212-watts currently.

While not adding a whole lot of economic benefit to hybrid cars, it's an easy solution for people looking to squeeze more juice out of them. Unlike solar additions in homes, hybrid cars have the technology already built in to benefit from a solar add-on making them a simple installation.

Via: Treehugger

Acumentrics manufactures 5000-watt solid oxide fuel cell systems (SOFC) for power applications. They are also developing combined-heat-and-power units (which are like boilers that produce electricity) for the home market. In 2000 they acquired a novel fuel cell technology. Since then, they have increased the output of a single fuel cell tube from 1 watt to 60 watts. Today they have over 30 units working in the field, including ones that power visitor’s centers at Exit Glacier National Park in Alaska, and Cuyahoga National Park in Ohio.

One of their key innovations was making ceramic fuel cell technology shatter resistant. It is shatter resistant because of its shape -- it is a tube, not a thin sheet as most others have used --with a special composition of layers that prevents them from flaking off. Solid oxide fuel cells must handle temperature swings from 20 to 800ºC. Many other solid oxide fuel cells crack when they are cycled on and off, because of thermal shock.

But what really makes Acumentrics different is that they aren't waiting around for the mythical hydrogen economy. The fuel cells run on natural gas, propane, ethanol, diesel, biogas, and biodiesel. While using non-hydrogen fuel means that the cell will produce CO2, Acumentrics fuel cells consume half as much fuel as a comparable small-engine generator, per kW. So they produce the same amount of electricity, while consuming half as much fuel, and producing half as much CO2.

Via: Treehugger