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Showing posts with label Bioelectric. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bioelectric. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
15 Year Old Invents Algae-Powered Energy System
Thanks to 15 year old Texan Javier Fernández-Han, we feel a little more hopeful about the next generation’s ability to adapt to a world of limited resources. The high school student developed a fully featured algae-powered energy system that combines a dozen new and existing technologies to treat waste, produce methane and bio-oil for fuel, produce food for humans and livestock, sequester greenhouse gases, and produce oxygen. Dubbed the VERSATILE system, the project is this year’s winner of the annual Invent Your World Challenge $20,000 scholarship.
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Sunday, May 10, 2009
We are still burning crops to move vehicles
No surprise here, Electric vehicles are more efficient than burning fuel in a conventional engine. According to a California Professor we should be using the energy we get from crops and use it to generate electricity for electric vehicles.
Excerpt:
"Bioelectricity outperforms ethanol across a range of feedstocks, conversion technologies, and vehicle classes. Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol. These results suggest that alternative bioenergy pathways have large differences in how efficiently they use the available land to achieve transportation and climate goals.
This is hardly a surprise, though it has seemed startling enough to the media that it's gone mainstream. After all, conventional car engines of the sort used to burn ethanol put out barely 20 per cent of their fuel's energy at the drive shaft. By contrast, an electric motor can beat 80 per cent without trouble."
But wait:
"Are you sure there's enough land, Professor?
Let's hope that Campbell never bumps into Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry here in the UK. Pike is deeply scathing about the idea of using plants to power transportation by any means - electric or ethanol. He notes that you get 2,000 per cent more energy per acre by covering land with solar cells, making Campbell's measly 80 per cent improvement look pretty rubbish"
Read the full article here
Excerpt:
"Bioelectricity outperforms ethanol across a range of feedstocks, conversion technologies, and vehicle classes. Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol. These results suggest that alternative bioenergy pathways have large differences in how efficiently they use the available land to achieve transportation and climate goals.
This is hardly a surprise, though it has seemed startling enough to the media that it's gone mainstream. After all, conventional car engines of the sort used to burn ethanol put out barely 20 per cent of their fuel's energy at the drive shaft. By contrast, an electric motor can beat 80 per cent without trouble."
But wait:
"Are you sure there's enough land, Professor?
Let's hope that Campbell never bumps into Dr Richard Pike, head of the Royal Society of Chemistry here in the UK. Pike is deeply scathing about the idea of using plants to power transportation by any means - electric or ethanol. He notes that you get 2,000 per cent more energy per acre by covering land with solar cells, making Campbell's measly 80 per cent improvement look pretty rubbish"
Read the full article here
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