Ed Ring

If you had 100 square feet of photovoltaic panels (PV), at 10 watts per square foot (full sun only), then you would be able to save one kilowatt-hour per hour. For that matter, if you only had 50 square feet of PV, but your panels yielded 20 watts per square foot in full sun, you would also be able to store one kilowatt-hour per hour. The reason all this matters is because there isn't a lot of room on the outside of automobiles for PV, but Fisker Automotive in Irvine, California, intends to put a silicon skin on their new plug in hybrid. During a follow up interview after our initial report "Fisker's Luxury Electric Car," Henrik Fisker also disclosed today that the car will be a series hybrid. But returning to silicon PV skin on electric vehicles, the real question is how many miles will you get per kilowatt-hour of stored electricity? Fisker wouldn't say, although from his remarks it appears they intend to exceed...

There are few ways to better illustrate the folly of ignoring thermal factors over atmospheric factors when prescribing global climate mitigations than this:  There are alternative energy technologies that will exploit cold conditions to offload heat.  Put another way, it is now cost effective to extract cold thermal mass from the deep waters of lakes and ocean coastlines with heat exchangers, pumps and pipelines, use that cool thermal mass for air conditioning in urban areas, then release the heated water back into the lakes and oceans.  But if we do this, how much faster do we heat the deep waters, otherwise so slow to warm?  Take the thermal mass of Los Angeles, pour it into the deep cool California current year after year, and see what happens. How funny we worry about CO2 when millions of square miles of tropical rainforest tree canopy are giving way to agriculture - the...

Here comes another all-electric automaker, and one with quite a pedigree.  If you go to the website for Fisker Automotive you will be tantalized but definitely not overwhelmed with information.  Like Aptera, this Southern California start-up is keeping a low profile as their next generation car takes shape.  On Fisker's home page you will see a sexy green silhouette of a sports car, a clock ticking backwards to the formal launch of the vehicle on January 19th, 2008 at the Detroit Auto Show, and three press releases, dated 9-5-07, 10-31-07, and 11-19-07.  Oh, and a pre-order form... Fisker Automotive's Plug-in Hybrid Four Door Sports Sedan. But there is nothing low profile about the team they're...

THE COMPANIES WHO PROVE WE ARE NOW ENTERING AN ERA OF ABUNDANT LAND, ENERGY & WATER McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry - Essential Software & Services Astec Inc. - Hycrete, Inc. - Sipcrete, LLC - Applied Materials - Ausra, Inc. - Gridpoint, Inc. Energy Recovery International - Epuramat - Netafim - General Motors High-rise urban farms will deliver water and food, freeing up millions of square miles of farmland Skyscraper Farms The promise this green iteration of high technology makes is that we will achieve resource abundance. Because of high-tech green innovation, we will soon have abundant land, abundant energy, and abundant water. Smart growth policies that are based on conditions of scarcity are short sighted. Spot shortages of energy and water - as well as perceived shortages of land - may last a few more decades but will eventually be swept away...

Will we ever see fuel cell cars on the road?  Many critics feel that government support for this technology is misguided, with far better options available for alternative-fuel, "green" transportation. While the fuel cell concept is simple, implementation faces major hurdles. For example, there are more than 170,000 gas stations in the United States and so far well under 100 hydrogen counterparts. Honda's FCX "Clarity" advanced fuel cell vehicle. Here is the basic science behind the operation of a fuel cell vehicle:  Air blows across one side of a permeable film while hydrogen passes across the other side. The film serves as a catalyst to combine two hydrogen molecules...

Today we caught up with Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health at Columbia University, who is arguably the world's leading proponent of "vertical farming" or, if you will, industrial scale hydroponic and aeroponic crop production within high-rise buildings.  If you go to his website www.verticalfarm.com, you will find a very in-depth body of work exploring the feasibility of this idea. A cross-sectional depiction of the vertical farm. It makes a lot of sense.  In a way, it totally inverts the conventional wisdom of many of today's agriculturalists.  Instead of using the biosphere to power the technosphere, we are using the technosphere to power the biosphere.  That...

The internet has been around a long time, but finding information about green technology and finance on the internet, that's something new entirely.  Take EcoWorld's "Green Chips" index, for example.  Established in 2000, it is possibly the first, and still one of surprisingly few attempts to map publically traded green companies and green funds for investors. Camino Energy's "Energy Navigator" Four new indexes of publically traded sustainable energy companies Social responsibility funds in general aggregate companies that embrace many phenomena, of which "green" (itself wildly subjective) is only one of a variety of social benefit criteria.  Along with actual funds, of course, are...

When we caught up with Gridpoint's Vice President for Product Strategy, Brian Golden, he wanted to make sure it was clear they offer a lot more than storage.  Gridpoint's "Connect Series" product is a turnkey electricity management system that can be installed in light commercial or multi-unit residential buildings or at a utility substation, in order to monitor and manage electricity usage.  And Gridpoint, who already counts among their customers virtually every major power utility in the USA, is one of a handful of companies who offer a suite of products to manage electrical resources more intelligently. Gridpoint's 12 kWh "Connect" Series But Gridpoint's "Connect...

There are no official announcements of when the GM Volt will actually hit the showrooms in production quantities, but the year 2010 continues to hold up as the unofficial date.  Last week in the Detroit Free Press, in a report by Katie Merx entitled "A New Era Dawns for GM," Vice Chairman Bob Lutz stated he "wants to make up to 100,000 fuel-efficient Chevrolet Volts in the first year of production."  This got our attention. The GM Volt - The World's First Production Series Hybrid? (GM Volt Image Gallery) Yesterday I asked GM spokesman Rob Peterson about the quantity of cars planned and the launch year 2010.  Peterson could not make an official comment on the year but confirmed that everything is still moving...

Ever since "The Global Warming Swindle" was aired in the U.K. several months ago, I've been wanting to see it.  Well here it is, linked to by a very interesting blogger named "Al Fin" who has been posting since 2005.  Tonight I watched it in its entirety, and am more convinced than ever how dangerous and how wrong it is to accept anything in the name of fighting global warming. This film, the second of three linked to by Fin in his post "Global Warming Doomsday Called Off," (all three of the films he links to are worth watching) was more thorough and measured than I'd expected, and confirmed many points of skepticism I already had.  In the over 90 minute presentation, some of the most eminent scientists and thinkers in the world came forward over and over with reasons why the global warming crowd has got it wrong, and the consequences we face if rational debate and cost/benefit analysis isn't...