Mobile Wind Turbine

Pope Design created The Mobile Wind Turbine, which would allow electricity creation in rural and hard to reach regions of developing countries. It can also be used for natural disaster relief for floods and hurricanes, providing electricity for rescue efforts.

I think the use of mobile solar trucks, such as the Sequoia, are better than mobile wind turbines because there is always sun shine, but wind turbines are only very successful in windy areas such as shores and coasts. It is still an amazing concept though.

Source: [Inhabitat]

Wind & Solar Cell Phone Towers

Ericsson Wind and Solar Cell Towers

Ericsson is planning to power 118,000 mobile phone towers using renewable energy in the Developing world. The project is expecting to save 600 million gallons of diesel. Ericsson is using "vertical wind turbines [which] can have some noise-cutting, cost-cutting and reliability advantages over traditional spinning windmills and may be perfect for in-city wind electricity generation, as well as personal backyard installations." [TreeHugger] [Gizmodo] [TreeHugger]

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Motorola Solar and Wind Powered Cell Phone Networks in Africa

Motorola has installed solar and wind powered in Dordabis village in the Khomas region of Namibia. The green solar and wind toers will operate the MTC Namibia's GSM network. [TreeHugger]

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T-Mobile Solar Cell Towers in US

These solar cell towers are "... in Chalfont, Pennsylvania. The 12 panels are enough to take the tower off grid, and even occasionally add power back onto the electric grid." [TreeHugger] [Green Yahoo!]



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The "Green" War

Europe: The Current Kings Solar Energy
According to the 9th Annual Photovoltaics Status Report, Europe is responsible for 73% of the worlds solar installations in 2009. Europe had a total of 5.8 GW of solar energy, with Germany as the continued dominate European solar leader. [TreeHugger]

World Solar Energy Levels:
Germany (3.8 GW)
Italy (0.73 GW)
Japan (0.48 GW)
United States (0.46 GW)


China: The Clean-Tech Lab for the World
China has now become a green technology center for the world, as they are planning to build a 102 MW Wind Farm by Shanghai. As OE Tech has said before, China is the world's leader in solar panel production, and now has become a leader in green technology development.

Peggy Liu, the founder and chairwoman of the Joint US-China Collaboration in Clean Energy, said "What the US doesn't realize [is that China] is going from manufacturing hub to the clean-tech laboratory of the world," clearly placing US clean energy development under the spotlight. [New York Times]


The US?
In order for the US to catch up to German solar investment, Obama would need to multiply current solar output by levels 8, which would cost quite a bit of money, but would also create a lot of new US jobs in the process. To catch up with China, the US will need to start investing in grand scale clean-energy projects, [like Operation Green Goods], in order to compete with China and Europe.

Brian Merchant recently wrote an article entitled, "If Obama had Chosen Energy over Health Care...," where writes about David Brook's article, An Alternate History, discussing if Obama had chosen his Energy Bill before health care, and how this decision would have allowed Democrats, "to spend the entire summer talking about technological advances, private sector growth and breakthrough productivity gains." Though this maybe true, I disagree with both Merchant and Brooks. Choosing healthcare before [not instead of] energy allows Obama to concentrate on green job development during the second half of his term, a perfect jump start into his second term.

Merchant writes, "But Brooks is right about one thing -- doing energy would have given Obama and the Democrats a chance to engage the public on the economy, and to make genuine strides towards genuine, sustainable job creation..."What I don't agree with here is the phrase, "doing energy would have..." helped out economy, but is this to say that passing a huge multi billion dollar energy plan tomorrow would not help stimulate US employment? Timing is everything, waiting to pass an energy bill and create more jobs for our returning troops and the currently unemployment meant waiting for a war to be over. The new National Train System will cost the US $50 billion and should create many new jobs as well.

In the end, it is clear that the US is under scrutiny for not investing in more Green technology programs, both at home and abroad. Not investing in major green tech programs hurts our reasoning for not joining the Kyoto Protocol. But I truly believe that this is on purpose. Creating mass amounts of green sector jobs for unemployed Americans and returning US troops is a sure-fire way to win the 2012 election.

Watch and see..!


Sources: [TreeHugger] [New York Times] [TreeHugger - Obama]

Magenn Wind Power

"The Magenn Power Air Rotor System (MARS) is a patented high altitude lighter-than-air tethered device that rotates about a horizontal axis in response to wind, efficiently generating clean renewable electrical energy at a lower cost than all competing systems..."

Source: [Magenn Power Inc.]

Up Close and Personal: Inside a Wind Turbine

Sources: [Tree Hugger] [Tree Hugger 2]

This Week in Green Development

Complete, Stand-Alone Off-Grid Refrigeration System

Promethean, an MIT offshoot, has designed a solar powered stand alone refrigeration system for the developing world.

Solar-powered food storage container: our refrigeration system is designed from the ground up to use very little electrical power. The food storage container can cool and preserve a variety of products—such as milk, fruits and vegetables—using as little as 100W of power. As a result, we could efficiently and economically power it with solar photovoltaic (PV) panels.


Solar-power optimizer: a "black-box" control system maintains the operation of the entire system, minimizes energy consumption and optimizes the use of available solar power. The solar-power optimizer uses proprietary algorithms to efficiently transfer power from solar panels to various electrical loads in the system.


Low-power, low-cost heat exchangers: to reach our cost and power consumption goals, we’ve designed our own heat exchangers to cool and preserve the products. For milk cooling, one of our heat exchanger cools the milk immediately to arrest bacteria growth and maintain milk quality according to international standards.


World's Largest Wind Turbine Offshore

Underway in Norway, the wind turbine will generate 10 MW of Power.



Sources: [Tree Hugger] [Green Technology] [Promethean]

Wind-Powered Highway Lights

Green Tech of the Week

Nothing says green development like wind-powered, disconnected from any power grid, highway lights. Though this product is very self-explanatory, my question is what happens if there is heavy traffic, at night, on a windless day?


Sources: [Gizmodo] [Turbine Light] [Inhabitat]