Comparing electric cars to gas powered cars

Following is an interesting article on the comparison of electric cars to gas powered cars:

Busting the electric car myth

The main point: The Tesla is at worst as pollutant as the Toyota Prius, if you consider that the Tesla's power comes from coal plants. This comes from the more efficient electric motor that the Tesla has, compared to a combustion engine.

First Solar: Quest for the $1 Watt

This months IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article on a start-up company called First Solar. They are very close to the $1 per Watt solar cell with their thin-film production process. This mark is the so called tipping point where solar energy becomes about as expensive as regular grid energy. Thus, if you can produce such a product, you can freely compete with any regular energy provider. The article can be found here:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/aug08/6464

Don't forget to have a look at the links in the: "To Probe Further" section on page 4. They are very interesting!

Household Energy Monitoring going Mainstream

Household Energy Monitoring start-ups pop up everywhere. Here is an interesting article from Wired that mentions some of them:

Flash Creators Reveal App for Saving Money on Energy

I wonder, if I should do my own start-up based on the research I am doing:

NAWMS: Nonintrusive Autonomous Water Monitoring System

New Way of Getting Oil Independent

The summer is over, I am a married man now, and it is time to get back to work. Here is an interesting article from Wired on Shai Agassi. He has a very interesting vision on how a country can get its oil independency:

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi

The key idea is that similar to cellphone providers, a Electric Recharge Grid Operator (ERGO) the batteries and provides charging stations pretty much everywhere. He also provides car at a substantial discount. The ERGO makes money by selling the power. Read the article if you are interested in more details.

UCLA Biotech Lab goes Green

Not directly a science article, but an article on a research lab that wants to go green, and faces some difficult challenges:

Teamwork helps lab go green

IEEE Power & Energy Society

A colleague pointed me to the following IEEE society:
IEEE Power & Energy Society

Looks very interesting. I have to see what kind of paper's they published at their conferences...

Paper or Plastic?

Who doesn't know this question after you went shopping for groceries? This is not a 100% academic science article, but still an interesting read and breakdown on how paper and plastic bags are produced:

Paper Bags or Plastic Bags? Everything You Need to Know

The conclusion in short: Both are bad. Use reusable cloth bags!

Ocean Power Catches a Wave

Found this interesting article in IEEE Spectrum: Ocean Power Catches a Wave. It discusses the implementation and test of wave energy harvesting power plants.

Even more interesting is David M. Clemen's comment on it:

I find this article to be a little disingenuous. It states that New Zealand...

The article also quotes a person from the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto. Seems to be an interesting company. I have to do some more research on them to see what they exactly are doing.

Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews

I found this nice journal on renewable and sustainable energy. It is published by Elsevier and can be found here. Unfortunately, it costs quiet a bit for personal use. I will see if my University has a subscription to it. For now, here is a list of the top 25 most downloaded articles from this review: Top 25 Renewable & Sustainable Energy Reviews Articles.

Early 20th Century Article on Wind Turbine Efficiency

I found an interesting article through one of The Economist articles (Trade winds). The author is Albert Betz, and he calculated the theoretic limit of windmill efficiency in the early 20th century ("Das Maximum der theoretisch möglichen Ausnutzung des Windes durch Windmotoren (Theoretical limit for best utilization of wind by wind-motors)"). The article itself is hard to find, and if anyone can help me locate it, I would really appreciate it. Anyhow, this article gets cited by about 50 papers. Some of the seem very interesting, and I will definitely have a look at them.

The Power and the Glory - The Economist Article

The Economist run a special report on green power and economy. There are a couple of interesting articles in the print edition, and I will post shortly some comments on them. In the meantime, you can read one of the articles online: The Power and the Glory

Green Science

Lately I got interested more and more in green science articles. This includes anything from sustainable energy to green technology. In this blog, I plan to post articles that I find interesting and write about what I think about them.

Let's see where this goes...