Biofuel and other chemicals from CO2

At UCLA (University of California - Los Angeles) James Liao is leading a research to create genetically modified algae which consumes CO2 from power plant fumes or any sources and creates biofuel or other usefull chemical compounds.

Their research has recently gotten some financial support from a Japanese company from Kaiteki Institute Inc. part of the Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings.

The revolutionary in this technology is that, it can create a material flow loop between burning fuel and the released CO2, which makes burning fuel sustainable as extra Carbon from oil and gas is not needed if the fuel generation is enough fast. The energy for this fuel generation is coming from the sun. More about the technology: here.

Smart Grid as an Internet

Katie Fehrenbacher at earth2tech posted about the recent news on the Smart Grid field, which seems to move towards an open standard system for example using IEEE's standard (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) for communication to gather the information from the consumer nodes for the central controlling at the utility.

If the Smart Grid will be as cheap as the Wi-Fi and will be wide spread and used at all utilities, the energy consumption of household will be much more flat eliminating the peaks, and the consumption feedbacks from the utility can give ideas to the consumers where are the possibilities to save more energy and money.
The post is at earth2tech, here.

Fly Ash Bricks

CalStar has developed production technology to produce bricks and pavers from the waste of coal burning, from fly ash. The method they use needs 85% less energy to produce than in case of a traditional clay brick. The released CO2 emmision during the production is 90% less. The performance of the Fly Ash Brick is as good as the traditional bricks and its price is competitive with it too. So this could be a really good replacement of an energy consuming technology.

Videos about the production and its benefits are at CalStar's website: here. And at SmartPlanet: here.

Feather Circuit Boards

Transmaterial blog recently released a post about a new way of using chicken feather and soybeans to create circuit boards in order to phase out petroleum based materials. Richard Wool is the director of the Affordable Composites from Renewable Sources (ACRES) program at University of Delaware.

More at Transmaterial.

New Solar Manufacturing Technology

Here is a new Solar manufacturing technology on the way, which will make the solar panels even more competitive to the traditional energy sources. The 1 dollar per Watt has been reached already, this new technological innovation will move the price of a solar panel even lower.


The company is 1366 Technologies. They gave an interview to the Scientific American about their innovation, the video can be reached from this link.