CleanBeta

Continental Wind Partners, a major renewable power developer, and CEZ Group, the leading CE power utility, finalized the sale of two massive wind farms in Romania today — Fantanele and Cogealac wind farms. CEZ purchased the two projects, which will together be the largest onshore wind farm in Europe with a total capacity of 600 megawatts. The projects will be nearly twice the size of the next largest fully permitted onshore wind farm in Europe, and triple the size of the largest current operational wind farm in Europe. The total investment of the CEZ Group into the project will reach €1.1 billion.

Construction will start in September and the turbines will be erected from April 2009 to June 2010 and become operational in stages as they are installed. By the end of 2009, 345 megawatts will be producing power, with the remaining turbines being commissioned the following year.

The Ventomobile runs with the wind and on it too.

A team of German students built the a wind-powered vehicle — the Ventomobile - featured above. The design is the brainchild of InVentus, a collaborative effort between Stuttgart University students of Aerospace Engineering. The team finished first in the “Aeolus Race,” held in the Dutch town of Den Helder last Friday. Working with nearly two dozen university students, Alexander Miller and Jan Lehmann built the vehicle in the last year.

The lightweight three-wheeler beat vehicles from five European universities and research centers. In addition to the glory, the team won awards for “innovative design” and their “PR” work, which this post is testimony to. Here are the other competitors:

ECN-Impulse, Netherlands

The ECN-impulse built by the Energy research Centre of the Netherlands finished second.

Japan is building the world’s first shipping vessel to run on solar-energy. The 60,000 ton tanker will rely on solar panels capable of generating 40 kilowatts of electricity to power its massive propulsion engines.

Nippon Yusen KK, Japan’s largest shipping line, and Nippon Oil Corp are spearheading the effort to build the carrier, which will be used by Toyota Motor. Nippon Yusen will invest about $1.4 million in the solar panel system, which Nippon Oil has agreed to design.

The solar panels will replace nearly 7% of fuel oil needed to operate the engines and will eliminate carbon dioxide emissions roughly 20 ton of carbon emission annually.

Although solar panels have been used on large vessels before, they have never been used to power a vessel’s primary engine.

The ship will be complete by December, but will not be fully commercialized for at least three years.

General Motors and the Electric Power Research Institute have partnered on a project to promote the integration of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles with the electrical grid.

Plug-in hybrids run on battery power for short trips, but include an engine to recharge the batteries for extended trips. For most commutes the plug-in hybrid will use battery power only, burning no fuel at all, while on long trips the plug-in hybrid should have a fuel economy similar to today’s hybrid vehicles. The cost of running on battery power is currently about one-fifth the cost of fueling with gasoline.

The question is how to recharge these vehicles without straining the electrical grid? One solution is to recharge them during off-peak hours. This so-called “smart charging” was demonstrated by GridPoint and Duke Energy in late March. The vehicles could also serve as an emergency power source, or they could provide supplemental power to the electrical grid during peak demand periods, such as unusually hot days.

The smoke created by burning wood or similar forms of biomass contains tiny particles that penetrate many of the most sensitive regions of a person’s lungs. Long term exposure to those particles can cause acute lower respiratory disease, pulmonary disease, cancers and other illnesses. These dangerous air-borne particles are frequently found in concentrations more than twice the minimum amount considered dangerous in poor households that rely on biomass stoves for heat and cooking.

Wind power is blowing up, especially in America. In 2007, the world connected 20,000 MW of wind power capacity to electricity grids. The U.S. claimed the lion’s share with 5,243 MW of installed wind capacity, the largest amount ever added by a country in a single year, according to a new study of the wind power industry by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The report, the second annual survey of the U.S. wind power industry, reveals how financial innovation has propelled wind power from a boutique industry into a major new energy source. The report, released late last week, reinforces the growing recognition of wind power’s strategic significance for America’s near term energy needs.

“During the past four years, wind power has surged from just under 2% of new generating capacity added in 2004, to 35% of the entire new generating capacity added in the country in 2007,” said Christine Real de Azua, Assistant Director of Communications for the American Wind Energy Association.

A new process has made it possible to control characteristics of the light coming from quantum dots with laser technologies, according to a report last week from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland’s Joint Quantum Institute (JQI).

Researchers at NIST and JQI have developed a technique that promises to significantly improve quantum dots as a source of pairs of “entangled” photons, a property with important applications in quantum information technologies. The accomplishment could accelerate development of powerful advanced cryptography applications, projected to be a key 21st-century technology. The study appeared recently in the journal Physical Review Letters.*

Cross-section scanning tunneling microscope shows indium arsenide quantum dot regions embedded in gallium arsenide. Each 'dot' is approximately 30 nanometers long–faint lines are individual rows of atoms. Credit: J.R. Tucker

Entangled photons are a peculiar consequence of quantum mechanics. Tricky to generate, they remain interconnected even when separated by large distances. Merely observing one instantaneously affects the properties of the other. The entanglement can be used in quantum communication to pass an encryption key that is by its nature completely secure, as any attempt to eavesdrop or intercept the key would be instantly detected.