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Green technology was hot in 2008. Barack Obama won the presidential election promising green jobs to Rust Belt workers. Investors poured $5 billion into the sector just through the first nine months of the year. And even Texas oilmen like T. Boone Pickens started pushing alternative energy as a replacement for fossil fuels like petroleum, coal and natural gas.

But there’s trouble on the horizon. The economy is hovering somewhere between catatonic and hebephrenic, and funding for the big plans that green tech companies laid in 2008 might be a lot harder to come by in 2009. Recessions haven’t always been the best times for environmentally friendly technologies as consumers and corporations cut discretionary spending on ethical premiums.

Still, green technology and its attendant infrastructure are probably the best bet to drag the American economy out of the doldrums. So, with the optimism endemic to the Silicon Valley region, we present you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.

1. Calera’s Green Cement Demo Plant Opens
2. Project Better Place Finds Homes
3. Solar Cell Production Gets Big, GIGA (watt) Big
4. Obama Picks A Green Tech Expert To Head DOE
5. Solar Thermal Plants Return To The Deserts
6. Pickens Plan Pushes Power Plays Into American Mainstream
7. The Catalyst That Could Enable Solar
8. Green Tech Legislation Gets Real
9. New Materials Cage Carbon
10. The Island of The Solar

Read more: Wired

The nation’s first commercial hydrokinetic turbine, which harnesses the power from moving water without the construction of a dam, has splashed into the waters of the Mississippi River near Hastings, Minnesota.

The 35-kilowatt turbine is positioned downstream from an existing hydroelectric-plant dam and — together with another turbine to be installed soon — will increase the capacity of the plant by more than 5 percent. The numbers aren’t big, but the rig’s installation could be the start of an important trend in green energy.

And that could mean more of these “wind turbines for the water” will be generating clean energy soon. (more…)

One of the great perpetrators of the United States’ wastefulness is urban sprawl, which leads to SOV (single occupancy vehicle) disorder. Many Americans drive to work, and we usually don’t carpool. Beyond driving to work, we use our cars for other things – soccer practice, forgotten items at the grocery store, and trips across our giant country. It doesn’t need to be that way. If we could break ourselves of this habit of hyper-convenience, we could have better bike lanes, rail, and bus systems. Or we could share our cars. Zipcar is an innovative car sharing service that prides itself upon its convenience and accessibility. We recently caught up with Zipcar spokesperson Lesley Neadel to ask a few questions about the company’s green cred.

source: Inhabitant

Who says water and electricity don’t mix? The world’s first solar-electric-diesel hybrid yacht will have you impressing the greenies at the Yacht Club and sailing the seas in style.

The Island Pilot DSe Hybrid catches rays with a 6.8 kW solar array that’ll get you to Margaritaville and back at 6 knots with zero emissions. But if the sun ain’t shining in Cocomo, you can crank up the Steyer Motors parallel hybrid system that mates a 75-horsepower diesel engine and a pair of 36-horsepower electric motors powered by a 20-kilowatt-hour battery pack.

The 40-footer was a hit at the recent Fort Lauderdale International Boat Show, where it was one of several green vessels and gadgets that ranged from the Epower Marine Calypso Classic electric fishing boat to the 100 percent recyclable propellers made by Piranha Propeller.

But it was the $600,000 DSe that really wowed the crowd.

The DSe can run for as long as two hours on battery power. Kick on the diesels and she’ll cruise at 13 knots while charging the battery pack through a pair of 25-kW generators. Run the diesel engine and electric motor in tandem and she’ll hit 15 knots. (more…)

Coral reefs, nature’s most lively architecture, could come tumbling down and it could take millions of years for them to return, if carbon dioxide emissions aren’t cut quickly, scientists warned today.

The world’s oceans have absorbed 40 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions produced by humans in the industrial age, but that buffering is changing the chemistry of the oceans. Already, the acidity of ocean waters, which are generally basic, has shifted about 0.1 on the pH scale, or 10 percent, since pre-industrial times, and could get far more acidic by mid-century.

In a editorial in the journal Science, the researchers also noted that unlike CO2’s climate impacts, which vary between models to some extent, ocean acidification is based on basic chemistry and is nearly sure to occur if we continue burning fossil fuels, with disastrous consequences for some marine life.

“What we’re doing in the next decade could mean that for the next two million years, there are no coral reefs in the ocean,” said Ken Caldeira, a Stanford professor, and recent Wired profilee.

While most of the attention on the impacts of carbon dioxide emissions has focused on its ability to act as a greenhouse gas, that warms the earth’s climate, the changes CO2 emissions will bring to the world’s oceans are receiving increasing attention. The more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more of it that dissolves into surface ocean water. That small chemistry change could cause huge changes in marine biology.

Marine organisms, like coral, that build skeletons out of calcium could find themselves unable to do so. If current emissions trends continue over the next decade, the world’s marine creatures will be dealing with what’s essentially an alien ocean. The last time ocean conditions like those predicted for mid-century existed was long before humans walked the earth.

“I think in order to find something that is as extreme as what we continue to do this century, you have to go back to when the dinosaurs became extinct, 65 million years ago,” Caldeira said.

After the last acidification, it took two million years for coral reefs to recover. The Science paper called for lower CO2 emissions caps and for them to come quickly. Otherwise, he warned, the Great Barrier Reef and other structures like it will be destroyed and will take millions of years to return.

“Where a doubling of CO2 might seem like a realistic target from a climate perspective, but from an ocean chemistry perspective, it means changes that haven’t been seen in tens of millions of years.”

Unlike climate change, which Caldeira thinks could be partially counteracted through geoengineering, ocean acidification is a problem of a completely different scale. In the physics of climate change, he said, sulfur particles can have an outsized effect in counteracting the greenhouse effect induced by carbon dioxide. But ocean acidification, and the chemistry that underlies it, is fundamentally different.

“There’s no way around having a molecule-to-molecule response, so the scale of the solution ends up being the scale of the problem,” said Caldeira.

While some individual reefs could be preserved by various means, the broader problem appears difficult to geoengineer.

“At the scale of the whole ocean, I don’t think is anything simpler than transforming our entire energy system,” he concluded.

Source: Wired

A San Diego start-up says it is using algae to make oil that can be refined into gasoline and other fuels that are both renewable and carbon-neutral, and it plans to produce 10,000 barrels a day within five years.

That’s a fraction of the 20 million or so barrels of petroleum the United States consumes each day, but Sapphire Energy says “green crude” production could ramp up to a level sufficient to ease our dependence on foreign oil, if not end it altogether.

Company CEO Jason Pyle says the algal oil is chemically identical to light sweet crude and compatible with America’s $1.5 trillion petroleum infrastructure, making it a direct replacement for oil. Although the algal fuels refined from it emit as much carbon dioxide as conventional fuels, the company says the emissions are offset by the photosynthetic process that uses sunlight, water and C02 to create algal crude.

“At the very worst, it’s carbon neutral,” Pyle says, calling the fuels a “benchmark for an entire new industry” and “a paradigm change.”

Read more about this:Wired, MSN News

NO CARS ALLOWED: Masdar will be filled with shaded streets to encourage walking. A solar-powered transit system will take you to the airport.
It may seem strange that the emirate of Abu Dhabi, one of the planet’s largest suppliers of oil, is planning to build the world’s first carbon-neutral city.
But in fact, it makes a lot of financial sense. The 3.7-square-mile city, called Masdar, will cut its electricity bill by harnessing wind, solar, and geothermal energy, while a total ban on cars within city walls should reduce the long-term health costs associated with smog.
Masdar is still on the drawing board — construction begins in January, with a very tentative completion date of 2009 — but the result will be watched closely around the world.
“If they can construct a zero-carbon city in this climate, you can do it anywhere,” says Richard Young, a research manager with SustainLane, which evaluates sustainable cities and products. “It will have tremendous economic impact.”
Indeed, all companies that sign up to take part — a list that so far includes British Petroleum (Charts), Fiat, General Electric (Charts, Fortune 500), and Mitsubishi — will get hefty carbon-credit bonuses, redeemable on the world’s two major carbon exchanges.

While carbon dioxide has been getting lots of publicity in climate change, reactive forms of nitrogen are also building up in the environment, scientists warn. Almost all of us does not yet know much about nitrogen, but in many ways it is as big an issue as carbon, and due to the interactions of nitrogen and carbon, makes the challenge of providing food and energy to the world’s peoples without harming the global environment a tremendous challenge, as stated by University of Virginia environmental sciences professor James Galloway said in a statement. Read more on this article

Creating cheap, clean energy is a huge problem.

So, how’s this for a big solution: Swiss researcher Thomas Hinderling wants to build solar islands several miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively inexpensive power.

He’s the CEO of the Centre Suisse d’Electronique et de Microtechnique, a privately held R&D company, and he’s already received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility in that country.

While limited information is available on the solar islands website, Hinderling laid out his scheme at The Oil Drum, a well-known blog about energy. Hinderling estimates that an island a mere mile across could generate 190 megawatts of power with a breakeven price point of $0.15 a kilowatt hour, or about twice current electricity prices in the United States.

The islands will consist of a plastic membrane loaded up with solar concentrating mirrors floating above the water. The mirrors are used to heat liquid to turn it into steam, which drives a turbine that generates energy.

On land, this type of electricity generation is fairly well known. So-called solar thermal plants are emerging as a leading alternative to fossil fuel power plants for future energy generation, with two of Google’s three alt-energy investments coming in solar thermal companies.

But why head to the ocean to create solar thermal power? Hinderling claims that the entire platform can be turned to align with the sun, generating maximum efficiency without a complicated tracking system. The company’s production schedule has it splashing a 1500-foot in diameter platform into the water at the end of 2010.

Mark Bollinger, a renewable energy researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National lab, thought it would be possible to create such an island, but questioned the viability of the enterprise.

“I’m sure it’s possible, but it seems a little bit out-there, just given where the technology is and how little of it has been developed on land,” Bollinger said.

From a feasibility perspective, he questioned the necessity of pushing solar thermal out to sea, where new variables like the waves could throw off precision-tracking of the sun’s rays.

“The reason you’d do that is if space was at a premium, but I don’t think it is, at least for solar thermal,” he said. “Where it works best is in the desert of the Southwest, and there’s a lot of land down there.”

Another big question Hinderling doesn’t address is transmission, i.e. how you get the power off the island and to the people. Luckily, offshore transmission options (.pdf) are already being explored for wind farms located out in the ocean. And Bollinger noted that there are ocean barges that already produce power for “load-constrained” areas of the Northeast.

All that said, we can’t help but think that this would be a great way to power The Seasteading Institute’s floating ocean colonies.

Source: Wired

TOKYO (AP) — Toyota is building a $192 million plant in Japan to produce batteries for gas-electric hybrid vehicles, as it seeks to keep its lead in an intensifying race for green cars among the world’s automakers.

Toyota’s joint venture with Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., which makes Panasonic brand products, is building the plant in Shizuoka prefecture, in central Japan, Toyota spokesman Paul Nolasco said Friday. He declined to give more details.

The plant will produce nickel-metal hydride batteries, now in the company’s hit Prius hybrid.

The Nikkei, Japan’s top business daily, reported Friday that Toyota was building another plant in Japan to make lithium-ion batteries, set to be running by 2010, for future ecological cars. Nolasco said no decision has been made on such a plant.

Japan’s top automaker, which leads the industry in gas-electric hybrids with its hit Prius, has said it will rev up hybrid sales to 1 million a year sometime after 2010.

Hybrids reduce pollution and emissions that are linked to global warming by switching between a gas engine and an electric motor to deliver better mileage than comparable standard cars. But they are still a niche market.

The Prius, which has been on sale for more than a decade, recently reached cumulative sales of 1 million vehicles.

Lithium-ion batteries, now common in laptops, produce more power and are smaller than nickel-metal hydride batteries. Toyota has said the lithium-ion batteries may be used in plug-in hybrids, which can be recharged from a home electrical outlet.

Rebecca Lindland, an industry research director at Global Insight, said hybrids are increasingly attractive in the U.S., which had in the past favored pickups and other gas guzzlers, as fuel prices surge, environmental concerns grow and tougher emission standards kick in.

“Hybrids are starting to make a lot more economic sense,” she said at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Tokyo, noting that the payback for a hybrid’s higher price comes a lot faster these days.

Lindland said the Prius owed its success to being “very well-badged” as an unmistakable hybrid to consumers.

The world’s other major automakers are also working on environmentally-friendly cars, and the race is on to produce the best batteries to power them.

Earlier this week, Honda Motor Co., Japan’s second-biggest automaker, said it will boost hybrid sales to 500,000 a year by sometime after 2010. Honda said it will introduce a new model sold solely as a hybrid next year, so the Tokyo-based company will have four hybrids in its lineup.

Nissan Motor Co., which still hasn’t developed its own hybrid system for commercial sale, said it will have its original hybrid by 2010. Nissan is focusing more on electric vehicles, promising them for the U.S. and Japanese markets by 2010.

Nissan said this week its joint venture with electronics maker NEC Corp. will start mass-producing lithium-ion batteries in 2009 at a plant in Japan.

Source: wired