Posted by Petah Marian on September 30th, 2008
There’s a lot of research going on across the UK’s universities around hydrogen as an alternative fuel for cars and other vehicles. Last week the University of Sunderland unveiled a Nissan car converted to run on hydrogen and the University of Birmingham has just bought a fleet of five hydrogen powered cars.
Now Loughborough University has weighed in with its own hydrogen refuelling station, with the aim of transferring its service vehicle fleet over to hydrogen.
The initiative is part of a cluster of hydrogen refuelling stations being set up across the region by the British Hydrogen Forum. Known, somewhat unglamorously, as the Midlands Hydrogen Ring the stations will be at the heart of a hydrogen fuelling infrastructure planned for the UK.
Loughborough University’s chief operating officer, Will Spinks, said:
“At Loughborough sustainability is key. The opening of this new refueling station underlines our commitment to operating in an environmentally friendly way and to the development of new technologies that support this goal.”
The hydrogen refueller has been funded by Loughborough University in partnership with the East Midlands Development Agency and was manufactured by Air Products. Initially gas for the facility will be provided by an external supplier, but the university is investigating ways of creating its own hydrogen through the use of green technologies on campus.
The university is renowned for its development of green technologies. Home to the acclaimed CREST (Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology), it has launched a research school in sustainability and has been using 100 per cent green power since 2002.
You can find out more here.
Posted by Petah Marian on September 30th, 2008
Promethean Power Systems unveiled a prototype of its solar powered refrigeration system at the MIT Emerging Technologies conference.
The company plans to target businesses in emerging economies that need cold storage. In countries where grid electricity is unreliable, companies rely on expensive and polluting diesel back up generators.
Promethean has developed an off-grid solar refrigerator, which uses quiet solid state technologies including PV panels.
The refrigeration technology is called thermoelectric cooling, which doesn’t require any moving parts, and is based on the Peltier effect - which is when a current passes through a circuit of two dissimilar conductors there is a rise or fall in temperature depending on the direction of the current flow.
Up until now it has not been efficient, limiting its use to small applications in consumer electronics such as computer micro-processor cooling blocks. But Promethean has now been able to develop this technology for large scale use.
You can find out more from Promethean directly here.
According to tech news website CNET News.com Promethean has also raised a round of angel funding from the Quercus Trust, which will allow the company to build another prototype solar powered refrigerator.
Picture credit: Promethean Power Systems
This technology story is brought to you in association with Kyocera
Posted by Petah Marian on September 30th, 2008
A fleet of five hydrogen powered cars have been unveiled at the University of Birmingham.
Designed and built by Microcab, the cars are being used in a study by the university’s School of Chemical Engineering to find out more about the viability of hydrogen in transport. Researchers will learn about their efficiency, performance and how they can be adapted to make hydrogen an attractive and cost effective option as a future fuel.
The cars can travel up to 100 miles on a full tank of hydrogen and reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour.
Professor Kevin Kendall, lead investigator for the project and head of the university’s Fuel Cells Group, says:
“The cars will now start to carry out tasks on the campus, including postal deliveries, recycling of materials and duties around the estate. This will enable us to test the car components for reliability, get the cars road-legal and confirm their efficiency and cost effectiveness.”
The university has a refuelling station on its campus, with more Midlands fuelling stations expected over the coming months.
The hydrogen is supplied by Green Gases Ltd, which says it is produced by ‘green’ means – manufactured from renewable energy, resulting in a considerable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when compared with conventionally produced hydrogen.
You can find out more here.
Posted by Greenbang on September 30th, 2008
Perhaps in an attempt to harness divine green energy from the ‘Big Man’ himself, the Pope is installing solar panels at the Vatican in Rome.
The old decaying cement roof tiles on the Paul VI auditorium will be replaced by 2,700 solar panels capabile of lighting, heating and cooling the 6,000 seat auditorium.
One of the engineers installing the panels told the Associated Press (AP) news agency:
“With this plant, if it is working, in about two weeks we avoid 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide, and this is the equivalent to 70 tonnes of oil.”
The panels have been donated by German company Solar World.
More from an AP video here and a BBC report here.
Posted by Rowan on September 30th, 2008
Today’s entry from Greenbang’s special report on UK Clean Tech Start-up businesses is about ViaPost Ltd, just one of the many companies found in the report.
- Chief Executive: Simon Campbell
- Founders: Ben Way, Charlie Lass
- Founding date: January 2007
If you thought the internet had sounded the death knell for snail mail, think again. In 2007, the Royal Mail handled £22bn items of post. (Remember what it felt like to receive a personal letter?) The bad news… post travelled thousands of miles and used a lot of fuel its way.
Enter Viapost, a company that has coined the concept of Post over Internet Protocol (PoIP) or put more simply, the last mile of post. Rather than printing invoices and such like in their office and sending them across the country, companies send electronic versions to Viapost, which prints them at the nearest regional centre and then delivers them.
Viapost has set up regional print centres around the UK and its secure software means people can now send physical post anywhere in the UK from their computer.
The Greenbang Barometer
When we looked at ViaPost, we pondered, why not just documents by email the whole way? Sure – in a perfect world, that would seem sensible. But some people still want to send paper, and the demand for that isn’t going away soon.If claims that Viapost delivery reduces the carbon footprint of each letter by 80 percent, this will certainly be a model for heavy users of the postal service. International expansion is on the cards too, so Viapost has a path to growth as well as a further hook for customers on the way.
Viapost can also charm with cost cuts - the real cost of sending a letter falls from £1 to just 27p plus VAT, says the company. It’s also worth noting that in the future, the company is looking to let customers use Viapost without any word processing software (the company is a partner of Microsoft) by creating the correspondence to be printed via their browser. Cunning – nice to see a company with the next generation of product already in the pipeline.
Posted by Petah Marian on September 29th, 2008
An immigrant from the Kiribati islands in the Pacific is appealing to the Australian Government to help in evacuations, saying her homeland is sinking under rising sea levels.
A Sydney Morning Herald report quoted Wanita Limpus at a Climate Emergency Event in Brisbane as saying:
“In 1991 I was having breakfast in my sister’s home one morning when there happened to be a king tide and waves crashed over a retaining wall and swept into the house and we found ourselves up to our ankles in sea water in the kitchen. I was shocked at this, but my sisters were laughing…they were used to it.
“Salt water is mixing with the groundwater and contaminating wells. Soon vital food providing plants and trees are going to die. Our people are inevitably going to have to abandon their land.”
Kiribati - formerly known as the Gilbert Islands - is composed of 32 atolls and one raised coral island dispersed over 3,500,000 square kilometres off the north east coast of Australia. With few natural resources it relies on export of Copra and fish as well as aid from Japan Australia and New Zealand.
Posted by Petah Marian on September 29th, 2008
If alien explorers came to our earth 100 million years from now, what would they find?
Dr Jan Zalasiewcz, a lecturer in geology at the University of Leicester, has published a book called The Earth After Us, asking that very question.
It takes the perspective of alien explorers arriving on earth, their geologists studying the layers of rock and using the clues to piece together its history over several billion years.
Stumbling upon the period in which humans lived they see a striking signal of climate changes, extinctions and strange movements of wildlife across the planet. Following this trail, the clues in the rocks lead them to the petrified remains of cities and the fossilised bones of those who built them.
Zalasiewicz says:
“Looking to the distant future gives us a warning for the present: our activities have already left a significant footprint on the planet, and not a flattering one. It is not too late to limit it. We would not wish to be dubbed by future explorers the ‘amazingly clever and utterly foolish two-legged ape’.”
Posted by Petah Marian on September 29th, 2008
The changing climate and issues of sustainability are no longer the only issues that are informing corporate decisions around climate strategy. The economic slowdown and increasing global uncertainty are problems that influence any environmental strategist.
Green Business Events are running a conference, called Green Strategy ‘08, exploring how companies can get their houses in order so they can come out of the recession with even stronger sustainability processes.
Its all happening at The Royal Institution of Great Britain on the 27 November and, with speakers like Jan Muehlfeit and John Sauven from Microsoft and Greenpeace respectively, it looks set to be an informative day.
Since Greenbang is a media partner at the event, the nice guys at Green Business Events are offering Greenbang readers an extra £50 off the already discounted early-bird discount. Don’t say that we don’t do anything nice for you.
You can find out more here.
This story is brought to you in association with Delta Simons
Posted by Greenbang on September 29th, 2008
Thanks to Greenbang contributor Rob Ashwell for tipping us off to this great article in the New York Times about the increasing popularity of solar panels - among thieves.
The paper says California police are reporting a spike in thefts of solar panels, with many being sold on to homeowners over the internet. One incident cited involves solar panels being stolen from a toll road in Newport Beach ending up on eBay for $100 each.
People are being advised to engrave some form of ID onto their solar panels in case of theft. Or you could just take the precautions of one resident who lost 16 panels in three seperate burglaries. She told the paper:
“I have a shotgun right next to the bed and a .22 under my pillow.”
Hmmm, then again maybe it’s better advice to just scratch your driving licence ID onto the panels.
Posted by Greenbang on September 29th, 2008
Plans to develop the world’s largest tidal power project off the coast of Scotland and Northern Ireland have been unveiled today by ScottishPower.
Three sites will initially be developed with a combined outpout of 60MW. Two of the sites are in Scotland in the Pentland Firth and the Sound of Islay, with the third off the North Antrim coast in Northern Ireland.
The projects will use the Lànstrøm tidal turbine developed by Hammerfest Strøm AS, a company jointly owned by ScottishPower Renewables and Norwegian companies StatoilHydro and Hammerfest Energi.
Each site is being evaluated with a view to installing between five and 20 undersea power-generating turbines. With each turbine having an installed capacity of 1MW, this could lead to a combined output of 60MW – enough energy for over 40,000 homes. Following planning approval, which will be submitted next summer, the projects could be operational by 2011.
Keith Anderson, director of ScottishPower Renewables, says:
“This is a historic day for the development of marine energy. The rapid technological advancement of tidal power has enabled us to progress plans for this substantial project which has the real potential to deliver significant environmental and economic benefits. Scotland has the best tidal resources in Europe with the Pentland Firth alone containing enough tidal energy to meet a third of Scotland’s power requirements.”
An excited Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, even declared this could lead to Scotland becoming the Saudi Arabia of marine power - we presume he’s referring to the tidal-generated electricity output rather than human rights record there. He added:
“Scotland has massive potential to meet our energy needs several times over from a wide range of renewables, from wind through biomass, hydro power and the massive potential of the sea. Today, the focus is on the opportunities to be found beyond our shoreline. Caithness, and the waters churning off the nearby coast from the Pentland Firth to the islands of Orkney, stand as a powerful symbol of that renewable energy potential. Scotland has a marine energy resource which is unrivalled in Europe - we have an estimated 25 per cent of Europe’s tidal resource and 10 per cent of its wave potential.
