Its Thursday, we have renewable energy news, we wish to keep them out of “the cracks”, lets round em up!
How one person gets online, renewably.
Some very smart people in Israel have figured out how to make biofuels with fungus. Very interesting as it dramatically increases the output and lowers the energy usage.
Speaking of biofuel, the mcsmartypants over at MIT have started making biodiesel out of the waste vegetable oil from the lunch room. They won the mtvU/GE Ecoimagination Challenge for their efforts. Good show smarties.
This man has reduced his diesel (the nasty kind) usage by 90%, how you may ask? With a little wind turbine and some solar panels. Now his organic farm will not be pumping out nasty fumes. Bad for the plants, bad for people.
We reported before on the increase in the solar home market, well it seems things are increasing, really really fast.
Parking your car just got a smidge greener, solar power parking ticket dispensers for parking garages. It seems small but will save several hundred dollars a year in electricity costs.
More news on the algae to biodiesel front, this seems like its going to be very very big.
Not only can algae make some biodiesel, it seems it can store up a lot of CO2 as well. Canada is in fact thinking of using it to store CO2 from heavy emitters. Pretty cool eh?
They are talking about biofuels in Africa. Lets hope they talk about the destruction that palm oil farms are doing, and lets hope they talk about how not all biofuels are good…
Leave it to the British to make a really good parody, funny with a nice irony filled message. See more at Spurt Airlines.
(in case you cant figure it out, they are making fun of Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK government, an anti-environment nut job)
Gordon may be trying to save a little face however because he just raised the road tax (a lot). He did it based on how fuel efficient your car is. Meaning your new hummer is going to cost you a lot more than your new hybrid.
Drivers of the biggest polluters such as Range Rovers and BMW X5s will be hammered hard.
As predicted, Brown announced their annual vehicle excise duty would rise by £90 to £300 this year – but band G drivers would see their road tax soar to £400 in 2008.
Millions of other drivers will see their road tax bills rise by between £5 and £10 in the next 12 months.
In a bid to encourage a switch to greener cars such as the Toyota Prius, tax was slashed by £15 to just £35. The tax on electric-petrol hybrid cars such as the Honda Insight will be reduced to zero.
Solar power and the all American sport, San Fran’s baseball stadium gets solar panels.
Another successful roundup. Do you got some news I should know about drop me a line, and I will make sure to take a look. Until next week.