The Top 10 Green-Tech Breakthroughs of 2008
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By Alexis Madrigal December 29, 2008 | 2:29:56 PMCategories: Chemistry, Clean Tech, Climate, Energy, Engineering, Environment, Geology, Science, Survival, Sustainability
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 ctor 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.溶解度的概念
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 prent you with the Top 10 Green Tech Breakthroughs of 2008, alternatively titled, The Great Green Hope.
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10. THE ISLAND OF THE SOLAR
With money flowing like milk and honey in the land of solar technology, all sorts of schemers and dreamers came streaming into the area. One Swiss rearcher, Thomas Hinderling, wants to build solar islands veral miles across that he claims can produce hundreds of megawatts of relatively in
expensive power. Though most clean tech advocates question the workability of the scheme, earlier this year, Hinderling's company Centre Suis d'Electronique et de Microtechnique received $5 million from the Ras al Khaimah emirate of the United Arab Emirates to start construction on a prototype facility, shown above, in that country. (Image: Centre Suis d'Electronique et de Microtechnique)
9. NEW MATERIALS CAGE CARBON
世界上最老的树Carbon capture and questration has a ductively simple appeal: We generate carbon dioxide emissions by burning geology — coal and oil — so to fix the problem, we should simply capture it and inject it back into the ground.
早上好日语谐音It turns out, however, that it's not quite so simple. Aside from finding the right kind of empty spaces in the earth's crust and the risks that the CO2 might leak, the biggest problem with the scheme is finding a material that could lectively snatch the molecule out of the hot mess of gas going up the flues of fossil fuel plants.
That's where two class of special cage-like molecules come into play, ZIFs and amines. This year, Omar Yaghi, a chemist at UCLA, announced a slough of new
CO2-capturing ZIFs and Chris Jones, a chemical engineer at Georgia Tech, reported that he'd made a new amine that ems particularly well-suited to working under real-world condition. Both materials could eventually make capturing CO2 easier -- and therefore, more cost effective.
Perhaps better still, Yaghi's lab's technique also defined a new process for quickly creating new ZIFs
with the properties that scientists — and coal-plant operators —want. Some of their crystals are shown in the image above. (Image: Omar Yaghi and Rahul Banerjee/UCLA)
8. GREEN TECH LEGISLATION GETS REAL
On the federal and state levels, veral historic actions put the teeth into green tech bills pasd over the last few years. A review committee of the EPA effectively froze coal plant construction, a boon to alternative energy (though earlier this month the EPA ignored the committee's ruling and it is unclear how the issue will be ttled). In California, the state unveiled and approved its plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, which could be a model for a nationwide system. Combined with the green-energy tax credits in the $700-billion bailout bill, the government did more for green tech in 2008 than in whole decades in the past.
7. THE CATALYST THAT COULD ENABLE SOLAR
In July, MIT chemist Daniel Nocera announced that he'd created a catalyst that could drop the cost of extracting the hydrogen and oxygen from water.
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Combined with cheap photovoltaic solar panels (like Nanosolar's), the system could lead to inexpens
ive, simple systems that u water to store the energy from sunlight. In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.
"You've made your hou into a fuel station," Daniel Nocera, a chemistry professor at MIT "I've gotten rid of all the goddamn grids."
The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a rever fuel cell, it splits water into
oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be ud to generate energy on demand.
6. PICKENS PLAN PUSHES POWER PLAYS INTO AMERICAN MAINSTREAM
Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens might be a lot of things, but environmentalist he is not. That's why his support for a nationwide network of wind farms generated so much excitement. While his solution for transportation, natural gas vehicles, may not pan out, his Pickens Plan is the most visible alternative energy plan out there and it began to channel support from outside coastal cities for finding new sources of energy.
Of cour, no one said Pickens is stupid. If his plan was adopted and major investments in transmission infrastructure were made, his wind energy investments would stand to benefit.
5. SOLAR THERMAL PLANTS RETURN TO THE DESERTS
When most people think of harnessing the sun's power, they imagine a solar photovoltatic panel, whi
ch directly converts light from the sun into electricity. But an older technology emerged as a leading city-scale power technology in 2008: solar thermal. Companies like Ausra, BrightSource, eSolar, Solel, and a host of others are using sunlight-reflecting mirrors to turn liquids into steam, which can drive a turbine in the same way that coal-fired power plants make electricity.
Two companies, BrightSource and Ausra, debuted their pilot plants. They mark the first rious solar thermal experimentation in the United States since the 1980s. BrightSource's Israeli demo plant is shown above. (Image: BrightSource)
4. OBAMA PICKS A GREEN TECH EXPERT TO HEAD DOE雨后池塘
President-elect Barack Obama ran on the promi of green jobs and an economic stimulus package that would provide support for scientific innovation. Then, Obama picked Steven Chu, a Nobel-prize winning physicist, to head the Department of Energy. Chu had been focud on turning Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory into an alternative-energy powerhou. The green tech community rejoiced that one of their own would be in the White Hou.
酒驾处罚标准That's becau green tech is going to need some help. With the world economy falling into recession, the price of oil has dropped, even though there are rious concerns about the long-term oil supply. When energy prices drop, clean tech investments don't em quite as attractive, and the renascent industry could be in trouble. It's happened before, after all.
Back in the '70s, geopolitical events nt the price of oil soaring, which, as it tends to, created a boom in green tech. But the early 1980s saw the worst recession since the Depression. Sound familiar? In the poor economic climate, focus and funds were shifted away from green tech. The last nail in the coffin was the election of Ronald Reagan, who immediately pulled off the solar panels Jimmy Carter had placed on the White Hou. The green tech industry collapd.
History has given U.S. alternative energy rearch a cond chance and environmental advocates hope that a different president will lead to a very different result. (Image: DOE)
