8 May 2015, ClimateWire: New England city turns to its wastes to ensure year-round supply of fresh vegetables and fish. By this time next year, residents in Keene, N.H., will have year-round access to local and sustainable fish and vegetables, thanks to their municipal landfill. Keene’s city officials are partnering with an organization called the Local Farms Project with plans to construct a 1-acre greenhouse and a recirculating aquaculture system on the grounds of the closed Keene Landfill. Once it is fully operational, the Keene Energy and Agriculture Project is expected to produce 500,000 pounds of fresh lettuce and herbs and 66,000 pounds of live tilapia for local grocery wholesalers each year. Read More here
Category Archives: New Energy Sources
The winners and losers in Tesla’s battery plan for the home. Tesla’s plans to use its new battery storage system to power homes will provide households with more opportunities to reduce bills. But it will also cause headaches for the electricity distribution companies.The company’s founder, Elon Musk, announced last week that it had developed the Powerwall batteries that could store electricity generated from solar panels. Read More here
26 April 2015, Climate News Network: Major changes are in store for electricity industry. As the battle to phase out fossil fuels heats up, finding economically viable ways to store surplus electric power is becoming vital. Inventors are in a race to find the best way of storing electricity to make the most of renewables and cut the use of fossil fuels. Currently, when more power than needed by consumers is produced by sources such as wind turbines or solar panels, some of the electricity is wasted. But that is changing. Governments have realised that one of their biggest challenges in cutting the use of fossil fuels is to store surplus electricity for use at peak times. Read More here
12 February 2015, Climate News Network: Rice serves up double measure of biofuel and fodder. An inexpensive process developed in Japan will allow farmers to produce their own tractor fuel and cattle feed in one simple step. Japanese scientists have found a potential answer to the biofuel dilemma that if you grow crops for energy, you have to sacrifice crops for food. They report that they can now ferment rice to deliver ethanol, while making silage for cattle feed –and that it can all be done on the farm without need for any expensive off-site processes. Mitsuo Horita, of the National Institute for Agro-Environmental Sciences in Tsukuba, Japan, and colleagues write in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels that they used a process of solid-state fermentation known to temperate zone farmers everywhere: grass or cereal is harvested, compressed, sealed, and fermented in the absence of oxygen. Read More here