The WSJ Leaps Aboard the Green Tech History Bandwagon

Now here’s what I like to see.

In Energy Innovation, Everything New Is Old Again – WSJ.com
“High-tech marvels, the solar dishes look like three-story-tall mirrored flowers atop steel stems. But at the heart of each dish is a very old-fashioned invention: a Stirling engine, patented by a Scotsman in 1816, decades before the diesel or internal [...]

links for 2009-12-08

OTHER CINEMA: Libido Versus Leisure
SUNDAY SPECIAL! After 5 years, OC welcomes back David Sherman, a veteran experimentalist and former curator of Total Mobile Home Microcinema, in collaboration with partner Rebecca Barten. He returns with a grand project indeed: Wasteland Utopias deals with the social and environmental consequences of the urbanization of Arizona’s Sonora Desert. His [...]

links for 2009-12-06

NREL: TroughNet – Parabolic Trough Solar Field Technology
NREL's basic parabolic trough backgrounder:
"A parabolic trough power plant's solar field consists of a large, modular array of single-axis-tracking parabolic trough solar collectors. Many parallel rows of these solar collectors span across the solar field, usually aligned on a north-south horizontal axis.
The basic component of a parabolic trough [...]

links for 2009-12-04

Solar Energy CEO’s Sound Off on the State of their Industry : Solar Power Engineering
"At the recent Solar Power International 2009 show in Anaheim, the CEOs of five solar power companies assembled to discuss the state of their industry and predict how they see their business evolving over the next few years. NBC correspondent Anne [...]

links for 2009-12-03

The science of fear
Interesting take on culture/ideology and fear, with reference to white males and nuclear power.
(tags: nuclear risk)

Links for 2009-12-01: Intermittency, Deep Retrofits, Energy Polling

From intermittent to variable: can we manage wind power?
“Milborrow tackles assertions such as “when the wind stops, the lights will go out” and “every MW of wind needs a MW of back-up plant” head on, with a qualitative and quantitative rebuttal – referenced to the UK. There is, the report states, a growing understanding that [...]

The Energy Innovators Google Is Listening To

In its swanky San Francisco office, Google hosted an event on energy innovation with a slate of heavy hitters including Lynn Orr, head of Stanford’s Precourt Energy Institute, Berkeley’s Dan Kammen, MIT’s Ernie Moniz, and Google’s Dan Reicher. What do they see in the country’s energy future?

Industrial Food Processes

Here’s the link backstory to my article on Wired Science about the industrial processes used to manufacture traditional Thanksgiving foods. Aside from Jon Snyder’s tremendous photo (seen above), the best part about the story was digging through old food process patents to see how food makers think about their goals.
Energy efficiency and technical rationality are [...]

links for 2009-11-24

Making buildings more efficient: looking beyond price
"How do we remove the barriers? It turns out we know a decent amount about them but comparatively little about how to overcome them. A great primer on this is “Energy Efficiency Economics and Policy” from Resources for the Future. It’s a survey of research on efficiency economics, [...]

Prodigal Sun

Back in 2000, Mother Jones delivered a really solid article on solar history and policy from the oil crises through the 1990s. Particularly noteworthy were the references to the book The Sun Betrayed and Who Owns the Sun?. The two books both argue that the vision for solar power originally proposed by decentralization and appropriate [...]