Lifeboat Foundation

By 2030 solar energy will have the capacity to meet all of our energy needs. The production of food and clean water will also be revolutionized.

Kurzweil believes solar energy could satisfy 100% our power needs. — CNN

If we could capture one part in ten thousand of the sunlight that falls on the Earth we could meet 100% of our energy needs, using this renewable and environmentally friendly source.

As we apply new molecular scale technologies to solar panels, the cost per watt is coming down rapidly. Already Deutsche Bank, in a recent report, wrote “The cost of unsubsidized solar power is about the same as the cost of electricity from the grid in India and Italy. By 2014 even more countries will achieve solar ‘grid parity.’”

Continue reading “Ray Kurzweil: This is your future” »

While solar or wind farms are now contributing more energy than ever to the world’s power supply, traditional energy sources are often required at peak times or to supplement renewable sources during dips in availability — at night, for example. So Canadian startup Hydrostor has invented a system of pressurised underwater balloons that can store renewable energy until it’s needed, which could reduce the need for diesel or gas as a back-up source of power.

The company says its solution can last twice as long as the best batteries we have today, and at a much lower cost. The first facility has been set up in Lake Ontario near Toronto, with a series of balloons set 55 metres under the surface of the water and connected to the power grid via a pipeline.

“Compressed air’s been around for 40 years,” Hydrostor CEO Curtis VanWalleghem told Canadian Manufacturing. “It’s finding places to store the air that’s been the problem [and] why it hasn’t been massively adopted. We open it up to thousands more sites because we use hydrostatic water pressure.”

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Tech behemoth Apple is set to become the first completely solar-powered company in Singapore.

As part of a long-term partnership with Sunseap Group, Apple will draw upon Sunseap’s vast network of more than 800 solar panel-equipped buildings, which will satisfy the energy requirements for the company’s forthcoming 2,500-person corporate campus and retail store operations in Singapore.

According to Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives, the company aims to completely kick its dependence on fossil fuels and rely instead on renewable energy sources for its facilities worldwide.

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Each year, an estimated 70 million sharks are killed for their fins. The brutal shark finning process involves cutting off a live shark’s fins and returning the debilitated animal back into the water to die a slow death. Highly valued in traditional Asian medicine and cuisine, the fins can sell for as much as $300 a pound on the black market.

What if an artificial shark fin could remove sharks from the equation completely?

New Wave Foods, a San Francisco-based sustainable seafood company, is developing a bioengineered fin product that could pull the rug out from underneath the shark trade.

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Revolutionary.

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Scientists have proposed a laser model that can could heat materials to temperatures hotter than the centre of the Sun in just 20 quadrillionths of a second. That’s 10 million degrees Celsius almost instantaneously.

The discovery brings us one step closer to the dream of achieving thermonuclear fusion energy — the production of clean, sustainable, and limitless energy using the same process the Sun uses to produce heat.

The challenge in harnessing the energy from thermonuclear fusion is that, as with any form of energy production, you need to get out more than you put in, and heating things to temperatures that rival the centre of the Sun is not easy. Current laser technology has failed to make the heating process efficient enough to make the process worthwhile, but a team from Imperial College London in the UK has come up with a model for a laser than can heat things about 100 times faster than the world’s most powerful fusion experiments.

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Police waited at the home of a family after someone called in seeing the parents “put a child in the trunk” of the car — someone who clearly wasn’t aware that the Tesla Model S can be equipped with a third row of seats for children.

I stumbled upon this video after comments veteran and Twitter tweeter @_McMike_ tweeted it.

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Solar power still amounts for a small share of net electricity generation around the world. In the USA, for instance, as of December 2014 it was responsible for just 0.45% of the total electricity produced.

Things are changing quite quickly, however, and if the German think tank Agora Energiewende is right, faster than expected.

The main obstacle to a more widespread adoption of photovoltaic so far, has been cost: solar used to be very expensive compared to coal or gas, but, according to Agora — that recently commissioned a study on the subject to the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems — this is no longer true.

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Lower Austria, the largest of the country’s nine states, announced this week that is has gone all in on clean energy, with 100 percent of its electricity generation for its 1.65-million-strong population now sourced from renewable energy.

In the weeks before world leaders meet for decisive UN climate talks in Paris later this month, the announcement of Lower Austria’s achievement is a beacon of hope amid other grim environmental news – and also a testament to how much the state has put into clean energy production.

“We have invested heavily to boost energy efficiency and to expand renewables,” said Erwin Proell, premier of Lower Austria, at a news conference, as reported by AFP. “Since 2002 we have invested 2.8 billion euros (US$3 billion) in eco-electricity, from solar parks to renewing (hydroelectric) stations on the Danube.”

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