Category — energy

This electic car can go from driving around on the street to riding on rails and back… It’s the car of ‘the future’ according to a Cincinatti tv station! We just need a network of fugly rails everywhere. By the way 1996 called and they want their html back.

[via auto blog green]

“MADRID (AFP) — US automaker General Motors said Tuesday it will equip the roof of its factory in Zaragoza in northeastern Spain with solar panels to create the world’s largest rooftop source of power from the sun.

The electricity produced by the 10 megawatt installation will be used by the plant, GM’s biggest in Europe, and also be sold to the local power grid, a company spokesman said.

“GM’s Zaragoza plant will become home to the biggest roof-top solar power station worldwide. This has significant potential to reduce costs at the plant,” GM Europe President Carl-Peter Forster said in a statement.

The company may install similar projects at GM Europe’s 11 other assembly and eight component plants depending on the results in Zaragoza, he added.

The installation will generate enough power annually to supply 4,600 households when it is completed at the end of September, the statement said.

It will comprise about 85,000 solar panels and cover about 2,000,000 square feet (183,000 square metres) of roof at the plant which assembles more than 480,000 vehicles a year for the European market.

GM currently has two of the largest solar power installations in the United States on the roofs of its Rancho Cucamonga and Fontana, California parts warehouses.

The company is due to install solar panels on its factory in Saint Petersburg, Russia next.

US firm Clairvoyant Energy and France’s Veolia Environment will build, own and operate the rooftop solar installation at Zaragoza.”

[AFP | photo by trochej | via physorg]

[New Scientist]

Mike is an “energetic guy”. Heh.

[Scientific American]

[Czeers via Impact Lab]

“GreenPix is a groundbreaking project applying sustainable and digital media technology to the curtain wall of Xicui entertainment complex in Beijing, near the site of the 2008 Olympic Games. Featuring the largest color LED display worldwide and the first photovoltaic system integrated into a glass curtain wall in China, the building performs as a self-sufficient organic system, harvesting solar energy by day and using it to illuminate the screen after dark, mirroring a day’s climatic cycle”

“The Media Wall will provide the city of Beijing with its first venue dedicated to digital media art, while offering the most radical example of sustainable technology applied to an entire building’s envelope to date. The building will open to the public in May 2008, with a specially commissioned program of video installations and live performances by artists from China, Europe and the US.”

Official Site | via inhabitat

“Rock Port, Missouri, is a small city of 1,300 people, and they just made history by being the first city in the US to be 100% powered by the wind, also making them #1 in the US for percentage of renewable energy. The Loess Hills Wind Farm, built by the Wind Capital Group, employing 500 workers from 20 states for about a year, is expected to produce about 16 million kilowatt hours annually, while Rock Port only uses 13 million. The excess wind power will be sold to other communities in the area.”

Way to go Rock Port!

[via TreeHugger | photo by andrijbulba]

TreeHugger gathered a panel of experts to discuss this here.

“We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Natures inexhaustible sources of energy — sun, wind and tide. … I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

In conversation with Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone (1931)

[photo by helmet13 on Flickr | WikiQuote via Eriks Brolis]

[Treehugger | Compact Fluorescent Lamp]