Free solar panels

The rash of free solar panel offers being promoted to householders aren't quite the financial bargain they first appear to be, a consumer rights group warns today.

Using figures from the Energy Saving Trust, Which? reveals that consumers could save as much as £10,500 over 25 years – depending on where in the UK they live – by taking out a loan to buy their own system.

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Algae Fuel

The sizable scientific team at Ocean Nutrition Canada in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the world’s largest supplier of omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acid supplements, was hardly looking for an alternative to conventional fossil fuels.

In 2005, as part of a five-year research effort, the company was screening algae samples, taken from marine environments across the Atlantic provinces of Canada, for specific nutraceutical ingredients. That is when, in one of hundreds of filmy, green test tubes and flasks, it uncovered a single-celled microorganism that produces substantial quantities of triacylglycerol oil — a base for biofuel.

“It was like finding a needle in a haystack,” said Ian Lucas, Ocean Nutrition Canada’s executive vice president of innovation and strategy. “We got extremely lucky. This certainly isn’t our core business, but we’ve been told by experts that this is the most efficient organism for the production of oil identified in the world to date.”

Dozens of companies and academic laboratories are pursuing the objective Ocean Nutrition Canada did not know it had — to cultivate algae, the foundation of the marine food chain, as a source of green energy.

But Ocean Nutrition Canada’s prolific grower, experts say, appears capable of producing oil at a rate 60 times greater than other types of algae being used for the generation of biofuels.

In view of its discovery, the company will lead a four-year consortium, formed over the past months and funded by the federal not-for-profit foundation Sustainable Development Technology Canada, to develop its proprietary organism into a commercial-scale producer of biofuels.

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Thinking Small, and Still Smaller, on Wind Power

An article in The Times on Wednesday centers on Tocco da Casauria, a small, traditional town in Italy whose four wind turbines, installed over the past four years, produce 30 percent more energy than its residents use. In fact, money made from the production of clean energy has brought the town back from the brink of insolvency and allowed to renovate its school and perform other much-needed municipal repairs.

Tocco is near L’Aquila, the site of a devastating earthquake in 2009, and the quake damaged many of its buildings, including the city hall. Some were no longer safe to inhabit.

In fact, many of the recent renewable plants in Italy are small in scale — a turbine or two in a village — not those immense wind parks that dominate a landscape. That is partly the because the permitting process for large-scale installation is so complicated in Italy.

Still, across the globe, there are signs that wind energy innovators are trying to go smaller still. Just as there are rooftop solar panels, so, too, engineers have designed rooftop turbines.

Swift turbines, designed by the British company Renewable Devices, are pole-mounted rooftop wind turbines that can generate as many as 1,900-kilowatt hours of energy a year, supplementing the supply of energy-poor households at a time of high electricity rates.

This summer, the French designer Philippe Starck unveiled his own chic version of a rooftop turbine, a sculptural gizmo called the Revolutionair, which comes in quadrangular or helicoidal shapes and costs about $3,500.

Some buildings in New York City and elsewhere are experimenting with rooftop wind. But getting useful amounts of energy out of a turbine requires the analysis of wind patterns and proper placement. And buildings in tightly packed urban areas can scatter the breezes.

So whether super-small is good when it comes to wind turbines remains to be seen.

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Hahaha

Here it is in video form, with David Cross.