Interesting things from treehugger.com

[unixronin]

Found by cymrullewes, Treehugger posts teasers on:

• Multipurpose broad-spectrum OLED panels -- It's a window!  It's a light panel!  It's a HD TV!  The article -- or the USC researcher quoted in the article -- tosses around a claim of "100 percent efficiency out of a single, broad spectrum light source."  I'll believe THAT when I see it.
• "Zero footprint energy" in Ontario -- or, lease-to-own your own ground-source heating/cooling plant.  US power utilities would probably hate it enough to buy a Congressman or six to pass a law making it illegal.

Comments

[koyote.livejournal.com]

.01 cents (in 1950 dollars, 2006 dollars?) per is a good goal, but this is one of those areas where the arbutrary money measurement may not be a good indicator of actual value....

Storage isn't a huge deal here- with a truly global distributed grid (and we're 85 to 95% there depending on who you talk to) you can move power around. Also, solar isn't a single answer- and isn't meant to be.

Leaving aside the continuous PV bias of most people (if yoou've ever used a propane powered fridge, you can see how solar AC would be of some use), combined with *distributed* wind generation (it has to be distributed to work in a large scale - multicontinental- grid) combined with solar, mid scale hydro, and nuclear for major energy density sites would kick us off fossil fuels for power generation in a couple years. not a couple decades. And the nuclear is almost a bone to the old school centralisation memeset, bucky's math never really indicated a need for it.

There are a lot of silly politics and general distrust for large money making organizations that have a history of lying to the public in the way of growth of central nuclear ppower generation. Unless I find a realistic answer to this, I'll continue to support the fulleresque distributed global grid using wind/solar/hydro/geothermal and whatever else we find suited to a local site :)

[smandal.livejournal.com]

I like the vision, but I'm skeptical that you can avoid centralized, high-energy-density tech for population-dense areas (which is most of the United States). And nuclear is a good option. It is true that the nuclear industry in the US has been rather byzantine, with competing interests between hawks who want to elevate our general nuclear tech, environmentalists who want to run it into the ground, and bureaucrats who like being in the middle of the whole mess.

Three Mile Island (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Mile_Island) and Shoreham Nuclear (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoreham_nuclear) are wonderful examples of this brain-clog -- working technology with bad PR and opportunistic regulation.