Well, coal can burn around the clock, as long as you have enough of it. But the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time. Sure, you can store power in batteries, but how much?

How about enough to power an LED streetlight, without wires, that is sure to turn on every night?

There’s a French company called Windela that has crossed a streetlight with a vertical-axis wind turbine and a solar panel. It charges up during the day, when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. At night, it shines.

It also can work as a Wi-Fi relay, similar to a solar streetlight known as Starsight. Imagine it: Wi-Fi, light at night, no coal required.

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In another court victory for Greenpeace, a judge in Almeria, Spain ruled that activists were merely expressing their opinion when, in 2006, they painted the words “Hotel Ilegal” and “Demolicion” in letters nearly twenty feet high on a hotel being built without permits on sensitive land.

“They only served to highlight Greenpeace’s disapproval of the works that were taking place,” wrote the court, adding that no violence or disruption was caused by the vandalism.

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Cork, as we know it, comes from the outer cell layer of the bark on cork oak trees (Quercus Suber). The stopper layer is easily separated from the mother cells when the connecting layer (phelogen) becomes brittle. Once the bark (cork) is stripped off the tree in the late string and early summer, it renews itself naturally. An added bonus: each time cork is harvested, the tree stores more CO2 as a result of regenerating. It is reported that the tree stores 3-5 times more CO2 when harvested regularly.
The cork industry has found its home for centuries in the Mediterranean. Portugal has the world’s largest cork industry, yet it is an important forest crop to Italy, Spain, Algeria, France, Tunisia, and Morocco. The forests cover nearly 2.7 million hectares in total, and produce over 15 billion cork stoppers.

What’s the news? Due to “cork” alternatives, the cork industry is losing its intrigue as a cultural staple for wine bottle closures. The World Wide Fund reports that cork sales in the wine industry fell 20% between 2000 and 2005. Portugal has reported a severe drop in cork stoppers exported to Australia and the U.S. “New consumer trends and winemaking techniques, as well as more competitive markets, have led producers to look for more technical or cheaper closures – plastic ‘corks’ and metal screw tops”. Despite the optimal performance of cork as a stopper material- high elasticity, natural insulatinsulating qualities, light weight, and durability - the plastic and metal screw tops are becoming more accepted as standard wine closures to us consumers.

This increase in market share is leading to a decline in the global cork market, and thus degradation of cork oak forests that have (and could for years to come) provided one of the most diverse ecosystems and community-based industries of the region. They report that this could potentially lead to a loss of 60,000 jobs, and thus could severely harm the biodiversity of the forests.

Although the market demand for cork is slowly shifting to flooring and wall coverings, wine stoppers still account for about 70% of the industry profits. Whatever the reason might be, there is a reason that we still call a cork a cork, synthetic or woody. "We’re fighting back,” says Antonio Amorim, third generation owner of one of Portugals largest wine stopper producers. "We may have lost market share in some places but we are gaining in others.” "The shares, which shot up 79 percent in the past two years, are set to rise more as he wins back customers by virtually eliminating cork taint," said analyst Sonia Baldeira.

To help: do your best to find wine bottles that sustain the true cork community’s integrity and unscrew the cork.

To see more intensive case studies and future scenarios, view this pdf file.

For more information:

Amorim Corkfacts

WWF: Changing Markets

Amorim Cork

Images source: Amorim Corkfacts

Editor's note: This week, Ecotality's Bill Hobbs points to an interesting new development: Algeria, a member of OPEC, has plans for exporting solar power. This post was originally published on June 20, 2007.

A member of OPEC jumps into the solar energy business? Gotta be from The Onion, right? Wrong. Algeria, which earns $1 billion every week exporting oil, is developing a plan to generate solar power for both export and domestic use, reports Reuters.

Algeria plans to make use of its hot southern desert to develop solar power for export and domestic consumption, the Opec member country said on Monday. The scheme is due to be completed by 2015 in Africa’s second-largest country, where most of the 33 million people live in the northern coastal strip. Temperatures in the desert south are high. “Algeria has a huge sunny area with big potential to be exploited. It has also financial and human resources. It lacks nothing. We can compete with other countries,” Energy and Mines Minister Chakib Khelil said.

Here’s some analysis from the Gulf Times of Qatar.

Opec member Algeria’s plan to generate solar power for export and domestic use is an excellent innovation that other Arab states would do well to emulate, a renewable energy advocacy group said yesterday. Wolfgang Palz of the Germany-based World Council for Renewable Energy said Arab states had been “left behind a bit” in the Western-led race for alternatives to fossil fuels but could catch up because they had the necessary educational base.

“For modern types of renewable energies like wind energy, the leadership is right now in Europe, California and Texas,” Palz, an engineer and physician by training, told Reuters. “Arab countries have been left behind a bit, and it’s very important now that political decisions are being taken to catch up with the rest of the world because Arab countries have resources - the intellectual resources - to do this.”

“We think that in the long run all renewable energies will be greatly needed because fossil and atomic energy will be progressively exhausted and disappear.” Palz praised Algeria’s plans to develop power for its domestic market as well as for exports from a hybrid solar-gas plant in the Sahara desert due to come on stream in 2009, with exports of power to Europe due to start up by 2015.

Algeria reportedly has enough oil to last it for 23 years and enough gas for 50 years at current production rates. But the country of 33 million people also has a fast growing population, high unemployment and booming demand for power.

Algeria’s move into solar energy is a very foreward thinking business move - it recognizes that Algeria’s economic future isn’t in the oil business but the energy business. Algeria isn’t the only oil-producing country that could make this kind of move. Much of the Middle Eastern oil nations are also blessed with an abundance of sunshine beating down on vast stretches of wide-open arid land and deserts. I don’t know, but I’m guessing there’s also incredible potential there for generating wind power, provided you could design wind turbines that would not be degraded by sandstorms.

As an American, I’m not entirely enthralled by the idea of the world becoming more dependent upon the Middle East for energy, but at least such diversification would benefit the environment and also lessen the dependence on the region’s abundant but ultimately finite underground energy resource.

Solar and wind power might also hold promise for parts of the Middle East and North Africa that have plenty of sun and wind but lack oil.