$2,000 Tata Nano gears up to revolutionise travel for millions. Written by south Asia correspondent Randeep Ramesh and shared with EcoWorldly as part of the Guardian Environmental Network.
India’s Tata group has announced that the world’s cheapest car, the Nano, will roll out of its car plant with a price tag of just 100,000 rupees - £1,350 or $2,000 - and will be exported to richer nations, beginning with Europe, in two years.
By Andrew Williams •
January 19, 2009
A US-based company has successfully tested a revolutionary solar panel that is expected to cut the costs of photovoltaic solar power generation by more than 50 per cent, and herald a new era of improved efficiency and lower production costs of solar energy globally.
The panel, known as the Alubond Solar Collector Panel (SCP), was created by American Building Technologies, a subsidiary of the UAE-based multinational group Mulk Holdings. Commenting on the breakthrough, a spokesman for Mulk said, “We hope the success of this project will lead to an upsurge in the development of more solar energy plants, which will not only lessen the strain on existing energy resources, but also severely reduce the pollution levels that are currently witnessed in power generation.”
By Dave Harcourt •
November 24, 2008
Ashenafi Chote, of the Wolaytta district south of Addis Ababa, says that he regrets converting his land from food crops to caster seeds for biodiesel. He is now dependent on Food Aid and can no longer generate income from his land. 
The company that got him into this situation admit they have been unable to pay him, as agreed, because a loan they expected hasn’t come through!
The realisation that the cost of biofuel crops grown in temperate climates is too high to support a viable biodiesel industry has lead Europe to look elsewhere for cheaper raw materials. Africa, with its appropriate climate, soil fertility, and low labour costs can produce oil for biodiesel much more cheaply than Europe. Biofuels have been supported as a development path by the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) and other agencies of the United Nations (UN), with the proviso that projects are properly implemented to avoid any impact on food production or the environment. Unfortunately, unscrupulous companies can quite easily take advantage of desperate small farmers and naive governments, to drive unfair contracts.
As someone living in South Africa, with some experience of working in poor rural areas, the stories of wealth and benefits for small scale farmers entering the biofuels sector make little sense to me. The shear scale of the world’s biodiesel demand result in numbers which just don’t make sense. Ashenafi Chote, who opened this story normally produced 100 kg of maize, which indicates that he is farming, at most, 0.4 ha. With normal yields this would produce about 160 litres of biodiesel which would allow a medium sized MPV to travel some 2,500 km. Therefore, 10 farmers are needed to keep the MPV on the road for a year. If farmers are expected to only change a third of their land to castor, this means 3 million farmers are needed to produce just 1 % of the UKs biodiesel consumption. The logistics of it are just impossible, imagine millions of farmers wanting to deliver their crop and collect their few dollars at harvest time. So I believe all these projects are actually designed around large scale commercial production with the small farmer component used to put a “good spin” on the project.
By Philip Proefrock •
August 22, 2007
Home Power magazine has collected information about a wide range of different wind turbines that are available for home or small business use. The 2007 Wind Turbine Buyer’s Guide is a small but information-packed article with a wealth of information about available turbines for small wind systems.
The review has information on 19 different small wind turbines ranging from 7 feet to 56 feet in diameter, including systems for battery charging,
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