Green Options

Global warming concerns, government policies, and money-saving efficiency benefits have spurred clean energy systems to spring up all over the world. But a giant wind farm in the middle-of-nowhere North Dakota doesn’t do much good if there aren’t transmission lines to connect the power with the more populated areas that need it.

Europeans are facing similar distribution and reliability issues with their burgeoning renewable energy growth, and some see a continent-wide grid as

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By Ecotality blogger Bill Hobbs. Originally published on July 23, 2007.

Regular readers of my writings here at the Ecotality blog know I have an abiding faith in the ability of profit-incentivized innovators and entrepreneurs to come up with solutions to the problems all tangled up in the global warming/energy puzzle, and today comes news out of Wales that fits thgreenbox.bmpat expectation to a tee.

It’s called the “Greenbox” and what it does is

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Instead of solar and wind power to supply to your own house - which are both weather dependent - has anyone thought about systems that might require some actual work, but provide a usable amount of power?

I was thinking, what if each member of my family carried a 40lb bag up 3 floors and hung it on a hook that was connected to a generator; would an effort like that actually provide

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Build it beautiful

In honor of the holiday and the American Dream of freedom and exploration, I am going to help you declare an “energy independence” today (at home anyway). Today, we are going to decrease our dependency on finite natural resources such as coal and natural gas used to generate much of the energy we consume in this country. The interesting lesson is that these finite resources are burned

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Following in step with Boeing's prophecy for future aviation biofuels, the Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded a $1.1 million contract to Shell Oil to produce synfuel for the U.S. Air Force and one NASA facility. The contract, signed on June 6th, requires Shell to produce and ship 315,000 gallons of synfuel through August 1-31, 2007.

What, you might ask, is 'synfuel'? As

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Photo Courtesy of Solaicx

Solaicx, a manufacturing company that produces high-efficiency silicon wafers for photovoltaic solar power, has announced a new facility planned for Portland, Oregon.

The 136,000-square-foot plant will produce silicon ingots, which are logs of pure silicon that get heated to high temperatures and sliced like lunch meat to make silicon wafers. The wafers are the semiconductor materials in solar panels. The process for producing and processing

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This is what an algae biodiesel farm might look like. If you aren't sick of the topic yet, here's one more story to throw in the mix: Several new startups, including a company called Solix Biofuels outside Ft. Colins, CO, and Greenfuel Technologies Corp. of MA, have plans for large-scale algae production that should be online within the year.

As I've

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This is part 2 of my series of posts about visiting GM Headquarters in Detroit for the ChallengeX program and to meet with some GM executives. I attended this event representing both GreenOptions.com and EcoGeek.org, and these articles are cross-posted to both sites. Previous story here.

Several of the vehicles were available to be driven at the ChallengeX event. Of the vehicles that were there, I was

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