energy

Oak Ridge National Laboratory will tap Nvidia chips to power what is expected to be one of the world's fastest supercomputers.

Oak Ridge's Titan supercomputer will eventually pack as many as 18,000 Nvidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and have the potential to deliver 20 petaflops of peak performance, making it one of the fastest computers in the world.

Last year, Nvidia made a splash when it announced that its chips were powering the Chinese "Tianhe-1A" supercomputer, which, at that time, became the fastest in the world. As of June, the Chinese system was ranked No. 2 in the world … Read more

An Obama administration appointee at the Energy Department pressed White House analysts to sign off on a $535 million loan to Solyndra even though his wife worked for the failed solar panel maker's law firm, according to internal e-mails made public on Friday.

The revelation adds new drama to a political battle over the administration's backing for Solyndra, which has filed for bankruptcy and has been raided by the FBI. The newly disclosed e-mails reveal "a disturbingly close relationship" between the White House, campaign donors, and wealthy investors relating to Solyndra, congressional Republicans said.

The e-mails show frequent inquiries from Steven Spinner, who was an adviser to the Energy Department on its use of economic stimulus funding to spur clean-energy technology, on the Solyndra loan, according to a report in The New York Times.

On September 29, the Energy Department had posted a "fact check" on Spinner's involvement in the Solyndra case on its Web site, explaining that he started his job after the company received conditional approval for its loan application.

The department said Spinner "was recused from engaging in any discussions on decisions affecting specific loan applications in which his spouse's law firm was involved out of concern for the appearance of a conflict of interest." … Read more

Building technology is improving every day, but if it's a super energy-efficient dwelling you're after, the tools are already well at hand.

Once a year, the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association organizes a green buildings open house where energy nerds like myself can see the latest in home efficiency.

The homes, which are both new construction and renovations, show that builders, architects, and homeowners have unlocked the code for making buildings dramatically more energy efficient than your typical construction. The question now is whether green building techniques and products will remain on the fringe or become more mainstream.

In … Read more

San Francisco and the CTIA are at odds yet again now that the wireless association has formally challenged cell phone warning legislation that the city passed earlier this year.

In a statement released Tuesday, John Walls, the CTIA's vice president of public affairs, called San Francisco's actions "both alarmist and false" and disputed any suggestion that the radio frequency (RF) emissions produced by cell phones have detrimental health effects. "The FCC and FDA have repeatedly found that cell phone use does not pose a danger," he said. "The Ordinance recommends such things as … Read more

The airflow of a typical human breath travels at less than 2 meters per second. Instead of lamenting its weakness, engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison decided to try to make a material that could react to this airflow in such a way as to convert it to electrical energy.

So they turned to polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), a material in which an electrical charge can build up in response to applied mechanical stress. (There's even a name for this: the piezoelectric effect.) The trick, then, was to get this material thin enough to be sufficiently stressed by human breath.

"We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face," says Xudong Wang, a materials science and engineering assistant professor who reports on these findings in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

Wang's team had go about thinning this material very carefully, so as to preserve its piezoelectric properties. They used an ion-etching process that, with some improvements, might eventually enable them to control thickness to the submicron level.

The obvious benefits of using respiration to power biomedical devices (think blood glucose monitors or pacemakers) are that the source is local and it is consistent.… Read more

In the quest to get more oil from the ground, Glori Energy is enlisting microbes.

The Houston, Texas-based company today filed to go public on the stock market in a bid to raise $115 million with a biotechnology designed to extract more oil from existing wells.

Well more than half of the oil in oil wells typically stays trapped underground because conventional techniques can't reach it all. About 10 percent to 15 percent of available oil can come out based on pressure. Then drillers flood wells with water in one well to help push the oil out of a … Read more

The excitement surrounding Tesla's Model S sedan is palpable, and in an attempt to stir up even more demand for the vehicle, the company Saturday night flung open its doors to show off its upcoming car.

At the event, Tesla let those who preordered the vehicle take a tour of the company's facilities and ride around in a prototype. In addition, according to Reuters, which was at the event, Tesla CEO Elon Musk asked attendees to promote the car to friends to help build more demand.

Tesla has a lot riding on the Model S. Unlike the Roadster, … Read more

General Electric and Nissan, keen on advancing plug-in vehicles, are looking for ways to make electric cars part of a home energy system.

The two companies on Friday signed a two-year research collaboration to speed up deployment of electric vehicles, an extension to an agreement announced last year.

One project focuses on tying electric cars' batteries into GE's energy management system. Nissan is already developing a Nissan Leaf battery charge point, which can provide backup power to homes.

The research will look at whether stored energy can automatically supply a house during peak times, when electricity rates are higher. … Read more

Solar company Stirling Energy Systems has filed for bankruptcy, another casualty of a brutal global price war that is favoring commodity photovoltaic panels.

The Scottsdale, Arizona-based company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy late last week. The utility-scale solar company's largest investor is renewable energy developer NTR of Dublin, Ireland.

Founded in 1996, Stirling Energy Systems makes a large, 38-foot-high reflective dish which concentrates sunlight onto a Stirling engine to generate electricity. The 25-kilowatt SunCatcher dishes are designed to be used as building blocks for utility-scale solar farms in desert areas with sufficient sunlight.

After decades of development including a … Read more