Pursuing Plant Power

In a quest to build a better solar cell, North Carolina State University chemical engineer Orlin Velev is borrowing from nature’s experts in collecting the sun’s energy: leaves. Starting with the natural pigments that help plants harvest solar rays, Velev and his team have crafted a flexible, nontoxic photovoltaic device that he hopes could eventually generate clean electricity far more cheaply than today’s silicon-based solar panels.

Velev’s one-square-inch proto­types consist of light-sensitive molecules—including the photosynthesis powerhouse chlorophyll—embedded in a water-based gel sandwiched between copper and plastic electrodes. Unlike traditional solar cells, many of which contain toxic elements such as cadmium, the biologically derived materials in Velev’s device can be safely released into the environment after use. The cell’s flexibility could make it an ideal choice for covering irregular surfaces; large pieces could even be rolled up or folded for easy transportation.

“This is a totally different way of thinking compared to a semiconductor cell, which is solid and expensive,” Velev says. In the next stage of development, he aims to boost the efficiency of the design, which is currently less than one percent of that achieved by top-performing silicon solar cells.

Article by Victoria Tang: Discover Magazine

Power Generation from Renewables Surpasses Nuclear: ENN

The latest issue of the Monthly Energy Review published by the US Energy Information Administration, electric power generation from renewable sources has surpassed production from nuclear sources, and is now "closing in on oil," says Ken Bossong Executive Director of the Sun Day Campaign.

In the first quarter of 2011 renewable energy sources accounted for 11.73 percent of US domestic energy production. Renewable sources include solar, wind, geothermal, hydro, biomass/biofuel. As of the first quarter of 2011, energy production from these sources was 5.65 percent more than production from nuclear.

As Bossing further explains from the report, renewable sources are closing the gap with generation from oil-fired sources, with renewable source equal to 77.15 percent of total oil based generation.

For all sectors, including transportation, thermal, and electrical generation, renewable energy production grew just over 15 percent in the first quarter of 2011 compared to the first quarter of 2010, and fully 25 percent over first quarter 2009. In a break-down of renewable sources, biomass/biofuel accounted for a bit more than 48 percent, hydro for 35.41 percent, wind for nearly 13 percent, geothermal 2.45 percent, and solar at 1.16 percent.

Looking at just the electrical generation sector, renewable sources, including hydro, accounted for nearly 13 percent of net US electrical generation in the first quarter of 2011, up from 10.31 percent for the same quarter last year. Non-hydro renewable sources accounted for 4.74 percent of net US production.

CSR With Hotel Soap and "Clean the World": Environmental News Network

Have you ever given much thought to what happens to those little bars of soap that you come across in hotel rooms? What happens when you open one of those neatly packaged bars and use it? Perhaps you don’t even finish it and leave it there and assume housekeeping will throw it away. According to Clean the World, hotels discard millions of pounds of soap and shampoo in the U.S. These products often end up in already overflowing landfills and contaminate fragile groundwater systems.

Clean the World is a non-profit organization that distributes recycled soap products, along with appropriate educational materials to impoverished communities and to domestic homeless shelters. According to them, each year more than five million lives are lost to severe respiratory diseases with the majority of deaths being among children less than five years old. Studies have shown that simple hand washing substantially reduces the spread of these diseases. Unfortunately, the essential items for proper hand washing are unobtainable for millions of people worldwide.

They have developed a process to sanitize used hotel soap and leftover shampoo. They reform the soap into new bars and then send it to parts of the world that can use it. They have also partnered with a number of hotel chains to collect all the little bars of used soap. Many hotels have also partnered with Clean the World as part of their CSR initiatives to ensure that soap is recycled effectively. In just two years of operation, the NGO has distributed more than 8 million bars of soap to children and families in the U.S and more than 40 countries including Haiti, Japan, Zimbabwe, Uganda, India, Honduras, Mexico and Albania.