China Longyuan to Spend $13 Billion to Lead Wind Power League

From Bloomberg.com...

"China Longyuan Power Group Corp, plans to spend about 92 billion yuan ($13 billion) over the next five years to become the world’s No. 1 wind-power producer as global demand for clean energy increases.

The Hong Kong-listed company aims to install at least 16,000 megawatts of wind turbines in China and overseas by 2015, President Xie Changiun said in an interview after a climate conference in Beijing today.

The expansion plan comes as the Chinese government encourages the use of renewable energy to cut reliance on more polluting coal. The Beijing-based company in December raised a net HK$16.7 billion ($2.2 billion) from the sale of 2.14 billion shares in Hong Kong in the world’s third-biggest IPO by an alternative energy company."

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Electricity-Generating Shock Absorbers

From Technology Review published by MIT...

"Shock absorbers that generate electricity, which are being developed by Cambridge, MA-based Levant Power, can lower fuel consumption by 1.5 to 6 percent, depending on the vehicle and driving conditions. The system can also improve vehicle handling.

Levant has demonstrated the technology in road tests with a Humvee and will expand testing to trucks, buses, and other vehicles this summer. The shock absorbers look like conventional ones from the outside, except for a power cord coming out of one end, and they can be installed in ordinary vehicles by mechanics. They plug into a power management device that can also manage power from other sources, such as regenerative braking systems, thermoelectric devices that convert waste heat into electricity, or solar panels. The power is then fed into the car's electrical system to reduce the amount of load on the alternator."

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A skyscraper designed to make a rotten river run clean

From CNN World...

"Imagine a skyscraper that -- instead of hosting offices -- houses a system that purifies the water of a polluted river, employs the people living in surrounding slums and gives them a home in which to live.

That's the revolutionary idea behind an architectural concept that aims to solve the problems generated by the polluted Ciliwung River in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia."

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Searching for Value in Ludicrous Ideas

From FastCompany.com

"How I first came to discover Johnson's work is a long story, but I was instantly enamored with it. His Nod Office, for example, is an ingenious piece of furniture that integrates a bed into a desk. Who among us has not wished for such a thing? He takes the idea of integration further--much further--with concepts such as Road Office ("for those wishing to catch up on work at the roadside ... or [in a] traffic tie-up," he says), the Treadmill Workstation (now that's productivity!), and any number of mobile workspaces, such as the chauffeur-driven executive suite or the Read Life Vehicle, an SUV that features rotating seats, pull-out computer stations, file cabinets, and laundry facilities."

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Information Processing: Has global warming stopped?

From Technology Review published by MIT...

"The current period is most likely a local minimum with respect to the last peak and one just need wait another 12 months or so, when we will return to increasing global monthly anomalies which then will be about +1 degree C in amplitude."

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'Green City' Builders Facing Technological, Financial Hurdles

From the New York Times...

"Four years into the Masdar Initiative, a grand plan by the United Arab Emirates to create a new 'greenprint' for urban design, developers are finding that the necessary elements include a stable of the world's brightest minds, plenty of cash, and a stomach for trying over."

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Wind Turbines Shed Their Gears

From Technology Review published by MIT...

"Seimans has begun selling a three-megawatt turbine using a so-called direct-drive system that replaces the conventional high-speed generator with a low-speed generator that eliminates the need for a gearbox. And last month, General Electric announced an investment of 340 million euros in manufacturing facilities to build its own four-megawatt direct-drive turbines for offshore wind farms."

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TR10: Real-Time Search

From Technology Review published by MIT...

"Social networking is changing the way we find information.

How do you parse a tweet? Five years ago, that question would have been gibberish. Today, it's perfectly sensible, and it's at the front of Amit ­Singhal's mind. Singhal is leading Google's quest to incorporate new data into search results in real time by tracking and ranking updates to online content--particularly the thousands of messages that course through social networks every second."

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Burj Khalifa

828 meters above ground on top of Burj Khalifa, Mr. Ahmad Abdelrazaq who has the distinction of being a key member of the design team (at SOM), the construction team (Samsung Corp.), as well as the full-scale monitoring of tower performance team (Notre Dame).

TR10: Green Concrete

From Technology Review published by MIT...

"Making cement for concrete involves heating pulverized limestone, clay, and sand to 1,450 °C with a fuel such as coal or natural gas. The process generates a lot of carbon dioxide: making one metric ton of commonly used Portland cement releases 650 to 920 kilograms of it. The 2.8 billion metric tons of cement produced worldwide in 2009 contributed about 5 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions. Nikolaos Vlasopoulos, chief scientist at London-based startup Novacem, is trying to eliminate those emissions with a cement that absorbs more carbon dioxide than is released during its manufacture. It locks away as much as 100 kilograms of the greenhouse gas per ton."

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