Renewable Energy

The need to make a solar panel is increasing day by day as we are heading towards hard economic times. Very day thousands residential solar panels are being installed and DIY solar panel is certainly becoming a way of life for many to fulfill their energy requirements. But, many simply don’t have a clue when it comes to renewable energy and keep on wondering how to make a solar panel ? A very widespread myth doing rounds in the society today is that the solar power is expensive and too technical for a common man to generate. Contrary to the popular belief solar power ... Read Full Story

Gov. Phil Bredesen says a legislative staff member who attacked a state-backed initiative to turn switchgrass into ethanol is playing politics and endangering chances to land a large investment for East Tennessee. The report on the University of Tennessee's Biofuels Initiative presented to the Fiscal Review Committee on Wednesday was highly critical of changes in the project since it was first announced. As originally envisioned, the facility was to produce 5 million gallons of ethanol per year that could be sold to pay the operating costs of the research refinery. Under the current plan, the facility will produce only about 250,000 gallons, enough to ... Read Full Story

Homemade wind generator power has caught everyone’s attention as people try to find alternative sources of energy. Experts observed that our planet is getting worse lately as a result of too much harmful gas emissions. How should we fight air pollution?—this is a question that environmentalists ask without end.Two most honest alternative sources of energy today are solar power and wind power.These substitute sources of energy can give limitless natural source of energy without giving off damaging air particles in the atmosphere. Homemade wind generator power are made similar to the bigger, traditional wind power machines except that homemade wind generators are smaller in ... Read Full Story

(NaturalNews) Byproducts from the production of corn for ethanol biofuels have been found to be contaminated with antibiotics. "Ethanol's drug problem is just the latest of many reasons to impose a moratorium on production of fuels from grains," wrote Stan Cox for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle. "If industry cannot supply sufficient quantities of alternative fuels without risking an even deeper medical crisis, it might just be another sign that our thirst for vehicle fuel has outgrown all ecological limits." Ethanol production has previously been criticized for diverting land from food to fuel production and for degrading soil, depleting water supplies and increasing ... Read Full Story

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lenders are leery of putting money into cellulosic ethanol and other new-generation biofuels due to the recession and an industry shakeout, Agriculture Department and biofuel leaders said on Thursday. That is one reason near-term production of advanced biofuels is unlikely to meet targets set by a 2007 energy law, said William Roe of Coskata Inc, which has a demonstration-size biomass plant in Pennsylvania. Several witnesses at a House Agriculture subcommittee hearing on the future of new-generation biofuels pointed to difficulties in securing credit. "Given the current recession and the banking sector's financial difficulties, lending has become scarce in the biofuels ... Read Full Story

With demand growing for ethanol produced from sources other than corn, researchers at Oklahoma State University said Wednesday that state agriculture producers could someday grow sweet sorghum or switchgrass as cash crops. Division scientists and engineers from OSU's Division of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources spoke during a "biofuels field day" at the university's South Central Research Station in Chickasha about the potential of crops that could be grown by Oklahoma farmers for use in ethanol production. Little sweet sorghum is grown in Oklahoma because there hasn't been much need for it, said Danielle Bellmer, a food process engineer at OSU's Robert M. Kerr ... Read Full Story

World`s largest biomass plant running on chicken manure online in the Netherlands Yesterday, Gerda Verburg, Dutch Minister of Agriculture, Environment and Food Quality, opened the world`s largest biomass power plant running exclusively on chicken manure. The €150 million project is owned and operated by multi-utility company Delta, cooperative DET, ZLTO and Austrian Energy & Environment A.G. (a consortium including Siemens Nederland N.V.) The facility will deliver renewable electricity to 90,000 households. The biomass power plant solves a key environmental problem in the Netherlands: managing the vast excess stream of chicken manure, which, until today, had to be processed at a high cost. The biomass ... Read Full Story