Just about half of Beijing’s dirvers were forced off roads today in an effort to curb pollutants downward for the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics.  We’re excited to see this plan put into action as we first reported on the potential for research while the skies are cleared of pollution.

Roughly 3.3 million cars circulate on a daily basis in Beijing.  The plan is to remove half of them from city streets over a two month period on a day-by-day basis, alternating by odd/even license plate numbers. Drivers will use public transportation instead when not permitted to drive. Two new subway lines have been added in the city to accommodate the usage surge leading up to and during the Olympics. Several Olympic athletes have already bowed out of events worried that poor air conditions may affect their performances, including the world’s greatest distance runner, Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia.

With the skies clearing over this very polluted city, we are hoping a group of researchers will do some heavy investigating on whatever environmental impacts follow. In the days that followed 9-11, researchers found that the average air temperature increased by 1.8 degrees F due to reduced aircraft contrails that partially blocked sunlight, while all planes were grounded. Can similar data be found in Beijing?

If so, what does this mean for our current plans (cars going green) to reduce current emissions into the atmosphere? Is this necessarily the right thing to be doing to curb global warming? Do we really understand the climate issue as a whole and are we all really working in the best possible direction to help our environment?

In our last post about tidal energy, we mentioned that sun light is the most abundant source of energy, found every second of the day on 50% of the planet. Cloud cover can reduce sunlight’s penetration to the Earth’s surface reducing its ability to be harvested, but not by a significant factor most of the time.

That said, MIT’s new development of glass that collects solar energy is making big news.

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For those without volume, solar concentrators are explained by associate professor Marc Baldo as a panel of glass that uses dye to collect sunlight across its surface and concentrate it to the glass’s edges where solar cells are located. Because the light is concentrated from a large area down to a very small group of solar cells, its energy can be concentrated to generate a great deal of electricity. Sort of like frying an ant with a magnifying glass.

One of the big advantages of this new technology is that the solar concentrators will be inexpensive to make. It will be inexpensive to produce because the concentrators are tolerant of defects in production. Conventional solar panels must be perfect in order to function, whereas solar concentrators will just deliver slightly less power.

An image from the MIT website is below showing the light concentrated at the edge of the glass. Its easy to imagine how this technology could be applied to windows used in buildings and vehicles.

There are several forms of alternative energy currently being explored, but one form has perhaps the most potential to successfully replace the energy production from fossil fuels. While sunlight is the most abundant source of energy available, tidal energy is one of the easiest and least expensive to transform into electricity.

We are very close, or have moved past sustainable oil output from our limited known reserves on Earth. If we want to create a solution to our future’s enormous gap between our demand for energy and the availability of energy, we must seek alternatives that can produce power at comparative levels to fossil fuels. Solar, wind, and bio-fuels are still too expensive and cannot produce the volume of energy to effectively harness as a replacement energy source.

The huge advantage of tidal energy over the alternatives is the many ways electricity can be generated from it, and the fact that we already know so much about how to harness it. We harvest tidal energy in the same way we harvest wind energy, through turbines. The major difference is the consistency and power of the ocean that trumps that of air.

The videos below show several different models that harvest energy from the ocean’s tides.

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Tidal energy is clean, sustainable, a relatively low cost to convert into electricity, and most importantly ABUNDANT and POWERFUL.

MIT has developed a mesh paper called Nanowire that absorbs oil from water. The intended use for the paper is to clean up oil and other organic pollutants. This new technology could play a very important role in oil spills if mass produced. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this new paper is that is it reusable and so is the oil it absorbs.

Below is a picture of a vile of water with gasoline (dyed blue) that has been removed with with the Nanowaire paper.

Researchers are already looking into how this technology can be integrated with water transfer and filtration systems in large cities to help with purification. Could substantial amounts of oil be pulled from these irrigation systems? Billions of gallons of water are transferred every day in the United States alone. From these billions of gallons of daily water, how much oil could be extracted and re-used?

Additionally, are there other applications where this oil absorbent material could be put to use, such as filtering oil particles out of pollutants?

The video below was published on youtube in June, 2007. We wanted to share it here as it makes a great point about the the energy sources we take for granted on a daily basis.

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The commercial was made for Epuron, a German based company specializing in renewable energy solutions, specifically photovoltaic, wind, bioenergy and solar thermal projects. A list of their current projects can be found here.

Its refreshing to see a company working towards innovative solutions to our energy crisis, while also taking the time to educate the general public on renewable energy. The “Mr. W” youtube video has received almost 1.5 million views since being published last year.