Tag: green energy

September 24, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Vertical Wind Turbine Spurring Interest

HONOLULU — It has been three years in the planning and now it is finally in place. The vertical axis wind turbine is close to being operational.

Nick Dizon of NIDON Clean Energy recently installed the carbon fiber clad turbine on a warehouse in Iwilei.

“It’s our effort to show that wind can work in Hawaii,” said Dizon.

Dizon is working with Siu Electric to test the U.S. designed turbine at the company’s 500 Alakawa offices.

The turbine was recently featured on Good Morning America. It is manufactured by a company called Urban Green Energy out of New York. The turbine on the warehouse is a four kilowatt system. The theory is the system could be ideal for urban small wind corridors. It needs at least 7 mph winds. The turbine is quiet and has with no exposed metal for rusting. It also has a relatively small footprint.

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June 3, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Exxon $600 Million Algae Investment Makes Khosla See Pipe Dream – Bloomberg.com

Bloomberg

June 3 (Bloomberg) — Inside an industrial warehouse in South San Francisco, California, Harrison Dillon, chief technology officer of startup Solazyme Inc., examines a beaker filled with a brown paste made of sugar cane waste. While the smell brings to mind molasses, this goo, called bagasse, won’t find its way into people-pleasing confections.

Instead, scientists will empty it into 5-gallon metal flasks of algae and water. The algae will gorge on the treat — filling themselves with fatty oils as they double in size every six hours, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its July issue.

Down the hall, past a rainbow of algae strains arrayed in Petri dishes, Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Wolfson shows off a gallon-size bottle of slightly viscous liquid. After drying the algae, wringing out the oil and shipping it to a refinery, this is the prize: diesel fuel that Wolfson says is chemically indistinguishable from its petroleum-based equivalent and which has already powered a Jeep Liberty and a Mercedes Benz sedan.

“We’ve produced tens of thousands of gallons, and by the end of 2010, I hope I can say we’ve produced hundreds of thousands,” Wolfson, 39, says. “In the next two years, we should get the cost down to the $60 to $80-a-barrel range.”

At that price, Solazyme’s algae fuel would compete with $80-a-barrel oil.

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