Start-Up in California Plans to Capture Lithium, and Market Share
By MATTHEW L. WALD
Published: September 28, 2011

A start-up company will announce on Wednesday that it is beginning commercial operations at a factory in Southern California to capture lithium from existing geothermal energy plants, a technology it says has the potential to turn the United States into a major lithium exporter.

The plant, built by Simbol Materials near the Salton Sea in the Imperial Valley, will also capture manganese and zinc.

None of the materials that Simbol plans to produce are so-called rare earths, but a study by the American Physical Society in February identified lithium and zinc as likely to be very important in the new energy economy of the future. The society considers them “energy critical elements.”

Lithium is a crucial element for batteries that power electric cars, and manganese is used in batteries and in specialty metal production. The United States imports much of its lithium and does not produce any manganese at all.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/28/business/energy-environment/simbol-materials-plans-to-extract-lithium-from-geothermal-plants.html?_r=2

Towering tablets are set to rise from a central green-roofed mound at the new University of Indonesia Library, which will house five stories of books and other precious reading materials. Insulated by a grass-covered roof and stone cladding, and protected from direct sunlight, the library's contents will be preserved in an ideal interior environment that does not exact a hefty cooling load. Winners of an open design competition, Denton Corker Marshall modeled the granite-clad towers after stone tablets or prasati, which the ancients used to inscribe wisdom. They are carved with narrow slots of glazing that allow daylighting to reach far into the interior.

Read more: Indonesia's New University Library Will be a Swirling Green Roofed Mountain | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building
http://inhabitat.com/indonesias-new-university-library-will-be-a-swirling-green-roofed-mountain/

Harnessing the power of sunlight can mean more than just laying solar panels on rooftops or putting them on motorized swivels to track the sun across the sky. MIT researchers have built solar panel towers and cubes capable of generating as much as 20 times more power compared with fixed, flat panels with the same base area.

The 3D solar panel structures have a higher price tag compared to ordinary flat panel installations, but can create higher energy output for a given size physical footprint. The solar towers also collect much more sunlight during the mornings, evenings and winters all days of the year regardless of clouds or shadows — possibly making solar power a much more reliable source of energy for the power grid.

"I think this concept could become an important part of the future of photovoltaics," said Jeffrey Grossman, a professor of power engineering at MIT.

The MIT team made their tallest tower in an accordion shape that "you could ship flat, and then could unfold at the site," Grossman said. He added that such portable solar towers might end up acting as charging stations for electric cars.


Read more at http://www.livescience.com/19322-solar-power-towers.html

• I got money in the morning from the ATM.
  
• I bought gas from an automated pump.
  
• I bought groceries at BJ's (a warehouse club) using an extremely well-designed self-service check out line.
  
• I bought some stuff for the house at Home Depot using their not-as-well-designed-as-BJ's self-service check out line.
  
• I bought my food at McDonald's at the kiosk, as described above.
  

All of these systems are very easy-to-use from a customer standpoint, they are fast, and they lower the cost of doing business and should therefore lead to lower prices. All of that is good, so these automated systems will proliferate rapidly.

The problem is that these systems will also eliminate jobs in massive numbers. In fact, we are about to see a seismic shift in the American workforce. As a nation, we have no way to understand or handle the level of unemployment that we will see in our economy over the next several decades.

These kiosks and self-service systems are the beginning of the robotic revolution. When most people think about robots, they think about independent, autonomous, talking robots like the ones we see in science fiction films. C-3PO and R2-D2 are powerful robotic images that have been around for decades. Robots like these will come into our lives much more quickly than we imagine -- self-service checkout systems are the first primitive signs of the trend. Here is one view from the future to show you where we are headed:
more at link

http://solarchargeddriving.com/news/solar-charged-driving/407-silence-the-ev-critics-with-the-25-kw-solar-pledge.html
Silence the EV critics with the 2.5 kW solar pledge
Monday, 26 July 2010 20:48 | Written by Christof Demont-Heinrich, SCD.Com Editor

There’s also a lot of stuff out there that questions whether electric cars are in fact greener than their gasoline powered counterparts. The preponderance of evidence shows that even when the electricity in an electric vehicle’s batteries has been produced by a coal-burning power plant that, on the whole, the EV is greener than its ICE counterpart. Plus, an EV is far more efficient.

Of course, the more of the electricity in your car’s batteries produced by renewable energy, the better. As we’ve noted in our series on what you’re plugging your EV into, if you live in the U.S., there are some great (Idaho, 90 percent renewable energy generated electricity) and not-so-great (West Virginia, 98 percent coal-produced electricity) places to plug in.

It’s simple: Anyone who buys a new EV pledges to put a 2.5 kW solar system on their home, garage, or elsewhere on their property.

In the vast majority of places in the U.S., and in terms of the average miles driven annually by most Americans (10,000 to 15,000 miles), a 2.5 kW solar system is enough to cover all of the miles you drive in your EV per year. More concretely, with a 2.5 kW solar system, we’re talking about a system that can produce between 5,000 solar-charged EV miles in extremely cloudy spots in the U.S. to up to 15,000 miles in ideal solar spots with the out-of-pocket cost for the system somewhere between $4,000 and $10,000 in most places in the U.S.

http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/12/03/07/apples_solar_farm_will_have_high_efficiency_panels_to_open_as_soon_as_october.html
Apple's solar farm will have high-efficiency panels, to open as soon as October
By AppleInsider Staff
Published: 02:15 AM EST (11:15 PM PST) (Wednesday, March 7, 2012)

A regulatory filing shows that Apple's solar farm for powering its server farm in Maiden, N.C., will utilize high-efficiency panels from SunPower and could begin operation as early as October.

The San Jose Mercury News uncovered Apple's filing, which reportedly reveals that San Jose-based SunPower had won the contract, on Tuesday. Apple apparently plans to self-finance the project and is aiming for at least 14 photovoltaic installations on the solar farm.

"Each of the photovoltaic installations will consist of multiple SunPower E20 435-watt photovoltaic modules on ground-mounted single axis tracking systems," the Cupertino, Calif., company's filing with the North Carolina Utilities Commission read.

Both Apple and SunPower declined to comment on the report.