Recognize that familiar United Parcel Service truck with the trademark brown paint job? Look twice. The government released its model Wednesday, replete with a new hybrid hydraulic system built for the Environmental Protection Agency by Cleveland-based Eaton Corp.

“With this new system, I guess you can say brown is the new green,” said EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson, standing in front of a UPS truck that will test the system on the streets of Detroit starting in August.

The new system replaces a truck’s transmission with hydraulics and that, combined with a low-emission diesel engine, yields a 60 percent to 70 percent saving on fuel use.

“We work on a lot of different hydraulic equipment for aerospace and this fits in very well,” said Ben Hoxie, Eaton’s engineering manager for the project.

red orbit

Energize America (Draft 5)

Written by Jérôme Guillet (Jerome a Paris), George Karayannis (Doolittle Sothere), Timothy Lange (Meteor Blades) and Mark Sumner (devilstower)
Contributing Editors: A Siegel, besieged by bush, btower, chriscol, Chris Kulczycki, deb9, deety, Engineer Poet, mateosf and dozens of other helpful Kossacks and netizens.

Following is the fifth version of a Kossack-generated (Kossacks are members of the blog Daily Kos) strategic energy plan designed to provide the United States with energy security by 2020 and energy independence by 2040.

Objectives:

To provide the U.S. with Energy Security by 2020 and Energy Independence by 2040 by: 1) reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 75%, 2) reducing oil imports by 50%, 3) generating 25% of electricity from renewable sources, and 4) creating or preserving over three million new jobs by 2020.

20 Point Plan:

I…....The Passenger Vehicle Fuel Efficiency Act (“500mpg cars”)

II…...The Transportation Industry Efficiency Act (“Long Haul”)

III…..The Fleets Conversion Act (“Mass Transit”)

IV…..The Community-Based Energy Investment Act (“Neighborood Power”)

V…...The Passenger Rail Restoration Act (“Bullet Trains”)

VI…..The Clean Coal Generation Act (“Clean Coal”)

VII….The Wind Energy Production Tax Credit Act (“Harvest the Wind”)

VIII…The 20 Million Solar Roof Act (“Harness the Sun”)

IX…..The Renewable Portfolio Standards Act (“Fair Everywhere”)

X…...The Federal Net Metering Act (“Get on the Grid”)

XI…..The State-Based Renewable Energy Investment Act (“Green States”)

XII….The New Energy Technology Demonstration Act (“Liquid Coal and Golden Glow”)

XIII…The Sustainable Energy Economic Prosperity Act (“Focused for Lasting Success”)

XIV…The Carbon Reduction Act (“Atmosphere Stability”)

XV….The Federal Energy Policy Enforcement Act (“People’s Energy Watchdog”)

XVI…The National Energy Efficiency & Conservation Act (“EnergySMART”)

XVII..The Home Efficiency Act (“C the Light”)

XVIII.The Demand Side Management Act (“Real Time Energy Pricing”)

XIX…The Telecommuter Assistance Act (“Work Smart”)

XX….The Energy Security Funding Act (“Paying the Piper”)

Read the whole Energize America proposal (.pdf). Although the plan has gone through 5 drafts, they are still open to critical analysis and suggestions. This could be your opportunity to help influence US policy.

Marlborough-based Aquaflow Bionomic yesterday announced it had produced its first sample of bio-diesel fuel from algae in sewage ponds.

It is believed to be the world’s first commercial production of bio-diesel from “wild” algae outside the laboratory – and the company expects to be producing at the rate of at least one million litres of the fuel each year from Blenheim by April.

New Zealand Herald

As President Bush urges Americans to cut back on the use of oil in wake of the recent surge in prices, more and more people are looking for more viable alternatives to the use of petroleum as the main fuel for the automotive industry. IsraCast recently covered the idea developed at the Weizmann Institute to use pure Zinc to produce Hydrogen using solar power. Now, a different solution has been developed by an Israeli company called Engineuity. Amnon Yogev, one of the two founders of Engineuity, and a retired Professor of the Weizmann Institute, suggested a method for producing a continuous flow of Hydrogen and steam under full pressure inside a car. This method could also be used for producing hydrogen for fuel cells and other applications requiring hydrogen and/or steam.

It’s a unique system that can produce Hydrogen inside the car using common metals such as Magnesium and Aluminum. According to the company, the system solves all of the obstacles associated with the manufacturing, transporting and storing of hydrogen to be used in cars. When it becomes commercial in a few years time, the system will be incorporated into cars that will cost about the same as existing conventional cars to run, and will be completely emission free.

IsraCast

Attempts to harness wave power for clean energy generation could be helped by building posts at sea, say researchers who have taken a lesson from optics and applied it to the ocean.

If the pillars are arranged in a lens-shaped array, the researchers report in Physical Review Letters1, they act as a glass lens does on light, to focus the waves into a point.

This would allow wave energy to be collected from a stretch of coastline several hundred metres long and focused onto a single device that converts their mechanical energy into some other form, such as electricity (see ‘Swell magnet stokes support for wave power’). Such devices often work best when the waves are large, as they would be after this kind of focusing.

Nature

WEATHER systems, as the world has recently been reminded, have awesome power. The energy released by a large hurricane can exceed the energy consumption of the human race for a whole year, and even an average tornado has a power similar to that of a large power station. If only mankind could harness that energy, rather than being at its mercy. Louis Michaud, a Canadian engineer who works at a large oil company, believes he has devised a way to do just that, by generating artificial whirlwinds that can be controlled and harnessed. He calls his invention the ?atmospheric vortex engine?.

His idea works on a similar principle to a solar chimney, which consists of a tall, hollow cylinder surrounded by a large greenhouse. The sun heats the air in the greenhouse, and the hot air rises. But its only escape route is via the chimney. A turbine at the base of the chimney generates electricity as the air rushes by. A small solar chimney was operated successfully in Spain in the 1980s, and EnviroMission, an Australian firm, is planning to build a 1,000-metre-high example in New South Wales. But the efficiency of such a system is proportional to the height of the chimney, notes Mr Michaud, which is limited by practical considerations. His scheme replaces the chimney with a tornado-like vortex of spinning air, which could extend several kilometres into the atmosphere.

The Economist via We Make Money Not Art