Guardian - Energy & Environment

A New Generation of Underwater Turbine... 19 Sep 08

A group of engineers from Oxford have designed a radically different of tidal turbine that promises to be more efficient, cheaper to build and maintain than the current systems available today. The Transverse Horizontal Axis Water Turbine or THAWT is an underwater turbine consisting of a cylindrical rotor that rolls around its axis, following the tides. There is potentially 15 gigawatts of tidal flow that can be harvested from the UK coastline. The THAWT system generates more electricity than other systems at 60% of the cost. Full story

Solar plant yields water and crops from the desert... 3 Sep 08

Vast greenhouses that use sea water for crop cultivation could be combined with solar power plants to provide food, fresh water and clean energy in deserts, under an ambitious proposal from a team of architects and engineers. Seawater Greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the existing glasshouses built in places such as the desert regions of southern Spain, where they now cover more than 40,000 hectares. A Friends of the Earth energy specialist said the potential of these desert technologies was huge. "Concentrated solar power mirror arrays covering just 1% of the Earth's deserts could supply a fifth of all current global energy consumption. And 1 million tonnes of sea water could be evaporated every day from just 20,000ha of greenhouses." Full story

Scotland hopes for big increase in hydro power...

A report published by Scottish ministers suggests that over 120 new dams and scores of smaller schemes powered by the natural flow of a river could be built across the Highlands, generating enough electricity for a quarter of Scotland's homes. Scottish executive officials said this would be a "significant step forward" to meeting Scottish ambitions of generating half the country's electricity from renewable sources by 2020. Full story

Branson launches $25m climate bid...

Millions of pounds are on offer for the person who comes up with the best way of removing significant amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson launched the competition today in London alongside former US vice-president Al Gore. Overseeing the innovations are James Hansen, the noted climate scientist and head of the Nasa Institute for Space Studies; the inventor of Gaia theory James Lovelock; UK environmentalist Sir Crispin Tickell; and Australian mammalogist and palaeontologist Tim Flannery. They are looking for a method that will remove at least one billion tonnes of carbon per year from the atmosphere. Full story

"Fail to act at this decisive time and the Earth, its people and its whole panoply of life will face the most severe and adverse consequences" - Quote from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change