Dr. S. Gomathinayagam, CWET's director, in front of the solar panel carport.

While in South India a few months ago I had the chance to visit the charming offices of the Centre for Wind Energy Technology, the Indian government’s brain trust on wind power. The headquarters is a clean-energy oasis in the middle of a disheartening landscape of concrete-block houses and potholed roads, a gust of hope for something cleaner than the smoggy air that many Indians have to endure these days.

My guide was Dr. S. Gomathinayagam, the head of the institute. (See him on YouTube here.) From a massive desk flanked by a table that holds various awards his agency has won — some of them in the shape of wind turbines — he directs efforts to understand India’s “wind resource,” certify that turbines meet certain standards, and help to train the next generation of wind engineers.

Wind power is becoming a pretty big deal in India. The country is the world’s 5th-largest wind energy producer and is home to Suzlon, one of the world’s leading wind turbine manufacturers. Of the 17 gigawatts (GW) of renewable energy that India is now producing, 13 GW come from wind. (But with India’s gross production of electricity approaching 600,000 GW, wind is still a tiny player.)

India's wind power map. Source: CWET

One of CWET’s most important jobs is to figure out where the wind blows best and how much energy might be harvested from it. The agency produced this map  to guide the siting of wind turbines. To date they have identified 233 sites of which 90 percent have been built. Further developments may require moving offshore.

But the most engaging thing about a visit to CWET is the proud but ramshackle feel that is unmistakably Indian. After the security guard solemnly directed me to sign into the guest book, I was led to the main building. Towering over it were two smallish wind turbines, partners to the windmill by the street that pumps water. The turbines, along with the solar panels that shade one of the parking areas, produce about 3.5 kilowatt-hours of power at peak output –  not nearly enough to power the building, but perhaps sufficient to supply the three air conditioners that keep Dr. Gomathinayagam’s office a little too chilly.

A wind turbine spins above the headquarters of CWET in Chennai, India.

By the entrance to CWET is an educational room for groups of schoolkids that has little models of how wind turines work. In the large, empty hallway outside, a group of cleaner-women in saris assemble bunches of straw into hand brooms. By the back exit, an “acoustic wind profiler” chirps every few seconds; the sound waves that bounce back reveal how strongly the wind blows. Surrounding it is an extensive garden of corn, and papaya and banana trees, kept by and for the employees of CWET. If a sanctuary of clean energy exists in India, this little campus may be it.

The Little Wind Energy Center that Could is a post from: The Ferris Files

A little background: ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy) is a new federal agency created by the Obama administration and originally funded with money from the 2009 stimulus package. It is the Energy Department’s answer to DARPA, the military’s extraordinarily successful research program that formed the basis for the stealth fighter, GPS and the Internet.  ARPA-E is funding environmentally-friendly solutions like smart buildings, carbon capture from coal plants, electrofuels and improved solar and wind power.

1. Printable LED Lights: Nth Degree Technologies

At the summit, Nth Degree Technologies made the debut of what it calls Printed Illuminated Paper. The company embeds paper with thousands of tiny LEDs, each the size of a white blood cell, to make sheets of light that can be cut to any shape or size.

The company had two kinds of demos on hand:  One was two light bulbs, or rather pieces of illuminated paper cut into the shape of light bulbs. (See the video.) However, Mark Lowenthal, the company’s vice president, told me that these were just attention-grabbers and that the final product will be based on a different technology and will bear more resemblance to the piece of paper in the photograph to the right. This light was far brighter and used 8 watts of electricity.  The next generation of illuminated paper, Lowenthal said, will consume a quarter the wattage and be 50 to 100 times brighter.

2. Trapping the Ocean’s Power: Atmocean, Inc.

The idea behind the Atmocean WEST (Wave Energy

Seawater Transmission) is to deploy an array of oceanborne devices that capture wave energy and store it for later use, all while creating better fishing grounds. How is such a trifecta possible?

WEST creates its power from a sort of tug-of-war. A series of buoys (the yellow items in the graphic) float on the surface. Underwater, each buoy has a tail equipped with a series of toggles that creates a huge amount of drag. Between the buoy and the tail is a pump that is activated with each passing swell. That pump sends seawater through a hose to a central floating platform, where it operates an air compressor. That compressor, in turn, routes through a hose  to the ocean floor, where the air is stored in bladders.

Those bladders are the invention of an ARPA-E awardee, Bright Energy Storage Technologies. (Atmocean isn’t an awardee, by the way, but was one of several companies whose presence on the show floor was a tacit endorsement by ARPA-E.) Bright Energy has realized that air, trapped in the pressurized environment of deep water, is an efficient way to store energy. A pneumatic tube connects the bladder to shore, where the air expands in volume and can be released to spin a turbine whenever the energy is needed.

Now about that fishing thing: Atmocean’s CEO, Philip Kithil, told me that his initial tests have shown that the toggle-and-buoy system creates an upwelling of cold water, which if it were borne out would make the area around the buoys into a nutrient-rich ground for fish.

3.  Refrigeration Anywhere: Xergy Inc.

Xergy uses the principles of a fuel cell to create cooling in a much smaller space than a traditional air conditioner, while consuming a fraction of the power and without using refrigeration fluids that are harmful to the atmosphere. “We are using hydrogen as a working fluid and pumping it across a membrane using electricity,” says Bahmad Bahar, the company’s president and an Iranian engineer who grew up in the family’s refrigeration business.

The company was a finalist in ARPA-E’s BEETIT (Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices) category and is a finalist in GE’s Ecoimagination contest.

With no moving parts and a simple design, Bahar thinks Xergy’s air conditioners could be scaled to cool an environment of almost any size, from a computer’s CPU to a full-size building.  And since it takes up less space, a unit could be inserted where air conditioners have never gone before, like the wall of a building or the door panel of a car.

4. Storing Sun and Wind Energy: General Compression

One of the biggest problems with renewable energies like wind and solar is that the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. General Compression is one of several companies funded by ARPA-E that is figuring out how to take these intermittent sources and make them into something that can provide “baseload power” that is available 24/7.

When the wind blows or the sun shines, a renewable-energy plant often produces more electricity than the grid can presently use. General Compression takes that extra power and uses it to make compressed air, which is stored in a salt cavern underground. Then, when night falls or the wind dies, the air can be released to spin turbines and create electricity.

There’s just one problem. When that stored air is released, or un-compressed, it becomes so cold that it’s difficult to handle. Other companies contend with this problem by burning some fossil fuels to heat the air.  General Compression’s answer is to trim the cold temperatures (and also the heat from the initial compression) by venting it to a pool of water on the surface.

4 Intriguing Inventions from the ARPA-E Innovation Summit is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Image Credit: Talking Points Memo

RIP, Energy Bill: Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced he didn’t have the votes to pass a climate-change bill that puts a price on greenhouse gases. With that statement one of Obama’s major campaign promises crashed to earth, along with hopes for slowing global warming or using cleantech to jump-start the U.S. economy. In place of a real energy bill is an “energy bill” that gives homeowners efficiency rebates and regulates deepwater oil drilling. But with a midterm election in the offing and more Republicans likely heading to Congress, the notion of cap-and-trade is, well, cap-and-dead.

BP Plugs the Spew in Gulf, Boardroom: Having capped its oil spill for what might be for good, BP replaced its foot-in-mouth CEO Tony Hayward with Robert Dudley, an American who says he’ll make safety his top goal. Meanwhile, while no one was paying attention, Obama became the first president to take a stab at managing the oceans.

NYC Water’s Hot, McDonald’s Not: When it comes to local sourcing, in New York City tap water we trust. McDonald’s, not so much.

LEAF is Cheaper, Volt Goes Farther. Who Wins? General Motors finally named a price for the Chevy Volt: $41,000, or about $8K more than its electric rival, the Nissan LEAF. In its defense, Chevy argues that the Volt can go 340 miles with its “extended range” gas engine, while the LEAF’s battery dies after 100 miles. Who will go the distance with buyers? Time will tell.

Image Credit: NASA

Blow, Google, Blow: The king of search officially became a utility as it arranged to mainline 114 megawatts of power from an Iowa windfarm. Also this week, the Alta Wind Energy Center in the California foothills announced it had secured the funds to grow to 1,550 gigawatts and so become the largest windfarm in the world.

Take the NASA Quiz: This week, NASA unveiled snazzy maps that reveal the answers to two not-so-trivial questions: Where are the tallest trees in the world, and where are the biggest dead zones in the ocean? Let’s tackle the second question first. The U.S. East Coast and Northern Europe have the largest dead zones, victims of too much chemical fertilizer leaking off the farms. The tallest trees (which sequester the most carbon) are in Southeast Asia and in the U.S. Pacific Northwest.

What Matters This Week: A Price for the Volt, but None for Carbon is a post from: The Ferris Files

Terrafugia Flying Car

This is David’s summary of the week’s news for the Matter Network. To see the original, or post your comments, go here.

Solar’s Sugar Daddy: During his Saturday address, President Obama lavished an astonishing $2 billion in loan guarantees upon two solar companies. This upended the administration’s seedling strategy with renewables — a few million for algae research here, a few million for efficient buildings there — without choosing winners. No question, then, that Spanish firm Abengoa is a favorite horse, receiving $1.45 billion for its plans to build 250  megawatts of solar concentrators outside Phoenix, Arizona.

This Week’s Reason to Hate BP: The British oil company is falling far short of its promises in cleaning up the epic leak  in the Gulf of Mexico. Since April 20, “BP has skimmed or burned about 60 percent of the amount it promised regulators it could remove in a single day,” the Washington Post reports.

Bulldog Bingaman: If any climate bill gets passed this year, it will probably be thanks to the tireless backroom efforts of Senator Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) Politico reports how the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources committee has quietly gained the support of some Republicans for a proposal to place a cap on emissions from power plants, without ever stepping in front of a camera to take credit.

Recession? Don’t Tell the Propellerheads. Americans bought almost 10,000 small wind turbines last year (100 Kw or under), growing the market by 15  percent even as the recession held the country in its chilly grip. Call it retail activism, call it a clever use of subsidies, but the end result is  more than 20 megawatts of clean, domestic electricity.

Finally, a Flying Car: Terrafugia is taking orders at $10,000 a pop for its “roadable aircraft.” With fold-up wings and a top cruising speed of 115 mph (in the air), this might be the wonderbug we’ve all been waiting for.

What Matters This Week: Solar’s Sugar Daddy, Terrafugia’s Flying Car is a post from: The Ferris Files

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Lessons from the Deep:

Forests Get Breathing Room: Indonesia’s government agreed to halt the cutting of its rainforests for two years in exchange for $1 billion in ransom. Norway made the offer because Indonesia holds hostage some of the largest remaining rainforests; what’s left around the world might keep more CO2 from the atmosphere than all the world’s cars, trucks, ships and planes combined.

Deforestation = Poor U.S. Farmers? Meanwhile, a report made a persuasive argument that deforestation in the tropics leads to economic ruin for U.S. foresters and farmers. By rapidly clearing land, tropical nations flood the market and undercut Americans’ prices for soybeans, beef, timber, vegetable oil, among others.

GM Retreats from Indian Rival: General Motors pulled out of a partnership with REVA, an Indian electric car company in India, after REVA was acquired by the Indian conglomerate of Mahindra & Mahindra, a major Indian manufacturer that has set its sights on the United States.

Nissan and Zipcar Grow: Nissan broke ground on its battery factory in Smyrna, Tennessee and said it will make 200,000 electric batteries a year. Zipcar announced plans for a $75 million IPO to fuel its own growth in the car sharing, despite competition from rental companies like Hertz and Enterprise.

That’s a Lot of Plug Points: Matter Network’s own John Gartner made headlines with his estimate that in five years, the world will need 4.7 million new charge points for electric cars. A few days later a coalition announced that 4,600 would be installed in nine U.S. cities by Coulomb Technologies and bankrolled with $37 million in government funds. Too bad China provides far more stimulus than the American government does.

Tough to Be a Small Fish: As the big boys jostled, HybridCars pointed out how smaller electric-car companies like Fisker, Coda, Aptera and Tesla have no margin for error as they try to compete.

image credit: picasaweb.google.com/mikelo

Veni, Vidi, Veggie: In the New York Review of Books, Michael Pollan took a look at five books that collectively point to a tying together of what’s loosely known as the “food movement” — urban agriculture, farmland preservation, food labeling, the organic movement, to name a few — into something more than the sum of their parts.

No Free Ride for Factory Farms: The EPA announced that factory farms — exposed in Pollan’s own book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — would be identified and their animal waste’s impact on waterways measured. As a result, thousands of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs, are likely to face new regulations.

Innovations of the Week: Cornell students figure out how to harness electricity from small wind; scientists grow  BPA-free plastic from the atmospheric scourge of CO2.

The Weekly: Deep Ignorance in the Deep Ocean is a post from: The Ferris Files

image credit: International Bird Rescue Research Center

The End of the World…Or the End of the World As We Know It? The Gulf oil nightmare deepened, as crude oozed deeper into Louisiana’s wetlands and British Petroleum sputtered in its attempt to “top kill” the leak. Yet as the Deepwater Horizon officially surpassed Exxon Valdez to become America’s worst oil spill, another, quieter event seemed destined to compete with it in the history books.  Craig Venter created a bacterial cell that is, as he called it, “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

The biofuels community immediately pondered what it all meant, while we hoped Venter’s computer might upgrade the Labrador retriever. No more hair on the couch? Combine this revelation with the announcement of the first fuel cell implant that could power a pacemaker, and it became clear the energy revolution has barely blinked awake.

More Oil in the Gulf… The Deepwater Horizon spill took the express toward Florida and the Atlantic states as it entered the Loop Current, and several fisheries were closed.

…And Less Oil in the Tank: Meanwhile, President Obama signed a memorandum that will for the first time require trucks to meet a minimum fuel standard by 2014. Today, America’s truck fleet consumes more than two million barrels of oil a day and averages a pathetic 6.1 miles per gallon.

Midwest: The New Hotbed of Cleantech? A burst of announcements demonstrated that other Midwestern states are starting to make like Michigan and bet the future on cleantech.  General Electric won a contract to supply five wind turbines to America’s first freshwater wind farm, slated for 2012 on the Ohio coast of Lake Erie. And that’s not all for the Buckeye State: Electric-vehicle company Coda said it would likely build a battery-assembly plant there. Meanwhile, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, a Spanish company unveiled plans for a wind-turbine and solar-components factory, and Indiana officials planned to roll out the red carpet for a delegation from China to discuss joint ventures in electric cars, in addition to the Th!nk City factory that’s already on the books.

Silicon Valley Gets Glam: When former British Prime Minister Tony Blair reinvented himself as a cleantech venture capitalist, he overshadowed the other celebrity event of the week: the kickoff of the Green Products Innovation Institute. Funded and endorsed by heavyweights like Wal-Mart, Google, Herman Miller and Brad Pitt, the GPII aims to be a third-party registry and establish standards for a new generation of chemicals. Its goal: to end the era where “endocrine disruptor” and “baby bottle” appear in the same sentence.

Toyota Hooks Up with Tesla: Toyota became the $50 million sugar daddy for Tesla, as the sexy electric-sportscar company moves into digs that are way too big for it. At first Tesla will curl up in a smallish corner of the massive, recently shuttered NUMMI plant in Fremont, California. Not that Toyota is done with sensible; it is reportedly working on a seven-seater Prius.

Popular Mechanics simulated the wonders and woes of driving an electric car in 2020, and car manufacturers announced that the electric car won’t be silent after all. It will make some sound so the deaf, blind, distracted, and earbud-wearing populace will know what hit them.

Meanwhile, Honda said it’s not so sure about the whole electric-car thing.

Buildings Beyond LEED: Yale Environment 360 wondered why building owners interested in saving money don’t seek out “building commissioning.” The practice is essentially a physical checkup for a structure’s energy-using systems, like ventilation, and often yields fixes that can save tens of thousands of dollars — even in buildings with that shiny LEED logo.

Triple Pundit took a look at Building Information Modeling, a 3-D simulation of heating, cooling, water and other systems that help construction managers avoid dumb and costly mistakes. Can’t come too soon; a Pike Research study estimates that by 2020 the world will install 53 billion square feet of green-certified space, a 900 percent increase from today.

The Week’s Best Ideas

Panera, the bread restaurant, is conducting an experiment in enlightened capitalism. In St. Louis it founded a sub-chain called Panera Cares Cafe that has day-old bread, but no cashier. Instead, you pay what you think you can afford, and if you can’t you donate your time.  No word yet on whether St. Louis has seen a spike in free lunches.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says that if India made a dramatic investment in energy efficient lightbulbs, refrigerators, irrigation pumps and the like, it could wipe out its notorious electricity shortages within three years.

image credit: Thomas Bresson

The “Geobacter” project at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published the results of its mind-bending research into electrofuels. Researchers established bacteria colonies that feed off electrons from a solar-powered electrode. On a diet of water and atmospheric CO2, the bacteria “exhaled” acetate, from which many fuels and chemicals can be made.

California Synaptics told GreenTech TV how it greens the business by buying used office furniture, giving discounts to employees who bring their own dishware to the cafeteria, and offering prime parking and car detailing to employees who carpool.

Finally, a book review at Off-Grid gives useful advice on how to screen calls with a microwave, or cook a salmon in your dishwasher.

The Weekly: BP, Better Buildings and Bacteria-Bots is a post from: The Ferris Files

I explored alternative designs in wind power for my latest “Innovate” column in Sierra magazine, and can report that 31 flavors of turbines are poised to engulf the plain ol’ vanilla version we know so well. It isn’t that anything’s so wrong with Old Reliable; it’s more that there’s categories of wind that a giant whirligig just can’t use.

Vertical-axis turbine. Image Credit: jetsongreen.typepad.com

On the roof of Adobe Systems in San Jose there’s a gang of vertical-axis turbines, spinning in breaths of wind that would leave your traditional turbine inert. Go even smaller and you find the Windbelt, suitable for installation by the hundreds on bridges or porch railings.

Sky Windpower turbine. Image Credit: skywindpower.com

Then there’s Earth’s atmosphere, where winds blow with even more power than they do on the Dakota prairies. A propeller on a steel post could only dream of catching the breezes harnessed by an out-there generation of kites. Tethered to the ground with a power line, these models describe endless circles in the sky 1,200 feet up, outfitted with two small propellers like a cross between a barnstormer and a Predator drone. Or the Sky Windpower turbine, which is essentially a helicopter the size of an airliner held to the ground by the world’s longest extension cord. It would fly itself five miles up into the Jet Stream, and if it needed maintenance or if the weather got too rough, it would maneuver itself back to the ground.

FloDesign generator. Image Credit: Sierra magazine

Back on Earth, the contraption that might kill the garden-variety windcatcher is the FloDesign turbine, currently undergoing testing in Massachusetts. Designed by aerospace engineers, it might do to the standard Vestas or General Electric turbine what the jet engine did to the prop plane. FloDesign is optimized to suck in air so its rotor spins like a crazed dervish. Its compact design means turbines might be able to be placed closer together than today’s spidery creatures, and quite possibly generate more power. Less space, more power; hasta la vista, vanilla turbine.

Aerogenerator turbine. Image Credit: Sierra magazine

Finally, I am waiting for the ambitious mayor of some oceanside city to unveil plans for an Aerogenerator. Standing 450 feet off the water, this behemoth would produce enough power for 2,700 homes, but even more importantly it would become an icon admired for its sheer industrial size, like the Golden Gate Bridge or the Hoover Dam. Unlike other monumental architecture, though, it would move, making three ponderous rotations a minute for the tourists’ cameras.

Maybe the plain ol’ wind turbine won’t disappear. Maybe it just will lose its category-defining status, the way that the term “computer” has come to mean more than just a big beige box sitting on your desk. The wind industry will have its laptops, Google Androids and iPads, each with its own size blades — or perhaps no blades at all.

All this reflection on the wind turbine has me wondering when we will become familiar enough with turbines that we begin to experiment with something other than their shape and style. Henry Ford famously said that “People can have the Model T in any color – so long as it’s black.” How long until the wind industry breaks out of its own beige box and turn out a windcatcher in dashing red, or shimmering gold?

What Wind Turbine 2.0 Will Look Like is a post from: The Ferris Files

The Oil Spill’s Unlikely Victim:

More Electric Cars Roll to the Starting Line: You’ve heard that the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt are on the way, but how about the Think and the Wheego? Wheego, a maker of electric putt-putt vehicles based in Atlanta, hopes that 200 highway-ready copies of its Whip Life will roll off the assembly line by August, months ahead of the well-publicized launch of the Leaf.  Meanwhile, the Norwegian carmaker Think raised $40 million this week and plans to start assembly of the tiny Think City in Elkhart, Indiana in early 2011.

How Is an Electric Car Like an iPad? The CEO of Coda Automotive announced a novel approach to manufacturing and selling his company’s electric car — less a come-on-down dealership blitzkrieg and more like a visit to Apple’s Genius Bar. “We are looking at this not as a new-car-model introduction, but as a new-technology introduction,” CEO Kevin Czinger told a transportation conference in Ohio. But that’s just one way Coda is creating an auto company on the cheap. Models will be partially assembled at a factory in China, shipped to the U.S. as “parts” to avoid import fees, and finished near company headquarters in California. Coda will have just one dealership in Los Angeles but seven satellite stores where the curious can come for a test drive — kind of how Steve Jobs warmed people up to the iPhone and the iPad. Models are due in 2011 for $30,000 to $40,000.

Toyota Bets on Hydrogen: Toyota surprised everyone by announcing it would debut a somewhat affordable, hydrogen-powered sedan by 2015. By whittling down the use of expensive materials like platinum, the company’s engineers dropped the cost of production by a factor of ten, and said they could offer the car for $50,000 and get within striking distance of a profit after launch.

How Does Power from Nantucket Sound? Less than two weeks after winning its hard fight for approval, the Cape Wind windfarm off Nantucket Sound closed a deal to sell half of its electricity. National Grid, the utility for a chunk of the Eastern Seaboard from New York to New Hampshire, will buy power at 20.7 cents per kilowatt-hour — a rate that will increase the average homeowner’s bill by about $1.59 a month. The $1 billion project is expected to start feeding power in 2013.

China: Winds of Change. U.S.: Pocket Change. The Department of Energy announced some nice grants for renewable energy projects this week. Investments include $13 million in seed money for projects that will help make industry emit less CO2, $62 million to develop concentrated solar power, and another $33 million on the way for innovations in biomass-to-fuel. That’s $108 million. Not bad!

Then China Longyuan Power Group, one of the largest wind-energy concerns in China, announced its own investment to become the world’s leader in installing wind turbines in five years. The amount? $13 billion.

Innovation Watch: Australia works on the world’s first biofuel helicopter; MIT grads invent a shock absorber that generates electricity; and Dell wonders if it could prosper without ever building another data center.

The Weekly: The Gulf Threatens a New Victim, China Throws Money Into Wind is a post from: The Ferris Files

A giant oil cap is lowered into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Are Offshore Oil Rigs a Threatened Species? Is the Deepwater Horizon spill the beginning of the end for offshore oil drilling, or just another Exxon Valdez? Today, as BP attempted to place a 100-ton cap over the broken well gushing under the Gulf of Mexico, it was uncertain if they’d be able to stanch the spreading damage at sea or in Washington, D.C.

The spill has muddied the prospects for a climate bill as one of its pillars — a new round of offshore oil drilling — founders in unstable political soil, as Mackinnon Lawrence reports. Meanwhile, environmental groups are hustling to make the case, as in this Sierra Club video, that offshore oil is dirty and unsafe.  Perhaps it’s not only brown pelicans and terns who will have trouble flying after all this is over, and the black tide might yet turn against its maker.

Efficiency Experts To America: Stop Dreamin’ and Pick Up Yer Caulkin’ Gun. At a symposium of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy — what, you missed it? — experts concluded that weatherstripping beats windfarms as the fastest way to save the US economy, and released some numbers to prove it. First, America is not as efficient as it thinks: the domestic economy is only 13 percent efficient, compared to 20 percent efficiency in Japan and some European countries. We were left pondering if it’s more efficient, percentage-wise, to order a veggie pizza from Papa John’s or gnaw on a frozen one from Trader Joe’s.

Even worse, the ACEEE noted, Americans seem to be ignoring efficiency even as they embrace the idea of electric cars, photovoltaic solar panels and Bloom Boxes as solutions to both the energy crunch and our economic revival. The US economy has tripled in size since 1970, and three-quarters of those gains have come from leaps in energy efficiency. The Council’s conclusion: The American economy will recover by caulking its cracks, not by putting giant windmills at sea, slathering our houses in solar paint, or beaming sunlight from space.

Raining on the Electric-Car Parade: Observers warned against the auto industry’s growing adoption of electric cars as the platform of the future when not a single customer has yet taken delivery of one. The German magazine Der Spiegel declared  electric cars an “e-llusion” for two reasons: they’re not zero-emissions, as all those electrons have to come from somewhere, and the industry would die in infancy without massive and expensive state subsidies. A few days later, John Mendel, an executive VP at Honda, warned against “a rush to select a winner that could lead us in the wrong direction.” And yesterday, the site Hybrid Cars said Hey! What about hybrid cars? And noted that Toyota is doubling its output of hybrid Priuses and that carmakers from Hyundai to Ford to Mercedes are planning models or entire series around the gas-electric engine.

Build Whose Dreams? In other auto news, Chinese electric carmaker BYD announced that it would stage its conquest of the United States from a new headquarters in Los Angeles. L.A. politicians applauded. BYD (“Build Your Dreams”) has an acronym in English and a logo that, um, reminds us of the symbol of a certain German automaker. What else does BYD plan to appropriate?

Sanyo Makes Giant Battery Bet: Korean conglomerate Sanyo announced it would invest $2 billion into electric-battery research in hopes of capturing 40 percent of the world market. The company’s expenditure is more than the entire U.S. government’s investment in domestic battery research.

Also Lotus says mainstream carmakers could spend just three percent more money and make their cars 38 percent lighter, if only they were more like Lotus.

Why Is Google Investing in North Dakota Wind? On Monday, Google announced it had invested almost $40 million in a NextEra windfarm in the North Dakota plains, without explaining exactly what it planned to do with the 170 MW of electricity. This isn’t one of the companies’ well-publicized seed investments in new technology. Neither will Google use the juice to power its own data centers, as more and more Silicon Valley companies are doing, as described in this illuminating article in Yale Environment 360. Rather, according to Google’s green-biz manager Rick Needham said, they “expect to earn an attractive return as well as free up capital to enable future wind projects.” Investors take note.

American Superconductor Goes to Sea: Massachusetts-based American Superconductor revealed plans to use its formidable talents in high-capacity electrical cables to make an offshore wind turbine 40 percent more powerful than any that now exist. The SeaTitan will pump out 10 megawatts, enough to power 300 to 400 homes, and is due for unveiling by the end of 2010.

Micro Power, Mega Visibility: Sam’s Club installed micro wind turbines atop the light poles in its store in Palmdale, California, producing 3-5 percent of the facility’s power but engendering 97 percent of its good media coverage. Also, 1,370 of the most heavily-viewed billboards on Florida highways will be outfitted with solar panels or small wind turbines.

Gadget Watch: This week, Pirelli works on a tire that talks to the car; Solar Aero toils on a wind turbine with no blades; and MIT researchers explore how a coating on ferns could make boats move faster.

The Weekly: Oil Rigs, Electric Cars, and Google’s Curious Investment is a post from: The Ferris Files