Energy
Transitioning to a world powered by renewable energy is key to tackling climate change. Here you can find the latest good news related to our clean energy transition, covering wind, solar, green hydrogen, hydropower, and more.
Biofuels and the future of the transportation industry
This week, FedEx announced it has agreed to purchase 3 million gallons of low-carbon biofuel per year. In The Optimist Daily, we have featured many more and similar announcements by corporate giants before. This article looks at the challenges, the future and the quest for biofuels in the Read More...
Australian energy giants say going off-grid is viable, sometimes even preferable
While Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott is raising eyebrows all over the world by insisting that coal is "good for humanity," a report from down under shows a different picture. A recent study has confirmed that "off-grid" distributed energy supply is a viable option for some regional and Read More...
The zero carbon house that couldn't
And here's another one where technology beats politics. In the UK, the Minister of Finance had infamously said homes need not be "zero carbon" as they were deemed too expensive. However, designers at the Cardiff University in Wales have now built a house that exports more power to the grid than it Read More...
Yeloha: Go solar on someone else’s roof
If you can turn your home into a hotel through renting it (Airbnb), you should be able to rent your energy generation capacity as well. What if you want to power your home with solar energy but your house catches mostly shade? You might work out a relationship with someone else who has solar, using Read More...
Why Japanese golf courses are turned into solar energy farms
Japan is known for its expensive, upper-crust golf clubs. But golf participation is down more than 40 percent from its high in the early 1990s. Now, the country is facing a severe over-development of golf courses. One solution: turning them into solar power plants. And so the multinational Kyocera Read More...
Wind power generates 140% of Denmark's demand
It is sometimes said that wind energy can't produce all the energy required. But late last week, on an unusually windy evening, Denmark produced 116% of its national electricity needs from wind turbines alone. By 3 amonFriday, when electricity demand dropped, that figure had risen to 140%. The Read More...
Facebook's newest data center to run on wind energy
Your social media use has a carbon footprint, too. Numerous servers in a steadily growing number of gigantic buildings called data centers require electricity to keep us all connected with others and, ideally, liked by them. So it's good news that Facebook's newest data center, in Fort Worth, Read More...
Solar power is mostly for the rich. Here’s how Obama wants to change that.
So far, solar energy is a toy for the affluent. The George Washington University Solar Institute reported earlier this year that of the some 645,000 U.S. homes and businesses with rooftop solar panels, no more than 5 percent were households earning less than $40,000 a year. On Tuesday, the Obama Read More...
Energy storage: the missing link of solar energy adoption
With solar panels on your roof you can generate your own energy. However most of that energy you won’t use yourself. The sun shines during the day when most people are at work. Their solar systems produce energy that’s exported back to the grid. Home energy storage systems allow people to use Read More...
Generating solar energy from noise barriers
Noise barriers along highways can be used as a source for clean energy. Used to dampen the loud sounds of traffic, these noise barriers just sit there, usually not even very pretty. So engineers at the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands created barriers with colored panels that Read More...