The Uboat concept design by Wyatt Little of Houston, Texas, tackles all the major issues associated with green living on a boat. Electricity for the Uboat is provided courtesy of 3 Schüco 180 Watt, 16 Volt solar panels, mounted to a green roof (which we assume can also grow herbs and veggies for human consumption).

Over the past ten years, Asia has suffered from an investment gap and a lack of confidence in clean energy private equity, according to the Asian Development Bank (ADB. Johanna Klein, investment officer at the capital markets and financial sectors division at ADB, said its role has been to identify these funding constraints and address them with their own and private sector funding.

Facebook’s new, state-of-the-art data center is situated on 120 acres of land in Central Oregon. The campus will be completed in two phases, each consisting of 150,000 square feet of data warehousing space. Phase I has been completed, with phase II scheduled for completion at the end of this year.

Key findings from an upcoming climate change report released by the United Nations are expected to show that cost reductions in the renewable energy sector are likely to continue through to 2050, boosting their deployment.

The discovery is an important development in the worldwide effort to mimic the way plants make fuel from sunlight, a key step in creating a green energy economy. It was reported last week in Nature Materials by theorist Jens Norskov of the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University and a team of colleagues led by Ib Chorkendorff and Soren Dahl at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).

Shropshire farmer Paul Parton could make more than £500,000 over the next 25 years by generating his own energy through solar PV panels installed on the roofs of his poultry units.Paul, who runs Parton’s Poulets in Market Drayton, is among the growing ranks of farmers nationwide finding new non-agricultural means of generating income in an increasingly competitive industry.

The Eco Fire Pot Stove is an innovation that uses biodiesel, which allows women in developing countries to cook using a comparatively much cleaner cooking gas fuel than the toxic fuel-producing substances like wood, kerosene and coal. The stove is cheaper in price for this is now made of sheet metal but is also possible to make the stove from scrap metal, clay and bricks, which means the cost spent will be more only for the burner.

The Pakistan Engineering Council (PEC) is all set to establish first on-grid solar electricity generation system in the country during the current year to overcome energy crisis.“This solar system and smart grid is becoming a reality in less than a year,” said PEC Chairperson Senator Rukhsana Zuberi, addressing a press conference Saturday.

The Japanese carmaker said it wants to accelerate the development and eventual implementation of wireless charging for cars. “The charging of a plug-in hybrid or electric vehicle could be as simple and convenient as parking near an embedded charger at a home or in a parking facility,” Toyota said in a press release.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) is to award bioenergy and biobased products with research grants in order to further the development of sustainable projects. After the selection process, the chosen projects will implement sustainable regional systems for the production of biofuels.

ANU has a partnership with a Chinese manufacturer to commercialise new solar cell technology. The scarcity of high grade silicon is one of the things which pushes up the price of roof top solar panels. The majority of existing solar energy cells on the market rely on high grade silicon components.

Philips Lighting is launching a new line of incandescent light bulbs designed to meet federal energy efficiency standards that will take force in the US over the next few years. While not as efficient as compact fluorescent or LED bulbs, EcoVantage bulbs will likely appeal to people who are unhappy with the quality of light delivered by the more energy efficient technologies.

Launching its 2050 Technology Roadmap in Biofuels for Transport at the Advanced Biofuels Leadership Conference, the IEA Director of Sustainable Energy Policy and Technology Bo Diczfalusy, said that “This [production cost] figure may seem large, but in fact even in the worst case biofuels would only increase the total costs of transport fuels by around 1% over the next 40 years, and could in fact lead to cost reductions over the same period.”

This marks Google's first clean energy project investment in Europe, the company said in a blog post, though it still requires formal approval from Germany regulators. Google is teaming up with German private equity company Capital Stage for the project, a firm that "brings strong experience in the German photovoltaic and renewable energy market," Google said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu Tuesday announced $5 million in new funding for community efforts to deploy electric vehicle infrastructure and charging stations. The funding opportunity furthers President Barack Obama's stated goals of putting one million electric drive vehicles on the road in the United States by 2015 and reducing U.S. oil imports by one-third by 2025.

Minimum taxes on energy-rich diesel will rise under the EU plans, although the commission has stressed that this will not automatically result in a rise in diesel prices at the pump. It points to Germany and other member states where diesel taxes are already above the proposed new minimum threshold of €412 euros per 1,000 litres.

The research team, led by Christian Wetzel, professor of physics and the Wellfleet Constellation Professor of Future Chips at Rensselaer, etched a nanoscale pattern at the interface between the LED's sapphire base and the layer of gallium nitride (GaN) that gives the LED its green color. Overall, the new technique results in green LEDs with significant enhancements in light extraction, internal efficiency, and light output.

A planned fund to channel hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries exposed to climate change has overcome an early obstacle, the UN said on Friday. Members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change have agreed on the make-up of a 40-seat transitional committee to design the Green Climate Fund (GCF), an issue that had been debated for weeks, the UNFCCC said.

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard today announced the approval of a $104.7 million project to integrate solar energy into one of Queensland’s largest fossil fuel power stations. The 750 megawatt (MW) coal-fired Kogan Creek Power Station in South West Queensland will be integrated with a new 44 MW solar thermal system, making it the largest project of its kind in the world.

Edano said, ‘We will create eco-towns that are fully equipped with district heating utilising plant matter and biomass from the region and cultivate features of communities that thoroughly foster public welfare. We will proceed by moving forward with the world’s most advanced reconstruction plan, with a vision of going beyond mere restoration to the previous state and instead create a truly marvelous Tohoku region and indeed a marvelous Japan.’

“Algae has been a hot topic of biofuel discussions recently, but no one has taken such a detailed look at how much America could make – and how much water and land it would require — until now,” said Mark Wigmosta, lead author and a PNNL hydrologist. “This research provides the groundwork and initial estimates needed to better inform renewable energy decisions.”

The study, published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), comes on the heels of federal initiatives to wean the United States off fossil fuels by mandating significant increases in ethanol production. The Department of Agriculture forecasts that by 2018, more than one-third of the country's corn harvest will be used to produce ethanol.

Under a memorandum of understanding signed by Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research Kim Carr in Berlin last week the ASI and Germany’s Deutches Zentrum für Luft und Raumfahrt (DLR) will collaborate to accelerate technologies aimed at enabling solar energy to become a sustainable energy source globally.

French scientists are looking at the possibility of submerging small nuclear power plants deep underwater to supply low-cost energy to isolated countries or islands that cannot afford a major inland atomic plant. France pioneered the mass development of nuclear power stations in the 1970s and now sees a possible use in the industry for technology adapted from nuclear submarines, a top engineer said.

By combining copper, zinc, tin, and sulphur or selenium, all abundant and low cost elements, the University of Luxembourg has produced a solar cell with 6.1 % efficiency. The Laboratory for Photovoltaics of the University of Luxembourg has developed an improved preparation process for kesterite solar cells, which resulted in a new European record efficiency of 6.1 percent.

Dubbed the ‘Solar Soldier’ project the two-year research and development mission aims to produce a power pack where the energy is gathered from a combination of solar cells and thermoelectric devices. The team of approximately 15 scientists and researchers from Glasgow, Loughborough, Strathclyde, Leeds, Reading and Brunel University will also work on investigating ways of managing, storing and using heat produced by the system.