Photo credit: bjmcdonald via Flickr/CC BY
Yes, wind turbines kill birds. But only a very small number of them, and scientists are hard at work to further improve technology that might prevent these deaths in the future. Cats and sport hunters kill many more birds every year than do wind turbines -- which is why this Daily Show bit about duck hunters fighting a proposed wind farm on the grounds that it will kill ducks is particularly amusing: ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Demonstrating that there are still novel ways of generating power from the wind, Winflex's inflatable wind turbines are made out of cloth, can be installed on roofs as easily as the ground, and are less expensive than conventional turbines. (h/t to Green Prophet for clueing us in to these.)
...Read the full story on TreeHugger
There are a number of pressing considerations we must be making as we move to adapt the global energy mix to a world faced with numerous environmental crises. Certainly, climate change is chief among these, and moving towards low carbon fuels should be a top priority. The amount of traditional pollution emitted must be watched as well. But we've also got to start paying a lot more attention to how much water our various energy sources suck down ......Read the full story on TreeHugger
Image via YouTube screengrab.
This week, office solutions company Ricoh unveiled what it is calling the "eco-board" - a billboard powered entirely by solar and wind power in London. Situated on the M4 motorway, the billboard is equipped with 96 solar panels and five wind turbines, and it only lights up when it has produced enough energy to do so. It's not the first of its kind, though- Ricoh has already installed similar billboards in New York and Sydney....Read the full story on TreeHugger
The Gdansk waterfront. Photo: Michael Cavén / Creative Commons.
In 1980, some 17,000 ship builders went on strike in Poland's Gdansk Shipyard, winning historic recognition that helped lead to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and eventually catapulting their leader, electrician Lech Walesa, to the Polish presidency. Thirty years later, the plans that are being laid in the same shipyard might not shake the world, but they could make it quite a bit greener....Read the full story on TreeHugger
Third Biggest New Source: Good News, Bad News
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the numbers for wind power in 2010, and there are two ways to look at it. The glass-is-half-empty version is that the amount of new wind power capacity as a percentage of the total new generation capacity went down to 25%, from 42% in 2009 and 43% in 2008. That's quite bad, especially since coal is way up. But there's a glass-half-full way to look at it......Read the full story on TreeHugger
Photo credit: jiazi via Flickr/CC BY-SA
Wind power technology -- like solar, hydro, even nuclear -- is behind the times. As this report from the New York Times notes, "experts say that vast improvements in wind technology still lie ahead -- which makes sense for an industry that is about 100 years behind, say, that of t...Read the full story on TreeHugger
A new study in 
Photo credit: 
Image credit: 
Image via YouTube screengrab.
This week, office solutions company 
Image credit: 
The Gdansk waterfront. Photo: 
Third Biggest New Source: Good News, Bad News
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has announced the numbers for wind power in 2010, and there are two ways to look at it. The glass-is-half-empty version is that the amount of new wind power capacity as a percentage of the total new generation capacity went down to 25%, from 42% in 2009 and 43% in 2008. That's quite bad, especially since coal is way up. But there's a glass-half-full way to look at it......
