By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

Restaurants looking to green their operations by generating some of their own electrical power are finding it easier as vendor companies try to fill in the gaps.

Owl Power Company, for instance, has developed a way for restaurants to more conveniently use vegetable oil as fuel. Owl’s Vegawatt is a combined heating and power system that runs on vegetable oil and can be connected to existing heating and power systems to be used as supplemental green energy.

[Read more →]

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

Camelina sativa, a member of the mustard family, is an oilseed crop that is proving to have a great industrial potential in the near future. Studied throughout the entire process, from planting to plane, Camelina has shown to be one of the more promising alternatives to petroleum jet fuel, according to a study done at Michigan Technological University.

[Read more →]

From Green Right Now Reports

Solano County, Calif., is getting its first bio-fuel station with the opening Thursday at Plaza Oliver Valero in Fairfield. The station will have two renewable biofuels, E85 ethanol and B5 biodiesel, which are considered cleaner burning and less expensive than comparable gasoline and diesel fuels.

Biofuels are fuels made at least partially from renewable biological sources such as corn, soybeans, or vegetable oil. E85 ethanol and B5 biodiesel are both low carbon fuels consistent with California’s new Low Carbon Fuel Standard and both are clean burning fuels that result in lower Greenhouse Gas vehicle exhaust emissions. Many current vehicles are capable of operating on less expensive, cleaner burning E85 ethanol and B5 biodiesel with no modification.

[Read more →]

By Ashley Phillips
Green Right Now

The friendly skies are getting cleaner thanks to efforts made by Continental Airlines in partnership with Boeing, GE Aviation/CFM International, and Honeywell’s UOP. In early January of this year, Continental Airlines conducted the first biofuel demonstration flight by a commercial carrier in North American. Wednesday, Continental Airlines announced their analysis of this flight in a statement.

The 90-minute test flight, taking off from, and then returning to, Houston, successfully completed many necessary flight operations. Engine 1 operated on 100% jet fuel, while Engine 2 of the Boeing 737-800 operated on a blend of 50% jet fuel and 50% biofuel. The biofuel was made from a combination of algae and jatropha plants, which do not impact food harvests, water resources or contribute to deforestation.

[Read more →]

From Green Right Now Reports

Leaders of the algae biofuel industry are headed to Capitol Hill today to raise awareness among congressional legislators and push for continued federal support to help the technology reach maturity.

Legislators are working a range of policy issues such as a Renewable Fuel Standard, tax code and Recovery Act funding that will have an enormous impact on emerging technologies, Executives from leading algae biofuel companies such as Aurora Biofuels, LiveFuels, and Solix Biofuels will be talking about production advancements that they believe will make algae biofuel commercially viable.

Algae-based biofuel has captured widespread interest for its ability to deliver significantly higher yields than plant-based technologies, recycle CO2 directly from industrial sources and not compete with agricultural land or water supply.

[Read more →]

From Green Right Now Reports

Amsterdam will install 45 ChargePoint charging stations for electric vehicles as part of a two-year pilot project. ChargePoint is a product of Campbell, Calif.-based Coulomb Technologies.

The City of Amsterdam plans to deploy 200 charging stations before 2012, and the charging stations are expected to fuel 10,000 electric cars by 2015. Energy company Nuon will provide renewable energy for the charging stations and Coulomb’s international partner 365-Energy will manage the ChargePoint Network for subscribers.

[Read more →]

From Green Right Now Reports

Officials of Will County and Waste Management of Illinois, Inc. today announced a plan to jointly develop a landfill gas-to-energy plant at the Prairie View Recycling and Disposal Facility near Wilmington.

Will County officials said they intend to apply for federal economic stimulus funds earmarked for renewable energy projects to help finance the project. Once the grant process is complete, Will County anticipates putting at least $1 million in stimulus funds toward the project.

[Read more →]

From Green Right Now Reports

As long as the world is busy refining crude oil for gasoline and other petroleum products, it may as well try to maximize the benefits from the process.

That’s the aim of “cogeneration” plants, such as the newest one put into action by ExxonMobil in Antwerp, Belgium. The refinery there will capture heat from the refining process to generate electricity, “cogenerating” or making dual use of the refining process, according to a press release.

[Read more →]

From Green right Now Reports

One of the major problems of many alternative energy sources such as hybrid electric cars, solar and wind-generation systems has been how to effectively store power. Now researchers at the University of Maryland report they have developed new systems for storing electrical energy that are as much as 10 times more efficient than current commercially available solutions.

Researchers at the Maryland NanoCenter in College Park developed the systems, which were announced in the latest issue of Nature Nanotechnology.

“Renewable energy sources like solar and wind provide time-varying, somewhat unpredictable energy supply, which must be captured and stored as electrical energy until demanded,” Gary Rubloff, director of the University of Maryland’s NanoCenter, said in a statement. “Conventional devices to store and deliver electrical energy - batteries and capacitors - cannot achieve the needed combination of high energy density, high power, and fast recharge that are essential for our energy future.”

[Read more →]

By John DeFore
Green Right Now

File this under Sounds Too Good To Be True: Researchers using nanomaterials at Penn State are experimenting with a device that changes carbon dioxide into methane that can be used as transportation fuel.

Chronicling their experiments in the journal Nano Letters, team leader Craig Grimes describes an array of nanotubes that were coated with catalyst layers of platinum and/or copper, then stuck in a stainless steel chamber with some CO2-loaded water vapor and placed in the sun. After a few hours, the catalyst had turned some of the carbon dioxide into methane.

[Read more →]

From Green Right Now reports

Nissan and the Pima Association of Governments, which represents the Tucson region, are forming a partnership to advance a zero-emission, electric vehicle (EV) charging network, the Renault-Nissan Alliance announced today.

ECOtality Inc. of Scottsdale, Ariz., a clean electric transportation and storage technologies company, also will participate in the partnership by working to facilitate the process of helping make the Tucson metro area EV-ready. Nissan has said it will introduce ZEVs in the United States in 2010 and will mass market ZEVs globally two years later.

[Read more →]

By Catherine Girardeau
Green Right Now

SAN FRANCISCO — You’ve probably heard of wheels powered by biodiesel, favored by indie rock bands, gardeners, and other greenies who want to save the world, one tank of used cooking oil at a time. These veggie-fuel fanatics can pull their trucks up to the local burger joint and haul away excess deep-fryer fat, which they take home and convert to usable fuel. But did you know scientists in university research labs and start up companies are using precision, high-tech gene splicing technology to figure out how to mass-produce biofuel from pond scum?

One such algae pioneer is Harrison Dillon, president and chief technical officer of South San Francisco renewable energy startup company Solazyme, Inc. Dillon, a PhD geneticist with training in patent law on the side, is leading his team of highly-skilled technicians to discover, and create, conditions under which algae will produce oil for food, cosmetics and fuel.

The first stop on my Solazyme tour was the parking lot for a ride in the company’s biodiesel-powered Jeep.

[Read more →]