Dear Subscriber,
This month features an exciting
summary Press Release article #1 for the upcoming Space, Propulsion & Energy Sciences
International Forum (SPESIF) 2012 to be held February 29 - March 2,
2012 at the University of Maryland. The Proceedings from SPESIF 2011 are online
for FREE download (www.futurenergy.org) and the SPESIF 2012
proceedings will be available a few months after the conference, published by
Elsevier Science through ScienceDirect.
Everyone knows that energy
demand is a crucial turnkey for the future of mankind. Do we go up or down?
As
all of the developing nations keep going up, Rocky Mountain Institute has a new
scenario in its "Reinventing Fire" program to add increased energy efficiency to
the mix, thereby flattening or
decreasing the overall energy demand. Article #2 is a great research
tool with lots of links to other information sources and references on this
important subject for future energy.
Now how about getting the bugs
to work for us and low wages? Before they can unionize and fight for higher
wages, Joule Unlimited plans to put them to work turning sunlight and CO2 into
liquid ethanol to sell for just
over a dollar a gallon. See
article #3 for an encouraging solar investment story that promises to be
profitable for a change.
In article #4, which could be the
blockbuster of this month's FE eNews, I'm revisiting a topic that was a subject
included in the Environmental Science class I used to teach at Erie Community
College in Buffalo, NY in the 1980's, when "ThermoCrete" was on the market with
phase change mass (PCM) energy
storage built into concrete. In fact, Jan Kosny says that he explored
the potential of the same subject three decades ago but now it's an idea whose
time has come. How about an energy storage medium 1.25 cm thick with the same
thermal mass of 25 cm of concrete? Or how about bed rolls for the third world
warmed by cooking stoves during the day to keep people warm at night? The
rediscovery of PCMs by several companies featured in article #4 can reduce the volume of storage material by
two-thirds, which is huge! This is an article to study and pass onto
your local high school for science class experiments. Lastly, you might
wonder what our Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) has been up to these days as it
undertakes projects that are finite in duration but that
create lasting revolutionary change. Article #5 shows two examples of artificial
birds that demonstrate controlled flight and hovering, the "nano-hummingbird"
and the related video on an "Airplane that flies like a bird". I must say that
it is exciting to see nature copied so precisely that it looks eerie.
Another
energy conference of interest is http://energytech2012.org/ with a Feb. 10, 2012
deadline for abstracts.
Thomas Valone,
PhD,PE
Editor: www.IntegrityResearchInstitute.org
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Full Text: Future Energy eNews Jan 2012
