Renewable Energy Hub

The Indian Parliament building, Sansad Bhavan, will soon be installed with solar PV systems, solar heaters and a biomass plant in an attempt to promote renewable energy technologies.

On the behalf of the Parliament, the Punjab Energy Development Agency has invited bids for installing 80 kW solar PV system. The power system would not only provide battery back up for the Parliament building but more than 50 percent of the generated power would be fed to the grid.

Some of the major companies submitting bids for this project are Reliance Industries’ Solar Energy Group, Wipro Ecoenergy and construction giant Punj Lloyd. This is a novel initiative by the Indian government which is trying to initiate a massive country-wide solar energy revolution which could eventually result in ballooning of the total installed capacity to 20,000 MW in the next 12 years.

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Scott Banta, a chemical engineering professor at Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, has won a federal grant to come up with a bacteria that can produce the biofuel butanol by growing on carbon dioxide and ammonia.  The carbon dioxide will come from ambient air, not fossil fuels, and the ammonia will come from wastewater or it can be generated through a chemical process using sustainably generated electricity.

The use of microbes to generate sustainable energy is under intense development, both to produce biofuels and to produce electricity in the form of microbial fuel cells, an area that the U.S. Navy has already caught on to.  Banta notes that the use of an ammonia-oxidizing organism makes this project unique.  It also involves one of those sustainability twofers that we love: while helping the U.S. turn away from the increasing risks of fossil fuel harvesting, it also may also help reclaim and recycle wastewater.

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Really amazing are the innovative ways solar power is put into use. Now a team of scientists working in Sandia National Laboratories is focusing on exploring basic steps to make synthetic liquid fuel with the help of solar panels. The goal is that t…