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Hydrogen economy in Scotland
The Scottish newspaper The Herald has an article on an effort to make the island of Islay into a "mini-hydrogen economy". The hydrogen will be produced by the wave power stations they have there and used all over the island.

It will be interesting to see how this works out. The UK isn't exactly well known for its efforts to curb pollution and work for a better environment, but change may be on the menu.
posted by bjelkeman at 21:53

The future of energy distribution and production in the west
Wired Magazine has an interesting article on energy distribution and production in the west: The Energy Web. A couple of quotes to give you a taster: "The current regime in Washington believes that the tree-huggers can go be virtuous and make sacrifices while real men go out and build more pipelines," [Electric Power Research Institute] spokesperson Brent Barker observes." and "If you add up the horsepower of all the machines and engines in US factories, businesses, farms, power plants, mines, ships, aircraft, railroads, and automobiles," [EPRI's] Barker says, "you find that 95 percent of the power capacity in our country resides in automobiles, with only about 2 percent in electric power plants."

The last observation by Barker is particularly interesting. Consider a future where all cars run clean fuel cell engines and can be plugged into your house or office to take part in supplying required energy. Suddenly there is no power shortage. The energy still has to be produced somewhere, but that is where OTEC power comes in.
posted by bjelkeman at 15:00

Extracting hydrogen from waste biomass
Researchers at the Process Technology Group at Warwick University, UK, have come up with a new process to extracting hydrogen from wet waste, i.e. wast which contains large amounts of water, such as sewage or waste from paper mills. Warwick's Ashok Bhattacharya says the new system could be twice as energy-efficient as existing systems, which are typically around 20 per cent efficient. "We're able to get much more hydrogen out," Bhattacharya says. The University press release holds more information and New Scientist has an article as well.
posted by bjelkeman at 12:12