Todos os dias, cerca de 30 toneladas de gordura proveniente de fritos e outros alimentos serão recolhidas dos restaurantes, bares, cafés e empresas de Londres e encaminhadas para aquela que será a maior central de energia de resíduos de gordura do mundo.
There's a reason that wind farms are placed offshore rather than in urban areas—the turbines are typically huge, difficult to erect, and need a solid sustained gust to produce any meaningful amount of current. This prototype, on the other hand, will assemble easily and take up little space as it quietly produces kilowatts atop skyscrapers.
Conventional wind farms need wind that is both steady and strong but with very little turbulence. Their turbines are mounted atop 300-foot pylons to avoid the roiling currents at ground level and employ enormous blades to drive their MW generators. Everything operates on a grand scale with these farms, but they're impractical in an urban environment.
Yet cities can be so windy—tightly-packed buildings funnel and redirect natural air currents, resulting in irregular, gusty winds. That's exactly what conventional turbines can't handle. What's more, finding the real estate to safely install a 300-foot tall turbine in the middle of, say, New York City, is impossible. So a new vertical-axis turbine, the McCamley MT01 Mk2, is a designed specifically these dense urban areas.
"Oxford researchers have developed a photovoltaic (PV) technology that has the potential to deliver low cost, efficient solar cells that can be readily incorporated into glass building facades.
Results just released in the journal Science promise to provide the lowest cost-performance photovoltaic solution on the market. The technology makes use of a simple manufacturing process with inexpensive and abundant raw materials. Prototypes of the new Meso-Superstructured Solar Cells (MSSC) demonstrated in the journal have already achieved an impressive 10.9% efficiency.
