Electric Fever at the 2012 Detroit Auto Show

Inhabitat Gets Electric Fever at the 2012 Detroit Auto Show - YouTube



Inhabitat hit the scene at the 2012 North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Michigan to get a sneak peak at the coolest electric cars and hybrid vehicles coming out in 2012. Watch the video for a sneak peak at the sexy Lexus LF-LC hybrid sports car, the brand new plug-in hybrid electric Ford Fusion Energi, Volkswagen's green take on the VW Beetle, the new Hybrid Jetta and the Smart For-Us electric pickup truck. Jill Fehrenbacher get's the lowdown on the coolest features and the inside info on which of these cars will make it to a showroom floor near you. Video by Brit Liggett.

TPI Composites and ALKE Launch Wind Blade Joint Venture in Turkey

TPI Composites and ALKE Launch Wind Blade Joint Venture in Turkey - MarketWatch

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. and IZMIR, Turkey, March 20, 2012 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- TPI Composites, Inc. a global supplier of wind turbine blades and other composite structures with headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona, and ALKE INSAAT, an engineering, manufacturing and construction company headquartered in Istanbul, Turkey, have formed a joint venture company in Izmir, Turkey to manufacture large composite wind turbine blades.  The new joint venture, TPI Kompozit Kanat Sanayi ve Ticaret A.S., will commence operations immediately from a 355,000-square-foot building in Izmir. With convenient access to both land and water transportation, the facility is located to serve the Turkish wind market and to cost-effectively export blades to southern and eastern Europe and northern Africa.

Gov’t has faith new incentives will boost FDI in Turkey

Gov’t has faith new incentives will boost FDI in Turkey

Çağlayan told Dutch entrepreneurs at the meeting. The minister estimated the total volume of FDI to Turkey in 2011 at $15.7 billion, 85 percent of this from the EU countries. Earlier data shows the FDI from surrounding markets and Middle Eastern countries to Turkey last year was lower when compared to 2010, while EU countries -- although under the strain of a government-debt crisis -- sent the highest share of total FDI to the country.  Netherlands’ İstanbul Counsel General Onno Kervers said logistics, high technology products and renewable energy were potential fields for mutual investments between Turkey and the Netherlands. Recalling that the number of Turkish-owned enterprises in the Netherlands -- where 400,000 people of Turkish origin live -- reached 18,000, Kervers said mutual investments could be increased with new business trips and meetings between both countries.

Turkish cooperation sought to modernise Islamabad

Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan - Turkish cooperation sought to modernise Islamabad

ISLAMABAD: The federal capital has sought Turkey’s cooperation in the fields of transportation, solid waste management, waste-to-energy generation and real estate development to make the capital one of the world’s most developed cities.  Prime Minister’s Task Force Chairman Faisal Sakhi Butt, while addressing a reception on Friday, said, “We hope the Turkish government shares its experiences, development models to help develop the city on modern lines.”

Tribes Fight Wind Energy Project In Ocotillo

Tribes Fight Green Energy Wind Project In Desert | Fronteras Desk

SAN DIEGO — Several Native American tribes in the Southwest are fighting a large wind farm planned near the town of Ocotillo, in Imperial County, CA. The tribes say there are more than 400 archeological sites on the land where the turbines would be located.  The Ocotillo Wind Express Energy Project, proposed by Pattern Energy, would produce up to 356 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough to power more than 130,000 households.  Ocotillo wind is one of the largest renewable energy projects planned on public land administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). It's one of 18 priority projects designated in 2011 by the bureau.

Magnolia Roadster's Vintage Styling Goes Green

Magnolia Roadster's Vintage Styling Goes Green | Autopia | Wired.com

Solutions to modern problems sometimes can be found in a distinctly classical place. The Magnolia Special was built to recapture the grace and romance of 1930s European roadsters — internal combustion and all — yet it emits 40 percent less CO2 than an equally powerful gas-burning automobile. And it does this using technology as old as internal combustion itself.  The Magnolia Special is the first bespoke, hand-built car built specifically to run on compressed natural gas. If nothing else, it proves eco-friendly need not mean boring.  “I really don’t think that environmentalists are worth a damn as car designers,” says J.T. Nesbitt, who designed and built the Magnolia Special. “They just lack passion. If the problem of global warming is left only to them, our cars are really going to suck.”

Native Hawaiians Provide Lessons In Fisheries Management

Native Hawaiians Provide Lessons In Fisheries Management | Science Sushi, Scientific American Blog Network

 Today, 85 percent of the world’s fisheries are either fully exploited, overexploited or have already collapsed. Combined, the world’s fishermen catch 2.5 times the sustainable number of fish every year. Scientists predict that if current trends continue, world food fisheries may collapse entirely by 2050. “We are in the situation where 40 years down the line we, effectively, are out of fish,” explains Pavan Sukhdev, special advisor to the UN Environment Programme.

Triodos Plans to Start a Successor Fund for Renewable Power

Triodos Plans to Start a Successor Fund for Renewable Power - Bloomberg

Triodos Renewables Plc, the clean- energy arm of the Netherlands’s Triodos Bank NV, plans to start a successor to its Ampere Equity Fund this year, targeting “hundreds of millions” of euros for renewable power.  Institutions that Triodos has talked with are “very interested” in infrastructure areas such as offshore wind, James Vaccaro, director at Bristol, U.K.-based Triodos Investment Management, said in a phone interview.  Pension funds and institutional investors “are interested in this area and we are well-placed to facilitate investments,” Vaccaro said. “The U.K. offshore wind market is particularly interesting and with our successful experience investing in the Walney project, these are the sorts of projects a successor to the Ampere fund would be looking at.”

Study: Carbon Market 2014 - Banking Of Surplus Carbon Emission Allowances

Carbon Market 2014 - Banking Of Surplus Carbon Emission Allowances - Google Docs

The market may be oversupplied by 2.7 billion tons by 2014, DIW estimated in a report dated March 8. Prices fell because they needed to find a level attractive to speculative buyers such as hedge funds, Neuhoff said.

Hedge Funds May Try CO2 Market

Futures Trading News: Hedge Funds May Try CO2 Market

Hedge funds seeking annual returns on investments of 15 percent may enter the European Union carbon market after prices plunged 59 percent in the past year, according to DIW Berlin.  The plunging price may be enough to attract some new investors to the market, even as supply threatens to overwhelm demand over the next few years, said Karsten Neuhoff, an energy and climate policy specialist at the provider of economic research in the German capital. “It could be an attractive market for hedge funds,” he said yesterday by phone.  Carbon permits for December fell 3.4 percent to 7.18 euros ($9.46) a metric ton on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London at 12:55 p.m. local time. They fell to a record 6.38 euros a ton on Jan. 4.  The market may be oversupplied by 2.7 billion tons by 2014, DIW estimated in a report dated March 8. Prices fell because they needed to find a level attractive to speculative buyers such as hedge funds, Neuhoff said.

Porsche’s $116,000 Rival Fisker Pushes Battery Power to Limits

Porsche’s $116,000 Rival Fisker Pushes Battery Power to Limits - Bloomberg



Fisker argues the Karma’s major selling point is its blend of sportiness and green credentials. I’m not convinced. Luxury consumers don’t like compromises, and the Karma is full of them.  The car works similarly to the Chevy Volt. It can run on all-electric power from a lithium-ion battery pack in what Fisker calls “stealth mode.” Most drivers will get more than 30 miles of range this way. Plug the car into a 220-volt outlet every night for a six-hour recharge, and you’ll use little or no gasoline on short commutes.  It has a 2.0-liter, turbocharged gasoline engine, which turns on when the batteries are depleted, or when the driver wants more oomph. Simply turn it to sport mode.  The 260-horsepower engine powers a generator, which in turn recharges the batteries on the go. While this eliminates range limitations, it also hurts the Karma’s official Environmental Protection Agency numbers. The EPA gave it a 52 miles-per-gallon equivalence in all-electric mode and only 20 mpg when running fully on gas.

Reliability Issue

This new technology comes with its own set of issues. These may include reliability. Consumer Reports said its Karma, which it bought, broke down. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that four out of five shipped to one dealership had software glitches almost immediately.
I experienced nothing like that. But the meshing of systems is often noisy and harsh, with unaccounted-for noises and vibrations. This happens almost entirely when the gas engine is on, and in a luxury ride it’s unacceptable.

Ethanol is good for corn and livestock producers

Futures Trading News: Ethanol is good for corn and livestock producers

In the past 10 years, the ethanol industry has changed the dynamics of both the livestock and corn industries across the nation.  "A lot has changed in the past 10 years. We have gone from 1 billion bushels of corn being used for ethanol in 2002, to 9 billion bushels of corn being used for ethanol in 2011," said Iowa's Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey, during a panel discussion on the synergies of livestock and ethanol at the Iowa Renewable Fuels Summit held in Des Moines in January.

Green Building Is The Key To Rebooting The Economy

Green Building Is The Key To Rebooting The Economy : TreeHugger

Jordan Weismann of the Atlantic puts together a graph that shows how construction had the worst percentage loss of jobs in the country, over one in four jobs lost in total. He writes:

The recession and painstakingly slow recovery have absolutely slammed industries traditionally dominated by high school educated males. Both in relative and absolute terms, they've seen the worst of this economy. And four years after things began to slide, those workers are still in a lot of pain.

One would have thought that green building and energy retrofitting might have been a good place to do some effective job creating, and indeed that was the plan with the Home Star Act of 2010, which would have put six billion dollars into energy retrofits. It was, as Brian noted, a "complete no-brainer" of a bill. But it was filibustered and killed by the Senate Republicans, who don't care about jobs, just their taxes.

Qatar's Green Plan for a 2022 World Cup Stadium: Is It Really as Eco-friendly as It Looks?

Qatar's Green Plan for a 2022 World Cup Stadium: Is It Really as Eco-friendly as It Looks? : TreeHugger

Qatar is touting its eco-friendly design for a new football stadium as a key component of the country's 2022 World Cup bid. In designs released by architects Foster + Partners, the building certainly looks cool and has a lot of the right qualifications -- energy efficient, close to transit, partially solar-powered. But critics say there's one big problem with the stadium: It shouldn't be built at all.According to designboom, the 86,250-capacity "Lusail Iconic Stadium" is "designed to be highly energy efficient and capable of performing in extreme summer climatic conditions" -- key for a country where summer temperatures average more than 104 degrees Fahrenheit. The plan incorporates direct connections to a new metro line and solar-collector canopies over parking and service areas that "will produce energy for the stadium when it is in use, as well as generating power for neighboring buildings."
Sounds good, right? Not so fast...

Twins' New Stadium to Cut Water Use in Half

Twins' New Stadium to Cut Water Use in Half : TreeHugger

When the year's first calls of "Play ball!" are heard in baseball stadiums around the United States, the Minnesota Twins will be fielding their team on a field that's greener than ever. Among other eco-friendly features, the team's new Target Field will collect, filter, and reuse rainwater, reducing its municipal water footprint by 2 million gallons a year.

One Mean, Green Stadium

One Mean, Green Stadium For North Texas : TreeHugger

With a name like 'Apogee Stadium,' there should be no doubt that the University of North Texas (UNT) was aiming for the utmost in green building with its new football stadium, and now the U.S. Green Building Council has recognized those efforts with LEED Platinum certification, making Apogee the first newly constructed collegiate football stadium in the nation to achieve this honor.

Philadelphia Eagles - The Green Team

Philadelphia Eagles - The Green Team - Scores Touchdown for Energy Independence : TreeHugger

Quoting directly from the Philadelphia Eagles presser: "The Eagles have contracted with Orlando FL-based SolarBlue, a renewable energy and energy conservation company, to install approximately 80 20-foot spiral-shaped wind turbines on the top rim of the stadium, affix 2,500 solar panels on the stadium's façade, build a 7.6 megawatt onsite dual-fuel cogeneration plant and implement sophisticated monitoring and switching technology to operate the system.

First Solar Stadium in South America. 12 More Will Follow.

First Solar Stadium in South America. 12 More Will Follow. : TreeHugger

From a 2MW solar array at FedEx Field to the world's largest solar stadium, the idea of incorporating clean energy—and solar power in particular—into major sporting arenas is nothing new. But now it's being taken to a whole new continent, as South America looks set to get its first solar soccer stadium by the end of this year. And just like the previously mentioned examples, this is about much more than just how much power it will generate. Gehrlicher Solar reports that it will be installing 403 kWp of thin-film solar modules on the roof of Pituaçu Stadium in Salvador da Bahia, the third largest city in Brazil. But this stadium is just the first of many that will be going a deeper shade of green as Brazil prepares to host the 2014 World Cup:

NFL’s Eagles Score With Stadium Solar, Wind

NFL’s Eagles Score With Stadium Solar, Wind : TreeHugger

Professional sports have always been competitive, but there’s a new game in town these days, for a new title: The Greenest Stadium in America. Among the latest contenders are the Minnesota Twins, with Target Field in Minneapolis-St. Paul taking LEED Silver in both the New Construction and Existing Buildings categories, and the Washington Redskins’ 2-megawatt-capacity solar power system at FedEx Field (providing both power for the stadium and shelter for tailgaters in inclement weather).

E.ON: EU's CO2 Trade Needs To Be "Revitalized"

E.ON: EU's CO2 Trade Needs To Be "Revitalized" | Fox Business

BERLIN –  E.ON AG (EOAN.XE) said Friday the European Union's carbon dioxide emissions trade needs to be "revitalized" and called for a harmonization of the diverse set of rules amongst the individual EU member states.  "The Emissions Trading Scheme is crushed under the weight of member-state dirigisme, a sad remnant of what was once hoped to be a decisive marked-based policy mechanism," Johannes Teyssen, chief executive of Germany's largest energy utility by market value, told reporters at a press briefing in Berlin.