Cool Technology: Japanese to mass produce cars that run off water!

Tired of pumping expensive gasoline into your car?

Tired of dead Americans fighting over oil wells in Iraq & oil pipelines in Afghanistan?

All you need is a liter of water – any kind of water to be exact, whether its river, rain, sea water, or even Japanese tea.

Once the water is poured into a water tank at the back of the car, the newly invented energy generator takes out the hydrogen from the water, releases electrons and finally generates electrical power.

h/t DisInfo

OK: My idea is to get a cooler full of beer, run a catheter from “Chester” to the tank and set off on a road trip

Build Your Own Solar Power Generator

Before the year is over, I am going to build something like this, even if to power my electronics and save a little green. I have most of the stuff, already, and I bet I can do it for less than $300.

h/t Fighting Tyranny

Tubular Solar Panels Offer Cost Savings and Greater Efficiency

One major way that Americans can help themselves and also help eliminate our dependence on oil is to go solar. There have been several issues that impede this move (costs associated with having solar cells ‘track’ the sun’s movement). Flat panels are getting cheaper, but they must be manipulated to ensure that they are always gathering as much sunlight, as possible, as the sun moves across the sky.

One way to eliminate moving the panels is to redesign the panel into a round, solar panels tube, mounted on a white roof (for maximum reflectivity).

Found on Yahoo! Green:

Tubular solar panels slash costs, boost efficiency

By Hank Green

There are a lot of reasons to think that flat solar panels would be the right way to go. The best way to capture sunlight is by being perpendicular to the sun and it’s usually cheaper to make things flat than round. But the folks at Solyndra have discovered that this traditional wisdom might be a bit faulty.

First, as to the second point, when dealing with thin-film CIGS solar panels, cylindrical is just as good as flat. But the first point, concerning harvesting the maximum amount of sunlight, gets a little confusing.

The cylindrical solar panels (think of fluorescent tube lights…except in reverse) can absorb energy from every direction, and when combined with a white roof (which are now the only legal, flat roofs in California) can capture up to 20% more light than traditional solar panels. The other gigantic advantage is that they don’t have to move to track the sun. The panels are always presenting some of their face directly perpendicular to the sun.

By removing solar-tracking and orientation from the equation, these systems can simply be laid onto roofs. Tracking solar panels have to be able to resist the force of strong winds, these will just lay flat and out of the way, reducing installation costs, which often comprise about half of the price of a solar project.

And with 30 billion square feet of flat roofs in America, this could be quite a market for cheap, clean electricity. Solyndra just announced that they’ve got $1.2 billion in contracts throughout Europe and America, and I can’t imagine that going anywhere but up.

Via Scientific American