The U.S. defense and aerospace giant, Lockheed Martin, is partnering with a major Chinese company to build a pilot project off the southern Chinese coast that will use temperature differentials between the deep and shallow ocean to generate electricity.

The technology, known as ocean thermal energy (more…)

UK officials are underestimating the vast energy potential of marine tides, a renewable and reliable energy source that could meet 20 percent of the nation’s electricity needs, according to a new report.

Writing in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, researchers explain that while the process of exploiting tidal energy remains (more…)

The earth contains enough wind energy to meet all of humanity’s power needs if future technologies are able to tap into high-altitude winds, a new study says.

Using models to quantify wind energy potential, researchers at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (more…)

I heard a really good talk about lifecycle analysis (LCA) yesterday that took wind energy as an example, and examined the overall ecological footprint associated with an individual large turbine. On average, about 7.8 megawatt-hours of energy goes into extracting the materials, forging the pieces, transporting, assembling (more…)

The operators of large California wind farms are considering the use of advanced radar and telemetry systems to reduce the number of birds killed by spinning turbines located in critical migration pathways.

The so-called avian radar systems, which have been deployed at wind farms in Texas and Europe, would (more…)

Alstom and SSE Renewables have signed a new joint venture agreement to co-develop the world’s largest wave farm in the Costa Head Wave Project, off the coast of Orkney, Scotland. The farm will deliver up to 200 Megawatts of renewable energy utilizing AWS Ocean Energy Ltd’s (AWS) Archimedes Wave Swing III technology (AWS-III). (more…)

I attended the American Wind Energy Association’s 2011 Conference & Expo in Anaheim last week where I was able to see a lot of technology for turbines both large and small.

On the small side, at 3.5 and 7.5 kW, was Sonkyo Energy’s WINDSPOT turbine. (more…)

A U.S. startup says it has developed an enhanced geothermal energy system (EGS) that engineers say can tap into heat from the Earth’s interior without any associated risks of triggering earthquakes or polluting underground aquifers.

While typical EGS processes require developers to (more…)

It may seem like wind farms are a relatively new form of green technology, but they have actually been around for years—decades, even.

In fact, the UK’s first commercial wind farm, located at Delabole in Cornwall, celebrated its 20-year anniversary with a multimillion-pound renovation. Delabole (more…)

A wind turbine is a device that converts kinetic energy from the wind into mechanical energy. If the mechanical energy is used to produce electricity, the device may be called a wind generator or wind charger. If the mechanical energy is used to drive machinery, such as for grinding grain or pumping water, the device (more…)