Vestas to Test World’s Longest Turbine Blades

Written by Timothy B. Hurst

Doesn’t it seem fitting that Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines, should be the maker of the world’s largest wind turbine? Well, they’re not - at least not yet. Today, Vestas revealed plans (pdf) for a new research and development center on the Isle of Wight (UK) that will test what company officials are calling “the world’s longest turbine” blades.

While Vestas did not say exactly how long the new prototype turbine blade will be, their largest turbine currently in production, the V-90, has blades that measure 44 meters in length. The largest wind turbine currently in operation is the 6MW Enercon E-126, which has a rotor diameter of 126 meters (413 ft).

The new development center will accompany an existing Vestas plant on the Isle of Wight that has produced turbine blades since 2000. The new facility is expected to become operational in 2010.

Vestas‘ second quarter net profit rose 27% to 65 million euros ($96 million) as revenue rose 2.5% to 1.09 billion euros.

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http://io9.com/5037773/genetically+engineered-trees-can-dissolve-themselves-into-fuel

Written by Jaymi Heimbuch

I am all for creative thinking, but this may be the oddest concept I've yet seen to treat one of the symptoms of global warming.

Going far beyond just tracking melting patterns, German researchers want to actually stop, or at least slow down the melting of glaciers in the Swiss Alps, and they plan to do so by setting up a large screen that would trap cold air over the ice. The experimental screen is nearly 50 feet long by 10 feet high, and was set up in the middle of the Rhone glacier in Switzerland’s Valais region. Twenty-seven German university students took part in the screen raising, all excited about the potential because the concept was successful in a lab experiment. The results will be studied next Thursday.

Ooooh kay. This may be one of those science-for-the-environment-gone-off-track moments. I have a very hard time imagining that this idea will go very far in keeping glaciers from melting, but at least their trying. Filed under “Weird.”

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Genetically-Engineered Trees Can Dissolve Themselves into Fuel

Worried about all the energy that's required to break poplar trees down into usable fuel? Never fear: We'll just stick some fungus genes into that poplar so that the tree can rapidly ferment itself as soon as it's chopped down. A self-fermenting tree can practically turn itself into fuel. That's exactly the kind of gene-hacking being proposed by geneticists at the Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute in California. Eddy Rubin, director of the Institute, has just published a paper in Nature about how trees can be genetically-engineered to be biofuel-ready.

Says Rubin:

With the data that we are generating from plant genomes we can home in on relevant agronomic traits such as rapid growth, drought resistance, and pest tolerance, as well as those that define the basic building blocks of the plants cell wall—cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. Biofuels researchers are able to take this information and design strategies to optimize the plants themselves as biofuels feedstocks—altering, for example, branching habit, stem thickness, and cell wall chemistry resulting in plants that are less rigid and more easily broken down

Rubin recommends the Clostridia species of fungus could be spliced into trees to make them self-fermenting. In the past, he has suggested splicing termite gut genes into trees so that they would essentially digest themselves and make biofuel processing easier.

I can't wait for a self-digesting apple so that I don't have to squash the things up to make my applesauce. I wouldn't mind eating a little bit of termite genome for that.

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