The timing was pure coincidence but the irony is still crushing: this week, while the fallout was still settling from the Massey coal mine disaster and crews were fighting vainly to stem a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, ARPA-E announced its picks for a new round of transformative energy projects.  ARPA-E, the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, is the federal agency charged with getting us out of this fossil fuel mess and into more sustainable forms of energy.

In this round of funding, ARPA-E will distribute 37 grants to transformative energy projects in 17 states for a total of $106 million.  The money comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.  The idea is to invest in sustainable technology that creates new green jobs.  Fossil fuels will be with us for a long time, but the faster we support new energy solutions, the sooner we can marginalize fossil fuels and reduce if not eliminate their devastating environmental and economic impacts.

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Lamar Advertising Co. will start retrofitting all billboards across Florida with wind and solar energy systems. The company intends to complete the operation by 2012 at the cost of about $12.5 million — the Department of Energy will provide $2.5 million while the remaining cost will be borne by Lamar.

The project will cover 1,370 billboards across eight markets throughout Florida with most of the billboards located along interstates and at thoroughfares. Not only will the billboards be powered by wind and solar energy systems, they will also function as small power generating hubs feeding the surplus electricity to the grid. The combined capacity of the billboard energy systems will be about 1 MW.

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A few years ago the whisper went around about cyanobacteria, saying that is was the next great biofuel.  Huge lakes of the stuff would be grown, harvested and then magically transformed into fuel to make our cars go broom-broom.

So various highly scientific people rolled up their sleeves and got to work fiddling around with the little critters.  Before too long they’d worked out that the whisper was right.  The US Department of Energy chucked wads of cash at the researchers and we now have petri dishes of gloop which secrete the all important biofuel through their skin like some kind of … oozy fuelly thing.  Yum yum.

However there is a problem with cyanobacteria or, to use its devil-spawn name, blue-green algae.  Many of its forms are toxic, producing fatal poisons which stick around in the water long after the algae itself has been removed.  The hows and whys of this aren’t fully understood, but thankfully it doesn’t seem to occur in the green scummy stuff in your pool in the back yard.

This is where the tobacco comes in.

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The nanotech company Shrink Nanotechnologies, Inc. has just announced that it has formed a subsidiary, Shrink Solar LLC, in order to market a solar film that could be used to retrofit windows and other elements of existing buildings to function as mini solar power stations.  The technology can also be applied to conventional silicon crystal solar panels to boost efficiency.

Instead of relying on mirrors or other conventional concentrating solar technology, Shrink Solar uses nanocrystals to soak up parts of the light spectrum that conventional silicon crystal solar panels don’t absorb.  And just imagine, we have that classic children’s toy from the Disco era,  Shrinky Dinks, to thank for  this…

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