Greetings, all! Apologies for the delay in posting, but a friend and frequent reader of ours is getting hitched, so we’re up in NY having a grand old time of it. But when we return, we’ll have made a list of companies who should be sponsoring solar energy development. It’ll be awesome. But for now, we’ve got some serious drinking to do. Thinking. We meant thinking. Oh dear.

In the meantime, click the picture to hear the latest on Obama’s green energy plans.

Okay, that list of potential sponsors for the Solar Decathlon is gonna have to wait, because someone just sent us an article on perhaps the coolest thing we’ve ever heard; solar power BEAMED DOWN FROM SPACE.

Now, it probably doesn’t need to be said how much we love outer space here at Corn Car. It is a boundless prairie of stars and planets that, perhaps because it’s so danged far away, sparks our curiosity something fierce. It’s one of the last things that we can really wonder about, and just about the only pleasant one. So hearing that it’s possible, with the right technology, to harness solar energy in space and beam it down to earth, turns us into giddy children. Really. Our intern won’t stop dancing.

Here’s how it’s all going down - According to the LA Times (linked above), “a Manhattan Beach start-up called Solaren Corp. seeks to launch an array of giant solar power collectors into orbit 23,000 miles above Fresno and beam the energy to Earth.” Pacific Gas & Electric Co., after years of pulling energy from split atoms, natural gas, and falling water, wants to buy the power should it prove feasible.

How they’re going to scrape together $2 billion during a recession is for them to figure out, but Solaren already has a plan. Once enough solar collectors are rocketed into stationary orbit, the solar energy they collect “would be converted into radio waves and beamed to a receiving station in Fresno…there, it would be converted to either alternating or direct electric current and dispatched to customers via high-voltage transmission lines.”

It’s a literal pie-in-the-sky grab, and critics maintain that we should stick with terrestrial alt. energy sources, and we should. But it’s also good to keep trying new technology, considering that many of the revolutionary advances we have now were untested risks in their infancy. Plus, if we can deliver pizza to space, why can’t we give this a shot?

Considering how hot it is outside, we thought it fitting to mention that we just got linked to the 2009 Solar Decathlon, hosted by the US Dept. of Energy, in which 20 teams of students compete to “design, build, and operate the most attractive and energy-efficient solar-powered house.”
Each team puts a crew together, raises funds, and works with contractors to build their solar-powered house, then they move them to the National Mall in DC and rebuild them there. When that’s done, the houses are opened up to the public and judged in 10 contests to determine an overall winner. Aside from the obvious educational factor at work here, the idea behind this event is to educate the public about conservation and solar energy use, and demonstrate that “Zero Energy Homes” are both possible and comfortable. The dates for each stage are listed below:

• Oct. 8-16—Teams compete in 10 contests
• Oct. 9-13—Houses are open to the public
• Oct. 15-18—Houses are open to the public
• Oct. 19-21—Teams disassemble their houses

As for the Decathletes themselves, they come from all over; teams have been put together at Cornell, Penn State, Virginia Tech, and Universidad de Puerto Rico, and that’s just a handful of the participants. The full list of teams is here.

There are also opportunities for private entities to sponsor the event, or individual teams - in our next post, we’ll list some companies who should sling a little money at this project.

Man, China just can’t stay out of the news, can they? This time it’s about clean coal, specifically that they’re miles ahead of us in both using and refining the process. According to the New York Times, “China has begun building such plants [more efficient, coal-fired power plant that use extremely hot steam] at a rate of one a month,” while the US is still dithering around with the prospect of building one.

This sounds worse than it actually is, though. If cellulosic ethanol technology is still in a state of infancy, clean coal is a zygote. And even if it wasn’t, China still burns more coal than pretty much every other country on earth combined, and still hasn’t begun regulating emissions yet. Plus, “even an efficient coal-fired power plant emits twice the carbon dioxide of a natural gas-fired plant.” As far as clean fuel technology goes, they’re not as far ahead as they may seem.

Even so, we shouldn’t allow them to get one up on us in the energy race. In his book, American Theocracy, former GOP strategist Kevin Phillips theorizes that superpowers decline when they fail to adapt to new sources of energy. The Dutch became a superpower in the days when wood, water, and wind were the high points of energy production. However, they didn’t latch onto coal fast enough and were usurped by the British, who powered an empire on the stuff. Phillips further explains that when initial sources of innovation stagnate (i.e. when countries become too dependent on them), newer ones can cause a shift in global leadership almost single-handedly.

China’s progress does expose how little we’ve addressed what to do with industry, though. Most of the biofuel/cleaner energy talk has been about cars and occasionally home use, but what about our own heavy industry? We haven’t outsourced all of it, god knows, and we haven’t spent much time outlining what’s going to replace oil on that scale yet. We vote ethanol. But we always vote ethanol. What do you think?