Friday, 14 October 2011

New Energy Generates Electricity on Flexible Plastic Using Novel See-Through SolarWindow(TM) Coatings

4 August, 2011

New Energy Technologies, Inc. (OTCQB: NENE) today announced that researchers developing its SolarWindow(TM) technology, capable of generating electricity on see-through glass, have now successfully generated electricity on flexible plastic using the Company’s ‘spray-on’ coating methods – an important technical achievement necessary for the development of electricity-generating window films.

“Today’s breakthrough supports a brand new commercial application for our core SolarWindow(TM) technology and is the direct result of numerous patent-pending methods, materials, and processes we have worked hard to invent and develop,” explained Mr. John A. Conklin, President and CEO of New Energy Technologies, Inc.

“These important technology breakthroughs have already resulted in a successful public demonstration last year of our SolarWindow(TM) application on glass, able to generate electricity while remaining see-through. Since then, New Energy’s product development group has worked aggressively to advance our SolarWindow(TM) application for glass windows towards commercial manufacturability. Concurrently, our research scientists have been working to create new and exciting SolarWindow(TM) products which reach beyond glass. The result is today’s announcement regarding our ability to generate electricity on flexible plastics.”

Scientists anticipate that commercially developed electricity-generating flexible plastic could be deployed as tinted window film, which remains see-through while generating electrical power. Traditionally, the prospect of creating see-through flexible plastic which generates electricity has been limited by numerous technical challenges, including the need for cumbersome temperature-specific, pressure sensitive, and expensive process methods for applying coatings to plastic surfaces.

New Energy researchers achieved today’s breakthrough by spraying the Company’s electricity-generating coatings onto flexible, lightweight lab-scale plastic (polyethylene terephthalate or “PET”) at room temperature and at low pressure, which may result in reduced manufacturing costs. While developing the first working PET prototype, researchers also overcame conventional issues with surface preparation, considered vital to achieving maximum strength of the coatings’ bond to the surface, and for optimizing product durability and lifespan.

Notably, researchers were able to maintain the working ‘architecture’ of New Energy’s SolarWindow(TM) while achieving flexibility. The SolarWindow(TM) architecture enables various important functions such as generating electricity on the surface of plastic and distributing electricity to the circuit.

Currently under development for eventual commercial deployment in the estimated 85 million commercial buildings and homes in America, SolarWindow(TM) is the subject of ten new patent filings and is the world’s first-of-its-kind technology capable of generating electricity on see-through glass windows.

About New Energy Technologies, Inc.
New Energy Technologies, Inc., together with its wholly owned subsidiaries, is a developer of next generation alternative and renewable energy technologies. Among the Company’s technologies under development are:

MotionPower(TM) roadway systems for generating electricity by capturing the kinetic energy produced by moving vehicles – a patent-pending technology, the subject of 18 US and International patent applications. An estimated 250 million registered vehicles drive more than six billion miles on America’s roadways, every day; and

SolarWindow(TM) technologies which enable see-through windows to generate electricity by ‘spraying’ their glass surfaces with New Energy’s electricity-generating coatings – the subject of ten patent applications. These solar coatings are less than 1/10th the thickness of ‘thin’ films and make use of the world’s smallest functional solar cells, shown to successfully produce electricity in a published peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy of the American Institute of Physics.

Through established relationships with universities, research institutions, and commercial partners, we strive to identify technologies and business opportunities on the leading edge of renewable energy innovation. Unique to our business model is the use of established research infrastructure owned by the various institutions we deal with, saving us significant capital which would otherwise be required for such costs as land and building acquisition, equipment and capital equipment purchases, and other start-up expenses. As a result, we are able to benefit from leading edge research while employing significantly less capital than conventional organizations.
For additional information, please visit: www.newenergytechnologiesinc.com

Legal Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
No statement herein should be considered an offer or a solicitation of an offer for the purchase or sale of any securities. This release contains forward-looking statements that are based upon current expectations or beliefs, as well as a number of assumptions about future events. Although New Energy Technologies, Inc. (the “Company” or “New Energy Technologies”) believes that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements and the assumptions upon which they are based are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations and assumptions will prove to have been correct. Forward-looking statements, which involve assumptions and describe our future plans, strategies, and expectations, are generally identifiable by use of the words “may,” “will,” “should,” “could,” “expect,” “anticipate,” “estimate,” “believe,” “intend,” or “project” or the negative of these words or other variations on these words or comparable terminology. The reader is cautioned not to put undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, as these statements are subject to numerous factors and uncertainties, including but not limited to adverse economic conditions, intense competition, lack of meaningful research results, entry of new competitors and products, adverse federal, state and local government regulation, inadequate capital, unexpected costs and operating deficits, increases in general and administrative costs, termination of contracts or agreements, technological obsolescence of the Company’s products, technical problems with the Company’s research and products, price increases for supplies and components, litigation and administrative proceedings involving the Company, the possible acquisition of new businesses or technologies that result in operating losses or that do not perform as anticipated, unanticipated losses, the possible fluctuation and volatility of the Company’s operating results, financial condition and stock price, losses incurred in litigating and settling cases, dilution in the Company’s ownership of its business, adverse publicity and news coverage, inability to carry out research, development and commercialization plans, loss or retirement of key executives and research scientists, changes in interest rates, inflationary factors, and other specific risks. There can be no assurance that further research and development will validate and support the results of our preliminary research and studies. Further, there can be no assurance that the necessary regulatory approvals will be obtained or that New Energy Technologies, Inc. will be able to develop commercially viable products on the basis of its technologies. In addition, other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially are discussed in the Company’s most recent Form 10-Q and Form 10-K filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These reports and filings may be inspected and copied at the Public Reference Room maintained by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission at 100 F Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20549. You can obtain information about operation of the Public Reference Room by calling the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission at 1-800-SEC-0330. The U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission also maintains an Internet site that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information regarding issuers that file electronically with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission at http://www.sec.gov. The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward looking statements that may be made to reflect the events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.

Sunday, 11 September 2011

Oil dealers must invest in storage, task force reports

An oil industry task force has identified storage capacity as a key missing link in ensuring the country’s long term energy security particularly now with the planned conversion of the Kenyan refinery into a merchant facility which buys and refines products for sale.

By Zeddy Sambu (email the author)

Posted Sunday, September 11 2011 at 21:31

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Oil dealers will in future be compelled to invest in storage tanks as part of new requirements for licensing, raising the bar for entry into the capital intensive industry.

An industry task force has identified storage capacity as a key missing link in ensuring the country’s long term energy security particularly now with the planned conversion of the Kenyan refinery into a merchant facility which buys and refines products for sale.

The refinery has since its establishment been running on a contract manufacturing model, where it refined products for a fee on behalf of other marketers.

Google Reveals the Numbers Behind Its Massive Hunger for Electricity, and Its Plan for the Future

Google recently revealed that their data centers and operations around the world consume a whopping 260 million watts, or roughly the equivalent of 200,000 homes in the United States. While that’s an enormous amount of electricity, it pales in comparison to the amount that Google wants to create from investments in renewable resources: 1.7 gigawatts. More than enough to impress Doc Brown. Yet neither Google’s massive hunger for power, nor their dedication to green energy may ultimately be as impacting as their third claim: that Google products are the most cost efficient and environmentally friendly choices for businesses. Does going green mean going Google? One thing is for certain: as the titan of search continues its phenomenal growth, they reveal that their strategy is just as ambitious as their scope.

That Google consumes as much electricity as 200,000 households is very impressive, and it gives you a sense of how truly enormous this company has become in the past decade. The New York Times (who originally reported the 260 megawatts figure) puts that power in perspective by stating that it is roughly equivalent to 1/4 of a nuclear power plant, though I would have said 1/2 of a typical coal burning plant. In any case, the message is clear: Google is consuming electricity on the level of a (not so) small nation.

In the past Google has been seemingly loathe to reveal its power needs for fear that it may give away too much about their inner workings and data center deployment. Apparently, however, those fears are no longer an issue, as Google’s official blog and the Google Green websiterevealed even more about their power needs and their plans for the future in a new section titled “The Big Picture“. On every level, Google’s Big Picture is showcasing how they are deploying innovative, future-minded strategies to secure their energy needs. To date they’ve invested $780 million in renewable energy resources, hoping to create 1.7 billion watts of electricity. That’s considerably more than they’ll need in the next few years (though who doubts they’ll eventually require as much if not more?). Google Green also mentions that 25% of their electricity came from renewable sources in 2010, a figure they hope to increase to 30% for 2011. (They’ve been a “carbon neutral” company since 2007, buying offsets to balance their non-renewable energy.) The Google Green site is awash in videos demonstrating new ways they improve efficiency in their data centers, many of which are too esoteric to appeal to a general audience. One idea, however, is too cool not to share. In Hamina, Finland Google uses a salt water cooling process to keep their servers chilly. Check out the setup in the video below:

The big numbers about electricity and the focus on renewable energy, however are hiding the quiet but potentially industry shifting claim that Google exceeds all expectations with their efficiency. At the individual consumer level (which is forefront on Google Green) Google tell us that providing a user with a month of Google products requires about as much energy as running a 60 watt light bulb for three hours (180 watt-hours). In case you don’t use old incandescent bulbs anymore, The Big Picture gives you plenty of other comparisons: a year of Gmail is equivalent to making one bottle of wine, 3 days of YouTube requires as much energy as to make just one DVD,etc.

Dig deeper and you’ll find this amazing report, which describes how cloud-based products, like those offered by Google, represent an enormous increase in efficiency compared to in-house server solutions. In some cases, Google claims that Gmail is 80 times more efficient than traditional systems. 80 times! Even against their data center competitors, Google claims to be twice as efficient. Not only that, but they compound their efficiency with their renewable energy habits to show that the carbon footprint of their services is a small fraction compared to other solutions.

From green energy to efficiency, Google’s message from these announcements is clear: “We not just using more power than you, we’re using it better.”

Which is a very powerful message. In the ongoing efforts to “go green” businesses are pursuing a variety of changes to improve their carbon emissions and their public image. Environmental consideration is big business. Google has essentially pulled that business into their laps. Why spend millions on innovating your electronic services when you can just switch to Google products? Products which, at least on a small business level, are essentially free.

Yeah. I know what I did. I use Google products all the freakin’ time.

Looking forward, it seems clear to me that Google plans on being the best at what they do at every level of their business. Google is not only investing in new energy resources, it has secured the rights to buy and trade energy as well. They not only are pushing for greater efficiency, they are trying to attract more users with that efficiency…which will help them further increase their efficiency. They are collaborating with other groups with similar goals in energy to form networks that raise the bar and enable new technologies in the field. You can look at Google’s impressive energy consumption numbers and say, “wow, these guys are huge” or you can look at their strategy and realize, “my God, they are going to get astronomically larger”. Bottom line, Google wouldn’t have made a big deal of announcing these numbers if they didn’t have a lot to gain from their release. A green mentality, great efficiency, and gigawatts of future energy all add up to one thing: Google’s growth is going to be irresistible.

18 months away from Proof of feasibility Global Geo politics about to change

The National Ignition Facility:

Ushering in a New Age for Science

“Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.”
—John Dewey

Scientists have been working to achieve self-sustaining nuclear fusion and energy gain in the laboratory for more than half a century. Ignition experiments at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are now bringing that long-sought goal much closer to realization.

NIF's 192 giant lasers, housed in a ten-story building the size of three football fields, will deliver at least 60 times more energy than any previous laser system. NIF will focus more than one million joules of ultraviolet laser energy on a tiny target in the center of its target chamber—creating conditions similar to those that exist only in the cores of stars and giant planets and inside a nuclear weapon. The resulting fusion reaction will release many times more energy than the laser energy required to initiate the reaction.

Experiments conducted on NIF will make significant contributions to national and global security, could lead to practical fusion energy, and will help the nation maintain its leadership in basic science and technology. The project is a national collaboration among government, academia, and many industrial partners throughout the nation.

Programs in the NIF & Photon Science Directorate draw extensively on expertise from across LLNL, including the Physical and Life Sciences, Engineering,Computation, and Weapons and Complex Integration directorates. This goal is a scientific Grand Challenge that only a national laboratory such as Lawrence Livermore can accomplish.

Edward Moses

Friday, 9 September 2011

Peel successful with biomass plans

9 Sep 2011, 16:44

Peel Energy has been granted consent for a revised application to build a biomass energy plant at Ince Marshes in Cheshire.

The proposed plant will be capable of producing 20MW of electricity as well as heat and steam. It will use around 175,000 tonnes of waste wood each year. The original consent was for a plant to produce bio-ethanol, an industrial alcohol produced by fermentation. Changes to regulation affected the market and made the scheme unviable, Peel said.

Jon Burley of Peel Energy said: "We would like to thank the council for giving the plans a fair hearing. We realise that applications like these are not easy. However, these are exactly the kind of decisions that are required if the UK is to meet its renewable energy targets and avoid valuable resources going into landfill.

"We are very pleased with the outcome and look forward to taking the project on to the next stage, ultimately delivering renewable energy and jobs for the region. We are also keen to continue our dialogue with community groups via the Ince Park Community Forum as we have done throughout the application process."

The two-year construction of the plant could begin in 2012 meaning that the plant would be making a substantial contribution to regional targets by 2014.

The plant would sit next to another energy-from-waste plant at Ince Marshes planned by Peel in a joint venture with US firm Covanta, with a 95MW capacity.

Solar Hype and Failure: A Long Story

Solar companies Solyndra of California, Evergreen Solar Inc. of Massachusetts, and SpectraWatt of New York have all filed bankruptcy petitions and face drastic restructuring if not liquidation. “There is a crisis in the solar manufacturing world…no question about it,” recently stated Ken Zweibel, director of the Solar Institute at George Washington University.The crisis transcends the companies in question. The underlying reality is that solar power is radically uneconomical against conventional electricity generation on the grid. Thus special government favor for short-term profits sets up the industry for longer-term failure when the subsidies dry up—or if other countries bait the same perilous hook and beat us at our own political game.

We should know that solar is not competitive by a long shot. As DOE secretary Chu told the New York Times last year, solar technology would have to improve five-fold to find its own way in the competitive world.

Here are some examples of the falseprognostications made by solar advocates:

Environmentalist and erstwhile presidential candidate Barry Commoner (1976):

Mixed solar/conventional installations could become the most economical alternative in most parts of the UnitedStates

within the next few years.

The head of the Solar Energy Industries Association (1987):

I think frankly, the—the consensus as far as I can see is after the year 2000, somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of our energy could come from solar technologies, quite easily.

Cynthia Shea of the Worldwatch Institute (1988):

In future decades, [photovoltaic technologies] may become standard equipment on new buildings, using the sunlight streaming through windows to generate electricity.

Enron’s Misdirection

Back in 1994, the New York Times excitedly reported that solar’s competitive moment had arrived thanks to Solarex, the second largest U.S. manufacturer of photovoltaic cells, operated and half-owned by Enron.

The feature, complete with a photo of an Enron executive holding a panel up in a sunny sky, concerned a project in the southern Nevada desert that would be the largest in the country, generating enough electricity from sunlight to power the equivalent of a city of 100,000 people. It was expected to begin operating by year-end 1996.

The project came with a bang and ended without a whimper. Here is what I wrote about the “smoke-and-mirrors” project in my book Capitalism at Work (pp. 310-11):

Enron hoodwinked the public back in 1994, claiming that its proposed $150 million project could produce solar power “at rates competitive with those of energy generated from oil, gas and coal.”

A business-section feature in the New York Times, “Solar Power, for Earthly Prices: Enron Plans to Make the Sun Affordable,” reported Enron’s pledge to deliver power for $0.055 per kilowatt hour from a 100 megawatt solar farm in the Nevada desert within two years, comparable to the average cost of delivered electricity across the nation. Enron’s rate was unheard of, exceeding even the most optimistic estimates from environmental pressure groups. But it was highly contrived, depending on a raft of government subsidies, as well as questionable assumptions about financing, technology, and delivery schedules. The rate was also back-loaded, with compounded annual cost escalations for thirty years.

Still, the article described the enticing profit prospects of Enron’s advances. Two officials from the Clinton Administration’s Department of Energy

were quoted. “This establishes the benchmark we want and restarts a stalled solar industry,” said the head of DOE’s photovoltaic section. Deputy Secretary William White (aka Bill White, one of Enron’s last defenders [and later Houston’s mayor from 2004 through 2009]) stated his intention to try to help make the economics of the project work.

But the smoke-and-mirrors project was too much for the Clinton Administration—and even for Enron, despite a suite of special subsidies. It languished and quietly died. Nevertheless, it was a heady PR moment for a politically correct company and a credulous press that either did not know or did not report the whole story.

Don’t expect false hopes to disappear. The European solar lobby is now predictingthat solar will be cost competitive by 2020.

But the failed past of solar informs the present, and Obama’s new push for “green” energy should be judged accordingly. Although stand-alone solar power has a certain free-market niche and does not need government favor, using solar power for grid electricity has been and will be an economic loser for ratepayers and a burden to taxpayers.

About New Energy Bank

New Energy Bank (NEB) has been founded to take advantage of extraordinary opportunities in the energy sector. The use of fossil fuels will continue to be the dominant energy source for the foreseeable future; however high carbon emissions and sustainability issues means that their use will come under increasing social, economic and political pressure. The trend for continued growth in the alternative and renewable energy sector will continue and NEB is positioned to lead this global trend by supporting suitable alternative energy projects in this rapidly growing market. Such projects must provide strong returns and stand alone as bankable projects. The NEB team have strong relationships with industry participants and an established track record in the alternative energy sector.

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