A Maine company called GridSolar (mostly a guy named Richard Silkman, it seems) is pushing an idea to build scores or hundreds of 2-megawatt solar power plants alongside existing power lines throughout central and western Maine. In a filing filing with the utilities commission (here, PDF) claims this would make it unnecessary to build a proposed $1.4 billion upgrade to the state’s power grid, which is designed to accommodate alternative energy and increase reliability.

New Hampshire Business Review reports that ISO New England, operator of the region’s bulk power system and wholesale electricity markets, says power demand this summer should be “relatively unchanged” from last year, barring record-breaking heat waves or anything like that. Perhaps this is due to increased energy efficiency, but I suspect the recession is the [...]

Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineer will once again be hosting the Formula Hybrid contest early next week. A total of 30 college/industry teams are competing, a big increase from the first two years - including one from Russia, two (wow!) from India and one from Taiwan. This is a version of the longrunning Formula SAE competition, in which college teams build small versions of racecars and compete nationally. It’s like a cross between FIRST Robotics and Formula 1 racing. The difference is that here the cars must be fuel/electric hybrids.

MIT has long had an odd relationship with student hacks - clever pranks that students pull, often involving big objects (such as a full-size model of a police car, complete with the dummy cop holding a donut) placed atop the school’s Dome. In theory the hacks are against school policy, but in practice MIT loves them as a way to boost its geekier-than-thou image. A number of years ago, I wrote about how the MIT Museum had an exhibit of hacks, which sort of killed the fun. What’s the point of tweaking authority if authority approves?

Doesn’t it seem that certain people stir the pot more at work, creating drama and conflict? You’re not imaging anything.

Google has a new service tacked onto its basic search that does excellent comparative data searches of certain public data. I’m still playing with it, but this search, comparing population growth in NH, Vermont and Maine, showed an interesting fact that I had missed - New Hampshire has virtually caught up with its bigger neighbor [...]

The wonderful Snopes.com, the site that has been examining urban legends since before the Web existed, has a good one today: Barbara and David Mikkelson resurrected the false Internet rumor from 2001 that Yahoo is shutting down Geocities … because finally, Yahoo is shutting down Geocities. (Even a blind pig finds a truffle, says the [...]

A company called Qteros - formerly SunEthanol - has a big rollout today near Springfield, Mass., for a cellulosic ethanol “pretreatment plant” that will be in production by the end of the year, with hopes that a full-scale pilot plan will be in operation in 2010, if financing can be rounded up. The company uses [...]

If you can’t beat ‘em, eat ‘em is the motto of a Vermont program (reported by the Burlington Free Press) that teaches people how to make salads and other edibles from some invasive plants. The program focuses on garlic mustard, which is listed as an invasive in New Hampshire too and, to be honest, I can’t imagine this would work with most invasives. (Purple loosestrife goulash? Milfoil a la mode?) But I would sure love to eat that dagblasted swallowort, aka milkweed vine, that is choking my property.

My wife is in the process of getting her first bee hive - the bees arrive in a couple of weeks; we have to finish setting up the hive soon. So I’m particularly interested to see that scientists from Spain say they have isolated a parasite that seems to be the sole cause of the widespread colony death called “colony collapse syndrome”.

Thanks to the visibility of iRobot, but also to a host of under-the-radar firms that work around the edges of the industry, the greater Boston area has become  “the center of robotics in the U.S.” - or so says this Mass High Tech opinion piece.
It mentions a “stealth startup” in Nashua that’s trying to “integrate [...]

I can’t decide whether carbon capture and sequestration - the possibility that carbon can be removed from emissions and tucked away for good so that it doesn’t enter the atmosphere - is an absolute necessity in tackling global warming since we’re going to burn coal and oil  no matter what people say, or a fool’s [...]

ADDENDUM: Here are full stories from the Telegraph. Here’s a later story, with court filings that say if the college isn’t sold it will have to close.

For some reason it never occurred to me that colleges could be bought the way that companies can. But Daniel Webster College in Nashua, which started as an aviation [...]

This isn’t directly about Cape Wind, the long-running proposal for a huge wind farm off Cape Cod, but that company’s boss tells the NY Times that new federal regulations about leasing the continental shelf for offshore wind could “open up the whole industry.”
There are a lot of obstacles to large-scale offshore wind, including the fact [...]

I was lying half-awake in bed this morning at about 5, trying to get back to sleep before the alarm went off, thinking of this and that - family stuff, the movie I’d recently seen at Wilton Town Hall Theater, what it would be like to be able to fly; the usual semi-sleepy tidbits - [...]