I hadn’t realized that PSNH wants to build a large (up to 5 megawatt, or 5,000 kilowatt) solar farm atop the capped Manchester city landfill. This would be the first almost-utility-scale photovoltaic plant in the New England, 11 times the size of the Brockton Brightfield and 100 times the size of the biggest solar sites [...]

The ever-wonderful Improbable Research blog has a post (here it is) pointing to one of the weirdest bits of research I’ve seen in a long time: It claims that use of cell phones over long periods of time correlates with “human parotid gland secretion” - i.e., salivating. It claims that in 50 subjects, there was [...]

It’s tough to judge the reality of new inventions from news stories - reporters are usually liberal-arts majors, not engineers - so stories like this one in the Burlington Free-Press need to be taken with a grain of salt. It says that a tiny company in Willston, Vt. has patented a new time of wind [...]

Researchers searching the ocean floor in the Gulf of Maine found plenty of hardened cysts deposited by algae last fall that can seed the blooms known as “red tide,” leading them to predict that this summer could be a bad season for the toxic algae. Its biggest effect is to shut down shellfish collecting, because [...]

The state’s Renewable Energy Fund, managed by the PUC, supports the residential renewable-energy rebate program, under which more than 240 homeowners have requesting rebates of up to $6,000 for photovoltaic and wind turbine systems under 5 kilowatts.  The combined generation capacity of these systems is roughly 600 kilowatts.
On Friday, Sept. 26 [...]

Comment spam on blogs has gotten quite sophisticated, with algorithms that create comments similar to real sentences, stealing terms from the post itself. They’ve gone way beyond the “Great post! I learned a lot!” stuff.  All of them include a link to a commercial site, to generate in-links that fool search engines
But in the past [...]

The Vermont Senate has voted not to extend Vermont Yankee’s license beyond 2012, when it runs out. Free-Press story here. Two months ago, I would have bet a bazillion bucks against this happening!
Here’s the whole gallery of Free-Press coverage, if you need background.
Here’s the next-day NY Times story, which notes “Unless the chamber reverses itself, [...]

The Vermont Senate is slated to vote today (Wednesday) whether to extend the license of the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant past 2012. Here’s a Free-Press story. All the recent bad news, especially the fact that the company didn’t admit to past leaks of radioactive tritirum, seem to have tilted the odds (which were once well [...]

Dartmouth researchers have developed a new molecular switch that changes its configuration as a function of the pH of the environment. Nano devices are so new that it’s hard to tell whether a discover like this will prove important or just quirky, but it’s sure interesting. Imagine if you could turn off the lights in [...]

New Hampshire is puttering along in the rooftop-solar-power business, with homeowners having applied for more than 600 kilowatts worth of Renewable Energy Fund rebates, mostly in 5-kilowatt photovoltaic increments. That’s the solar-power equivalent of sandlot baseball.
With our climate we’ll never probably enter the big leagues, like a 400-megawatt PV plant proposed for the California desert, [...]

The utility National Grid is finding that giving people energy-usage scorecards comparing them to their neighbors is a great way to get them to reduce how much they use. NY Times tory here.  Boston Globe story from last October here. It’s the “guilt-trip” method of getting other people to do things you want them to [...]

There are plenty of reasons to be interested in and/or worried about the situation at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, where walls collapse and tritium escapes into groundwater, but the Burlington Free-Press offers a new one today: It might be harming the Vermont brand!
Cheddar cheese, maple syrup and craft beer are just a few of [...]

My alternative-energy Google Map of Northern New England (here it is, for those of you who have ignored that big ugly link over in the right-hand rail) has several pins pointing to tidal-energy projects, all of them still in the R phase of R&D.

One of the most promising, which I’ve written about a couple of times over the years, is by a company called Ocean Renewable Power, which puts what looks like a big horizontal-axis egg beater on the ocean floor; its double-helix design means it spins whichever way the tide is flowing, and its direct-drive system is relatively straightforward, reducing (in theory) maintenance. The units are stackable, making expansion easy.

The Portland Press-Herald has a big story today on the company’s preparation for a 60-megawatt test, and hopes for a 1-megawatt project operating within a year or so. That’s tiny by utility standards, enough for a couple hundred homes perhaps, but would be a big step forward for a power source that has always seemed promising but which faces lots of obstacles. If nothing else, keeping electronics and spinning mechanical systems going amid constantly surging sea water is tough.

After seeing the item about the Software Association of NH joining the NH High-Tech Council, former Telegraph colleague Dave Aponovich sent me a note reminiscing about his appearance at a 1998 SwANH panel at which the lunchtime speaker was Dan Brown. The advance notice reads: “The luncheon keynote speaker will be Dan Brown, the Phillips [...]

The  New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services’ Emergency  Services  Unit said Friday it will begin weekly tests of water samples along the Connecticut River, in response to the tritium leak at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which is adjacent to the river. Some samples have already been collected since the plant admitted [...]