Photo couresty PSNH. The Merrimack Station power plant in Bow includes fountains that are part of the system used to reduce the temperature of cooling water prior to release into the Merrimack River.
Remember that backwards fight over installing big, expensive scrubbers to reduce mercury emissions at the state’s dirtiest power plant? As I and others reported, environmentalists said the scrubbers sholdn’t be installed (because the money should be spent on alternative energy, not on coal power) while the utility, PSNH, said they should - because it needs the plant to meet customer demand (coal power is cheap to make).
Well, the work can go ahead as planned: The state’s Public Utilities Commission said yesterday that it has no authority to block it, because the work was mandated by the legislature. Serious work is set to begin in the spring on the huge installation, which includes a water-treatment plant to keep stuff out of the Merrimack River.
Fake blog posts, YouTube clips of fake TV appearances, fake back story: it turns out that one of the political pundits which made this year’s electio nso goofy - the one who said Palin didn’t know Africa was a continent - was made up as a sort of prank. The NY Times has the story [...]
“Nano” has been pushed aside by “green” as most buzzy of tech prefixes, but it’s stil of great interest to plenty of our companies (eg., Nanocomp of Concord) and researchers (e.g., UNH Nano Group, Center for HIgh-Rate Nanomanufacturing). So we should all be interested when a Royal Commission warns “More testing and regulation of nanomaterials” [...]
My Telegraph column today looks a little more closely at the FCC’s decision to allow parts of the freed-up TV spectrum to be used for wireless broadband, especially in rural areas. Executive Summary: The equipment exists but the rules are still being drawn up, and what will come of it is still unclear.
Miles-per-gallon is pretty easy to calculate when a vehicle’s wheels are powered exclusively or mostly by internal combustion engines. But how do you calculate it when they’re usually powered by the electric motor in a hybrid?
That question is raised by AFS Trinity Power, which installs systems similar to the upcoming Chevy Volt, in that the [...]
It’s Monday morning, which is depressing enough, so let’s be more depressing with three wet-blanket stories from the Globe:
A new report reiterates the extra cost and complexity of making the nation’s electric grid able to take advantage of wind and solar power. It says that carbon reduction plans (like our own RGGI) “may force changes [...]
Dean Kamen gave his hometown paper, The Union-Leader, a look at a prototype model he created of an electric car in which the battery is recharged in part by a Stirling engine that can use a variety of fuels. (Kamen loves Stirling engines, which in theory can be vastly more efficient than internal combustion engines, [...]
Hanover, as we have noted before, is involved in a legal fight over access to space on telephone poles so it can create its own fiber-optic broadband network, while TDS (which as part of its national network operates a number small, formerly independent phone companies in New Hampshire, is suing a town to keep it [...]
In the historically/technically complicated question of “what was the first video game?” (topic of this wikipedia article), New Hampshire has a good claimant in Ralph Baer of Manchester. As an engineer in Nashua, at what is now BAE Systems, he developed what became Odyssey, the first home video game.
I love Daylight Savings Time in the fall, when we get an extra hour, but I hate it in the spring. In this, I suspect, I’m not alone. I’ve always suspected the whole thing is kind of stupid in its attempt to alter energy usage - cutting off one end of the blanket and sewing [...]
The late Eugene Mallove of the Concord area - a former MIT professor who created a national reputation for himself in fringe science areas, particularly those around cold fusion - was murdered four years ago in Connecticut, where he had grown up.
http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/2283/mysterious-bat-killer-found
Looks like they’ve taken the first step in finding out the cause of the bat population declines in the Northeast. The hardest part now is managing a fix.
http://www.technologyreview.com/energy/21643/?a=f
Here’s a new gadget for wind turbines that would have been a great help back when I was working on wind farms. They use a laser to measure the wind as much as 1000 feet out in front of the turbine to improve the dynamic response of the windmill. It doesn’t take much of an [...]
I missed this story thanks to the election (how much longer can I blame my errors on the election, I wonder?) - the Globe has a good story about some mysterious, very high waves that hit the Maine coast earlier this week, for reasons that have specialists stumped.
Specialists have posed a variety of possible explanations, [...]
I know the above headline is true, so I should put my hours where my mouth is, eh? Thanks to the SeacoastNRG blog, I found a terffic program called StayWarmNH, in which volunteers help do basic “winterization” in thousands of low-income homes throughout the state.
You can consider it a social-service exercise, helping those in need [...]
David Brooks has written a science column for the Nashua Telegraph since 1991 and has overseen this blog since 2006. Earle Rich is a jack-of-many-trades engineer with particular experience in wind turbines.
Alternative powerplants
Check out
this Google Map, which shows utility-scale solar, wind, hydro and nuclear plants in and around N.H., plus a few other intriguing items.
