While in Hong Kong on a business trip recently, Oliver Goh was on his laptop playing around in a virtual world, when he realized he’d left the water running in his home back in Switzerland. He noticed this because the virtual world contained a recreation of his Swiss residence that pulled information about the home’s energy and water consumption in real time. The gauge that measures water use was blinking. No problem: After his avatar hit the right button, the real-world water valve in Switzerland turned off.

That’s one of the applications of the OpenShaspa Home Energy Kit, available starting tomorrow from the startup that Goh co-founded, also called Shaspa. Created with open-source components like Arduino circuit boards, the kit comes with a system that can monitor and control home power output with wireless sensors, and connect this data to mobile phone and Internet applications. (After reading Katie’s story on another open-source energy tool, ACme, Goh says he plans to add an OpenShaspa device driver that supports it.) Sensors for gas, water and other utility resources can be integrated into the control system, as well.

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Mechanical Technology, Inc., the Albany, N.Y.,-based parent of fuel-cell developer MTI Micro, said late Monday it’s voluntarily delisting its shares from Nasdaq. In a statement, MTI said its low share price (95 cents at Monday’s close) and the zombie-like trading activity – 21,000 shares a day on average over the last year, or less than a half a percent of its outstanding shares) just weren’t worth the expense and glamor of a Nasdaq listing.

Of course, it also didn’t help that, just last Tuesday, MTI received a letter from Nasdaq warning of an impending and involuntary delisting. So MTI is quitting Nasdaq just in time to avoid getting kicked off (the company said it was thinking of delisting even before Nasdaq’s warning).

Nasdaq pretty much bends over backwards to make it easy for companies to stay on the exchange. Once a stock is listed, it needs to meet at least one of three criteria: Net income from continuing operations of $500,000 in the last fiscal year, $35 million in market value of listed shares, or $2.5 million in stockholders’ equity. MTI had a net loss of at least $9.6 million for the past three years, a recent market cap below $5 million and, as of December 2008, $1.5 million in stockholder’s equity.

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Many investors are seeing fund raising slow down, and the CalCEF Clean Energy Angel Fund is no exception. The fund, which in October said it had raised $9.3 million toward its goal of $20 million, is still working to raise the rest of the money. Representatives said it has raised “about half” of the cash so far.

The angel fund is a for-profit venture that the Clean Energy Fund, a nonprofit founded with $30 million from the Pacific Gas and Electric Company bankruptcy, launched last April. Susan Preston, the angel fund’s general manager, said the fund raising is taking longer than expected because of the recession. “We’re working very hard at it, but it’s a struggle right now, no question about it,” she said. “We’re talking to lots of people all over the place, and everyone is saying, ‘We’re sorry, we agree with what you’re doing, but we just don’t have money right now.’”

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Traffic tie-ups aren’t just a headache for drivers, they can also be a significant source of pollution. But new, low-cost, wireless sensors could offer real-time information on traffic hotspots, potentially helping to clear up the congestion, and clear the air. UK researchers are showing off a network of pollution sensors today at a government-backed technology conference in London.

Called the MESSAGE project — for Mobile Environmental Sensing System Across Grid Environments — the research is led by the Imperial College London. The government’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which organized the conference and is partially backing the sensor research, said the network is the first of its kind in the world.

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Can a car run on solar? Yes —as long as you don’t need to fit a whole lot in your trunk. And as long as you don’t mind that it doesn’t actually have a trunk. The new solar car from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Solar Electric Vehicle Team might be small on size, but it’s big on ambitions.

Called “Eleanor,” the solar car has a cruising speed of 55 miles per hour — on a sunny day. Even if it’s cloudy, the team said that on a full charge the car’s batteries can hold enough power to drive from Boston to New York without needing any sunlight. That’s more than 200 miles on solar power.

There should be plenty of sunlight where they’re going — the car is set to compete in the World Solar Challenge race across Australia in October. This will be the 10th World Solar Challenge race, which draws teams from around the world for a 1,864 journey from Darwin in the Northern Territory to Adelaide in South Australia. The MIT team grabbed third place in the 2003 race, averaging 56 miles per hour with its last car, the “Tesseract.”

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Energy harvesting has been getting interest from a number of different sectors for tiny, energy-saving applications, and now it’s making its way down to the nanoscale. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have attached a tiny muscle-movement-driven generator to a hamster and let him loose in his little hamster wheel, running and scratching, to show that energy can be harvested from irregular body movements (hat tip to MIT’s Technology Review).

The system uses a piezoelectric-based nanogenerator where the stretching of a nanowire creates electricity. Zhong Wang, a materials science and engineering professor who led the research, told the Technology Review that this is the first time a generator has been shown to get energy from small, irregular motion — irregular in terms of frequency of motion as well as amplitude of power. This opens the door for possible uses in implantable medical devices that get their power from muscle stretches, heartbeats and bloodflow.

Putting energy harvesting nanodevices into bodies may be a few years away, but there are some energy harvesting systems that are already on the market, or at least much closer to market, including wireless sensors, regenerative braking, and even bumps in the road. And it’s not just startups that are getting in the game.

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Wind turbine makers are aiming ever higher to get more power from the giant machines, building turbines that pack more of an electricity generating punch, as well as towers and blades that are just, well, bigger. But how big can the turbines get?

American Superconductor is going for a whopping 10 megawatts, more than twice the power of some of the bigger turbines in operation today. General Electric, one of the largest manufactures of wind turbines in the world, currently makes turbines ranging from 1.5 MW to 3.6 MW.

American Superconductor said this week that it will work with the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory and its National Wind Technology Center to look at the economics of building a 10-MW turbine. The Devens, Mass.-based company said it can get a bigger power punch but still keep the size and weight under control by using its high temperature superconductor wire, which it claims is lighter and more efficient than the copper wire traditionally used in wind turbines.

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IBM and researchers from Harvard University launched a joint effort today to identify more efficient and lower-cost solar cell materials using distributed computing. Leveraging small amounts of computing power from potentially hundreds of thousands of personal computers, this latest addition to the company’s World Community Grid platform will process more than 1 million configurations of atoms over the next two years in search of an organic molecule that can be used to make materials for an ultra-efficient plastic photovoltaic cell.

For each configuration of atoms, IBM Master Inventor Viktors Berstis told us on Friday, the program will calculate “what would happen if sunlight hit this thing,” and then enter information about the properties in a database. The goal is to find a configuration that turns a greater percentage of light into electricity than is possible with current plastic (also called polymer) solar technology. The distributed computing process could cut the time needed to run the planned calculations by about two decades, said Berstis, a senior software engineer and chief scientist for the World Community Grid.

Even at the cutting edge of solar research (we wrote about some coming out of UCLA last week), scientists today can achieve only a little more than 5 percent efficiency with plastic, compared with more than 10 percent efficiency with thin-film silicon. Researchers continue to pursue polymer solar cells, however, because of the potential for much cheaper and more flexible materials that could be used on more varied surfaces than today’s solar arrays.

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Computing giant IBM and French electric utility EDF will together research ways to boost the efficiency of power plants and modernize electricity infrastructure, IBM announced today. The collaboration puts them in the thick of what’s known as the smart grid industry, a potentially $65 billion market whose key players include IT, energy, and utility companies. Their goal: Harness wasted energy and untapped data to create an ultra-efficient, dynamic power network that allows energy — and information — to flow both ways.

With smart grid tech, the power grid can more easily accommodate, say, a home with solar panels on its roof feeding unused energy back into the general power supply. If something like the Better Place infrastructure project in California, or for that matter, EDF’s own partnership with Renault in France, goes nationwide, all of those plug-ins could put a big strain on power supplies — unless a more “intelligent” grid allows cars to give and take juice from the grid according to when electricity is needed most.

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Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say a shorter-term solution, with cheaper start-up costs, could help spread the use of carbon capture and storage at coal plants and still clean up a large amount of carbon dioxide.

Although CCS has been touted as the answer to the problem of cleaning up coal, there are still no full-scale commercial plants using the system, in part because it carries a hefty price tag for power companies. Carbon capture alone, not including transporting and storing the CO2, can boost the cost of a power plant by 30 to 60 percent, depending on the type of plant. It can also decrease plant efficiency, according to the study, raising the cost per kilowatt-hour.

The researchers said partial capture, for both pulverized coal and integrated gasification combined cycle plant (aka “clean coal”), represents a smaller capital investment, because smaller or fewer pieces of equipment are necessary. Full capture, defined as 90 percent of emissions captured, is often accomplished with two trains of carbon dioxide absorbers and strippers, while a single train can be used for partial capture up to a certain level, according to the study. It won’t help with operating costs, though. Once the plant is up and running, the MIT study showed that the cost per ton for operating a power plant with CCS is about the same at 60 percent capture as at 90 percent.

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