Renewable energy: 13% of US electricity in April 2009

The amount of renewable energy generated in the US continues to increase as that generated by coal drops. A welcome trend indeed.

Goldman Sachs. The full scale media war is on

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c [...]

Onion waste converted to electricity at California processing plant

Gills Onions fuel cells

[Gills Onions] The nation’s largest processor of fresh onions, will debut today an anaerobic digester system at its Oxnard, California location, whereby 100% of its onion waste and juice is transformed into electricity, heat and cattle feed.

Wow. No waste. Thus, they’re turning an expense (trucking away the waste) into [...]

FDIC’s Bair: Up to 500 more banks could fail

That’s what a senator quoted her as saying at a hearing. The FDIC demurs a bit, saying no estimate was given on the number of banks that could fail.

Note that FDIC is not even remotely being perky here or saying bank failures won’t happen. Nor are they making any attempt to contradict that up [...]

Goldman Sachs as vampire squid article now online

Matt Taibbi’s “The Great American Bubble Machine” in Rolling Stone is now online. His oft-quoted opening paragraph has probably already passed into the public lexicon.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of [...]

Harry Potter and the Half-Dead Movie

The new Harry Potter movie starts off with a stunning open sequence but then meanders all over the place with no real plot coherence. Even the opening sequence, which shows Death Eaters attacking London, has no apparent relevance to the rest of the movie and is never mentioned again. That’s what I mean by [...]

World’s first utility-scale, zero-emissions hydrogen power plant

This is about as cleantech as it gets. A New Mexico firm plans a power plant to use renewable energy power like wind and solar to create hydrogen to run turbines. The big advantage here is the hydrogen can be stored and then used on demand to create electricity.

The 10-megawatt New Mexico plant [...]

Algae engineering: Prime time for pond scum

WSJ explains how current algae-to-biofuel R&D is focused on genetic engineering to coax the algae to secrete the biofuel naturally rather than having to manually squeeze it out.

WSJ goes after Goldman Sachs too

Arianna Huffington says this is hands across the water, left and right unity against Goldman Sachs.

The only factions still cheer leading Goldman Sachs are the U.S Congress and government. Because the financial world no longer is. And that is a massive sea change.

(I’d much rather blog about cleantech snd renewable energy, and [...]

Madoff accountant waives indictment, may plead guilty

Apparently the MSU method of accounting isn’t always the best of ideas after all

Madoff’s accountant, David Friehling, will probably plead guilty to various charges of Making Sh*t Up due to his fantasy audits of Madoff’s businesses. Prosecutors aren’t saying that he knew about the Ponzi scheme, but rather that he did virtually nothing [...]