2012-05-07 Reporter TVI - Facturas de Betão : Porque é a electricidade tão cara?

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Portugal vai fazer 9 barragens novas, que vão gastar mais electricidade do que produzir. Quem vai pagar são os consumidores, nas facturas. Saiba porque a electricidade é tão cara, no Repórter TVI. «Facturas de Betão» é uma Grande Reportagem do jornalista Carlos Enes, com imagem de Carlos Carvalho e montagem de Miguel Freitas.

http://aventar.eu/tag/barragem/
 

TOXIC Alberta

http://www.vice.com/toxic/toxic-alberta-1-of-3

Once pristine wilderness, Alberta is now a world of poisoned water, polluted air, and rare cancer. VBS travels to the oil sands of Canada to investigate the impact of digging for this previously unobtainable oil.

MIT chemists Daniel Nocera and Matthew Kanan have discovered a way to to convert sunlight into chemical fuel by using Cobalt to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. According to Dr. Nocera, water combined with light will split the hydrogen and oxygen in a water molecule, then recombining hydrogen and oxygen will produce energy and water. This means those pollution-free fuel cell vehicles already in the market will be able to acquire their fuel using a sustainable energy source instead of energy acquired from fossil fuels.

Personalized Energy | MIT World

About the Lecture 

Daniel Nocera is swimming very hard against the current of mainstream energy research. While many scientists are figuring out how to scale up wind, geothermal or biomass systems, Nocera is focusing on “personalized” energy units that can be manufactured, distributed and installed on the cheap. His main concern lies with the increasing energy demands of six billion people, primarily from developing nations, who will be marching onto the world stage by 2050 and likely doubling the planet’s energy consumption, from around 13 to 26 terawatts (that’s trillion watts). A “solution to the energy challenge rests in providing the non-legacy (developing) world a carbon-neutral, sustainable energy supply,” says Nocera.

Nocera’s science isn’t about making big or efficient systems. For non-legacy populations, “cost means everything and efficiency is secondary.” Nocera’s metrics look at cost in terms of energy stored per weight of something, and so he plots a Boeing 777 plane, etching tools, and Big Macs on the same cost curve. Priced out this way, cars cost around $1 million. Pursuing this logic, Nocera wants to build large quantities of small energy systems and get them into the developing world before giant infrastructure-based energy takes root.

Nocera’s vision builds on major research breakthroughs: He has figured out how to harness critical biological processes that may bring widespread solar power closer to reality. Nocera’s innovations include replicating in the lab the process of photosynthesis in plants, using sunlight to split water molecules and store energy. “Chemically, I’m not doing anything in a sophisticated way…just taking water, rearranging bonds and making fuel.” A liter of water, energized by sunlight from a photovoltaic cell, can store 13 megajoules. The 3.2 million liters in MIT’s pool could yield 43 terawatts – enough energy “to take care of all of you.” Nocera’s photosynthesis uses a cobalt-phosphate cocktail that mimics the mineral-based catalytic process in a plant, and “keeps fixing itself,” running endlessly on such humble fuels as Charles River water. His process even yields pure drinking water from waste.

Nocera’s goal is to make each home its own power station, with photovoltaic arrays on the roof feeding the catalytic reaction that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen. Some of these elements are still pricey or unreliable -- in particular, fuel cells and photovoltaics are troublesome -- yet he envisions villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing one of his basic systems for $800. While Nocera acknowledges his critics, he views them as institution-bound naysayers: “I always say when the scientists stop fighting, then you’re screwed.”

THE OIL FACTOR: Behind the War on Terror

After assessing today's dwindling oil reserves and skyrocketing use of oil for fuels, plastics and chemicals, "The Oil Factor" questions the motives for the U.S. wars in the Middle-East and Central Asia where 3/4 of the world's oil and natural gas is located.

With exclusive footage shot on location in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the film documents the spiraling violence now engulfing both Iraq and Afghanistan, a country conspicuously absent from the commercial media's news segments.

Interviews gathered throughout the Middle-East, Europe and the United States, including a Bechtel executive in Baghdad, also expose who is cashing in on the tens of billions of dollars requested from congress by the current administration of G. W. Bush.

With detailed maps and graphics, The Oil Factor features many experts and personalities such as former Defense Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, M.I.T. professor Noam Chomsky, the Project for the New American Century Executive Director Gary Schmitt, Coalition Provisional Authority Chairman Paul Bremer, former Pentagon analyst Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, current Iraqi government official Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim and authors Ahmed Rashid and Michael C. Ruppert.

Contributing organizations include the United Nations, the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, the Pentagon, Washington's Institute for Policy Studies, New York's World Policy Institute, London's Jane's Intelligence and Petroleum Economist, Paris' Agence France Press and Center for Energy Strategy Studies (C.E.P.S.E.) or the Organization for Economic and Cooperative Development (O.E.C.D.)

How to Bring Solar Energy to Seven Billion People

April 6, 2009 Science at the Theater talk: By exploiting the powers of nanotechnology and taking advantage of non-toxic, Earth-abundant materials, Berkeley Lab's Cyrus Wadia has fabricated new solar cell devices that have the potential to be several orders of magnitude less expensive than conventional solar cells. And by mastering the chemistry of these materials—and the economics of solar energy—he envisions bringing electricity to the 1.2 billion people now living without it.