Spanish renewable energy company Acciona Energy announced its new solar plant in Moura Portugal, is operational.

The Amareleja plant covers a total area of 250 hectares, located in the parish of Amareleja in the municipality of Moura, in Portugal’s Alentejo region, not far from the border with Spain. It has 2,520 Buskil trackers (ACCIONA in-house technology), each with a surface of 142 m2, 13 meters long and 10.87 meters high.

The plant is not far from the border with Spain and has 2,520 Acciona tracker solar panels. The first 3 megawatts were installed at the end of 2007 and connected provisionally in 2008. The Amareleja plant will help achieve goals set by the Portuguese government regarding energy efficiency. The goal is to have 30 percent of Portugal’s energy come from renewable sources.

Source: Solarbuzz

Technorati : Acciona, Solar Cells, Solar Power, solar power plant Portugal
Del.icio.us : Acciona, Solar Cells, Solar Power, solar power plant Portugal

There is a new solar facility in Iran. The Shiraz solar power plant boasts a modest 250 KW energy production capacity. It’s a solar thermal facility that uses parabolic mirrored troughs to gather sunlight.

The mirrors focus the sunlight in an intense ray on a tube that runs the length of the array of mirrors. Inside the tube, a liquid insulated by a vacuum transfers the heat of the mirrors to a traditional generator, where it’s used to produce steam and generate electricity.

Iran took its first step toward the large scale realization of that potential this week with the inauguration of its first solar energy plant. The plant was constructed with domestic materials and labour in Shiraz, the Fars province.

This solar thermal plant joins some 4,075 small scale solar thermal installations throughout Iran-3,781 residential solar water heaters and 294 public baths heated with solar thermal energy.

Technorati : Solar facility Iran, green electricity, solar panels
Del.icio.us : Solar facility Iran, green electricity, solar panels

All the best in 2009. Happy New Year. Many new product reviews, many news about the best solar panels, about the best solar cells, GIGS, solar energy and renewable energies…..

I really enjoy blogging about this, because I believe that the things like this will change our future. That the Solar Energy will became the 1st energy used to produce electricity. Especially when I think that I live in a country (Reunion Island) where the sun shines almost 365 days a year.

Hopefully everybody enjoy reading this blog, so keep coming back reading … or just grab my RSS feed…

Best Wishes

Vladan

Ecofriend has published recently a top 10 of Green blogs. You might know well some of them, but not others, like me. I was very happy that i found a top 10 list for ECO tech blogs, because I did not know about a half of them.

I’m not expecting my blog to be one of them as I’m the only one person to contribute to this blog. Beside that I have a full time job and I’m also running another blog about ESX Virtualization (I’m system engineer…). If you are into VMware or Hyper-V it’s somethink for you.

But if you keep reading those lines, you might consider give me some  ….. to keep me motivated…. -:) for the future.

Here is the list of Top 10 Blogs of 2008:

• TreeHugger - My preffered…
• CleanTechnica - did not know really about, but looks great
• GoodCleanTech – Guide to Eco-Technology
• Inhabitat - suitainable architecture and design
• EcoGeek - I like a lot…
• GreenPacks - even small efforts can save the planet
• MetaEfficient - Highly efficient stuff.
• HippyShopper - Ethical consuperism
• Ecotality Life - Eco Developement
• Keetsa - Ecofriendly news

Source:  EcoFriend

Solar charger from Energizer:

If you want to have an efficient solar charger for your AA and AAA batteries, you better wait a bit for this solar charger from Energizer. It should hit the market this January. Apparently Energizer will be fixing the price limit to be reasonable (around 50$) with two batteris s AA included .

The charger will  convert sunlight into power for rechargable AA and AAA batteries as well as provide USB output for devices. It’s completely weatherproof and comes with a USB port to power electronics. So you can charge you Laptop, iPhone, cellphone and others….

So the device is able to:

• be charged from an AC wall outlet
  
• can power most of your gadgets via USB port (iPhone, Laptops etc….)
  
• can charge AA and AAA batteries
• It’s waterproof (great !!!)
  

Source : GoodCleantech

Today I wanted to transfer my RSS feed from another Google account I had into my regular account and I guess I broke the original feed. The reason was that I was using 2 google accounts, one for Adsense and the other one for the rest of services (Reader, e-mail etc…). And Actually I got quite confused with all the changements I had to deal with:

• Two Google accounts
• Two Feedburner accounts
• Three Websites
• Multiple logins (passwords) for Feedburner/Google

Unfortunately something went wrong. So I ended up with my feed stats reset. It’s not that dramatic, but you, regular readers might get penalized, because you’ll not see any updates in your reader from now on. So If you were previously subscribed to my blog, please re-subscribe, because my old feed was lost.

You can do it here: RSS reader.

It’s been some time I did not take any break. Break from my job, break from blogging, to relax and enjoy life. I stay on the island. (Island? yes I live on the island called Reunion - it’s french territory.) If you follow this link, you’ll land on my other website about Reunion Island. I’m planing to migrate this website into Wordrpress soon.

There is certainly a lot thinks to do at the Reunion Island. We have a volcano - “Peak of the Furnace”, The climat is great. I’ts a few years we moved here from Europe. So I’m going on the beach this morning to take some swim in the lagon….. -:)

So I take a break during few days. Just relax, do some trekking, going to the beach and so……

Merry X-mass and happy new year to all my readers…. !!!

Vladan

I have done some articles in the past about some best solar chargers and some most efficient solar chargers availables. Let’s have a look at this one.

Freeloader is the portable solar powered charger that can power everything from phones to gaming machines to digital cameras and much much more.

FreeLoader is an advanced portable charging system that can power any hand held device anywhere, anytime. Freeloader takes power from its solar panels or via a supplied charge cable that plugs into a computer’s USB.

The internal battery can power an iPod for 18 hours, a mobile phone for 44 hours, a PSP for 2.5 hours and a PDA for 22 hours, and that it will hold its battery charge for up to three months if not used.

Technical specifications:

• 120mA premium quality crystalline solar cells
• 1000mAh environmentally friendly Li-ion battery – typical battery life is 2 years
• Size: 123 x 62 x 17 mm
• Weight: 185 g

Rainbow Solar Inc. found a new technology that could revolutionize the buildings and skyskrapers. The company has released details of its new semi-transparent solar window that can generate up to 250 watts of electricity while protecting indoors from ultraviolet and infrared radiations and heat !!!! That’s simply amazing. Especially for a hot countries, like where I live (FYI I live at Reunion Island and we have summer now ). All those savings one could make on airconditionning

The solar windows are based on the company’s patent-pending multi-tier PV and heat insulation system that reduces the energy required to cool down the building, while generating between 80 and 250 watts of clean power. The windows can be made in various sizes to a maximum of 81 square feet, depending on the requirements and the size of the building.

Source: Solar.tm and

Technorati : solar buildings, solar panels, solar panels windows
Del.icio.us : solar buildings, solar panels, solar panels windows

Last night I upgraded my wordpress installation to 2.7 version. It did not went without a troubles. After I uploaded all the files to my web space with my FTP client, there was a nasty error 1226 in wp-admin page. I went to sleep, quite disappointed, and worried about what am I gonna do if I’ll have to re-install and restore the whole blog (oh my god…). But then I re-uploaded the whole thing once again and all went ok. This new version has pretty, new graphical user interface in admin area.
For those who want to easily ugrade their worpress installation to the new version there are 3 easy steps to follow:

1. Download Wordpress 2.7

2. Unzip it, Upload and Replace your WordPress files, except: wp-config.php file and wp-content folder.

3. Point your browser to “http://yourdomain/wp-admin/upgrade.php“. Follow the instructions on screen to continue and upgrade within seconds.

I would say there is a fourth one: Backup you WP database before - because after could be too late….   -:)

There is a video of presentation all the new features, in case you want to check this out.

You can get Wordpress here.