Fresh off several conferences and meetings where discussions centered around smart grid, wind power, and other renewable energies, yesterdays tour of the Shanghai Municipal Waste Facility proved to be a very interesting site visit.  Operational for 3 years now, this facility (one of two facilities in Shanghai) incinerates about 1500 tons of trash a day [...]

The news that Jiangxi is set to build its first garbage incineration power plant, comes as welcoming news as I spent last week driving by farmland on fire. The Urban Appearance and Environmental Administration Bureau of Nanchang City recently signed an agreement with the Hong Kong-based Biomax Green Energy Group to build Jiangxi Province’s first [...]

When working with the issues of poverty alleviation, and those at the bottom of the pyramid, I am constantly amazed by how simple it is to make improvements through the use of existing technologies and a little money. World Bank loans money to China for biogas project highlights one of those efforts: The World Bank [...]

Wang Mengjie, Director of China Centre for Rural Energy Research and Training, in 2002 submitted the 4 page article Biogas Technology and Ecological Environment Development IN Rural Areas Of China (PDF Download Here) at the First International Conference on Ecological Sanitation While not a technical paper, Wang gives some nice support for the use of [...]

For China, algae blooms are an issue they have been dealing with for a long time.  In the last 2 years, there has been international coverage of blooms in Wuxi (China’s 3rd largest lake) and Qingdao (right before the Olympics), but the problem is much larger and has a longer history. When covering the issues [...]

For most Westerners, not having 7000 pieces of dried yak dung around the house is not necessarily a bad thing, but in Tibet where a household may need to burn 7000 pieces to keep the house warm.. 7000 pieces is not enough. The recent article Tibet moving on climate change threat highlights an issue that [...]

Developing biomass from cellulose has been a key step for many, and two Chinese scientists (one based in China and one in the US) have developed a way using tungsten carbide to split the cellulose into its sugar components so that those components can be fermented into biomass. Where this research may yield benefits is [...]