As many of you know renewable energy plays a big part in many, if not all new buildings that are being constructed. Well on that note a couple of days ago Belgium inaugurated the Princess Elisabeth Base which is a Zero Emission Polar Station.

Here is a very cool do it yourself way to make solar rechargeable batteries. This method was designed by Knut Karlsen and what he did was basically wrap solar cells around his batteries connect them and left them in the sun. With time they slowly began to charge and there you have as many rechargeable batteries as you need. For the full set of steps on how to make these you can head over to GreenUpgrader. More pictures are available below.

Currently the competition to be number one in the Solar industry is close but just recently California signed the world’s largest solar deal. This deal is set to give California 1,300 MW of solar energy which is enough to power over 840,000 homes. Over the course of a year this project will produce 3.7 billion KWH of power and will avoid the use of two million tons of CO2.

For some time now there has been talk of a solar powered cell phone and finally Samsung has released its first solar powered cell phone. Now many of you may be thinking solar on a cell phone that would just look ugly but Samsung has made it a very sleek and nice design. The phone features the solar panels on the back of the phone and it can generate enough energy to actually charge up the phone.

The competition in the area of renewable energy has been growing amongst countries and Germany has just recently unveiled the worlds toughest wind turbines. They have spent 10 years developing them and have made them water proof, light and have a very simple design (the simpler the design the easier it is to maintain).

At the Antarctic’s research base many things such as Seal brains, Penguin eggs and other foods of that sort have stopped being served. They now receive their food in shipments which consists of canned foods, frozen foods and dried foods giving the wildlife there a chance to advance and grow. There was actually a point in time where seals where killed simply for dog food so it’s good to hear that that has been taken off the menus.

In order to raise awareness on the Global Warming issues 15 artist constructed a structure that consist of a piece of ice and two Polar Bears on top. You can see the sculpture floating on the Thames River and is definitely eye catching as this does happen to the Polar Bears where they either swim for miles only to find no ice or simply one small piece that they sit on waiting to get their energy back or simply floating on to find more ice. You can check out more pictures below.

A while ago we introduced to you some Solar Power trash compactors that where set to be installed in various parts of Shanghai. These compactors would use the solar energy to compact all the trash into a nice cube that could be easily picked up. Each trash can would in turn hold more trash and keep in nice and clean seeing as how the trash can would not have an overflow problem like many do in big cities.

Manually inspecting wind turbines can take quiet some time and can also be dangerous for the person doing the job. Well in light of the the developers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Factory Operation and Automation are in the process of developing a new Robot that will inspect all of the wind turbines and will actually do it better then humans.

Many of us know that many plastics are not biodegradable. Although we have come a long way in making better and less toxic plastics the fact remains that some still may cause health risks. Well liquid wood could soon be replacing plastics. The wood based product can be mixed with other materials to make a non-toxic alternative to petroleum plastic and will still be just as strong. Below you can find a small excerpt from DW-World.