Dallas Kachan's blog

Police in Scotland, with booze confiscated there, prepare to party.

Why pour confiscated alcohol down the drain, police in Sweden ask, when it can be repurposed for making biofuel?

A large trade in smuggled alcohol across the Baltic Sea from Denmark sees customs officials in Sweden confiscating a million bottles a year from purveyors trying to evade local taxes.

Hundreds of thousands of litres of alcohol used to be routinely poured down the drain, literally, but it has now become a contributor to Sweden’s fight against climate change.

Australia's Financial & Energy Exchange (FEX) is set to open a new trading board, with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to give an address at the opening.

The FEX Sustainability and Cleantech Investment Market (FEX-SIM) will open September 14th, with Gore the special guest speaker.

FEX-SIM will target the sustainability and cleantech industries.

All companies listing on the FEX-SIM board will be subject to NSX (National Stock Exchange) listing rules.

First, they brought you a directory of where to find biodiesel in your 'hood (see Biodiesel finder for your cell phone.)

Now, NearBio is giving you a way to tell biodiesel makers that you want biodiesel in your 'hood.

The web site www.needbio.com is a new, free registry intended to link local consumer demand for biodiesel with suppliers serving their area.

The site captures info like your vehicle type (e.g. automobile, commercial truck, or agricultural), number of vehicles in your fleet, estimated miles/gallon, annual miles, proximity preferences, zip code, desired blend, and optional comments/details.

Got a little extra cash in your pocket and have always wanted some prime cleantech Internet dot com real estate?

Ethanol.com is one of thousands of properties that will be up for auction at Thursday, June 21st at 3:00 p.m. EST at The Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

Moniker.com, which is brokering the deals, announced today that its next Live Domain Auction will be held at T.R.A.F.F.I.C. NYC 2007.

Among the other premium Internet domains you can bid on:

Ma Yanjun, of Qiqiao village, Shaanxi province wanted his mother to be able to shower comfortably.

So he attached 66 beer bottles to a board and connected them so that water flows through them, according to the China Economy Network.

Ma says it provides enough hot water for all three members of his family to have a shower every day.

More than 10 families in the village have already followed suit and installed their own versions of Ma's invention, for his Ma.

Soon you might no longer have to mutter "scuse me," as you shuffle past workers at solar installer Akeena Solar's corporate headquarters.

The company announced this morning that it's upgrading to larger office space.

More workers than you might think possible are currently shoehorned into a modest building in the auto body sector in downtown Los Gatos, California (for more color, read our interview with CEO Barry Cinnamon, Cinnamon on solar.) In our last visit to Akeena, only a few weeks ago, the company had even set up desks and a conference room in what was formally its warehouse.

Moller International, the company that's been working more than twenty years on vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (surely you've heard of the SkyCar?) says it gets better performance out of ethanol when it's blended with water.

Today, a Central American newspaper reports that corn is expected to be scarce in Guatemala in coming months due to the United States' "buying and hoarding massive amounts of the grain."

The Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology says this is just the beginning of the negative effects for the region due to the massive ethanol production promoted by the United States.

Yesterday, Cuba's ambassador to the United Nations, Rodrigo Malmierca, reaffirmed his country's position against the use of food crops as biofuels when more than two billion people across the world are starving.

On an announcement today that clunky-named WorldWater & Power had changed its name, a [small] buzz flew through the Cleantech Group's world headquarters (the sylvan view from HQ.)

What exciting new name would the co. now sport?

Did it hire a high profile naming firm? How much did it cost? How many junior marketeer consultants slaved away on primary and secondary research, testing individual phonemes and researching the semantics of contenders in languages around the world?

Would it be trendy? Would it be timeless?

Would it be sexy?

A pennystock company based in Las Vegas that's been trumpeting biofuel-from-algae has been making announcements lately that are even more oddly mixed by its own bizarre standards.

AlgoDyne Ethanol (OTCBB: ADYN) touts a microalgae-based (phytoplankton) technology that "provides a powerful means to produce clean, renewable energy from the continual harvest of bio-mass from Photo-Bioreactors. The end result is the production of ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, electricity, coal and animal feed—all in a carbon dioxide neutral way."