Newsletter for DOE Biofuels Program. Articles on recent DOE grants and contracts under Bioenergy Initiative and related programs; also on creation of National Bioenergy Center at NREL.

This guide provides readers with a broad understanding of the potential benefits that current renewable energy technologies can offer rural microenterprises. It also introduces the institutional approaches that have been developed to make RE technologies accessible to microentrepreneurs and the challenges that these entrepreneurs have encountered.

This publication addresses the need for energy in schools, primarily those schools that are not connected to the electric grid. This guide will apply mostly to primary and secondary schools located in non-electrified areas. In areas where grid power is expensive and unreliable, this guide can be used to examine other energy options to conventional power. The authors' goal is to help the reader to accurately assess a school's energy needs, evaluate appropriate and cost-effective technologies to meet those needs, and to implement an effective infrastructure to install and maintain the hardware.

An overview of the U.S. Department of Energy Building America Program and how it works with the U.S. building industry to demonstrate the benefits of energy efficient integrated systems in residential construction.

In the last 10 years advances in biotechnology have reduced the cost of bioethanol by almost 25%. The DOE bioethanol program targets process improvements intended to allow bioethanol to compete with gasoline in the marketplace. Researchers are utilizing biomass feedstock for bioethanol conversion. The bioethanol conversion technology depends on hydrolysis and fermentation. To maximize biomass fermentation, biotechnology researchers have produced new strains of yeast and bacteria.

PET is uniquely capable of providing information on biochemical transformations in the living human body. Although most of the studies of monoamine oxidase (MAO) have focused on measurements in the brain, the role of peripheral MAO as a phase 1 enzyme for the metabolism of drugs and xenobiotics is gaining attention (Strolin Benedetti and Tipton, 1998; Castagnoli et al., 1997.). MAO is well suited for this role because its concentration in organs such as kidneys, liver and digestive organs is high sometimes exceeding that in the brain. Knowledge of the distribution of the MAO subtypes within different organs and different cells is important in determining which substrates (and which drugs and xenobiotics) have access to which MAO subtypes. The highly variable subtype distribution with different species makes human studies even more important. In addition, the deleterious side effects of combining MAO inhibitors with other drugs and with foodstuffs makes it important to know the MAO inhibitory potency of different drugs both in the brain and in peripheral organs (Ulus et al., 2000). Clearly PET can play a role in answering these questions, in drug research and development and in discovering some of the factors which contribute to the highly variable …

This is a two-page fact sheet describing FEMP's Federal Energy Saver Showcase program.

Interview with Navy veteran and survivor of the sinking of the USS Houston. The interview includes Feliz's personal experiences about being a prisoner-of-war of the Japanese during World War II, the sinking of the Houston, imprisonment at Serang, Java, the Changi Prison Camp, hell ship to Japan, prison camp at Ohasi, Honshu, and liberation.

This ``annual report'' details the FY 1999 achievements of the US Department of Energy PV Program in the categories of Research and Development, Technology Development, and Systems Engineering and Applications. Highlights include development of a record-breaking concentrator solar cell that is 32.3% efficient; fabrication of a record CIGS (copper indium gallium diselenide) cell at 18.8% efficiency; sharing an R and D 100 award with Siemens Solar Industries and the California Energy Commission for development and deployment of commercial CIS thin-film modules; and support for the efforts of the PV Industry Roadmap Workshop.