A million Prius hybrids hit the road; spreadable, self-powered Organic Light Emitting Diodes; and a high school science project raises new hope for storing solar power. The weekend is in sight: welcome to the Friday edition of The Daily Five.

Toyota has sold over a million Prius sedans worldwide: Toyota announced a milestone yesterday — they’ve sold their millionth Prius hybrid. They’re actually about 28,000 north of that number, the vast majority of which is represented by the company’s second generation Prius, which went on sale in 2003. Generation three is scheduled to be introduced at next January’s Detroit Auto Show, and Prius #2,000,000 is probably not too far in the future. (Autoblog Green)

Airbus and Algae: Why Biofuels Won’t Cut It: A gloomy reality check on the future of algae-based aviation biofuel from the WSJ. Airbus and Honeywell went public this week with their plans to to meet a third of the airline industry’s needs with second generation biofuels by 2030. The problem is this: despite Airbus’s promise. at air travel’s current rate of annual growth, we’ll still need eight million more barrels of conventional jet fuel each day than we are currently using. (WSJ.com)

Special Purpose Computing Focuses on Energy Efficiency: A couple weeks back, we reported on a Berkeley research team’s plan to build a powerful climate simulator out of iPod-like embedded computer chips. Now O’Reilly Radar writer Jim Stogdill examines the story in view of the computer industry’s overall march to better efficiency. But Stoghill points out that improvements in things like virtualization and chip architecture can only take you so far. Beyond that, IT managers will have to find ways to make their own demands on complicated systems less burdensome. (O’Reilly Radar)

Who needs wind power when you can store energy in the air?: High School science projects don’t make it to Scientific American too often, but Washington sophomore Joseph Christopher Churchmay have come up with a solution for using solar power to work whenever you want it — even at night. He’s constructed a model of something he call an air battery. You use solar photovoltaic power to pump air into a container, then generate electricity by letting it out. On an industrial scale, this technique could be used to supply base power from solar PV farms. (Scientific American Community)

Researchers tout spreadable, self-powered OLEDs: Organic Light Emitting Diodes have a big advantage over conventional LEDs: they don’t require backlighting. That makes an OLED monitor inherently more efficient than conventional units. Now Sumitomo Chemical and Mitsubishi Chemical say they’ve developed an ultra-tin “spreadable” OLED process that atkes things a step further. The spreadable OLEDs also act as a solar panel, capturing their own operating power. Just don’t use them for sandwich spread at you next EcoTechie lunch meeting. (Engadget)

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