How cool is this?

Two Ev Entries in the “How Cool is This?” File

Economical energy storage has long been the Holy Grail of electricity. Since 1800, when Alessandro Volta invented the electric pile (a forerunner of the modern battery), hobbyists, scientists, and engineers have experimented with chemicals and materials to create economical storage at a smaller scale than a hydroelectric dam and with a more portable technology than, …

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How Cool is This? A Transparent Solar Cell

I’ve not been sharing enough of my “how cool is this?” moments, and believe me, I’ve had plenty of them in the digital and clean tech areas lately. I find this one very exciting: Michigan State researchers have developed a fully transparent solar cell that could be used for windows or device screens: Instead of trying …

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Esther Dyson on the Future of 3d Printing

3D printing is incredible. Take, for example, recent Northwestern mechanical engineering graduate and softball player Lauren Tyndall, who designed and printed her own more ergonomic and comfortable cast for her broken pinkie finger. Or consider the cost and energy use benefits of 3D printing of metal airplane parts in titanium, rather than machining them out …

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How Cool is That Nickel-iron Battery?

It’s been too long since I’ve done a “how cool is that?” expression of awe and wonder at a piece of ingenious creativity. You may recall that early automobiles were battery-powered — the origins of the electric car are deep and over a century old. One battery technology, courtesy of (you guessed it) Thomas Edison, …

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The Lifx Lightbulb: Bringing the Internet of Things to Electricity

Lynne Kiesling The LIFX lightbulb is one of the most exciting things I’ve seen in a while, even in a period of substantial innovation affecting many areas of our lives. It’s a Kickstarter project, not coming from an established company like GE or Philips, not coming from within the electricity industry. Go watch the intro …

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Automating Activities Helps Us Thrive: Three Examples

Lynne Kiesling [… and one of those examples is not using transactive technology to automate individual responses to energy-related variables like price or % renewable! Read on …] Digital technologies do more than reduce transaction costs. They open up new activities, new behaviors that were not imaginable before but are now valuable and contribute to …

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Waste Heat into Electric Power?

Michael Giberson I don’t understand the physics here – it’s some combination of quantum mechanics and carbon nanostructures – but according to this news release from the University of Arizona, it can turn waste heat into electric power. So far the interesting properties have been simulated in a computer model, but not demonstrated in a …

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