A geek at the peak, in a world at the peak
GravityLight is a new LED-based lamp that is powered much like a cuckoo clock…a bag of sand (or anything weighing about 20lbs) is pulled down by gravity, generating electricity to power the LEDs for about half an hour. It’s a neat idea for developing countries. The project is being funded via indiegogo, and have already surpassed their funding goal (with 33 days left in the campaign).
(read more at FastCompany)
A British company is working on a process which makes a hydrocarbon fuel out of CO2 and water. Cool idea, but at this point it’s a lab experiment and nothing more (though they’ve produced about five liters in the lab, so it’s proving itself). The big question is, is it scalable, what’s the efficiency, and what’s the source for the energy required to power this process.
The most important point here though, is that this is just one of many such projects in the works, trying to find more eco-friendly fuel sources. If just one of these can be successful, it can make a real impact on the sustainability of our lifestyle on this planet. Our current fossil-fuel-dependent lifestyle is most definitely NOT sustainable and we need to transition to an alternative quickly.
Read more here.
A company in England, Air Fuel Synthesis, has demonstrated a method of making a liquid hydrocarbon fuel from nothing more than air. Well, more specifically, they say the process:
“captures carbon dioxide and water from the air, electrolyzes the water to make hydrogen, and reacts the carbon dioxide and hydrogen together to make hydrocarbon fuels”
I have no idea of this rotating, conical solar panel(?) from V3Solar lives up to their marketing hype (which you can hear in the embedded video below), but it’s far and away the coolest looking photovoltaic system I’ve ever seen. The inner conical section rotates inside of a fixed transparent shell, which in itself seems like a concern…it takes energy to overcome the friction of rotating this 12 hours a day (they say it uses 1A and floats on magnets), but it does seem like a plausible way of addressing efficiency, through optimization of the angle and improved cooling of the cells. Another neat part of this is that, since it’s rotating, the DC produced by the cells is converted to AC by nature of this rotating motion and the junction between that and the fixed base…it should be a simpler conversion process, in theory (which might improve efficiency further).
They claim this produces more than 20 times the electricity of a flat panel with the same area of PV cells, though I didn’t see information on the orientation of that flat panel.
Read more over at Gizmag.
Researchers at Wake Forest University are working on a cool nanotech application – developing a fabric-like material that generates electricity from body heat. It’ll be neat to see if something like this reaches the mainstream market. Read the full paper here, or check out the CNN video below.
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