The Bloom Box: a power plant for the home

The Bloom Box: a power plant for the home

Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home -- one block can power the average European home. At least that's the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that's been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell. Bloom's design feeds oxygen into one side of a cell while fuel (natural gas, bio gas from landfill waste, solar, etc) is supplied to the other side to provide the chemical reaction required for power. The cells themselves are inexpensive ceramic disks painted with a secret green "ink" on one side and a black "ink" on the other. The disks are separated by a cheap metal alloy, instead of more precious metals like platinum, and stacked into a cube of varying capabilities -- a stack of 64 can power a small business like Starbucks.

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Night Biking Gadget: Mobile Laser Lane for Safer Cycling | Designs & Ideas on Dornob

Night Biking Gadget: Mobile Laser Lane for Safer Cycling - Designs

Just about everyone agrees that bicycling is an environmentally friendly way to get to and from work, yet not many of us actually commute this way. A large part of the reason for this lack of bike commuters is the safety issue. Any cyclist who’s ever had a close call with a car knows that riding on a street with no bike lane can be a bit scary. But installing bike lanes is prohibitively expensive, and many cities simply can’t afford the cost of adding these life-saving safety features to their streets.

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Building Cheap And Stable House Out Of Recycled Bottles

Building Cheap And Stable House Out Of Recycled Bottles

This is probably one of the best ideas for getting cheap home. Those bottles are pretty cheap even if you buy them new and they filled them with sand and tiny stones. The walls are thick enough to give them full thermal isolation and stability for the building.

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Renewable energy: The seat of power | The Economist

Renewable energy: The seat of power

WHERE there’s muck, there’s brass—or so the old saying has it. The cynical may suggest this refers to the question of who gets what, but thoughtful readers may be forgiven for wondering, while they are recovering from the excesses of Christmas in the smallest room in the house, what exactly happens when they flush the toilet.

The answer is encouraging. Less and less waste, these days, is actually allowed to go to waste. Instead, it is used to generate biogas, a methane-rich mixture that can be employed for heating and for the generation of electricity. Moreover, in an age concerned with the efficient use of energy, technological improvements are squeezing human fecal matter to release every last drop of the stuff. Making biogas means doing artificially to faeces what would happen to them naturally if they were simply dumped into the environment or allowed to degrade in the open air at a traditional sewage farm—namely, arranging for them to be chewed up by bacteria. Capturing the resulting methane has a double benefit. As well as yielding energy, it also prevents what is a potent greenhouse gas from being released into the atmosphere.

The consequence of techniques such as these is that an ever-larger proportion of sewage is being used as a raw material for energy generation. Germans already process about 60% of their faeces this way, and the Czechs, Britons and Dutch are close behind (see chart). GENeco reckons the figure in Britain by the end of 2010 will have leapt to 75%—enough, when converted into electricity, to power 350,000 homes. And the latest thinking is to improve yields still further by cutting out the middle man. Faeces are food that has been processed by the human digestive system to extract as much useful energy as possible. An awful lot of waste food, though, never enters anyone’s mouth in the first place, and this is an even more promising source of biogas.

Bacteria engineered to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

Bacteria engineered to turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel

Genetically engineered strains of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus elongatus in a Petri dish. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of California - Los Angeles)

Global climate change has prompted efforts to drastically reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas produced by burning fossil fuels.

In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.

The research appears in the Dec. 9 print edition of the journal Nature Biotechnology and is available online.

From ScienceDaily

Plastic Solar Breakthrough: 7.9 % Efficiency -- Record Broken by Solarmer

Plastic Solar Breakthrough: 7.9% Efficiency -- Record Broken by Solarmer

Photo: Solarmer

Plastic Organic Photovoltaic Technology is Maturing
The Californian startup Solarmer has been making good progress with its plastic organic PV in the past few years. It hit 6% efficiency in 2007, 7.6% a few months ago, and they've now broken their own record with 7.9%

Solarmer's roadmap aims for a 10% conversion efficiency for its OPV cells by the end of 2010. The company is currently doing some pilot manufacturing with roll-to-roll technology, and plans to bring some products to market next year.

Here's more details on Solarmer's technology:

First, low-cost plastic is used as the active materials to convert solar energy into electricity. Thanks to the extraordinary light absorption capability of the plastics, the active plastics layer is extremely thin - only a few tenth of micrometer thick, i.e. less than 1/1000 of silicon cell. This material cost is significantly lower.

Second, very low cost printing techniques can and will be used to manufacture plastic solar cells (just thinking of the newspaper). The combination gives much lower cost of equivalent energy (only ~10 - 20% that of silicon technology). In addition, the fabrication process is both low temperature and environmentally friendly, significantly reduces the amount of energy consumption in the manufacturing process.

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Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars

Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars

The Ecological and Economical Traffic Light Concept [relogik.com] by Damjan Stankovic is a Red Dot Design 2009 Award winner and consists of a simple yet, potentially highly practical visualization concept for everyday traffic lights that could reduce pollution and promote safer driving. There might already be quite some traffic light time counters around today, but few focus on informing the car drivers in a physically integrative and visually glanceable way like this proposed design concept.

Eko Light is specifically designed so it can be easily installed onto existing traffic light systems without much effort. It claims to bring forward following benefits:
- Less pollution, as drivers can turn their engines off and cut carbon emissions while waiting for the green light,
- Less fuel consumption, as turning off vehicle engines lowers fuel consumption in the long run,
- Less stress, since drivers know exactly how long to wait, and
- Safer driving, as all traffic participants are fully aware of how much time they have left before the light changes, reducing the chance for potential traffic accidents.