by Julian Rollins
Whether it’s clubbers on the dance floor, soldiers on the go, or just lonely long-distance runners, energy harvested from toiling muscles is a hot topic. Until recently, prototypes have relied on high-impact movements to generate any current to speak of. But the race is on to harness power from the slightest swish of a skirt, twist of a wristwatch or shrug of a shoulder.
The US National Science Foundation has offered a $350,000 grant to researchers at the University of California-Berkeley, who are developing microscopic piezoelectric fibers that could be woven into any garment. The research team claims that a million fibers spun into a shirt would generate enough current to power an iPod. So far the team, led by Professor Liwei Lin, has succeeded in...
by Justin Vela
The Uspensky Cathedral in Helsinki, Finland. Water used to cool a data center in the bomb shelter of the cathedral will go on to heat 500 homes. (Image via Flickr/hansco)
A mini revolution in eco-friendly computing is taking place in the depths of the 19th-century Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral in downtown Helsinki, Finland.
The Finnish IT company Academica has installed a new 2MW database server center in an empty second world war bomb shelter meant to protect city officials in the event of a Russian attack. Water warmed while cooling the servers will go on to provide heat for 500 homes or 1,000 flats in a city that often suffers winters of -20C. After the heat is extracted, the water will be recycled back to cool the servers again.
"There have been smaller...
By Wren Elhai - This is a joint post with Molly Kinder.
This week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit to Pakistan was front-page news in every Pakistani newspaper (and most here in the United States as well). Clinton brought with her two main things: a long list of new aid projects worth half a billion dollars—see the box below for what was on the list—and a strong message to Pakistanis that the United States intends to stick it out for the long haul. She handled well the difficult task of carefully balancing messages intended for Pakistani audiences with those intended for American audiences, and overall, said most of the right things to the right audiences at the right times.
Before the trip, we thought this was the best chance Clinton would have to signal to the...
Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:
2009
Temporary Spaces and Creative Infill
After an unexpected dining experience in which she discovered that two businesses, each with unique menus and ambiance, shared one restaurant space, Julia Levitt wondered: "why don't relationships like this form more often?" The answer leads her to explore the nature of temporary spaces...
2008
Can Our Allocation of Energy Represent Our Values?
Carey King examines society's struggle to understand the value of output of renewable energy systems and processes and asks: "for every unit of energy input from field to fuel, how much of that input should be responsible for each product?"...
2005
Further Concentration
Jamais Cascio explores Pyron Solar's new novel solar...
The U.S. and Europe added more power capacity in 2009 from renewable sources than from conventional sources such as coal and oil, and this year or next the world as a whole will add more capacity to the electricity supply from alternative energy sources than from fossil fuels, according to two new reports. The reports, issued by the United Nations Environmental Program and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, said that in 2009 renewables made up 60 percent of newly installed power capacity in Europe and more than 50 percent in the U.S. Although global investment in green energy decreased in 2009, to $162 billion, some countries, such as China, saw rapid growth; private and public investment in clean energy in China jumped 53 percent in 2009, with the country...
An E & Co investment:Toyola manufactures and sells energy efficient cook stoves in urban and rural Ghana. The stoves use standard charcoal but are 40% more efficient than the traditional stoves used in the region. This greatly reduces the amount of charcoal necessary to cook, which also reduces carbon dioxide emissions and saves family’s money. To date, Toyola has provided this cleaner energy product to 35,000 households...See related slideshow and carbon offset...
General Electric has announced a $200 million competition, called the Ecomagination Challenge, that is aimed at fostering entrepreneurial ideas to help speed up development of a "smart grid" in the United States -- a much-needed upgrade to the nation’s aging electric system.
To register your idea or vote for your favorite idea, visit the competition website.
For more information about this story, see the New York Times Green Blog entry "$200 Million for Smart Grid Ideas" by Tom Zeller Jr.:
“With this challenge we are inviting others to work with our partners and us to accelerate progress in creating a cleaner, more efficient and economically viable grid,” Mr. Immelt said. “We want to jump-start new ideas and deploy them on a scale that will modernize the electrical...
New technologies, feed-in tariffs, and tax credits are helping propel the small wind industry, especially in the United States. Once found mostly in rural areas, small wind installations are now starting to pop up on urban rooftops.
by Alex Salkever
The Solarium, a new 8-story apartment building in New York City, is part of a new wave of green buildings in Gotham. Its exterior is made from 100 percent recycled material. The burnished floors are sustainably farmed bamboo. The apartments lack bathtubs in order to save water. Perhaps the most novel green accoutrement of the Solarium, however, is a small, black windmill perched on a short pole rising from the rooftop. Made by WindTronics, the windmill went live in April — it is one of the early beta units from the Michigan......
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Jon Gosier on solar company Barefoot Power and its sustainability factors:Barefoot Power tackles the problem of offering low-cost power solution to the poor. Low-cost is key, because there’s nothing sustainable about running around the bush handing out free anything like Johnny Appleseed...the business model of Barefoot is to sell product locally or to use micro-finance options for people who still can’t afford their solutions. The company:“...is now growing at 25-50% per month and this is exhausting our current capital base. In April 2010 we secured US$1 million of investment from the European Commission, ring fenced to build our back end, which essentially is our administration, IT and key staffing requirements. This means that new investment can be wholly channelled to inventory,...
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In Afrigadget:...We believe that biogas from cow dung holds huge promise for rural and urban areas as a cheap source of energy that can be turned into domestic use or even business anywhere in rural Kenya….eg. pasturizing milk, making yoghurt, running fridges, generators, hammer mills for grinding corn, cooking, baking, heating water, running machines… and reducing your carbon footprint.I have recently become the latest guinea pig for Dominic Wanjihias experiments … and it has been quite a learning experienceMore hereRelated articles by ZemantaCow Manure Will Power Data Centers In Coming Years [Renewable Energy] (gizmodo.com)Shenyang to have the most poop power? (jcwinnie.biz)How cow manure could power 1,000-server data center...
Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:
2009
Interview with IRENA Director General Nominee Hans Jǿrgen Koch
Ben Block interviews Hans Jǿrgen Koch on renewable energy...
2008
Seeing the African Challenge in a Single Graph
Our allies at the Global Footprint Network and WWF released a report, "Africa: Ecological Footprint and Human Well-Being," on pathways towards sustainable development and what really hit Alex Steffen was this graph, which seems to sum up the fundamental challenge in one image...
2005
Protecting Genetic Resources on the Deep Ocean Floor
Sam Johnston says it is precisely because deep sea bioprospecting is just getting started that the time is right to create a legal framework for its conduct: Alex Steffen wonders how that can be done and...
Worldchanging on Solar Sisters with a cautionary note:Solar Sisters is addressing the same issues as the impressive Indian Barefoot Solar Engineer program. That program's success depended both on a clear understanding of women's roles as energy managers and on a smart approach to financing. That second part seems to be the one thing missing from the Solar Sisters project. Before Solar Sisters really takes off, I have a feeling that they will take the lessons learned from their early clients' community financing arrangements and build them directly into their business model.More...
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Covered earlier an update video on the Barefoot Women Solar...
Editor's Note: This list is a collection of headlines compiled by Joe Romm in two posts at Climate Progress.
Europe’s Wind Power is Booming
The European Union will continue its 2009 record-breaking pace this year for adding wind power, reports the European Wind Energy Association.
The industry group expects EU countries will install 10 gigawatts of new wind power capacity, the same as 2009’s record, bringing the total to 85 GW by year’s end.
“What is encouraging is that, unlike in 2009, the 2010 results consist of orders placed after the start of the financial crisis,” Christian Kjaer, the group’s CEO, said Monday in a statement. “Wind energy will be competing for the top spot with new gas power plants.”
Europe’s new gas plants produced twice as much power as...
In yesterday's post on human powered devices I made the claim (well, repeated Alex's earlier claim) that such products help to make the invisible visible through visceral body awareness and instant energy feedback. Here are two different kinds of products that also seek to reveal hidden energy use:
The Kill A Watt device provides instant electricity use feedback when used with appliances in a home. Plug loads are one of the largest sources of a building's or home's energy use, and not something architects can control very well, since they are created by the things occupants bring into a building or home. Providing instant feedback on energy use on an appliance-by-appliance basis, the makers of Kill A Watt hope to educate people on the efficiency of their appliances and help to...
A San Francisco company has developed a wireless light-monitoring network that it says can cut the energy use of office buildings by roughly 40 percent. The technology, developed by Adura Technologies, can dim or switch off lights to coincide with changes in the hours of daylight and enables employees to remotely turn lights off and on. The system’s “smart grid” technology assigns an IP address to each light and electrical outlet, providing building owners with a detailed picture of how much energy is being used in a building and how that use can be cut. “I can give you your carbon footprint by cubicle or by room,” said Adura chief executive Jack Bolick. In a recent test by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, giving employees wireless control of the three lights...
After reading Joe Romm's recent blog entry, "Good for Your Buns, Good for the Environment," I started noticing other stories about human powered devices circulating the web, and thought I'd share a link round-up of a selection of new resources and products with Worldchanging readers. As Alex Steffen has previously written, human powered devices can provide us with a "sense of the kind of actual work done by the machines we use to power our civilization, [which] is itself a worldchanging realization, a sort of making visible the invisible."
Power at HomeThe Human Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors is a book by Tamara Dean that features "pedal-powered, treadled, and hand-cranked devices for use in and around the home." Per the book's website:
It includes a brief history of...
by John Robb
Resilient technologies can be applied across the spectrum, from the black holes of consumption in developed economies to the most isolated village in the global hinterland, to radically improve security and enable vibrant prosperity.
A good example of how resilient tech can be used for the most basic development is Gobar Gas. A simple underground bioreactor that produces methane energy for cooking, lighting and other household uses from vegetable waste and dung. The intrepid and well traveled Michael Yon has a brilliant post on the topic. He delineates the myriad of benefits from the addition of this simple production system to a household:Energy independence. Methane energy production replaces dozens of hours spent daily gathering firewood. The conversions saves...
Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:
2009
"The Rocketship Wonder of Earlier Decades is Gone"
Alex Steffen provides a great round-up of the talks at worldchanging ally and writer Geoff Manaugh's London conference, Thrilling Wonder Stories. Here are some interesting tidbits...
2008
How to Get Off Coal
Jim Hansen outlines three things we need to address in order to phaseout coal...
2005
Kabul Snapshots
Alex Steffen shares links to a Danish woman's blog and Flickr photo set from her life in Afghanistan, and notes her disturbing, yet informative, creation of a "kidnapping kit"...
Other recent "look backs":
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Ory Okolloh at WEF on entrepreneurs you should know:One thing that struck me this year (and last) were all the young entrepreneurial Africans who’d managed to circumvent the perennial challenges we complain about when it comes to doing business in Africa, who’d managed to build strong, profitable, businesses , and who the had ambition to scale even further heights. And this are not just businesses that make money but that touch on critical sectors for the future of Africa – media/information; technology; infrastructure; agriculture. The kind of stuff that makes you want to run back to your hotel room and start putting a business plan together instead of tweeting in my case Anyway, I thought I’d share the profiles of some of these entrepreneurs with you…always important to keep...
Mainstream applications of LED's are moving beyond holiday light strings! LED lighting has long promised to be an energy efficient replacement to incandescent and fluorescent lighting. This week three articles caught my eye that show how LED's are on their way to delivering on that promise. It looks like there are exciting improvements happening in the market, bulb technology, and architectural design applications:
Market for LED Bulbs To Boom in the Next Decade, Study Says
The market for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) should grow dramatically over the next decade, passing compact fluorescent lightbulbs as the biggest emerging lighting product, according to a new report. LEDs — a light source made from semiconductors — will account for 46 percent of the $4.6 million...
Looking back one, two and five years ago today on Worldchanging:
2009
Solar Carbon Payback
Some naysayers argue that solar panels don't make sense because it takes so much energy to make them--mining, smelting or refining, processing, etc. Do they really save fossil fuel energy and greenhouse gas emissions over the long run? The simple answer is yes. They save a whole lot. But then the question is: what kinds of solar panels are better than others?...
2008
Intent Shapes Environment, Environment Shapes Life
Claude Lewenz says we can't design and build based on fear; we need to focus on community with environmental protection as a baseline...
2005
The Numbers
Here are some particularly pleasing numbers about the climate: 132 | 37 | Four | One billion | 2004 and 23. Read on to...
Vancouver and Seattle are working on new models for outcome-based energy codes, with the potential to change a longstanding bureaucratic framework and improve the energy performance of buildings across North America.
Even if you're not a policy wonk, this is important stuff. More and more people are catching on to the potential of energy-saving technologies, from in-unit energy meters to district energy solutions to simple smart and effective retrofits. Yet buildings continue to be a big problem when it comes to the energy they consume and the greenhouse gases they emit. Part of the reason is that even though the right technologies exist, the regulatory framework for getting them into the built environment (in North America, at least) is at best only minimally effective, and at...