Category: Energy systems
Living in the smart city – solar powered pavements and roads that can charge electric cars
Maybe we're not all doomed: Solar energy cheaper than coal in Australia?
Some potentially good news for a Monday morning: It appears that solar energy could be about to overtake coal as Australia's most viable source of energy. Hopefully, anyway. Writing in The Guardian, Giles Parkinson explains: Last week, for the first…
British Gas to add remote appliance control to smartphone apps
British Gas have begun trialing a new app service that will allow customers to remotely switch off appliances from a smartphone. The service, designed to keep bills low by tighter control over appliances (as well as being an additional safety…
REVIEW: AlertMe Starter Energy monitoring kit
In these penny-pinching times we need every bit of help we can get to keep our bills down. Is AlertMe the solution to keeping those electricity bills in check, or a needlessly expensive alternative to switching off the lights before heading on out for the day?
Nokia looking to patent self-recharging phone batteries
Nokia are looking to file a patent for a mechanism that would allow phone batteries to recharge themselves when out and about by collecting the kinetic energy generated by movement. It'd work like this: the heavier components within a phone…
Turbine City concept – Gallery
It gets pretty windy in Norway apparently. Well, windy enough for On Office's idea for a city built within wind turbines not to sound completely ludicrous anyway. The concept here is that with turbines growing in size to accommodate our…
CES 2010: Final Thoughts
The Consumer Electronics show, the behemoth of tech, the Valhalla of gadgetry, has come and gone for yet another year. But this time, rather than arriving with a bang, it slinked into sight with something more like a whimper. CES…
CES 2010: Day 1 Round-Up
With CES 2010 now well under way, it can be pretty tough keeping track of all the latest announcements. Here's Tech Digest's round-up of the of best Day 1 at CES 2010 so far, including all the news from the…
Waterless washing machines to hit the market next year
To be fair, “waterless” is a slight exaggeration, but only slight because a company named Xeros has managed to develop a washing machine that uses just 90% of the water used by a normal houselhold unit.
This utility room game-changer employs reusable nylon polymer beads to wash your undies. They clean the clothes faster, using 30% less energy and each cycle only requires a single drop of detergent too. What’s more, expensive eco-enemy tumble dryers need less time because you’re linen will be less wet too. Therefore saving a few inches more planet. Sounds pretty marvelous really.
The trick has been working out a way to get the beads from your togs at the end of the wash but, now that’s sorted, Xeros reckon they’ll have commerical units in hotels and other such large operations by the end of the year.
And if that hasn’t got your juices flowing green, then check this – if these nylon polymer machines were as standard in the UK, it’d be the equivalent of taking 2 million cars of our roads. Where do I sign up?
(via Cambridge News)
Mobile phones and gadgets to charge themselves?
What if you never had to plug any of your gadgets in to charge them ever again? No stray wires running around your walls, no need to remember to pack numerous chargers when going on holiday and of course there are the financial and ecological benefits as well.
Well, this could well become a possibility. Nokia has got their boffins in Cambridge working on a technique whereby a phone can remain in standby mode and effectively charge itself using just ambient radio waves.
I’m no scientist, but I’ve done the research and I understand it as thus:
Waves in the air, such as Wi-Fi, radio, television and so forth can be harnessed and converted into enough juice to power your gadgets.
The system needs a bit more developing though, currently the boffins are only able to gather between three to five milliwatts of power and they need this figure to be more like 50 milliwatts in order for it to work in practice.
If they do manage to master this system, the possibilities are pretty immense. On the flip side, how scary is it that, potentially, there is enough electricity floating about in the air to charge mobile phones? How our brains don’t get frazzled remains a mystery to me.
(via NokNok)
