Green Technology

Imagine a computer so small it could slip through the human bloodstream. At just a millimeter in width, a new battery built by a Harvard University and University of Illinois team is perfectly suited to be a power source for tiny computers. It is also the first battery to ever be fabricated with a 3D printer. The team used a custom printer and ink to produce the batteries. A nozzle one millimeter wide deposited layers of nanoparticle-packed paste in a comb-like shape. A second printed comb nestled into the first, their teeth interlocked. These functioned as the two halves of electrodes, which conduct electricity. After printing, the electrode layers quickly hardened and were placed in a small container filled with solution. The finished product measured in at less than a millimeter wide. The team published their work Tuesday in Advanced Materials (subscription required). A battery like this could transform fields like robotics, which are limited by how small they can build product by currently available materials. It would benefit tiny flying and swimming drones that must work autonomously over long distances, plus medical implants and discrete, wearable electronics. Other small batteries are made of layers of film, but are too thin to provide much power. This 3D printed variety is dense and thick enough to compete with a traditional battery, and it’s also a lithium-ion battery: the same style as in a cell phone. “The electrochemical performance is comparable to commercial batteries in terms of charge and discharge rate, cycle life and energy densities. We’re just able to achieve this on a much smaller scale,” co-author Shen Dillon said in a Harvard release. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013How emerging technologies will influence collaborationOpportunities for the future of batteries

What if you could grow and sell food in the same place? That is the radical idea behind Ben Greene's The Farmery project. Can this revolutionize our current food transportation system?

This hotel for insects was created to promote urban biodiversity.

It was starting to look like battery-swapping was DOA, or at least not going to happen for a while, but Tesla seems to want to revive the idea.

GooseWatch NYC volunteers hope to stop goose killing in the city's parks.

When it comes to evaluating our energy options, policymakers typically perform cost-benefit analyses. That seems pretty uncontroversial, right? Where it gets squirrelly is in the selection of ingredients. What costs to include? Short term costs, or long-term? Include externalities? If a particular technology emits pollutants that threaten life on earth as we know it, how much should that matter? That kind of thing. Same thing on the benefits side. Do you value the resource as a short term or long term generator? Should you account for time of generation, given that electricity costs more during times of high demand? Do you include other grid benefits, such as the potential to avoid other capital outlays, such as investments in transmission and distribution systems? How about benefits that go beyond the grid? Should societal benefits such as the value of cleaner air and reduced morbidity be factored into cost-benefit evaluations? How about climate change impacts? Employment and other economic impacts? Impacts on water consumption? We think so. To this end, we’ve joined a coalition of groups (AmericanLung Association in California, Asian Pacific Environmental Network, Brightline Defense Project, California Center for Sustainable Energy, California Environmental Justice Alliance, California Solar Energy Industries Association, Coalition for Clean Air, Distributed Energy Consumer Advocates, Environment California Research & Policy Center, Environmental Defense Fund, Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Inc., Local Energy Aggregation Network, Dr. Luis Pacheco, Presente.org, Sierra Club, Solar Energy Industries Association) to request that the California Energy Commission undertake a study of the societal costs and benefits of California’s net energy metering program. The petition can be found here (pdf). If you think this is a good idea, the CEC is requesting public comment. Instructions for adding your voice, here (pdf). All public comment on the matter here. Vote Solar is a non-profit grassroots organization working to fight climate change and foster economic opportunity by bringing solar energy into the mainstream. Related posts:Just Because a Utility Says It, Doesn’t Mean It’s TrueCost of Solar Energy Lower Than Usually Reported, Study SaysDOD Budgeting Rules May Impede Green BuildingLouisiana on the Brink of Dismantling Net MeteringCongress Requires Department of Defense to Perform Cost Benefit AnalysisCopyright © 2008-2010 CleanTechies, Inc. and Partners This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. Written by The Vote Solar Initiative. To the comments (Digital Fingerprint: b008bf120fbd682ffd7ee5812c495c9a)Rating: 0.0/5 (0 votes cast)

They will stay in the city until June 20th. After that, they continue their journey which will end in Norway.

Instead of concentrating on becoming a reputable certification system, it trash-talks the competition.

One of the great scientific questions has now been answered. No, it's not something about the Higgs Boson or the Riemann hypothesis...

GE wants to be a big data company. In a presentation in San Francisco Tuesday, the industrial giant announced a platform of products, including predictive software products, a Hadoop-based big data appliance for ingesting and managing industrial data and a relationship with Amazon Web Services to share industrial data in public clouds. All of this is key to its industrial intent vision, where connected sensors on machines talk to the cloud and companies harness the power of industrial data in real time to automate industrial processes. GE has estimated that connecting devices to the “industrial internet” could boost global GDP to the tune of $10 trillion to $15 trillion by 2030. GE’s new data and cloud products GE is building a big data appliance called the Historian that uses Hadoop to manage time-series data to help industrial customers track their rising industrial data. GE’s Bill Ruh, VP of the Global Software Center, pointed out that industrial data is growing at twice the rate of other types of data. For example, GE generates about 5 terabytes of data a day in its labs. The Hadoop part of the box allows the data to scale across multiple nodes, while the time-series component of the software helps manage the influx of tiny pieces of data that comes in almost constantly. Time-series data isn’t huge, but it’s always coming in, adding up to millions and billions of records over a relatively short amount of time depending on how often it is collected. The partnership with Amazon (Amason CTO Werner Vogels attended the event, and he’ll also speak at our Structure event tomorrow in San Francisco) means the cloud giant will be the first cloud provider on which GE will deploy its industrial internet platform. It’s not clear yet, if Amazon will use GE’s Hadoop appliance in its cloud or if there are just some API links being built. In some ways the demonstrations that GE showed off, are taking direct design strategies from consumer applications such as Facebook, and its software options, called Predictivity are designed to connect the data coming in from machines to people in user-friendly ways. The goal behind all of these products is to bring the internet of things back to the enterprise realm. It’s nice to connect your home, but when you can connect power plants you can drive a lot more results in terms of energy efficiency and even cost savings. And because the money is there, we’ll see a lot of interesting software to solve the problems associated with managing, analyzing and running predictions against data. I’ll update the story with more information after the event. “Now for the first time I think we’re going to see innovation coming out of the industrial space and not just the IT space, “said Paul Maritz, the CEO of Pivotal, a company that GE recently invested $105 million in. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Connected world: the consumer technology revolutionAnalyzing the wearable computing marketLocating data centers in an energy-constrained world