Green Technology

With nothing more than a marker and a blank sheet of paper, children are capable of producing some amazing things; when armed with a keen conviction and respect for our planet's future, the same is true.

A French startup is testing a transparent panel that would use solar energy to increase cell phone battery life by 20 percent. SunPartner Group hopes to see its Wysips panels appear in cell phones beginning next year. At less than half a millimeter thick, they are unobtrusive and can be built into a phone or placed on top of an existing screen. Wysips won’t replace products like Mophie’s Juice Pack Air case, which can double an iPhone’s battery life, but at a few dollars each they are an especially cheap option. They collect power with strips of thin solar cells. These are covered with a layer of lenses that render the cells nearly invisible while concentrating solar energy. Without any external accessory or charger, phones could use idle time to recharge with natural or artificial light — and even recover from a dead battery. A boost from the sun would be especially useful in a disaster situation or an area with little power connectivity. Wysips won’t charge the phone endlessly, but it would allow a quick call here and there. Devices that use less power, such as a Kindle, could rely solely on a Wysips to stay charged. SunPartner reports the screens are currently 90 percent transparent. That’s a step above more-expensive transparent solar cells, which absorb infrared but not visible light to preserve the screen’s visibility. The company wants to double the screens’ energy output by 2014. Wysips wouldn’t replace the traditional phone battery. But they would provide an easy charge in a bind and make routine activities like listening to music have very little impact on battery life. SunPartner also isn’t stopping with small device screens either; it is working on embedding Wysips in glass and other materials, which would expand its territory to billboards, car windows, building surfaces and beyond. Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system spaceSurvey: How apps can solve photo managementWhy retailers should forget showrooming and turn to in-store Wi-Fi

The Seychelles are a group of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, about 1,000 miles east of the coast of Africa. The archipelago currently relies on expensive and dirty diesel generators to produce most of its electricity.

A round-up of the different ways biomimicry is being used in the fields of energy, transportation, medicine and pollution control.

Many are familiar with Vélib, the huge bike-sharing program in Paris (18,000 bicycles and 1,200 stations!), but not everyone knows about Autolib Paris' other shared transportation service.

In a world where gasoline costs $11.50/gallon, a slick Tesla pulls up at a gas station's fuel pumps and... the front trunk (aka the 'frunk') opens to reveal fuel canisters.

Granny was thrown out of her wheelchair and off a cliff in one of the most controversial ads of the 2012 US presidential election. Whether you love or hate the clip, which went after Republicans on Medicare, it shows the emotional tenor we bring to the debate over health care costs. Energy costs affect Granny at least as much – and everyone else too. Yet we rarely devote such time and passion to the issue, except when gasoline prices spike. Even then, the talk is temporary. We become acclimated to the higher costs. Note how little grumbling you hear now that $3-$4 per gallon gasoline is the new normal. Why do we make a big deal about the economics of health care and not the economics of energy? Because we are not doing the math. That’s what a new report by United Technologies Corp. reveals. Few realize, for example, that we spend about the same amount each year powering our homes, stores and offices – $432 billion – as businesses spend on health insurance. “It is on par, which is remarkable because it speaks to where we can go,” said John Mandyck, chief sustainability officer for UTC Climate, Controls and Security, in an interview. Where UTC sees us going is toward saving money through greater energy efficiency, which opens the way toward deploying the extra capital for other personal or investment purposes. “Unlocking American Efficiency: The Economic and Commercial Power of Investing in Energy Efficient Buildings,” looks specifically at the economics of making US buildings 30 percent more efficient by 2030. Here are a few eye-catching points the report makes about what that could mean for our finances. A 30% investment in building efficiency brings a 28.6 percent internal rate of return over 10 years. That’s about four times better than average corporate bond yield or average equity performance and more than double the returns of high performing venture capital firms. Households could save about $466 per year – twice as much as they spend on average for fresh vegetables and nearly as much as they spend on prescription and non-prescription drugs. After recouping the cost of upgrading government buildings, the US would save about $8 billion per year on energy costs. How meaningful is this? Over a decade, this is as much savings as we could achieve by raising the Medicare retirement age to 67, increasing taxes one percent for top earners, or taxing foreign earnings by US corporations. It’s also about as much as we would save by eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency. Here is another way to look at energy savings. Think about lowering energy costs as a way to raise household income, says the report. We hear a lot about the decline in middle class salaries. Had energy costs remained level since 2000, they would have made up for the average drop in household income. Thinking about energy costs this way converts the issue from being “a problem to an opportunity,” Mandyck said. It offers a chance to consider how we can “redeploy that cash flow in other ways.” It makes sense for the US to pursue this line of thought with greater vigor. As a share of gross domestic product, energy costs rose from 6.2 percent to 9.2 percent over the last decade, says the report. And we can expect to see energy costs rise another 17% over the next two decades, according to the International Energy Agency. Ultimately, the UTC’s energy efficiency story is about us keeping more of our own money and using it in other productive ways. Granny’s wheel chair doesn’t need to be powered by a heartless force beyond her control that sends her over a cliff. Embed more energy efficiency into the economy and Granny can afford her own motorized, self-propelled wheelchair and go wherever she wants. Elisa Wood is a long-time energy writer whose work appears in many of the industry’s top magazines and newsletters. She is publisher of the Energy Efficiency Markets podcast and newsletter. Related posts:Forum on Federal Leadership in Sustainable BuildingA

A fun chat on humans' inconvenient minds and why they make finding consensus on climate hard, but consensus on some smart energy steps easy.

Most of the new power technology we learn about these days falls on one side or the other of the power-generation/power-storage divide. But a power cell developed by researcher Zhong Lin Wang at Georgia Tech both produces and stores power in the same tiny unit. The self-charging cell uses a "piezoelectric membrane that drives lithium ions from one side of the cell to the other when the membrane is deformed by mechanical stress. The lithium ions driven through the polarized membrane by the piezoelectric potential are directly stored as chemical energy using an electrochemical process." According to the researchers, the direct transfer of physical energy (such as a shoe hitting pavement) to chemical energy is as much as five times as efficient as separate generation and storage systems. The self-charging power cell is only a device the size of a coin, and only provides enough power to operate a small calculator. But the potential for use in wearable computing (as well as the everpresent "military applications," given DARPA sponsorship of the research) make this technology an interesting one to watch for further development. images: Gary Meek/GT Research News

The art and science of biomimicry teaches us to find solutions to our problems by looking at what nature has come up with to solve similar problems.