There only a speakerphone, microphone, battery pack, and a small piece of hardware that connects to the cloud. s a connected device,
As part of the deal, Apple will get electricity from the farm at a fixed rate for 25 years.
There even a built-in 37-watt lithium-ion battery and a USB plug so you can power your smartphone up to six times while on the go.
But should the battery lose power it comes with a TSA-approved master key that will help you
#Scientists Make Energy-Generating Keyboard That Knows Who#s Typing On it Passwords continue to be a glaring weakness in digital security.
and typing style the nonmechanical keyboard is able to generate energy to power itself and self cleans thanks to a dirt repellent coating
How much energy can be generated by typing on the smart keyboard? Enough to charge mall electronics at arbitrary typing speed greater than 100 characters per minaccording to the team
#Amazon Invests In 150mw Indiana Wind farm To Power Its Data centers Amazon today announced that it is working with the Pattern Energy Group to construct
and operate a 150 megawatt wind farm in Benton County, Indiana. The new wind farm will go online in about a year
and the expectation is that it will supply at least 500,000 megawatt hours of wind power annually.
but the mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) that the full name of what was called previously the owler Ridge IV Wind Projectwill only be used to power Amazon AWS data centers.
but Pattern Energy notes that this is a 13-year agreement. As Amazon announced last November, its long-term goal is o achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint.
US WEST (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt) and its AWS Govcloud. mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of datacenters
When a constant current is applied to an LED light bulb a constant stream of photons are emitted from the bulb
high speed information can be transmitted from an LED light bulb. The company has begun already shipping actual product in the form of
coupled with a battery powered Lifi mobile unit attached to a laptop screen, allows users to roam within a room,
Companies like Realtymogul in the $2 trillion real estate industry and Noesis in the $18 billion commercial energy equipment market have seen rapid growth despite a narrow focus. nlike some industries,
A personal craft that can lift off vertically, fly 200 miles and land vertically, all on battery power.
Battery power and battery weight will have to improve dramatically safety systems will have to be developed and anti-collision infrastructure will have to be deployed.
Drones could spur demand for lighter batteries or a different kind of power source. Drones need to see where they are going
Interestingly there is no mention here of using these tiny bits of working muscle muscle that twitches in response to electricity
Sony notes that the phone has a two-day battery life. Sony says the phone is waterproof under a few conditions.
#Kraftwerk Is A Power plant That Fits In The Palm Of Your Hand It looks and acts like a battery pack but kraftwerk is actually the first hand-held fuel cell generator that can regenerate energy in less than 3 seconds.
And it can power all your mobile devices for weeks. kraftwerk which translates to ower stationin German is the product of ezelleron an engineering team that spun out of German research firm Fraunhofer Gesellschaft.
Fuel cell technology has been bandied about since the 1950 (Wikipedia says the first reference to it was in 1838)
but gas and other fossil fuels have eclipsed it as a preferred energy source. The reasons for low adoption of the tech are varied
but it does hold the promise of a cheap clean and efficient source of energy.
It works by converting chemical energy into electricity instead of needing to plug it into the power grid.
This means kraftwerk units can be taken all over the world including vast regions of Earth that aren connected to electricity
There have been a few other fuel cell Kickstarters for powering cellphones but none look as slick as kraftwerk.
The Devotec Micro Fuel Charger a key ring sized fuel cell cellphone charger added about 20-30 minutes of extra talk time
There was also the unsuccessfully funded HALO fuel cell charger. Touted as emergency preparedness for the outdoorsy type with an ipad it was a bit clunky looking.
and turn off your unit to conserve energy and save money. The unit itself is even monitoring temperature and humidity locally,
and Energy for checking what drawing power and switching them on and off remotely. Using Homekit, ios device users with 8. 1 or above can check on all the stats gathered by the Eve from their devices,
Sensors are sold individually at $79. 99 for Eve Room, $49. 95 for Eve Weather, $49. 95 for Eve Energy and $39. 95 for Eve Door & Window,
letting you save energy and maximize comfort in every area. With Homekit ecobee3 owners can group actions together for control via Siri,
or boost your energy with controls on your smartphone. As we reported back in October, the Los Gatos-based startup has raised $13 million to change your mood using electrical stimulation.
calm and energy. Once you begin, you can dial the intensity of the experience up
Instead, it uses tiny pulses of electricity to stimulate the skin at your temple, which then activates the instinctual fight-or-flight response in your brain to indirectly affect emotional response.
I didn have time to try out the Energy mode, but if it works as effectively as the Calm mode, it should make users wired.
I could see myself using it to get that initial boost of energy needed to get to the office
or merchants can charge the reader battery and then connect wirelessly. Charge the battery and connect wirelessly,
or plug it into the Square Stand USB hub. The partnership announcement came during Apple WWDC conference keynote,
and other battery-enabled devices on the go using something that is already abundantly flowing all around us radio waves.
Nikola Labs presented at Techcrunch Disrupt a couple years back with the same idea turning radio frequency signals into battery power.
China also pledged that 20 percent of its energy would come from sources other than fossil-fuels by 2030.
and director of the Tsinghua-MIT China Energy and Climate Project. But economic growth has slowed (it was 7. 7 percent in 2012
and in turn so has growth in demand for energy. Also, this year China government has announced already a plan to reduce air pollution by taxing and limiting coal use.
and assumed that China would accomplish ambitious near-term goals for expanding nuclear power and renewables,
#A Battery to Prop up Renewable Power Hits the Market A new kind of battery that stores energy from solar
long-lived batteries that could make it possible to rely heavily on intermittent, renewable energy sources. Aquion Energy, a company spun out of Carnegie mellon University,
recently delivered the first of its batteries to operators of small power grids, or icrogrids, that can operate independently of the centralized grid.
Microgrids, which typically use local energy sources such as wind solar, and hydropower, could help hundreds of millions of people who live beyond conventional grids get reliable electricity.
Batteries can store power from solar panels or wind turbines to provide round-the-clock power. Alternatively, diesel generators can be used.
Aquion batteries use sodium ions from saltwater as their electrolyte. Electrical current moves through this brackish liquid from positive electrodes based on manganese oxide to negative ones based on carbon.
The batteries are large and operate slowly, but they are manufactured also cheaply, using repurposed manufacturing equipment.
Last week Aquion announced $34. 6 million in funding to help it scale up production. The batteries cost about as much as lead-acid ones
which are used sometimes now, but they last twice as long, effectively cutting the long-term costs in half (see emo:
Storing the Sun. Other long-lived batteries exist, but they cost far more than lead-acid batteries. The new energy storage technology could be crucial to making renewable energy more viable, especially in remote locations.
By making solar power cheaper than diesel fuel in many places, it could help bring clean power to some of the more than one billion people in the world without reliable electricity (see Billion People in the Dark.
As costs come down further, the batteries could find new applications beyond microgrids, including stabilizing conventional power grids as they come to rely more heavily on renewable energy.
The company isn disclosing where its batteries are being usedxcept to say the projects are international a
#Police in California and Texas Test Networked Guns When a police officer draws a firearm he
or she often doesn have an opportunity to radio for backup. Yardarm, a California-based company, is building technology that will automatically alert headquarters in such situations.
The company makes a chip that goes into the handle of a regular firearm and transmits data over a cellphone network connection.
The data transmitted includes the location of a gun and whether it has been discharged unholstered or.
#Will a Breakthrough Solar technology See the Light of Day? The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen.
and an equal number of even smaller solar cells, each the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen.
claims that the next generation of this power unit will make solar power the cheapest option for utilities installing new power plants.
000 of these devices, utilities would produce electricity at less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is even cheaper than today least expensive option:
and has set records for solar-cell efficiencyeaning the amount of energy in sunlight that is converted into electricity.
This year it demonstrated that it could use a version of its technology to make a novel kind of solar cell that,
some believe, could convert half of the energy in sunlight into electricity, about three times better than conventional solar cells.
Semprius must scale up the production of its solar cells significantly. Right now it can make enough solar units to produce six megawatts of power per year,
In the heyday of the solar technology bubble, the ill-fated startup Solyndra raised about $1 billion from venture capitalists
allows Semprius to improve upon a type of solar power called concentrated photovoltaics, which has been around for decades (see ltra-Efficient Solar.
The idea is that you can increase the amount of energy any solar cell gathers by putting lenses over the cell to focus light into it.
Existing versions of this technology might use a lens with an area of about 400 square centimeters and focus it on a one-centimeter solar cell, for a concentration ratio of 400.
Semprius stamp makes it possible to make arrays of solar cells that are far smaller and thinner than the ones that had been used in concentrating photovoltaics.
For the concentrating technology to work the solar cells need to be picked up and arranged in an array
and transfer thousands of the tiny solar cells at once without breaking them, completely changing the economics of using small solar cells.
Small cells have many advantages; because they require little material, they can be made of expensive types of semiconductors that are far more efficient than silicon.
and real estate to generate the same amount of power as a typical solar cell. These advantages,
hat we saw is a way to get to very low costs of electricity. The plan had been for Siemens
but also flooded the market with cheap solar panels. Given the supply of cheap solar panels, it became nearly impossible for companies with alternative technologiesuch as thin film solar
or concentrated photovoltaicso compete. Dozens of promising solar startups failed and the projected market for concentrated photovoltaics shrank,
convincing Siemens to get out of the business, ending the partnership and marking the beginning of hard times for Semprius.
conventional silicon solar panels still have room to become significantly cheaper and more efficient. New ways of manufacturing silicon wafers, the most expensive part of a solar cell, could cut wafer costs in half
or more (see raying for an Energy Miracle. New solar cell designs are edging up their efficiencies.
Such advances might eventually make solar power cheaper than fossil fuels, even without Semprius technology. But silicon-based solar power is not yet there,
and that the opportunity for Semprius. The U s. Energy Information Administration estimates that new solar power plants will produce power at just under 15 cents per kilowatt-hourar higher than the 6. 5 cents per kilowatt-hour for natural gas power.
Thus, if Semprius is right that it will soon have technology to make solar panels capable of producing electricity at around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour,
its technology could be attractive to those planning new power plants. o invention is required, just good, solid engineering,
Burroughs says. So Semprius continues its search for a new investor to scale up its technology.
and contains a wireless modem and eight-hour rechargeable battery which means it could be carried around a store or restaurant if needed.
#Blame the Weather for Last Year s Rise in U s. Carbon dioxide emissions A colder winter was one of the main reasons carbon dioxide emissions from energy use rose in the United states by 2. 5 percent in 2013
, according to new data from the Energy Information Agency. Besides a small rise in the price of natural gas and slightly cheaper coal, the weather played the biggest role in in pushing up emissions,
there were 18 percent more days in 2013 cold enough to cause a spike in demand for energy for heating,
This contributed to an 0. 5 percent increase in the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP,
In addition, the amount of electricity generated using natural gas dropped 10 percent between 2012 and 2013,
More coal and less gas meant a much smaller drop in the U s. energy system arbon intensity?
the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of energy produced. All of this combined to make the carbon intensity of the whole U s. economy,
#Internet-Connected Battery Could Bring Smoke alarms Online A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful:
a nine-volt battery with built-in Wi-fi. The battery can alert you on your smartphone
or the battery itself is about to die. Roost the Sunnyvale California-based company behind the battery plans to sell the batteries starting next year for $25 to $35.
We were approaching the Internet-of-things space not from a perspective of##How can we build a whizzy new device that does something?
Roost has its sights set on other devices battery-powered and not that are excluded currently from the growing throng of connected gadgets.
Roost s first batteries which are based lithium and meant to last for more than five years contain a Wi-fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring.
Using the app you can give a battery a name (like living room or kids bedroom) and connect it to your home Wi-fi
and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm. Right now Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive;
Blackwell expects a battery-sized version to be ready in the spring. Roost plans to go beyond the nine-volt battery in the future##Blackwell says the company is thinking about AA BATTERIES
since they re commonly used in toys and remote controls. He s also thinking about adding other sensors such as an accelerometer or thermometer to the battery o
#This Method of Robotic Pickup Could Stick The sticky effect seen when you rub a balloon on your hair could be used to help robots pick things up,
including jobs that involve handling delicate materials such as thin semiconductors for new, advanced solar cells. But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.
and its stored energy is used then to aid the more tiring motion of pulling the body upward.
Walking though a seemingly simple act is still largely mysterious using energy in a very economical manner that is difficult to re-create in robotics.
and ankle prosthesis that behaves as he puts it more like a motorcycle than a bicycle meaning that it puts energy into the system rather than relying solely on human power.
The Biom T2 uses a battery to power a system of microprocessors sensors springs and actuators;
They also designed it to minimize the battery at the calf to keep it from getting in the way of dance steps.
and by lowering the energy costs of walking reduce joint stress and fatigue. But bringing bionic devices into the clinic is not easy.
or two battery charges a day for instance so Herr and his colleagues are working to make prosthetic devices smaller lighter quieter and more efficient.
But he recently worked with Herr on a far more minimalistic approach focusing solely on providing mechanical power to the ankle to reduce the energy it needs for walking.
and powered by a wearable battery pack is the first exoskeleton that can actually lower the metabolic costs of walking as demonstrated in a study published this May in the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation.
Lockheed martin s announcement last week that it had developed secretly a promising design for a compact nuclear fusion reactor has met with excitement but also skepticism over the basic feasibility of its approach.
Nuclear fusion could produce far more energy far more cleanly than the fission reactions at the heart of today s nuclear power plants.
which the hydrogen nuclei fuse together at levels that release a useful amount of energy.
In decades of research nobody has produced yet more energy from fusion reaction experiments than was required to conduct the experiments in the first place.
Tom Mcguire project lead of the Lockheed effort said in an interview that the company has come up with a compact design called a high beta fusion reactor based on principles of so-called magnetic mirror confinement.
Lockheed said the test reactor is only two meters long by one meter wide far smaller than existing research reactors.
In a smaller reactor you can iterate generations quicker incorporate new knowledge develop faster and make riskier design choices.
If successful the program could produce a reactor that might fit in a tractor-trailer and produce 100 megawatts of power he said.
The small team developing the reactor at the company s skunkworks in Palmdale California has done 200 firings with plasma Mcguire said
The company is even talking about how fusion reactors could one day power ships and planes.
Ian Hutchinson a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the principal investigators at the MIT fusion research reactor says the type of confinement described by Lockheed had long been studied without much success. Hutchinson says he was only
Lockheed joins a number of other companies working on smaller and cheaper types of fusion reactors. These include Tri-Alpha a company based near Irvine California that is testing a linear-shaped reactor;
Helion Energy of Redmond Washington which is developing a system that attempts to use a combination of compression and magnetic confinement of plasma;
and Lawrenceville Plasma physics in Middlesex New jersey which is working on a reactor design that uses what s known as a dense plasma focus.
Another startup General Fusion based in Vancouver British columbia tries to control plasma using pistons to compress a swirling mass of molten lead
and other stimuli such as light and electricity have been around for decades. You can find them in cars airplanes robots and medical implants.
While these carbon-capture processes have previously been tested in power plants cement plants differ because their emissions include much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide plus more dust and other contaminants.
#An Industrial-Size Generator That Runs on Waste Heat, Using No Fuel Power plants waste huge amounts of energy as heat about 40 to 80 percent of the total in the fuel they burn.
Thermoelectric materials which convert heat into electricity have been around for decades but they have always been too expensive to use outside extreme situations in spacecraft for example.
Matt Scullin the CEO of Alphabet Energy the startup that developed the new device says connecting it to the exhaust pipe of a 1000-kilowatt generator will yield enough electricity to save 52500 liters of diesel fuel a year for a reduction
Alphabet Energy s system is modular meaning it could be scaled up to make use of larger amounts of waste heat.
The company is also developing another thermoelectric material based on silicon nanowires that could convert a higher percentage of the energy in waste heat to electricity.
#Lighting Sheets Would Use Half as much Power as Lightbulbs The next big thing in lighting could be glowing sheets that use half as much energy as an equivalent fluorescent fixture
Hydrogen gas has a poor energy density by volume compared to petrol. In fact, there is at least 60 percent more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline then there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen.
and this takes energy. Worse, the materials tend to physically break down as the number of charging cycles increase beyond 100 or so.
#A Promising Step Toward Round-the-clock Solar power If solar power is to become a primary source of electricity around the world,
wel need cheap ways to store energy from the sun when it isn shining. A paper published in the journal Science this week reports a major step toward such a system.
and efficiently converts the energy in sunlight into hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel
Switzerland, along with colleagues in Korea and Singapore, built a device that uses electricity and catalyst materials to make hydrogen and oxygen from water.
relatively high-voltage solar cells to generate the needed electricity, along with inexpensive new catalyst materials based on nickel and iron for two electrodesne produces hydrogen
The solar cells use an inexpensive and easily manufactured material known as perovskite, which has been generating excitement in the research community
The solar water splitter stores 12.3 percent of the energy in sunlight in the form of hydrogen.
but consider that most solar cells convert only 16 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity,
without the added step of turning that energy into easy-to-store hydrogen. More work is needed before the device can be practical.
For one thing, it only lasts a few hours before the solar cell performance quickly drops off. Researchers aren sure why perovskite materials degrade quickly
or improving the way the solar cells are sealed against the elements. Researchers recently demonstrated a perovskite solar cell that lasted over a month
#The Coming Era Of Self-Assembly Using Microfluidic Devices When it comes to building microscopic devices,
but the big challenge is the amount of energy the devices use. The Harvard prototype is much sleeker than most exoskeletons.
and battery-powered motors move cables to pull up on the heel or on part of the leg near the hip##adding a propelling tug at just the right moment as the wearer steps forward.
and testing people s energy consumption as they use it. He is also hoping for advances in batteries to help lighten the load further.
Whereas a person can walk 3. 5 miles using the energy in a single cookie an electric bike requires a battery weighing 10 times as much to travel the same distance.
Energy storage is still a challenge he says
#Gene-Silencing Drugs Finally Show Promise The disease starts with a feeling of increased clumsiness.
If researchers can figure out how to make the stuff in large quantities it could be used as a structural material for making planes and trucks as well as in battery electrodes.
The new materials might be particularly interesting for use in batteries notes Nicholas Fang a mechanical engineer at MIT who is also working on nanostructured ceramics.
and are lightweight a combination that could make for a fast-charging battery that stores a lot of energy in a convenient package.
In fact Greer says she is collaborating with German electronics company Bosch to apply her designs to lithium-air batteries i
like a minuscule light bulb. Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible. They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.
This is tricky because different layershe battery the electronics, and the touch componentsend to be stacked, and the innermost layers have to bend more than the outermost ones.
Making a flexible battery is another challenge. While the lithium-polymer batteries used in smartphones today are somewhat flexible
they can survive being bent many times. One option is to make a segmented battery, like a segmented watch band, says Kevin Chen,
general manager for energy storage solutions at Applied materials. His company is developing solid-state batteries, which could easily be cut up into small pieces for flexible devices,
and which also have the potential to store much more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries (see onger-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices.
Apple outlines a similar battery design in another recent patent application. Steady progress means fully flexible devices could be available in just a few years.
Meanwhile we have flexible displays that are fixed in places in the Apple Watch r
#A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.
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