22 Mar, 2016

Energy innovations to save you money (and keep you warm at work!)

Renewable Energy & Energy Efficiency | UNITED STATES | 15 Mar, 2016
Published by : Care To Trade

ARPA-E is a little known arm of the U.S. Department of Energy that has invested $1.3 billion into new energy technologies since launching in 2010. The projects ARPA-E has backed have also attracted more than $1.25 billion from the private sector.

And ARPA-E is getting a 20% funding boost this year thanks to Mission Innovation, the commitment by President Obama and 19 other world leaders to increase government invest in clean energy.

At a summit last week in Washington, D.C., funding recipients and other innovators got to show off their inventions and ideas. Here are five of the most interesting projects showcased.

A fleet of solar-powered motorcycles ... in a box

Imagine four solar-powered motorcycles coming out of the same box -- that also happens to double as a charging station and a shipping container.

That's what Current Motor has created: a mini fleet-in-a-box.

"We wanted to marry electric vehicles with solar," Current Motor Executive Chair Lauren Flanagan said at the ARPA-E conference.

The charging station -- which has expandable solar panels -- can also locate the motorcycles via GPS as well as track carbon savings.

Current Motor is currently taking orders for the product, which is intended for use by businesses, first responders and the military.

The bikes can carry 450 lbs, reach 70 mph, and travel 50 miles between charges.

The office chair with a thermostat

The office is never the right temperature. Too hot? Too cold? How do you keep everyone happy?

The Center for the Built Environment -- a research collaboration with UC Berkeley -- came up with a solution: Make everyone's office chair a personal heating and cooling system.

The chairs can reduce energy consumption by as much 60% and are a low-power alternative to keeping the entire space at a "room temperature" that not everyone agrees on. (It runs on a battery that's recharged about twice a week.)

A prototype of the chair was showed off at the ARPA-E conference, but Personal Comfort Systems has a license to produce a commercially available version, David Lehrer at CBE said.

It was previously manufactured by Tempronics and retailed for about $1,000, according to the company.

The instant energy audit for your office space

You're probably wasting a lot of energy and don't even realize it. Energy audits are meant to identify ways to improve efficiency and save on utility bills -- but they're usually time-consuming and invasive.

Indoor Reality wants to change all that. It built a wearable machine (about the size of a camping backpack) that uses sensors to collect relevant data as an auditor goes through a building. It also creates a 3D map, simply by walking room to room.

The corresponding computer program can identify problem areas and give recommendations on how to save on electric, heating and cooling bills.

Avideh Zakhor, Indoor Reality's cofounder and CEO, actually invented 3D mapping, which is now used to create video games and street-level views on Google Earth.

"You can do the same kind of energy audit that would have taken a week in an hour or so," Zakhor said in a video interview.

The immortal battery

San Francisco-based Alveo Energy is developing a battery that it says could last forever.

What's so special about this battery? Typicallys the energy produced for electricity -- whether it's from a solar panel, wind turbine or a coal plant -- has to be consumed immediately. Electric grids haven't had a lot of ways to efficiently or cost-effectively store energy.

All batteries eventually stop working, and ones that are big enough to provide adequate backup storage are typically very expensive.

But Alveo says its "radical new" battery can be charged and recharged without degrading.

The company says it's also cost competitive because it uses simple ingredients like sodium -- essentially table salt -- and Prussian blue, which is a pigment that can be sourced from blue jeans, paint and crayons.

Dr. Colin Wessells, the startup's founder and CEO, said he plans to have the product ready for testing in about two years.

"If we're successful with this battery technology, what you can imagine is a world where solar and wind and other renewable resources can be deployed much more widely," Wessells said in an video for ARPA-E.

The robotic farmer changing biofuels forever

You've probably heard of biofuels -- plants that are converted into fuel and have the potential to replace gasoline.

But there's a problem: Plants take energy to grow and to be converted into a usable fuel. And that makes biofuels more expensive and resource-draining than traditional fuels.

But machines like this one -- created by the Danforth Plant Science Center -- and a plant called sorghum could change all that.

With an $8 million investment from ARPA-E, Danforth created a robot that uses a variety of sensors to pinpoint which plants in a field are thriving while using the least amount of resources.

That information could allow the farmers to breed super-plants that are cheaper and more efficient to grow. That could finally make biofuels cost-competitive with gasoline.

"We can see that the potential answer is within reach in just a matter of years," Tod Mockler of the Donald Danforth Center said in a video highlighting the project.

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Images & Article by Jackie Wattles from CNN Money