No matter what you get for your loved ones this Christmas, you're likely to need some batteries for it. Whether the devices comes with on-board in a proprietary casing, or a "batteries no included" label, it's important to consider what juices your gifts.

First Rule of Holiday Power Supplies: Never buy anything that has standard batteries included. Alkalines are evill and, if they're included with a device, they are likely also horribly cheap and inadequate.

Second Rule: Avoid Alkalines. At all costs! Anything that is expensive, made of heavy metals and disposable is bad for you, your bank account and the environment. You don't have to bother as much with recycling if you use can re-use your batteries.

Third Rule: If you do use alkalines, buy an alkaline recharger. "Alkaline recharger?"  you ask?  Yes, they do exist, and though they're fairly expensive, they're great if you can remember to never charge them all the way down. At that point, the batteries become unusable. But if you keep some juice in them all the time, you'll have the batteries for 10 to 15 times longer.

Fourth Rule: Try to Stick with the standards. While on-board proprietary battery packs often provide more power per gram, they are more expensive to produce, and thus more expensive to replace. They're also a heck of a lot harder for the recycling folks to handle. If you're not dealing with a super-high powered, necessarily light-weight device, it's best to buy something that can take AA or AAAs.

 

And the Final Rule: PRECHARGE. There's nothing worse than that three-hour Christmas morning charge, when you know you've got a fancy new digicam, but you can't actually use it because the gift giver didn't have the courtesy to pre-charge some batteries for you.

Of course, the precharge can now be avoided if you include some Hybrio's on your christmas list. These standard-size rechargeable NiMH's hold their charge as well as alkalines and thus can be used the moment you open the package.

Finally, here's my battery ranking based on cost, performance, toxicity and recyclability.

1. Li-ion
2. NiMH
3. NiCD
4. Lead Acid (which you probably will never see anyway)
5. Alkaline

Note: Li-ion batteries do come in standard sizes, but shouldn't be used in unapproved devices.

All across the world, we've submerged forests. Huge areas of productive lands are buried beneath massive amounts of water every time we build a dam. And while we've mostly stopped building dams in America, those forests are still down there, preserved for decades, completely unproductive even as fish habitat.

One might ask "why didn't we clear-cut the forests before we damed the rivers." But Triton Logging is asking, and answering, a better question: "Why don't we clear-cut them now."

Triton Logging has created a submersible lumberjack, the Sawfish, which can latch itself onto the base of a submerged tree, and cut it 'down.'  I use quotation marks here because, in this case, the tree will actually be cut upwards. The sawfish connects inflatable bags to the trees, ensuring that, Instead of falling, the tree floats to the surface, where it can easily be floated to onshore processing plants.

Estimates of submerged timber in British Columbia alone reach five billion board-feet (7.5 billion feet of  2x4s) and the worldwide value of submerged timber approaches $50 billion.  A pretty good business opportunity, but it has yet to be seen if the sawfish, with it's multiple operators and high introductory cost, can make harvesting of long-dead forests profitable. But if it can, I'm planning on never buying wood from any other source.

 

Via TreeHugger

The Department of Energy has just confirmed that Boeing-Spectrolab has produced a solar cell that will convert sunlight to electricity at 40% efficiency. Boeing-Spectrolab has long been the leader in high-efficiency, high-cost solar panels. They've achieved 40% efficiency by using 'multijunction' solar cells that basically have several layers of photovoltaics, each one absorbing a different set of wavelengths of light.

The bad news is that cheaper solar cells, while creating less electricity per unit of sunlight, create more electricity per unit of moola. So, while the DOE press release talks a lot about hoping this will usher in 3 cent per watt solar, the chances of that are really really unlikely.

Applications in high-density solar industries (space, mostly) abound, but we might not see 40% efficiency on Earth for quite a long time.

Via the DOE

I'm not really the type for lawn art or even Christmas lights. But I've got nothing against them. OK, yes I do, they're a god-awful waste of energy. But they don't have to be! Check out this listing from the American Inventor Spot of solar powered Christmas decorations and I will officially stop giving you such a hard time.

Daaaamn....this is a sweet machine. LG has just won the prestigious Red Dot design Award for this concept laptop called the Ebook.

Now, this isn't actually an ebook, nor is it actually available for purchase, but I think it's a good example of things to come. First, the device uses an OLED display, which is more efficient in use, and also takes less energy to produce. Additionally, it's brighter, thinner and lighter (not to mention much more expensive).

Second, instead of the traditional Li-ion battery pack, this thing uses a methanol fuel cell (the bubbly blue tube is the methanol tank.)  Though picking up a pack of methanol tanks is definitely less convenient than plugging the device into the wall, it certainly makes for a prettier and more environmentally sensitive design.

Via Coolest Gadgets

I know this isn't officially a politics blog, but I like Al Gore, I believe that he is an EcoGeek, and I would love to have an EcoGeek president.

Check out this interview. The guy asks Gore a couple of very interesting questions to which Gore gives very interesting answers.

 

 

The second interesting question first: If climate change is such a big deal, then couldn't you pretty much save the world by becoming president?  Isn't that a good enough reason to run?

Gore answered "I think it's still to early, I can't use that answer for much longer." But it isn't an answer he's been using for very long. At the beginning of An Inconvenient Truth, he didn't use that answer at all. It was a flat "no," which only transformed into a "maybe" a few months ago.

 

Gore was also asked about the Iraq War, and basically whether he, as president,  would retreat defeated from the Iraq War. Instead of using his famous "Bus Crashed, Fire Bus Driver" metaphor, he stumbled, said some incoherent B.S. and then moved onto the next question.

It was like Y2K Gore All Over Again!  What he's doing here is trying to seem more thoughtful about Iraq, a very divisive issue, while relying on climate change to be his main bedfellow. What he's actually doing is looking like a total weenie again, which is exactly what lost him the election in 2000. So Gore is officially campaigning, and he's officially looking like a dipstick doing it....alas.

While the cheesy photoshopped graphics from SkySail were cool, seeing these things attached to a real live barge (in choppy seas nonetheless) is much more impressive.

We've talked about the SkySail before, including them in the 'extremely old technology returns' category. But, honestly, these things are pretty advanced. Every SkySail sold comes with a software and hardware package used for optimizing efficiency of an ocean voyage.

The SkySail system can save up to 20% of fuel costs by harnessing the power of the wind on ocean voyages. The 500,000 to 2.5m euro devices can pay for themselves in as little as two year's time. That time period will also likely go down as the Sails get cheaper and fuel prices continue to rise. Already, 30 barges on the open ocean are using the system, and the firm predicts they will be in use on over 1,500 vessels by 2015.

 

Via YahooNews

 

 

Last month, we pointed out a AA size battery that could be recharged when plugged in to a USB port.

Now, a company called Ecosol has introduced a USB charged portable battery called the Powerstick. It's about the same size as a USB memory stick, and although it doesn't contain any flash memory, it's almost as smart. It contains a lithium polymer battery (a probable successor technology to lithium ion). It does not fit into electronic devices directly, but instead is used to recharge a whole range of phones, MP3 players, cell phones, PDAs, etc. using different power tips.

The thing we like best about the Powerstick is that it has a display on its side to show how much power the battery has remaining. It's one more step to make it easier to kick the "disposable" battery habit and use rechargable power for all our electronic devices.

via: Treehugger

While at the L.A. Auto Show last week, I had a chance to talk with Nick Zielinski, GMs director of Vehicle Technology Integration, and JB Straubel, the CTO of Tesla Motors. While conversing with each of these extremely well informed folks, I brought up supercapacitors.

Both of these guys are heavily reliant on battery technology and both of them are putting varying amounts of faith in Lithium Ion batteries. Obviously, it's working well for Tesla, and we can hope it will work well for GM.

When asked about supercapacitors, both men had the same response: Supercaps represent interesting technology, but they cannot replace batteries, and using them to augment batteries is too complex.

So, what on earth are Zenn and Eestor talking about when they discuss large cars that can run for hundreds of miles at high speeds using only power stored in supercapacitors? The answer is that NO ONE KNOWS what they're talking about. It's possible that not even Eestor knows what it's talking about. Maybe it's all a lie, maybe the scientific secret is just waiting for it's day in the light.

So now, I know two things for certain, 1.If Zenn's claims turn out to be true, it will be a marvelous leap forward. 2. People in the know are very skeptical that Zenn's claims will turn out to be true.

I'm really not sure, but if you want to save up to $100 bucks a year on your electricity bill, while doing your part to mitigate environmental impacts of computing, you should check out LocalCooling.

LocalCooling provides a really simple application that introduces some powerful power-saving functionality to Windows XP. The system also catalogs how much power it saves and sends that information back to the website. The software actually reads your system information so it knows exactly how much power your system draws. And, thus, exactly how much power can be saved by spinning down your hard disks, turning off your monitor and

That way, the LocalCooling site can keep track of how much power the software has saved (so far, around 6000 kwh.) The goal of LocalCooling is to be installed on 100,000,000 PCs across the world and thus prevent the release of 300 billion kilograms of CO2 per year.

I'm happy to be a part of it, you should try it out too.

 

Having a somewhat disturbing connection with my PC, I have often thought, "Wouldn't it be nice if I had to work out to work." For example, if my mouse weighed 50 lbs, I could probably be a champion arm wrestler in a month's time.

But, instead, I become softer for every minute I spend at this computer, and I spend a lot of minutes here. This YouTube video that I spotted at ecoIron shows a pretty impressive pedal power generating system. The beefy guy on the left does all the work, while the guy behind the camera, one can assume, put together the electronics for the system. They're using an ultracapacitor, it seems, to store and regulate the charge, and have a "watts up" power meter measuring the draw from the device. Zack, the pedaler, seems to have no problem keeping up the 20-30 watts it takes to power the IBM Thinkpad.

I would pay a lot of money for a desk chair that had a keyboard and mouse pad and pedals. The Pedal Chair: Stay fit, use renewable power, and strengthen the man-machine interface. No one was ever this ready for the apocalypse.

Via TechEBlog

 

That was me trying to fit a story into a headline and I think I did a pretty good job. The only really important number I left out was 2007, which is when the first 500 vehicles will be made available by Phoenix Motorcars, a California Company that specializes in all-electric vehicles.

The cars are powered by Lithium Ion batteries, which are somehow (this technology is getting very advances (and confusing)) significantly different from the ones used by Tesla and consumer electronics companies. Advanced battery technology is the keystone of the electric car right now. They weren't good enough when the EV1 came out, and now we have to worry that the expanded potential of Li-ion comes with the risk of 'thermal runaway events,' that could melt a cars to the pavement. This SUV, though expensive, can charge in 6 - 7 hours at any electrical socket, and could easily save thousands of dollars a year in gasoline costs.

I have a really hard time figuring how these small start-ups can do this, while large auto-companies can't manage an extra 50 miles of range, crash test the thing, and bring it to market. In the next five years, I bet we'll see it, but it really shouldn't have taken us this long...

 

Via Engadget