Offshore wind farms in the United States are the new flying car. We keep saying that it's just around the corner but somehow practical results never manifest. Europe has 2,488 offshore wind turbines up and running, with 408 installed in the last year; this nation has a grand total of zero. (U-S-A! U-S-... ah, forget it.) However, a plucky new company could soon change that.
The Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Project in Nevada is set to come online in March. Once completed, it will use thousands of mirrors to focus sunlight on a tower, melting millions of pounds of salt contained inside. The molten salt will heat water into steam, which then turns turbines and generates electricity without any carbon byproducts. There's just one little problem: During a test run on January 14, the intense heat from the mirrors reportedly incinerated and/or vaporized more than 100 birds.
What if you could replenish your phone's battery while you were nowhere near the electrical grid? Sure, there are plenty of external power packs that will do this kind of thing, but what if you also didn't need to recharge those from the grid? Then you'd have the crowdfunded Kraftwerk, a clever charging device that draws its power from gas instead.
If there are enough clear summer days in a row, Bye Aerospace's Sun Flyer may just live up to its name and charge in sunlight. Bye just sold twenty of their distinctive training airplanes to the Spartan College of Aeronautics and Technology. If the Sun Flyers take off, they could signal a future of more sustainable flying.
Charismatic futurist and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku worked the audience of tech journalists and bloggers in Las Vegas, eloquently espousing benefits of a so-called hydrogen society that Toyota hopes to spur with its Mirai fuel-cell vehicle, set to go on sale later this year.
