Alternative Power

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Initial Ideas

Stirling Engine

Thermoelectric

  • Forum for the Future’s Head of Built Environment, Martin Hunt, notes that “Geothermal technologies have been around for a long time and are commercially viable. It looks like this application of heat recapture technology will only make sense in busy public spaces, but if the numbers stack up I can see it could be used on a wider scale.”
  • http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~khirata/academic/kiriki/begin/history.html

History of Thermoelectrics

Sundholm and his colleague Klas Johansson stumbled upon the idea while drawing on a crinkled napkin during a coffee break two years ago. "[The excess body heat] was previously just let out into the air. We thought we could do something with it," says Johansson, head of Jernhusen's environmental division. Both men are optimistic about the possible future uses of the technology: if they can figure out how to harness excess body heat on a mass scale, it could offer a significantly cheaper way to heat homes and reduce carbon emissions. Sundholm says the aim is to one day transfer body heat generated in residential areas at night to office buildings in the morning, and back again in the afternoon. "It could even be our next project," he says.

But it may not be as easy as it sounds. One obstacle is that the buildings need to be close together for the engineering to work. "It is very hard to move low-temperature heat very far. The buildings would have to be very close together by 100 to 200 yards and they would have had to really do some magnificent engineering to make sure they were not using more energy to pump the hot air over in the train station into the office building," says Lester Lane, director of Carnegie Mellon University's Green Design Initiative. (Sundholm says his system does not require more energy to move the heat than what is produced.) In addition, Lane says, countries like the U.S., where energy is not as expensive as it is in Sweden, may not see the same financial benefits after investing in the insulation, pipes and pumps. Furthermore, if people don't regularly turn up to the train station or other high-density place where the energy is being derived, there won't be enough body heat to fuel the heating systems.

With its freezing winters, ecologically minded citizenry and high energy costs, Sweden has long taken a creative approach to heating its homes. Last year, the city found a novel way to generate energy by burning the carcasses of rabbits that had been culled from local parks to keep the critters' numbers in check. "Sweden has always been very good at engineering and energy," says Ulla Hamilton, Stockholm's deputy mayor, who is heavily involved in the capital's environmental, waste and recycling plans. She attributes this to the Swedish lifestyle. "Most Stockholmers have families living in the countryside so they have a specific relationship towards nature," Hamilton says. "Because of this, sustainability is a large part of our culture."

Wireless Electricity

Energy Harvesting

  • Rectenna - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectenna
  • "There is nothing in this that would have prevented them inventing this 10 or even 20 years ago," commented Professor Sir John Pendry of Imperial College London who has seen the experiments. "But I think there is an issue of time. In the last few years we have seen an exponential growth of mobile devices that need power. The power cable is the last wire to be cut in a wireless connection." - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6725955.stm
  • monitoring neurons in brain, brain's electricity is only 20-100 microvolts, too small, but one person did map it out to produce an epilepsy song
  • body heat, joule thief, thermoelectrics

Getting closer

  • Designing a fictional history in which an artist is contracted to redesign an electrical company. the artwork is the redesign of the organisation which will design the next electrical company and generator product. a slightly decentralised solution. it needs to be mass production, scalable.
  • Franchising, turn key operation
  • a world in which stirling engine and other thermoelectrics were more popular?
  • blinking? smart grid? electromechanical? energy pulse? micropeltier? galvanic skin response? GSR, conductive ink, carbon ink - http://www.cooking-hacks.com/documentation/tutorials/ehealth-biometric-sensor-platform-arduino-raspberry-pi-medical
  • emphasis on building design to bring people together, festival hlall, mass events, mass rapid transport?
  • energy harvesting + wireless energy transmission (distributed generation) -> driving forward miniaturisation -> providing infinite power to the internet of things
  • good points of wireless energy is that it has a long operating life and no battery maintenance with this
  • ubiquitous computing, little or no human intervention
  • Deptford Power Station was a coal-fired power station on the south bank of the River Thames at Deptford, south east London and is regarded as the first modern high-voltage power station in the world. The need to lay distribution cables across the streets of numerous local authorities stirred up a Board of Trade Inquiry, and concerns about the wisdom of concentrating so much generating capacity at a single site.
  • Sure, one *could* use batteries instead of capacitors, possibly relying on the household bank of batteries that nearly all off-grid homes use for when their solar / electric / wind power isn't available, but discharging batteries excessively quickly can cause two bad effects: electrolysis of the electrolye (the water in the battery acid turns to H2 and O2), and heat creation in the batteries (boiling of electrolyte, melting of the casing, etc.). In fact, this is one of the big reasons why some off-grid homes poorly handle peak loads.
  • The industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio bands are radio bands (portions of the radio spectrum) reserved internationally for the use of radio frequency (RF) energy for industrial, scientific and medical purposes other than telecommunications.[1] Examples of applications in these bands include radio-frequency process heating, microwave ovens, and medical diathermy machines. The powerful emissions of these devices can create electromagnetic interference and disrupt radio communication using the same frequency, so these devices were limited to certain bands of frequencies. In general, communications equipment operating in these bands must tolerate any interference generated by ISM equipment, and users have no regulatory protection from ISM device operation.

writing

http://www.amazon.com/Brave-New-World-Aldous-Huxley/dp/sitb-next/0060850523/ref=sbx_txt#textstats

exposition rising action - disaster 1 conflict - disaster 2 climax - disaster 3 falling action resolution – ending

See also

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