Nesscap Ultracapacitors

What I find most welcome about this item is that it represents direct competition for EEStor. While some find the claims made hard to swallow, that is really not the issue.

One can make an ultracapacitor out of ball bearing sized capacitors if one wished it. It simply would store way too little energy. Reducing the size of the little balls increases contained power density as an inverse power ratio. Thus cutting the size in half should increase power by eight. I am sure that this is not totally complete but I would be very surprised to not find a cubed variable in the relevant equation’s denominator.

Thus the secret to making useful ultracapacitors is to manufacture the right moon dust. EEStor has convincingly done just that as confirmed by independent lab work.

Their optimism suggests that they have a good protocol for making devices from this moon dust. After all, they have had years to figure it out. The challenge is and was to produce the sizing needed to achieve performance.

The drawing here is showing the same thing.

This means that others are now fully in the hunt to produce these devices and that surely means their commercialization is close.

September 30, 2009

South Korean company Nesscap Claim Ultracapacitors with 10 times the Power and Lifetime of Batteries

http://nextbigfuture.com/2009/09/south-korean-company-nesscap-claim.html

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Nesscap Inc., a South Korean-based ultracapacitor manufacturing and power storage solutions company, announced today that it has closed a bridge financing round in the amount of $9 million.

Nesscap ultracapacitor information

* High energy density (2.7V 5000F Prismatic : 5.8Wh/kg, 7.1Wh/l)

Which is not that special.

Experimental electric double-layer capacitors from the MIT LEES project have demonstrated densities of 30 W·h/kg and appear to be scalable to 60 W·h/kg in the short term, while EEStor claims their examples will offer capacities about 400 W·h/kg. For comparison, a conventional lead-acid battery is typically 30 to 40 W·h/kg and modern lithium-ion batteries are about 160 W·h/kg.

The Nesscap ultracapacitor is an Electric Double Layer Capacitor (EDLC) that uses an activated carbon powder and coating process, common in the battery industry, to prepare electrodes as opposed to using a higher-cost carbon cloth or other manufactured carbon structures. The Nesscap ultracapacitor's high energy density is made possible through the use of a proprietary binder formulation and specially developed electrode-making process. For Nesscap ultracapacitor cells above 1000 Farad, cell structure and process technology have been optimized to achieve a major reduction in equivalent series resistance (ESR). The 5000F/2.7V Nesscap ultracapacitor exhibits energy densities of 5.8Wh/kg & 7.1Wh/l and power densities of 5.2KW/kg & 6.4KW/l.

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Earth2tech.com reports Nesscap, founded back in 2001, says its ultracapacitors can deliver 10 times more power and last 10 times longer than standard batteries, and can store more energy than other commercially available ultracapacitors. The startup is targeting energy storage for consumer electronics, renewable energy on the power grid, and vehicles and sells ultracapacitor in both cells and modules that vary in size and power.

Do not see where Nesscap is claiming new products with a stated figure for Wh/kg.

The highest ultracapacitor energy storage claims are the MIT work and carbon aerogel capacitors have achieved 325 J/g (90 Wh/kg) energy density and 20 W/g power density.

Ultracapacitors tested by UC Davis in 2009

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Lithium Batteries tested by UC Davis

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Ethanol Surprise

This is a big surprise. What it means is that ethanol jumps as an alternative to diesel for long haul transportation.

This is good news because batteries are not anyone’s first choice for hauling tonnage across country.

This also sounds like superior performance will make the transition highly attractive.

Thus in the last two days, ethanol and bio jet fuel have proven superior operating performance when the opposite had been accepted. We now have a compelling case for speedy transition in both sectors.

Everyone is expecting a long transition between technologies to take place. I am not so conservative. The advent of the EEStor super capacitor or its equivalent at anything approaching a reasonable price point will put a new battery car in everyone’s garage inside of two years as everyone doubles up on vehicles. Fuel based systems will become hanger queens rather quickly and remain as a second choice.

Transitioning the long haul business will be slower as the need is not nearly as compelling. You must still buy fuel so waiting to trade into a new vehicle works just fine.

Ethanol Carbon Footprint With Diesel Efficiency?

Written by Gavin D.J. Harper
Monday, 25 May 2009

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2765/69/

Biofuels may just be a transitional technology - by the time affordable battery electric vehicles and fuel cell cars come out, we may no longer need them. But biofuels are developing, too, and as they improve, they present themselves as a better way to "green the masses".

Ricardo, an international automotive engineering design firm, has designed a technology that allows engines powered by ethanol to approach levels of efficiency hitherto only afforded to diesel engines, wiping the floor with poor gasoline engine efficiency. It's called by it's acronym "EBDI" or ethanol boosted direct injection. The thing about ethanol is that it has subtly different properties to gasoline, which manufacturers have been slow to exploit. For example, it is a higher octane fuel, and has a higher heat of vapourisation.

Rather than taking a "performance hit" of approximately 30% as many so-called "flex fuel" cars do, EBDI capitalises on the differences in the fuel properties. In part the technology works by using higher levels of turbocharging than would be possible in a conventional petrol engine - forcing extra air into the cylinder, creating a denser charge. It also uses the best of current gasoline engine technology - direct injection, variable valve timing and optimised ignition. The prototype engine is a 3.2L V6. Whilst it's only a temporary solution, any technologies that can help us minimise carbon emissions whilst we transition to alow carbon alternatives is a welcome development.

Ten Inconvenient Truths on Oil & Gas

Chis Nelder, who I have quoted before has compiled this list about the oil industry. I am much more optimistic, only because the resources have been found to advance all technologies simultaneously and they are visibly paying of. I have never seen such a flood of breakthroughs and the transition time from discovery to commercial product is visibly dropping. Governments are barely involved except to cater to some preferred constituent.

Everyone accepts that we are exiting the oil energy protocol and we are doing this now before it bites us again.

Things that I spoke about a year ago in the face of little enthusiasm are now trumpeted on the front page. Plenty of work had been progressing behind the scenes and the 2008 oil jolt and the credit collapse flushed all that work out into the media spotlight.

If EEStor is successful, then the conversion will be abrupt. If not, we are still going to get to the same place within a few short years.
Multiple nuclear protocols are been now tried on and our coverage has revealed just now fast that sector will be able to ramp up.

If fusion energy is to work, we are now going to find out soon. If it works, then all grid energy will convert to fusion energy just as fast as it can be imagined since every other method will be more costly

Ten Inconvenient Truths

Allow me then to stake out a bit of middle ground, based on what I believe to be the objective facts, in an effort to bring the parties together and perhaps make some actual progress on the policy front.

1. We have extracted nearly all of the world's easy, cheap oil and gas, and now we're getting down to the difficult, expensive stuff. The largest untapped resources that remain are in extreme places like deepwater and the Arctic, and marginal formations like shale. As a result, global oil production has for all intents and purposes peaked. Natural gas production will also peak in 10 to 15 years. Neither technology nor high prices will change that. Therefore we must begin to replace those fuels with renewables, and use what remains much more efficiently, with the expectation that most of the world's oil and gas will be gone by the end of this century.


2. Drilling for oil and gas drilling in the OCS and ANWR must and will be done; our need for those fuels is simply too great to pass them up. An additional 2-3 mbpd will put a dent in the roughly 12 mbpd we now import, but if we drill for it now, it won't come to market for 10 years or more. By that time, it probably won't even compensate for the depletion of conventional oil in North America, nor will it do much to reduce prices. But it will be crucially necessary, and producing it won't make an ugly mess of the environment.


3. Renewables are clearly the long-term answer, as is an all-electric infrastructure that runs on its clean power. However, it will likely take over 30 years for renewables to ramp up from a less than 2% share of primary energy today to 20% or more. They probably won't even be able to fill the gap created by the decline of fossil fuels. Oil and gas currently provide about 58% of the world's primary energy, and they will remain our primary fuels for a long time to come.


4. It will take many decades to reconfigure out transportation systems to run on electricity. It will take decades to fix our wasteful, leaky built environment so that it doesn't need as much energy to begin with. None of the solutions will come quickly or easily.


5. Neither renewables nor fossil fuels nor nuclear power alone can bring "energy independence." Indeed, if independence means isolating ourselves from the rest of the world's energy commerce, it might not even be desirable.


6. We must pursue all sources of energy immediately and aggressively if we hope to meet our future needs, and pitting one against another is counterproductive.


7. Nuclear power will not grow significantly in the next several decades, as nearly all of the existing reactors will need to be decommissioned within the next 20 years, and a new generation of reactors must be built to replace them. After we do that, a renaissance for next-generation nuclear energy may be a possibility but it will only happen after we have confronted the crises of peak oil and peak gas. It may produce no net reduction in emissions at all.


8. It is quite possible that even our best efforts on all fronts will not achieve the carbon emission targets we have set. Climate change must be confronted via a unified policy on emissions and energy supply, which is to say that in our zeal to control emissions, we take care not to squelch the production of the oil and gas that constitutes the majority of our energy supply, at least until we have something to replace it. To do so could have unintended and paradoxical consequences, like impeding the manufacture of renewable energy devices, and contributing to tight supply situations that once again cause fossil fuel prices to skyrocket and further damage the economy. Rather than emphasizing the uncertainty on climate change data, and fomenting fear about the cost of mitigation, all sides must come together in a depoliticized dialogue strictly based on neutral scientific analysis.


9. We should use accurate and unbiased models of the future growth and decline curves of all forms of energy for policymaking—models based on historical data, not faith. If the data says we're likely to recover another 1.2 trillion barrels of oil worldwide and no more, then we should not assume that future drilling and technological progress will somehow turn that into 3 trillion barrels of recoverable oil.


10. Carbon emissions will soon come with a price. Drilling the remaining prospects for oil and gas will be expensive: From the decision to invest until first oil is produced, it can take 10 years and $100 million dollars to drill the first well in a new deepwater resource, using rigs that cost $1 million a day to run, and the production platform can cost as much as $5 billion. Deploying thousands of wind turbines and square miles of solar will be expensive, slow, and difficult. Replacing millions of inefficient internal combustion engine vehicles with electric and plug-in hybrids will be expensive. Rebuilding the nation's rail system will be hugely expensive. In short, the good ol' days of cheap electricity and gasoline are likely gone forever, and all the solutions going forward will be expensive.

Bill Ford Rallies the Automobile Industry

It is clear reading this article with Bill Ford, that the Ford Motor company is likely to make it through this period of transition very successfully. The industry has been trending toward a plug and play manufacturing model for the past decade. Ford has wholeheartedly embraced it to not just make better cars but to maximize flexibility for the real transition coming down the pike.

The best thing that the USA and North America can do today to assert its stature in the world is to exit the global oil business as briskly as possible. The rest of the world can have all they want, but we are out of here Jack.

North America has access to unimaginable internal reserves provided we reduce our own consumption by two thirds over the next decade. Those reserves are best used for everything except transportation. By doing that, we free ourselves from having our conspicuous consumption impacting agriculture in Africa.

The promise made by EEStor is going to be met by either EEStor of a competitor inside the next five years. Immediately we will be driving electric cars with a three hundred mile range. Bill Ford is telling us that his organization is ready for it and can make the switch of the same dime. It is going to be the most abrupt technology switch in human history

Of course this overnight success took decades of focused work in the laboratory to pull of but the objective has never been in doubt.

And as Bill makes clear, there may be other winners out there also that need to be supported.

After saying all that, the North American was long overdue for a formal restructuring that forced global cost structures on the internal industry. You must be able to compete head to head in your own country and the UAW made the deals for jobs with these competitors and thus broke their own labour monopoly. They have now the pleasure of dealing with the natural result of such practices.

April 21, 2009

Bill Ford: Prepare for Auto Industry Transformation

The Ford scion believes it's a "cool time" to be part of the auto industry, despite ailing U.S. automakers

By Colin Sullivan

DANA POINT, Calif. -- Ford Motor Co.'s executive chairman offered a rare glimpse yesterday into the U.S. auto industry's corporate direction and culture, painting a bright picture for the sector even though Chrysler LLC and General Motors Corp. are flirting with bankruptcy.

Bill Ford, the great-grandson of Henry Ford, said the U.S. auto industry is facing an unprecedented financial crisis that has shaken its foundation. But, he said, the turn toward insolvency should mean opportunity for an "insular industry" that has long been mired in stale thinking.

"We haven't had a lot of revolutions, but boy, are we now," Ford said during an extensive interview here. "It's a really cool time to be part of this industry."

Executives at Chrysler and General Motors who are now taking marching orders from the White House might take exception to that statement, but Ford described the shakeup and government bailouts as essential for an industry that is more than a century old and has often been stuck in a rigid mindset. The old guard, Ford said, is no longer "fighting" the change to new technologies because it has no other choice.

At Ford Motor Co., for example, executives have decided to bring their global platform of vehicles, including smaller models that do well in Europe, to the North American market. Ford described the move as risky, given the recent dip in the price of gasoline, but he said the company is committed to efficiency over the long haul and the belief that a downsizing of the U.S. car market is inevitable when gas prices rebound.

"Nobody wanted change, really, within the industry," said Ford, describing a boardroom atmosphere that was hostile to talk of climate change, energy efficiency and environmental protection. "But I am so energized by what's going on now, I think it's fantastic."

The comments from Ford, who served as the company's CEO from 2001 to 2006, come amid signs that a bankruptcy at GM or Chrysler could disrupt operations for the entire U.S. industry and its supply chain.

Ford Motor Co. officials fear a bankruptcy filing could mean deeper concessions from unions and bondholders for Chrysler and GM, and leave the companies in better competitive shape.

Ford reiterated some of those concerns and said bankruptcy may not be the best option for the sector, especially as it leaves the future of hundreds of thousands of jobs in the hands of a single bankruptcy judge.

"One keeps reading about 'quick and easy' bankruptcies," he said. "I have a hard time believing it will be easy."

Call for stability

Ford was the only U.S. automaker of Detroit's Big Three to reject bailout funds from Congress. And many have credited Bill Ford for preparing the company while he was CEO faster than either Chrysler and GM for constrained oil supplies and the dawn of a carbon-constrained economy.

Ford, who sat for an interview during a forum hosted by Fortune magazine, said his priority from day one as CEO was to diversify the company's fleet to account for "whichever way the infrastructure breaks" over the next few decades. That meant developing cars powered by biodiesel, electricity, natural gas and oil all at the same time, even though predicting a victor among these options is still difficult.

"These are very, very quickly shifting technologies," Ford said. "It isn't clear to us now that ultimately there's going to be one winning technology."

Ford explained that the decision to slim down to a single global platform of vehicles – instead of varying platforms for North America, Asia and Europe – gives the automaker the flexibility to ramp up to, say, electric cars if consumers start pushing the market in that direction.

He called the strategy "a plug-and-play operation" that allows Ford Motor Co. to not bet on a single technology.

Still, Ford admitted the lack of stability in gas prices is a major problem. Indeed, consumers who had been rushing to buy smaller cars when gas was more than $4 a gallon have lately returned to purchasing bigger models, an issue Ford says should be addressed by government policy.

Ford said he would support a gas tax or a price on carbon to add some stability to the market that could send better signals to the auto manufacturers. Gyrations on the fuel side, he added

"The worst thing for us is instability, and, unfortunately, that's what we've been dealing with," Ford said.

"We have no idea whether we're planning the right vehicle or not."

Shifting dependencies?

To address the highs and lows of fuel prices, Ford would like to see a gas tax or a cap-and-trade system that establishes a hard price on carbon. He also wants the Obama administration to convene a summit of automakers, nongovernmental organizations and lawmakers to establish a "glide path" for vehicle technology.

A glide path would mirror the European model, which brought players together years ago to effectively select "clean diesel" as the vehicle of the near future, at least until hydrogen-powered or electric plug-in vehicles develop. Incentives from governments to enact the glide path made purchasing decisions easier for consumers, Ford said.

Ford said he is averse to picking winners and losers, but when the alternative is industrial collapse, he thinks the European model is a viable option.

"It worked," Ford said. "We've really lacked that in this country."

On batteries for electric cars, Ford conceded that Asian manufacturers are ahead in terms of building the actual batteries, even if U.S. companies are positioned to develop components and design cars to integrate the batteries. He sees the emerging market as a problem if Americans trade oil dependency for battery dependency.

"As a country, we're not well served to trade that one dependency for another," he said.

More broadly, Ford expects a "messy" fight on Capitol Hill over climate change and the future of his industry. But he also believes the political will is there to shape a federal law within the next year or so.

"We can't go on with cheap gasoline forever," Ford said. "It's just not a path that his country wants to go down."

Reprinted from Greenwire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. www.eenews.net, 202-628-6500

Super Capacity Super Capacitor

The news keeps coming. This development promises a power delivery of one megawatt per kilo of device and an energy density up there with the super capacitors.

The fabrication method sounds like it could be easily automated. This strategy is very clear and also very convincing. I cannot comment on how it compares to EEStor as they are clearly using a different approach and it is not fully described yet. They do claim that commercial delivery is soon.

This means though that the advent of a commercial device is soon form either approach.. Such a device will swiftly convert the automobile industry to electric just as quickly as possible.

Atomic construction yields punchier power store

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16768-atomic-construction-yields-punchier-power-store.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
18:00 15 March 2009 by Colin Barras

Devices from electric cars to laptops could benefit from a new kind of capacitor, which combines the best features of conventional devices to store a large quantity of charge and release it rapidly.

Electrostatic capacitors store charge on the surface of two conducting plates separated by an insulating layer. Their advantage is that they can store and release energy much faster than batteries.

That makes them ideal candidates to replace batteries in devices that require speedy discharge of power, such as electric cars. However, electric capacitors can hold only limited charge. Supercapacitors that store charge chemically as well as electrically have greater capacities, but perform only as well as the best batteries.

Now a prototype capacitor has been made that manages to store power as densely as a supercapacitor, but deliver it at speeds comparable with electrostatic capacitors.

Best of both worlds

It was made by chemist Gary Rubloff at the University of Maryland, with colleagues from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

The secret to the prototype's performance is that it actually has 10 billion tiny capacitors, each just 50 nanometres across, crammed into every square centimetre. Electrodes connect up the mini devices so they can function as a single unit.

The team starts the creation of such small capacitors by anodising – adding a surface layer of oxide – a sheet of aluminium foil to create a regularly spaced array of nanopores across its surface. Each pore is then filled with three nested, concentric layers of material that function as the traditional conductor-insulator-conductor arrangement of an electric capacitor.

The conducting layers are made from titanium nitride, and the insulating layer from aluminium oxide. They are laid down with a highly precise way of depositing nanoscale structures called atomic layer deposition (see image).

Atomic precision

That technique makes it possible to create thin layers of metals with unprecedented accuracy, says Rubloff: That is why the semiconductor industry is heavily pursuing atomic layer deposition to make a next generation of computer chips, he adds.

The resulting capacitor can deliver energy at a speed typical of electrostatic capacitors, at a rate that would allow a single kilogram to deliver one megawatt of power – enough to power 10,000 100-watt light bulbs. It can also store energy as densely as a supercapacitor, with 1 kg holding 2500 joules.

"Our primary target [for this technology] is as part of a hybrid battery-capacitor system for electric cars," says Rubloff. "But there are many [potential] small scale applications, [including] better electrical storage systems for cellphones or laptops."

The next step is to tweak the design to improve its performance – for instance, the team will experiment with deeper pores that can each hold bigger capacitors and thus store more energy.

Journal reference:

Nature Nanotechnology (DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2009.37)

Great Image:

http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn16768/dn16768-1_761.jpg

Electric Car Concensus

This item came out over a month ago but it sat in my inbox as other stories got precedence. Today’s item on the general sh9ifting of the energy production industry increases the significance of this story.

We may think that we are at the beginning of a technology transition, but these stories show us that we are really at the beginning of the actual build out. We are not inventing anything in order to accommodate electric cars.

We are building what is possible in the best way possible so that improvements can be simply folded in.

EEStor cars will still need electric power depots. Those depots will need access to massive power supply. The nighttime surplus that the grid is plagued with will disappear fast and a lot of fresh grid power must be added.

Electric cars mean that a lot of this power will need to be supplied by huge new power sources, and the swift rise of alternatives is showing us the way.

***********************

We are in a world in which the proverbial crap has hit the energy fan. It is now accepted that we must remove ourselves from the oil teat just as fast as we may. The developed world has a consensus as this article truly reflects.

We knew a long time ago that it was the right thing to do but cheap oil let us put of that day. The determination now exists to see this trap ended and this article talks of the use of a dense power distribution network. This is the brute force solution that we hope is never needed.

Otherwise this is a pretty complete survey of what is brewing as more and more outfits pile into the electric car rush.

If EEStor can deliver then I will be brave and now predict the fastest convergence to new technology in human history. I can see been paid to remove gasoline cars from the rolling stock in as little as three years after this happens.

http://www.financialpost.com/magazine/story.html?id=1086989

Online exclusive: Electric storm on the horizon

David Dias, Financial Post Magazine Published: Monday, January 05, 2009

If necessity is the mother of invention, you might wonder if the electric car runs the risk of being orphaned. Gasoline is cheaper than it's been in years, and cash-strapped automakers are looking to avoid risky ventures. So will the electric car be killed yet again? Not a chance. With emerging nations increasing their appetite for oil, and the U.S. sticking to its planned increase in fuel-efficiency regulations, the race to set the standards for the electric cars industry is hotter than ever.

The battle to mass-produce the first modern electric car has garnered a lot of ink: GM's vow to take the lead by producing over 50,000 Chevy Volts a year after its 2010 launch date is being challenged by Renault-Nissan's plan to produce up to 100,000 electric vehicles by the end of 2011. What type of vehicles become dominant will impact another looming battle: the fight to set the standard for the electric infrastructure that the vehicles will tap into.

Renault-Nissan has signed a deal with a visionary California-based sustainable transportation company by the name of Better Place, which was formed in 2007. The company hasn't built anything yet, but its CEO, Shai Agassi - a software tycoon and former VP at SAP - has been busy cobbling together deals to blanket cities with charge spots and battery-swapping stations, all tied to a sophisticated IT network.

Sound like fantasy? Tell that to governments in Israel, Denmark, Australia, Hawaii and California, which have signed up, offering billions of dollars in support.

With the government's backing, Better Place will soon start building its electric vehicle infrastructure.

"We take a holistic, systematic approach," says the head of global development, Sean Harrington.

People buying an electric car will sign up for a subscription to Better Place's network. The company will install a home charging station and set up a GPS device on the vehicle's dashboard that can guide the driver to one of the thousands of charge spots that Better Place intends to build - at workplaces, in parking lots and at shopping malls. If the client can't wait several hours for the battery to charge, the GPS system will guide them to a station where the battery can be swapped with a fresh one in five minutes. Better Place hasn't announced its pricing, but insists it will be cheaper than gas. "This is not only for elite people who can afford it," says Harrington. "We are going for the masses here."

But Paul Scott of the electric vehicle advocacy group Plug-In America isn't convinced. He says plug-in hybrids like the Chevy Volt - which will be able to go 60 kilometres on battery power before switching to gas and can be charged at home - will have little use for Better Place's grid. "We're shaking our heads thinking, ‘Man, nobody's going to really need that,'" he says.

Meanwhile, a Texas company called EEStor is working on an ultra-capacitor that could allow a small electric vehicle to travel 400 kilometres and charge in five minutes. If something like this becomes a reality, the need for an electric network may vanish.

None of these threats, however, seem to be stopping Better Place from working to make its ideas into reality. In Israel, the company's pilot project is set to be built early this year, including 1,000 charge spots. Denmark and California will likely follow.

At this early stage, it's impossible to say if Better Place will ultimately set the standard for the industry, and its early entry into the sector may not amount to much once the big auto companies realize how lucrative the electric car market will be. But its bold experiment will certainly help get automakers and consumers moving toward an electric reality.

Ecogeek on 2008 Cleantech

Ecogeek runs out a pretty good list of innovations from 2008. The only one we have not covered is the light antenna, which is an oversight that I am sure that I will soon get to. This will perhaps remind us that we live in exciting times, and for once that means that we are not dodging bullets.

I would add the not yet visible emergence of real nanotechnology from the labs of which EEStor is a sniff. We can do it, and we are working full out to master the art with our powerful computers.

Expect to see real three dimensional manipulation as part of a manufacturing protocol shortly.

http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/2422/73/

7 Cleantech Stories of 2008 that will Change Everything

Written by Hank Green

Thursday, 01 January 2009

It can sometimes be a little unclear (especially first day of a new year) how the previous year changed the world. No one guessed in 1946 that the Magnetron Spencer Percy was developing for use in a RADAR system (and that subsequently melted a candy bar in his pocket) would one day become the microwave oven. But I like to think that we can make some pretty good guesses about which of this year's innovations are going to be with us, and changing our world, for a good long time.

Here's my list of the top ten clean tech innovations of 2008.

Light Antennas

You know how you can capture and produce radio waves with antennas? Well, what if you could built an antenna so small, it could capture and emit light? The first large array of these nano-antennas was produced this year, and the possibilities for them are endless. They may become efficient light sources, efficient solar panels, or simple ways to transfer energy we feel as heat into energy that we don't feel at all, making them a kind of passive climate control system.

President Barack Obama

Maybe not an innovation in the traditional sense, though, I like to think that it took some innovative thinking to get this man elected president. But President Obama's Administration has already grown to include clean technology advocates and researchers, and carries with it promises of green collar jobs, carbon markets, and restored protections for many of our imperiled ecosystems.

EEStor Begins to Emerge

The power storage company, EEstor, which we're still not 100% sure isn't full of crap did finally begin to tell us some things about their miraculous-sounding power storage technology. If true, vehicles could have batteries lighter than gas tanks, that could charge in five minutes and would never degrade. These ceramic "electrical energy storage units" have not yet seen the light of day (or independent verification) but they do already have contracts with Lockheed Martin and plans to deliver their first unit to an electric car company shortly.

The Gas Crunch

Hey...remember back when gas was freaking ridiculously expensive? Well, while the market may not (the Ford F-150 is, once again, America's most popular vehicle) the innovations that poured into the market to try and help consumers deal with high gas prices will not go away. Better hybrid systems, more efficient engines, massive investments in biofuels, the re-emergence of diesel in America were all direct implications of skyrocketing gas prices.

Solar at Grid Parity

The cost of delivering electrons to the grid has gone up a little bit in the past year, and the cost of delivering electrons to the grid using solar power has dropped dramatically. The first solar electrons costing roughly the same amount as natural gas electrons were produced this year. There's no reason to think that this trend will end, as natural gas gets more expensive, and solar systems get more efficient. In fact, one company is already promising solar power at the same price as coal!

Project Better Place Expands Wildly

While I'm still not 100% sure that Better Place, with it's many battery swapping stations, cell phone-like payment plans and "one sized battery fits all" platform makes the most sense, they have managed to get a lot of governments to bite. California, Hawaii, Australia and Denmark have all signed deals with Agassi's gigantically ambitious electric car program. It could all become extremely passe if EEStor's technology pans out. But otherwise it's one of the few solutions that will work now, instead of waiting for battery technology to catch up with our goals as car drivers.

Pickens Counterbalances Gore with a Real Vision

We've tired of Al Gore. The love affair was great while it lasted, but he's been attacked from too many angles to really latch onto his message anymore. But what about an ultra-conservative, Texas oil man? Now that's the kind of champion clean technology needs! And not only does he provide a different perspective, he provides a clear plan for how he wants to change our energy future. And while it might be a plan that would make him one of the richest people in the world, it's also actually a pretty good plan.

Reverse Engineering the UFO

Reverse Engineering the UFO

I posted this tidbit in early November. Much more has happened since.

http://globalwarming-arclein.blogspot.com/2008/11/pleistocene-nonconformity-sequel-and.html

What is a UFO?

It is a craft that is designed to operate in a magnetic field and possibly even produce one. Its working skin is a sandwich of single atomic layers that include a semiconductor cooling layer and a high temperature superconductor. We can actually do this in our labs now. Technical finesse will take a lot longer of course. This means that an activated skin sealing off the exterior will exclude the Earth’s magnetic field producing massive lift. Most likely, the larger the craft design is, the stronger the lift as total density drops. With this technology it becomes simple to leave the Earth’s gravity well and perhaps even selectively navigate in the solar system itself.

For my next trick we place a super conducting magnetic ring around the outside edge and use it to produce a directed pinched magnetic bottle steered in the direction desired. It is not that simple but you get the idea.

Therefore leaving the Earth becomes cheap and easy. It we had this technology tomorrow; we could move every human off planet inside a generation. We already know how and it will likely take us only another generation to create a working craft.

The remaining unmentioned issue was energy storage and energy supply. Two months ago we only had a glimmer. We are much better off today. The EEStor battery skin described in the Lockheed Martin patent is a natural design element for the active skin described in my post. If this can be made to work, we have storage system for the massive amounts of electrical energy that is needed.

Yesterday’s post on the Dense Plasma Focus Device (DPFD) finally gives us a compact geometry promising high energy output. This can believably be put into a small craft once it is mastered. It starts small and will only get smaller as load and design are optimized.

Hell, we can even have enough juice to fire a microwave pulse laser to paint a few crop circles while we are at it, if our friends in the British Air force are not up to doing it.

When I was fourteen, I saw that no technical explanation existed for a working UFO. I thought that this represented an interesting problem to reverse engineer. It has taken us over forty five years to reach the correct level of knowledge to simply understand the feasibility of the project. I am now prepared to declare it feasible in terms of present knowledge and achievable within the decade if the DPFD actually works and we can be quick about manufacturing issues that are not minor. Right now the problem list has suddenly become finite, rather than open ended.

Such a craft, while not controlling gravity can be operated the majority of the time with an acceleration of one earth gravity. This makes travelling around the solar system fully feasible while maintaining proper gravity for maintaining human health. Of course a computer does all the real work, but we already have that capability.