future tech – Explore Home Power

Home power problems, military solutions

The Editors — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 01:41:49 +0000

It’s 2012, in the middle of the night. The batteries that your solar panels charged up during the day are on the blink, and power in your home is fading fast, so you might miss tonight’s episode of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant (there is really a show called this, we’re not making it up). You’re freaking out. All of a sudden in parachutes a team from the 82nd Airborne. You freak out some more. But they’re carrying portable fuel cells that they use to power your home back up. Crisis averted.

So this ridiculous scenario would never happen (the show you’d be worried about missing is actually another revival of Fox’s Paradise Hotel), but you will probably be enjoying better alternative energy solutions thanks to the U.S. military.

Can DARPA now score another double success by changing how both the military and civilian worlds consume and produce energy? DARPA’s first goal is always to magnify the might of the U.S. armed forces. That’s why Arlington (Va.)-based DARPA is devoting an estimated $100 million of its $3 billion annual budget to alternative energy.

[…]

In addition to spurring the development of palm-size fuel cells, DARPA has contracted with companies to miniaturize solar cells that would supplant the need for generators. It now wants to develop inexpensive diesel and jet fuel from algae that could be produced in the battle zone. All three programs include the aim of accelerating the manufacture of any new product by private companies, from whom the military could buy.

We’d wager that the entity responsible for the Internet will end up making some significant contributions to the field of alternative energy.

It’s raining radio waves

The Editors — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 00:23:03 +0000

PG&E have agreed to purchase power from a startup, Solaren, that will gather the power in a space based solar farm and then beam it back to Earth as radio waves which will them be turned into electricity. Part of the deal is that PG&E only pays for power delivered, so if Solaren can’t pull this off, presumably PG&E owes them nothing.

Space based power

The Editors — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:52:30 +0000

In our efforts to bring you the cutting edge developments in home power, we direct you to a podcast from Stratfor on space based solar collectors.

The podcast starts off referencing the discovery of large amounts of methane gas on Mars. Energy could be produced from this methane on the Red Planet, although presumably it would be used there, and not exported back to Earth.

Then the podcast gets into the really good stuff, space based solar collectors. We’d put solar collectors in orbit and then beam the collected power down to us on Earth with microwaves. The solar collectors wouldn’t have the drawback that those on Earth do, nighttime, because they’d be orbiting high enough to always be exposed to the Sun’s rays.

Dr. Friedman, who has authored a book that talks about space based energy (and many other topics), predicts prototypes by 2030 to 2040. He also predicts that the United States military needs will drive the development of the technology. The United States could become a bigger energy producer than Saudi Arabia.