4 Solar Power

And you thought all I could do was cook.  Here is some food for thought.  Now, you will look so smart over dinner, coffee, on your next date, or taking a break at the office.  Check it out.

Source

I am obsessed with this.  Each hour of sunlight charging can power your Kindle for 3 days!  And it's only $80.  And you can re-charge it anywhere, no searching for outlets or carrying around cords.  The new design has won the Consumer Electronics Show 2012 Innovation Award, and will go on sale January 15 via SolarFocus.

Now they need one for the iPad.

Turns out, they do.  The Spark Solar Tablet Case  will fully charge an iPad in 10 hours and can charge a wide range of other electronics.  Added bonus, the fabric for the case is made from recycled soda bottles. 

A 13 year old studied how trees branch out in specific design to maximize their ability to collect sunlight.  He then translated this using solar panels for a more efficient design, creating a solar tree.  This is called Biomimicry, where we design something that is based on something naturally occurring in nature.  Article here.

Similarly, Designer Ross Lovegrove has created Solar Trees to line urban streets in Vienna.  These trees are solar powered lamps that also bring a little nature into the city.  Article here.  I wonder if he knew about the importance of branching?

This has been on my mind since hearing about Jeremy Rifkin's The Third Industrial Revolution.  I still need to read this book, but this article is what caught my attention.

"The [German] federal government has teamed up with six regions across Germany to test the introduction of an "energy Internet" that will allow tens of thousands of German businesses and millions of home owners to collect renewable energies onsite, store them in the form of hydrogen, and share green electricity across Germany in a smart utility network, just like we now share information online. Entire communities are in the process of transforming their commercial and residential buildings into green micro-power plants, and companies like Siemens and Bosch are creating sophisticated new IT software, hardware, and appliances that will merge distributed Internet communications with distributed energy to create the smart buildings, infrastructure, and cities of the future."  

What is so interesting about this is that these stored energies could be sold to other countries who do not have the capacity to do this themselves.

Where is America on all this?  Still attempting to drill for oil, sadly.

Considering calling this "Think about it Thursday" and posting about a current event type thing completely open to discussion.  Thoughts?