A portion of ticket proceeds will benefit Global Green USA.

“When explaining the motives behind why one would want to take some free beer, the evil man responsible for dumping the beer, Joe Priesmeyer said, ‘Beer is a popular product.’”–Treehugger article about three landfill employees who “rescued” fifty cases of beer that was slated to be destroyed.

Amen, brother Joe. You are a true American Hero.

We are never going to solve serious problems like climate change or peak oil while governments focus on silliness like this.

CORRECTION: In my haste to craft a Very Funny Joke, I missed the obvious: Joe Priesmeyer is not the hero in this story-he’s the guy who dumped the beer. The two landfill employees are the ones who really have earned the title of Great American Heroes.

Joe Priesmeyer: A thousand curses! A pox on you!

Landfill Guys, we raise our steins to you!

“My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games,” — Jane McGonical

In her inspiring TED talk, game designer Jane McGonigal throws out a very interesting statistic: young gamers spend approximately 10,000 hours playing online games by the time they reach age 21. While this number may not seem significant, at first, it happens to be about the same number of hours a child will spend in school between 5th grade and high school graduation, and, according to Blink author Malcolm Gladwell is the magical number of hours one needs to spend learning a particular skill in order to become a “virtuoso”.

This means that young people today are become virtuosos at playing online games. Ms. Mcgonigal explains that we can harness this virtuosity to solve the world’s problems, just by asking the question: “Exactly what skills are these gamers getting good at?”

“The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games, like World of Warcraft, will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation.”

Jane’s work has become quite mainstream, recently, and I have a feeling that it won’t be long before we see our first real-world “epic win”, generated 100% by gamers.

I first encountered DotUI and its Founder/CEO, Ishak Kang, at the Green:NET 2009 Conference, where Mr. Kang presented his vision of user interfaces which are independent of their respective devices, following the user as he or she moved from one device to another. The presumption is that much useful technology goes unused because their user interfaces are difficult to learn. At the time, I wasn’t completely sure how this vision would translate into a viable product in the cleantech market, but it sure sounded interesting.

The company’s first offering, called the Nudgee, includes a wireless touch-screen digital picture frame device, which displays real-time energy usage data collected from “a universal gateway and electrical sub-meter. Gas, water, and air quality meters are optional.”

According to the article: “the company…is taking a fun approach, allowing users to see how much energy is being consumed, with updated images and content from friends and family, and utilizing social networking sites such as Facebook, instead of a dashboard approach other companies are pursuing.”

The company, in partnership with SAP, has announced a pilot program which will implement their technology to help Cal State Chico compete in the Campus Climate Challenge: “The Nudgee technology calculates carbon footprints of college students using high-resolution energy usage data and posts the results in social media competitions, including one between students living in university-owned housing versus the Greek system.”

In a brief conversation today, Mr. Kang confirmed that the Nudgee product has a number of interesting applications, including the ability to allocate energy usage to a particular student, or to a particular department’s budget, allowing for very specific social feedback mechanisms.

DotUI was a semifinalist in the 2009 California Cleantch Open’s Smart Power category. The company is currently seeking $600,00 in angel investor funding.

Dot UI puts social networking spin on energy management [Cleantech Group, LLC]

Resources:

• Notes from the Cleantech Open Awards Gala [TriplePundit.com]
• 2009 Cleantech Open Semifinalists [cleantechopen.com]
• Wikipedia article on SmartGrid [wikipedia.org]

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This article originally appeared on TriplePundit and is reprinted here thanks to 3P’s Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. You can find out more about Creative Commons licensing here.on twitter.

pmain: all good points. One that needs to be addressed right away is the idea of compounding growth in business as necessary or even possible. Simple math will show you that continuous compounding or exponential growth is not possible in a closed system. The Earth is a closed system, and as long as the Earth is the defining system boundary, then unchecked growth is not possible.

For some strange reason, even the most brilliant amongst us fail to grasp the consequences of this. We seem to be almost hard-wired to ignore it, because our individual evolutionary imperative tells us to accumulate as many resources as possible, to make sure that our own descendants survive. On an individual level, the short-term far outweighs the long-term.

Therefore, it is imperative that we implement systems of economics and government that take into account the realities of limited resources, limited ecosystem services, and overpopulation. One major step forward would be for generally accepted economic theory to price resources at their true cost to society.

Steve

Originally posted as a comment
by spuma
on Triple Pundit using DISQUS.

PeterRijs, this is really fascinating. I don’ know much about chemical batteries, but replacing the electrolyte wouldn’t really be “charging” in the traditional notion. Doesn’t this simply replace one liquid fuel (oil) with another (the electrolyte)? The article doesn’t say what the electrolyte would be…do you happen to know it is, and what the economics are? What about the environmental impact of extracting it? Can it be re-used/recycled?

One nice thing about charging batteries with electricity is that it doesn’t matter where the electricity comes from. While it might currently be coming from a coal-fired plant, in a few years it could be coming from a solar plant and in 50 years it might come from a fusion reactor or a space-based solar grid.

I think that a chemical-based battery might be a good option, if you can “recharge” the electrolyte with a process that uses electricity, similar to the way that hydrogen can be generated from water or natural gas.

Like I said, I am no expert on chemical batteries, so I would love to hear more about this technology.

Originally posted as a comment
by spuma
on Triple Pundit using DISQUS.

pmain: I don’t know if it is as much an issue of “will we have enough time?” as an issue of “are we willing to commit enough money and resources right now?” We could not have developed the atomic bomb in only a couple of years if we hadn’t been willing to throw a massive no-holds-barred effort behind it. The only reason we were willing to do that was because we were, quite literally, “under the gun.”

I believe that there is more than enough that we can do RIGHT NOW, with today’s technology, to make a big enough dent to get the fossil fuel monkey off of our back. But we have to be willing to make huge investments, and make them right now.

The first step, of course, is hyper-efficiency for almost everything that uses energy. In the book Natural Capitalism, Lovins, Lovins & Hawken showed that a whole-systems approach can bring enough energy savings to buy us he time we need to redesign everything else for the long term.

Solar panels are already net-energy-positive, i.e., they produce more energy over their lifetimes than it takes to produce/maintain them (much more). The same goes for concentrated solar (a 70s technology, by the way.) If you take a close look at what EVIN is proposing, you can actually convert almost any vehicle to run on electricity, using current battery tech, and you don’t need to worry about range, IF you have enough places where you can swap out battery packs.

Originally posted as a comment
by spuma
on Triple Pundit using DISQUS.

I had the pleasure to speak with the animated Mr. Saba and his charming wife at the Fast Lane to CleanTech Incubator Mixer, held at Club Autosport in San Jose. Club Autosport is the current home of Saba Motors, and hosts it and a number of other cleantech companies at its “car-condominium” facility, as part of the Electronic Transportation Development Center (ETDC), a San Jose Redevelopment Agency initiative to incubate and support startups dedicated to clean automotive technologies, including battery infrastructure startup EVIN, the very unusual compressed air powered Magnetic Air Cars, and over 30 others.

SABA Motors is a competitor in the Progressive Automotive X-Prize Competition, with a $10 million dollar prize awarded to the car that, in addition to being the winner in a series of speed and endurance trials, must achieve an effective 100 miles per gallon, and adhere to a large number of very stringent design and safety criteria (complete competition details have yet to be finalized). According to Mr. Saba, these rules are so stringent that, “if the Toyota Prius were to be entered in the X-Prize competition, it would fail to meet the design criteria.” SABA’s competition include rival sports car makers Tesla Motors, Zap and Aptera, along with 37 others that have qualified to date.

The company’s strategy to win the X-Prize, and to deliver on its retail-price promise, is to reduce the amount of batteries needed by making the rest of the vehicle as lightweight as possible. Because they are some of the heaviest and most expensive components of the car, reducing the number of batteries allows the company to achieve both goals simultaneously.

Those familiar with Amory Lovins‘ work on the Hypercar concept will see much of that concept embodied in SAAB Motor’s prototype vehicle. The theory goes something like this: the lighter you make the car, as a whole, the smaller you can make the individual components. For example, a car with less mass requires less energy to move it, and the same is true for making it stop, hence smaller engines and brakes can be employed. As each component becomes smaller, it reduces the requirements for all of the other components, and becomes a compounding effect resulting in large gains in efficiency, and should ultimately result in overall cost savings in the production vehicle.

Mr. Saba demonstrated to me just how lightweight the vehicle is, by effortlessly moving it back and forth with two hands. As a matter of fact, one of his biggest obstacles is how to get more traction to the ground in such a lightweight vehicle. He cites the tires breaking free of the pavement has the biggest limiting factor in the amount of speed that the car can currently achieve.

And… just for the record, the prototype is no glorified golf cart or three-wheeled motorcycle disguised as a car. It’s a real looker, and evokes the minimalist spirit of English roadsters like the Jaguar D-Types of the 50s and 60s or even the Mazda Miata of the 90s, with the same driving-first-and-only mentality. (meaning you will probably need some nice, steampunk-y, leather goggles to keep the bugs out of your face.)

But, unlike its cousin, the Tesla Roadster, the SABA is not intended to be an expensive toy that only a few can afford. Rather, Mr. Saba believes that the only way for an electric vehicle to make a real impact in reducing greenhouse gas emissions is to sell a whole lot of them. Mr. Saba plans on achieiving this by building a car that is not only mere transportation, but also captures the imagination. He believes that if he can do all that while making the car emissions free and under $40,000 retail, he will have a winner on his hands. (the Miata is a great example of how successful this strategy can be, and it wasn’t even emissions-free!)

Who wouldn’t want to own a car with Ferrari-like performance for the price of a well-equipped Toyota, that is zero-emissions to boot? Heck, I’ll take two!

Do you think Simon Saba will realize his vision? Tell us about it in the comments.

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EcoFactor, the competition’s overall winner, humorously presented an amazingly simple concept: a web-enabled thermostat that automatically and continuously adjusts the temperature of your home based on local environmental conditions. According to the company, over 50% of households with programmable thermostats do not program them. This technology avoids that problem, providing 25% or more energy savings with a hands-free solution.

While EcoFactor certainly has a very innovative product, I was simply shocked that they managed to beat out fellow finalist New Sky Energy, whose carbon-negative C02-to-building materials process appears to be an almost magical solution to excess carbon emissions. New Sky’s revolutionary chemical technology takes carbon dioxide from the air, combines it with polluted water, salts and renewable energy and ends up with carbonate-based building materials, in the form of bricks, tiles, laminated wood composites and others.

Essentially, the company has figured out an environmentally-friendly way to scrub C02 out of the air, sequester it in building materials, and clean up polluted water, all at the same time! I’m sure that we will be hearing much more about New Sky in the very near future.

But perhaps chemistry just didn’t capture the imagination of the judges. Amongst the finalists were several more companies with chemistry based solutions. RiverTop Renewables is creating ecologically-friendly chemicals and bio-products from renewable plan sugars. LivingGreen Materials showed off a small vial containing Dye-Sensitive Solar (DSC) powder, which is essentially the stuff that will allow for solar panels that can be “painted” onto surfaces, and will be more efficient than photovoltaics. LivingGreen also mentioned that DSC has just recently passed the test for durability that will allow it to be used in similar situations to PV.

Somewhat more conventional technologies were also included in the finalists. National Sustainability Award Winner HydroVolts displayed a very small and efficient micro-hydroelectric generator that can be set up in a small river or channel in about 15 minutes. Curiously-named Armageddon Energy is taking a novel approach to solar panels, by focusing on ease of installation. Their lightweight, inexpensive, and quick-to set up system uses hexagonal panels mounted on triangle-shaped aluminum brackets, and was demonstrated live as several Armageddon employees effortlessly set up three panels live, during the 3-minute presentation.

I also found a number of interesting companies amongst the runners-up. My favorite was EVIN, the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Network (a company that I will be writing more about in the near future). EVIN has a novel approach for deploying swappable battery packs for electric cars, so that they can be deployed in advance of the purchase of vehicles.

The company plans on selling the battery packs to multiple-unit housing complexes, allowing them to save money by charging the batteries during at night, when electricity is cheap, and then using that electricity during the day, when it is expensive. Once enough of these installations are in place, it becomes very easy to add the battery-swapping service to them, allowing them to be used by EV owners and providing additional revenue for the owner of the apartment complex.

Keep an eye on TriplePundit for more in-depth coverage of these and other Cleantech Open startups, by following our Startup Friday series.

Other notable CleanTech Open finalists and semifinalists not mentioned in the article:

SunTrac Solar (solar thermal)

Tru2Earth (sustainable rooftop tiles)

Powerzoa (mesh-networked appliance modules)

Alphabet Energy (waste heat recovery)

HydroCoal (clean coal process)

DotUI (universal user interfaces)

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In the interview, Mr. Gore talks about the potential impacts of climate change, the need for sustained action, the importance of reducing dependence on foreign oil, and the benefits that can be realized in the process. He also addresses questions about his most vocal climate change critics.

The following are highlights from the interview, or you can watch the full show on the CBS News website.

Clip 1: We’ve Got To Act

Al Gore speaks about the key to solving the climate crisis is having a strong grassroots consensus, and how many people are beginning to stand up.

Clip 2: Cap and Trade

Al Gore stresses the importance of having American-made renewable energy that can create new jobs. Gore also mentions that our “roller coaster is headed for a crash, and we’re in the front car.”

Clip 3: Climate Change Critics

The Vice-President addressed criticisms from leading scientists and researchers who have discredited his position on human-caused global climate change.

Clip 4: Praising the Copenhagen Summit

In this clip, Gore states that the upcoming climate change conference, to be held in Copenhagen, would be very beneficial for new environmental initiatives.

Further Reading:

“Should I Trust Al Gore, or My Rock Hard Nipples?” (Treehugger)

Grist on the NYT’s “Baseless Hit Job on Al Gore” (AlterNet)

Al Gore And Stephen Colbert Debate Global Warming Solutions (Ecorazzi)

How does the mind grasp climate change? (Columbia University)

Are Americans Cooling on Global Warming? (NY Times)

Excerpt and Sound Clip from Al Gore’s New Book (ABC News)

Al Gore’s Our Choice: Progressive Book Club Review

Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis by Al Gore on Amazon.com

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