A new technology being developed in Australia will harness the energy from vibrations and movement (kinetic energy) of an object and store that energy in a battery!
Kind of like the watches you can buy that wind themselves from the movement of your arm.
Saw this on EnGadget today:
Some other cool stuff from GizMag:
And an article on the AirCar
I’ve been following the Air Car (a car can run only on compressed air) for some time. It’s been interesting to see the project evolve from concept and lots of hopes and dreams and venture capital… to nearly dying without a business model, to now looking like it might actually get off the ground. There is a lot of debate around whether this car actually saves anything in the way of fossil fuel consumption because of the electricity requirements needed to actually deliver compressed air to the car. Would we simply be shifting the pollution and energy consumption from the road to the power plant? Quite possibly. But I look at it this way… it’s much much easier, and more economical to devise ways of create power more efficiently when large amounts of power are needed. Economies of scale and all that. It’s also much easier to “contain” and limit pollution from a limited number of large sources, than from a million cars on the road.
I doubt everyone will be driving an Aircar in the near future, but it’s perhaps another technology that could wean us from our dependance on gas guzzling SUVs.