Green Options

I’ll admit, never saw this one coming–using Mountain Dew as fuel. It surely makes the Mountain Dew Game Fuel much more appropriate!

Inventor Paul Patone has created the GEET (Global Environmental Energy Technology) Fuel Processor. A mod that allows you to run your car on about 80% water. Or possibly, just a nice cold Tab.

When I was nine years old - I just knew something along just these lines was in our futuristic future!

My Jetpack: finally! Here it is; invented by German aerospace engineer Alexander Boeck, and first seen (by me) in the Chinese Olympics. Here, finally, on sale in stores near you, at $269; is that new high tech transport!

I am so down for casually commuting to work at 25 miles an hour, and striding nine feet at a time, and loping gracefully along with the occasional leap over a short building or two.  All while looking like some kind of robotic gazelle - - and one that is two feet taller than me!

And the carbon footprint of this amazingly delightful form of transport? It’s Zilch!

Those folks at Nissan have been keeping us busy lately, but the latest development really is a first - an air-conditioning system specifically designed to mess with our brains!

Earlier this week the Japanese number three announced the development of a new “Forest AC” air conditioning system, “which systematically controls cabin temperature, ventilation, aroma and humidity to create an optimal interior environment.”

But there’s more, the system is based on the results of a research study on the effects of aroma on human mental activity meaning it can “influence the physiological state and senses of the driver and passengers.”

As electric vehicles gain traction, a concern is how to produce renewable energy to charge them up. Well, look no further than your refrigerator. One company is using onions to produce electricity and the owner, Steve Gill along with brother David Gill of Gills Onions, are crying all the way to the bank. In the new energy paradigm, many experts predict that we will no longer transport our energy around the world but will create it within our own communities. Using the waste juice from onions fits right into this scenario.

Gills Onions is the largest fresh onion processing plant in the world. The company has more than 15,000 acres of farmland and 300,000 square feet of processing and warehousing facility. Gill was looking for ways to reduce his costs in his farming operation when he began to experiment using the juice from his onion crop in Oxnard, California to create the energy to run his lighting and refrigerators. The result was the creation of an Advanced Energy Recovery System (AERS).

In a macabre When Life Deals You Lemons - Make Lemonade kind of news item: Researchers are considering that perhaps we could safely reuse radioactive land: to grow crops for biofuel.

Growing food is still too dangerous in southeastern Belarus because the region is still so contaminated by fallout from Chernobyl that crops grown there cannot safely be eaten by humans for hundreds of years, until the radioactive isotopes decay.

Yet 1.5 million mostly older people have not left, and some are in fact growing some grain on the contaminated land anyway. The radioactive material concentrates in roots and stalks, which they just plough back into the ground after harvesting. As a result; the soil is still almost as contaminated now as it was after the accident.

Things could not be much worse there than they are now and the Belarus government is open to new ideas. So when an Irish company had the idea of remediating the soil by planting a biofuel crop, Belarus was more open to the idea than you might imagine:

It’s hard being an environmental celebrity, especially when you are Royal too. People want to see you, but that can mean racking up a lot of carbon miles.

So Prince Charles had his Aston Martin converted to run on bio-ethanol made from aged English wine, and his Audi, Jaguar, and Range Rover all run on what the English call old cooking fat.

In the US we call this reused cooking oil because that’s much hipper and greener sounding, and marketing is everything.

So now Prince Charles is driven in the royal Jaguar that runs on homemade biodiesel and, for a little variety; in the Land Rover or the Audi, in a carbon conscious fashion.

But what about his airplane travel? Well…

Don’t laugh.

This started as just another ho-hum, run-of-the-mill, zero emissions, homemade solar powered EV.

But, sensibly, noting the enormous contribution of the wind turbine in the “snout” 400 watts at 28 MPH, night or day! Joe Rush, the inventor plans on adding a second wind turbine! This would bring the total on-board electricity supply  to nearly 1 KW. Well, at least when it’s traveling at 28 mph, it would.

Perhaps following the findings of that Federal study which recently found that wind power is the second most cost-effective investment for Federal renewable energy dollars, right behind geothermal power Joe Rush is simply utilizing the free energy generated by simply being a moving vehicle: wind, from which he creates the first wind powered EV.

Unfettered by the slow-moving decision-making procedures of giant auto companies (some of which will no doubt still be trying to sell us gas guzzlers even while our poor planet enters it’s second Eocene) Joe is able to nimbly head back to the drawing board for this radical revision. A second wind turbine will be added.

But where?

For many years, environmentalists have encouraged people to tread more lightly on the planet through buying local. The most common way to buy local is through fresh food purchased at a local farmer’s market, and to get there you should bike or walk since everyone knows that you can’t produce a sustainable car with local material. Right? Wrong. You’ve heard of bamboo bikes, well now there are bamboo taxis. These taxis were commissioned by the mayor of Tabontabon (in the Philippines) Rustico Balderian.

The bamboo taxis are made out of 90 percent bamboo and run on coconut biodiesel. The palm trees and wild bamboo stalks are native to the area.

Who doesn’t want to find a way to save on gas and also find an excuse to purchase an iPhone? Well now you have one. MaxQData, LLC announced today the availability of a new application called Bliss Trek, which the company is hailing as the first “eco-driving” application for the iPhone.

At first glance, you’d think that it would direct you the the gas station with the cheapest gas. But alas, you are wrong. It actually works by utilizing speed and acceleration information in real time to provide immediate feedback to drivers about the efficiency of their driving. Drivers earn points for efficient driving behavior such as driving the speed limit on the highway and for smooth acceleration and braking and lose points for less efficient behavior such as driving 100 mph or sitting idle. A friendly animated interface displays the current score along with speed and other information.

Picture the scene - the sun is shining and the idea comes into your head that it might be quite nice to go for a scenic drive through the countryside. You dial a number on your mobile phone and within seconds a car appears outside your house.

You climb in, recline the seat back as far as it’ll go and quietly whisper ‘drive.’ Then, as the car glides smoothly along, you pour yourself a long cold drink and admire the scenery, occasionally barking out the odd instruction like “left at the lights,” “faster,” or “turn the MP3 up.”

Sounds like a nice dream? Well, if Dutch-US design team Mike and Maaike have their way that dream could one day be within the reach of every driver.

The duo have created an all-electric concept vehicle, known as the ATNMBL, (short for ‘Autonomobile’) that could revolutionize the way we interact with our cars, by controlling them with our voices (more pics after the jump).

Segway inventor Dean Kamen is developing a hybrid electric scooter that can run on almost anything that burns.

According to the patent, the bike has a small two-piston Stirling engine right under the seat. Though with an engine of that size, it really isn’t going to provide much juice - not much more than 5bhp.

A Stirling engine is based on tech which predates internal combustion engines by almost 100 years. It’s kinda like a steam engine in the sense that it uses external combustion. They use pistons for the crankshaft, but unlike the alternatives they have no valves for no gas ever enters or leaves the cylinders.