The Yogen Max foldable laptop charger eschews fuel cells or any other fancy schmancy type of portable power technology for the worst source of power ever: you. Although the details are sketchy nonexistent, Easy Energy’s charger purports to recharge things like MP3 players or even laptops with your beastly muscles. Just step on the pedal for an unspecified amount of time, and your batteries will be charged an unspecified amount. It’s an eco-friendly and potentially convenient concept prototype, especially if you travel a lot, but seriously, they expect me to work to charge my laptop? That’s nonsense. Utter nonsense.
While I find the trend kind of disappointing, it seems the only way you can sell toys to kids these days is by including some kind of electronic light & sound feature. And that of course means the toy also needs batteries, and is immediately at risk of being ignored once those batteries die. But a company called Sprig has come up with a line of rugged toy trucks and vehicles complete with sounds and lights that not only don’t require batteries, but are eco-friendly as well.
The toys are molded from a product called ‘Sprigwood’ which is a kid-friendly, bio-composite material made from recycled wood and reclaimed plastic. And the material is colored when it’s produced, so the toys don’t feature any decorative paint, but are still bright and colorful. Each vehicle has a different off-road theme that is accompanied with custom sounds and LED lights, but they use a push-and-pump-action to harness a child’s endless supply of energy which powers the electronic components.
And while many eco-friendly toys also come with outrageous price tags, the Sprig vehicles are actually quite reasonable, ranging in price from about $20 for the Rally Racer and Baja Scout, and up to $50 for the larger Discover Rig.
Looking forward to this year’s LA Auto Show, I was hoping to see something to reassure me that things are seriously happening towards innovating our way out of a gasoline dependent transport economy. Aaaaand I didn’t really get that, at all. There were lots of impressive concepts, to be sure, and a lot of talk about sustainability and green initiatives and crap. But what are people actually producing? Nothing especially remarkable, with a few exceptions.
First of all, just about everything is a hybrid. Which is good, I guess… Or I should say, it’s better than things not being hybrids. The thing is, though, that just because something is a hybrid doesn’t mean it gets significantly better (or even good) gas mileage. At least, that’s the way it seemed from just walking around the show looking at the EPA estimated mpg stickers. Why is this the case? I think it’s because car manufacturers (and car buyers) are still for some silly reason concerned with maximizing horsepower, which is most of the time useless after a certain point. But maybe my 95 Volvo and I are just jealous. Most new cars were distinctly unimpressive when it came to gas mileage, whether they were hybrids or not.
Also, everybody’s got a fuel cell car or light SUV now, but most of them are sort of “hey look, we can do it too!” vehicles rather than a serious production effort. And of course, nobody’s been able to solve the crucial problem: distribution. I think BMW has had the most promising interim solution (and has for years) in the Hydrogen 7 gas/hydrogen hybrid, but it wasn’t at the show… Rather, BMW was promoting a system to make gas engines up to 20% more efficient by dynamically controlling power output. That’s nice and all, but gasoline should be the past, not the future.
Is it too much for me to expect that automakers asking for a financial bailout should be trying new things and not just taking existing cars and retrofitting them with hybrid engines to eke out a few extra MPG? Maybe it is, I suppose it’s cheaper to do that than to make a serious commitment to a new technology that might not prove to be adoptable mainstream. But there is some good and important work going on, using technology that makes a substantial difference to efficiency and eco-friendliness. Have a look, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »
As someone who relies on vertical blinds to keep his home in a constant cave-like atmosphere, I can see the benefit of this Solar Vertical Lamp concept designed by Yoon-Hui Kim and Eun-Kyung Kim. The vertical blinds are embedded with a matrix of white LEDs which can be illuminated to produce glowing lamp-like shapes. Obviously the effect looks pretty cool, but the LEDs are also powered by a battery which is recharged by the sun during the day since the outward facing sides of the blinds also serve as solar cells. In theory the blinds should be able to provide plenty of ambient light during the night, without adding any costs to your electric bill.
Most solar-powered devices aren’t that aesthetically pleasing, but this simple Solar Clock manages to maintain a clean design even with its fairly large solar cell located front and center. The clock can be mounted on the wall in a vertical or horizontal position, or you can swap out the overhanging hands with an included shorter set and simply place it on a table or desk instead.
It’s available from SUCK UK for about $38, but appears to be out of stock until sometime later in the month.
Luke first wrote about the H2GO hydrogen fuel cell car at the beginning of the year, but at that time there was no information on pricing or availability. Well here we are almost 9 months later and it looks like Hammacher Schlemmer now has the H2GO available, just in time for the gift-giving season. Besides the futuristic design, what sets the H2GO apart from other RC cars on the market is that it uses a bona-fide hydrogen fuel cell instead of AAs or other types of built-in rechargeable batteries. So instead of having to remember to buy batteries for Christmas morning, you just need to make sure you have plenty of tap water available.
The hydrogen used by the fuel cell is generated by the included fueling station which uses electrolysis to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, and it itself is solar powered. The car is controlled by the Wiimote Nunchuck looking remote (which is probably the one component of the kit that does require a battery) and has a top speed of about 6MPH. You’ll get about 6 minutes of driving time after each 3 1/2 minute refueling, and the hydrogen fuel station will operate for about an hour after a 4-minute charge from its solar panel. At $149.95 it’s probably not the cheapest or even the most exciting remote control toy car on the market, but it will teach your kids about the exciting world of alternative fuels!
My fridge is usually pretty bare, which is why I like this collapsible Soft-Refrigerator concept by Electrolux. The use of a heat-insulating membrane and modular vented shelving means the fridge can be collapsed and ’size-optimized’ based on how much food you need to refrigerate. And besides making more room in a cramped kitchen, by collapsing the fridge you also reduce the volume of space that needs to be cooled, which in theory should reduce its energy usage. The Soft-Refrigerator even seems a clever alternative to a cooler when traveling, though I imagine the energy saving benefits are negated if you have to bring a portable generator with you to keep it running.
The sun is totally, like, hot, you know? And if you get enough bits of sunlight together in the same spot, you can do some pretty spectacular things with the resulting 2,400 degrees (Fahrenheit, I assume) of heat. Like melting a tidy little hole through a solid steel plate in mere seconds. If they’d just hook up a Stirling Engine to this thing, our energy problems would be solved. And if not, well… It’d make a pretty badass death ray.
If you can’t quite afford to blow $109,000 on a Tesla Roadster, how about $60,000ish on a model with two extra doors and a trunk with room for more than golf clubs? The above picture is the preproduction version of the Tesla-S sedan, due sometime in 2010.
The design is very different from the roadster, since the roadster is based on the Lotus Elise while the Tesla-S is a platform developed entirely by Tesla. This is good, because it lets Tesla design a purely electric car from the ground up, and bad because they’re a less experienced car company. But hey, looks good to me, especially since the numbers end up about the same: 240 miles per charge, and a 0-60 time of somewhere under 6 seconds.
Related Tags: Eco-friendly, Laptops, Power
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