An intro to energy for hi-tech geeks | An introduction to energy | Energy 101

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Cleantech Funding Meeting Notes

These are my raw notes from the CleanTX funding forum meeting: Other People’s Money: The New Funding Landscape.

Summary:

  • longer time to payback than Web 2.0, IT companies
  • VC world is suffering through..ahem…”creative destruction.”
  • find customers
  • be flexible

Frankly, sounds like typical funding advice except the relience on science and atoms.

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water-tech2energy.com
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From Bloom Energy to LEED Certification via Cleanovation and Water

(42 mins.  38mb)

Today’s podcast is different; we discuss items in the news for a good long time.  Bloom energy, Cleanovation Conference, water, etc.  Also, how to get LEED certified if you’re not an architect nor a developer.

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4

CellEra: The Future Now with Fuel Cells, the Electrochemical Dark Horse

Fuel cells are like batteries that don’t die.  As long as they’re connected to their fuel source–typically hydrogen, natural gas, alcohol, or methanol–they pump out electricity.  They are potentially a disruptive technology for how we power our buildings.  But, they’ve been expensive, finicky in the past. Are they just an electrochemistry geek’s dream, or are they for real?

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Nissan LEAF Test Drive: An Electric Vehicle Driving Experience

It’s been over a hundred years since a consumer had to seriously consider whether they wanted their car to be one with an internal combustion engine or an electric motor.   But now that electric vehicles are going to become available over the next year or so, what’s it like to actually drive one?

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Local Energy Storage

What if  you could buy an energy device to power your house in the way you buy an air conditioner?  What if you could power it by purchasing a block of energy at Wal-mart?

Electrochemistry expert Dr. Jeremy Meyer joins futurist Garry Golden and I as we discuss a distributed generation scenario that’s outside the box.

We discuss fuel cells… Read the rest

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Volta and Napolean with a Volta Pile, the first battery. Electricity Storage at the utility level hasn't progressed much since then.
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Electric Utility Level Storage

Following up on our introduction to the grid podcast, Garry Golden and I invited Dr. Jeremy Meyers to talk about ideas for utility level storage. Jeremy is a professor at UT with an expertise in electrochemistry. We talk about the near term future holds for electricity storage at the utility level, which can be an important capability when integrating renewables… Read the rest

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2

The Grid 101

The National Academy of Engineering calls it the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th century. Others call it the largest machine ever made. It snakes through and between cities and lives in the walls of our homes.

Containing the bottled lightening that is electricity, the electrical grid is the foundation for much of our quality of life. While oil mainly… Read the rest

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The Department of Energy: Funding Gets Interesting for Energy Research

(10.3mb, 11:12)

Garry Golden and I discuss recent announcements by the Department of Energy on funding energy research..and a surprising announcement from GM. Could the research be cause for cautious optimism?

ARPA-E Home page.
DOE Energy Innovation Hub Q&A.
DOE Energy Frontier Research Centers

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Nanotech and Energy

(16.2mb, 17:38)

The realm of the very small may be a key to new energy futures. Nanotechnology is science and engineering at the scale of atoms. Garry Golden and I talk about possible future scenarios of nanotech applied to energy.

We discuss the some of the reasons why working at the nano scale is attractive, including the idea that the… Read the rest

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Disruptive Technology in Energy

(18:21, 16.8mb)

In our inaugural Tech2Energy podcast, Garry Golden and I talk about potentially disruptive technology in energy. We discuss how to think about disruptive technology and examples of potential disruptive technologies.

Energy — whether it’s the petroleum industry for transportation, or the electric utility industry for everything else — has a scale to it that appears to work against… Read the rest

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    Tech2Energy is proudly produced by Joel Greenberg. Reach him at:

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