Madrid's "Air Tree" is a working experiment in combining public spaces with energy generation.
posted on Jan 25, 2008 - View this thread

Popular Science has named Nanosolar the #1 innovative product of the year. Finally, cheap and ubiquitous solar power has arrived, “You’re talking about printing rolls of the stuff—printing it on the roofs of 18-wheeler trailers, printing it on garages, printing it wherever you want it,” The only problem is demand, so they're building the world’s largest solar-panel manufacturing facility in San Jose. See 96 other innovations in PopSci's Best of 2007.
posted on Nov 17, 2007 - View this thread

CARMA, released today, is a map/database that shows the carbon emissions of more than 50,000 power plants and 4,000 power companies in every country on Earth, showing not only the worst but the best. Find out how much CO2 comes from electricity plants in a particular city, county, congressional district, company, town, ZIP code, or an individual plant.
posted on Nov 14, 2007 - View this thread

High Voltage Cable Inspection
posted on Sep 25, 2007 - View this thread

Steve Ward's Singing Tesla Coil video. Previously.
posted on Jul 15, 2007 - View this thread

Weather shock horror! Survivors live to tell the tale!
posted on Jul 12, 2007 - View this thread

Fry Little Doggie, FRY!
posted on Jul 6, 2007 - View this thread

William Kamkwamba decided to build a windmill to power lights in his home: "For many years we had only paraffin candles to light my home at night. They are expensive, smoky, smelly and have to be purchased about 8 km from home."
posted on Jul 5, 2007 - View this thread

Creepy High Voltage Installations The Russian countryside yields sometimes most improbable sights - abandoned artifacts and installations from bizarre military/scientific research, strangely futuristic forms left to rust and decay - to be found by a curious photographer. "Master" stumbled upon this installation close to Russian city of Istra (50 km from Moscow) quite by chance, and these mysterious shots were percolating for a while around the web, until the answer was found. According to this little, cryptic, and quite secretive website [in Russian], the weird alien-like towers are the Experimental Grounds for High-Voltage Generation, the only open-air kind in the world. Amazingly, it's still in use... as the powerful lightnings rip through the night and the darkened forest - much like in "The Prestige" movie.
posted on Jul 4, 2007 - View this thread

This fellow reads up on electricity generating machines in old books and then builds them.
posted on Jun 25, 2007 - View this thread

Google went solar yesterday! Google's PV solar system went live yesterday (or at least the stats page did.) Also, they converted 100 Priuses to plug-in electric vehicles, to be recharged by the PV solar panels. Pictures.
posted on Jun 19, 2007 - View this thread

Mike Strizki lives in the nation's first solar-hydrogen house. "The technology this civil engineer has been able to string together – solar panels, a hydrogen fuel cell, storage tanks, and a piece of equipment called an electrolyzer – provides electricity to his home year-round, even on the cloudiest of winter days. Mr. Strizki's monthly utility bill is zero – he's off the power grid – and his system creates no carbon-dioxide emissions. Neither does the fuel-cell car parked in his garage, which runs off the hydrogen his system creates."
posted on Mar 16, 2007 - View this thread

Cheap solar power poised to undercut oil and gas. The "tipping point" will arrive when the capital cost of solar power falls below $1 per watt, roughly the cost of carbon power.
posted on Feb 19, 2007 - View this thread

CitizenRe is a solar power rental company for the home. Free to install (!), a monthly rental fee is equal to what would normally be paid to the power company. Video.
posted on Jan 11, 2007 - View this thread

"The Science Service Historical Image Collection represents twentieth-century scientific research consisting of images and original captions as they appeared in period publications." For an easy browse, check out the fun randomly selected thumbnail images. Science Service is a nonprofit organization founded in 1921 to increase public interest in science. These images, culled from their past publications, span 40 years of innovations in electricity. Science Service currently publishes Science News.
posted on Jan 4, 2007 - View this thread

A Mall Divided (youtube) - a musical tale of commerce, employment and electrical distribution for our times.
posted on Dec 18, 2006 - View this thread

The Spark Museum John Jenkins' collection of vintage wireless, radio, scientific and electrical equipment, including Crookes and Geissler tubes, Barlow wheels and other early electric motors, loudspeakers and many more oddball electrical devices. [via TeamDroid]
posted on Nov 13, 2006 - View this thread

In 1987, Canadian photographer Robin Collyer began documenting houses that aren't houses at all – they're architecturally-disguised electrical substations, complete with windows, blinds, and bourgeois landscaping.
posted on Jun 12, 2006 - View this thread

Fables of the reconstruction. The Bush administration does not intend to seek any further funding for Iraqi reconstruction, leaving only $3.5 billion left to spend out of the $18.4 billion the US budgeted. Approximately half of all reconstruction costs spent so far -- $7.5 billion -- have been eaten up by increased costs due to the insurgency. All remaining reconstruction costs will depend entirely upon foriegn contributions and Iraq's oil industry. But will foriegn aid come through if its too dangerous to work there? Can Iraq's oil industry pay for reconstruction when its output has been in a tailspin for well over a year, falling from 2.8 million barrels a day in May 2004, to 1.82 million barrels per day in January 2005, to 1.2 million barrels a day by November. and ending the year with a low of 1.1 million barrels a day in December? As for the Iraqi infrastructure left to be rebuilt, water and sanitation is still poor in most areas, and electricity production, which looked promising last summer after imports from Iran and Turkey, has deteriorated again, falling to only 3700 megawatts in November 2005, essentially at the same level produced in May 2004.
posted on Jan 2, 2006 - View this thread

Be. The. Battery.
A brilliantly simple concept will allow anyone who needs (a small amount of) power to generate their own just by walking around while wearing this special backpack. By mounting the pack's load on springs connected to a rack and pinion device that is, in turn, connected to a small generator, the wearer's natural walking motion can generate up to 7.4 watts of power. Plenty enough to keep your Nofriendo DS charged. Or your sniper rifle's night scope.

The bonus? By having the pack's load on springs, the backpack is more comfortable and ergonomic than a traditional backpack too.
posted on Dec 8, 2005 - View this thread

Double-discharge Lichtenberg figure [qtvr] : what they are and how they're made.
posted on Dec 1, 2005 - View this thread

Hamster driven micro Power Plants ... the Hamster powered Night Light from the Otherpower.com guys .... also the school project of a London teen ... "Every two minutes Elvis spends on his wheel gives me about 30 minutes talk time on my phone." The teenage inventor was given a C for his project and has been awarded a D overall for the course" Please no Richard Gere jokes OK?
posted on Nov 7, 2005 - View this thread

Power-dressing man leaves trail of destruction. An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building.
posted on Sep 16, 2005 - View this thread

Power Cut Shuts Down Iraq Oil Exports ASRA, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq's oil exports were shut down Monday by a power cut that darkened parts of central and southern Iraq, including the country's only functioning oil export terminals, Iraqi and foreign oil officials said.
posted on Aug 22, 2005 - View this thread

Electric power transmission and distribution explosions and fireworks for your Fourth of July weekend.
posted on Jul 2, 2005 - View this thread

Lightning On Demand is a volunteer organization of engineers, artists, scientists and machinists. Our key objective is to produce a controllable discharge of lightning at the greatest physical scale imaginable using modern technology. They've built the worlds biggest Tesla coil, Electrum, a Taser Cannon and some other projects
posted on Apr 30, 2005 - View this thread

Huff & Puff Energy "Think about it. We go to the gym every day, get on a machine and expend great amounts of energy. Multiply that by everyone in your gym, in all the gyms in all the world and what have you got? a lot of power! This project is a request "for speculative proposals to re-design exercise equipment to generate and store energy; and/or to retrofit gyms to function as local power sources linked to the grid." It envisions a redesign of gyms into power hubs and a linking together of the power hubs into a massive power network. All this and get fit too." [via Treehugger]
posted on Apr 11, 2005 - View this thread

Electrifying art! This is my favorite, but maybe you'll prefer fine art or kitsch or deco.
posted on Mar 5, 2005 - View this thread

I never was before engaged in any study that so totally engrossed my attention and my time Ben Frankin's extensive experiments with electricity went well beyond his famous kite flying; he also proved that lightning was electrical (and invented the lightning rod), and was the first one to use the words "positive" and "negative" to describe electrical charges. It would no doubt please the ingenious Mr. Franklin to know that all of his writings on electricity are now available online (Note: link goes to 912k PDF file.) Franklin's excitement over his discoveries is palpable--and high school students can duplicate them on their own, thanks to Ben Franklin As My Lab Partner. And for a demonstration that combines Ben's knowledge of electricity with his mischievous sense of humor and fondness for political subversion, watch Conspirators, or The Treason.
posted on Feb 15, 2005 - View this thread

It's not the other white meat, but it seems cows have yet another use.

"That's some good shit, man (in my very best Tommy Chong!)."
posted on Jan 24, 2005 - View this thread

Hack a fibre optic display. Blow up smarties. Make a lava lamp (that actually works). Things to make and do from Big Clive.
posted on Dec 21, 2004 - View this thread

The Bakken: A social history of electricity The Bakken is a growing center "for education and learning that furthers the understanding of the history, cultural context, and applications of electricity and magnetism in the life sciences and their benefits to contemporary society." The site includes an illustrated collection of artifacts ranging from static electricity generators and Leyden jars to Victorian therapeutic magnetic belts, and exhibitions on Mesmer and Mesmerism and Mary Shelley and Frankenstein. The institute was founded by Earl Bakken, the co-inventor of the pacemaker.
posted on May 30, 2004 - View this thread

On the A46 motorway heading towards Bath, Richard Box has "planted" a field of flourescent tubes powered entirely by the electric field surrounding some overhead power lines. A very cool piece of art, but with a serious background: some people believe that the electromagnetic fields around power lines can cause cancer, while others aren't so sure.
posted on Feb 23, 2004 - View this thread

Maybe you've seen the Electric Arc of Death video. OK, so maybe it's just capable of death if you get too close. But, if you work in the power industry like I do, I was amazed to see this rather impressive video of a switchyard problem. Electric arcs involving switchgear for transmission lines are nothing new, and this link provides an excellent analysis of why this arc is occuring. Make sure you turn the volume up for an extra charge of excitement.
posted on Jan 16, 2004 - View this thread

Nuclear plant operation correlates with increased infant mortality rate. Correlation may not prove causation, but these numbers are pretty dramatic.
posted on Nov 3, 2003 - View this thread

Pay your electricity bill -- or Fluffy gets it. Russia's First Channel television reported Dalenergo, an electricity company in Russia's Far Eastern city Vladivostok, is so frustrated by customers who owe around 300 million roubles (6 million pounds) that it has decided to confiscate their pets.
posted on Oct 9, 2003 - View this thread

Wind Power cheaper than coal, electric car does 0 to 60 in 3.7 w/300 mile cruising range

It's official: wind power is now cheaper than electricity from Coal, Stanford Researchers report in a study published in the Journal Science. Quiz for Metafilter science wonks: how much of current US energy consumption could be supplied by spending 200 billion dollars on wind turbines?

Meanwhile...Powered by 6800 lithium-ion batteries, the Tzero "from zero to 100 and through the quarter mile, will run with, or beat, the $281,000 Lamborghini Murci
posted on Sep 24, 2003 - View this thread

Anyone smell a conspiracy? London and the South East gets hit by a massive power cut in a similar way to New York and the surrounding areas. Complaints from authorities in both cities of "under-investment in the National Grid " and talk of "antiquated infrastructure" strangely mirror each other and it's odd that these two extremely rare events have happened so close together. Was this a deliberate test of our emergency infrastructures, terrorism or just plain coincidence?
posted on Aug 29, 2003 - View this thread

How Niagara Mohawk and Enron brought energy deregulation to the US. Greg Palast explores the links between Mohawk, Enron, Bush I, and George Pataki and how their successful attempts at deregulation has left the US with a weaker grid and more expensive energy.
posted on Aug 16, 2003 - View this thread

BLACKOUT BLOG - Cleveland.com decides a weblog is the best way to cope with their servers getting knocked out in yesterday's power outage.
posted on Aug 15, 2003 - View this thread

Top 10 ways to cope with power outages
From the Iraqis, who've had plenty of exeprience with this recently. (via Tapped)
posted on Aug 15, 2003 - View this thread

Welcome to the Blackout History Project. With all the hub-bub today, josh m. marshall of talkingpointsmemo posted a link to an associates history of two other nyc blackouts. marshall says:

The Blackout History Project...which covers the social history of these events, what happened, people's reminiscences in written and recorded formats, and so forth. The site also has a great deal of information about just how blackouts happen, what these 'grids' are that folks are talking about, and how various forms of electricity deregulation which have taking place over recent years have made an event like we've seen today much more likely.

take it easy nyers and anyone else blacked out.
posted on Aug 14, 2003 - View this thread

Free electricity from the phone company. I already knew that phone lines carry an electrical current, but using it to power devices other than telephones is a new one on me. Some of these are useful, some are interesting, and some are pretty ironic. [via boingboing]
posted on Dec 4, 2002 - View this thread

While scientists like Einstein and Heisenberg are familiar names, others like Nikolai Tesla have been largely forgotten by history, despite the fact that some of his work with electricity still cannot be replicated to this day. Despite this, claims of governmental conspiracies are probably fairly far from the truth.
posted on Oct 12, 2002 - View this thread

"When you talk about running electricity through someone's genitals, most people think of torture. However, we have found that low power, high frequency (audio) current can produce some very interesting tingling and throbbing sensations." Bored of the same, day-in, day-out masturbation routine? Try electronic masturbation! "
posted on Sep 18, 2002 - View this thread

Bert Hickman has a ten inch diameter Tesla coil powered from two neon sign transformers in his screened-in (but unheated) porch, along with a device that produces magnetic fields strong enough to shrink coins. One of the byproducts of the coin-shrinking: an eight inch ball of plasma.
posted on May 14, 2002 - View this thread

Fuel cell–generated electricity goes online on Long Island Clean air, anyone?
posted on Nov 8, 2001 - View this thread

Edison electrocutes an elephant at Coney Island. I never knew this horrifying bit of history until I read about it via rscharm's MeFi post.
posted on Jul 23, 2001 - View this thread

Energy woes continue in CA and now it looks like there may be a more serious push to consider price caps. But what if that doesn't happen? I've been thinking about this a lot lately and wondering what we as consumers can do. And I came up with this sort of crazy idea that I can't seem to shake: What if we all just stop paying our electric bills? Is this an appropriate form of protest? Would it be immoral? Would it be possible? And most importantly, would it make a difference?
posted on Jun 14, 2001 - View this thread

Act for Change : California’s electricity crisis Act now and be heard! Express your own position on the California energy crisis by sending an email to the state speaker of the Assembly.
posted on Jan 19, 2001 - View this thread