7 Cool New Ideas

By Andrew Downie/ Rio de Janeiro, Margot Roosevelt, Eric Roston, Sarah Sturmon Dale/Minneapolis, David E. Thigpen/Chicago, Susan Jakes/Beijing, Liz Keenan/Port Kembla, New South Wales

A Sweet Ride in Brazil

Alcohol consumption in Brazil is on the rise, but not because people are drinking more. Instead, drivers are filling their gas tanks with ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, which is one of two fuel options used in a new generation of Brazilian cars called Flex. The cars work like traditional vehicles but can run on either gasoline or ethanol derived from sugar cane--a commodity in abundance in Brazil. Volkswagen, Ford, Fiat and GM all produce Flex lines. In May sales of Flex vehicles overtook gasoline models for the first time. By August, Flex sales had risen 61.7%. "I am hard pressed to think of any other technology that has been such a success so quickly," says Barry Engle, president of Ford Brasil.

Brazil is a leader in this technology by virtue of its extensive expertise at every stage of the supply chain: growing sugar cane efficiently, refining it, converting it to ethanol and manufacturing the cars. Brazil is building ethanol plants and is in a great position to capitalize on its vast experience by selling its knowledge to other countries that decide to adopt this new technology or buy its cars.

In the U.S., where ethanol is usually made from corn, it has had a rockier road partly because government subsidies are seen as benefiting big producers. Brazil's ethanol industry has created nearly 1 million jobs and helped cut oil imports. Says Alfred Szwarc, an expert with Sao Paulo's sugar-cane association: "People see Flex cars as the car of the future."

Wi-Fi in the Sky

As the afternoon light sparkles off the Colorado Rockies, office workers spill out of buildings in downtown Boulder and alight at outdoor-cafe tables, laptops in hand. With a click, they tap into a bold new energy future: a wireless network powered by the sun. The $10,000 project, which covers a six-block area, allows anyone to connect to the Internet through wi-fi transmitters powered by solar panels on nearby rooftops. The panels collect the sun's rays even on cloudy days and hook up to batteries that store 72 hours' worth of power, ensuring a steady supply. "It was a snap to hook up--no wires, no drilling," says Gerard Cote, spokesman for Downtown Boulder Inc., the business group that footed the bill. The cost was half the competing bid for a conventional wireless system.

Solar wi-fi is ideal for regions where electricity is scarce--from archaeological digs to disaster scenes, says Sally Lyon, co-founder of Boulder-based Lumin Innovative Products, which invented the system. Fellow founder and former Air Force engineer Ben Adams, who hatched the idea three years ago as he lugged a generator through the Nevada desert to hook up a communications system, is negotiating this month with U.S. and Australian forces to market solar wi-fi in Iraq. Each solar-paneled access point can relay wireless signals as far as 25 miles to other stations and can connect to a series of other nodes, extending the signal from the cities to rural areas. A model linking solar panels with satellites is in the works. Ever since Boulder inaugurated its system last July, inquiries have flooded in. Last month the company won a contract to transmit air-pollution data in California's Death Valley. "We're getting e-mails from Afghanistan to Thailand," says Lyon. "They're asking, 'How soon can we get this?'"

March of the Solar Soldier

U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan often carry much more than 50 lbs. of equipment, including telephones, computers, night-vision goggles and, begrudgingly, the batteries to run them. The batteries alone can weigh as much as 4 lbs.

Researchers at the Army's Soldier Systems Center in Natick, Mass., would like to ease that load by turning soldiers into walking power plants. Iowa Thin Film Technologies began supplying the Army last year with pocket-size solar rechargers (weight 6 oz.) and tents embedded with flexible, plastic panels that can generate electricity. Soldiers field-testing the tents use them both for shelter and to operate medical or communications equipment. Another solar company, Konarka of Lowell, Mass., has also received a military grant and hopes to do away with solar panels altogether. The firm is developing light-sensitive fabrics that the Army can manufacture directly into power-generating, camouflaged tents, uniforms or backpacks. The military hopes solar power will allow soldiers to stay out on missions longer and safely travel farther from supply bases.

Civilians can benefit too. Iowa Thin Film Technologies already sells solar-powered radio headsets and rolls of its 13-in.-wide electricity-making plastic through a business unit, PowerFilm Solar. Konarka has partnered with another firm to design juice-generating clothing. For day hikers, Washington-based Reware sells backpacks embedded with lightweight, sun-sensitive plastic chargers that can juice cell phones and iPods. Roughing it has never been easier.

Putting Bugs in the Paint

You probably never thought your average house paint could help solve the world energy crunch. But Michael Flickinger, 54, founding director of the University of Minnesota's Biotechnology Institute, has found a way to make hydrogen--and then electricity--from genetically engineered bacteria embedded in the adhesive latex polymer particles that form the basis of most paints. Thinly coated onto plastic or metals, the polymers, which are infused with bacteria, are permeable to gases and nutrients. The coatings--about two-thirds the thickness of a sheet of paper--jump to life when exposed to light and begin making hydrogen gas, which can be captured in fuel cells and converted into electricity. Sounds cool, but what's it good for, exactly? "We're a couple of years away from showing practical applications," admits Flickinger. "But we're very optimistic about its future." Photo bioreactors already exist in labs, but because they're made from a slurry of bacteria and liquid that needs to be stirred constantly, they are inefficient and expensive. Flickinger's paint concept needs nothing more than waste carbon sources, sunshine and a thin coating of highly concentrated microbes. For the moment, more fundamental scientific and engineering studies are needed in the laboratory to prove the concept. But, one day, Flickinger's polymers could help wean us off fossil fuels, one light bulb at a time.

Flower Petal to the Metal

Mention sunflowers and you probably think of the famous painting by Van Gogh or perhaps the tasty salad oil. But Valerie Dupont, a scientist at England's University of Leeds, thinks of hydrogen. Last summer Dupont and her team developed a method for extracting hydrogen using nothing but sunflower oil, air, water and two specialized catalysts. That development may help solve one of the chief problems slowing the advance of the much touted automobile fuel cell: how to provide a clean, renewable source of its hydrogen fuel. The process works by vaporizing oil and water, breaking them down and capturing the hydrogen locked inside. Built on a large scale, such a hydrogen generator could provide fill-ups of hydrogen fuel for thousands of cars. The technology would also help solve a potential pollution problem by allowing a by-product of the process, carbon dioxide, to be captured and filtered at a single point. Imagine if all the pollutants could be stripped out of gasoline before you filled up your tank. Known scientifically as "unmixed steam reforming," the process used by Dupont was invented in the U.S. But she is believed to be the first to apply it to sunflower oil. U.S. producers, who have 1.8 million acres under till and produce about 280,000 metric tons of cooking oil annually, are interested. So are producers in places like Argentina and Russia, which grow even more acres. For now, Dupont's prototype must be refined, and the cost of the process remains too high to be widely practical. But time and a few more years of rising oil prices could make sunflower power a reality.

Pigpen Power in China

That cities in the world's largest country are thirsty for oil is no secret. But China's countryside, home to 900 million, has energy woes of its own--low tech, but no less important to the nation's development. Most rural Chinese households depend on coal braziers and open wood-fueled hearths for their cooking. That is why Yunnan province, nestled between Tibet and Burma in the country's southwest, boasts forests that are among the world's most biodiverse--and most imperiled. Consumption of wood for fuel in the area averages about 6 tons per family of four per year, hacking 300,000 acres off the forest each year and leaving some of China's poorest families exposed to a host of troubles: lung disease from smoky houses, soil erosion and floods from the denuded land.

But a "biogas digester," a simple, inexpensive device introduced to Yunnan by the Nature Conservancy (TNC) and catching on in other parts of the country, is cutting down on tree cutting. In place of a woodpile, the system gives homes a pigpen, toilet, greenhouse, underground tank and some rubber tubing. Waste--from the pigpen, the toilet and the odd kitchen scrap--ferments in the underground tank, heating the greenhouse and producing a steady stream of methane to power stoves and lamps. The greenhouse helps keep the tank warm in winter, and the by-product of the tank's digestion makes good fertilizer. The whole setup costs $180. TNC, which installed more than 1,700 digesters in Yunnan last year, often donates the units to village schools, harnessing the energy of children first and using it to fire up their parents.

Surf's Up, Light's On

At the Kiama blowhole, south of Sydney, tourists watch from a discreet distance as geysers of spray burst from a hole in the cliff top. Growing up in the area, Tom Denniss was fascinated by these eruptions, caused when waves rushing deep into a cave force a mix of compressed air and water out through a gap in the roof. Now, a few miles south of Kiama, in the industrial city of Port Kembla, Denniss and his company, Energetech, are using the principles of the blowhole to turn wave energy into electricity.

In place of a cave, Energetech's four-story-high floating power plant has an open-based, dome-roofed chamber with a narrow opening at the top. As the waves rise and fall inside the chamber, compressed air is forced in and out of the opening, past a turbine that drives a generator. The device, which has been dubbed an "oscillating water column," has been the basis of several plans for generating useful energy. But Denniss, a former lecturer in mathematics and oceanography, curved one wall of the chamber to amplify the wave, much as a car headlight's concave reflecting surface intensifies the light from the low-wattage bulb. And he designed a turbine that rotates in the same direction no matter which way the column of air is moving.

His oscillating water column successfully generated power during trials outside Port Kembla harbor in June. (A rival system called Pelamis, using 120-m-long hinged cylinders, was successfully tested in Scotland in April.) Once commissioned, Energetech's plant is expected to feed into the local grid enough clean power for 500 homes. Energetech is developing several commercial-scale projects from Israel to Rhode Island. Wave energy, Denniss says, is "more consistent, predictable and concentrated than wind. It's also inexhaustible." Having studied the ocean's power all his life, he's in no doubt that it will soon be turning on our lights.