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"Donald Sadoway: The missing link to renewable energy Tweet this talk! (we'll add the headline and the URL) Post to: Share on Twitter Email This Favorite Download inShare Share on StumbleUpon Share on Reddit Share on Facebook TED Conversations Got an idea, question, or debate inspired by this talk? Start a TED Conversation, or join one of these: Green Home Energy=Hydrogen Generators-alternative sources Started by Kathleen Gilligan-Smith 1 Comment What is the real missing link in renewable energy? Started by Enrico Petrucco 8 Comments Comment on this Talk 60 total comments Sign in to add comments or Join (It's free and fast!) Sort By: smily raichel 0 Reply Less than 5 minutes ago: Nice smily raichel 0 Reply Less than 5 minutes ago: Good David Mackey 0 Reply 3 hours ago: Superb invention, but I would suggest one more standard mantra that they should move on from and that is the idea of power being supplied by a centralised grid. This technology seems to me to be much more beneficial on a local scale, what if every home had its own battery, then home power generation becomes economically more viable for everyone. If you could show that a system like this could pay for itself in say 5 years then every home would want one. Plus for this to be implemented on a large scale requires massive investment that could be decades away. Share the technology and lets get it in homes by next year. Great ted talk. Jon Senior 0 Reply 1 hour ago: I agree 100%. Localised energy production would also make energy consumers more conscious of their consumption and encourage efforts to reduce it. We can invent and invent all we want, but the fast solution to allowing renewable energies to take centre stage is to reduce the base energy draw. With lower baseline consumption, smaller "always on" generators are required to keep the grid operational. Town and house-l

A new era for commodities Cheap resources underpinned economic growth for much of the 20th century. The 21st will be different. NOVEMBER 2011 * Richard Dobbs, Jeremy Oppenheim, and Fraser Thompson Source: McKinsey Global Institute, Sustainability & Resource Productivity Practice In This Article Exhibit: In little more than a decade, soaring commodity prices have erased a century of steady declines. About the authors Comments (2) Has the global economy entered an era of persistently high, volatile commodity prices? Our research shows that during the past eight years alone, they have undone the decline of the previous century, rising to levels not seen since the early 1900s (exhibit). In addition, volatility is now greater than at any time since the oil-shocked 1970s because commodity prices increasingly move in lockstep. Our analysis suggests that they will remain high and volatile for at least the next 20 years if current trends hold-barring a major macroeconomic shock-as global resource markets oscillate in response to surging global demand and inelastic supplies. Back to top Demand for energy, food, metals, and water should rise inexorably as three billion new middle-class consumers emerge in the next two decades.1 The global car fleet, for example, is expected almost to double, to 1.7 billion, by 2030. In India, we expect calorie intake per person to rise by 20 percent during that period, while per capita meat consumption in China could increase by 60 percent, to 80 kilograms (176 pounds) a year. Demand for urban infrastructure also will soar. China, for example, could annually add floor space totaling 2.5 times the entire residential and commercial square footage of the city of Chicago, while India could add floor space equal to another Chicago every year. Such dramatic growth in demand for commodities actually isn't unusual. Similar factors were at play throughout the 20th century as the planet's population tripled and demand for various resource

Copper theft has become such an issue that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warning stating that copper theft is a threat to critical homeland infrastructure. In a 2009 survey published by the Electrical Safety Foundation International, utilities in the United States reported approximately $60 million in losses and 450,000 minutes of outage time annually because of copper theft.

"Global demand for insulated cable and wire is forecast to expand 8.3% p.a. between 2014 - 2018. Azerbaijan, China, Lithuania, Turkey, and the United States are considered the highest potential markets in the coming years."

"The stationary fuel cell sector continues to be the vanguard of the overall global fuel cell industry. As the focus on grid stability increases and the costs associated with natural disasters rise, the use of fuel cells as small distributed power plants for grid stabilization and backup is moving forward more rapidly, in terms of megawatts and revenue, than any other fuel cell sector. "

Slower growth in emerging markets, up take in others