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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

I recently noted that Hawaii has enacted a law that requires all new homes to install solar water heaters. Eventually, Hawaii may have as many water heaters as Israel, where 90% of homes have solar water heaters installed. When viewed from above, the Jerusalem often glitters with the shine of the thousands of solar heaters that adorn rooftops.

Hawaii has become the first state to require solar water heaters in new homes. The bill was signed into law by Governor Linda Lingle, a Republican. It requires the energy-saving systems in homes starting in 2010. It prohibits issuing building permits for single-family homes that do not have solar water heaters. Hawaii relies on imported fossil fuels more than any other state, with about 90 percent of its energy sources coming from foreign countries, according to state data.

" This innovative 'green' home, featuring solar panels and numerous other energy-saving products, is truly a home of the future," Buffett wrote his shareholders. "Estimated costs for electricity and heating total only about $1 per day when the home is sited in an area like Omaha."

The results of the first ever silver antimicrobial product trial in a nursing home environment, published in the British Journal of Community Nursing, reveal that levels of potentially deadly bacteria can be dramatically reduced using products treated with silver antimicrobial agents, creating cleaner and safer nursing homes for elderly residents across the UK.

The Chinese government said that it would expand an existing subsidy program to encourage the purchase of new vehicles and home appliances, thereby boosting domestic spending. China will now allocate 5B yuan ($733M) for owners of light trucks and passenger vans who upgrade to new models. It also plans to spend 2B yuan ($293M) to fund discounts of new purchases of home appliances when customers turn in old goods, which will possibly give support to domestic copper demand. The plan will apply to almost all household appliances, including air-conditioners, television sets, refrigerators, washing machines and computers. Exports of these have been weak and the plan will help local producers to de-stock more quickly.

According to the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, the home appliances 'trade in' policy realized RMB121.1B of sales income in 2010. Sales income and sales volume amounted to RMB16.6B and 3.6 million sets respectively in Q4 2010. Value was up by 142.7% and volume 147.7% from the same period a year ago. A joint programme of the Ministry of Commerce, Ministry of Finance, and Ministry of Environmental Protection stated that effective from June 2010, the policy would be launched in 19 additional provinces and cities, in addition to the existing nine. The time period of the policy was extended to the end of 2011. Home appliances covered by the programme include television sets, refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners and computers.

UK telecoms provider BT is to invest £1.5 billion ($3 billion) to roll out superfast broadband to up to 10 million UK homes by 2012. The system will enable services such as video conferencing, video on demand, and other high bandwidth activities. The programme is Britain's largest ever investment in superfast broadband, which will deliver speeds of up to 100 megabits per second. The fibre will be linked to a cabinet in the street and in some cases - such as the Olympic village for the 2012 Games - directly to the premises. Homes linked to a fibre-to-the-cabinet network will receive initial speeds of up to 40 Mbps, due to the copper cable that connects the house to the cabinet. However, BT expects this to increase to 60 Mbps with new technologies. Those on a fibre-to-the-premises network will see speeds of up to 100 Mbps.

Panasonic encouraged by the Japanese Home Appliance Recycling Law has set up a lab called the 'Eco Technology Center' to recycle these products with the cooperation of consumers, retailers and of course manufacturers.

Instead, America's consumption binge drew support from two major asset bubbles-property and credit. Courtesy of cheap and freely available credit, in conjunction with record housing price appreciation, consumers tripled the rate of net equity extraction from their homes, from 3 percent of disposable personal income in 2001 to 9 percent in 2006. Only by levering increasingly overvalued homes could Americans go on the biggest consumption binge in modern history. And now those twin bubbles-property and credit-have burst, and so has the US consumption bubble: real consumer spending fell at an unprecedented 3.5 percent average annual rate in the two final quarters of 2008. While the original excesses were made in America, the rest of the world was delighted to go along for the ride. With the United States lacking in internal saving, it had to import surplus savings from abroad in order to grow-and ran massive current-account and trade deficits to attract that capital. This fit perfectly with the macro-imbalances of the export-led developing countries of Asia, whose exports exceeded a record 45 percent of regional GDP in 2007-fully ten percentage points higher than their share ten years earlier, in the depths of the Asian financial crisis. China led the charge, taking its exports from 20 percent, to 40 percent of its GDP over the past seven years alone. The export-led growth in developing Asia could well be described as a second-order bubble-in effect, a derivative of the one in US consumption.

Increased copper use and communications in the home.

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts (Reuters) - A U.S. scientist has developed a new way of powering fuel cells that could make it practical for home owners to store solar energy and produce electricity to run lights and appliances at night. A new catalyst produces the oxygen and hydrogen that fuel cells use to generate electricity, while using far less energy than current methods. With this catalyst, users could rely on electricity produced by photovoltaic solar cells to power the process that produces the fuel, said the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who developed the new material.