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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

Due to a major contraction in orders intake, Wieland-Werke announced that it will introduce short-time working for 3,450 staff. Earlier plans of the company considered short-time working for 1,100 out of its 4,300 employees in Germany. The decision is attributed to very weak demand across all regions and industries, especially the automobile, electronics and construction sectors. As a result, impacted staff will work 20% less than normal.

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

Mention copper to almost anyone in the PCB industry these days and the first thing that springs to mind is the ongoing price increase. Although copper pricing is not directly monitored by BPA, the impact on the price of laminate and PCBs is monitored through BPA's quarterly survey for its PCB Information Service. \n\nIn the short term, forecasted increases on the demand side for copper prices are likely to remain at least at the current level. The trend in copper usage has diverged in the fact that a number of different applications now exist. \n\nAt one time, 1 ounce (35µm) copper was standard, but the average is now 0.5 ounces. Using thinner copper, if the design will allow, can, to some extent, offset a price increase. However, one segment of the PCB industry which is particularly vulnerable to copper prices is the automotive sector, where recent developments have seen the introduction of thick copper PCBs for smart fuse boxes and power electronics. These boards use 4 ounce, 6 ounce and 10 ounce copper--up to 20 times the standard thickness.

Mr Obama's stimulus includes calls for $38bn in direct government spending and $18bn in tax breaks for clean energy spread over the next 10 years, according to Dewey & LeBoeuf, the law firm. Owners of solar, wind, and other clean energy facilities will be able to claim tax credits against the cost of new equipment, helping attract big institutional investors who have been put off investing in clean energy because of uncertainty about taxes. But the short timeframe - credits can only be claimed for projects that are up and running within the next three to four years - means projects still on the drawing board may not be ready in time to qualify.

Over the past six weeks, executives have become markedly more optimistic about current economic conditions and prospects for their national economies, a new McKinsey survey shows. Expectations started out so gloomy, however, that even now, fewer than a third expect an economic upturn this year, and two-thirds expect their nations' GDPs to decrease in 2009.\n\nSimilarly, at the company level, more executives still expect to shed workers than to hire, but the share expecting to decrease the workforce has fallen below half for the first time since January. And a full third of respondents now expect profits to increase in 2009, up 8 percent in six weeks. Furthermore, even though respondents see fallout from the crisis in a variety of financial and nonfinancial measures such as employee morale and the pace of innovation, strong majorities expect those effects to be short-lived.

"Some of Lectromec's conclusions from the data review: One would typically anticipate a high number of failures at the beginning and end of an aircraft's life cycle (component life cycle article here), but incidents for aircraft with less than 10k hours represent only 7% of all reported incidents. Many of the aircraft individually reviewed in the 30 - 40k cycle range were 8 - 10 years old with about 10k cycles. Date of aircraft entering service is not readily available with the data (to be included in future data reviews). If this assumption holds, then most wire incidents around the time of the first aircraft D-check. The most common system to be reported is the emergency path lighting system. Many of the EWIS errors were found during routine service checks. The hazard of these EWIS failures to the aircraft/crew is not easily ascertained from many of the reports. Of the 725 records reviewed: 25 reports identified shorting. 15 reports including detection of smoke - 8 of these were identified as faulty smoke detectors. 5 reports including mention of electrical arcing There were some incidents that were reported to have included smoke/fire. An example of this is the following: "

According to data from the Copper and Brass Servicenter Association(CBSA), total shipments from US brass and copper mills slipped 1.1% y-o-y in 2012, to 261.5Mlb (118,600t). Data from November had indicated that year-to-date shipments were roughly unchanged from 2011, however, a 16.9% m-o-m drop in shipments in December tipped total shipments into contraction territory for the year. In general, copper semis shipments were stronger than alloy shipments, with copper rod shipments up 8.3% in 2012, to 64.4Mlb (29,200t). Total alloy shipments fell 5.4% in 2012, to 139.6Mlb (63,300t), with 300-series alloy RBS shipments declining by the largest amount in the year, falling 11.9% to 61.3Mlb (27,800t).

According to Aurubis Buffalo's vice president of marketing and sales, demand for brass mill products in the US has been strong so far in 2013. The company has seen a strong pickup in demand from sectors including ammunition, electronics, heating and HVAC so far this year. The executive said that lead times at service centers were longer than eight weeks in January for flat-rolled products and that the company is considering hiring more workers at its Buffalo operation to meet the demand.

The demand for copper flat-rolled products softened coming into March after a strong start to the year, according to sources at some US service centers. Lead times for some copper products, which were quoted as long as eight weeks back in January, may have shorted to six weeks or less in March according to an American Metal Market report. A drop in demand for appliances and connectors market was noted by some sources contacted by AMM, but sales of ammunition, a key end-use of flat-rolled brass, have remained buoyant since the start of the year.