23 March 2009

Inventing a super-kite to tap the energy of high-altitude wind: Saul Griffith on TED.com

Unveiled at TED2009: In this brief talk, Saul Griffith debuts the invention his new company Makani Power has been working on: giant kite turbines that create surprising amounts of clean, renewable energy. (Recorded at TED2009, February 2009, in Long Beach, California. Duration: 05:25.)

Watch Saul Griffith's talk from TED2009 on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 400+ TEDTalks -- including more tales of invention.

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12 December 2007

William Kamkwamba in the Wall Street Journal

William Kamkwamba, a young Malawi man who designed and built a windmill for his family when he was 14 -- and who spoke so memorably at TEDGlobal Africa this June -- is profiled on the front page of today's Wall Street Journal in a story headined "A Young Tinkerer Builds a Windmill, Electrifying a Nation." Writer Sarah Childress adds detail to the story that Kamkwamba told onstage in Tanzania:

Mr. Kamkwamba's wind obsession started six years ago. He wasn't going to school anymore because his family couldn't afford the $80-a-year tuition.

When he wasn't helping his family farm groundnuts and soybeans, he was reading. He stumbled onto a photograph of a windmill in a text donated to the local library and started to build one himself.

There's also a great 2-minute video that shows the updates Kamkwamba has made to his family's home power system, and talks about what's next for him:

Video: Writer Sarah Childress from the Wall Street Journal talks to William Kamkwamba, a 20-year-old Malawian who built a windmill to power his family's home. Image courtesy Wall Street Journal

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27 September 2007

Quotes from the TED Salon

Last night in Manhattan, TED hosted its 2007 Salon, called "Hot Science: Radical Ideas to Combat the Climate Crisis." A detailed roundup is coming later today -- but first, a few quotes from last night:

The first speaker, Michael Oppenheimer, began by saying: "I'm the depressing, immobilizing part of the talk." He went on to make this point: While Hurricane Katrina can't be directly tied to climate change, it did teach us one thing:

You can't count on the government to save you from global warming. They're still inept to this day, and half an American city is gone, and how the hell are we going to deal with this? And what are we doing instead?

He puts up a devastating slide of the hyperdevelopment on the beach at Atlantic City -- which would lose 100 feet of beachfront if global sea levels rise 1 foot, as they will.

Alternative energy expert Martin Hoffert is a staunch advocate for getting off fossil fuels altogether. He spun out one scenario:

Let me say a few words about space solar power. The advantage of putting solar collectors in orbit: The sun is basically shining 24/7. We already have thousands of satellites up there -- suppose you could build a transmitting antenna in orbit that would beam energy down to collectors, beaming energy using lasers (not microwaves) from geostationary orbit? We could send it up in one launch vehicle, and power a village, maybe in Africa, to demonstrate the viability of solar power. We could do this in 3 to 5 years.

Environmental scientist David Keith talked about geoengineering -- dramatic, cheap solutions to a warming atmosphere, such as blowing a Mt. Pinatubo-size cloud of sulfur into the sky to bring the global temperature down. Such ideas seem overly dramatic, and even immoral, but they are out there, and he argues:

We should move this out of the shadows and talk about this seriously, because sooner or later we will be confronted with a decision on this. We would do [geoengineering] instead of cutting emissions, instead of mitigation, because it's cheaper. It's very cheap. It's not a GOOD idea, but that's how big the [incentive] is. That is not in dispute, though we might argue over the sanity of it ...

Russ George, the chief scientist of Planktos, offered a way to think about all the factors contributing to the larger issue of climate change:

We have a bunch of aberrant applications in this planet, jamming a lot of errors against that primary operating system, and it's threatening to reboot and give us that blue screen of death, threatening a reboot back to 16 million years ago.

Juan Enriquez (pictured above) talked about how much of our energy, such as coal and oil -- made from ancient plants -- is simply "concentrated sunlight." How can we get to the point where we grow our own energy as efficiently as we grow wheat? Looking at a photo of a pile of surplus grain, Enriquez notes:

That would probably be a good outcome for energy.

Photo of Juan Enriquez by Myrna Suarez, Condé Nast Portfolio

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28 June 2007

To the depths of the Earth ... and beyond! Watch Bill Stone on TED.com

Bill Stone, the maverick cave explorer and diver -- who has invented robots and rebreathing equipment to let him plumb Earth’s deepest abysses -- talks about his efforts to build a robot to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. The plan is to send the droid to bore through miles of ice and swim through a liquid underworld that may harbor alien life. And if that’s not enough, he’s also planning to mine ice, on Earth's own moon, by 2015. (Recorded March 2007 in Monterey, CA. Duration: 17:55) Read more about Bill Stone on TED.com.

Watch this talk on TED.com, where you can download it, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances.

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