Taylor Wilson has been called “The Boy Who Played With Fusion” by Popular Science magazine. At age 9, Wilson stunned tour guides at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with his complex understanding of rocket science. At 12, he set out to make a “star in a jar.” By 14, Wilson had become the youngest person to achieve nuclear fusion with a working reactor. Built in his parents’ garage, the deuterium-hurling device is now housed in the physics department of the University of Nevado, Reno.

At TED2013, Wilson made his second appearance on the TED stage, above. Now 19, he arrived with a bold new idea — a way to make nuclear energy safe and portable, on a scale where it has the potential to address the global energy crisis. In today’s talk, Wilson shares his latest innovation — Small Modular Fission Reactors. These reactors are small, meaning that they can be built in factories and shipped around the globe. They run on already-molten material, so meltdowns won’t be an issue. They’re installed three meters underground, making them hard to tamper with, and yet, in the event of a disaster, the core can be drained to a tank underneath, stopping the reaction. And while traditional nuclear power plants run for 18 months before needing refueling, the small-scale versions could run for up to 30 years, after which they could be sealed for discarding.

To hear how these reactors work — and a few potential applications, from bringing carbon-free energy to the developing world to propelling rockets into space — watch this talk.

A year ago, at TED2012, Wilson took the TED stage to talk about the nuclear fusion reactor he created in his basement. “I would like to make the case that nuclear fusion will be … our energy future,” he says in this talk, “Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactor.” “I’d also like to make the case that kids can really change the world.”

Wilson isn’t the only teenager who has shared an energy innovation on the TED stage. At TEDGlobal 2007, William Kamkwamba answered questions about his incredible creation – a homemade windmill he built at age 14.

Kamkwamba set out to make a windmill to bring electricity to his family’s home in rural Malawi. He got the basic plans from a library book, reimagining the design out of spare parts, like a bicycle frame and plastic pipes. Kamkwamba made significant alterations in the design to improve upon it, adding an extra blade to increase the windmill’s power production. In the end, the windmill created 12 watts of energy – enough to power four lightbulbs and two radios in his family’s home.  At TEDGlobal 2009, he returned to the stage to tell the story in more detail in the talk “How I harnessed the wind.”

After his TED experience, Kamkwamba set his sights on building a bigger windmill to pump water and power irrigation for his entire village. Kwambama’s story was recently the subject of the documentary William and the Windmill, which won the Grand Jury Award at SXSW.

Bill Gross, the founder of Idealab, is an adult now. But in his talk from TED2003, he revealed that he started his first energy company — called Solar Devices — when he was 15 years old, building on what he learned in school about how parabolas could concentrate rays of light onto a single point. At the height of the gas shortage in 1973, Gross developed his own design for a Stirling engine in metal shop.

“I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of Popular Science magazine, for $4 each,” he says in this talk, “Bill Gross on new energy.” “I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech.”

Want more talks with ideas for energy (regardless of the speaker’s age)? Watch the TED playlist “The End of Oil.” It begins with Wilson’s talk about his nuclear fusion reactor, continues with Donald Sadoway sharing the missing link to renewable energy, and continues with eight more great ideas for moving beyond our reliance on oil.

William Kamkwamba: How I harnessed the wind

William and the Windmill, directed by Ben Nabors and starring TED’s own Tom Rielly, who became Kamkwamba’s mentor, follows Kamkwamba’s journey from his home in Malawi to Dartmouth College, reflecting on the highs and lows of living between two very different cultures. As IndieWire writes in its rave review of the film, “Kamkwamba’s scientific achievement speaks for itself, but the attention he received in its wake is a thornier issue that Ben Nabors turns into a fascinating look at the tricky balancing act of third-world activism.”

William and the Windmill received recognition last night at SXSW alongside Short Term 12, winner of the Grand Jury Award for Narrative Feature. Below, check out stills from William and the Windmill, courtesy of Nabors. And stay tuned to the TED Blog for a Q&A with Kamkwamba.

Director Ben Nabors accepts the Grand Jury Award on Tuesday night at SXSW.

A still from the film: William hard at work on his windmill.

A still from the film: A windmill from afar.

A still from the film: William, deep in contemplation.

Here, watch the film’s trailer:

And head to the Tribeca Film Institute website to read about 5 films that influenced Nabors as he made this doc »

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Have you checked your email today? Your finances? What about your energy use? Alex Laskey thinks that with just a shift in attitude toward our energy use, we can all save a lot.

Laskey introduces an experiment he ran with his team at Opower. People received one of three different messages on their doors about why they should try to save energy:

- You can save $54 this month
- You can save the planet
or
- You can be a good citizen

Which one won? None. No one message showed a marked difference. So Opower added a fourth message: Your neighbors are doing better than you.

That one worked. The locals who heard the message that 77% of their neighbors turned down their A/C, Also turned down their AC, creating a marked difference in energy consumption. As Laskey says, “If something is inconvenient, even if we believe it, persuasion won’t work. But social pressure? That’s powerful stuff.”

Every year in the U.S. alone $40 billion of energy is wasted. Laskey projects that by thinking not just about material sciences but about behavioral sciences, we could save 2 terawatts a year — more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City for more than a year.

We can be doing so much better, says Laskey, starting by tapping into the power of social behavior.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

Taylor Wilson graduated from high school in May. And Popular Science has already dubbed him “The Boy who Played with Fusion” and Forbes has suggested that he may just be “The Bill Gates of Energy.”

Taylor Wilson: Yup, I built a nuclear fusion reactorWilson first received attention at the age of 14, after building a nuclear fusion reactor he’d dreamed up in his parents’ garage. He spoke at TED2012 about that experience, and he’s back this year at TED2013 to talk about a new project.

“I realized that the biggest problem we face — what all these other problems come down to — is energy,” says Wilson. “This is a talk about fission — about taking something old and bringing it into the 21st century.”

Wilson has invented Small Modular Fission Reactors. These reactors are small, meaning that they can be built in factories and shipped wherever they need to go. They are installed three meters underground — making them far safer from a counterterrorism standpoint than something aboveground. And these are molten salt reactors, which means that they have the potential to run on the waste from old nuclear weapons — making the wide distribution of this technology a potential way to secure the material from weapon stockpiles.

As Wilson explains, one of the problems with traditional nuclear power plants is that they only run for 18 months before needing refueling. Small Modular Fission Reactors, on the other hand, will run for about 30 years before they run out of juice. This means that they will be a closed system while they are in use, making them safer. And after the 30-year mark, these reactors can be sealed up and discarded.

“Everybody after Fukushima had to reasses the safety of nuclear,” says Wilson. “When I set out to design a reactor, I knew it had to be passive and intrisically safe.”

As Wilson explains, because the material in Small Modular Fission Reactors is already molten, meltdowns won’t be a factor. And in the case of a disaster, the core can be drained to a tank underneath, stopping the reaction.

Wilson is excited about the potential of Small Modular Fission Reactors because they could provide carbon-free electricity for homes and businesses, helping to combat climate change. And because they are produced in factories, for cheap, they may be a way to bring power to the developing world. Wilson excitedly tells TED curator Chris Anderson that he hopes to have Small Modular Fission Reactors to market in five years.

But Wilson sees other potential for these reactors — to fuel scientific exploration in other areas, perhaps even space.

“Imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50-100 megawatts. That’s the rocket designer’s dream,” says Wilson. And it isn’t inconceivable, considering that plutonium batteries have been sent into space aboard rockets. ”I think there’s something poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars. Because the stars are giant nuclear power reactors themselves.”

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

The cofounder of PayPal, Elon Musk has become one of his generation’s most aggressive, not to mention successful, entrepreneurs. As CEO and product architect of Tesla Motors and CEO and CTO of SpaceX, his interests clearly lie in transforming transportation and creating an economy built on sustainable energy. Now he takes the TED stage to tell us more.

First, he talks about the genesis of Tesla, his realization while still at university that the development of a sustainable energy system is critical to the ongoing existence of humanity — and therefore a problem worth tackling. And while, yes, these cars require being fed by current electrical systems, his belief is that given the inevitability of electric transportation, perhaps Tesla cars will help to kickstart the genuinely sustainable system necessary to support it. “All modes of transport will become electric, with the ironic exception of rockets. There’s no way around Newton’s third law,” he says. “So the question is how you create a really energy efficient car.” In Tesla’s case, the key is to make it incredibly light, with an aluminum chassis and body made in North America. “We applied rocket design techniques to make the car light, despite the large battery pack.”

Musk clearly isn’t going to talk about his recent spat with the New York Times, but he does want to talk about the range of the car. “Customers of the Model S are competing with each other to get the highest possible range,” he says. 420 miles is apparently the record, though he acknowledges that 250 miles on a single charge is a more likely number. But what he truly loves about the Tesla is the driver experience. “The responsiveness is incredible,” he says. “We want people to feel a mind-meld with the car, that you and the car are one. As you corner, accelerate, it just happens. It’s like the car has ESP.”

But Musk isn’t just here to talk about Tesla. Another string to his energy bow: SolarCity, a company harnessing the power of the “giant fusion generator in the sky,” the sun. Why solar? “I’m confident solar will beat everything hands down, including natural gas. If it doesn’t, we’re in deep trouble.” With this company, Musk is attempting to create no less than a giant, distributed utility, leasing solar panels to homes and companies. “Utilities have been this monopoly and people haven’t had a choice. It’s the first time they have had competition,” he says. “It’s empowering.”

And so to SpaceX, a project Musk jokes might well prove to be the fastest way he can lose his fortune. Despite setbacks, they persist, and when he says the goal of the company is to advance rocket technology and convert humanity into a spacefaring civilization, it’s hard to laugh him off. Especially when he challenges us to consider which we’d prefer: Exploring other planets, or confining ourselves to earth and eventual, inevitable extinction.

The real innovation of SpaceX is to build a reusable rocket. The Space Shuttle was an attempt at this, he says, but it took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish a rocket for a flight, at a cost of about $1 billion per flight. That’s not a sustainable business model, and in the past few months Musk and his team have made good progress in designing a rocket that can take off — and land again safely. He shows video of a test, a 12-story-high rocket taking off, hovering at 40 meters, and then magically landing again. The audience is appropriately impressed. Even more so when he tells us that none of the design innovations in the rocket are patented. “Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable,” he says wryly.

As to how he manages it all, he has three tips for would-be innovators. First, work a lot. Secondly, study physics and learn how to reason from first principles rather than reason by analogy. Finally, he says, pay attention to negative feedback, particularly from friends. “That may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that,” he concludes.

This interview with 60 Minutes from June 2012 is well worth a watch:

Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Kicking off the TED conference would be a daunting prospect for most, but Jennifer Granholm has tackled both nastier challenges and less friendly audiences in her time. After all, she is the former governor of Michigan, a state that, as the blurb to her book A Governor’s Story: The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future puts it, was “synonymous with manufacturing during a financial crisis that threatened to put all America’s major car companies into bankruptcy.” TED? For Granholm? A piece of cake–and an opportunity to air her theme of how to foster meaningful innovation at state level, and to lay down a challenge for the assembled TEDsters.

But first, she wants to share three enigmas. First: how do you create good jobs in America? Granholm has a story to share, featuring empirical data from her first year in office in Michigan in 2003. The 8,000-person-strong community of Greenville, Michigan, was about to lose its major employer, an Electrolux refrigerator factory. 3,000 jobs were set to be lost when the company moved its operation to Mexico. “Not on my watch,” said Granholm.

Off she went with her cabinet to convince Electrolux to stay. Proposed incentives included: zero taxes for 20 years! A new factory! The UAW would offer unprecedented sacrifices! Management, she tells us, considered the proposal for all of 17 minutes before unceremoniously rejecting it. None of the incentives made any difference when salaries in Mexico were $1.75 an hour. So Electrolux left, and Greenville’s longstanding manufacturing-based culture was decimated. “All I know how to do is make refrigerators. Who is ever going to hire me?” asked one worker, echoing those from the 50,000 factories closed between 2000 and 2010. It’s a sobering point.

Granholm’s next two enigmas include two minor challenges. First, how do you solve global climate change? Second, how do you do any of this with Congressional gridlock? After all, she jokes, Congress is rated worse than cockroaches, lice, Nickelback and Donald Trump (though better than meth labs and gonorrhea). The audience loves this.

Now Granholm points us to an Obama administration policy that did cause massive changes across the country — the “Race to the Top for Education.” This $4.5 billion proposal prompted competition among 48 states and caused many voluntary changes across America. The price of entry was that governors had to raise their college standards–and Granholm wonders if we couldn’t do the same kind of thing with clean energy.

After all, $1.6 trillion has been invested in that sector; but most of that has not been in the United States. Couldn’t a similar prize competition prompt real action? When the President is calling for 80% clean energy by 2030, couldn’t the states take on that challenge instead? And could the prize be the same $4.5 billion budget afforded to the education prize? The figure is, after all, a rounding error on the federal side. 

“Each region has something to offer,” Granholm details. ”Iowa and Ohio could lead in wind energy. The sunbelt could produce solar energy for the country. Jerry Brown could create a solar cluster in California. Every region of the country could do this.”

“If you create a competition, it respects the states, it respects federalism,” she adds. “And both Republican and Democratic governors love to cut ribbons; they want to create jobs. It fosters innovation at the state level.”

So how do we pay for it when Congress can’t agree on anything? “Go around them,” she says simply. And now, her challenge. “What if we created a private-sector challenge to the governors?” she asks. “What if several of the high-net-worth individuals or companies here at TED decided to band together to create a national competition to the governors to have a race to the top?” The audience giggles, but a smattering of applause shows that they’re paying close attention. “What if it all started here at TED? What if you were here when we figured out how to crack the code to create good paying jobs here in America, to create an energy policy, and create an energy strategy from the bottom up?” More applause. There’s a sense in the room that this could really happen.

“If you’re impatient, as I am,” Granholm concludes, “You know our competitors are in the game and eating us for lunch. We can get in the game or not. We can be at the table or on the table. I don’t know about you, but I prefer to dine.”

Air conditioning used to be a luxury — but as Doris Kim Sung points out in this talk from TEDxUSC, modernized society has become thoroughly air-conditioning reliant.

This is largely a problem of materials, says Sung, a professor at the USC School of Architecture. Many new buildings — especially skyscrapers — are built with floor-to-ceiling windows, which means that the spaces inside are constantly heated by the greenhouse effect and that the windows cannot be opened to let in a breeze. But could there be a smarter material that is better able to regulate inside temperature?

Sung — who studied biology before she became an architect — has given herself the challenge of creating a metal that acts like human skin, in which pores and sweat glands work together to provide cooling.  She has created a thermo-bimetal that bends and flexes depending on outside temperature, without using any energy at all. Crafted into interlocking strips, these thermo-bimetals warp in the sun to form a canopy that shades an area, while leaving openings for ventilation. Having tested the strips in installations (check out her sculpture “Bloom”), Sung now imagines using them in the creation of new buildings, as well as in replacement windows that could be fitted into existing ones. Thermo-bimetals could potentially replace curtains and shutters, providing privacy while also lowering air-conditioner reliance.

“When you’re tired of opening and closing those blinds day after day, when you’re on vacation and there’s no one on the weekends to turn off the controls, or when there’s a power outage and there’s no electricity to rely on, these thermo-bimetals will still be working tirelessly, efficiently and endlessly,” says Sung.

To see exactly how these thermo-bimetals work and to hear about how Sung is also taking inspiration from eyelashes and grasshoppers for new materials, watch her talk. Below, a few other TED speakers who also have creative ideas for how to keep us cool.

Wolfgang Kessling: How to air-condition outdoor spaces
In June of 2022, Qatar will host the World Cup. Wolfgang Kessling has been tasked with creating an open-air stadium for the event that will keep both fans and players comfortable in the 106F/41C heat. In this talk from the TEDxSummit in Doha, Kessler explains that the plan isn’t to blast air conditioning, but to use innovative shading as well as chilled water piped through the stadium’s floor. (Read the TED Blog’s roundup of five public spaces with surprising cooling systems.)

Kamal Meattle: How to grow fresh air
As activist Kamal Meattle shared at TED2009, it is possible to grow your own air indoors. He explains how three common household plants — Areca palm, Mother-in-law’s tongue and the Money plant — can be placed in specific spots in a home or office to dramatically improve the air quality.

Thom Mayne on architecture as connection
Architecture is about the world of ideas bumping up with the limitations of reality, says architect Thom Mayne. At TED2005, he takes us on a tour of some of the buildings he’s created, including an office in San Francisco whose tower has no air conditioning at all. Instead, it uses a skin that moves on hydraulics, forcing air through it.

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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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

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