The Green Optimistic

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Fungi grown on rotten wood could one day be harvested and genetically engineered for providing future fuel cells with an alternative to the platinum that they nowadays have inside, playing the role of a catalyst.

This spring, Boeing announced a flight powered by fuel cells, only that the take-off was powered by a Li-Ion battery. This autumn, on Sept. 30, the Germans did it from head to toe by using only hydrogen! Wow!

Just two days ago, MTI MicroFuel Cells Inc. has made a press release for their third generation Mobion chip, a portable fuel cell powered device aimed for small-scale devices, such as iPods, media players and mobile phones.

From now on, the people with motion disabilities will go green. Mitsubishi Gas Chemical exhibited last week a fuel cell power unit suited for small applications, such as powering an electric wheelchair. It has the size of a microwave oven, weighs 22 kg, and outputs 300W.

A team of scientists from the Monash University, Australia, has designed a fuel cell which will be used in the latest generation of hybrid cars. Their fuel cells could make the vehicles more reliable and more cheap to build.

Michael Strizki’s house is the most low impact house I’ve ever seen. He lives his life off-grid, because his home system feature solar panels, 10 hydrogen tanks filled with the excess energy from the solar panels, with the hydrogen taken out of water, and a 15 year-old geothermal system, that covered its price 8 times since it was installed.

A British company, ITM, has invented a device that does electrolysis and splits water into hydrogen. They even modified a Ford Focus to run on the hydrogen they make(basically no big deal, just a few adjustments to the top dead center of the pistons and a little chip tricking on the exhaust).

In their search to make better fuel cells, a research team from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the University of Liverpool, has discovered a new structure that moves oxygen ions through the cell at substantially lower temperatures than previously thought possible.