3 Promising Energy Technologies
Three new technologies aim to tap unconventional energy sources—automobile motion and the temperature and saltiness of seawater—to produce vast new supplies of electricity.
The kinetic energy of automobiles and sea currents may help scientists create large stores of energy in the future: “Getting a car moving takes a lot of energy, but when the vehicle comes to a stop most of that energy just gets dissipated. The engineers who designed hybrid gas-electric autos came up with a way to recover some of the energy lost in braking and convert it to electricity to recharge the hybrid’s batteries. But what if that converted energy could be put into the electric grid?”
