Cinco claves del éxito del reciclaje en Suecia

A los niños les enseñan desde pequeños la importancia del reciclaje y el uso de las estaciones para recoger el material reciclable. FOTO Cortesía sweden.se

Que el 99 por ciento de la basura se recicle es un logro que cuenta Suecia con orgullo y la meta es aún más ambiciosa, quieren que su país sea el primero que produzca cero basura. Pero ¿Para qué reciclar todos los desechos?, la respuesta es muy simple: para producir energía.

El programa se llama “de desecho a energía” (WTE en inglés) y transforma la basura en energía para todo el país. Lo particular es que ha sido tan efectivo que ahora Suecia importa 700.000 toneladas de residuos procedentes de otros países como Noruega, Italia y Reino Unido para abastecer los 32 centros de energía que ahora poseen.

¿Cómo ha logrado Suecia esta, la llamada, revolución de reciclaje?. Con un trabajo colectivo y una gran educación de sus habitantes.

Estas son las 5 claves de dicho país en su trabajo

1. Estaciones de reciclaje
Por ley, en Suecia, deben existir estaciones de reciclaje en cada zona residencial ya que la mayoría de los suecos separan todos los residuos reciclables en sus casas y los depositan en contenedores especiales en sus viviendas que luego llevan a estas estaciones de reciclaje.

Los hogares suecos separan

• periódicos, 
• plástico, 
• metal, 
• vidrio, 
• aparatos eléctricos, 
• bombillas y 
• pilas. 

Muchos municipios también animan a los consumidores a separar los residuos de alimentos. Y todo esto se reutiliza, recicla o abona. 

• Los periódicos se convierten en masa de papel, 
• las botellas se funden en nuevos elementos, 
• los envases de plástico se convierten en materia prima plástica; 
• los alimentos se convierten en abono para el suelo o en biogás a través de un proceso químico complejo. 
• El desperdicio de agua se purifica hasta el punto de ser potable. 
• Camiones de basura especiales van alrededor de las ciudades y recoger la basura electrónica y los residuos peligrosos, como los productos químicos. 
• Las farmacias reciben el medicamento que sobra o que ya está vencido. 
• Y residuos como televisores usados o muebles rotos los llevan los suecos a centros de reciclaje en las afueras de las ciudades.

Quienes llegan a vivir a Suecia por diversas razones aprenden de inmediato que este es un compromiso con la ciudad y así lo manifiestan en redes sociales como este ciudadano que escribió: “cosas que uno aprende cuando vive en Suecia”

Things one learn when living in #Sweden, #Recycling. pic.twitter.com/P05FYic5Mb—
Carlos A. Perdomo (@Capesgo) Mayo 10, 2015

2. La basura se quema
El 50 por ciento de la basura doméstica se quema para producir energía, el otro 50 por ciento viene de los residuos de industrias y otras actividades comerciales. La incineración de residuos proporciona calor correspondiente a las necesidades de 810.000 hogares y alrededor de un 20 por ciento de toda la calefacción urbana producida. También proporciona electricidad correspondiente a las necesidades de casi 250.000 hogares.

En ese proceso hay un 15 por ciento de esas cenizas que no sirven para energía, en ese caso los metales son separados y reciclados, y el resto, como la porcelana y azulejos, se tamizan para extraer grava que se utiliza en la construcción de carreteras. Cerca de un 1% de basura persiste y se deposita en vertederos. Sobre la quema hay estándares de calidad que garantizan que no hay contaminación.

3. Ropa usada se recicla, y Mc Donalds a cambio de botellas Las empresas en Suecia se unen al esfuerzo del reciclaje con descuentos y bonos, es el caso de reconocidas marcas. H & M, por ejemplo, acepta ropa usada por los clientes y a cambio estos reciben cupones de descuentos. Y Mc Donalds acepta botellas vacías de cerveza a cambio de hamburguesas, por 10 botellas puedes cambiar una hamburguesa de queso y por 40 botellas llevarte una Big Mac.

4. Bolsas de colores La compañía Optibag desarrolló una máquina que puede separar las bolsas de residuos de colores unos de otros. La gente tira la comida en una bolsa verde, el papel en una roja, y el vidrio o el metal en otro. Una vez en la planta de reciclaje, Optibag ordena las bolsas automáticamente.

5. Carros de basura con música
Una de las ciudades de Suecia, Helsingborg, optó por equipar lo carros de basura con altavoces que emiten música agradable, como dicen ellos, “todo en nombre del reciclaje” y para hacer que el paso del camión sea una experiencia entretenida y para nada escandalosa.

ORIGINAL: El Colombiano

Claudia Arango Holguín

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Meet the electric life forms that live on pure energy

Photo credit: Shewanella oneidensis / U.S. Department of Energy

Unlike any other life on Earth, these extraordinary bacteria use energy in its purest form – they eat and breathe electrons – and they are everywhere

STICK an electrode in the ground, pump electrons down it, and they will come: living cells that eat electricity. We have known bacteria to survive on a variety of energy sources, but none as weird as this. Think of Frankenstein's monster, brought to life by galvanic energy, except these "electric bacteria" are very real and are popping up all over the place.

Unlike any other living thing on Earth, electric bacteria use energy in its purest form – naked electricity in the shape of electrons harvested from rocks and metals. We already knew about two types, Shewanella and Geobacter. Now, biologists are showing that they can entice many more out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice. Experiments growing bacteria on battery electrodes demonstrate that these novel, mind-boggling forms of life are essentially eating and excreting electricity.

That should not come as a complete surprise, says Kenneth Nealson at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. We know that life, when you boil it right down, is a flow of electrons: "You eat sugars that have excess electrons, and you breathe in oxygen that willingly takes them." Our cells break down the sugars, and the electrons flow through them in a complex set of chemical reactions until they are passed on to electron-hungry oxygen.

In the process, cells make ATP, a molecule that acts as an energy storage unit for almost all living things. Moving electrons around is a key part of making ATP. "Life's very clever," says Nealson. "It figures out how to suck electrons out of everything we eat and keep them under control." In most living things, the body packages the electrons up into molecules that can safely carry them through the cells until they are dumped on to oxygen.

"That's the way we make all our energy and it's the same for every organism on this planet," says Nealson. "Electrons must flow in order for energy to be gained. This is why when someone suffocates another person they are dead within minutes. You have stopped the supply of oxygen, so the electrons can no longer flow."


The discovery of electric bacteria shows that some very basic forms of life can do away with sugary middlemen and handle the energy in its purest form – electrons, harvested from the surface of minerals. "It is truly foreign, you know," says Nealson. "In a sense, alien."

Nealson's team is one of a handful that is now growing these bacteria directly on electrodes, keeping them alive with electricity and nothing else – neither sugars nor any other kind of nutrient. The highly dangerous equivalent in humans, he says, would be for us to power up by shoving our fingers in a DC electrical socket.

To grow these bacteria, the team collects sediment from the seabed, brings it back to the lab, and inserts electrodes into it.

First they measure the natural voltage across the sediment, before applying a slightly different one. A slightly higher voltage offers an excess of electrons; a slightly lower voltage means the electrode will readily accept electrons from anything willing to pass them off. Bugs in the sediments can either "eat" electrons from the higher voltage, or "breathe" electrons on to the lower-voltage electrode, generating a current. That current is picked up by the researchers as a signal of the type of life they have captured.

"Basically, the idea is to take sediment, stick electrodes inside and then ask 'OK, who likes this?'," says Nealson.

Shocking breath

At the Goldschmidt geoscience conference in Sacramento, California, last month, Shiue-lin Li of Nealson's lab presented results of experiments growing electricity breathers in sediment collected from Santa Catalina harbour in California. Yamini Jangir, also from the University of Southern California, presented separate experiments which grew electricity breathers collected from a well in Death Valley in the Mojave Desert in California.

Over at the University of Minnesota in St Paul, Daniel Bond and his colleagues have published experiments showing that they could grow a type of bacteria that harvested electrons from an iron electrode (mBio, doi.org/tqg). That research, says Jangir's supervisor Moh El-Naggar, may be the most convincing example we have so far of electricity eaters grown on a supply of electrons with no added food.

But Nealson says there is much more to come. His PhD student Annette Rowe has identified up to eight different kinds of bacteria that consume electricity. Those results are being submitted for publication.


Nealson is particularly excited that Rowe has found so many types of electric bacteria, all very different to one another, and none of them anything like Shewanella or Geobacter. "This is huge. What it means is that there's a whole part of the microbial world that we don't know about."

Discovering this hidden biosphere is precisely why Jangir and El-Naggar want to cultivate electric bacteria. "We're using electrodes to mimic their interactions," says El-Naggar. "Culturing the 'unculturables', if you will." The researchers plan to install a battery inside a gold mine in South Dakota to see what they can find living down there.

NASA is also interested in things that live deep underground because such organisms often survive on very little energy and they may suggest modes of life in other parts of the solar system.

Electric bacteria could have practical uses here on Earth, however, such as creating biomachines that do useful things like clean up sewage or contaminated groundwater while drawing their own power from their surroundings. Nealson calls them self-powered useful devices, or SPUDs.

Practicality aside, another exciting prospect is to use electric bacteria to probe fundamental questions about life, such as what is the bare minimum of energy needed to maintain life.

For that we need the next stage of experiments, says Yuri Gorby, a microbiologist at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York: bacteria should be grown not on a single electrode but between two. These bacteria would effectively eat electrons from one electrode, use them as a source of energy, and discard them on to the other electrode.

Gorby believes bacterial cells that both eat and breathe electrons will soon be discovered. "An electric bacterium grown between two electrodes could maintain itself virtually forever," says Gorby. "If nothing is going to eat it or destroy it then, theoretically, we should be able to maintain that organism indefinitely."

It may also be possible to vary the voltage applied to the electrodes, putting the energetic squeeze on cells to the point at which they are just doing the absolute minimum to stay alive. In this state, the cells may not be able to reproduce or grow, but they would still be able to run repairs on cell machinery. "For them, the work that energy does would be maintaining life – maintaining viability," says Gorby.

How much juice do you need to keep a living electric bacterium going? Answer that question, and you've answered one of the most fundamental existential questions there is.

This article appeared in print under the headline "The electricity eaters"

Leader: "Spark of life revisited thanks to electric bacteria"

Wire in the mud

Electric bacteria come in all shapes and sizes. A few years ago, biologists discovered that some produce hair-like filaments that act as wires, ferrying electrons back and forth between the cells and their wider environment. They dubbed them microbial nanowires.

Lars Peter Nielsen and his colleagues at Aarhus University in Denmark have found that tens of thousands of electric bacteria can join together to form daisy chains that carry electrons over several centimetres – a huge distance for a bacterium only 3 or 4 micrometres long. It means that bacteria living in, say, seabed mud where no oxygen penetrates, can access oxygen dissolved in the seawater simply by holding hands with their friends.

Such bacteria are showing up everywhere we look, says Nielsen. One way to find out if you're in the presence of these electron munchers is to put clumps of dirt in a shallow dish full of water, and gently swirl it. The dirt should fall apart. If it doesn't, it's likely that cables made of bacteria are holding it together.

Nielsen can spot the glimmer of the cables when he pulls soil apart and holds it up to sunlight (see video). 

Flexible biocables

It's more than just a bit of fun. Early work shows that such cables conduct electricity about as well as the wires that connect your toaster to the mains. That could open up interesting research avenues involving flexible, lab-grown biocables.

ORIGINAL: New Scientist
by Catherine Brahic
16 July 2014

The disruptive potential of solar power

As costs fall, the importance of solar power to senior executives is rising.
The economics of solar power are improving. It is a far more cost-competitive power source today than it was in the mid-2000s, when installations and manufacturing were taking off, subsidies were generous, and investors were piling in. Consumption continued rising even as the MAC Global Solar Energy Index fell by 50 percent between 2011 and the end of 2013, a period when dozens of solar companies went bankrupt, shut down, or changed hands at fire-sale prices.

Image Original: MAC Global Solar Energy Index

The bottom line: the financial crisis, cheap natural gas, subsidy cuts by cash-strapped governments, and a flood of imports from Chinese solar-panel manufacturers have profoundly challenged the industry’s short-term performance. But they haven’t undermined its potential; indeed, global installations have continued to rise—by over 50 percent a year, on average, since 2006. The industry is poised to assume a bigger role in global energy markets; as it evolves, its impact on businesses and consumers will be significant and widespread. Utilities will probably be the first, but far from the only, major sector to feel solar’s disruptive potential.

Economic fundamentals 
Sharply declining costs are the key to this potential. The price US residential consumers pay to install rooftop solar PV (photovoltaic) systems has plummeted from nearly $7 per watt peak of best-in-class system capacity in 2008 to $4 or less in 2013.1 Most of this decline has been the result of steep reductions in upstream (or “hard”) costs, chiefly equipment. Module costs, for example, fell by nearly 30 percent a year between 2008 and 2013, while cumulative installations soared from 1.7 gigawatts in 2009 to an estimated 11 gigawatts by the end of 2013, according to GTM Research.

While module costs should continue to fall, even bigger opportunities lurk in the downstream (or “soft”) costs associated with installation and service. Financing, customer acquisition, regulatory incentives, and approvals collectively represent about half the expense of installing residential systems in the United States. Our research suggests that as they become cheaper, the overall costs to consumers are poised to fall to $2.30 by 2015 and to $1.60 by 2020.

These cost reductions will put solar within striking distance, in economic terms, of new construction for traditional power-generation technologies, such as coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy. That’s true not just for residential and commercial segments, where it is already cost competitive in many (though not all) geographies, but also, eventually, for industrial and wholesale markets. Exhibit 1 highlights the progress solar already has made toward “grid parity” in the residential segment and the remaining market opportunities as it comes further down the curve. China is investing serious money in renewables. Japan’s government is seeking to replace a significant portion of its nuclear capacity with solar in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear accident. And in the United States and Europe, solar adoption rates have more than quadrupled since 2009.

Exhibit 1
A sharp decline in installation costs for solar photovoltaic systems has boosted the competitiveness of solar power.

While these economic powerhouses represent the biggest prizes, they aren’t the only stories. Sun-drenched Saudi Arabia, for example, now considers solar sufficiently attractive to install substantial capacity by 2032,2 with an eye toward creating local jobs. And in Africa and India, where electric grids are patchy and unreliable, distributed generation is increasingly replacing diesel and electrifying areas previously without power. Economic fundamentals (and in some cases, such as Saudi Arabia, the desire to create local jobs) are creating a brighter future for solar.

Business consumption and investment
Solar’s changing economics are already influencing business consumption and investment. In consumption, a number of companies with large physical footprints and high power costs are installing commercial-scale rooftop solar systems, often at less than the current price of buying power from a utility. For example, Wal-Mart Stores has stated that it will switch to 100 percent renewable power by 2020, up from around 20 percent today. Mining and defense companies are looking to solar in remote and demanding environments. In the hospitality sector, Starwood Hotels and Resorts has partnered with NRG Solar to begin installing solar at its hotels. Verizon is spending $100 million on solar and fuel-cell technology to power its facilities and cell-network infrastructure. Why are companies doing such things? To

• diversify their energy supply, s
• ave money, and 
• appeal to consumers. 

These steps are preliminary, but if they work, solar initiatives could scale up fast.

As for investment, solar’s long-term contracts and relative insulation from fuel-price fluctuations are proving increasingly attractive. The cost of capital also is falling. Institutional investors, insurance companies, and major banks are becoming more comfortable with the risks (such as weather uncertainty and the reliability of components) associated with long-term ownership of solar assets. Accordingly, investors are more and more willing to underwrite long-term debt positions for solar, often at costs of capital lower than those of traditional project finance.

Major players also are creating advanced financial products to meet solar’s investment profile. The best example of this to date is NRG Yield, and we expect other companies to unveil similar securities that pool renewable operating assets into packages for investors. Google has been an active tax-equity investor in renewable projects, deploying more than $1 billion since 2010. It also will be interesting to track the emergence of solar projects financed online via crowdsourcing (the best example is Solar Mosaic, which brings investors and solar-energy projects together). This approach could widen the pool of investors while reducing the cost of capital for smaller installations, in particular.

Disruptive potential
The utility sector represents a fascinating example of the potential for significant disruption as costs fall, even as solar’s scale remains relatively small. Although solar accounts for only less than half a percent of US electricity generation, the business model for utilities depends not so much on the current generation base as on installations of new capacity. Solar could seriously threaten the latter because its growth undermines the utilities’ ability to count on capturing all new demand, which historically has fueled a large share of annual revenue growth. (Price increases have accounted for the rest.)

Depending on the market, new solar installations could now account for up to half of new consumption (in the first ten months of 2013, more than 20 percent of new US installed capacity was solar). By altering the demand side of the equation, solar directly affects the amount of new capital that utilities can deploy at their predetermined return on equity. In effect, though solar will continue to generate a small share of the overall US energy supply, it could well have an outsize effect on the economics of utilities—and therefore on the industry’s structure and future (Exhibit 2).

Exhibit 2

Although solar power will continue to account for a small share of the overall US energy supply, it could well have an outsize effect on the economics of utilities.

That’s already happening in Europe. Over the last several years, the demand for power has fallen while the supply of renewables (including solar) has risen, driven down power prices, and depressed the penetration of conventional power sources. US utilities can learn many lessons from their European counterparts, which for the most part stood by while smaller, more nimble players led the way. Each US utility will have to manage the risks of solar differently. All of them, however, will have to do something.

Broader management implications
As solar becomes more economic, it will create new battlegrounds for business and new opportunities for consumers. When a solar panel goes up on a homeowner’s roof, the installer instantly develops a potentially sticky relationship with that customer. Since the solar installation often puts money in the homeowner’s pocket from day one, it is a relationship that can generate goodwill. But, most important, since solar panels are long-lived assets, often with power-purchase agreements lasting 15 or 20 years, the relationship also should be enduring.

That combination may make solar installers natural focal points for the provision of many products and services, from security systems to mortgages to data storage, thermostats, smoke detectors, energy-information services, and other in-home products. As a result, companies in a wide range of industries may benefit from innovative partnerships built on the deep customer relationships that solar players are likely to own. Tesla Motors already has a relationship with SolarCity, for example, to develop battery storage coupled with solar. It is easy to imagine future relationships between many other complementary players. These possibilities suggest a broader point: the solar story is no longer just about technology and regulation. Rather, business-model innovation and strong management practices will play an increasingly important role in the sector’s evolution and in the way it engages with a range of players from other industries. Segmenting customers, refining pricing strategies, driving down costs, and optimizing channel relationships all will figure prominently in the solar-energy ecosystem, as they do elsewhere.

As solar becomes integrated with energy-efficiency solutions, data analytics, and other technologies (such as storage), it will become an increasingly important element in the next generation of resource-related services and of the world’s coming resource revolution. In the not too distant future, a growing number of industries will have to take note of the promise, and sometimes the threat, of solar to business models based on traditional energy economics. But, in the meantime, the battle for the customer is taking place today, with long-term ramifications for existing industry structures.

About the authors
David Frankel is an associate principal in McKinsey’s San Francisco office, where Dickon Pinner is a principal; Ken Ostrowski is a director in the Atlanta office.

The authors would like to thank Stefan Heck, Sean Kane, and Farah Mandich for their contributions to this article.

ORIGINAL: McKinsey

by David Frankel, Kenneth Ostrowski, and Dickon Pinner 

April 2014 |

These Harvard researchers are making a new type of battery using the same molecule in rhubarb

photo: Eliza Grinnell, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Summary:

A funky battery that’s made of natural materials and uses liquid tanks is being developed in a lab at Harvard. If the breakthrough makes it to market it could be a low cost energy storage option for clean power.



Rhubarb isn’t just good for baking in pies — turns out the natural molecules found in the plant are being used as the basis for a new type of battery for the power grid, developed by a group of Professors at Harvard.

The Harvard researchers and engineers set out to build a low cost, metal-free flow battery, which is a type of battery that uses separate liquid tanks to store energy. In contrast, the batteries in your laptop and cell phone (and even in an electric car), use chemicals that are adjacent and enclosed in a casing. But by separating the electrolyte out of the battery, flow batteries can easily scale up and down (using larger and smaller tanks) to deliver the capacity needed, and can thus be lower cost than traditional batteries.

Because they can be inexpensive, power grid operators and utilities are looking at flow batteries carefully as a way to act as energy storage option on the power grid next to a wind or solar farm. These clean power sites generate energy only at certain times of day, and adding energy storage to clean power can make it more effective and economical.

Typical flow batteries use metal liquids like vanadium; or some next-gen ones, like startup EnerVault, are using metals like iron and chromium. The breakthrough with the Harvard researchers is that they’re using non-metal natural substances for the flow battery.

For the first iteration of the flow battery the researchers decided to turn to naturally-occurring organic molecules found in plants, animals and even oil called quinones. The best fit for the battery medium they wanted turned out to be the same quinones found in rhubarb. Go figure.

Harvard SEAS Professor Michael J. Aziz with the flow battery tech

The Harvard team discovered the right quinone molecule (out of more than 10,000) using a computing and sophisticated algorithms. Other universities are using computer models to find all sorts of battery breakthroughs.

So far the battery is working as well as the vanadium flow batteries on the market, but it’s much less expensive. The battery is still in the development phase, so a lot of things can change between now and commercialization. A release from Harvard noted that an application somewhere in the future could even be used at a home (say, in a basement), connected to a solar panel roof project.

The battery technology was first published in Nature on Wednesday, and the team received funding from the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E program, which gives small grants to early stage, high risk, research. The Harvard group plans to start commercializing the battery down the road with project developer Sustainable Innovations.

ORIGINAL: GigaOhm
By Katie Fehrenbacher
Jan. 8, 2014 - 12:45 PM PST

U.S. Electrical Grid on the Edge of Failure

ORIGINAL: Scientific American
By Jeff Tollefson and Nature magazine


Network analysis suggests geography makes the grid inherently unstable 

Orderly networks, like the US power grid, have more critical nodes that increase instability, compared to randomly structured networks Image: STEVE HOCKSTEIN/BLOOMBERG/GETTY

Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse.
That is according to a mathematical study of spatial networks by physicists in Israel and the U.S. Study co-author Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, says that the research builds on earlier work by incorporating a more explicit analysis of how the spatial nature of physical networks affects their fundamental stability. The upshot, published August 25 in Nature Physics, is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt—and unpredictable—collapse.

The electric grid, which operates as a series of networks that are defined by geography, is a prime example, says Havlin. “Whenever you have such dependencies in the system, failure in one place leads to failure in another place, which cascades into collapse.”

“I suppose I should be open-minded to new research, but I'm not convinced,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates.” The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. Havlin says that this outage is an example of the inherent instability his study describes, but others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world.

Critical order

Havlin and his colleagues focused on idealized scenarios. They found that randomly structured networks—such as social networks—degrade slowly as nodes are removed, which in the real world might mean there is time to diagnose and address a problem before a system collapses. By contrast, the connections of orderly lattice structures have more critical nodes, which increase the instability. The problem is that such orderly networks are always operating near an indefinable edge, Havlin says. To reduce that risk, he recommends adding a small number of longer transmission lines that provide short cuts to different parts of the grid.

Benjamin Carreras, a physicist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee who has conducted similar work, says that network theory can be useful for providing insight into electric grids but must be complemented with more complex models that attempt to represent both the physical realities and the responsiveness of the modern electric grid. Although in some cases adding long lines can benefit the overall stability of an electric system, Carreras’ work suggests that in certain circumstances such an approach allows problems to propagate even farther.

“More connections may stabilize some processes, by, for instance, increasing the number of paths to generators, but also may destabilize others,” Carreras says. “One cannot make generic statements on this topic.”

Although local outages caused by falling trees knocking down distribution lines are common, large-scale failures within the core transmission lines rarely occur on a modern electric grid. Before 2003, the last major blackout in the United States had been on the west coast in 1996, and more recently an outage has struck in the San Diego area.

Dagle says that the 2003 blackout stemmed from a combination of bad vegetation management—the first three lines tripped after sagging into trees but were all within their load rating—and a series of monitoring and communications breakdowns. Vegetation requirements have since been standardized, and a new generation of sensors is providing grid operators with more information about what is happening across the grid at any given moment.

“Many more utilities have much more data,” Dagle says. “The next phase of our voyage is to make better use of that data.”

This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on August 25, 2013.

No Nobel for Nikola

ORIGINAL: OBR Review
9th July 2013

Add caption

Many who remember him would call him insane. Many, a prodigious Prometheus. Larry Page, founder of Google, calls him his hero. He amazed the US patenting office and raised hairs at Wall Street, but never successfully commercialised his inventions nor received the proper recognition for many of his greatest creations

Although never winning the Nobel Prize, Nikola Tesla, a Serb born engineer of meagre beginnings, still deserves honourable mention in the Nobel Prize series for several reasons. His alternating current system for one still keeps the world alight to the present day. His other inventions and theories on radar, remote control, X-rays, radio transmission and more, all represent engineering feats of revolutionary capacity, opening new vistas of scientific advancement since their inception. Further, due to a revival of public fame over recent decades, Tesla has probably received more funding and support from the public today than he ever did when seeking it at the time of building his inventions. The most famous funding failure was the Wardenclyffe tower .

Tesla Broadcast Tower 1904. Wikipedia

It was designed by Tesla as a broadcasting system able to provide electricity to the world wirelessly, which had been dismantled before its completion in 1917. One quantifying example of Tesla’s current fan base is from crowd sourcing – a highly popular method for raising funds from online communities. In 2012, Matthew Inman, creator of the comic website ‘The Oatmeal’, raised more than half a million pounds in less than a week to build a Tesla museum on his old New York laboratory grounds where the Wardenclyffe tower once was (see Oatmeal’s campaign website- ‘Let’s Build a Goddamn Tesla Museum’).

War of the currents

Many have speculated as to why Tesla never won the Nobel Prize, but it is believed to have a lot to do with his fierce rivalry with Tomas Edison. This was known as ‘the war of the currents’. Reasons for their rivalry amongst others were their approaches to how electricity should be carried. Edison, who unlike Tesla was a businessman at heart, promoted a system of electrical power distribution known as direct current (DC). This electric distribution, via his company the ‘Edison Illuminating Company’, was aimed to capitalise on his earlier invention of the incandescent light bulb. However DC’s rule as the standard electric distribution system was short lived. Tesla’s refinement of alternating current (AC) eventually lead to this method of power distribution being selected as the new global standard.

Tesla’s patent for his alternating motor. AC vs. DC

Rumour has it that Tesla conceptualised the application of AC in 1882 at the age of 24 when he was walking in a Budapest park and was struck by the image of a functioning AC electric induction motor. Tesla realised, based on Faraday’s Law of electromagnetic induction, that if one can rotate a magnetic field around a stationary wire coil, AC voltage can be produced across the wire. This means AC current switches the direction of charge repeatedly in cycles, as opposed to DC which is unidirectional. So in the famous cartoon for example, when Jerry hands Tom a DC live wire, Tom is unable to let go. Whereas if Jerry were to hand him an AC wire, due to the rapid reversal of current, Tom would have enough time to relax his muscles and pull away.

The winning factor AC has over DC, regardless of its potential dangers, (see Edison’s efforts to electrocute a circus elephant with AC) is its transmission of electricity. Unlike DC, AC uses transformers, which means high voltages can be used to compensate for the increased resistance over long distances. These voltages can then be transformed back to domestic voltages without the use of thick cables or cumbersome local generators, which are required with DC. Presently, 21st century technology is changing this playing arena significantly, potentially leading to a comeback for DC. Indeed, the Three Gorges dam in China is the largest power plant in the world and uses high-voltage DC transmission.

Nobel rumours

Legend has it, if Edison were to be awarded first the Nobel prize for physics, then Tesla would refuse an offer (and vice versa). People claimed this refusal of allowing the other scientist to be awarded the Nobel prize, or to share the award between them, meant that neither would win the accolade. The closest Tesla got to receiving Nobel recognition was for his efforts toward radio communication. However, this was awarded in 1909 to Guglielmo Marconi for his work on the same topic (he was the first to signal the letter ‘s’ in morse code over the Atlantic using wireless transmission in 1901). Ironically before knowing Marconi was to receive the Nobel Prize, Tesla’s response to Marconi’s achievement was ‘Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents.’ It was realised more than three decades later though that Tesla’s patent history meant he should have in fact been included in winning the aforementioned prize.

Tesla’s legacy

Before developing a passion for inventing, Tesla was a poet, writing pieces such as “Fragments of Olympian Gossip” a jestful portrayal of the science of his day. His imagination as an extreme visual thinker, allowed him to cast, analyse and modify blueprint after blueprint in his mind of the next great invention. Unfortunately at the end of his years, his eccentricities became better known than his new engineering visions. Tesla was known to be highly reclusive, have a famously high regard for pigeons and further, be someone unafraid of speaking out about his views on extraterrestrial life. In his letter to New York Times in 1909, ‘How to signal to Mars’, he writes ‘Of all the evidence of narrow mindedness and folly, I know of no greater than the stupid belief that this little planet is singled out to be the seat of life, and that all other heavenly bodies are fiery masses or lumps of ice. Most certainly, some planets are not inhabited, but others are, and among these there must exist life under all conditions and phases of development.’

Although Tesla never won a Nobel Prize, he should still be classed as one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. His unconventional methods were indeed inspiring. For example, he proposed wireless energy transmission using electrical energy captured from the earth’s ionosphere- an upper part of the atmosphere where the aurora borealis occurs. In 2003, inspired by Tesla’s original AC motor design, Elon Musk-also founder of SpaceX and PayPal, cofounded the new electric sports car company ‘Tesla Motors’. A silicon valley based company, now set to create waves with the avant-garde concept of designing vehicles environmental friendly yet still of high performance.

It seems great admirers of Tesla, like Elon Musk (Tesla Motors, SpaceX) and Larry Page (Google) have taken on board the failures of Tesla, realising, like Edison, you need to profit to innovate, so you can innovate some more. The question now, when one considers the current technological advances, the global energy demands and the effects on nature and climate by man, is- who will be the next great Tesla, to transform our technology age with a new way of thinking?

‘El foco de Riopaila Castilla es la bioenergía’

ORIGINAL: Portafolio
Cristina Bustamante. Redacción Portafolio 

Mayo 21 de 2013

Djalma Teixeira De Lima Filho
Foto: Archivo Particular

Dos meses después de asumir el cargo, Djalma Teixeira De Lima Filho, presidente de la compañía, dice que la empresa busca redistribuir su negocio y pasar de ser una organización del sector azucarero a un gran jugador agroindustrial en el país.

El recientemente nombrado presidente de Riopaila Castilla, Djalma Teixeira de Lima Filho, dice que aunque el azúcar representa el 86 por ciento del negocio de la compañía, este porcentaje cambiará gracias a los proyectos que adelantan para la cogeneración eléctrica y destilación de etanol.

Según cifras de la Superintendencia de Sociedades, durante el 2012 la compañía reportó activos por 1 billón de pesos y obtuvo ingresos operacionales por 707.021 millones de pesos, lo cual representó una contracción del 8,5 por ciento frente al 2011.

¿Cómo fue el año pasado para la compañía?
Fue un año importante porque permitió la consolidación de la estrategia de crecimiento y fortalecimiento del negocio en el Valle del Cauca, al firmarse los contratos para la construcción de una destilería de alcohol carburante con capacidad de 400 mil litros por día y la planta de cogeneración de energía para 35 MW.

Pese a la caída en la producción sectorial de azúcar en 6 por ciento, logramos un crecimiento del 0,3 por ciento en la producción de azúcar.

Como nuevo presidente, ¿seguirá la misma línea que su antecesor? Sí. Mi idea es continuar con el plan de fortalecimiento y crecimiento del core business de la empresa. En complemento, queremos transformar Riopaila Castilla en un importante jugador del agronegocio, así como ya lo es en el sector azucarero.

¿Cuáles son sus proyectos para este año? Nuestro objetivo es reforzar la actuación en el core business de la empresa, que es el área de bioenergía. Para esto, tenemos dos proyectos: la destilería y la planta de cogeneración, ubicados en la Planta Riopaila, con una inversión de 120 millones de dólares.

Además, continuamos con la gestión rigurosa en la eficiencia y productividad, donde se han logrado importantes resultados financieros en los dos últimos años (alrededor de 16 mil millones de pesos en optimización de costos).

Adicionalmente, tenemos planeadas acciones que buscan volver a Riopaila Castilla un importante jugador en su core business, con una visión más amplia dentro del agronegocio, a través de nuestra actuación en la altillanura colombiana, donde vamos a direccionar esfuerzos en palma y granos, principalmente.

¿Cuánto han avanzado para la incursión en bioenergía? Ya tenemos los estudios técnicos y regulatorios, así como la estructuración financiera para poner en funcionamiento el proyecto. Además, se firmaron los contratos para adquisición de la nueva caldera y el turbogenerador. estamos trabajando para tener los dos proyectos en operación en el primer semestre del 2015.

¿Cómo se reparte ahora el negocio de la empresa? Las ventas de azúcar son el 86 por ciento del total, ecuación que se va a cambiar con la entrada de los proyectos de cogeneración y la destilería de etanol.

También queremos reforzar la venta de servicios, que representa 6 por ciento del total, pero que, por ser una de nuestras vocaciones naturales, pretendemos incrementar a lo largo de los próximos años.

¿Qué tan buen negocio es producir etanol en Colombia? Es muy importante por dos razones: la primera, es un aporte al ecosistema al utilizar energías renovables; la segunda, permite la diversificación del negocio azucarero, dándole una connotación más amplia de una organización de bioenergía.

Respecto a la cogeneración eléctrica, ¿es más rentable producir energía con bagazo o destinarlo a papel? El costo de oportunidad de la producción de papel a partir del bagazo será el potencial de generación de caja en la venta de energía. Obviamente, eso depende de algunas variables de mercado.

¿Cuánta energía van a producir y a quién se la piensan vender? 35 MW, de los cuales esperamos vender a la red eléctrica nacional 20 MW. La comercialización puede ser hecha dentro de algunos modelos, los cuales estamos evaluando.

Enfoque completamente local

¿Tienen proyectos de internacionalización?
En el corto plazo no. Nuestra prioridad está en el agronegocio nacional, en el fortalecimiento de nuestras relaciones con grupos de interés y la sostenibilidad de nuestras actividades.

Sin embargo, todas las oportunidades son evaluadas, considerando la visión de largo plazo.

¿Qué retos ven en Colombia?
Nuestra prioridad es el mercado nacional, con la generación de azúcares y derivados de mayores valores agregados, que nos permitan cumplir y, por qué no, superar, las expectativas de los clientes. Nuestros retos, frente a este asunto, consisten en la fidelización y preferencia de los hogares e industrias colombianas.

Adicional a ello, y por las características del negocio en Colombia, priorizamos las relaciones con los proveedores de caña, volviéndonos su mejor alternativa, a través de un concepto de mercadeo relacional COE (Cercanía, Oportunidad y Ejecución).

Unleashing oxygen ‘Superlattice’ structure could give a huge boost to oxygen reaction in fuel cells, increasing their power potential.

ORIGINAL: MIT

David L. Chandler, MIT News Office

April 30, 2013

Professor Bilge Yildiz (left) and graduate student Yan Chen stand in front of the scanning tunneling microscope used for their research. PHOTO COURTESY OF BILGE YILDIZ

New research at MIT could dramatically improve the efficiency of fuel cells, which are considered a promising alternative to batteries for powering everything from electronic devices to cars and homes.

Fuel cells make electricity by combining hydrogen, or hydrocarbon fuels, with oxygen. But the most efficient types, called solid oxide fuel cells (SOFC), have drawbacks that have limited their usefulness — including operating temperatures above 700 degrees Celsius (roughly 1300 degrees Fahrenheit). Now, MIT researchers have unraveled the properties of a promising alternative material structure for a key component of these devices.

The new structure, a “superlattice” of two compounds interleaved at a tiny scale, could serve as one of the two electrodes in the fuel cell. The complex material, discovered about six years ago and known as LSC113/214, is composed of two oxides of the elements lanthanum, strontium and cobalt. While one of the oxides was already known as an especially good material for such electrodes, the combination of the two is far more potent in promoting oxygen reduction than either oxide alone. 

The interfaces between these two oxides were thought to be the key. But until now, no one had been able to observe the LSC113/214 interface properties in operation, at sufficiently high resolution, to figure out why it worked so well.

The MIT team used a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to study the electrical activity of a superlattice material composed of two different compounds of the elements strontium, lanthanum and cobalt. At bottom, a diagram of how they "sliced" the material on an angle to expose wider bands of the thin layers of material. The center two images show the resulting measurements of the surface topography of the material, and the activity of electrons moving through it. At top, a diagram of the molecular structures of the two compounds. 
GRAPHIC COURTESY OF CHEN ET AL

Oxygen reduction is one of two main reactions in a fuel cell, and the one that has limited their overall performance — so finding improved materials for that reaction could be a key advance for fuel cells, the researchers say. The new findings are published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials in a paper co-authored by graduate student Yan Chen, professors Harry Tuller and Bilge Yildiz, and three other researchers at MIT.

Yildiz, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, says LSC113/214 has been “a singular example” of a material with extremely high reactivity to oxygen reduction; the new results explaining why it works so well could lead to further optimization or the discovery of other materials that might perform even better.

The best of both

The key to the material’s performance, she explains, is the marriage of complementary qualities from its two constituents. One of the oxides allows superior conduction and transfer of electrons, while the other excels at holding onto oxygen atoms; to perform well as a fuel cell’s cathode — one of its two electrodes — a material needs to have both qualities. 

The close proximity of the two materials in this superlattice causes them to “borrow” one another’s attributes, the MIT team found. The result is a material whose reactivity exceeds that of the best materials currently used in fuel cells, Yildiz says: “It’s the best of the two worlds.”

Now that the MIT team has analyzed LSC113/214, it may be possible to discover even better materials by conducting systematic searches, Yildiz says; the team is now working on that. “If we can crack this problem, then we can make great strides in improving the performance,” adds Tuller, a professor of ceramics and electronic materials in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering.

Unique tool enables observations

The finding was made possible by instrumentation developed in Yildiz’s laboratory at MIT for observation of electron-transfer properties on surfaces: The instrument, a modified scanning tunneling microscope (STM), can observe materials at high temperatures and in an oxygen-rich environment — “representative of the operating conditions of a fuel-cell cathode,” Yildiz says. This high-temperature phenomenon would not have been detectable with conventional methods.

Tuller describes the superlattice as a “layer cake” of the two different oxides. But these layers are vanishingly thin. To overcome this, the team “sliced” the layers on an extreme angle, exposing much wider surfaces of each. “That magnifies the layers by a hundredfold,” Tuller says.

That slicing is done using a focused ion beam, Chen explains, to expose the interface in a way that the STM can observe more easily at high temperature.

The researchers hope that with this new knowledge, it will be possible to make rapid progress in the search for better electrode materials, helping make fuel cells practical for a wide range of energy applications, from powering homes to powering mobile devices. 

John Kilner, a professor of energy materials at Imperial College, London, who was not involved in this project, calls this “a very elegant set of experiments that contributes a great deal toward our understanding of the very complex problem of oxygen surface exchange.”

Kilner adds, “It waits to be seen if we can capitalize on this knowledge to aid in the construction of practical devices, but it opens up the possibility of engineering new structures with enhanced performance at low temperatures.”

The work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Basic Energy Sciences Program.

Plant-e: living plants generate electricity

ORIGINAL: Plant-e

Technology

Plant-e develops products in which living plants generate electricity. These products are based on technology that was developed at Wageningen University, which was patented in 2007. The patent is now held by Plant-e. The technology enables us to produce electricity from living plants at practically every site where plants can grow. The technology is based on natural processes and is safe for both the plant, and its environment.

Via photosynthesis a plant produces organic matter. Part of this organic matter is used for plant-growth, but a large part can’t be used by the plant and is excreted into the soil via the roots. Around the roots naturally occuring micro-organisms break down the organic compounds to gain energy from. In this process, electrons are released as a waste product. By providing an electrode for the micro-organisms to donate their electrons to, the electrons can be harvested as electricity. Research has shown that plant-growth isn’t compromised by harvesting electricity, so plants keep on growing while electricity is concurrently produced. 

For more information on the technology and recent publications see

www.plantpower.eu

http://cordis.europa.eu/projects/226532

PlantPower - living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production

From 2009-01-01 to 2012-12-31 | PLANTPOWER website

Objective

Living plants in microbial fuel cells might be used as future large-scale Europe wide green energy providers. Such a system can produce in-situ 24 hours per day green electricity or biohydrogen without harvesting the plants. That this might become true was indicated by our first small scale proof of principle experiments describing the so called Plant Microbial Fuel Cell (Plant-MFC) (Strik, 2008, De Schamphelaire, 2008). The Plant-MFC aims to transform solar radiation into green electricity or biohydrogen in a clean and efficient manner. In the Plant-MFC concept, living plants and living microbes form an electrochemical system that is capable of sustainable production of green electricity or biohydrogen from solar energy. By its nature, the Plant-MFC is in potential 5 times more efficient than conventional bio-energy systems.

The technology might be implemented in several ways, ranging from local small scale electricity providers to large scale energy wetlands and islands, high-tech energy and food supplying greenhouses and novel biorefineries. This way, affordable bioenergy maybe produced in Europe as well as in developing countries. Plant-MFCs can be integrated in landscapes invisibly which makes this technology socially highly acceptable. However, exploration of new areas of science and technology is necessary to overcome Plant-MFCs bottlenecks and to make this principally clean, renewable and sustainable technology come true. It is now time to show that significant independent European biofuel and bioelectricity production is possible; we propose that Plant-MFCs can be an excellent choice for our future. We expect that Plant-MFC technology can at least cover 20% of Europe s primary energy need in a real clean and sustainable way. The Plant-MFC concept has several attractive qualities which can provide the significant break through for sustainable energy production in Europe. It will reinforcing competitiveness of Europe since Plant-MFC is world-wide implementable.

Project details

Project reference: 226532

Status: Completed

Total cost: EUR 5 209 687

EU contribution: EUR 3 989 080

Programme acronym: 

FP7-ENERGY

Subprogramme area: 

ENERGY.2008.10.1.1

Contract type: 

Collaborative project (generic)

Results

Periodic Report Summary - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Periodic Report Summary 2 - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Documents

Periodic Report - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Periodic Report 2 - PLANTPOWER (Living plants in microbial fuel cells for clean, renewable, sustainable, efficient, in-situ bioenergy production)

Publications (28)

via OpenAIRE

Enzymatic versus Microbial Bio-Catalyzed Electrodes in Bio-Electrochemical Systems

L

Results

aure Lapinsonniere - Matthieu Picot - Frederic Barriere

pH and Temperature Determine Performance of Oxygen Reducing Biocathodes

David P. B. T. B. Strik - Matthieu Picot - Cees J. N. Buisman - Frédéric Barrière

A versatile route to modify polyethersulfone membranes by chemical reduction of aryldiazonium salts

M. Picot - R. Rodulfo - I. Nicolas - A. Szymczyk - F. Barriere - M. Rabiller-Baudry

These Bacteria Eat Electricity And Make Fuel

ORIGINAL: FastCoExist

It’s not a diet we’d recommend for everyone, but these hungry bugs might be the key to a clean source of gasoline.

The reason we’re hooked on oil, and its climate warming derivatives, is the astonishing amount of energy packed into every gallon of the stuff. Gasoline burns brighter compared to alternatives from ethanol to electricity whenever it’s stored in a tank or battery. But if we could make energy-dense liquids from electrons, the energetic sub-atomic particles driving an electrical current, we could begin weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, particularly in transportation.

Mariprofundus ferrooxydans PV-1, a little bacteria from the ocean, may be the microbe for the job. It feasts on the iron atoms dissolved in seawater, which makes it attractive to scientists who want to turn it into an electric factory for making biofuels. Here’s how it works: Most life on Earth depends on the sun to drive photosynthesis. Plants use solar radiation to use and capture chemical energy, combining water and carbon dioxide to create sugars, carbohydrates, proteins, and other compounds. These are in turn eaten by other organisms higher up the food chain. A few rare classes of organisms actually feed directly on the energy in chemical bonds of the Earth’s minerals. By rearranging molecules, the microbes grab energy from the transfer of electrons among atoms. One group, known as lithoautotrophs, or "eaters of rock," reduce mineral compounds to fuel their metabolism while driving massive geological processes such as rock weathering in the process.

Organisms may one day turn an electrical current into a rich source of organic compounds for biofuels.

M. ferrooxydans is one of them. Iron is its main course, and primary source of electrons. So researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, publishing in the open-source journal mBio, isolated the bacteria and trained them to "eat" electrons in an electric current flowing from a cathode. Despite the lack of iron atoms, the bacteria thrived, growing as a biofilm on the electrode. The results, say the researchers, suggest similar organisms may one day turn an electrical current into a rich source of organic compounds for biofuels. This study, and a handful of others like it, at least show it’s possible to shoot electrons into a bacteria’s metabolism and produce organic compounds as well.

But there’s a long way to go. The next step (PDF) is to harness renewable, carbon-free electricity that serves as a food supply for electron-eating bacteria to churn out biofuels. Research to achieve that vision is only just beginning.

inShare

next step (PDF) is to harness renewable, carbon-free electricity that serves as a food supply for electron-eating bacteria to churn out biofuels. Research to achieve that vision is only just beginning.

MICHAEL J. COREN

Michael Coren covers science, economics and the environment. He is the cofounder of the multimedia production studio + newsroom MajorPlanet Studios.

The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis

ORIGINAL: Focus Forward Films on Vimeo

THE SUPER SUPERCAPACITOR is a Finalist in the $200,000 GE FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition. Learn more about the Competition and FOCUS FORWARD at focusforwardfilms.com

Ric Kaner set out to find a new way to make graphene, the thinnest and strongest material on earth. What he found was a new way to power the world.

FULL CREDITS

Director: Brian Golden Davis

Producers: David Paul Meyer, Laura Lee, Brian Golden Davis

Directors of Photography: Brian Golden Davis, David Paul Meyer

Sound: David Paul Meyer

Music Performed by: Falling Fall, Snow Flake Symphony - Benjamin Vella & Barney Freeman

Mice Music - Ben Stone & John Trudeau

Special Thanks: Ric Kaner, Maher El-Kady, Charles Lee

Lights out – France to force shops and offices to go dark overnight

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

Katie Davies guardian.co.uk

30 January 2013

French light pollution law is expected to save 250,000 tonnes of C02 a year

France's light pollution law comes into effect on 1 July. Photograph: Guardian

Shops and offices throughout France will be forced to turn off their lights overnight in a bid to fight light pollution, the country's environment ministry has announced.

Under the new law, which comes into effect on 1 July, lights in shop window displays will be turned off at 1am. Interior lights in offices and other non-residential buildings will have to be switched off an hour after the last employee leaves. Local councils will be able to make exceptions for Christmas and other special occasions, and in certain tourist or cultural areas.

The move, announced on Wednesday, is expected to save 250,000 tonnes of CO2 – enough energy to power 750,000 French households for a year.

The French ecology minister, Delphine Batho, said she hoped the law would change attitudes in France and help the country become a pioneer in reducing light pollution.

Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived - The Oatmeal

ORIGINAL: The Oatmeal

Additional notes from the author: 

• If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time
• Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla. Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome. 
• There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life. 
• The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too. 
• History.com has a great article about Edison and how his douchebaggery had a chokehold on American cinema. 
• X-rays: just to clarify, Tesla did not discover x-rays, but he was one of the early pioneers in its research. 
• Cryogenic engineering: I'm referring to the cryogenic engineering that has to do with using liquified air to cool a coil and reduce its electrical resistance (Patent No. 11,865), not freezing people and waking them up in the future so they can fight Wesley Snipes. 
• Transistor: Tesla's influence on the modern transistor can be found in patents 723,188 and 725,605. (a better explanation here) 
• Radio: Tesla was the nicest geek ever until he decided to sue Marconi a few years later. 8 months after Tesla died, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Marconi's patents on the invention of radio. So Tesla eventually won that battle, although he was dead by then. 
• Tesla VS Edison: I could write a novel on the differences between Tesla and Edison, but seeing as how this comic is already huge I decided to leave many things out. For instance, Edison killed cats and dogs, but Tesla loved animals and had a cat as a child. Originally Tesla wanted to be a poet, but after getting zapped by static electricity from his kitty he was inspired to study the effects of electricity. One could vaguely construe that Tesla's cat was responsible for the second industrial revolution, which arguably makes it the most awesome cat who ever lived. 
• Edison believed that fossil fuels were the future and that there were enough resources in South America to provide for the next 50,000 years. Tesla believed that renewable energy sources like hydroelectric, solar, and wind power were the future. This is remarkable because in the 1890s there was no such thing as "going green," so Tesla's ideas on conservation were very forward-thinking at the time. 
• Lastly, a big thank you to Jane C. Daugherty for proofreading this article for me. If you want to learn things from the most awesome librarian this side of the North American tectonic plate, follow her on Twitter.