My New Column Starts This Month In Sierra Magazine

Look on page 69 of this month’s Sierra magazine and you’ll find Innovate, a column in which I explore new ideas in energy.

I’m excited about this assignment because it lets me roam about at the beginning of our new era, the Renewables Age, and bend down to pick up the shiniest objects. The field is suffused with a sense of possibility. Seems like every week I hear about a new idea for capturing electricity from an orphan source, or harnessing it in a  superior way. Trapping windpower (PDF) from passing subway trains! Making ice at night to cool buildings by day! Deriving fuel from our own sludge, or from carbon dioxide in the air, or from a glass of water!

Innovate is eye candy for techno-enviro geeks. The centerpiece is a large graphic about a technology, or a suite of technologies, that could solve one of our myriad energy conundrums. The trick for me as a journalist is to find the inventions and trends, and then work with a graphic artist to turn complex ideas into an illustration that can be understood at a glance. Finally, I do a profile of one of the pioneers of that exciting new field.

Someday a decade or more from now, when the Renewable Age is fully upon us, we will do what humans do: We will glance back at promising technologies that sputtered out and chuckle in a knowing way; we will admire the victorious inventors, who will live in mansions and run businesses that have become boring and predictable; we will drive cars with a battery the size of a tea bag and a tank filled with gas made from old coffee grounds, but we will complain that it doesn’t have enough cupholders.

This is not the column for that day. This is the column for this day, when we don’t yet know who the winners or losers are, but can see with growing certainty that something fantastic is just around the corner.