Clean Energy | The Ferris Files

Dyeing Sports Clothes Without a Drop of Water

During the Olympics, sportswear giants Adidas and Nike made simultaneous announcements of a new dyeing process that uses carbon dioxide instead of water. Though few noted it at the time, this development is a very big deal. […]

New Forbes Post: The Sun-Powered Spy Drone

As “green” technology finds its way into more parts of our society, it is starting to be bent toward all sorts of ends — like spying on people. I just posted a story on Forbes about the Silent Falcon, a new robot drone that vastly increases its flight time with wings carpeted in solar panels. […]

A Controversial Post: Can Tidal Power Create Enough Jobs to Save a Dying Town?

A post I wrote for Forbes about tidal power in Maine has generated some controversy among the people of Eastport. […]

Making Your Home More Efficient with Psychedelic Photos

Image credit: Essess

Essess is a Boston company that plans to drive by your home in the middle of the night and create an image that looks like this.

The footage was captured by an infrared thermal camera mounted on a Toyota RAV4, and the resulting picture has been tweaked into what Essess […]

New on Forbes: How Wireless Charging Will Make Life Simpler (and Greener)

It almost goes without saying that the more gadgets we buy, the most waste we create. But what if a new kind of device created less waste by its very design? […]

How the Bahamas Can Get Electricity from the Ocean

I write about some pretty out-there ideas for my “Innovate” column in Sierra magazine, but the most latest subject is one that is almost ready for the big time. The subject is ocean thermal energy conversion, or OTEC. It is the unwieldy, unsexy name for a power source perfectly suited to islands. […]

The Mud-Powered Robot

Searching about for a topic for a recent column, I stumbled across the work of Dr. Lenny Tender and his benthic microbial fuel cell. The idea blew me away once I grasped it. Tender, an electrochemist at the Naval Research Laboratory, procured a tiny but steady stream of electricity from …. river mud. […]

Making Money from Cow Pies, and Other Big News

There are two reasons to be excited about my most recent column in Sierra magazine. One has to do with the topic, which is farmers using cow patties to fuel small electric power plants. The other has to do with the graphic we used to tell this remarkable story. […]

The Robo-Fish that Will Save Millions of Salmon

One little-known problem with the giant hydroelectric dams of the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest is that they kill salmon, millions each year. It’s not just the adult ones going upstream to spawn, which have gotten lots of attention; it’s the young ones heading downstream. As many as 10 percent of salmon smolt perish as they try to wriggle through the whirling blades of the hydroelectric turbines. A solution is on its way, and I wrote about it in a story for Popular Mechanics that was published yesterday. […]

The Power of the Dammed

Did you know that only three percent of dams in the United States create electricity? What a waste. I heard this factoid a few months ago and was curious if anyone was trying to capture all that unused power. Yesterday a story I wrote on the subject was published at Ecomagination. […]

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