Skip to content
Guest Thinkers

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.
Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

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?”

Sign up for the Smarter Faster newsletter
A weekly newsletter featuring the biggest ideas from the smartest people

Related

Up Next
“Demand for water in agriculture and energy production could spike in the coming decades while catastrophic floods and droughts strike more often,” reports The Independent.