Two Germans Travel Across Australia in a Wind Turbine Car [with Video]

When it comes to crazy-cool engineering, nobody can top ze Germans. If it’s even vaguely plausible, you can bet that some German crackpot inventor has done it. Well, now two Germans – Stefan Simmerer and Dirk Gion – have broken three Guinness World Records in a ... wait for it ... wind turbine powered electric car.

That’s right, an EV that’s powered by a wind turbine, those big robotic looking windmills you may have seen in farms atop hilltops in Scotland or Pennsylvania. Here’s how it works:

At night, Simmerer and Gion park the Wind Explorer – that’s what it’s called – and erect a nifty looking collapsible wind turbine. While they sleep, the lightweight turbine generates enough energy to recharger the Wind Explorer’s batteries. If they’re running low on energy during the day, they can whip out a kite that helps powered the vehicle forward.

Simmerer, Gion and the Wind Explorer have recently completed a 4,800 kilometer (2,983 mile), 18 day trek across Australia where they either broke or established three Guinness World Records: the first to cross the Great Southern Land in a wind powered car, the longest distance travelled in a 36 hour period and the most distance travelled overall in a wind powered car.

You can check out some sweet videos of the Wind Explorer’s journey below.

By Tristan Hankins

Source: Wind-Explorer

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Brew Your Own Ethanol Fuel from Food scraps and Old Newspapers

If there’s one thing all Americans are good at, it’s producing waste: thirty million tons of it a year, in fact. From food scraps to old newspapers, a lot of compostable materials end up in the nation’s landfills. Thomas Quinn, the founder of Silicon Valley start-up E-Fuel wants to change all that.

The E-Fuel system uses two washing machine sized components: the MicroFusion Reactor (which to me conjures up images of Mr. Fusion from Back To The Future Part II) and the MicroFueler. The former reduces organic waste into sugar water and ferments it into a sugary, bacteria-ridden alcoholic soup not unlike bathtub homebrew.

The latter turns this soup into usable ethanol for automotive fuel. The whole process takes about 3 kWh of energy, or about a tenth of the average home’s daily energy usage. That’s less than the 4 to 7.5 kWh it takes to make a gallon of gasoline, at least according to Jacob Ward of the U.S. Department of Energy.

A third component called a GridBuster uses the ambient heat from a portable generator to fuel the whole compost to ethanol process. So good is it, in fact, that a claimed 80 to 90% of the E-Fuel’s power can come from this ambient heat alone.

Quinn sought the assistance of Floyd Butterfield, the inventor behind the legendary Butterfield Sill, to develop the E-Fuel system. Each of the three components are said to cost US$10,000 each, for a total cost of US$30,000 per complete unit.

E-Fuel’s mainstay clientele at the moment are universities and governments who, unlike the vast majority of consumers, are able to shell out copious amounts of money to save a little bit of the planet. In the words of “ethanol expert” David Blume:

“E-Fuel's machines aren't cheap, but for early adopters of new technology like this, I think cost really isn't the issue.”

Quinn hopes consumers will be able to lease the units from distributors, with some seventy already ready for immediate lease in both the U.S. and overseas. A lack of E85 compatible vehicles on the market may stunt E-Fuels growth, though apparently one can convert an E10 vehicle over to flex fuel with relative ease.

Quinn is expecting sales to double this year, though requires an investment of US$25 million to top up the company’s coffers and keep E-Fuel rolling. In his own words:

“In this economy, finding capital is impossible. Banks aren't taking any risks and we're facing a green tech bubble that's popping, because investors have dumped so much money into solar and wind and haven't seen returns.”

Only time will tell if E-Fuel is the way of the future or another woulda-coulda-shoulda in a long line of clever-if-financially-flawed enviro-tech.

By Tristan Hankins

Source: E-Fuel via CNN

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