Alaska has vast renewable energy resources, but doesn’t always have populations that live close to that resource or inter-ties to the resources. The Aleutian islands for example have a ton of wind and potential geothermal energy. If there was a way to store that energy in say zinc pellets or beam down to the lower 48 via microwave, both of these are not real examples, then Alaska could provide a lot of energy to the rest of the US. Another possibility is to provide some sort of value-added process to raw materials. This is possible with fish processing.  When I visited Iceland in 2007, they had Alcoa on a 30 year contract for cheap electricity that was a fixed cost for the 30 years. This example of storing compressed air for later use might be useful for the wind energy in some rural communities. Hopefully there will be some break through in energy storage and transport in the next 5 years. This would also allow energy to be created at a distance from cities which might lower the economic and environmental impacts.

Interesting article about using the energy from the AM and FM radio stations to power a sensor. I think the key technologies for the future will be using the summing of waves to move things really small distances or change properties of light and sound. And the other key feature is tapping into the resonant frequency of materials.

I have been thinking about the power of resonance ever since I saw the Tacoma Narrows bridge disaster (1:25 into the video), which I feel every engineering student saw at some point. There must be cool ways to leverage resonance.