Green4Life

The Carolina Green Fair is bringing their four year old event to Columbia on October 22nd at Finlay Park.  The South Carolina Green Fair is supported by a committee of passionate individuals, who believe that by educating both consumers and businesses through the Green Fair Events it is possible to make South Carolina an even finer place to live! Their purpose is to create excitement and enthusiasm for green products, services and technologies that are available to the residents of South Carolina using an environmentally responsible forum of education and entertainment.  More at CarolinaGreenFair

Presently sitting in a very interesting session on the above topic at OECD Global Forum on the Knowledge Economy.  More on this later.

Later:

They play with the ideas of lock-in and path dependence, a situation where a technology that may be inferior to alternatives still dominates because switching would create too many problems, or be too expensive, or where an early decision limits the options available later, even if the original conditions are no longer relevant.

A new study from the OECD Fostering Innovation for Green Growth looks at these issues too, but with more of a policy focus than say Steamboy or FreakAngels. It may be hard to see what government bureaucracies with their rules and procedures could do to promote innovation other than shut up and leave the innovators to get on with it. In fact, they can do quite a lot. History has plenty of examples of inventions and other innovations that came about thanks to public money.   Rest

June 24, 2011 - Celmet is a porous metal made from nickel or nickel chrome alloy. The porous metal manufacturing process comprises electro conductive coating to plastic foam, followed by nickel plating and plastic foam removal by heat treatment.

Celmet’s features include high porosity (up to 98%), considerably higher than other porous metals, such as nonwoven metal fabric and foam metal; it also features a three-dimensional mesh-like structure that forms interconnected, open and spherical pores. Moreover, it is easy to process the porous metal into various shapes by cutting and stamping.

These features lead to favorable filling, retaining and current-collecting performance, when used with an active material. As such, Celmet has recently been adopted as a positive electrode current collector in hybrid vehicle nickel-hydrogen batteries.  Rest

A couple of months ago the Green Buildings Discussion Group of the New York Academy of Sciences hosted a panel discussion titled Achieving Urban Infrastructure Efficiencies Through Building Networks. The link to the Academy eBriefing was just posted last month and you can find the audio and slides from the discussion under the “Media” tab of the eBriefing. At this event, experts focused on the idea that realizing the full urban potential for deep energy reductions will require a reconceptualization of urban infrastructure: we must begin to think of cities not as collections of discrete buildings but as networks of buildings that can share information and better manage resources collectively.