Cool Future Technologies

A very interesting press release appeared yesterday morning that was brought to our attention. A startup company, Gravitomagnetism, LLC, was granted a patent that enables it a multitude of applications ranging from energy generation to teleportation. 

"Imagine one day having a wind-up watch-sized device that could power your entire house, your boat, your car and your airplane." - Michael Boyd, Gravitomagnetism, LLC 

As one Redditor put it: 

“So, in other words, this patent describes a device that can be built to produce energy from gravity, propulsion without propellant (using gravity, or antigravity), a means to convert matter into energy and back again without changing the original configuration of matter, or the ability to convert energy into another form and beam it to another location where it can be converted back into the original form.

So, in essence, yes. Star Trek.”

The Advanced Rail Energy Storage is a 19th century solution for a 21st century problem. 

In April, the Bureau of Land Management approved an ARES—that’s Advanced Rail Energy Storage—project, conceived by a Santa Barbara-based energy startup called, well, ARES. By 2019, ARES operations head Francesca Cava says, the facility will occupy 106 acres in the excellently-named town of Pahrump, Nevada. By running a train up and down a hill, ARES can help utilities add to and subtract from the grid as needed.

The Nevada project has a power capacity of 50 megawatts and can produce 12.5 megawatt-hours of energy. That’s relatively large, especially compared to a lot of battery storage projects. But it might not be large enough to make money. “Fifty megawatts doesn’t get us to economies of scale,” ARES CEO James Kelly admitted in an interview with UtilityDive. “We are more efficient as we get larger.”