modern marvels

saw this wonderful program on the History channel couple of weeks back.. where they brought to us the renewable energy modern marvels..

1) solar tower: thousands of mirror track the sun's movement and reflect the light on to a reasonably small area up high on a very tall cylindrical tower. the small area can get heated up to more than 1000 deg C .. there are copper pipes running just below the surface carrying water.. and the steam so generated pushes a turbine to generate power.. good neough to give power for a city block's lighting needs or so.. i thought that was very nice

2) solar wind energy: this is a bit audacious, i thought.. but someone in australia is making a big bet on it.. the basic idea is a huge inverted funnel placed in a desert like area. the base of the funnel being spread over a few miles circumference, gently sloping towards the central stem.. the stem goes up a few kilometers (when built it will dwarf the largest towers in the world by a distance)... the hot air dying to go up the funnel (hot air has only one way to go... up the funnel, that's how the base is designed.. i think hermetically sealed or something) pushes a few wind turbines and generates electricity.. there is a restaurant up at the top of the funnel stem, of course, which also will generate revenue for the project....

3) car that runs on compressed air cylinders. instead of spark plug igniting fuel and creating bursts.. a timer releases compressed air into the cylinder and pushes the piston... our own tatas has also got this technology licensed and is to produce these cars by 2010, i read.
.. the distance travelled by the compressed air car per cylinder was quite good.. don't remember the numbers though.

there is also a gasoline/compressed air hybrid.. which i thought will be a killer


why i put this post was - there is so much information which is useful/valuable/interesting out there... one tends to get overwhelmed at the thought of ingesting all this.. so the best thing to do is to keep sharing so that we don;t need to be there at the right time/right place all of us at the same time :)