Screenshot from the short film 'slaughterbots' showing people flee during the rampage of AI based automated killing robots

The video taps into what could happen if AI killing machines became politicized tools of war -- the exact thing that tech leaders around the world fear most for our future.

Artificial intelligence is to the point where it barely needs humans to code itself. The applications seem endless. Automated services, generating content, basic care and services can all be greatly improved with the introduction of AI.

But what about weaponry?

This short film called Slaugherbots serves as a horrific prediction of what could happen should automated weaponry overrun the need for protection in our world.

[WARNING: The following video does contain violence and images of injury and even death. Viewer discretion is advised.]

For those who support AI-based weaponry, it's an object without feelings that can do the work of a military while saving officers from potentially devastating situations -- both mentally and physically. 

And while there aren't governments openly and brazenly funding it now, AI-driven weaponry was a big enough threat to send Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and other industry leaders to pen a letter to the United Nations begging them to preemptively work toward putting together solutions.

The video opens a bit like Tesla's semi truck reveal, actually. The press event swayed the audience into ooos and ahhhs as they watch miniaturized, AI-driven robots kill a group of "bad guys" during the demonstration. The press speaker encourages the enthusiasm, promising that all it takes to program these drone bots with a profile is someone's age, sex, fitness, uniform, and ethnicity.

However, as with a lot of technology, the drones fall into the wrong hands. The AIs get hacked and target one single group of politicians. They later break through concrete and glass to kill university students who had all shared a video exposing the injustices of the drones and their policies.

At the end of the video, you're left wondering if this is what Elon Musk sees when he rails against autonomous AI weaponry being developed.

And it's not just Musk. Stuart Russell works at the University of California Berkeley as a leading AI scientist. He said the world is closer to integrating autonomous weapons than we are self-driving cars.

"The technology illustrated in the film is simply an integration of existing capabilities. It is not science fiction. In fact, it is easier to achieve than self-driving cars, which require far higher standards of performance," Russell said in an interview with the Guardian.

Russell also pointed out similar issues in the video for the non-profit Stop Autonomous Weapons.

"I've worked in AI for more than 35 years," says Russell in the video. "Its potential to benefit humanity is enormous, even in defense, but allowing machines to choose to kill humans will be devastating to our security and freedom."

"Thousands of my fellow researchers agree. We have that opportunity to prevent the future you just saw, but the window to act is closing fast."

Those researchers include Noel Sharkey, emeritus professor of AI at Sheffield University who notably tried warning the robotics community about this issue in 2009.

“The movie made my hair stand on end as it crystallizes one possible futuristic outcome from the development of these hi-tech weapons,” he said. “There is an emerging arms race among the hi-tech nations to develop autonomous submarines, fighter jets, battleships and tanks that can find their own targets and apply violent force without the involvement of meaningful human decisions. It will only take one major war to unleash these new weapons with tragic humanitarian consequences and destabilization of global security.”

A lightweight, comfortable jacket that can generate the power to light up a jogger at night may sound futuristic, but materials scientist Trisha Andrew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst could make one today. In a new paper this month, she and colleagues outline how they have invented a way to apply breathable, pliable, metal-free electrodes to fabric and off-the-shelf clothing so it feels good to the touch and also transports enough electricity to power small electronics.

She says, "Our lab works on textile electronics. We aim to build up the materials science so you can give us any garment you want, any fabric, any weave type, and turn it into a conductor. Such conducting textiles can then be built up into sophisticated electronics. One such application is to harvest body motion energy and convert it into electricity in such a way that every time you move, it generates power." Powering advanced fabrics that can monitor health data remotely are important to the military and increasingly valued by the health care industry, she notes.

Generating small electric currents through relative movement of layers is called triboelectric charging, explains Andrew, who trained as a polymer chemist and electrical engineer. Materials can become electrically charged as they create friction by moving against a different material, like rubbing a comb on a sweater. "By sandwiching layers of differently materials between two conducting electrodes, a few microwatts of power can be generated when we move," she adds.

PEDOT-coated yarns that act as 'normal' wires transmit electricity from a wall outlet to an incandescent lightbulb. Materials scientist Trisha Andrew at UMass Amherst and colleagues outline in a new paper how they have invented a way to apply breathable, pliable, metal-free electrodes to fabric and off-the-shelf clothing so it feels good to the touch and also transports electricity to power small electronics. Harvesting body motion energy generates power. Credit: UMass Amherst

In the current early online edition of Advanced Functional Materials, she and postdoctoral researcher Lu Shuai Zhang in her lab describe the vapor deposition method they use to coat fabrics with a conducting polymer, poly(3,4-ethylenedioxytiophene) also known as PEDOT, to make plain-woven, conducting fabrics that are resistant to stretching and wear and remain stable after washing and ironing. The thickest coating they put down is about 500 nanometers, or about 1/10 the diameter of a human hair, which retains a fabric's hand feel.

The authors report results of testing electrical conductivity, fabric stability, chemical and mechanical stability of PEDOT films and textile parameter effects on conductivity for 14 fabrics, including five cottons with different weaves, linen and silk from a craft store.

"Our article describes the materials science needed to make these robust conductors," Andrew says. "We show them to be stable to washing, rubbing, human sweat and a lot of wear and tear." PEDOT coating did not change the feel of any fabric as determined by touch with bare hands before and after coating. Coating did not increase fabric weight by more than 2 percent. The work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

Until recently, she and Zhang point out, textile scientists have tended not to use vapor deposition because of technical difficulties and high cost of scaling up from the laboratory. But over the last 10 years, industries such as carpet manufacturers and mechanical component makers have shown that the technology can be scaled up and remain cost-effective. The researchers say their invention also overcomes the obstacle of power-generating electronics mounted on plastic or cladded, veneer-like fibers that make garments heavier and/or less flexible than off-the-shelf clothing "no matter how thin or flexible these device arrays are."

"There is strong motivation to use something that is already familiar, such as cotton/silk thread, fabrics and clothes, and imperceptibly adapting it to a new technological application." Andrew adds, "This is a huge leap for consumer products, if you don't have to convince people to wear something different than what they are already wearing."

Test results were sometimes a surprise, Andrew notes. "You'd be amazed how much stress your clothes go through until you try to make a coating that will survive a shirt being pulled over the head. The stress can be huge, up to a thousand newtons of force. For comparison, one footstep is equal to about 10 newtons, so it's yanking hard. If your coating is not stable, a single pull like that will flake it all off. That's why we had to show that we could bend it, rub it and torture it. That is a very powerful requirement to move forward."

Andrew is director of wearable electronics at the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring in UMass Amherst's Institute of Applied Life Sciences (IALS). Since the basic work reported this month was completed, her lab has also made a wearable heart rate monitor with an off-the-shelf fitness bra to which they added eight monitoring electrodes. They will soon test it with volunteers on a treadmill at the IALS human movement facility.

She explains that a hospital heart rate monitor has 12 electrodes, while the wrist-worn fitness devices popular today have one, which makes them prone to false positives. They will be testing a bra with eight electrodes, alone and worn with leggings that add four more, against a control to see if sensors can match the accuracy and sensitivity of what a hospital can do. As the authors note in their paper, flexible, body-worn electronics represent a frontier of human interface devices that make advanced physiological and performance monitoring possible.

For the future, Andrew says, "We're working on taking any garment you give us and turning it into a solar cell so that as you are walking around the sunlight that hits your clothes can be stored in a battery or be plugged in to power a small electronic device."

Zhang and Andrew believe their vapor coating is able to stick to fabrics by a process called surface grafting, which takes advantage of free bonds dangling on the surface chemically bonding to one end of the polymer coating, but they have yet to investigate this fully.

Source:University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Journal Reference:

Lushuai Zhang, Marianne Fairbanks, Trisha L. Andrew. Rugged Textile Electrodes for Wearable Devices Obtained by Vapor Coating Off-the-Shelf, Plain-Woven Fabrics. Advanced Functional Materials, 2017; 1700415 DOI: 10.1002/adfm.201700415

An electrical device which accelerates charged atomic or subatomic particles to high energies. The particles may be charged either positively or negatively. If subatomic, the particles are usually electrons or protons and, if atomic, they are charged ions of various elements and their isotopes throughout the entire periodic table of the elements.
 

Accelerators that produce various subatomic particles at high intensity have many practical applications in industry and medicine as well as in basic research. Electrostatic generators, pulse transformer sets, cyclotrons, and electron linear accelerators are used to produce high levels of various kinds of radiation that in turn can be used to polymerize plastics, provide bacterial sterilization without heating, and manufacture radioisotopes which are utilized in industry and medicine for direct treatment of some illnesses as well as research. They can also be used to provide high-intensity beams of protons, neutrons, heavy ions, pi mesons, or x-rays that are used for cancer therapy and research.
 

The x-rays used in industry are usually produced by arranging for accelerated electrons to strike a solid target. However, with the advent of electron synchrotron storage rings that produce x-rays in the form of synchrotron radiation, many new industrial applications of these x-rays have been realized, especially in the field of solid-state microchip fabrication and medical diagnostics.

Particle accelerators fall into two general classes—electrostatic accelerators that provide a steady dc potential, and varieties of accelerators that employ various combinations of time-varying electric and magnetic fields.

Electrostatic accelerators

 

Electrostatic accelerators in the simplest form accelerate the charged particle either from the source of high voltage to ground potential or from ground potential to the source of high voltage. All particle accelerations are carried out inside an evacuated tube so that the accelerated particles do not collide with air molecules or atoms and may follow trajectories characterized specifically by the electric fields utilized for the acceleration. The maximum energy available from this kind of accelerator is limited by the ability of the evacuated tube to withstand some maximum high voltage.

Time-varying field accelerators. In contrast to the highvoltage- type accelerator which accelerates particles in a continuous stream through a continuously maintained increasing potential, the time-varying accelerators must necessarily accelerate particles in small discrete groups or bunches.
 

An accelerator that varies only in electric field and does not use any magnetic guide or turning field is customarily referred to as a linear accelerator or linac. In the simplest version of this kind of accelerator, the electrodes that are used to attract and accelerate the particles are connected to a radio-frequency (rf) power supply or oscillator so that alternate electrodes are of opposite polarity. In this way, each successive gap between adjacent electrodes is alternately accelerating and decelerating. If these acceleration gaps are appropriately spaced to accommodate the increasing velocity of the accelerated particle, the frequency can be adjusted so that the particle bunches are always experiencing an accelerating electric field as they cross each successive gap. In this way, modest voltages can be used to accelerate bunches of particles indefinitely, limited only by the physical length of the accelerator construction.

All conventional (but not superconducting) research linacs usually are operated in a pulsed mode because of the extremely high rf power necessary for their operation. The pulsed operation can then be adjusted so that the duty cycle or amount of time actually on at full power averages to a value that is reasonable in cost and practical for cooling. This necessarily limited duty cycle in turn limits the kinds of research that are possible with linacs; however, they are extremely useful (and universally used) as pulsed high-current injectors for all electron and proton synchrotron ring accelerators. Superconducting linear accelerators have been constructed that are used to accelerate electrons and also to boost the energy of heavy ions injected from electrostatic machines. These linacs can easily operate in the continuouswave (cw) rather than pulsed mode, because the rf power losses
are only a few watts.
 

The Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility (CEBAF) uses two 400-MeV superconducting linacs to repeatedly accelerate electrons around a racetrack-like arrangement where the two linacs are on the opposite straight sides of the racetrack and the circular ends are a series of recirculation bending magnets, a different set for each of five passes through the two linacs in succession. The continuous electron beam then receives a 400-MeV acceleration on each straight side or 0.8 GeV per turn, and is accelerated to a final energy of 4 GeV in five turns and extracted for use in experiments. The superconducting linacs allow for continuous acceleration and hence a continuous beam rather than a pulsed beam. This makes possible many fundamental nuclear and quark structure measurements that are impossible with the pulsed electron beams from conventional electron linacs. 

 

As accelerators are carried to higher energy, a linac eventually reaches some practical construction limit because of length. This problem of extreme length can be circumvented conveniently by accelerating the particles in a circular path maintained by either static or time-varying magnetic fields. Accelerators utilizing steady magnetic fields as guide paths are usually referred to as cyclotrons or synchrocyclotrons, and are arranged to provide a steady magnetic field over relatively large areas that allow the particles to travel in an increasing spiral orbit of gradually increasing size as they increase in energy.

Practical limitations of magnet construction and cost have kept the size of circular proton accelerators with static magnetic fields to the vicinity of 100 to 1000 MeV. For even higher energies, up to 400 GeV per nucleon in the largest conventional (not superconducting) proton synchrotron in operation, it is necessary to vary the magnetic field as well as the electric field in time. In this way the magnetic field can be of a minimal practical size, which is still quite extensive for a 980-GeV accelerator (6500 ft or 2000min diameter). This circular magnetic containment region, or “racetrack,” is injected with relatively low-energy particles that can coast around the magnetic ring when it is at minimum field strength. The magnetic field is then gradually increased to stay in step with the higher magnetic rigidity of the particles as they are gradually accelerated with a time-varying electric field.

Superconducting magnets

 

The study of the fundamental structure of nature and all associated basic research require an ever increasing energy in order to allow finer and finer measurements on the basic structure of matter. Since the voltage-varying and magnetic-field-varying accelerators also have limits to their maximum size in terms of cost and practical construction problems, the only way to increase particle energies even further is to provide higher-varying magnetic fields through superconducting magnet technology, which can extend electromagnetic capability by a factor of 4 to 5. Large superconducting cyclotrons and superconducting synchrotrons are in operation.

 

Storage rings

 

Beyond the limit just described, the only other possibility is to accelerate particles in opposite directions and arrange for them to collide at certain selected intersection regions around the accelerator. The main technical problem is to provide adequate numbers of particles in the two colliding beams so that the probability of a collision is moderately high. Such storage ring facilities are in operation for both electrons and protons.
 

Besides storing the particles in circular orbits, the rings can operate initially as synchrotrons and accelerate lower-energy injected particles to much higher energies and then store them for interaction studies at the beam interaction points.
 

Large proton synchrotrons have been used as storage-ring colliders by accelerating and storing protons in one direction around the ring while accelerating and storing antiprotons (negative charge) in the opposite direction. The proton and antiproton beams are carefully programmed to be in different orbits as they circulate in opposite directions and to collide only when their orbits cross at selected points around the ring where experiments are located. The antiprotons are produced by high-energy proton collisions with a target, collected, stored, cooled, and eventually injected back into the synchrotron as an antiproton beam.

Electron-positron synchrotron accelerator storage rings have been in operation for many years in the basic study of particle physics, with energies ranging from 2 GeV + 2 GeV to 104 GeV+104 GeV. The by-product synchrotron radiation from many of these machines is used in numerous applications. However, the synchrotron radiation loss forces the machine design to larger and larger diameters, characterized by the Large Electron
 

Positron Storage Ring (LEP) at CERN, near Geneva, Switzerland (closed down in 2000), which was 17 mi (27 km) in circumference. Conventional rf cavities enable electron-positron acceleration only up to 50–70 GeV (limited by synchrotron radiation loss) while higher energies of 100–150 GeV require superconducting cavities.

 

Advanced linacs

 

Although circular machines with varying magnetic fields have been developed because linacs of comparable performance would be too long (many miles), developments in linac design and utilization of powerful laser properties may result in a return to linacs that will outperform present ring machines at much lower cost. As a first example, the 20-GeV electron linac at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California, has been modified to provide simultaneous acceleration of positrons and electrons to energies as high as 50 GeV, while operating in what is called the SLED mode. After acceleration the electrons and positrons are separated by a magnet, and the two beams are magnetically directed around the opposite sides of a circle so that they collide at one intersection point approximately along a diameter extending from the end of the linac across the circle. This collider arrangement is much less expensive than the 17-mi (27-km) ring at CERN and provides electron-positron collisions of comparable energies but at lower intensities.

Physicists in Darmstadt have been able to stop something that has the greatest possible speed and that never really stops: light. The physicists, headed by Thomas Halfmann, stopped light for about one minute. They were also able to save images that were transferred by the light pulse into the crystal for a minute – a million times longer than previously possible.

Light-experiment: Success by combining known methods. Picture: Katrin Binner

Already a decade ago, physicists stopped light for a very short moment: In previous years, this extended towards stop times of a few seconds for simple light pulses in extremely cold gases and special crystals. But now the researchers at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Technische Universität Darmstadt extended the possible duration and applications for freezing the motion of light considerably.

The researchers achieved the record by cleverly combining various known methods of their field. The result will have practical significance in future data processing systems that operate using light.

A Glass-like Crystal to Stop the Light 

To stop the light, the physicists used a glass-like crystal that contains a low concentration of ions – electrically charged atoms – of the element praseodymium. The experimental setup also includes two laser beams. One is part of the deceleration unit, while the other is to be stopped.

The first light beam, called the “control beam”, changes the optical properties of the crystal: the ions then change the speed of light to a high degree. The second beam, the one to be stopped, now comes into contact with this new medium of crystal and laser light and is slowed down within it. When the physicists switch off the control beam at the same moment that the other beam is within the crystal, the decelerated beam comes to a stop.

More precisely, the light turns into a kind of wave trapped in the crystal lattice. This can be explained in greatly simplified form as follows. The praseodymium ions are orbited by electrons. These behave similarly to a chain of magnets: if you put one into motion, the movement – mediated by magnetic forces – propagates in the chain like a wave.

Storing a Striped Pattern

Since physicists call the magnetism of electrons “spin”, a “spin wave” forms in the same manner when freezing the laser beam. This is a reflection of the laser’s light wave. In this way, the Darmstadt researchers were able to store images, such as a striped pattern, made of laser light within the crystal. The information can be read out again by turning the control laser beam on again.

Professor Thomas Halfmann. Picture: Katrin Binner

The fact that only very short storage times were possible until now is because perturbing environments interfered with the spin wave, similar to how moving ships mix up waves in a lake. The information about the stored light wave is thus gradually lost. The perturbations can be alleviated by applying magnetic fields and high-frequency pulses. In our example, these fields reduce the number of boats on the lake, as it were.

Only the Beginning

How well this works depends strongly on the parameters of the driving optical fields, magnetic fields and the high-frequency pulses. There are very many variations, and the optimal setting can hardly be calculated because of the complexity. Therefore, the Darmstadt researchers used computer algorithms that quickly and entirely automatically find the best solutions during the experiment.

One of the algorithms is based on natural evolution, which produces organisms that are adapted as well as possible to the environment. Using the algorithms, the researchers were able to optimize the laser beams, the magnetic field and the high-frequency pulses in such a manner that the spin waves survived nearly as long as is possible in the crystal.

Based on this success, Halfmann’s team now intends to explore techniques that can store light significantly longer – perhaps for a week – and to achieve a higher bandwidth and data transfer rate for efficient information storage by stopped light.

Christian Meier

Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed arrays of tiny nano-antennas that can enable sensing of molecules that resonate in the infrared (IR) spectrum.

Nanoantennas made of semiconductor can help scientists detect molecules with infrared light.

“The identification of molecules by sensing their unique absorption resonances is very important for environmental monitoring, industrial process control, and military applications,” said team leader Daniel Wasserman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and a researcher at the Micro and Nano Technology Laboratory at Illinois.

The food and pharmaceutical industries use light to detect contaminants and to ensure quality. The light interacts with the bonds in the molecules, which resonate at particular frequencies, giving each molecule a “spectral fingerprint.” Many molecules and materials more strongly resonate in the IR end of the spectrum, which has very long wavelengths of light – often larger than the molecules themselves.

“The absorption signatures of some of the molecules of interest for these applications can be quite weak, and as we move to nano-scale materials, it can be very difficult to see absorption from volumes smaller than the wavelength of light,” Wasserman said. “It is here that our antenna array surfaces could have a significant impact.”

Other nano-scale antenna systems cannot be tuned to a longer light wavelength because of the limitations of traditional nanoantenna materials. The Illinois team used highly doped semiconductors, grown by a technique called molecular beam epitaxy that is used to make IR lasers and detectors.

Nanoantennas made of semiconductor can help scientists detect molecules with infrared light.

“We have shown that nanostructures fabricated from highly doped semiconductors act as antennas in the infrared,” said Stephanie Law, a postdoctoral researcher at Illinois and the lead author of the work. “The antennas concentrate this very long wavelength light into ultra-subwavelength volumes, and can be used to sense molecules with very weak absorption resonances.”

The semiconductor antenna arrays allow long-wavelength light to strongly interact with nano-scale samples, so the arrays could enhance the detection of small volumes of materials with a standard IR spectrometer – already a commonplace piece of equipment in many industrial and research labs.

The researchers further demonstrated their ability to control the position and strength of the antenna resonance by adjusting the nanoantenna dimensions and the semiconductor material properties.

The group will continue to explore new shapes and structures to further enhance light-matter interaction at very small scales and to potentially integrate these materials with other sensing systems.

“We are looking to integrate these antenna structures with optoelectronic devices to make more efficient, smaller, optoelectronic components for sensing and security applications,” Wasserman said.

Green energy includes natural energetic processes that can be harnessed with little pollution. Anaerobic digestion, geothermal power, wind power, small-scale hydropower, solar energy, biomass power, tidal power, and wave power fall under such a category. Some definitions may also include power derived from the incineration of waste.Some people, including George Monbiot and James Lovelock have specifically classified nuclear power as green energy. Others, including Greenpeace disagree, claiming that the problems associated with radioactive waste and the risk of nuclear accidents (such as the Chernobyl disaster) pose an unacceptable risk to the environment and to humanity.

No power source is entirely impact-free. All energy sources require energy and give rise to some degree of pollution from manufacture of the technology.In several countries with common carrier arrangements, electricity retailing arrangements make it possible for consumers to purchase green electricity (renewable electricity) from either their utility or a green power provider.

When energy is purchased from the electricity network, the power reaching the consumer will not necessarily be generated from green energy sources. The local utility company, electric company, or state power pool buys their electricity from electricity producers who may be generating from fossil fuel, nuclear or renewable energy sources. In many countries green energy currently provides a very small amount of electricity, generally contributing less than 2 to 5% to the overall pool. In some U.S. states, local governments have formed regional power purchasing pools using Community Choice Aggregation and Solar Bonds to achieve a 51% renewable mix or higher, such as in the City of San Francisco.

A Solar Trough System

By participating in a green energy program a consumer may be having an effect on the energy sources used and ultimately might be helping to promote and expand the use of green energy. They are also making a statement to policy makers that they are willing to pay a price premium to support renewable energy. Green energy consumers either obligate the utility companies to increase the amount of green energy that they purchase from the pool (so decreasing the amount of non-green energy they purchase), or directly fund the green energy through a green power provider. If insufficient green energy sources are available, the utility must develop new ones or contract with a third party energy supplier to provide green energy, causing more to be built. However, there is no way the consumer can check whether or not the electricity bought is "green" or otherwise.

In some countries such as the Netherlands, electricity companies guarantee to buy an equal amount of 'green power' as is being used by their green power customers. The Dutch government exempts green power from pollution taxes, which means green power is hardly any more expensive than other power.

In the United States, one of the main problems with purchasing green energy through the electrical grid is the current centralized infrastructure that supplies the consumer’s electricity. This infrastructure has led to increasingly frequent brown outs and black outs, high CO2 emissions, higher energy costs, and power quality issues. An additional $450 billion will be invested to expand this fledgling system over the next 20 years to meet increasing demand. In addition, this centralized system is now being further overtaxed with the incorporation of renewable energies such as wind, solar, and geothermal energies. Renewable resources, due to the amount of space they require, are often located in remote areas where there is a lower energy demand. The current infrastructure would make transporting this energy to high demand areas, such as urban centers, highly inefficient and in some cases impossible. In addition, despite the amount of renewable energy produced or the economic viability of such technologies only about 20 percent will be able to be incorporated into the grid. To have a more sustainable energy profile, the United States must move towards implementing changes to the electrical grid that will accommodate a mixed-fuel economy.

Turbine at a Micro Hydro Power Plant

Types of Green Energy Systems

However, several initiatives are being proposed to mitigate these distribution problems. First and foremost, the most effective way to reduce USA’s CO2 emissions and slow global warming is through conservation efforts. Opponents of the current US electrical grid have also advocated for decentralizing the grid. This system would increase efficiency by reducing the amount of energy lost in transmission. It would also be economically viable as it would reduce the amount of power lines that will need to be constructed in the future to keep up with demand. Merging heat and power in this system would create added benefits and help to increase its efficiency by up to 80-90%. This is a significant increase from the current fossil fuel plants which only have an efficiency of 34%.

A more recent concept for improving our electrical grid is to beam microwaves from Earth-orbiting satellites or the moon to directly when and where there is demand. The power would be generated from solar energy captured on the lunar surface In this system, the receivers would be “broad, translucent tent-like structures that would receive microwaves and convert them to electricity”. NASA said in 2000 that the technology was worth pursuing but it is still too soon to say if the technology will be cost-effective.

The World Wide Fund for Nature and several green electricity labelling organizations have created the Eugene Green Energy Standard under which the national green electricity certification schemes can be accredited to ensure that the purchase of green energy leads to the provision of additional new green energy resources.

Local green energy systems
 

Harnessing Wind Energy

Those not satisfied with the third-party grid approach to green energy via the power grid can install their own locally based renewable energy system. Renewable energy electrical systems from solar to wind to even local hydro-power in some cases, are some of the many types of renewable energy systems available locally. Additionally, for those interested in heating and cooling their dwelling via renewable energy, geothermal heat pump systems that tap the constant temperature of the earth, which is around 7 to 15 degrees Celsius a few feet underground, are an option and save money over conventional natural gas and petroleum-fueled heat approaches.

The advantage of this approach in the United States is that many states offer incentives to offset the cost of installation of a renewable energy system. In California, Massachusetts and several other U.S. states, a new approach to community energy supply called Community Choice Aggregation has provided communities with the means to solicit a competitive electricity supplier and use municipal revenue bonds to finance development of local green energy resources. Individuals are usually assured that the electricity they are using is actually produced from a green energy source that they control. Once the system is paid for, the owner of a renewable energy system will be producing their own renewable electricity for essentially no cost and can sell the excess to the local utility at a profit.

Using green energy
 
Renewable energy, after its generation, needs to be stored in a medium for use with autonomous devices as well as vehicles. Also, to provide household electricity in remote areas (that is areas which are not connected to the mains electricity grid), energy storage is required for use with renewable energy. Energy generation and consumption systems used in the latter case are usually stand-alone power systems.

Some examples are:

• Energy carriers as hydrogen, liquid nitrogen, compressed air, oxyhydrogen, batteries, to power vehicles. 
• Flywheel energy storage, pumped-storage hydroelectricity is more usable in stationary applications (eg to power homes and offices. In household power systems, conversion of energy can also be done to reduce smell. For example organic matter such as cow dung and spoilable organic matter can be converted to biochar. To eliminate emissions, carbon capture and storage is then used.

Tides-A form of Renewable Energy

Usually however, renewable energy is derived from the mains electricity grid. This means that energy storage is mostly not used, as the mains electricity grid is organised to produce the exact amount of energy being consumed at that particular moment. Energy production on the mains electricity grid is always set up as a combination of (large-scale) renewable energy plants, as well as other power plants as fossil-fuel power plants and nuclear power. This combination however, which is essential for this type of energy supply (as eg wind turbines, solar power plants etc.) can only produce when the wind blows and the sun shines. This is also one of the main drawbacks of the system as fossil fuel powerplants are polluting and are a main cause of global warming (nuclear power being an exception). Although fossil fuel power plants too can made emissionless (through carbon capture and storage), as well as renewable (if the plants are converted to e.g. biomass) the best solution is still to phase out the latter power plants over time. Nuclear power plants too can be more or less eliminated from their problem of nuclear waste through the use of nuclear reprocessing and newer plants as fast breeder and nuclear fusion plants.

Renewable energy power plants do provide a steady flow of energy. For example hydropower plants, ocean thermal plants, osmotic power plants all provide power at a regulated pace, and are thus available power sources at any given moment (even at night, windstill moments etc.). At present however, the number of steady-flow renewable energy plants alone is still too small to meet energy demands at the times of the day when the irregular producing renewable energy plants cannot produce power.

Besides the greening of fossil fuel and nuclear power plants, another option is the distribution and immediate use of power from solely renewable sources. In this set-up energy storage is again not necessary. For example, TREC has proposed to distribute solar power from the Sahara to Europe. Europe can distribute wind and ocean power to the Sahara and other countries. In this way, power is produced at any given time as at any point of the planet as the sun or the wind is up or ocean waves and currents are stirring. This option however is probably not possible in the short-term, as fossil fuel and nuclear power are still the main sources of energy on the mains electricity net and replacing them will not be possible overnight.

Several large-scale energy storage suggestions for the grid have been done. This improves efficiency and decreases energy losses but a conversion to a energy storing mains electricity grid is a very costly solution. Some costs could potentially be reduced by making use of energy storage equipment the consumer buys and not the state. An example is car batteries in personal vehicles that would double as an energy buffer for the electricity grid. However besides the cost, setting-up such a system would still be a very complicated and difficult procedure. Also, energy storage apparatus' as car batteries are also built with materials that pose a threat to the environment (eg sulphuric acid). The combined production of batteries for such a large part of the population would thus still not quite environmental. Besides car batteries however, other large-scale energy storage suggestions for the grid have been done which make use of less polluting energy carriers (eg compressed air tanks and flywheel energy storage).

Green Energy in United States

The United States Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the Center for Resource Solutions (CRS) recognizes the voluntary purchase of electricity from renewable energy sources (also called renewable electricity or green electricity) as green power.

The most popular way to purchase renewable energy as revealed by NREL data is through purchasing Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). According to a Natural Marketing Institute (NMI) survey 55 percent of American consumers want companies to increase their use of renewable energy.

DOE selected six companies for its 2007 Green Power Supplier Awards, including Constellation NewEnergy; 3Degrees; Sterling Planet; SunEdison; Pacific Power and Rocky Mountain Power; and Silicon Valley Power. The combined green power provided by those six winners equals more than 5 billion kilowatt-hours per year, which is enough to power nearly 465,000 average U.S. households.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency‎ (USEPA) Green Power Partnership is a voluntary program that supports the organizational procurement of renewable electricity by offering expert advice, technical support, tools and resources. This can help organizations lower the transaction costs of buying renewable power, reduce carbon footprint, and communicate its leadership to key stakeholders.

Throughout the country, more than half of all U.S. electricity customers now have an option to purchase some type of green power product from a retail electricity provider. Roughly one-quarter of the nation's utilities offer green power programs to customers, and voluntary retail sales of renewable energy in the United States totaled more than 12 billion kilowatt-hours in 2006, a 40% increase over the previous year.

Conceptually, one can define three generations of renewables technologies, reaching back more than 100 years.

First-generation technologies emerged from the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century and include hydropower, biomass combustion, and geothermal power and heat. Some of these technologies are still in widespread use.


Second-generation technologies include solar heating and cooling, wind power, modern forms of bioenergy, and solar photovoltaics. These are now entering markets as a result of research, development and demonstration (RD&D) investments since the 1980s. The initial investment was prompted by energy security concerns linked to the oil crises (1973 and 1979) of the 1970s but the continuing appeal of these renewables is due, at least in part, to environmental benefits. Many of the technologies reflect significant advancements in materials.


Third-generation technologies are still under development and include advanced biomass gasification, biorefinery technologies, concentrating solar thermal power, hot dry rock geothermal energy, and ocean energy. Advances in nanotechnology may also play a major role.

—International Energy Agency, RENEWABLES IN GLOBAL ENERGY SUPPLY, An IEA Fact Sheet


First- and second-generation technologies have entered the markets, and third-generation technologies heavily depend on long term research and development commitments, where the public sector has a role to play. A 2008 comprehensive cost-benefit analysis review of energy solutions in the context of global warming and other issues ranked wind power combined with battery electric vehicles (BEV) as the most efficient, followed by concentrated solar power, geothermal power, tidal power, photovoltaic, wave power, coal capture and storage, nuclear energy, and finally bio fuels. 

Nishidaira Dam

First-generation Technologies