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Tesla is building world’s largest backup battery in Australia
After blackouts left 1.7 million residents without electricity, Elon Musk famously guaranteed that Tesla could supply 100 megawatts of battery storage in 100 days. The company has announced it will do just that by installing a Powerpack battery storage system that can run over 30,000 homes. The 100-megawatt project "will be the highest power battery system in the world by a factor of three," tweeted CEO Elon Musk. It will back up the 315 megawatt Hornsdale Wind Farm, charging during low energy usage and providing electricity for peak hours.
Wind powered knitting machine takes the tedium out of your heirloom production
Knitting is one of those acquired crafting skills we just never fully warmed up to. We'll embroider, crochet, or quilt until the sun sets for the last time on the day of the apocalypse, but knitting is just so... boring sometimes. Luckily, ingenious artist Merel Karhof has a solution for the monotony of the knit - purl - knit - purl routine. She's designed and invented a machine that knits all on its own, harnessing the ever-present power of the wind. Called the Wind Knitting Factory, the automatic knitting machine itself looks like a cross between an old-timey coffee grinder and a medieval torture device (which we like about it very much), and knits a scarf in about two hours. This isn't likely to be the type of thing that every hits the retail market, but we'll tell you this: if it did, we'd be first in line. Hit the read links for video, more photos, and an explanation of the machine's design.Read - Merel Karhof's blogRead - Show RCA Wind Knitting Factory
Maglev wind turbines 1000x more efficient than normal windmills
We've seen a couple innovative wind power solutions pop up, but none that claim to offer the benefits of maglev wind turbines, which use full-permanent magnets to nearly eliminate friction by "floating" the blades above the base. According to developers, the technology is capable of scaling to massive sizes, with a proposed $53M turbine able enough to replace 1000 traditional windmills and power 750 thousand homes. Additional benefits include the ability to generate power with winds as slow as three miles per hour, operational costs some 50 percent cheaper than windmills, and an estimated lifespan of 500 years. That all sounds great, but the real proof will come when these things get put to use, which may happen sooner than you'd think: Development is proceeding rapidly in both the US and China, with Chinese power company Zhongke Hengyuan Energy Technology currently building a $5M factory to produce the turbines in capacities from 400 to 5,000 watts.
