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Jules Verne would be right at home with today’s emerging car technology. Although compressed air technology was used in pneumatic locomotives and trams in the late 1800s, widespread commercial use in cars was partially blocked by pressure from the oil industry by the 1930s. The race on to find eco-friendly fuel alternatives, air cars rate up high on the efficiency vs. clean fuel alternative ratio. Although in the past people have bantered around the idea of an air car, the ultimate clean air car may be closer than you think.

How does it work? An electric pump compresses air into a tank at high pressures and stores energy. As the air escapes, it pushes against the pistons, similar to a combustion engine. Compressed air is stored in large cylinders underneath the car, and the only emission into the environment is cold air. In fact, the tailpipe air emissions will be cleaner than the air going in since the air is run through carbon filters to remove dust, dirt and other impurities that could curb engine performance. This makes the car especially attractive to emissions activists, worried over global warming.

To fill up, just stop by your local compressed air service station for a few minutes, or plug into an electrical outlet at home for four hours. At speeds over 35 mph this particular air car uses small amounts of fuel to heat air inside a heating chamber and allows the car to get to an estimated top speed of 96 mph. No major infrastructure is necessary to support the air car, other than a high pressure re-charger around 300 psi. This of course makes the Air Car very attractive since most of our stumbling blocks when it comes to finding an alternative to petroleum are infrastructure changes.

For now fossil fuels are still needed to generate electricity to recharge, there will still be a net energy savings and reduction in CO2 emissions and pollutants. As wind and solar energy are used more and more as primary energy generators then the electricity used to run the car’s electric pump will also be from clean sources. Air cars have a promising future and are one of the major hopes for an easier than expected transition into a new clean fuel era.

It is going to be exciting to watch these early air car prototypes transform and grow into viable vehicles for the 21st Century. Source

DEFLATING THE AIR CAR

Though the AIRPod is supposed to go on sale in a couple of months, the Nègre's have been struggling to commercialize pneumatic vehicles for more than a decade, incurring a reputation for unfulfilled promises.

So if the AIRPod does whoosh onto French streets within months as promised, there will be quite a bit more riding on the quirky little runabout than MDI’s fate. It could finally prove the viability of compressed-air transport—or doom it for the foreseeable future. 

Guy insists that within the first few months of 2010 MDI will have its first assembly line at Carros churning out one AIRPod per hour while he and his son are coordinating the creation of three more assembly plants set up by European licensees. Source

‘Peak Oil’ is the biggest threats to a sustainable economic recovery.
According to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, out of the 54 oil producing nations and regions in the world, only 14 are still increasing production. Alarmingly, 30 oil producing nations and regions are definitely past their peak output and the remaining 10 appear to have modestly declining production rates. Put another way, when weighted by production, ‘Peak Oil’ is already a grim reality in 61% of the oil producing world!

Global crude oil production has probably peaked, New discoveries have dried up There is a shortage of capital for investment purposes Accordingly, I suggest that all my readers allocate a meaningful proportion of their investment portfolio to upstream energy companies and to businesses in the energy services sector. Source

GLOBAL CRISIS IS UNPRECEDENTED

The global economic order is structured and run as a dreamlike perpetual-motion machine in total ignorance of thermodynamics and systems dynamics.

A key issue is NET ENERGY. Net energy is the amount of energy that is available to power the global economy when all the direct and indirect energy costs of mining, processing, transporting and distributing energy resources has been deducted.

The essential technologies and know-how required for a transition to sustainable ways of living and doing business are known. The transition is feasible without the massive costs and without heavy-handed government policies.

This is a matter of cognitive failure; that is to say, the cognitive and cultural inability to figure out how to successfully meet the challenges within the necessary time frame despite the required knowledge and expertise being readily available. When cognitive failure happens to a given society, as it has happened many times historically in various localised fashions, that society simply crashes and usually never recovers.  Source

DEVALUATION OF CASH RESERVES

• share prices struggling

• property prices falling

• bonds once considered safe now being eroded by inflation

• where does one put their money?

There seems to be no such thing as risk free investment

Every self-respecting investor should regard at least 10% invested in disruptive technology in the energy field such as IndraNet Technologies and its associated companies, as a calculated protection against devaluation of cash reserves.
 

He has a very interesting viewpoint on many things and obviously has done a huge amount of research and thinking over the years, although I thought there was an element of spin to promote his ventures/products. The audience were all ears for over an hour and a half as Louis tried to move his shareholders from "myth to reality".

The main message I took away is that we cant afford to sit around waiting for Governments and big business or the Kyoto Protocol or Emissions Trading Schemes and the like to do anything significant in time. Governments and big business don't even want to acknowledge that the situation we face is longer BAU (Business As Usual)- Louis is very fond of acronyms. He says there is a widespread "disconnect" from the reality of what we are facing. The media is still amplifying the message from Governments etc that this is just a recession and soon we will be back to BAU as soon as the recovery occurs. Louis's opinion is that it will be individuals and entrepreneurs who will lead the change to a "100% Solar sustainable future" and that there is no return to BAU.

Dr Arnoux is quite a visionary and some would say a radical, but he is not just full of talk and he has shown that he has the connections, inventions and nous to back up what he talks about. I had nearly written IndraNet and the likes off over the years when nothing concrete seemed to be emerging from them but I now have a renewed confidence that they are on track. I will definitely be downloading and reading his free e-book "Peak Oil, Climate Change & all that Jazz" (not sure about the title though). Source
 

• In the future look for a solar element to this process
• Refueling stations near wind farms
• Home based Compressed Air iPower units supplying your household, refueling your car and excess generation going back into the power gird.
• Turbines can be installed alongside fast flowing rivers and air filling stations located on river banks.

And other yet unexplored ideas - new technologies bring new innovations.......Read More

• Amazing New Air Car - It's NOT About the Air!
• And it's not even about the car!
• It's a whole new way of thinking about energy!

Every now and then an idea comes along that will change the world - and gets mostly ignored..............
MDI has a good chance of creating an amazingly efficient little car, and that's cool. But what's REALLY exciting are all the other potential industrial applications. Read More  Source

Well you know what Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Looks like we’re beginning to exit the laughing phase and the fighting can’t be far off.
MDI deserves every opportunity to succeed, in my book, as one of very few companies offering a way forward that is sustainable, interesting and fun.
Their concept of decentralized manufacturing based on locally sourced materials, and labor, as well as locally sourced power generation is something that could well be one of the answers to the larger questions of what we’re going to do with the planet over the next 50 years. Source

MDI is set to become the biggest technological advancement of our time, as it is every environmentalist dream. Source

"Our business model is to produce cars in small factories close to markets. Our start up business partners will build cars in their countries which I think is a new concept " said Mr Guy Nègre  The cars will hit Indian and Australian roads first, France will see the air car in 2009. Source

Tata Motors agreement with MDI strengthens IndraNet - MDI joint venture for Australasian markets and potential exports of combined IT-MDI distributed electrical power generation technology package.

BEGINNING OF CHANGE?
"The world is at the beginning of a structural change of its economic system. This change will be triggered by declining fossil fuel supplies and will influence almost all aspects of our daily life."

The world had to move quickly towards the massive deployment of renewable energy and to a dramatic increase in energy efficiency, both as a way to combat climate change and to ensure that the lights stayed on. "If we did all this we may not have an energy crisis."

iPOWER - INTELLIGENT POWER
In the near future we will begin to see changes in our power industry. Two of the firms leading the way in this change are Indranet with its wireless meshed network and MDI with its compressed air power generator. Combine these two technologies and we have a new era in complimentary power generation. Read More

ENGINES IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN
The coolest car engine in all creation is one that runs on God's own atmosphere. The fuel tank contains compressed air. The exhaust is so clean you can breathe it; it's so low in temperature you can use it for air-conditioning. Gasoline engines are ponderous hunks of iron because they must contain the heat of exploding fossil fuel. The air engine, in contrast, is made of aluminum and weighs in at a featherlight 80 pounds. Christopher Steiner describes it in " Driving on Air". Source

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