First, there are profound public interests in having more energy options. Our national security, economic health and environment are at issue. These are not primary motivations for private-sector investments, but they merit a public commitment.

Second, the nature of the energy business requires a public commitment. A new generation of television technology might cost $10 million to develop. Because those TVs can be built on existing assembly lines, that risk-reward calculus makes business sense. But a new electric power source can cost several billion dollars to develop and still carry the risk of failure. That investment does not compute for most companies.

Third, the turnover in our power system is very slow. Power plants last 50 years or more, and they are very cheap to run once built, meaning there is little market for new models.

It is understandable, then, why private-sector investments in clean energy technology are so small. Yet, while it may make sense for individual companies to make these choices, accepting the status quo would condemn our country to very bad options.

Gates has been talking a lot about reshaping energy policy. I find that pretty refreshing. I wonder if he intends on backing any particular initiatives himself. He definitely has the funds.

I find his argument for why companies haven't embraced R&D for new energy technologies rather convincing. A lot of those same arguments applied, at one time, to the current technologies behind modern computers and the Internet itself. Without government intervention we might not have the transistor (much less the iPad) or the Internet. Perhaps we need an energy policy similar to the telecommunications policy that put a telephone line in every home.

Why hasn't someone thought of this sooner? This seems like a very "Apple" thing, if you can make such a statement. What's up, Apple? I bet there some patent somewhere that's stopped this from being a mainstream convenience. I have to believe that's the case, because there's really no reason I can think of this that isn't licensed out to every electronics manufacturer that makes USB devices.

This should absolutely be part of the next USB or Firewire specification.

We don't usually associate RCA with new and innovative technologies, but we think know they're on to something with its Airnergy power system, which harvests energy from WiFi signals. Shipping this summer, the pocketable dongle picks up WiFi signals from the air and manages to charge an internal battery through some magic inside. You don't have to connect to a network, you just have to be in a place that has signal, and it will automatically charge up. As if we weren't intrigued already, they told us that they're planning on building the tech into actual cellphone batteries, so you would theoretically never need to plug in again and your device would always be topped off. Yeah, we want.

Cool idea. But I'm not exactly clear on how this works, inverse square law and all. Seems like this device is more about marketing than actual functionality. I really wish that it would work as well as RCA seems to claim that it does, but I'm having a hard time actually believing that's even remotely possibly. All this is going to do is put a bunch of receivers all over the place, and just cause further signal degradation in the 2.4GHz band. You know, because there just isn't enough interference in the spectrum already with wireless phones, microwaves, notebooks, and smart-phones.