´óÏó´«Ã½

POZNAN, POLAND: You'll be pleased to hear - I hope - that not everybody at the here is busy just talking about what countries could or should be doing to reduce carbon emissions, decrease energy use or whatever else it might be.

Some have come with inventions that might actually help do the job of reducing emissions, decreasing energy use and so on.

As a relief from the talk, I took a walk around the energy technology exhibition in the hope of finding some ideas that were new to me, if not entirely new to science.

For the most part, it was business as usual - low-energy lightbulbs, heat pumps, gadgets to control energy use in the home, more efficient solar cells - all of value, but nothing that wasn't a natural iteration of concepts you could have found in a magazine five years ago.

There were hi-tech cars aplenty, from the likes of Mercedes, BMW and Toyota, running on hydrogen, biofuels or batteries - all technologies where the worth in terms of carbon saving is open to question, never mind the economics.

Where was the radical edge, the fresh vision?

It turned out to be just down the road: the three gadgets that caught my eye, at least, came from right here in Poland.

Standing in a corner like a beached cable car was an orange pod big enough to seat four or five people - clearly a transport device of some kind, though whether using the known laws of physics or something like teleportation was not immediately clear.

In fact, it's the prototype for a kind of urban transport that a wants to try out in a couple of cities, Opole and Rzeszow.

The cable-car or ski-lift comparison is pretty accurate. The pods would hang from rails above a city's major streets, moved along the rails by electric motors.

Every so often there would be a "siding" into which the pod could slide when people wanted to get off or on.

The developers reckon that with frictional forces lower than road-based transport, there should be benefits for energy use and carbon emissions, never mind urban smog.

At the far end of the hall next to some bales of straw sat looking like a small stove with a long tube coming out of it - a tube that ran for several metres just above the ground before twirling up and over with a theatrical flourish.

Every so often, the tube dispensed a light brown cylindrical lump.

Straw goes into the stove-like end - a kind of centrifuge - and emerges along the cylindrical tube, where it's compressed because it's being forced out against the material that's already in the tube. Dropping off the theatrically twirling end are briquettes of compressed straw which the inventors claim contain as much energy as lumps of hard coal, the staple fuel in these parts.

My third Polish exhibit was also, I think, my favourite: home-made solar heaters.

They come from the village of Kunkowce, where two years ago the Sporting Club Association set up a project called "Let's Catch the Sun".

With advice and practical help, 15 homes in the village now have home-made kit on their roofs which catches solar energy and heats water. Each is reckoned to cost about half as much as a commercial installation - though the association gave no indication of how efficient they are.

I'm not sure whether any of these ideas actually has a discernible impact on greenhouse gas emissions: I don't think that has been measured. But they might.

So might the developed in Israel that uses enzymes to bond earth to make a solid base for tarmac, cutting down on concrete use (cement making is large on greenhouse gas emissions) and minimising the transportation of hard core.

And so might , or India's pedal-powered irrigation pump.

As the delegates polished up their jargon in the main conference hall, it was good to see a little innovation at work on the sidelines.

• Bookmark with:
• |
• |
• |
• |
• - What's this?