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http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/4298e48e35b7efc0?hl=en
"Now, there are probably lots of ways you could do this [grow cell cultures as agricultural liquids like orange juice] that you know more about that I. But here is what I envision for home use (as opposed to big industrial use).
    You have two versions. One is for outdoors, and is a big machine you set up in you yard with a glass top that has photosynthesizing algae that either produce the liquids directly or produce something that feeds another culture specific to a plant or animal derived culture specific to what you want to make. You need to add water, but for extra nutrients, you also add ground up rock dust (Smari could sell everyone some from Iceland :-) or you add seawater.
    For indoor use, you replace your home furnace with these things as presumably they would give off heat if indoors you lit them with artificial lamps or if they consumed oil or natural gas (bio-derived elsewhere) as feedstocks. Again, you add water and rock dust (or seawater). So, you have year-round indoor agricultural liquid production at very low cost.
    (I'll give away an idea here as a patent-preventing disclosure that I've been hoarding. :-) You could have this or any other local industrial process be thermostat controlled (or predictively controlled, or timer controlled, or some combination), so if your house or facility needs more heat you run the process; and if your building is hot enough for your needs, you don't run it, thus using local industrial-like processes to regulate your homes climate. For processes that absorb heat you could do the inverse for air conditioning. You can do that with networked computers too, so if you need heat you do local computation for the network, if you don't need heat, you shut those processors down. Special processor units or industrial process units for various purposes could be designed to replace regular electric baseboard heaters or central furnaces. So, essentially, industry is running for no extra energy charge where people use electricity to heat, and it runs at a subsidy where people use currently cheaper ways to heat like oil or gas or wood. And sometimes you might want to produce stuff anyway, and so you would need to dump the waste heat or use it in some other way or store it in some thermal storage system like a water mass or sand mass or phase changing salts or other such system, with the stored heat being used as part of the thermoregulatory planning. Of course, if you insulated your home well, you might not need a furnace, so there are economic limits to this idea as people improve their infrastructure in other ways...)
    This would totally change how agriculture was done. Instead of having lunar moonscapes like Iowa is part of the year, people would just produce their own agricultural liquids in neighborhood facilities or at home, using the local waste heat for other purposes as well. Most agricultural lands could be returned to wilderness. The total energy bill for a home might not go up very much using the above idea for thermostatic regulation. "

A week ago I sent something to GE about this idea for their ecomagination challenge --even though I missed getting the idea into their contest, I wanted people to know about it. But it is not listed here yet (if ever):
http://challenge.ecomagination.com/ct/ct_list.bix?c=home

GE did this in some of their print ads, the SmartGrid has an Augmented Reality feature

No, it isn't. Although they are indeed a "hybrid" between a diesel and electric design, they don't use battery power or regenerative breaking, and the word "hybrid" is generally not used, as it's understood that virtually all diesel locomotives are actually diesel-electric hybrids.

However, to add to the confusion, there are a few experimental locomotives that are indeed battery-carrying hybrids. GE has a very impressive prototype which will likely enter mainstream service in the near future. The financial and environmental advantages to the technology apparently make it a win-win situation for the railroads. GE's promotional materials promise a $2.5 million savings over the course of the life of the locomotive.

Even more confusing, there are electric-electric hybrids that can operate on battery power over short sections of unpowered track. These have been around for a long time in various capacities.

Many electric locomotives and multiple-units (ie. self-propelled subway cars) now use regenerative breaking to feed power directly back to the grid, providing all of the advantages of a hybrid. There are numerous other practical advantages to this method, including reduced brake wear.

And then combine those two with something like this**, and connect it to this and a GPS dealie, and we have a whole new medium.


**((It's really worth the time to print out the marker if you haven't seen this yet))

I could ship people huge bags of thallium, mercury and dead baby condors and still be hailed as eco-friendly as long as the packaging was recycled.

Unfortunately this is all too true. For instance GE, with it's Ecomagination campaign is trying to greenwash it's image. However what you won't hear from them is how they're trying to work on the Three Gorges Dam which will forcibly displace millions of Chinese and submerge a lot of land, graves, and archaeological sites.

Falcon

It's regenerative braking, not dynamic breaking. If you are feeding back the power from braking, the diesel generator load is greatly reduced and the throttle setting is greatly reduced, saving fuel. Excess returned power is shunted into resistors and shed as heat. Full hybrid locomotives are nearing operation, see http://ge.ecomagination.com/site/products/hybr.html

      Brett

I work for GE, and they have launched a campaing doubed ecomagination that goes all the way from research to (of course) marketing. While this is not a campaigne aimed at getting employees to go green, its a business modle that bets on a future industry centered around competitive advantage through environmentally friendly/friendlier products.