5 Technologies That Will Change the World

Guests don't go to the glitzy Mohegan Sun casino and resort, in central Connecticut, to see the fuel-cell center that's housed in an old fire station on an access road. And they don't ooh and aah over the dozen hydrogen storage tanks on the fire station's roof.

But the fuel-cell center, which is designed to provide the casino with reliable, clean backup power, may be one of the most glamorous things going at Mohegan Sun. Eventually, on-site power generation and storage facilities like Mohegan Sun's could change the structure of the country's power grid. The concept is called "distributed generation" (or sometimes, "decentralized generation").

Today, the way that power is generated in the United States looks a lot like the old world of mainframe computers, says Chip Schroeder, CEO of Proton Energy, the Connecticut company installing the hydrogen system at Mohegan Sun. A few big, clunky plants are connected together in what's known as "the grid." In some ways, that system is efficient -- it's the cheapest way that we know to produce and distribute electricity -- but in other ways, it's terrible. Electricity is lost as it's transmitted over long distances. No one likes living next to a massive power plant. And the huge capital investments mean that old, expensive plants keep running long after cleaner, more efficient technology becomes available.

Schroeder says that the new power network will look a lot more like the Internet than the outmoded mainframe model. Smaller generating facilities -- some using solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies and others using scaled-down gas-fired turbines -- will be widely distributed and placed closer to where the power is actually being used. They will be more easily upgradeable. The power will be more reliable, because most outages are caused by distribution problems, like a downed line.

The installation at Mohegan Sun is one of only a few tentative steps toward this Internet-like power network. "But you need to prove that this can work before more people will adopt it," says Dan Reicher, a vice president at Northern Power, recently acquired by Proton. And other projects are popping up. Later this year, Northern Power will be starting a demonstration project in Vermont that will be the world's first "microgrid." This web of generating technologies will serve an industrial park and a few nearby residences, and even feed surplus power back to the main power grid. A similar microgrid is being built in downtown Detroit by DTE Energy, a subsidiary of Detroit Edison.

"It may take awhile, and we're probably biased," says Schroeder, "but we think this is the future."

The glass door of the dressing room at Prada's Epicenter store in SoHo slides shut.

I hang a $450 gray patterned shirt on a rack inside, and suddenly, a color flat-screen display on the wall lights up. The dressing room has "recognized" the item I've brought in, then suggests other sizes and materials that it comes in and even shows a picture of a much-better-looking-than-me model wearing the shirt in a Prada fashion show.

Attached to the shirt, along with the stratospheric price tag, is a piece of clear plastic the size of a business card. Embedded in the plastic is a coil of bronze microchip circuitry, which contains information about the shirt and conveys it to a reader built into the dressing room. This is a smart tag (or RFID tag, for radio-frequency identification), made by Texas Instruments and sold for about $3. It can be made much smaller -- about the size of a fleck in a snow globe -- and for as little as 10 cents.

The promise of smart tags is that they could serve as an advanced version of the omnipresent UPC bar code, providing information about not just what a product is, but also where it is, where it has been, and how it has been handled. A smart-tag reader in a warehouse, truck, or store can "query" all of the smart tags in its vicinity, taking inventory without human help. Smart tags are also being affixed to refrigerated containers to make sure that food is stored at the right temperature.

Gillette uses the tags to track cartons of Venus women's razors through a packaging and distribution center in Massachusetts, and may buy as many as a half-billion tags over the next two or three years. The tags could also tell retailers how many cans of its shaving cream sit on their shelves at any given moment. Seven million tags are already attached to the keychains of drivers who pay for their gas with ExxonMobil's SpeedPass system. The tipping point for smart tags will likely arrive by 2005, when Wal-Mart will require its top 100 suppliers to attach them to each forklift pallet of products they deliver to the retailer. (Privacy concerns could slow things down. The fear: You could be traced through your clothing or possessions.)

"You'll see a lot of diverse uses," says Bill Allen, Texas Instruments' e-marketing manager for RFID products, "because not only can you store information on the tags, you can also rewrite it." In Iraq, the tags were used on a Navy hospital ship to track the location and triage status of injured soldiers. "And then," Allen says, "in peacetime, you've got a company like Prada, using [smart tags] to improve the customer's shopping experience."

PS: I bought the shirt. It was on sale for half off. But the tag wasn't smart enough to get my editors to pay for it.