Now here is something you don't see every day.  A thermoelectric device every cat should have.  I'll let the citation and abstract speak for themselves:

Former Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore has called for America to abandon all fossil fuels for the production of electricity within 10 years.  He envisions a combination of solar, wind and geothermal renewable energy sources to produce all electricity in the US.

The audacity of thermionic hope?

A reader called to my attention the 'The Thermionic Revolution' website which includes what sounds like an endorsement from friend and esteemed authority Gerry Mahan as well as the following claims:

"A simple way has been found that promises to make cheap abundant electricity from the heat in air

A few weeks ago I noted the recent discovery of some new quaternary iron-based superconductors which might be of interest for thermoelectrics.  David Bérardan tells me his group had already initiated studies and have a paper currently in the "early view" section of physica status solidi (RRL):

Ulysess, the NASA/ESA mission to study the sun will end on or about July 1, 2008.  The spacecraft has exceeded the design lifetime by nearly four times.  The first mission to study the sun from above and below the solar poles, Ulysess utilized a gravitational 'slingshot' around Jupiter to get out of the solar system's ecliptic plane and eventually enter a solar orbit past the north and south solar poles.

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A recent blog piece indicates worldwide production of tellurium amounts to about 135 metric tons and that this entire amount would be required to produce a single GW of electricity using current CdTe photovoltaic cells.  They indicate the three main uses for tellurium today are hardening steel, thermoelectric coolers and now CdTe solar cells.  Their point is, of course, is there may not be enough tellurium to do everything we want to do with it.

A report about BMW R&D on the Motor Authority website attributes a "real world" gain of 5% in fuel economy to use of a thermoelectric generator to produce electricity from exhaust heat.  As much as 1 kW of electricity could be produced this way.  The US DoE FreedomCar program goal is 10% fuel savings.

A new family of quaternary iron-based superconductors with superconducting transition temperatures (T_c) up to 52 K are discussed in the latest issue of Physics Today.  The family of compounds, based on LaOFeAs (so called 1:1:1:1 phase), was first synthesized by Jeitschko at Dupont in the mid-1970s and more recent work by HIdeo Hosono at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.  The current record T_c~52 K was reported by Zhongxian Zhao of the Insitute of Physics in B

Better late than never.   A DoE funding solicitation (applications closed on 20080422) expects to invest US$7.5M through FY2011 in "Solid State Energy Conversion for Vehicular Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) and for Waste Heat Recovery".