Category: Energy

The heat can then be used to warm water in the winter when energy is more expensive.

By M. Moon

A company in Finland has created an an unusual storage solution for renewable energy: One that uses sand instead of lithium ion or other battery technologies. Polar Night Energy and Vatajankoski, an energy utility in Western Finland, have built a storage system that can store electricity as heat in the sand. While there are other organizations researching the use of sand for energy storage, including the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Finns say theirs is the first fully working commercial installation of a battery made from sand.

By DEREK ANDERSEN

The E-Stablecoin would require several scientific advancements that are already in the works, and would allegedly make it possible to transmit electricity almost for free.

Researchers at the federally funded Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California have combined statistical mechanics and information theory to design a class of stablecoin dubbed the Electricity Stablecoin (E-Stablecoin) that would transmit energy as a form of information. Livermore’s Maxwell Murialdo and Jonathan L. Belof say their innovation would make it possible to transmit electricity without physical wires or a grid and create a fully collateralized stablecoin pegged to a physical asset – electricity – that is dependent on its utility for is value. 

According to the scientists, the E-Stablecoin would be minted through the input of one kilowatt-hour of electricity, plus a fee. The stablecoin could then be used for transactions the same way as any stablecoin, or the energy could be extracted by burning it, also for a fee. The entire process would be controlled by smart contracts with a decentralized data storage cloud. No trusted centralized authority would be needed to maintain or disburse the asset.

A thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell (size 1 cm x 1 cm) mounted on a heat sink designed to measure the TPV cell efficiency. To measure the efficiency, the cell is exposed to an emitter and simultaneous measurements of electric power and heat flow through the device are taken.

by Jennifer Chu,  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency—a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb excess energy from renewable sources such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid.

Quaise says it has a plan, and the technology, to drill deeper than ever before and unlock the vast geothermal power of the Earth to re-power fossil-fired electricity plants with green energy

By Loz Blain

MIT spin-off Quaise says it’s going to use hijacked fusion technology to drill the deepest holes in history, unlocking clean, virtually limitless, supercritical geothermal energy that can re-power fossil-fueled power plants all over the world.

The heat beneath our feet.

Everyone knows the Earth’s core is hot, but maybe the scale of it still has the power to surprise. Temperatures in the iron center of the core are estimated to be around 5,200 °C (9,392 °F), generated by heat from radioactive elements decaying combining with heat that still remains from the very formation of the planet – an event of cataclysmic violence when a swirling cloud of gas and dust was crushed into a ball by its own gravity.

Where there’s access to heat, there’s harvestable geothermal energy. And there’s so much heat below the Earth’s surface, according to Paul Woskov, a senior fusion research engineer at MIT, that tapping just 0.1 percent of it could supply the entire world’s energy needs for more than 20 million years. 

The problem is access. Where subterranean heat sources naturally occur close to the surface, easily accessible and close enough to a relevant power grid for economically viable transmission, geothermal becomes a rare example of totally reliable, round-the-clock green power generation. The Sun stops shining, the wind stops blowing, but the rock’s always hot. Of course, these conditions are fairly rare, and as a result, geothermal currently supplies only around 0.3 percent of global energy consumption.

The Sea Change vessel that will operate in the San Francisco Bay Area.BAE

The system eliminates diesel fuel use and reduces engine maintenance.

BAE Systems recently announced that it has successfully installed a zero-emission propulsion system in the first U.S. hydrogen fuel cell powered marine vessel, the Sea Change.

BAE Systems provided its HybriGen Power and Propulsion solution to Zero Emission Industries for integration on the Sea Change vessel that will operate in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

The Sea Change project is funded and owned by SWITCH Maritime, an impact investment firm building the first fleet of zero-carbon, electric-drive maritime vessels for adoption by existing ship owners and operators.

By Otilia Drăgan

One of the most interesting products on display at the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow was a hydrogen fuel cell module presented by Rolls-Royce. The brand’s Power Systems business unit has joined forces with cellcentric to create highly-efficient fuel cell solutions for emergency power generation. 

With a minimalistic design and H-shaped front panel, Rolls-Royce’s mtu fuel cell element is a good example of future technology. This modern-looking module will be able to generate a net power output of 150 kW, enough to power ten homes. But its clean power is meant to be used as a backup for large data centers. Multiple modules can also be connected into fuel cell power plants for impressive megawatts outputs.

This fuel cell module is the result of a collaboration between Rolls-Royce and cellcentric, the joint venture set up by Daimler Truck and Volvo earlier this year. The mtu hydrogen fuel cell solution will be developed based on cellcentric’s fuel cell modules. Hydrogen is promoted as a viable alternative for fossil fuels, but it’s also considered a key element for climate-neutral telecommunications and internet traffic. These domains are linked to huge data centers that require large amounts of energy. So, why not make this clean energy?

Radiant says each unit of its microreactor delivers over 1MW of electricity, providing enough power to support 1,000 homes per unit.

Radiant’s microreactors are designed to supply power to remote or disaster-struck areas.

• Radiant was co-founded by former SpaceX engineers
• Radiant’s microreactors are aimed at military and commercial usage
• Each Radiant unit can support over a thousand homes

Governments all over the world are looking at energy security as a priority to power their industries, businesses, homes, and offices. But there are finite sources of energy and the technology to harness renewable energy is still decades away from a wider adoption. US-based company Radiant is trying to address this challenge by developing a portable nuclear microreactor. It is collecting funds to design the reactor that can be used where other forms of power generation, including diesel gensets, are not practical. Radiant is founded by engineers who have worked with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

This technology is expected to enable people in remote and disaster areas with rapid supply of electricity as needed. The microreactors can be monitored remotely and centralised fueling, maintenance enable microgrids without any permanent impacts.

An array of 90 tubular biosupercapacitors

By Nick Lavars

By combining miniaturized electronics with some origami-inspired fabrication, scientists in Germany have developed what they say is the smallest microsupercapacitor in existence. Smaller than a speck of a dust but with a similar voltage to a AAA battery, the groundbreaking energy storage device is not only safe for use in the human body, but actually makes use of key ingredients in the blood to supercharge its performance.

The scientists behind the new device were working within the realm of nano-supercapacitors (nBSC), which are conventional capacitors but scaled down to the sub-millimeter scale. Developing these types of devices is tricky enough, but the researchers sought to make one that could work safely in the human body to power tiny sensors and implants, which requires swapping out problematic materials and corrosive electrolytes for ones that are biocompatible.

These devices are known as biosupercapacitors and the smallest ones developed to date is larger than 3 mm³, but the scientists have made a huge leap forward in terms of how tiny biosupercapacitors can be. The construction starts with a stack of polymeric layers that are sandwiched together with a light-sensitive photo-resist material that acts as the current collector, a separator membrane, and electrodes made from an electrically conductive biocompatible polymer called PEDOT:PSS.

By RYAN MORRISON  

• Chinese officials have begun work on a new space-solar-power research centre
• The researchers there will work out how to send power over very large distances
• It is hoped solar panels orbiting 23,000 miles from Earth will send power back
• The facility has a 25 acre exclusion zone in case of problems with wireless power 

China plans to launch a fleet of mile-long solar panels into space by 2035 and beam the energy back to Earth in a bid to meet its 2060 carbon neutral target. 

Reports suggest that once fully operational by 2050, the space-based solar array will send a similar amount of electricity into the grid as a nuclear power station.