Category: Energy

by Razvan Calin

Elon Musk has already shaped our world in several different ways, and the debate of whether they’re all beneficial to humanity is ongoing. But apart from putting electric vehicles on top of the automotive world’s agenda and making us dream about outer space travel, there is one somewhat unintentional side effect of his frantic quest for broader horizons.

A former employee of SpaceX has set a very ambitious goal of building a working solution for humanity’s ever-growing need for electricity. No bigger than a regular container, his invention is a nuclear fission reactor generator. Portable, affordable, and economically feasible, the power plant can be deployed everywhere. In an interview for Interesting Engineering, the head of Radiant Nuclear (the company that builds the reactor) shed light on his work.

Doug Bernauer, CEO of Radiant Nuclear and ex-SpaceX engineer, got the idea from a project he worked on while at SpaceX: supplying power to a human colony on Mars. The challenge was that it had to sustain the facilities on the ground and refuel spaceships that could travel back and forth between Earth and the Red Planet. Since the Sun was not a good enough solution, nuclear energy came up. But, until humankind reaches that stage, we can successfully use that invention on our Blue Planet. With $10 in million funding from Union Square Ventures, Radiant Nuclear is on its way to building the world’s first portable, zero-emissions power source. The prototype could begin the testing stage in five years. 

By Monit Khanna

The reactor eventually receives around 2,500 suns’ worth of energy or around 50 kilowatts of solar thermal powerThe heat is channelled to push a two-step thermochemical redox cycle. Water and pure CO2 are injected into a ceria-based redox reaction that turns them simultaneously into hydrogen and carbon monoxide.Since it’s all being done in a single chamber, scientists can tweak the rate of water and carbon dioxide to manage the exact composition of the syngas in real-time

A novel solar thermal power plant in Spain is able to produce carbon-neutral and sustainable diesel and jet fuel by absorbing carbon dioxide, water and sunlight.

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.