1. Fossil Fuels

View the full-size infographic

While the U.S. is a dominant player in both oil and natural gas production, China holds the top spot as the world’s largest fossil fuel producer, largely because of its significant production and consumption of coal.

Over the last decade, China has used more coal than the rest of the world, combined.

However, it’s worth noting that the country’s fossil fuel consumption and production have dipped in recent years, ever since the government launched a five-year plan back in 2014 to help reduce carbon emissions.

2. Nuclear Power

View the full-size infographic

The U.S. is the world’s largest producer of nuclear power by far, generating about double the amount of nuclear energy as France, the second-largest producer.

While nuclear power provides a carbon-free alternative to fossil fuels, the nuclear disaster in Fukushima caused many countries to move away from the energy source, which is why global use has dipped in recent years.

Despite the fact that many countries have recently pivoted away from nuclear energy, it still powers about 10% of the world’s electricity. It’s also possible that nuclear energy will play an expanded role in the energy mix going forward, since decarbonization has emerged as a top priority for nations around the world.

3. Renewable Energy

View the full-size infographic

Source: Charted: 40 Years of Global Energy Production, by Country

[…]

To avoid taking water from an already strained local supply, a team led by Gang Kevin Li, senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, Australia, has built a system which extracts water from airborne vapor using a hygroscopic electrolyte, in this case sulfuric acid. The approach then uses solar-generated electricity to split the water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The team proved it could operate at a relative humidity of about 4 percent, well below that of most deserts. On a warm sunny day, the meter-square unit was able to produce 3.7m³ of hydrogen.

“Hydrogen is the ultimate clean energy,” the paper, published in Nature Communications, said. “Despite being the most abundant element in the universe, hydrogen exists on the earth mainly in compounds like water. H₂ produced by water electrolysis using renewable energy, namely, green hydrogen, represents the most promising energy carrier of the low-carbon economy. H₂ can also be used as a medium of energy storage for intermittent energies such as solar, wind, and tidal.”

[…]

Source: Hydrogen could be harvested from thin air in the desert • The Register

A nuclear fusion reaction has lasted for 30 seconds at temperatures in excess of 100 million°C. While the duration and temperature alone aren’t records, the simultaneous achievement of heat and stability brings us a step closer to a viable fusion reactor – as long as the technique used can be scaled up.

Most scientists agree that viable fusion power is still decades away, but the incremental advances in understanding and results keep coming. An experiment conducted in 2021 created a reaction energetic enough to be self-sustaining, conceptual designs for a commercial reactor are being drawn up, while work continues on the large ITER experimental fusion reactor in France.

Now Yong-Su Na at Seoul National University in South Korea and his colleagues have succeeded in running a reaction at the extremely high temperatures that will be required for a viable reactor, and keeping the hot, ionised state of matter that is created within the device stable for 30 seconds.

Controlling this so-called plasma is vital. If it touches the walls of the reactor, it rapidly cools, stifling the reaction and causing significant damage to the chamber that holds it. Researchers normally use various shapes of magnetic fields to contain the plasma – some use an edge transport barrier (ETB), which sculpts plasma with a sharp cut-off in pressure near to the reactor wall, a state that stops heat and plasma escaping. Others use an internal transport barrier (ITB) that creates higher pressure nearer the centre of the plasma. But both can create instability.

Na’s team used a modified ITB technique at the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research (KSTAR) device, achieving a much lower plasma density. Their approach seems to boost temperatures at the core of the plasma and lower them at the edge, which will probably extend the lifespan of reactor components.

[…]

Source: Korean nuclear fusion reactor achieves 100 million°C for 30 seconds | New Scientist

Hydrogen fuel promises to be a clean and abundant source of energy in the future – as long as scientists can figure out ways to produce it practically and cheaply, and without fossil fuels.

A new study provides us with another promising step in that direction, provided you can make use of existing supplies of post-consumer aluminum and gallium.

In the new research, scientists describe a relatively simple method involving aluminum nanoparticles that are able to strip the oxygen from water molecules and leave hydrogen gas.

The process yields large amounts of hydrogen, and it all works at room temperature.

That removes one of the big barriers to hydrogen fuel production: the large amounts of power required to produce it using existing methods.

This technique works with any kind of water, too, including wastewater and ocean water.

“We don’t need any energy input, and it bubbles hydrogen like crazy,” says materials scientist Scott Oliver from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC).

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Key to the process is the use of gallium metal to enable an ongoing reaction with the water. This aluminum-gallium-water reaction has been known about for decades, but here the team optimized and enhanced it in a few particular ways.

With the help of scanning electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques, the researchers were able to find the best mix of aluminum and gallium for producing hydrogen with the greatest efficiency: a 3:1 gallium-aluminum composite.

The gallium-rich alloy does double duty in both removing aluminum’s oxide coating (which would ordinarily block the reaction with water) and in producing the aluminum nanoparticles that enable faster reactions.

“The gallium separates the nanoparticles and keeps them from aggregating into larger particles,” says Bakthan Singaram, a professor of organic chemistry at UCSC.

“People have struggled to make aluminum nanoparticles, and here we are producing them under normal atmospheric pressure and room temperature conditions.”

The mixing method isn’t complicated, the researchers report, and the composite material can be stored for at least three months when submerged in cyclohexane to protect it from moisture, which would otherwise degrade its efficacy.

Aluminum is easier to get hold of than gallium as it can be sourced from post-consumer materials, such as discarded aluminum cans and foil.

Gallium is more expensive and less abundant, but in this process at least it can be recovered and reused many times over without losing its effectiveness.

There is still work to do, not least in making sure this can be scaled up from a lab set-up to something that can be used on an industrial scale. However, the early signs are that this is another method that has a lot of potential for hydrogen fuel production.

“Overall, the Ga-rich Ga−Al [gallium-rich gallium-aluminum] mixture produces substantial amounts of hydrogen at room temperature with no energy input, material manipulation, or pH modification,” the researchers conclude in their paper.

The research has been published in Applied Nano Materials.

Source: Scientists Find a Simple Way to Produce Hydrogen From Water at Room Temperature : ScienceAlert

A major breakthrough in nuclear fusion has been confirmed a year after it was achieved at a laboratory in California.

Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL’s) National Ignition Facility (NIF) recorded the first case of ignition on August 8, 2021, the results of which have now been published in three peer-reviewed papers.

Nuclear fusion is the process that powers the Sun and other stars: heavy hydrogen atoms collide with enough force that they fuse together to form a helium atom, releasing large amounts of energy as a by-product. Once the hydrogen plasma “ignites”, the fusion reaction becomes self-sustaining, with the fusions themselves producing enough power to maintain the temperature without external heating.

Ignition during a fusion reaction essentially means that the reaction itself produced enough energy to be self-sustaining, which would be necessary in the use of fusion to generate electricity.

If we could harness this reaction to generate electricity, it would be one of the most efficient and least polluting sources of energy possible. No fossil fuels would be required as the only fuel would be hydrogen, and the only by-product would be helium, which we use in industry and are actually in short supply of.

[…]

In this latest milestone at the LLNL, researchers recorded an energy yield of more than 1.3 megajoules (MJ) during only a few nanoseconds. For reference, one MJ is the kinetic energy of a one tonne mass moving at 100mph.

[…]

In the experiments performed to reach this ignition result, researchers heat and compress a central “hot spot” of deuterium-tritium (hydrogen atoms with one and two neutrons, respectively) fuel using a surrounding dense piston also made from deuterium-tritium, creating a super hot, super pressurized hydrogen plasma.

“Ignition occurs when the heating from absorption of α particles [two protons and two neutrons tightly bound together] created in the fusion process overcomes the loss mechanisms in the system for a duration of time,” said the authors in a paper publishing the results in the journal Physical Review E.

[…]

 

Source: Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Confirmed: California Team Achieved Ignition

Virtually all wind turbines, which produce more than 5 percent of the world’s electricity, are controlled as if they were individual, free-standing units. In fact, the vast majority are part of larger wind farm installations involving dozens or even hundreds of turbines, whose wakes can affect each other.

Now, engineers at MIT and elsewhere have found that, with no need for any new investment in equipment, the energy output of such wind farm installations can be increased by modeling the wind flow of the entire collection of turbines and optimizing the control of individual units accordingly.

The increase in energy output from a given installation may seem modest—it’s about 1.2 percent overall, and 3 percent for optimal wind speeds. But the algorithm can be deployed at any wind farm, and the number of wind farms is rapidly growing to meet accelerated climate goals. If that 1.2 percent energy increase were applied to all the world’s existing wind farms, it would be the equivalent of adding more than 3,600 new wind turbines, or enough to power about 3 million homes, and a total gain to power producers of almost a billion dollars per year, the researchers say. And all of this for essentially no cost.

[…]

“Essentially all existing utility-scale turbines are controlled ‘greedily’ and independently,” says Howland. The term “greedily,” he explains, refers to the fact that they are controlled to maximize only their own power production, as if they were isolated units with no detrimental impact on neighboring turbines.

But in the real world, turbines are deliberately spaced close together in wind farms to achieve economic benefits related to land use (on- or offshore) and to infrastructure such as access roads and transmission lines. This proximity means that turbines are often strongly affected by the turbulent wakes produced by others that are upwind from them—a factor that individual turbine-control systems do not currently take into account.

[…]

a new flow model which predicts the power production of each turbine in the farm depending on the incident winds in the atmosphere and the control strategy of each turbine. While based on flow-physics, the model learns from operational wind farm data to reduce predictive error and uncertainty. Without changing anything about the physical turbine locations and hardware systems of existing wind farms, they have used the physics-based, data-assisted modeling of the flow within the wind farm and the resulting power production of each turbine, given different wind conditions, to find the optimal orientation for each turbine at a given moment. This allows them to maximize the output from the whole farm, not just the individual turbines.

[…]

In a months-long experiment in a real utility-scale wind farm in India, the predictive model was first validated by testing a wide range of yaw orientation strategies, most of which were intentionally suboptimal. By testing many control strategies, including suboptimal ones, in both the real farm and the model, the researchers could identify the true optimal strategy. Importantly, the model was able to predict the farm power production and the optimal control strategy for most wind conditions tested, giving confidence that the predictions of the model would track the true optimal operational strategy for the farm. This enables the use of the model to design the optimal control strategies for new wind conditions and new wind farms without needing to perform fresh calculations from scratch.

Then, a second months-long experiment at the same farm, which implemented only the optimal control predictions from the model, proved that the algorithm’s real-world effects could match the overall energy improvements seen in simulations. Averaged over the entire test period, the system achieved a 1.2 percent increase in energy output at all wind speeds, and a 3 percent increase at speeds between 6 and 8 meters per second (about 13 to 18 miles per hour).

[…]

Source: A new method boosts wind farms’ energy output, without new equipment

“Switch to solar panels to help save the planet,” they say.

And they’re (mostly) right. Solar panels are a great source of clean energy because, unlike fossil fuels, solar energy doesn’t produce harmful carbon emissions while creating electricity. But how “clean” is the process of creating solar panels?

Ironically enough, solar panel production is reliant on fossil fuels. It also involves mining for precious metals, which contributes to greenhouse gasses and pollution.

Before we explore the extent of it, we want to be clear that we’re not here to tear down the use of solar panels. EcoWatch is a huge fan of solar energy and has helped hundreds of homeowners reduce their carbon emissions by going solar. But we want to be transparent about the impact that solar panels have on the environment — both good and bad.

The Carbon Footprint of a Solar Panel

While solar panels are an environmentally friendly energy solution, the materials and manufacturing process used to create them do have a decent-sized carbon footprint, as they involve mining, melting and cooling to be used.

Environmental Impact of Mining for Solar Panel Materials

Most solar cells are made up of silicon semiconductors and glass, as well as metals like silver, copper, indium and tellurium. And if we’re including solar batteries, add lithium to the list.

When it comes to environmental impact, gathering silicon and glass are both non-issues, as they’re abundant and non-toxic. However, the process of mining for those metals creates greenhouse gas emissions and can lead to soil, water and air pollution.¹

Environmental Impact of Solar Panel Facilities

First thing to consider: Solar facilities are massive. It’s safe to assume that, in most cases, some wildlife and recreation land has been cleared to create solar panel production facilities.

Solar panel facilities also require a lot of energy to keep up and running, and unfortunately, a lot of the energy used for melting down silicon comes from coal burning, especially in China where pollution emissions are already high.²

There’s also a great need for water for the cooling process, which can be an environmental strain in more arid areas where water isn’t as available. And like any big production facility, solar panel production facilities cause air pollution.

Environmental Impact of Solar Panel Manufacturing

There are three different types of solar panels — monocrystalline, polycrystalline and thin-film — and each are manufactured differently, meaning they each leave a different sized carbon footprint.

Manufacturing Monocrystalline Panels

Monocrystalline panels are the most common and have the highest energy conversion efficiency, typically ranging between 19 and 22%. Monocrystalline solar panels are made of pure, single-cell silicon crystals wedged between thin glass.

To make a monocrystalline solar panel, a huge piece of silicon is molded into a block, then cut into small wafers to be affixed onto a solar panel. It’s a complex process and, therefore, produces the highest emissions compared to any other solar panel manufacturing method.³

Manufacturing Polycrystalline Panels

Polycrystalline solar panels are also made of silicon, but instead of coming from a block, the silicon crystals are melted together and then placed onto the panel. Because of the melting process, polycrystalline solar panels do require a bit of electricity to create, although not as much as monocrystalline.⁴

Manufacturing Thin-Film Panels

Lastly, you have thin-film solar panels, which can be made from several different types of materials, like amorphous silicon, cadmium telluride (a type of silicon) or copper indium gallium selenide. T

ypically, thin-film solar panels are going to leave a smaller carbon footprint compared to their more popular counterparts.⁵ But on the downside, they’re created from extremely toxic materials that can lead to both human and environmental harm if not handled properly.⁶

Environmental Impact of Transporting Solar Panels

Emissions from solar panel transportation present another challenge. Solar panels are produced all over the world, but primarily in China, followed by the U.S. and Europe. And solar panels that are produced in one country may require shipments of parts from another.

To be honest, it’s hard to say exactly how big the carbon footprint is for each stage of making a solar panel — no matter which type. There hasn’t been much research or data released on the environmental impact of solar panel production. However, the Coalition on Materials Research Transparency is reportedly working to measure and report the carbon impacts associated with mining, producing and transporting solar panels.

It’s important to note that the amount of carbon emissions produced to create solar panels is still nowhere near that of traditional energy facilities, and it is quite small when compared to oil drilling, fracking or coal mining.⁷

But production aside, another common challenge surrounding solar panels is what happens after their average 25-year lifespan.

A Larger Issue: Solar Panel Recycling

The Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) set a target for solar energy to account for 30% of energy generation in the U.S. by 2030.⁸ If that target is hit, more than 1 billion solar panels will be actively collecting solar energy throughout the U.S. alone over the next decade.

While this is great news for reducing carbon emissions, it brings up a larger issue the solar industry hasn’t quite nailed down yet: solar panel recycling.

Scientists have been working on a better solution, but as of now, there isn’t a flushed-out system to recycle old solar panels. And there certainly aren’t enough places to do it.

As mentioned earlier, solar panels are made up of a lot of precious metals, and the carbon footprint of producing solar panels could be reduced if these materials could be recycled and repurposed instead of having to mine for more. Instead, lack of solar panel recycling availability is only creating more e-waste, which could eventually lead to solar panel material scarcity.

How Much Better is Solar for the Environment?

We’ve discussed all the ways in which solar panels can be harmful to the environment, but let’s not forget that they’re still a far better option than non-renewable energy alternatives.

Taking the carbon footprint of solar panels into account, one study still found that coal generates a footprint 18 times the size, while natural gas creates an emissions footprint 13 times the size of solar.⁹ It’s also worth repeating that solar energy produces zero emissions after production. For that reason alone, studies have revealed solar to be an essential solution to slowing climate change.¹⁰

But if solar continues to grow as the SEIA predicts it will, technology will also need to improve to minimize the effects that solar panel production will have on the environment, and proper solar panel recycling methods must be created.

Source: The Environmental Impact of Solar Panels – EcoWatch

The aviation industry’s attempts to go green are getting a boost from an unlikely place: carbon-neutral jet fuel pulled from thin air.

That may seem far-fetched, but it’s a concept that engineers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) have not only proved experimentally, but apparently proven again at scale. Even better, the fuel created by the process is allegedly a drop-in alternative to fossil-derived aviation fuel that can be used without changes to storage or distribution infrastructure.

Here’s how the system works:

Synthesizing kerosene pure enough to be used as jet fuel from thin air isn’t even a new concept. We know it can be formed from something called synthesis gas, or syngas, which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide.

Crucially, the goal of this particular project is to produce a clean, carbon-neutral form of syngas that doesn’t create additional emissions. According to the researchers, the best way to do that is with solar energy.

For their test-scale unit, the researchers built an array of 169 sun-tracking reflectors that focus approximately 15kW of solar energy at a 16-inch aperture on a tower-mounted solar reactor. According to the researchers, the solar energy directed at the reactor “corresponds to an average solar concentration ratio of approximately 2,500 suns, with a peak above 4,000 suns.”

Inside the reactor, temperatures reach approximately 1,500°C (2,732°F), which is hot enough to split captured carbon dioxide and atmospheric water vapor to form syngas. As it cools, the syngas flows out of the reactor to a gas-to-liquid unit that processes it into kerosene.

According to the researchers, the syngas produced by the reactor has selectivity, purity, and quality high enough to make it suitable for Fischer–Tropsch synthesis, which turns liquid syngas made from hydrogen and carbon monoxide into hydrocarbons we can use to fly planes.

The system isn’t the most efficient – only managing a 4.1 percent solar-to-syngas efficiency. Still, project lead and ETH engineering professor Aldo Steinfeld told IEEE, 4.1 percent is a record for thermochemical fuel production.

The test-scale project didn’t use any heat capture technology, meaning that 4.1 percent record should be easily beaten. If heat capture technology were added to a future iteration of the facility, efficiency rates could reach as high as 20 percent, the researchers claimed.

Jet fuel that begins life as air and captured carbon, the researchers explained, is completely carbon-neutral because the fuel only produces as much carbon dioxide as went into its manufacturing.

[…]

Source: Pull jet fuel from thin air? We can do that, say scientists • The Register

Wave Swell Energy’s remarkable UniWave 200 is a sea platform that uses an artificial blowhole formation to create air pressure changes that drive a turbine and feed energy back to shore. After a year of testing, the company reports excellent results. New Atlas reports: As we’ve discussed before, the UniWave system is a floating device that can be towed to any coastal location and connected to the local energy grid. It’s designed so that wave swells force water into a specially designed concrete chamber, pressurizing the air in the chamber and forcing it through an outlet valve. Then as the water recedes, it generates a powerful vacuum, which sucks air in through a turbine at the top and generates electricity that’s fed into the grid via a cable. As a result, it draws energy from the entire column of water that enters its chamber, a fact the team says makes it more efficient than wave energy devices that only harvest energy from the surface or the sea floor.

[…] A 200-kW test platform was installed last year off King Island, facing the notoriously rough seas of Bass Strait, which separates the island state of Tasmania from the mainland of Australia. There, it’s been contributing reliable clean energy to the island’s microgrid around the clock for a full 12 months. The WSE team has made a few live tweaks to the design during operation, improving its performance beyond original expectations. “We set out to prove that Wave Swell’s wave energy converter technology could supply electricity to a grid in a range of wave conditions, and we have done that,” said WSE CEO Paul Geason in a press release. “One key achievement has been to deliver real-world results in Tasmanian ocean conditions to complement the AMC test modeling. In some instances, the performance of our technology in the ocean has exceeded expectations due to the lessons we’ve learnt through the project, technological improvements and the refinements we have made over the course of the year.” “Our team is excited to have achieved a rate of conversion from wave power to electricity at an average of 45 to 50% in a wide range of wave conditions,” he continues. “This is a vast improvement on past devices and shows that the moment has arrived for wave power to sit alongside wind, solar and energy storage as part of a modern energy mix.”

The King Island platform will remain in place at least until the end of 2022, and the company is now gearing up to go into production. “Having proven our device can survive the toughest conditions the Southern Ocean and Bass Strait can throw at it, and deliver grid compliant electricity, our priority now shifts to commercializing the technology,” said Gleason. “For Wave Swell this means ensuring the market embraces the WSE technology and units are deployed to deliver utility scale clean electricity to mainland grids around the world.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD5fXCW-yKc

Source: Blowhole Wave Energy Generator Exceeds Expectations In 12-Month Test – Slashdot

TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION (“Toyota”) and its subsidiary, Woven Planet Holdings, Inc. (“Woven Planet”), have developed a working prototype of its portable hydrogen cartridge. This cartridge design will facilitate the everyday transport and supply of hydrogen energy to power a broad range of daily life applications in and outside of the home. Toyota and Woven Planet will conduct Proof of Concept (“PoC”) trials in various places, including Woven City, a human-centered smart city of the future currently being constructed in Susono City, Shizuoka Prefecture.

Portable Hydrogen Cartridge (Prototype)^*1

[…]

Together with ENEOS Corporation, Toyota and Woven Planet are working to build a comprehensive hydrogen-based supply chain aimed at expediting and simplifying production, transport, and daily usage. These trials will focus on meeting the energy needs of Woven City residents and those living in its surrounding communities.

Benefits of Using Hydrogen Cartridges

• Portable, affordable, and convenient energy that makes it possible to bring hydrogen to where people live, work, and play without the use of pipes

  • Prototype dimensions

    400 mm (16″) in length x 180 mm (7″) in diameter

  • Target weight

    5 kg (11 lbs)

• Swappable for easy replacement and quick recharging
• Volume flexibility allows for a broad variety of daily use applications^*2
• Small-scale infrastructure can meet energy needs in remote and non-electrified areas and be swiftly dispatched in the case of a disaster

Next Steps for the Hydrogen Cartridge

[…]

Our goal is to help hydrogen become commonplace by making this clean form of energy safe, convenient, and affordable. By establishing the underlying supply chain, we hope to facilitate the flow of a larger volume of hydrogen and fuel more applications. Woven City will explore and test an array of energy applications using hydrogen cartridges including mobility, household applications, and many future possibilities we have yet to imagine. Together with inventors and those living within and around Woven City, we will continue to advance mobility over time by constantly developing more practical applications for hydrogen cartridges. In future Woven City demonstrations, we will continue to improve the hydrogen cartridge itself, making it increasingly easy to use and improving the energy density.

Hydrogen Cartridge Applications (Image)

The ultimate goal of this project is to realize a carbon-neutral society where everyone can access clean energy, first in Japan and then throughout the world. Toyota and Woven Planet aim to develop best practices for incorporating clean hydrogen energy into daily life by conducting human-centered demonstrations in and around Woven City. These real-life experiences will help us learn how to best transform hydrogen into a familiar, well-used, and well-loved form of energy.

The portable hydrogen cartridge prototype will be showcased at Super Taikyu Series 2022 Round 2 at Fuji SpeedWay from June 3 to 5, 2022^*3. Our showcase is geared toward teaching people about how hydrogen energy works and helping them imagine the countless ways hydrogen can become a useful part of their daily lives.

Source: Toyota and Woven Planet Have Developed a New Portable Hydrogen Cartridge Prototype | Corporate | Global Newsroom | Toyota Motor Corporation Official Global Website

Turkey announced last week it discovered a massive rare earth reserve almost as big as the world’s largest in China. The find is reportedly so large that it could on its own satisfy global demand for decades.

According to the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, the country found a supply of 694 million metric tons (765 million short tons) of rare earth minerals in Beylikova, Eskişehir. That reportedly makes Turkey’s rare earths reserve the world’s second-largest behind China, which has 800 million tons according to AA Energy. Deposits reportedly include 10 of the 17 rare earth elements and are close to the surface, which would simplify extraction.

Fatih Dönmez, the country’s Minister for Energy and Natural Resources said the construction of processing infrastructure will begin later this year after R&D concludes. When the mining and refinement industries are up and running, Turkey anticipates it’ll have the capability to process 570,000 metric tons of rare earths annually. That’s nearly double the 315,000 metric tons that The Conversation reports will be demanded globally in 2030.

[…]

Source: Turkey’s Newfound Cache of Rare Earths Could Supply the World’s EVs and More

Finnish researchers have installed the world’s first fully working “sand battery” which can store green power for months at a time.

Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind.

The sand stores the heat at around 500C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.

[…]

Right now, most batteries are made with lithium and are expensive with a large, physical footprint, and can only cope with a limited amount of excess power.

But in the town of Kankaanpää, a team of young Finnish engineers have completed the first commercial installation of a battery made from sand that they believe can solve the storage problem in a low-cost, low impact way.

“Whenever there’s like this high surge of available green electricity, we want to be able to get it into the storage really quickly,” said Markku Ylönen, one of the two founders of Polar Night Energy who have developed the product.

The device has been installed in the Vatajankoski power plant which runs the district heating system for the area.

Low-cost electricity warms the sand up to 500C by resistive heating (the same process that makes electric fires work).

This generates hot air which is circulated in the sand by means of a heat exchanger.

Sand is a very effective medium for storing heat and loses little over time. The developers say that their device could keep sand at 500C for several months.

So when energy prices are higher, the battery discharges the hot air which warms water for the district heating system which is then pumped around homes, offices and even the local swimming pool.

[…]

The idea for the sand battery was first developed at a former pulp mill in the city of Tampere, with the council donating the work space and providing funding to get it off the ground.

[…]

One of the big challenges now is whether the technology can be scaled up to really make a difference – and will the developers be able to use it to get electricity out as well as heat?

The efficiency falls dramatically when the sand is used to just return power to the electricity grid.

But storing green energy as heat for the longer term is also a huge opportunity for industry, where most of the process heat that’s used in food and drink, textiles or pharmaceuticals comes from the burning of fossil fuels.

[…]

Source: Climate change: ‘Sand battery’ could solve green energy’s big problem – BBC News

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have managed to run a computer for six months, using blue-green algae as a power source.

A type of cyanobacteria called Synechocystis sp. PCC 6803 – commonly known as “blue-green algae,” which produces oxygen through photosynthesis when exposed to sunlight, was sealed in a small container, about the size of an AA battery, made of aluminum and clear plastic.

The research was published in the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

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Christopher Howe from the University of Cambridge and colleagues claim that similar photosynthetic power generators could be the source of power for a range of small devices in the future, without the need for the rare and unsustainable materials used in batteries.

The computer was placed on a windowsill at one of the researchers’ houses during the lockdown period due to COVID-19 in 2021, and stayed there for six months, from February to August.

The battery made of blue-green algae has provided a continuous current across its anode and cathode that ran a microprocessor.

The computer ran in cycles of 45 minutes. It was used to calculate sums of consecutive integers to simulate a computational workload, which required 0.3 microwatts of power, and 15 minutes of standby, which required 0.24 microwatts.

The microcontroller measured the device’s current output and stored this data in the cloud for researchers to analyze.

Howe suggests that there are two potential theories for the power source. Either the bacteria itself produces electrons, which creates a current, or it creates conditions in which an aluminum anode in the container is corroded in a chemical reaction that produces electrons.

The experiment ran without any significant degrading of the anode and because of that, the researchers believe that the bacteria is producing the bulk of the current.

[…]

Source: A colony of blue-green algae can power a computer for six months

[…]

In a recent paper published in Cell Reports Physical Science, they demonstrated how freezing and thawing a molten salt solution creates a rechargeable battery that can store energy cheaply and efficiently for weeks or months at a time.

[…]

Most conventional batteries store energy as chemical reactions waiting to happen. When the battery is connected to an external circuit, electrons travel from one side of the battery to the other through that circuit, generating electricity. To compensate for the change, charged particles called ions move through the fluid, paste or solid material that separates the two sides of the battery. But even when the battery is not in use, the ions gradually diffuse across this material, which is called the electrolyte. As that happens over weeks or months, the battery loses energy. Some rechargeable batteries can lose almost a third of their stored charge in a single month.

“In our battery, we really tried to stop this condition of self-discharge,” says PNNL researcher Guosheng Li, who led the project. The electrolyte is made of a salt solution that is solid at ambient temperatures but becomes liquid when heated to 180 degrees Celsius—about the temperature at which cookies are baked. When the electrolyte is solid, the ions are locked in place, preventing self-discharge. Only when the electrolyte liquifies can the ions flow through the battery, allowing it to charge or discharge.

[…]

Right now the experimental technology is aimed at utility-scale and industrial uses. Sprenkle envisions something like tractor-trailer truck containers with massive batteries inside, parked next to wind farms or solar arrays. The batteries would be charged on-site, allowed to cool and driven to facilities called substations, where the energy could be distributed through power lines as needed.

[…]

Source: Rechargeable Molten Salt Battery Freezes Energy in Place for Long-Term Storage – Scientific American

In December 2021, 27,591 aircraft took off or landed at Frankfurt airport—890 every day. But this winter, many of them weren’t carrying any passengers at all. Lufthansa, Germany’s national airline, which is based in Frankfurt, has admitted to running 21,000 empty flights this winter, using its own planes and those of its Belgian subsidiary, Brussels Airlines, in an attempt to keep hold of airport slots.

Although anti-air travel campaigners believe ghost flights are a widespread issue that airlines don’t publicly disclose, Lufthansa is so far the only airline to go public about its own figures. In January, climate activist Greta Thunberg tweeted her disbelief over the scale of the issue. Unusually, she was joined by voices within the industry. One of them was Lufthansa’s own chief executive, Carsten Spohr, who said the journeys were “empty, unnecessary flights just to secure our landing and takeoff rights.” But the company argues that it can’t change its approach: Those ghost flights are happening because airlines are required to conduct a certain proportion of their planned flights in order to keep slots at high-trafficked airports.

A Greenpeace analysis indicates that if Lufthansa’s practice of operating no-passenger flights were replicated equally across the European aviation sector, it would mean that more than 100,000 “ghost flights” were operating in Europe this year, spitting out carbon dioxide emissions equivalent to 1.4 million gas-guzzling cars. “We’re in a climate crisis, and the transport sector has the fastest-growing emissions in the EU,” says Greenpeace spokesperson Herwig Schuster. “Pointless, polluting ‘ghost flights’ are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Aviation analysts are split on the scale of the ghost flight problem. Some believe the issue has been overhyped and is likely not more prevalent than the few airlines that have admitted to operating them. Others say there are likely tens of thousands of such flights operating—with their carriers declining to say anything because of the PR blowback.

“The only reason we have [airport] slots is that it recognizes a shortage of capacity at an airport,” says John Strickland of JLS Consulting, an aviation consultant. “If there wasn’t any shortage of capacity, airlines could land and take off within reason whenever they want to.” However, a disparity between the volume of demand for takeoff and landing slots and the number of slots available at key airports means that airlines compete fiercely for spaces. In 2020, 62 million flights took place at the world’s airports, according to industry body Airports Council International. While that number sounds enormous, it’s down nearly 40 percent year on year. To handle demand, more than 200 airports worldwide operate some kind of slot system, handling a combined 1.5 billion passengers. If you board a flight anywhere in the world, there’s a 43 percent chance your flight is slot managed.

Airlines even pay their competitors to take over slots: Two highly prized slots at London Heathrow airport reportedly changed hands for $75 million in 2016, when tiny cash-rich airline Oman Air made Air France-KLM an offer it couldn’t refuse for a sleepy 5.30 am arrival from Muscat to the UK capital.

[…]

Source: Thousands of Planes Are Flying Empty and No One Can Stop Them | WIRED

Engineers at the University of Illinois Chicago have built a cost-effective artificial leaf that can capture carbon dioxide at rates 100 times better than current systems. Unlike other carbon capture systems, which work in labs with pure carbon dioxide from pressurized tanks, this artificial leaf works in the real world. It captures carbon dioxide from more diluted sources, like air and flue gas produced by coal-fired power plants, and releases it for use as fuel and other materials.

[..]

Using a previously reported theoretical concept, the scientists modified a standard artificial leaf system with inexpensive materials to include a water gradient — a dry side and a wet side — across an electrically charged membrane.

On the dry side, an organic solvent attaches to available carbon dioxide to produce a concentration of bicarbonate, or baking soda, on the membrane. As bicarbonate builds, these negatively charged ions are pulled across the membrane toward a positively charged electrode in a water-based solution on the membrane’s wet side. The liquid solution dissolves the bicarbonate back into carbon dioxide, so it can be released and harnessed for fuel or other uses.

The electrical charge is used to speed up the transfer of bicarbonate across the membrane.

When they tested the system, which is small enough to fit in a backpack, the UIC scientists found that it had a very high flux — a rate of carbon capture compared with the surface area required for the reactions — of 3.3 millimoles per hour per 4 square centimeters. This is more than 100 times better than other systems, even though only a moderate amount of electricity (0.4 KJ/hour) was needed to power the reaction, less than the amount of energy needed for a 1 watt LED lightbulb. They calculated the cost at $145 per ton of carbon dioxide, which is in line with recommendations from the Department of Energy that cost should not exceed around $200 per ton.

[…]

The UIC scientists report on the design of their artificial leaf and the results of their experiments in “Migration-assisted, moisture gradient process for ultrafast, continuous CO2 capture from dilute sources at ambient conditions,” which is published in Energy & Environmental Science.

[…]

Source: Stackable artificial leaf uses less power than lightbulb to capture 100 times more carbon than other systems | UIC Today

[…]

the pilot system demonstrates an important possible source of carbon-neutral fuel for industries struggling to decarbonise, such as aviation and shipping, which currently contribute around 8 per cent of total carbon dioxide emissions attributed to human activity.

But, producing 32 millilitres of methanol in a typical seven-hour-day run, the current proof of concept will require investment and a policy shift to compete with fossil fuels.

The technique, described in a peer-reviewed early access version of the paper in science journal Nature earlier this month, captures carbon dioxide and water directly from ambient air. They are then fed into a solar redox unit which is heated to 1,500˚C using an umbrella-like parabolic sunlight collector. The inside of the reactor employs cerium oxide in a two-step thermochemical process. Firstly, cerium oxide is reduced, and oxygen is released. In the second step, CO₂ and water are added to a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The cerium oxide then absorbs oxygen, oxidizes and returns to its initial state, allowing the process to begin again.

The output mix – also known as syngas – is fed into a gas-to-liquid unit where it is converted to methanol, although such units can convert the gases into kerosene, gasoline, or other liquid fuels.

Given the high investment needed to scale such technology, the output would cost vastly more than commercial aviation fuel and would need policy support to be viable, according to the research group led by Professor Aldo Steinfeld of ETG Zurich.

[…]

With investment, the researchers estimate that the technique could produce 95,000 litres of kerosene a day – enough to fuel an Airbus A350 carrying 325 passengers for a London-New York roundtrip – from a 3.8km² field.

Co-sourcing water and CO₂ from the air means the system could operate without a fresh water supply, making it suitable for desert locations, thus avoiding impact on agriculture, human population or areas rich in wildlife.

[…]

Source: Swiss lab’s rooftop demo makes fuel from sunlight and air • The Register

electricityMap is a live visualization of where your electricity comes from and how much CO2 was emitted to produce it.

Source: electricityMap | Live CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption

[…]

while the EV battery recycling industry is starting to take off, getting carmakers to use recycled materials remains a hard sell. “In general, people’s impression is that recycled material is not as good as virgin material,” says Yan Wang, a professor of mechanical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “Battery companies still hesitate to use recycled material in their batteries.”

A new study by Wang and a team including researchers from the US Advanced Battery Consortium (USABC), and battery company A123 Systems, shows that battery and carmakers needn’t worry. The results, published in the journal Joule, shows that batteries with recycled cathodes can be as good as, or even better than those using new state-of-the-art materials.

The team tested batteries with recycled NMC111 cathodes, the most common flavor of cathode containing a third each of nickel, manganese, and cobalt. The cathodes were made using a patented recycling technique that Battery Resourcers, a startup Wang co-founded, is now commercializing.

[…]

The researchers made 11 Ampere-hour industry-standard pouch cells loaded with materials at the same density as EV batteries. Engineers at A123 Systems did most of the testing, Wang says, using a protocol devised by the USABC to meet commercial viability goals for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. He says the results prove that recycled cathode materials are a viable alternative to pristine materials.

[…]

“We are the only company that gives an output that is a cathode material,” he says. “Other companies make elements. So their value added is less.”

Their technology involves shredding batteries and removing the steel cases, aluminum and copper wires, plastics, and pouch materials for recycling. The remaining black mass is dissolved in solvents, and the graphite, carbon and impurities are filtered out or chemically separated. Using a patented chemical technique, the nickel, manganese and cobalt are then mixed in desired ratios to make cathode powders.

[…]

[…]

Source: Study: Recycled Lithium Batteries as Good as Newly Mined – IEEE Spectrum

To make the transition to low-carbon energy sources and address climate change we need open data on the global energy system. High-quality data already exists; it is published by the International Energy Agency. But despite being an international institution that is largely publicly funded, most IEA data is locked behind paywalls. This makes it unusable in the public discourse and prevents many researchers from accessing it. Beyond this, it hinders data-sharing and collaboration; results in duplicated research efforts; makes the data unusable for the public discourse; and goes against the principles of transparency and reproducibility in scientific research. The high costs of the data excludes many from the global dialogue on energy and climate and thereby stands in the way of the IEA achieving its own mission. 

We suggest that the countries that fund the IEA drop the requirement to place data behind paywalls and increase their funding – the benefits of opening this important data are much larger than the costs.

[…]

In 2018, the annual budget of the IEA was EUR 27.8 million. According to the IEA’s budget figures, revenues from its data and publication sales finance “more than one-fifth of its annual budget”. That equates to EUR 5.6 million per year. To put this figure in perspective, it is equal to 0.03% of the total public energy RD&D budget for IEA countries in 2018, which was EUR 20.7 billion.² Or on a per capita basis split equally across IEA member countries: 0.44 cents per person per year.³

We believe that the relatively small revenues that the paywalls generate do not justify the very large downsides that these restrictions cause.

[…]

The statistical work of the IEA is of immense value. It is the only source of energy data that captures the full range of metrics needed to understand the global energy transition: from primary energy through to final energy use by sub-sector. It is the go-to source for most researchers and forms the basis of the energy systems modelling in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Reports.⁴ It is also heavily utilised in energy policy, collaborating with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on developments in energy data and analytics.

Some alternative data sources on energy exist, but none come close to the coverage and depth of the IEA data. The BP Statistical Review of World Energy, published by the multinational oil and gas company BP is the most commonly used alternative. As a freely available dataset it is widely used in research and is where the IEA would want to be – ‘at the heart of the global dialogue on energy’. But as it is published by a private fossil fuel company it has some obvious drawbacks.

One is that it focuses on commercially-traded fuels; this means most high- and middle-income countries are included but lower-income countries are almost completely absent even from very basic metrics such as primary energy. It also focuses on primary energy statistics and does not offer insight into the breakdown in final energy or sector-specific allocations.

The series of maps show the comparative geographical coverage of primary and final energy between the publicly available dataset from BP, and the private licensed dataset from the IEA.

[…]

Source: The International Energy Agency publishes the detailed, global energy data we all need, but its funders force it behind paywalls. Let’s ask them to change it. – Our World in Data

In late September, Carbios, a French startup, opened a demonstration plant in central France to test this idea. The facility will use enzymes to recycle PET, one of the most common single-use plastics and the material used to make most beverage bottles.

[…]

Carbios’s new reactor measures 20 cubic meters—around the size of a cargo van. It can hold two metric tons of plastic, or the equivalent of about 100,000 ground-up bottles at a time, and break it down into the building blocks of PET—ethylene glycol and terephthalic acid—in 10 to 16 hours.

The company plans to use what it learns from the demonstration facility to build its first industrial plant, which will house a reactor about 20 times larger than the demonstration reactor. That full-scale plant will be built near a plastic manufacturer somewhere in Europe or the US, and should be operational by 2025, says Alain Marty, Carbios’s chief science officer.

Carbios has been developing enzymatic recycling since the company was founded in 2011. Its process relies on enzymes to chop up the long chains of polymers that make up plastic. The resulting monomers can then be purified and strung together to make new plastics. Researchers at Carbios started with a natural enzyme used by bacteria to break down leaves, then tweaked it to make it more efficient at breaking down PET.

Carbios estimates that its enzymatic recycling process reduces greenhouse gas emissions by about 30% compared to virgin PET. Marty says he expects that number to increase as they work out the kinks.

[…]

Source: A French company is using enzymes to recycle one of the most common single-use plastics | MIT Technology Review

Tesla’s Big Battery, located in southern Australia, just got hit with a federal lawsuit for failing to provide the crucial grid support it once promised it could.

Built by Tesla in 2017, the 150-megawatt battery supplies 189 megawatt-hours of storage and was designed to support the grid when it becomes overloaded. Now operated by French renewable energy producer Neoen, it supplies storage for the adjacent Hornsdale wind farm, using clean energy to fill gaps that coal power leaves behind. It made waves at the time of its construction for being the largest lithium-ion battery in the world—though it’s now been superseded by another Tesla battery, the 300-megawatt Victorian Big Battery, also in Australia, which caught fire in July.

On Wednesday, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER), the body that oversees the country’s wholesale electricity and gas markets, announced it had filed a federal lawsuit against the Hornsdale Power Reserve (HPR)—the energy storage system that owns the Tesla battery—for failing to provide “frequency control ancillary services” numerous times over the course of four months in the summer and fall of 2019. In other words, the battery was supposed to supply grid backup when a primary power source, like a coal plant, fails.

The HPR’s alleged pattern of failures was first brought to light during a disruption to a nearby coal plant in 2019, according to the regulator. When the nearby Queensland’s Kogan Creek power station tripped on October 9, 2019, the HPR was called on to offer grid backup, having made offers to the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) to do so.

But the power reserve failed to provide the level of grid support that AEMO expected, and, in fact, was never able to do so in the first place, the lawsuit alleges, despite making money off of offering them. Though HPR did step in eventually, and no outages were recorded, the incident spurred investigation into a number of similar failures over the course of July to November 2019. The reserve’s failure to support the grid in the way it promised created “a risk to power system security and stability,” a press release on the lawsuit says.

“Contingency FCAS providers receive payment from AEMO to be on standby to provide the services they offer,” Clare Savage, chair of AER, said in a press release on the suit. “We expect providers to be in a position, and remain in a position, to respond when called upon by AEMO.”

[…]

Source: A Tesla Big Battery Is Getting Sued Over Power Grid Failures In Australia

Wooden floors infused with silicon and metal ions can generate enough electrical power from human footsteps to light LED bulbs. Researchers hope that they could provide a green energy source for homes.

Some materials can generate an electrical charge when they come into contact with another such material and are then separated, due to a phenomenon called the triboelectric effect. Electrons are transferred from one object to another and generate a charge. Materials that tend to donate electrons are known as tribopositive and those that tend to receive them are known as tribonegative.

Guido Panzarasa at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and his colleagues found that although wood sits in the middle of this spectrum and doesn’t readily pass electrons, it can be altered to generate larger charges. The team infused one panel of wood with silicon, which picks up electrons on contact with an object. A second panel was infused with nanocrystals of zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), a compound containing metal ions and organic molecules, and these crystals tend to lose electrons. They called this impregnation process “functionalisation”.

The team found that this treatment made a device that contained both wooden panels 80 times more efficient than standard wood at transferring electrons, meaning it was powerful enough to light LED bulbs when human footsteps compressed the device and brought the two wooden panels into contact.

Read more: Wooden floors rotted by fungi generate electricity when walked on

Panzarasa said: “The challenge is making wood that is able to attract and lose electrons. The functionalisation approach is quite simple, and it can be scalable on an industrial level. It’s only a matter of engineering.”

The engineered wood was fitted with electrodes from which the charge could be directed, and the team found that a 2-centimetre-by-3.5-centimetre sample that was placed under 50 newtons of compression – an order of magnitude less than the force of a human footstep – was able to generate 24.3 volts. A larger sample that was around the size of an A4 piece of paper was able to produce enough energy to drive household LED lamps and small electronic devices such as calculators.

Panzarasa and his team now hope to develop chemical coatings for wood that are more environmentally friendly and easier to manufacture.

Source: Wooden floors laced with silicon generate electricity from footsteps | New Scientist

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.

[…]

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.

This stack is placed on a wafer-thin surface that is subjected to high mechanical tension, which causes the various layers to detach in a highly controlled fashion and fold up origami-style into a nano-biosupercapacitor with a volume 0.001 mm³, occupying less space than a grain of dust. These tubular biosupercapacitors are therefore 3,000 times smaller than those developed previously, but with a voltage roughly the same as an AAA battery (albeit with far lower actual current flow).

These tiny devices were then placed in saline, blood plasma and blood, where they demonstrated an ability to successfully store energy. The biosupercapacitor proved particularly effective in blood, where it retained up to 70 percent of its capacity after 16 hours of operation. Another reason blood may be a suitable home for the team’s biosupercapacitor is that the device works with inherent redox enzymatic reactions and living cells in the solution to supercharge its own charge storage reactions, boosting its performance by 40 percent.

Jacob Müller

The team also subjected the device to the forces it might experience in blood vessels where flow and pressure fluctuate, by placing them in microfluidic channels, kind of like wind-tunnel testing for aerodynamics, where it stood up well. They also used three of the devices chained together to successfully power a tiny pH sensor, which could be placed in the blood vessels to measure pH and detect abnormalities that could be indicative of disease, such as a tumor growth.

[…]

Source: Dust-sized supercapacitor packs the same voltage as a AAA battery