Rice University researchers have created an efficient, low-cost device that splits water to produce hydrogen fuel.
The platform developed by the Brown School of Engineering lab of Rice materials scientist Jun Lou integrates catalytic electrodes and perovskite solar cells that, when triggered by sunlight, produce electricity. The current flows to the catalysts that turn water into hydrogen and oxygen, with a sunlight-to-hydrogen efficiency as high as 6.7%.
This sort of catalysis isn’t new, but the lab packaged a perovskite layer and the electrodes into a single module that, when dropped into water and placed in sunlight, produces hydrogen with no further input.
The platform introduced by Lou, lead author and Rice postdoctoral fellow Jia Liang and their colleagues in the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano is a self-sustaining producer of fuel that, they say, should be simple to produce in bulk.
“The concept is broadly similar to an artificial leaf,” Lou said. “What we have is an integrated module that turns sunlight into electricity that drives an electrochemical reaction. It utilizes water and sunlight to get chemical fuels.”
Perovskites are crystals with cubelike lattices that are known to harvest light. The most efficient perovskite solar cells produced so far achieve an efficiency above 25%, but the materials are expensive and tend to be stressed by light, humidity and heat.
“Jia has replaced the more expensive components, like platinum, in perovskite solar cells with alternatives like carbon,” Lou said. “That lowers the entry barrier for commercial adoption. Integrated devices like this are promising because they create a system that is sustainable. This does not require any external power to keep the module running.”
Liang said the key component may not be the perovskite but the polymer that encapsulates it, protecting the module and allowing to be immersed for long periods. “Others have developed catalytic systems that connect the solar cell outside the water to immersed electrodes with a wire,” he said. “We simplify the system by encapsulating the perovskite layer with a Surlyn (polymer) film.”
The patterned film allows sunlight to reach the solar cell while protecting it and serves as an insulator between the cells and the electrodes, Liang said.
A typical nuclear reactor uses only a small fraction of its fuel rod to produce power before the energy-generating reaction naturally terminates. What is left behind is an assortment of radioactive elements, including unused fuel, that are disposed of as nuclear waste in the United States. Although certain elements recycled from waste can be used for powering newer generations of nuclear reactors, extracting leftover fuel in a way that prevents possible misuse is an ongoing challenge.
Now, Texas A&M University engineering researchers have devised a simple, proliferation-resistant approach for separating out different components of nuclear waste. The one-step chemical reaction, described in the February issue of the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research, results in the formation of crystals containing all of the leftover nuclear fuel elements distributed uniformly.
The researchers also noted that the simplicity of their recycling approach makes the translation from lab bench to industry feasible.
“Our recycling strategy can be easily integrated into a chemical flow sheet for industrial-scale implementation,” said Johnathan Burns, research scientist in the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Nuclear Engineering and Science Center. “In other words, the reaction can be repeated multiple times to maximize fuel recovery yield and further reduce radioactive nuclear waste.”
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For their experiments, they prepared a surrogate solution of uranium, plutonium, neptunium and americium in highly concentrated nitric acid at 60-90 degrees Celsius to mimic dissolving of a real fuel rod in the strong acid. They found when the solution reached room temperature, as predicted, that uranium, neptunium, plutonium and americium separated from the solution together, uniformly distributing themselves within the crystals.
Burns noted that this simplified, single-step process is also proliferation-resistant since plutonium is not isolated but incorporated within the uranium crystals.
“The idea is that the reprocessed fuel generated from our prescribed chemical reaction can be used in future generations of reactors, which would not only burn uranium like most present-day reactors but also other heavy elements such as neptunium, plutonium and americium,” Burns said. “In addition to addressing the fuel recycling problem and reducing proliferation risk, our strategy will drastically reduce nuclear waste to just the fission products whose radioactivity is hundreds rather than hundreds of thousands of years.”
The solution, some propose, is to store energy chemically—in the form of hydrogen fuel—rather than electrically. This involves using devices called electrolyzers that make use of renewable energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gas.
“Hydrogen is a very good carrier for this type of work,” says Wei Wang, who is the chief scientist for stationary energy storage research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington. It’s an efficient energy carrier, and can be easily stored in pressurized tanks. When needed, the gas can then be converted back into electrical energy via a fuel cell and fed into the grid.
But water electrolyzers are expensive. They work under acidic conditions which require corrosion-resistant metal plates and catalysts made from precious metals such as titanium, platinum, and iridium. “Also, the oxygen electrode isn’t very efficient,” says Kathy Ayers, vice-president of R&D at Nel Hydrogen, an Oslo-based company that specializes in hydrogen production and storage. “You lose about 0.3 volts just from the fact that you’re trying to convert water to oxygen or vice versa,” she says. Splitting a water molecule requires 1.23 V of energy.
In a bid to overcome this problem, Nel Hydrogen and Wang’s team at Pacific Northwest joined forces in 2016, after receiving funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. The solution they’ve come up with is a fuel cell that acts as both a battery and hydrogen generator.
“We call it a redox-flow cell because it’s a hybrid between a redox-flow battery and a water electrolyzer,” explains Wang.
Photo: Nel HydrogenNel Hydrogen’s reversible fuel cell system.
A redox-flow battery, in essence a reversible fuel cell, is typically made up of a positive and negative electrolyte stored in two separate tanks. When the liquids are pumped into the battery cell stack situated between the tanks, a redox reaction occurs, and generates electricity at the battery’s electrodes.
By comparison, the new invention has only one electrolyte, comprised of an iron salt (rather than the more commonly used vanadium) dissolved in acid. When hydrogen ions react with the iron salt (Fe2+), hydrogen gas is produced at the platinum-coated carbon cathode in the battery stack.
“We introduce iron as a middleman, so we can separate electrolysis into two reactions,” says Wang. Doing so allows one to control where and when to reverse the reaction to produce electrical energy to supply to the grid. “The system gives you flexibility… you could do the regeneration during evening time when electricity prices are at a peak,” he says.
Regenerating Fe2+ in the reverse reaction also allows for the continuous production of hydrogen gas, he says. “And because the hydrogen-iron cell uses about half the voltage of a traditional electrolyzer, you can generate hydrogen at a much cheaper cost if you do everything right.”
It also helps that iron is much cheaper and more abundant compared with vanadium.
Qing Wang, a materials scientist at the National University of Singapore, sees another benefit. “If you care more about purity and want to have ultra-pure hydrogen, then maybe it’s a good solution,” he says. Cross-contamination can sometimes occur during electrolysis because the hydrogen and oxygen gases produced are so small that they are able to traverse the membrane separator.
The new redox-flow cell performed well in lab tests, exhibiting a charge capacity of up to one ampere per square centimeter, a ten-fold increase over normal flow batteries. It was also able to withstand “several hundred cycles” of charging, which has never been demonstrated before in hydrogen ion flow batteries, says Wang, who has a number of patents for the invention, with a few more pending.
While the PNNL team experimented on a single cell measuring 10 square centimeters, Ayers and her colleagues at Nel Hydrogen proved that the technology could work even when scaled up to a five-cell stack measuring 100 square centimeters. They plan to spend the next few months fine-tuning the system and eliminating kinks, such as how to minimize damage to the pumps caused by the acidic electrolyte, before commercializing it.
A rapid-charging and non-flammable battery developed in part by 2019 Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough has been licensed for development by the Canadian electric utility Hydro-Quebec. The utility says it hopes to have the technology ready for one or more commercial partners in two years. Hydro-Quebec, according to Karim Zaghib, general director of the utility’s Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage, has been commercializing patents with Goodenough’s parent institution, the University of Texas at Austin, for the past 25 years.
As Spectrum reported in 2017, Goodenough and Maria Helena Braga, professor of engineering at the University of Porto in Portugal, developed a solid-state lithium rechargeable that used a glass doped with alkali metals as the battery’s electrolyte. (The electrolyte is the material between cathode and anode and is often a liquid in today’s batteries, which typically means it’s also flammable and potentially vulnerable to battery fires.) Braga said her and Goodenough’s battery is high capacity, charges in “minutes rather than hours,” performs well in both hot and cold weather, and that its solid-state electrolyte is not flammable. Hydro-Quebec’s Gen 3 battery “can be glass or ceramic, but it is not a [lithium] polymer,” Zaghib said of the Goodenough/Braga battery’s electrolyte. “So with Daimler (which is also working with Hydro-Quebec to develop a second-gen lithium solid-state battery), it’s an organic compound, and with John Goodenough, it’s an inorganic compound. The inorganic compound has higher ionic conductivity compared to the polymer.”
“That means the ions shuttle back and forth more readily between cathode and anode, which could potentially improve a battery’s capacity, charging speed, or other performance metrics,” adds IEEE Spectrum.
We interviewed John B. Goodenough soon after his solid-state battery was announced. You can read his responses to your questions here.
Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a device that uses a natural protein to create electricity from moisture in the air, a new technology they say could have significant implications for the future of renewable energy, climate change and in the future of medicine.
As reported today in Nature, the laboratories of electrical engineer Jun Yao and microbiologist Derek Lovley at UMass Amherst have created a device they call an “Air-gen.” or air-powered generator, with electrically conductive protein nanowires produced by the microbe Geobacter. The Air-gen connects electrodes to the protein nanowires in such a way that electrical current is generated from the water vapor naturally present in the atmosphere.
“We are literally making electricity out of thin air,” says Yao. “The Air-gen generates clean energy 24/7.” Lovely, who has advanced sustainable biology-based electronic materials over three decades, adds, “It’s the most amazing and exciting application of protein nanowires yet.”
The new technology developed in Yao’s lab is non-polluting, renewable and low-cost. It can generate power even in areas with extremely low humidity such as the Sahara Desert. It has significant advantages over other forms of renewable energy including solar and wind, Lovley says, because unlike these other renewable energy sources, the Air-gen does not require sunlight or wind, and “it even works indoors.”
The Air-gen device requires only a thin film of protein nanowires less than 10 microns thick, the researchers explain. The bottom of the film rests on an electrode, while a smaller electrode that covers only part of the nanowire film sits on top. The film adsorbs water vapor from the atmosphere. A combination of the electrical conductivity and surface chemistry of the protein nanowires, coupled with the fine pores between the nanowires within the film, establishes the conditions that generate an electrical current between the two electrodes.
The researchers say that the current generation of Air-gen devices are able to power small electronics, and they expect to bring the invention to commercial scale soon. Next steps they plan include developing a small Air-gen “patch” that can power electronic wearables such as health and fitness monitors and smart watches, which would eliminate the requirement for traditional batteries. They also hope to develop Air-gens to apply to cell phones to eliminate periodic charging.
These guys have 6 years of battery data on a range of electric cars. Each model is different in terms of degradation, but it seems that over six years time you lose around 12% of your battery capacity. This means that if your car was able to drive, say 523 km (Tesla Model X), after 6 years you can expect it to have a range of 460km. So long as the graph continues, after 12 years you have a 397km range.
This is the second day of the new decade, and the world’s largest floating wind farm is already doing its damn thing and generating electricity.
Located off the coast of Portugal, the WindFloat Atlantic wind farm connected to the grid on New Year’s Eve. And this is only the first of the project’s three platforms. Once all go online, the floating wind farm will be able to produce enough energy for about 60,000 homes a year. Like many European countries (including Denmark and the UK), Portugal has been investing heavily in wind as a viable clean energy option.
The problems with the design of current battery technologies like lithium-ion are well known, we just tend to turn a blind eye when it means our smartphones can run for a full day without a charge. In addition to lithium, they require heavy metals like cobalt, manganese, and nickel which come from giant mines that present hazards to the environment, and often to those doing the actual mining. These metals are also a finite resource, and as more and more devices and vehicles switch to battery power, their availability is going to decrease at a staggering pace.
As a potential solution, scientists at IBM Research’s Battery Lab came up with a new design that replaces the need for cobalt and nickel in the cathode, and also uses a new liquid electrolyte (the material in a battery that helps ions move from one end to the other) with a high flash point. The combination of the new cathode and the electrolyte materials was also found to limit the creation of lithium dendrites which are spiky structures that often develop in lithium-ion batteries that can lead to short circuits. So not only would this new battery have less of an impact on the environment to manufacture, but it would also be considerably safer to use, with a drastically reduced risk of fire or explosions.
But the benefits of IBM Research’s design don’t stop there. The researchers believe the new battery would have a larger capacity than existing lithium-ion batteries, could potentially charge to about 80 percent of its full capacity in just five minutes, would be more energy-efficient, and, on top of it all, it would be cheaper to manufacture which in turn means they could help reduce the cost of gadgets and electric vehicles. These results are estimations based on how the battery has performed in the lab so far, but IBM Research is teaming up with companies like Mercedes-Benz Research and Development to further explore this technology, so it will be quite a few years before you’re able to feel a little less guilty about your smartphone addiction.
Today’s Tesla Model 3’s lithium-ion battery pack has an estimated 168 Wh/kg. And important as this energy-per-weight ratio is for electric cars, it’s more important still for electric aircraft.
Now comes Oxis Energy, of Abingdon, UK, with a battery based on lithium-sulfur chemistry that it says can greatly increase the ratio, and do so in a product that’s safe enough for use even in an electric airplane. Specifically, a plane built by Bye Aerospace, in Englewood, Colo., whose founder, George Bye, described the project in this 2017 article for IEEE Spectrum.
The two companies said in a statement that they were beginning a one-year joint project to demonstrate feasibility. They said the Oxis battery would provide “in excess” of 500 Wh/kg, a number which appears to apply to the individual cells, rather than the battery pack, with all its packaging, power electronics, and other paraphernalia. That per-cell figure may be compared directly to the “record-breaking energy density of 260 watt-hours per kilogram” that Bye cited for the batteries his planes were using in 2017.
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One reason why lithium-sulfur batteries have been on the sidelines for so long is their short life, due to degradation of the cathode during the charge-discharge cycle. Oxis expects its batteries will be able to last for 500 such cycles within the next two years. That’s about par for the course for today’s lithium-ion batteries.
Another reason is safety: Lithium-sulfur batteries have been prone to overheating. Oxis says its design incorporates a ceramic lithium sulfide as a “passivation layer,” which blocks the flow of electricity—both to prevent sudden discharge and the more insidious leakage that can cause a lithium-ion battery to slowly lose capacity even while just sitting on a shelf. Oxis also uses a non-flammable electrolyte.
Presumably there is more to Oxis’s secret sauce than these two elements: The company says it has 186 patents, with 87 more pending.
A new lithium-ion battery design makes it possible for electric vehicle drivers to charge their cars and hit the road in as little as ten minutes, according to a new study.
The quick charge gives drivers up to 200 miles per ten minute charge while maintaining 2,500 charging cycles, the researchers behind the study say. That is equivalent to over half a million miles throughout the battery’s life, a press release notes. All that happens in the time it takes you to brew a morning coffee.
Researchers say that this design could finally make electric vehicles a viable competitor for traditional vehicles. “Range anxiety” is the fear of being stranded if your electric vehicle runs out of charge which has been a common barrier to adoption for many drivers.
In the study, published on Wednesday in Joule, researchers from Penn State University describe an asymmetric approach to fast-charging batteries that mitigates the effects of natural degradation of the lithium-ion batteries. This is achieved by quickly charging at a high temperature and then storing the charge more slowly at a cooler temperature. The researchers found that this approach allowed the batteries to avoid performance loss usually created from “battery plaque,” called lithium plating or solid-electrolyte-interphase (SEI) growth, which typically grows on batteries over time when exposed to heat.
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In order to charge your car in just ten minutes with these new batteries in the future though, you might have to buy a new car or at least replace the battery.
“[The car] would require a new battery with our internal heating structure built in,” Chao-Yang Wang, coauthor of the study and director of the Electrochemical Engine Center at Penn State, said in an email.
Growing demand for SUVs was the second largest contributor to the increase in global CO2 emissions from 2010 to 2018, an analysis has found.
In that period, SUVs doubled their global market share from 17% to 39% and their annual emissions rose to more than 700 megatonnes of CO2, more than the yearly total emissions of the UK and the Netherlands combined.
No energy sector except power drove a larger increase in carbon emissions, putting SUVs ahead of heavy industry (including iron, steel, cement and aluminium), aviation and shipping.
“We were quite surprised by this result ourselves,” said Laura Cozzi, the chief energy modeller of the International Energy Agency, which produced the report.
The recent dramatic shift towards heavier SUVs has offset both efficiency improvements in smaller cars and carbon savings from electric vehicles.
As the global fleet of SUVs has grown, emissions from the vehicles have increased more than fourfold in eight years. If SUV drivers were a nation, they would rank seventh in the world for carbon emissions.
“An SUV is bigger, it’s heavier, the aerodynamics are poor, so as a result you get more CO2,” said Florent Grelier from the campaign group Transport & Environment.
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SUVs started to become popular in the 1980s, and often earned nicknames such as “Chelsea tractor” as a result of the wealthy city suburbs they became associated with. Since then, sales have continued to rise, and the vehicles are often marketed as a status symbol.
However, opposition to SUVs in cities is also rising. Recent protestsin Berlin demanded a ban on the vehicles after a driver hit and killed four pedestrians, while activists at a Frankfurt motor show protested against the vehicles’ impact on the climate. SUVs are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes, and although they are often marketed as safer, those driving them are 11% more likely to die in a crash than people in normal cars.
Cozzi said a number of factors were driving the demand for bigger cars. While perceptions of heightened safety or increased social status could play a role at the individual level, she also pointed towards manufacturers’ changing offering.
She said the difficult market situation led carmakers to look for the most profitable models in their ranges.
“There is a really big need for car manufacturers to find the margins wherever it is possible, and the SUV segment seems to be one of those places,” she said.
In 1999, at the peak of Hydrogen fuel cell company start ups in California he left BAe to start his own fuel cell company. “My old boss at Rolls Royce pointed out that the Hydrogen needed to come from somewhere. So I looked at other technologies and found metal-air,”he says.
Technically described as “(Al)/air” batteries, these are the — almost — untold story from the battery world. For starters, an aluminum-air battery system can generate enough energy and power for driving ranges and acceleration similar to gasoline-powered cars.
Sometimes known as “Metal-Air” batteries, these have been successfully used in “off-grid” applications for many years, just as batteries powering army radios. The most attractive metal in this type of battery is aluminum because it is the most common metal on Earth and has one of the highest energy densities.
Think of an air-breathing battery which uses aluminum as a “fuel.” That means it can provide vehicle power with energy originating from clean sources (hydro, geothermal, nuclear etc.). These are the power sources for most aluminum smelters all over the world. The only waste product is aluminum hydroxide and this can be returned to the smelter as the feedstock for — guess what? — making more aluminum! This cycle is therefore highly sustainable and separate from the oil industry. You could even recycle aluminum cans and use them to make batteries.
Imagine that — a power source separate from the highly polluting oil industry.
“I rented a lab, read everything on it and then turned back into a Development Engineer, which means: thinking, making, testing and tweaking until you find answers. One or two bolts from the blue and I saw a massive difference on one test,” says Jackson.
But hardly anyone was using them in mainstream applications. Why?
Aluminum-air batteries had been around for a while. But the problem with a battery which generated electricity by “eating” aluminum was that it was simply not efficient. The electrolyte used just didn’t work well.
This was important. An electrolyte is a chemical medium inside a battery that allows the flow of electrical charge between the cathode and anode. When a device is connected to a battery — a light bulb or an electric circuit — chemical reactions occur on the electrodes that create a flow of electrical energy to the device.
When an aluminum-air battery starts to run, a chemical reaction produces a “gel” by-product which can gradually block the airways into the cell. It seemed like an intractable problem for researchers to deal with.
But after a lot of experimentation, in 2001, Jackson developed what he believed to be a revolutionary kind of electrolyte for aluminum-air batteries which had the potential to remove the barriers to commercialization.
“Everything was steady, the hydrogen and gel were almost gone but the power was a lot better.”
His specially developed electrolyte did not produce the hated gel that would destroy the efficiency of an aluminum-air battery. For Jackson, it seemed like a game-changer: “All I needed to do was to tell the government. ‘Simple’, I thought.”
The breakthrough — if proven — had huge potential. The energy density of his battery was about eight times that of a lithium-ion battery. He was incredibly excited. Then he tried to tell politicians…
Despite a detailed demonstration of a working battery to Lord “Jim” Knight in 2001, followed by email correspondence and a promise to “pass it onto Tony (Blair),” there was no interest from the U.K. government.
And Jackson faced bureaucratic hurdles. The U.K. government’s official innovation body, Innovate UK, emphasized lithium battery technology, not aluminum-air batteries.
He was struggling to convince public and private investors to back him, such was the hold the “lithium battery lobby” had over the sector.
This emphasis on lithium batteries over anything else meant U.K. the government was effectively leaving on the table a technology which could revolutionize electrical storage and mobility and even contribute to the fight against carbon emission and move the U.K. toward its pollution-reduction goals.
Disappointed in the U.K., Jackson upped sticks and found better backing in France, where he moved his R&D in 2005.
Finally, in 2007, the potential of Jackson’s invention was confirmed independently in France at the Polytech Nantes institution. Its advantages over Lithium Ion batteries were (and still are) increased cell voltage. They used ordinary aluminum, would create very little pollution and had a steady, long-duration power output.
As a result, in 2007 the French Government formally endorsed the technology as “strategic and in the national interest of France.”
At this point, the U.K.’s Foreign Office suddenly woke up and took notice.
It promised Jackson that the UKTI would deliver “300%” effort in launching the technology in the U.K. if it was “repatriated” back to the U.K.
However, in 2009, the U.K.’s Technology Strategy Board refused to back the technology, citing that the Automotive Council Technology Road Map “excluded this type of battery.” Even though the Carbon Trust agreed that it did indeed constitute a “credible CO2-reduction technology,” it refused to assist Jackson further.
Meanwhile, other governments were more enthusiastic about exploring metal-air batteries.
[…]
Jackson tried to tell the U.K. government they were making a mistake. Appearing before the Parliamentary Select Committee for business-energy and industrial strategy, he described how the U.K. had created a bias toward lithium-ion technology which had led to a battery-tech ecosystem which was funding lithium-ion research to the tune of billions of pounds. In 2017, Prime Minister Theresa May further backed the lithium-ion industry.
Jackson (pictured below) refused to take no for an answer.
He applied to U.K.’s Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. But in 2017 they replied with a “no-fund” decision which dismissed the technology, even though DSTL had an actual programme of its own on aluminum-air technology, dedicated to finding a better electrolyte, at Southampton University.
Jackson turned to the auto industry instead. He formed his company MAL (branded as “Metalectrique“) in 2013 and used seed funding to successfully test a long-range design of power pack in its laboratory facilities in Tavistock, U.K.
Here he is on a regional BBC channel explaining the battery:
He worked closely with Lotus Engineering to design and develop long-range replacement power packs for the Nissan Leaf and the Mahindra Reva “G-Wiz’ electric cars. At the time, Nissan expressed a strong interest in this “Beyond Lithium Technology” (their words) but they were already committed to fitting LiON batteries to the Leaf. Undeterred, Jackson concentrated on the G-Wiz and went on to produce full-size battery cells for testing and showed that aluminum-air technology was superior to any other existing technology.
In tests, Jackson’s Aluminium-Air power technology could create a 1,500 mile range battery with a 90 second swap system. The benefits are obvious: Cost effective for the driver; safe & CO2 free; recyclable and reusable; and with an £0.08 / mile cost to driver. The batteryis also low cost: just £60/kWh (Battery Price to OEM).
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The advantages of aluminum-air technology are numerous. Without having to charge the battery, a car could simply swap out the battery in seconds, completely removing “charge time.” Most current charging points are rated at 50 kW which is roughly one-hundredth of that required to charge a lithium battery in five minutes. Meanwhile, hydrogen fuel cells would require a huge and expensive hydrogen distribution infrastructure and a new hydrogen generation system.
But Jackson has kept on pushing, convinced his technology can address both the power needs of the future, and the climate crisis.
Last May, he started getting much-needed recognition.
The U.K.’s Advanced Propulsion Centre included the Metalectrique battery as part of its grant investment into 15 U.K. startups to take their technology to the next level as part of its Technology Developer Accelerator Programme (TDAP). The TDAP is part of a 10-year program to make U.K. a world-leader in low-carbon propulsion technology.
The catch? These 15 companies have to share a paltry £1.1 million in funding.
And as for Jackson? He’s still raising money for Metalectrique and spreading the word about the potential for aluminum-air batteries to save the planet.
What happens when it runs out of juice? You replace it with a new one while the old one gets recycled. At the beginning of the electric car era when charging infrastructure was nonexistent, the idea of swapping spent batteries for fully charged new ones was considered feasible. Jackson says such a thing could be the future, with his batteries/fuel cells sold at grocery stores and retail outlets. He says the process of disconnecting the old one and connecting the new one will take about 90 seconds.
But is it tin foil hat time? Is this story just another example of some crackpot inventing some radical new product that defies conventional physics, like cold fusion? Lots of people think so, and in fact Jackson says powerful forces have attempted to prevent his idea from reaching a larger audience. But an independent evaluation by the UK Trade and Investment agency in 2017 said Jackson’s invention was a “very attractive battery” based on “well established’” technology, and that it produced much more energy per kilogram than standard electric vehicle types, according to a report in theDaily Mail.
Some comparisons are in order. A Tesla Model S can drive up to 370 miles on a single charge. Jackson says if you drove the same car with an aluminum-air cell that weighed the same as the Tesla’s lithium-ion battery, it would have a range of 2,700 miles. Aluminum-air cells also take up less space. If that same Tesla were fitted with an aluminum-air fuel cell the same size as its current battery, it could run non-stop for 1,500 miles.
[…]
Jackson has also secured a £108,000 grant for further research from the Advanced Propulsion Center, a partner of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. His technology has been validated by two French universities. He says: “It has been a tough battle but I’m finally making progress. From every logical standpoint, this is the way to go.”
Austin Electric has three targets for the new batteries — the three-wheeled tuk-tuks used for transportation in many countries such as Pakistan, electric bicycles with far more range than current models, and a program that will convert front wheel drive cars with internal combustion engines into hybrids by fitting aluminum-air batteries and motors to drive the rear wheels.
Jackson expects the conversion operation to start next year. He says the cost of each conversion will be £3,500 or about $4,000. He thinks this will be a proof of concept “stepping-stone” phase in the transition to aluminum-air batteries for all vehicles. “We are in discussions with two aircraft manufacturers. It’s not going to be suitable for jets. But it would work in propeller planes, and be suitable for short-haul passenger and cargo flights.”
It’s ridiculous that this invention is only now going into small scale production and only gets 108k for development. Considering this is relevant and the technology is really viable, this should be on the top of the agenda. What happens to li-ion batteries is melt and destroy the environment.
Electric vehicles are everywhere now. It’s more than just Leafs, Teslas, and a wide variety of electric bikes. It’s also trains, busses, and in this case, gigantic dump trucks. This truck in particular is being put to work at a mine in Switzerland, and as a consequence of having an electric drivetrain is actually able to produce more power than it consumes. (Google Translate from Portugese)
This isn’t some impossible perpetual motion machine, either. The dump truck drives up a mountain with no load, and carries double the weight back down the mountain after getting loaded up with lime and marl to deliver to a cement plant. Since electric vehicles can recover energy through regenerative braking, rather than wasting that energy as heat in a traditional braking system, the extra weight on the way down actually delivers more energy to the batteries than the truck used on the way up the mountain.
The article claims that this is the largest electric vehicle in the world at 110 tons, and although we were not able to find anything larger except the occasional electric train, this is still an impressive feat of engineering that shows that electric vehicles have a lot more utility than novelties or simple passenger vehicles.
In southern France, 35 nations are collaborating to build the world’s largest tokamak, a magnetic fusion device that has been designed to prove the feasibility of fusion as a large-scale and carbon-free source of energy based on the same principle that powers our Sun and stars.
The experimental campaign that will be carried out at ITER is crucial to advancing fusion science and preparing the way for the fusion power plants of tomorrow.
ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. ITER will be the first fusion device to maintain fusion for long periods of time. And ITER will be the first fusion device to test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity.
Thousands of engineers and scientists have contributed to the design of ITER since the idea for an international joint experiment in fusion was first launched in 1985. The ITER Members—China, the European Union, India, Japan, Korea, Russia and the United States—are now engaged in a 35-year collaboration to build and operate the ITER experimental device, and together bring fusion to the point where a demonstration fusion reactor can be designed.
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Three conditions must be fulfilled to achieve fusion in a laboratory: very high temperature (on the order of 150,000,000° Celsius); sufficient plasma particle density (to increase the likelihood that collisions do occur); and sufficient confinement time (to hold the plasma, which has a propensity to expand, within a defined volume).
At extreme temperatures, electrons are separated from nuclei and a gas becomes a plasma—often referred to as the fourth state of matter. Fusion plasmas provide the environment in which light elements can fuse and yield energy.
In a tokamak device, powerful magnetic fields are used to confine and control the plasma.
[…]
The tokamak is an experimental machine designed to harness the energy of fusion. Inside a tokamak, the energy produced through the fusion of atoms is absorbed as heat in the walls of the vessel. Just like a conventional power plant, a fusion power plant will use this heat to produce steam and then electricity by way of turbines and generators.
The heart of a tokamak is its doughnut-shaped vacuum chamber. Inside, under the influence of extreme heat and pressure, gaseous hydrogen fuel becomes a plasma—the very environment in which hydrogen atoms can be brought to fuse and yield energy. (You can read more on this particular state of matter here.) The charged particles of the plasma can be shaped and controlled by the massive magnetic coils placed around the vessel; physicists use this important property to confine the hot plasma away from the vessel walls. The term “tokamak” comes to us from a Russian acronym that stands for “toroidal chamber with magnetic coils.”
First developed by Soviet research in the late 1960s, the tokamak has been adopted around the world as the most promising configuration of magnetic fusion device. ITER will be the world’s largest tokamak—twice the size of the largest machine currently in operation, with ten times the plasma chamber volume.
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Taken together, the ITER Members represent three continents, over 40 languages, half of the world’s population and 85 percent of global gross domestic product. In the offices of the ITER Organization and those of the seven Domestic Agencies, in laboratories and in industry, literally thousands of people are working toward the success of ITER.
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ITER’s First Plasma is scheduled for December 2025.
That will be the first time the machine is powered on, and the first act of ITER’s multi-decade operational program.
On a cleared, 42-hectare site in the south of France, building has been underway since 2010. The ground support structure and the seismic foundations of the ITER Tokamak are in place and work is underway on the Tokamak Complex—a suite of three buildings that will house the fusion experiments. Auxiliary plant buildings such as the ITER cryoplant, the radio frequency heating building, and facilities for cooling water, power conversion, and power supply are taking shape all around the central construction site.
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ITER Timeline
2005
Decision to site the project in France
2006
Signature of the ITER Agreement
2007
Formal creation of the ITER Organization
2007-2009
Land clearing and levelling
2010-2014
Ground support structure and seismic foundations for the Tokamak
2012
Nuclear licensing milestone: ITER becomes a Basic Nuclear Installation under French law
2014-2021
Construction of the Tokamak Building (access for assembly activities in 2019)
2010-2021
Construction of the ITER plant and auxiliary buildings for First Plasma
2008-2021
Manufacturing of principal First Plasma components
2015-2023
Largest components are transported along the ITER Itinerary
2020-2025
Main assembly phase I
2022
Torus completion
2024
Cryostat closure
2024-2025
Integrated commissioning phase (commissioning by system starts several years earlier)
Dec 2025
First Plasma
2026
Begin installation of in-vessel components
2035
Deuterium-Tritium Operation begins
Throughout the ITER construction phase, the Council will closely monitor the performance of the ITER Organization and the Domestic Agencies through a series of high-level project milestones. See the Milestones page for a series of incremental milestones on the way to First Plasma.
From the FAQ: The EU seems to be paying $17bn (and is responsible for almost half the project costs). There is around $1bn in deactivation and decomissioning costs, making the total around $35bn – as far as they can figure out. That’s a staggering science project!
Russia’s first floating nuclear power plant sailed Friday to its destination on the nation’s Arctic coast, a project that environmentalists have criticized as unsafe.
The Akademik Lomonosov is a 140-meter (459-foot) long towed platform that carries two 35-megawatt nuclear reactors. On Friday, it set out from the Arctic port of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula on a three-week journey to Pevek on the Chukotka Peninsula more than 4,900 kilometers (about 2,650 nautical miles) east.
Its purpose is to provide power for the area, replacing the Bilibino nuclear power plant on Chukotka that is being decommissioned.
The Russian project is the first floating nuclear power plant since the U.S. MH-1A, a much smaller reactor that supplied the Panama Canal with power from 1968-1975.
Environmentalists have criticized the project as inherently dangerous and a threat to the pristine Arctic region. Russia’s state nuclear corporation Rosatom has dismissed those concerns, insisting that the floating nuclear plant is safe to operate.
Rosatom director, Alexei Likhachev, said his corporation hopes to sell floating reactors to foreign markets. Russian officials have previously mentioned Indonesia and Sudan among potential export customers.
Electricity output was curtailed at six reactors by 0840 GMT on Thursday, while two other reactors were offline, data showed. High water temperatures and sluggish flows limit the ability to use river water to cool reactors.
In Germany, PreussenElektra, the nuclear unit of utility E.ON, said it would take its Grohnde reactor offline on Friday due to high temperatures in the Weser river.
The second heatwave in successive months to hit western Europe is expected to peak on Thursday with record temperatures seen in several towns in France.
Utility EDF, which operates France’s 58 nuclear reactors, said that generation at its Bugey, St-Alban and Tricastin nuclear power plants may be curbed until after July 26 because of the low flow rate and high temperatures of the Rhone.
Its two reactors at the 2,600 megawatt (MW) Golfech nuclear power plant in the south of France were offline due to high temperatures on the Garonne river.
EDF’s use of water from rivers as a coolant is regulated by law to protect plant and animal life and it is obliged to cut output in hot weather when water temperatures rise, or when river levels and flow rates are low.
Atomic power from France’s 58 reactors accounts for over 75 percent of its electricity needs. Available nuclear power supply was down 1.4 percentage points at 65.3% of total capacity compared with Wednesday.
A spokeswoman for grid operator RTE said that although electricity demand was expected to rise due to increased consumption for cooling, France had enough generation capacity to cover demand. Peak power demand could be above 59.7 GW reached the previous day.
The ever-more-humble carbon nanotube may be just the device to make solar panels—and anything else that loses energy through heat—far more efficient.
Rice University scientists are designing arrays of aligned single-wall carbon nanotubes to channel mid-infrared radiation (aka heat) and greatly raise the efficiency of solar energy systems.
Gururaj Naik and Junichiro Kono of Rice’s Brown School of Engineering introduced their technology in ACS Photonics.
Their invention is a hyperbolic thermal emitter that can absorb intense heat that would otherwise be spewed into the atmosphere, squeeze it into a narrow bandwidth and emit it as light that can be turned into electricity.
The discovery rests on another by Kono’s group in 2016 when it found a simple method to make highly aligned, wafer-scale films of closely packed nanotubes.
[…]
The aligned nanotube films are conduits that absorb waste heat and turn it into narrow-bandwidth photons. Because electrons in nanotubes can only travel in one direction, the aligned films are metallic in that direction while insulating in the perpendicular direction, an effect Naik called hyperbolic dispersion. Thermal photons can strike the film from any direction, but can only leave via one.
“Instead of going from heat directly to electricity, we go from heat to light to electricity,” Naik said. “It seems like two stages would be more efficient than three, but here, that’s not the case.”
[…]
Naik said adding the emitters to standard solar cells could boost their efficiency from the current peak of about 22%. “By squeezing all the wasted thermal energy into a small spectral region, we can turn it into electricity very efficiently,” he said. “The theoretical prediction is that we can get 80% efficiency.”
Nanotube films suit the task because they stand up to temperatures as high as 1,700 degrees Celsius (3,092 degrees Fahrenheit). Naik’s team built proof-of-concept devices that allowed them to operate at up to 700 C (1,292 F) and confirm their narrow-band output. To make them, the team patterned arrays of submicron-scale cavities into the chip-sized films.
Spanish renewable energy giant and offshore wind energy leader Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy last week inaugurated operations of its electrothermal energy storage system which can store up to 130 megawatt-hours of electricity for a week in volcanic rock.
[…]
The heat storage facility consists of around 1,000 tonnes of volcanic rock which is used as the storage medium. The rock is fed with electrical energy which is then converted into hot air by means of a resistance heater and a blower that, in turn, heats the rock to 750°C/1382 °F. When demand requires the stored energy, ETES uses a steam turbine to re-electrify the stored energy and feeds it back into the grid.
The new ETES facility in Hamburg-Altenwerder can store up to 130 MWh of thermal energy for a week, and storage capacity remains constant throughout the charging cycles.
This week the world’s first and only digital circuit breaker was certified for commercial use. The technology, invented by Atom Power, has been listed by Underwriters Laboratories (UL), the global standard for consumer safety. This new breaker makes power easier to manage and 3000 times faster than the fastest mechanical breaker, marking the most radical advancement in power distribution since Thomas Edison.
Picture the fuse box in your basement, each switch assigned to different electrical components of your home. These switches are designed to break a circuit to prevent the overloaded wires in your wall from overheating and causing a fire. When this happens, you plod down to your mechanical room and flick the switches on again.
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His experienced based inquiry has revolved around a central assertion that analog infrastructure doesn’t allow us to control our power the way we should be able to. That idea has led to some pretty critical questions: “What would it take to make power systems controllable?” and “Why shouldn’t that control be built in to the circuit breaker itself
[…]
Instead of using mechanics to switch the power, we apply digital inputs,” Kennedy told Popular Mechanics. “Now I have no moving parts. Now I have the ability to connect things like iPhones and iPads for remote power management, which increases safety and improves efficiency. I can set the distribution panel to a schedule so the flow of power is seamless, unlimited, and shifts between sources automatically. You literally wouldn’t notice. The lights wouldn’t even flicker.”
[…]
For a grid-connected solar home, for example, residents sometimes have to disconnect their solar input because traditional power systems (including the circuit breakers) aren’t advanced enough to properly manage multiple power sources that change.
In short, “the modern world has outgrown the risks and constraints of traditional circuit breakers”—a company claim, but also a compelling fact when you consider these inefficiencies and the dangers of a system that requires manual remediation of power surges and failures.
“Old school breakers simply can’t operate as fast as the flow of power,” says Kennedy. “When things go wrong in larger buildings, they go really wrong because you typically have a much bigger source feeding that demand.”
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Poor energy management results in 30,000 electrical hazard accidents per year. Arc flash events can take out an entire building for weeks. Due to their ability to interrupt 100,000 amps with unprecedented speed, digital breakers effectively eliminate these risks, resulting in “the safest, fastest, most intelligent system to date.”
The obvious drawback of solar panels is that they require sunlight to generate electricity. Some have observed that for a device on Earth facing space, which has a frigid temperature, the chilling outflow of energy from the device can be harvested using the same kind of optoelectronic physics we have used to harness solar energy. New work, in a recent issue of Applied Physics Letters, looks to provide a potential path to generating electricity like solar cells but that can power electronics at night.
An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity.
[…]
By pointing their device toward space, whose temperature approaches mere degrees from absolute zero, the group was able to find a great enough temperature difference to generate power through an early design.
“The amount of power that we can generate with this experiment, at the moment, is far below what the theoretical limit is,” said Masashi Ono, another author on the paper.
[…]
Calculations made after the diode created electricity showed that, when atmospheric effects are taken into consideration, the current device can theoretically generate almost 4 watts per square meter, roughly one million times what the group’s device generated and enough to help power machinery that is required to run at night.
By comparison, today’s solar panels generate 100 to 200 watts per square meter.
While the results show promise for ground-based devices directed to the sky, Fan said the same principle could be used to recover waste heat from machines. For now, he and his group are focusing on improving their device‘s performance.
A technology that removes carbon dioxide from the air has received significant backing from major fossil fuel companies.British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way.It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.
[…]
The quest for technology for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the air received significant scientific endorsement last year with the publication of the IPCC report on keeping the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C this century.
In their “summary for policymakers”, the scientists stated that: “All pathways that limit global warming to 1.5C with limited or no overshoot project the use of CDR …over the 21st century.”
Around the world, a number of companies are racing to develop the technology that can draw down carbon. Swiss company Climeworks is already capturing CO2 and using it to boost vegetable production.
Carbon Engineering says that its direct air capture (DAC) process is now able to capture the gas for under $100 a tonne.
With its new funding, the company plans to build its first commercial facilities. These industrial-scale DAC plants could capture up to one million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year.
So how does this system work?
CO2 is a powerful warming gas but there’s not a lot of it in the atmosphere – for every million molecules of air, there are 410 of CO2.
While the CO2 is helping to drive temperatures up around the world, the comparatively low concentrations make it difficult to design efficient machines to remove the gas.
Carbon Engineering’s process is all about sucking in air and exposing it to a chemical solution that concentrates the CO2. Further refinements mean the gas can be purified into a form that can be stored or utilised as a liquid fuel.
[…]
The captured CO2 is mixed with hydrogen that’s made from water and green electricity. It’s then passed over a catalyst at 900C to form carbon monoxide. Adding in more hydrogen to the carbon monoxide turns it into what’s called synthesis gas.
Finally a Fischer-Tropsch process turns this gas into a synthetic crude oil. Carbon Engineering says the liquid can be used in a variety of engines without modification.
“The fuel that we make has no sulphur in it, it has these nice linear chains which means it burns cleaner than traditional fuel,” said Dr McCahill.
“It’s nice and clear and ready to be used in a truck, car or jet.”
[…]
CO2 can also be used to flush out the last remaining deposits of oil in wells that are past their prime. The oil industry in the US has been using the gas in this way for decades.
It’s estimated that using CO2 can deliver an extra 30% of crude from oilfields with the added benefit that the gas is then sequestered permanently in the ground.
“Carbon Engineering’s direct air capture technology has the unique capability to capture and provide large volumes of atmospheric CO2,” said Occidental Petroleum’s Senior Vice President, Richard Jackson, in a statement.
“This capability complements Occidental’s enhanced oil recovery business and provides further synergies by enabling large-scale CO2 utilisation and sequestration.”
One of the other investors in Carbon Engineering is BHP, best known for its coal mining interests.
“The reality is that fossil fuels will be around for several decades whether in industrial processes or in transportation,” said Dr Fiona Wild, BHP’s head of sustainability and climate change.
“What we need to do is invest in those low-emission technologies that can significantly reduce the emissions from these processes, and that’s why we are focusing on carbon capture and storage.”
The research team led by RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, developed a new technique using a liquid metal electrolysis method which efficiently converts CO2 from a gas into solid particles of carbon.
Published in the journal Nature Communications, the authors say their technology offers an alternative pathway for “safely and permanently” removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Current carbon capture techniques involve turning the gas into a liquid and injecting it underground, but its use is not widespread due to issues around economic viability, and environmental concerns about leaks from the storage site.
The new technique results in solid flakes of carbon, similar to coal, which may be easier to store safely.
To convert CO2, the researchers designed a liquid metal catalyst with specific surface properties that made it extremely efficient at conducting electricity while chemically activating the surface.
The carbon dioxide is dissolved in a beaker filled with an electrolyte liquid along with a small amount of the liquid metal, which is then charged with an electrical current.
The CO2 slowly converts into solid flakes, which are naturally detached from the liquid metal surface, allowing for continuous production.
RMIT researcher Dr Torben Daeneke said: “While we can’t literally turn back time, turning carbon dioxide back into coal and burying it back in the ground is a bit like rewinding the emissions clock.”
“To date, CO2 has only been converted into a solid at extremely high temperatures, making it industrially unviable.
“By using liquid metals as a catalyst, we’ve shown it’s possible to turn the gas back into carbon at room temperature, in a process that’s efficient and scalable.
“While more research needs to be done, it’s a crucial first step to delivering solid storage of carbon.”
Lead author, Dr Dorna Esrafilzadeh said the carbon produced by the technique could also be used as an electrode.
“A side benefit of the process is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so it could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles,” she said.
“The process also produces synthetic fuel as a by-product, which could also have industrial applications.”
For most of the industrial era, a nation’s carbon emissions moved in lock step with its economy. Growth meant higher emissions. But over the past decade or so, that has changed. Even as the global economy continued to grow, carbon emissions remained flat or dropped a bit.
It would be simple to ascribe this trend o the explosion in renewable energy, but reality is rarely so simple. Countries like China saw explosive growth in both renewables and fossil-fuel use; Germany and Japan expanded renewables even as they slashed nuclear power; and in the United States, the federal government has been MIA, leading to a chaotic mix of state and local efforts. So it’s worth taking a careful look into what exactly might be causing the drop in emissions.
That’s precisely what an international group of researchers has now done, analyzing what’s gone on in 79 countries, including some that have dropped emissions, and others that have not. The researchers find that renewable energy use is a big factor, but so is reduced energy use overall. And for both of these factors, government policy appears to play a large role.
Who’s losing?
The researchers started by identifying countries that show a “peak and decline” pattern of carbon emissions since the 1990s. They came up with 18, all but one of them in Europe—the exception is the United States. For comparison, they created two different control groups of 30 countries, neither of which has seen emissions decline. One group saw high GDP growth, while the second saw moderate economic growth; in the past, these would have been associated with corresponding changes in emissions.
Within each country, the researchers looked into whether there were government energy policies that could influence the trajectory of emissions. They also examined four items that could drive changes in emissions: total energy use, share of energy provided by fossil fuels, the carbon intensity of the overall energy mix, and efficiency (as measured by energy losses during use).
On average, emissions in the decline group dropped by 2.4 percent over the decade between 2005 and 2015.
Half of this drop came from lowering the percentage of fossil fuels used, with renewables making a large contribution; another 35 percent came from a drop in energy use. But the most significant factor varied from country to country. Austria, Finland, and Sweden saw a drop in the share of fossil fuels within their energy mix. In contrast, a drop in total energy use was the biggest factor for France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The US was an odd one out, with all four possible factors playing significant roles in causing emissions to drop.
For the two control groups, however, there was a single dominant factor: total energy use counted for 75 and 80 percent of the change in the low- and high-economic growth groups, respectively. But there was considerably more variability in the low-economic growth group. All of the high-growth group saw increased energy use contribute 60 percent of the growth in emissions or more. In contrast, some of the low-growth group actually saw their energy use drop.
Policy-driven change
So why are some countries so successful at dropping their emissions? Part of it is likely to be economic growth. While the countries did experience economic expansion over the study period, the growth was quite low (a bit over 1 percent), which implies that a booming economy could potentially reverse this progress.
But that’s likely to be only part of the answer. By 2015, the countries in the group that saw declining emissions had an average of 35 policies that promoted renewable energy and another 23 that promoted energy efficiency. Both of those numbers are significantly higher than the averages for the control groups. And there’s evidence that these policies are effective. The number of pro-efficiency policies correlated with the drop in energy use, while the number of renewable policies correlated with the drop in the share of fossil fuels.
The control group of rapidly expanding economies did see an effect of renewable energy policies in that the fraction of fossil-fuel use dropped—emissions went up because the total energy use expanded faster than renewables could offset it. Similarly, conservation policies correlated with a drop in the energy intensity of per unit of GDP. So in both those cases, the evidence is consistent with policies keeping matters from being worse than they might have been otherwise.
Overall, the evidence is clearly consistent with the idea that pro-renewable and efficiency policies work, lowering total energy use and the role of fossil fuels in providing that energy. But we haven’t reached the point where they have a large-enough impact that they can consistently offset the emissions associated with economic growth. And even in countries where overall emissions do drop, the effect isn’t large enough to help them reach the sort of deep emissions cuts needed to reach the goals set forth in the Paris Agreement.
The analysis isn’t sufficient to tell us what would need to change in order to see more consistent and dramatic effects. Additional or stronger policies might do the trick, but it’s also possible that they’ll hit a ceiling. In addition, policies not considered here—those promoting carbon capture, for example—might ultimately become critical.
Ethereum mining consumes a quarter to half of what Bitcoin mining does, but that still means that for most of 2018 it was using roughly as much electricity as Iceland. Indeed, the typical Ethereum transaction gobbles more power than an average U.S. household uses in a day. “That’s just a huge waste of resources, even if you don’t believe that pollution and carbon dioxide are an issue. There are real consumers — real people — whose need for electricity is being displaced by this stuff,” says Vitalik Buterin, the 24-year-old Russian-Canadian computer scientist who invented Ethereum when he was just 18.
Buterin plans to finally start undoing his brainchild’s energy waste in 2019. This year Buterin, the Ethereum Foundation he cofounded, and the broader open-source movement advancing the cryptocurrency all plan to field-test a long-promised overhaul of Ethereum’s code. If these developers are right, by the end of 2019 Ethereum’s new code could complete transactions using just 1 percent of the energy consumed today.
n some states, solar energy accounts for upwards of 10 percent of total electricity generation. It’s definitely a source of power that’s on the rise, whether it be to lessen our dependence on fossil fuels, nuclear power, or the energy grid, or simply to take advantage of the low costs. This form of energy, however, is highly decentralized, so it’s tough to know how much solar energy is being extracted, where, and by whom.
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The system developed by Rajagopal, along with his colleagues Jiafan Yu and Zhecheng Wang, is called DeepSolar, and it’s an automated process whereby hi-res satellite photos are analyzed by an algorithm driven by machine learning. DeepSolar can identify solar panels, register their locations, and calculate their size. The system identified 1.47 million individual solar installations across the United States, whether they be small rooftop configurations, solar farms, or utility-scale systems. This exceeds the previous estimate of 1.02 million installations. The researchers have made this data available at an open-source website.
By using this new approach, the researchers were able to accurately scan billions of tiles of high-resolution satellite imagery covering the continental U.S., allowing them to classify and measure the size of solar systems in a few weeks rather than years, as per previous methods. Importantly, DeepSolar requires minimal human supervision.
DeepSolar map of solar panel usage across the United States.
Image: Deep Solar/Stanford University
“The algorithm breaks satellite images into tiles. Each tile is processed by a deep neural net to produce a classification for each pixel in a tile. These classifications are combined together to detect if a system—or part of—is present in the tile,” Rajagopal told Gizmodo.
The neural net can then determine which tile is a solar panel, and which is not. The network architecture is such that after training, the layers of the network produce an activation map, also known as a heat map, that outlines the panels. This can be used to obtain the size of each solar panel system.
