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The notorious E. coli bacteria plays a role in a "revolutionary" new artificial photosynthesis system that converts waste carbon dioxide into plastic...
Unhappy with any of the available methods of solar storage, a German inventor and engineer has put his favorite pastime of tinkering to good use. While others are attempting to build a better battery, Wolfram Walter is instead building a better way to use the batteries he already has.
It’s not a long stretch of the imagination for Walter. The inventive German has already modified his bicycle and his Porsche, upgrading both of them to EVs. Featured on PRI’s The World, Walter is described as “a man obsessed with things electric.”
"If we can nail this down it means that they value of the PV solar on the grid is no longer just in the sunshine hours, but in the whole 24-hours of the day," he said.
"It kills the argument put out there by the anti-renewable mob that they're intermittent and you can't rely on them… and it turns intermittent renewables like solar and wind into a direct competitor for base load power."
Rather than research new options for storage, Mr Troman said the trail will purchase batteries for testing that are already commercially available making the impact more immediate and maintaining the independence of the data.
Electric car maker Tesla's first foray into lithium-ion batteries for homes the Powerwall, announced last week featuring technology developed by Canberra start-up Reposit Power, could be part of the trials when it goes on the market.
China has a long range plan to develop nuclear power that is cheaper than coal. China will develop its own commercial scale fast reactor in 2023 with a more advanced version in 2030. They will then scale up production as part of a build up to around 400 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2050. This would be four times more than the nuclear power...
A company in Sweden is claiming to have designed a system that can convert 34% of sunlight into solar energy, potentially changing the future of solar power.
Ripasso, the company behind the development, is currently testing the product in South Africa’s Kalahari desert. The 34% power conversion is around double that of normal solar panels, reports The Guardian.
Wood pulp-derived nanocellulose is turning out to be pretty useful stuff. Previously, we'd heard how it could be used in things like high-strength lightweight composites, oil-absorbing sponges and biodegradable computer chips. Now, researchers from Sweden and the US have used the material to build soft-bodied batteries that are more shock- and stress-resistant than their traditional hard counterparts.
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have for the first time simulated the formation of structures called "plasmoids" during Coaxial Helicity Injection (CHI), a process that could simplify the design of fusion facilities known as tokamaks. The findings, reported in the journal Physical Review Letters, involve the formation of plasmoids in the hot, charged plasma gas that fuels fusion reactions. These round structures carry current that could eliminate the need for solenoids - large magnetic coils that wind down the center of today's tokamaks - to initiate the plasma and complete the magnetic field that confines the hot gas.
"Understanding this behavior will help us produce plasmas that undergo fusion reactions indefinitely," said Fatima Ebrahimi, a physicist at both Princeton University and PPPL, and the paper's lead author.
(Phys.org)—In a new study, scientists have reported a world record stabilized efficiency of 13.6% for a triple-junction thin-film silicon solar cell, which is a newer version of the single-junction thin-film silicon solar cell that has been used in commercial products since the 1970s. This value edges out the previous record of 13.44%, and the researchers expect that a few reasonable improvements will push it above 14%.
The experiment set-up with powder fuels (Ni + 10%(in weight)LiAlH4) is 20 grams filled in a nickel cell，located in the stainless-steel reaction chamber. The existing heater is made of nichrome wire, which is wound on a ceramic tube. A stabilized DC power supply is used. The heater is surrounded by MgO thermal insulation material, which is filled in an aluminum hollow cylindrical jacket with inner-diameter of 55 mm, outer-diameter of 25 cm and 40 cm long. The temperature is measured by stainless steel shielded K-type thermocouples. The thermocouple T1 is located on the outer surface of the stainless-steel reaction chamber, T2 is placed in contact with outer surface of the nickel cell and T3 is inserted inside container in contact with the fuel powders. The experiment was carried out in 4-8 May.
The experiment was carried out in 4-8 May, 2015, lasted 96 hours. In the first day, the reaction chamber was vacuumed to 10-4 mbar, and then was heated up. The LiAlH4 was degassed, and the upper pressure in the chamber reached 400 kPa at temperatures of 150-300 0C or so. Then the pressure went down to -90 kPa in subsequent 18-hours. In the next day, when the temperature of thermocouple T3 was increased to about 950 0C by tuning electric power to 900 W, the temperature of thermocouple in the fuel cell increased rapidly
First Solar has achieved 18.6% aperture conversion efficiency for its full size cadmium-telluride (CdTe) photovoltaic (PV) module.
Certified by the US Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the new record of 18.6% aperture area efficiency relates to a full area conversion efficiency of 18.2%.
The achievement overcomes the previous record of approximate full area efficiency of 17.7% of multi-crystalline Si PERC module.
First Solar CEO Raffi Garabedian said: "First Solar's CdTe thin film is now rightly categorized as a high performance product.
"At one time, we might have been characterized as a low cost, low efficiency technology, but consistent with our technology projections we are now proving that CdTe thin film delivers both industry-leading performance AND sustainable thin-film cost structures.
An advanced manufacturing approach for lithium-ion batteries, developed by researchers at MIT and at a spinoff company called 24M, promises to significantly slash the cost of the most widely used type of rechargeable batteries while also improving their performance and making them easier to recycle.
"We've reinvented the process," says Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Ceramics at MIT and a co-founder of 24M (and previously a co-founder of battery company A123). The existing process formanufacturing lithium-ion batteries, he says, has hardly changed in the two decades since the technology was invented, and is inefficient, with more steps and components than are really needed.
The new process is based on a concept developed five years ago by Chiang and colleagues including W. Craig Carter, the POSCO Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. In this so-called "flow battery," the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid and pumped through various compartments of the battery.
The new battery design is a hybrid between flow batteries and conventional solid ones: In this version, while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles. Chiang and Carter refer to this as a "semisolid battery."
A research group led by Dr. Liyuan Han, the leader of the Photovoltaic Materials Unit at the National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS, Sukekatsu Ushioda, president) achieved 15% energy conversion efficiency in perovskite solar cells for the first time in the world as officially recognized by an international public test center.
The most conversion efficiencies in perovskite solar cells reported thus far had been measured using small-sized cells (about 0.1 cm2). A conversion efficiency of 20.1% has been reported previously, but the measurement error was large in that study due to the small-sized cells used (0.0955 cm2) and the report did not present the measurement method. To steadily advance R&D of perovskite solar cells based on reliable data, it is an important issue to measure the conversion efficiencies at international public test center.
The research group attained increased conversion efficiency and reproducibility of perovskite solar cells by controlling morphology of perovskite layer with new fabricating method. In addition, since the conventional material used for a charge carrier transport layer is hydrophilic, the conversion efficiency of the cell deteriorates rapidly. Here, we developed a new charge transport material which shows hydrophobicity and high carrier mobility, and successfully improved the stability of perovskite solar cells with this new material. Based on these results, we expanded the solar cell to more than 1 cm square and improved the method to create the device. As a result, we achieved 15% conversion efficiency in perovskite solar cells for the first time in the world certified by the international public test center (Calibration, Standards and Measurement Team at the Research Center for Photovoltaics, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology).
The United States may add small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs) to its energy portfolio in the next ten years, US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said at the 2015 Energy Information Agency conference on Monday.
"We are hoping we will see the first of these units [SMRs], particularly right now one in the 50 Mega Watt (MW) scale, deployed early in the next decade," Moniz stated.
The US Department of Energy remains "very interested" in testing the deployment of small modular reactors to assess the safety and environmental benefits, Moniz noted, adding that the SMRs present other advantages because of their relatively low capital costs per unit.
SMRs are smaller, factory produced units designed to provide electricity in areas that are isolated or may have smaller electric grids, or where water and space are limited. SMR energy production can range up to 300MW, under current designs.
