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(Phys.org) —A cutting-edge battery technology developed at the University of Colorado Boulder that could allow tomorrow's electric vehicles to travel twice as far on a charge is now closer to becoming a commercial reality
One commonly touted problem electric cars have always faced is the lack of stations to charge them on long drives. As our own Evan Ackerman reported two years back, the Chevy Volt has a way of dealing with this issue. “After you run out of battery power, a small four-cylinder engine runs a generator to extend the range of the car for another 300 or 400 miles, and you can always just keep putting more gas into it to keep on going,” he writes.
But what if it simply wasn’t an issue? What if the car could go 300 or 400 miles without a recharge? That would make it pretty difficult to argue against the electric car, so it’s exactly what Tesla Motors went ahead and did: it patented a battery that can allegedly keep a car running for 400 miles.
Cool in a few years that means they might be halfway there!!
Soitec, a consistent leader in concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) efficiency and commercial development, this month announced that it had set a 31.8% CPV commercial module efficiency record.
“Soitec’s new module, which is already in industrial volume production, has the highest efficiency of any commercial product available for multi-megawatt installations,” the company noted in a press release.
“Using an optimized anti-reflective coating, Soitec’s CX-M500 module increases nominal peak power output over previous generations from 2,335 Wp to 2,450 Wp. The new module has been certified according to the International Electrotechnical Commission‘s (IEC)and Underwriters Laboratories‘ (UL) standards (IEC 62108, IEC 62688, UL 62108 and UL SU 8703), confirming that it meets product safety, performance and reliability requirements in both the US and European markets.”
Cool in a few years that means they might be halfway there!!
They are there now. Since the Tesla's batteries are removable, you can replace them with higher capacity batteries as such come on the market. It takes about 2 minutes to replace a Tesla battery. Try that with your ICE's engine.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems ISE, Soitec, CEA-Leti and the Helmholtz Center Berlin jointly announced today having achieved a new world record for the conversion of sunlight into electricity using a new solar cell structure with four solar subcells. Surpassing competition after only over three years of research, and entering the roadmap at world class level, a new record efficiency of 44.7% was measured at a concentration of 297 suns. This indicates that 44.7% of the solar spectrum's energy, from ultraviolet through to the infrared, is converted into electrical energy. This is a major step towards reducing further the costs of solar electricity and continues to pave the way to the 50% efficiency roadmap.
Back in May 2013, the German-French team of Fraunhofer ISE, Soitec, CEA-Leti and the Helmholtz Center Berlin had already announced a solar cell with 43.6% efficiency. Building on this result, further intensive research work and optimization steps led to the present efficiency of 44.7%.
Tesla patents an electric car battery that'll last 400 miles
One commonly touted problem electric cars have always faced is the lack of stations to charge them on long drives. As our own Evan Ackerman reported two years back, the Chevy Volt has a way of dealing with this issue. “After you run out of battery power, a small four-cylinder engine runs a generator to extend the range of the car for another 300 or 400 miles, and you can always just keep putting more gas into it to keep on going,” he writes.
But what if it simply wasn’t an issue? What if the car could go 300 or 400 miles without a recharge? That would make it pretty difficult to argue against the electric car, so it’s exactly what Tesla Motors went ahead and did: it patented a battery that can allegedly keep a car running for 400 miles.
Tesla patents an electric car battery that'll last 400 miles | DVICE
If you take even one vacation yes you do. So that's almost 100%. Not really the issue though.
Many families have a second vehicle or rent one for unusual events like that.
Read more at Bio-based Nylon Could Reduce Climate Change Emissions 85% Compared To Petroleum-based | CleanTechnicaCalifornia-based Rennovia develops chemicals and chemical processes that are bio-renewable to replace petrochemical production. In a press release, they announced that they have produced a 100% bio-based nylon polymer. Compared with petroleum-based adipic acid, which is used in making nylon polymer 6,6, using their bio-based version could reduce climate change emissions by 85%.
Scientists have created a heat-resistant thermal emitter that could significantly improve the efficiency of solar cells. The novel component is designed to convert heat from the sun into infrared light, which can than be absorbed by solar cells to make electricity -- a technology known as thermophotovoltaics. Unlike earlier prototypes that fell apart at temperatures below 2200 degrees Fahrenheit (1200 degrees Celsius), the new thermal emitter remains stable at temperatures as high as 2500 F (1400 C). "This is a record performance in terms of thermal stability and a major advance for the field of thermophotovoltaics," said Shanhui Fan, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University. Fan and his colleagues at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign (Illinois) and North Carolina State University collaborated on the project. Their results are published in the October 16 edition of the journal Nature Communications.
A typical solar cell has a silicon semiconductor that absorbs sunlight directly and converts it into electrical energy. But silicon semiconductors only respond to infrared light. Higher-energy light waves, including most of the visible light spectrum, are wasted as heat, while lower-energy waves simply pass through the solar panel.
"In theory, conventional single-junction solar cells can only achieve an efficiency level of about 34 percent, but in practice they don't achieve that," said study co-author Paul Braun, a professor of materials science at Illinois. "That's because they throw away the majority of the sun's energy."
Thermophotovoltaic devices are designed to overcome that limitation. Instead of sending sunlight directly to the solar cell, thermophotovoltaic systems have an intermediate component that consists of two parts: an absorber that heats up when exposed to sunlight, and an emitter that converts the heat to infrared light, which is then beamed to the solar cell.
Conventional solar cells based on photovoltaic technology have come a long way in recent years, but they’re still missing a big chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum. The silicon semiconductors in a solar cell are geared toward taking infrared light and converting it directly to electricity. Meanwhile, the visible spectrum is lost as heat and longer wavelengths pass through unexploited. A new nano-material being developed by a group of researchers spread across the country could act as a “thermal emitter,” making solar power significantly more efficient by scooping up more of that wasted energy.
Carbon-negative energy, a reality at last -- and cheap, too | Cutting Edge - CNET NewsIn Berkeley, Calif., All Power Labs is turning out machines that convert cheap and abundant biomass into clean energy and rich, efficient charcoal fertilizer.
BERKELEY, Calif. -- In 2007, officials from this famously liberal city shut off the electricity to an artists space known as the Shipyard. That action, which forced the artists there to seek a new way to power their flamethrowers, is the origin story of a company that now produces what it says is the world's only carbon-negative power source.
Located in one of the grittiest areas of town, where train tracks, garbage, and broken down cars are far more prevalent than the hippies Berkeley is famous for, All Power Labs has set up shop inside the Shipyard. Run by CEO Jim Mason -- who owns the space -- the 5-year-old startup now produces technology used to transform dense biomass like corn husks or wood chips into clean, sustainable, and cheap energy.All Power Labs makes machines that use an ancient process called gasification to turn out not only carbon-neutral energy, but also a carbon-rich charcoal by-product that just happens to be a fertilizer so efficient that Tom Price, the company's director of strategic initiatives, calls it "plant crack."
Gasification, in which dense biomass smoldering -- but not combusting -- in a low-oxygen environment is converted to hydrogen gas, is nothing new. Price said that ancient cultures used it to enrich their soils, and during World War II, a million vehicles utilized the technology. But after the war, it more or less vanished from the planet, for reasons unknown. Until Mason needed a way to power his flamethrowers, that is.
All Power Labs has taken gasification and combined it with two of the Bay Area's most valuable commodities -- a rich maker culture and cutting-edge programming skills -- to produce what are called PowerPallets. Feed a bunch of walnut shells or wood chips into these $27,000 machines and you get fully clean energy at less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour, a fraction of what other green power sources can cost.
Significant improvements to the efficiency of solar cells could be possible in the near-future thanks to the recent development of a new heat-resistant thermal emitter by researchers at Stanford University.
The new heat-resistant thermal emitter was created as a means of converting the higher-energy portion of light into lower energy waves which can then be absorbed by the solar cells and converted into electricity, along with the lower energy portions that most solar cells convert. Technologies such as this — more broadly known as thermophotovoltaics — have been around for quite some time, but have, until now, possessed a number of important limitations that this new device seems to overcome.
It should be noted that utility company's control the amount of power being fed back onto the grid from separately derived systems. All "grid-tie" systems are required to have a transfer switch to control when the energy can be fed back onto the grid.Researchers Design a New Low Cost Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery
Researchers Design a New Low Cost Lithium-Polysulfide Flow Battery | SciTech Daily
May 24, 2013 by Staff
Menlo Park, California Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energys (DOE) SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have designed a low-cost, long-life battery that could enable solar and wind energy to become major suppliers to the electrical grid.
For solar and wind power to be used in a significant way, we need a battery made of economical materials that are easy to scale and still efficient, said Yi Cui, a Stanford associate professor of materials science and engineering and a member of the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, a SLAC/Stanford joint institute. We believe our new battery may be the best yet designed to regulate the natural fluctuations of these alternative energies.
Cui and colleagues report their research results, some of the earliest supported by the DOEs new Joint Center for Energy Storage Research battery hub, in the May issue of Energy & Environmental Science.
In this video, Stanford graduate student Wesley Zheng demonstrates the new low-cost, long-lived flow battery he helped create. The researchers created this miniature system using simple glassware. Adding a lithium polysulfide solution to the flask immediately produces electricity that lights an LED. A utility version of the new battery would be scaled up to store many megawatt-hours of energy. Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Currently the electrical grid cannot tolerate large and sudden power fluctuations caused by wide swings in sunlight and wind. As solar and winds combined contributions to an electrical grid approach 20 percent, energy storage systems must be available to smooth out the peaks and valleys of this intermittent power storing excess energy and discharging when input drops.
Carbon-negative energy, a reality at last -- and cheap, too
Carbon-negative energy, a reality at last -- and cheap, too | Cutting Edge - CNET NewsIn Berkeley, Calif., All Power Labs is turning out machines that convert cheap and abundant biomass into clean energy and rich, efficient charcoal fertilizer.
BERKELEY, Calif. -- In 2007, officials from this famously liberal city shut off the electricity to an artists space known as the Shipyard. That action, which forced the artists there to seek a new way to power their flamethrowers, is the origin story of a company that now produces what it says is the world's only carbon-negative power source.
Located in one of the grittiest areas of town, where train tracks, garbage, and broken down cars are far more prevalent than the hippies Berkeley is famous for, All Power Labs has set up shop inside the Shipyard. Run by CEO Jim Mason -- who owns the space -- the 5-year-old startup now produces technology used to transform dense biomass like corn husks or wood chips into clean, sustainable, and cheap energy.All Power Labs makes machines that use an ancient process called gasification to turn out not only carbon-neutral energy, but also a carbon-rich charcoal by-product that just happens to be a fertilizer so efficient that Tom Price, the company's director of strategic initiatives, calls it "plant crack."
Gasification, in which dense biomass smoldering -- but not combusting -- in a low-oxygen environment is converted to hydrogen gas, is nothing new. Price said that ancient cultures used it to enrich their soils, and during World War II, a million vehicles utilized the technology. But after the war, it more or less vanished from the planet, for reasons unknown. Until Mason needed a way to power his flamethrowers, that is.
All Power Labs has taken gasification and combined it with two of the Bay Area's most valuable commodities -- a rich maker culture and cutting-edge programming skills -- to produce what are called PowerPallets. Feed a bunch of walnut shells or wood chips into these $27,000 machines and you get fully clean energy at less than 10 cents a kilowatt hour, a fraction of what other green power sources can cost.
