Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: energy – Page 112

Israel’s Brenmiller Energy has announced the opening of a “gigafactory” to manufacture the company’s thermal energy storage systems, which store power as heat and then provide users with energy on demand via steam. The company believes it to be the first factory in the world of its kind.

Thermal energy storage, true to its name, stores energy as heat — a crucial function as society transitions to renewable sources like solar and wind, sources that are now economically viable to gather but, alas, are as variable as the weather and seasons.

Brenmiller is angling for the new facility to be their primary production hub and plans to hit full capacity by the end of 2023.

Read more | >

A team from NIST and the University of Colorado Boulder have developed a novel device using gallium nitride nanopillars on silicon that significantly improves the conversion of heat into electricity. This could potentially recover large amounts of wasted heat energy, benefiting industries and power grids.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have fabricated a novel device that could dramatically boost the conversion of heat into electricity. If perfected, the technology could help recoup some of the heat energy that is wasted in the U.S. at a rate of about $100 billion each year.

The new fabrication technique — developed by NIST researcher Kris Bertness and her collaborators — involves depositing hundreds of thousands of microscopic columns of gallium nitride atop a silicon wafer. Layers of silicon are then removed from the underside of the wafer until only a thin sheet of the material remains. The interaction between the pillars and the silicon sheet slows the transport of heat in the silicon, enabling more of the heat to convert to electric current. Bertness and her collaborators at the University of Colorado Boulder recently reported the findings in the journal Advanced Materials.

Read more | >

The James Webb Space Telescope is so powerful that it can vividly see stars in a galaxy 17 million light-years away.

Astronomers pointed the most advanced space observatory ever built at the galaxy NGC 5,068, peering deep into its starry core. The greater goal is to better grasp how stars, like our energy-providing sun, form and evolve in galaxies. Crucially, Webb views a type of light that’s invisible to the naked eye, called infrared light. These long infrared light waves pierce through thick clouds of cosmic dust and gas, allowing us unprecedented views into galactic hearts.

“With its ability to peer through the gas and dust enshrouding newborn stars, Webb is the perfect telescope to explore the processes governing star formation,” the European Space Agency, which collaborates on the telescope with NASA and the Canadian Space Agency, wrote. Solar systems born enveloped in cosmic dust simply can’t be seen with visible light telescopes like Hubble, the space agency said.

Read more | >

The International Energy Agency just released its annual investment report. Here’s where the money is going.

Money makes the world go round.

The International Energy Agency just published its annual report on global investment in energy, where it tallies up all that cash. The world saw about $2.8 trillion of investments in energy in 2022, with about $1.7 trillion of that going into clean energy.

Read more | >

“For instance, in Japan, a battery tanker can carry power from regions with high renewable energy supply potential, such as Kyushu and Hokkaido, to high-demand areas of Honshu or for inter-island power transmission,” the company explained.

While electric propulsion vessels might be the future to decarbonize the shipping industry, there appears to be a need to haul stored renewable power to other grids worldwide via a new tanker class.

Read more | >

The quest to develop hydrogen as a clean energy source that could curb our dependence on fossil fuels may lead to an unexpected place—coal. A team of Penn State scientists found that coal may represent a potential way to store hydrogen gas, much like batteries store energy for future use, addressing a major hurdle in developing a clean energy supply chain.

“We found that can be this geological hydrogen battery,” said Shimin Liu, associate professor of energy and mineral engineering at Penn State. “You could inject and store the hydrogen energy and have it there when you need to use it.”

Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel and shows promise for use in the most energy intensive sectors of our economy—transportation, electricity generation and manufacturing. But much work remains to build a and make it an affordable and reliable energy source, the scientists said.

Read more | >

The 1st atomic bomb was nicknamed “gadget.”

Does this say something about who we are? Or does it say something about the nature of technology and the power to do good or evil?

Today we live in a universe of ever-more-powerful gadgets and humanity has never wielded more technological power because we live in the most scientifically advanced century in the history of our civilization. The paradox, however, is that ours is also the most dangerous century not only for countless other species going extinct but also for our own existence.

Read more | >