Lifeboat Foundation

How China can boost its carbon neutrality efforts by ensuring renewables account for more than 50% of the power supply for aluminium production by 2045.

Decarbonizing the power supply for primary aluminium is critical for the sector to reach net zero. Electricity used during aluminium smelting – the process of extracting the metal from its ore – accounts for more than 60% of the industry’s carbon emissions.

It is particularly important to control the carbon emissions of China’s production of primary aluminium, which comes directly from mined ore rather than using recycled or alloy materials. Primary aluminium produced and consumed in China accounts for approximately 60% of the global market. Due to the high proportion of coal-fired energy used, 12.7 tonnes of carbon is emitted per tonne of aluminium produced in China, versus a global average of 10.3 tonnes, according to the latest figures, which cover the 2005 to 2019 period. This is why decarbonizing the power supply for Chinese primary aluminium production is critical.

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Gao Jifan said he sees solar dropping to a third or less of current costs by the middle of the century.

A 3D printer that uses lasers to build up an object in any order, rather than layer by layer, could produce more advanced designs than is currently possible.

Existing 3D printers work by depositing layers of a plastic filament from a nozzle or by curing layers of resin with UV light. In both cases objects are built up one layer at a time, meaning that overhanging parts of a structure – the outstretched arms of a model human, say – must be propped up by temporary supports until printing is complete. These supports must then be carefully removed manually.

To get around this, Dan Congreve at Stanford University in California and his colleagues created a 3D-printing system that involves focusing a red laser at a particular point in a pool of resin. The resin is impregnated with particles 80 nanometres wide that convert red light into blue once the light hits a certain energy threshold, which only occurs at the point where the red laser is precisely focused.

Imagine growing crops with 95% less water, or producing meat through methods that free up 80% of the world’s agricultural land. And how about eliminating the CO₂ of global supply chains by simply moving production facilities closer to customers and cutting the parts used in the final product a hundredfold? What might sound like crazy ideas are solutions available today through green technologies.

Green tech describes the technology and science-based solutions that mitigate the negative human impact on the environment in a broad range of fields from agriculture to construction. Sixteen per cent of global emissions are caused by transportation, 19% by agriculture, 27% by energy production, 31% by construction and production, with the remaining 7% caused by heating. Green technologies can be applied in all of these CO2-emitting sectors, thus offering broad solutions for sustainable growth.

PG&E announced that they have turned on their giant Tesla Megapack project with 730 MWh of capacity, and the electric grid company expects that it will “enhance the overall reliability of California’s ever-changing energy supply.”

We first learned of the project at PG&E’s Moss Landing substation when it submitted it to CPUC and the company was in talks with Tesla in 2017. It involves four separate energy storage projects, and two of them, including the one using Tesla Megapack, should become the world’s largest battery systems.

In 2018, we obtained Tesla’s proposal for the project, and it showed that the company plans to use “Megapack” instead of its usual Powerpack for large utility-scale projects. It was one of the first projects announced to use the new battery system, but the actual deployment took so much time that many more Megapack projects came online since.

A lucky discovery involving lithium-sulfur batteries has a legitimate chance to revolutionize how we power our world.

Newly discovered Fermi arcs that can be controlled through magnetism could be the future of electronics based on electron spins.

These new Fermi arcs were discovered by a team of researchers from Ames Laboratory and Iowa State University, as well as collaborators from the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom. During their investigation of the rare-earth monopnictide NdBi (neodymium-bismuth), the research team discovered a new type of Fermi arc that appeared at low temperatures when the material became antiferromagnetic, i.e., neighboring spins point in opposite directions.

Fermi surfaces in metals are a boundary between energy states that are occupied and unoccupied by electrons. Fermi surfaces are normally closed contours forming shapes such as spheres, ovoids, etc. Electrons at the Fermi surface control many properties of materials such as electrical and thermal conductivity, optical properties, etc. In extremely rare occasions, the Fermi surface contains disconnected segments that are known as Fermi arcs and often are associated with exotic states like superconductivity.

Countries, especially potential exporters, should improve hydrogen statistics to justify and promote investments in hydrogen. The measures should result from broad cooperation, also intended to standardize and homogenize measurements, said Columbia University‘s Anne-Sophie Corbeau. “Countries could start working together to determine how best to collect hydrogen data, both on the demand and production sides, and include existing consumption as well as potential future consumption in new sectors. Statistics on the demand side need to anticipate new uses in buildings, industry, transport, and power, as well as account for hydrogen’s potential use to produce other energy products such as ammonia and methanol,” the French scholar wrote on Monday.

Vancouver-based First Hydrogen has identified four industrial sites in the United Kingdom and is advancing discussions with landowners to secure land rights to develop green hydrogen production projects. It said it would be working with engineering consultants Ove Arup & Partners Limited (ARUP) for engineering studies and designs. “The sites are all in prime industrial areas spread strategically across the North and South of the United Kingdom and will each accommodate both a large refueling station — for light, medium and heavy commercial vehicles with on-site hydrogen production, to serve the urban areas of Greater Liverpool, Greater Manchester, the London area, and the Thames Estuary — and a larger hydrogen production site of between 20 and 40 MW, for a total for the four sites of between 80 MW and 160 MW,” First Hydrogen wrote on Monday. The Canadian company wants to use the production facilities to serve customers of its automotive division. “First Hydrogen’s green hydrogen van is to begin demonstrator testing in June with final delivery for road use in September 2022.”

Plastic and molten salt batteries may be the key to grid-scale energy storage.

Electricity is a marvelous thing. It can power every manner of machine and digital device, but it is ephemeral. It has to be used as soon as it is created or it is lost forever. The trick to making it serve the needs of humanity is to store it, and to do that, you need a battery.

There are hundreds of ways to make a battery — the Romans did it with copper and iron in a lemon juice bath. But not all of those storage techniques are practical in the real world. Some are too heavy, others too bulky. Many are too costly or use materials that are too scare. Nickel has long been a major component of today’s lithium-ion batteries, but upheavals in some countries masterminded by criminal leaders have caused it to triple in price recently.

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