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Category: energy – Page 197

The chance that ESA’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft will encounter space debris during its upcoming Earth flyby is very, very low. However, the risk is not zero and is greater than any other flyby ESA has performed. That there is this risk at all highlights the mess we’ve made of space—and why we need to take action to clean up after ourselves.

On 27 November, after a year and eight months flying through the inner Solar System, Solar Orbiter will swing by home to ‘drop off’ some extra energy. This will line the spacecraft up for its next six flybys of Venus. These final gravity assists will hone and tilt Solar Orbiter’s , enabling the heat-protected probe to capture the first-ever direct images of our star’s poles, and much more.

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In yet another bid to push forward its solar business, electric vehicle maker Tesla has launched a new solar roof tile that has a higher power output while retaining the dimensions of the old one.

Tesla entered the clean energy business when it acquired SolarCity for $2.6 billion in 2016. It makes switching to solar energy sleeker by replacing regular roof tiles with energy-generating solar roof tiles, instead of having to install bulky solar panels. Tesla offers a 25-year warranty on the tiles and takes end-to-end responsibility for installing the new solar roof.

However, the company has so far struggled to make its product mainstream due to fluctuations in pricing, Electrek reported. With variations across house designs, Tesla has found it difficult to create a streamlined product and even introduced a roof-complexity factor, earlier this year to determine cost estimates.

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Electrify America announced that it has now deployed over 30 MW of battery capacity using Tesla Powerpacks at over 140 charging stations.

In 2019, Tesla and Electrify America, VW’s electric vehicle charging network, announced that they reached a deal for the former to deploy Powerpacks at more than 100 charging stations operated by the latter.

We have been tracking their progress in deploying those battery systems since it appears to be the largest deployment of energy storage at electric vehicle charging stations.

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An Italian energy storage company, Energy Dome, has announced the close of its $11M Series A fundraise, with the goal of deploying the first commercially viable CO2 battery in a demonstration project in its native Sardinia, Italy. The proposed 100 megawatt-hours (MWh) CO2 Battery could support the increased use of renewable power in the generation mix and address the growing need for energy storage on electrical grids.

The CO2 Battery’s optimal charge/discharge cycle ranges from 4 to 24 hours, positioning it perfectly for daily and intra-day cycling. The company points out that this is a fast-growing market segment, not well served by existing battery technologies. Significantly, the CO2 Battery can be charged during the daytime when there is a surplus solar generation and dispatched during the subsequent evening and next-morning peaks, when solar generation falls short of demand. The modular, scalable energy storage solution will allow for solar and wind generation to be dispatchable 24 hours per day.

Using low-cost, off-the-shelf components, the company claims that its CO2 battery achieves a 75–80% round-trip efficiency. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which degrade significantly in performance after roughly a decade of use, the battery maintains its performance during its expected 25-year operational life. This means the cost of the storage will be about half of the cost of storing with similar-sized lithium-ion batteries.

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Boy, how the market for Hydrogen and Hydrogen Fuel Cells has changed in the past couple of years! From my Seeking Delphi podcast.

“So I submit to my colleagues here today that hydrogen is not as far away as we think it is.”–Bob Inglis.

In February of 2017, Seeking Delphi™ featured Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Inc.™ founder and CEO Bill Smith, in an episode entitled What Ever Happend to Fuel Cells.

Not much was happening in early 2017. The market for hydrogen fuel cells, and hydrogen in any form for that matter, had been stagnant for for over a decade.

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For many of us, this is a part of the year when we are acutely aware of time and timekeeping, even more so than usual. Thanks in part to the changing of clocks I talked about in my last post, it gets dark much earlier, and there’s another month or so to go of the days getting shorter and the nights longer (in the northern hemisphere, anyway; if you’re in most of South America, much of Africa, or Australia, enjoy your long summer days…). We’re also coming into the cluster of solstice-related holidays— Hanukkah started last night, and Christmas is fast approaching— so a lot of kids are counting down days, and adults juggling family and social commitments and trying to find time to shop for gifts. The preceding might make this seem like a particularly Western preoccupation. That’s true in a narrow sense— the holidays of the moment are Jewish and Christian, and there’s nothing all that significant happening in, say, the Muslim world for the next couple of months— but in fact basically every human culture we know much about has devoted significant energy to the tracking of time. Full Story:

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Prepare to be Baffled.

The misconception is that electrons carry potential energy around a complete conducting loop, transferring their energy to the load. This video was sponsored by Caséta by Lutron.

Further analysis of the large circuit is available here: https://ve42.co/bigcircuit.

Special thanks to Dr Geraint Lewis for bringing up this question in the first place and discussing it with us. Check out his and Dr Chris Ferrie’s new book here: https://ve42.co/Universe2021

Special thanks to Dr Robert Olsen for his expertise. He quite literally wrote the book on transmission lines, which you can find here: https://ve42.co/Olsen2018

Continue reading “The Big Misconception About Electricity” | >

The extra juice comes from a secret ingredient…corn starch.

Could a simple materials change make electric car batteries able to four times more energy? Scientists in South Korea think so. In a new paper in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters, a research team details using silicon and repurposed corn starch to make better anodes for lithium ion batteries.

This team is based primarily in the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), where they’ve experimented with microemulsifying silicon, carbon, and corn starch into a new microstructured composite material for use as a battery anode. This is done by mixing silicon nanoparticles and corn starch with propylene gas and heating it all to combine.

Using biowaste corn starch is already pretty popular, with products like biodegradeable “corn plastic” cutlery, packaging, and the infamous nontoxic packing peanut. The same qualities that make corn starch attractive in these applications apply to the silicon anode project. Existing lithium-ion batteries use carbon anodes, and scientists know silicon would work better in many ways but have struggled to stabilize the silicon enough for this use to be practical. “To enhance the stability of silicon, Dr. Jung and his team focused on using materials that are common in our everyday lives, such as water, oil, and starch,” KIST wrote in a statement about the paper.

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