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Category: energy – Page 221

Greenspot submits application for 1,000MWh big battery at former coal plant

Greenspot lodges development application for Wallerawang battery, and it hopes to have the first stage in operation in just two years.

Privately owned NSW development company Greenspot says it has lodged a development application for a huge 500MW, 1000MWh big battery at the site of the closed Wallerawang coal fired power station near Lithgow, and hopes to bring it into service within two years.

The development application to the state government comes just weeks after the last chimney stacks of the closed coal generator were brought down. The battery will be called the “Wallerawang 9 Battery,” to acknowledge the legacy of units 7 and 8, which were the last coal fired units at the power station.

“The lodgement of the development application for the Wallerawang 9 Battery is an important early marker in repurposing the site for the next chapter of success”, Greenspot CEO Brett Hawkins said in a statement.

Ground-State Entanglement gives birth to Quantum Energy Teleportation

Circa 2009 real teleportation not just in the quantum realm.

Ground-state entanglement induces emergence of negative-energy-density regions in quantum systems by squeezing zero-point oscillation, keeping total energy of the systems nonnegative. By use of the negativity of quantum energy density, protocols of quantum energy teleportation are proposed that transport energy to distant sites by local operations and classical communication. The energy is teleported without breaking any physical laws including causality and local energy conservation. Because intermediate subsystems of the energy transfer channel are not excited during the protocol execution, the protocol attains energy transportation without heat generation in the channel. We discuss the protocol focusing around qubit chains. In addition, we address a related problem of breaking ground-state entanglement by measurements.

Could F-35s Get New Engines by 2027? The US Congress Thinks So

A flurry of upgrades is on the horizon.

The conference version of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2022 shows that the U.S. Congress wants new engines to be installed in the current and future F-35 aircraft starting from 2027, Air Force Magazine reported.

We had earlier reported that the U.S. military would be required to look into re-engining its F-35s towards the end of this decade. The F-16s and A-10C Thunderbolts are close to the end of their lifetimes which means that the bulk of the workload for the U.S. military will fall on F-35s’ shoulders. Under the Adaptive Engine Transition Program (AETP), the U.S. Air Force has already begun work to develop engines that can deliver more power or range as required.

According to the Air Force Magazine, Congress has sought details of the acquisition strategy and fiscal considerations that the Air Force will apply in its plan to re-engine its F-35As. We had reported that the development cost of the AETP is likely going to be too high for the Air Force to bear alone. However, the U.S. Navy uses a different configuration of the F-35s, where the AETP cannot be deployed in its present form.

Full Story:

China’s Solar Giants Make a Bid to Dominate Hydrogen Power

Chinese companies spent 10 years aggressively maneuvering to become the dominant players in solar power. Now they’re seeking to lead the way in developing the next big thing in clean energy: hydrogen.

Top solar manufacturers including Longi Green Energy Technology Co. are ramping up the production of electrolyzers, the equipment needed to make green hydrogen, the cleanest form of the fuel. They are accelerating investments on a bet that a market will boom as industries and consumers switch to lower-carbon fuels.

Amprius Reports Extreme Fast Charge Battery: 0–80% In 6 Minutes

Amprius Technologies announced that its lithium-ion battery cells with silicon anode (Si-Nanowire platform) achieved a breakthrough fast charging capability of 0–80% state-of-charge (SOC) in just 6 minutes (10C current).

The capability of extreme fast charging has been validated and confirmed by Mobile Power Solutions for three 2.75 Ah sample pouch cells (see report here). It actually took less than 6 minutes to achieve 80% SOC.

0–70% charging takes less than 5 minutes, and 0–90% is usually above 8 minutes. Then, the charging rate is much slower, so 100% is achieved after 25–27 minutes (90–100% takes 17–19 minutes).

Inside Clean Energy

The price of the batteries that power electric vehicles has fallen by about 90 percent since 2010, a continuing trend that will soon make EVs less expensive than gasoline vehicles.

This week, with battery pricing figures for 2021 now available, I wanted to get a better idea of what the near future will look like.

First, the numbers: The average price of lithium-ion battery packs fell to $132 per kilowatt-hour in 2021, down 6 percent from $140 per kilowatt-hour the previous year, according to the annual battery price survey from BloombergNEF. The new average is a step closer to the benchmark of $100 per kilowatt-hour, which researchers say is the approximate point where EVs will cost about the same as gasoline-powered vehicles.

Giant Tesla Megapack project is turned on after fire setback

A giant Tesla Megapack project operated by Neoen in Australia has finally been turned on after a fire set back the battery system this summer.

Tesla’s energy storage products have been particularly popular in Australia, where the electric grid is in great need of stabilization.

Its famous “Tesla Big Battery” in partnership with Neoen in South Australia has had a tremendous success that other states are trying to replicate.

Using aluminum and water to make clean hydrogen fuel — when and where it’s needed

“If we’re going to use scrap aluminum for hydrogen generation in a practical application, we need to be able to better predict what hydrogen generation characteristics we’re going to observe from the aluminum-water reaction,” says Laureen Meroueh PhD ’20, who earned her doctorate in mechanical engineering.

Since the fundamental steps in the reaction aren’t well understood, it’s been hard to predict the rate and volume at which hydrogen forms from scrap aluminum, which can contain varying types and concentrations of alloying elements. So Hart, Meroueh, and Thomas W. Eagar, a professor of materials engineering and engineering management in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, decided to examine — in a systematic fashion — the impacts of those alloying elements on the aluminum-water reaction and on a promising technique for preventing the formation of the interfering oxide layer.

To prepare, they had experts at Novelis Inc. fabricate samples of pure aluminum and of specific aluminum alloys made of commercially pure aluminum combined with either 0.6 percent silicon (by weight), 1 percent magnesium, or both — compositions that are typical of scrap aluminum from a variety of sources. Using those samples, the MIT researchers performed a series of tests to explore different aspects of the aluminum-water reaction.