Phillips 66 is turning its large crude oil refinery in California into a plant that produces renewable fuel.
What if you could solve two of Earth’s biggest problems in one stroke? UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle plastic waste, such as soda or water bottles, into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage.
Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources, such as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty, and portabella mushrooms. Their latest success could reduce plastic pollution and hasten the transition to 100% clean energy.
“Thirty percent of the global car fleet is expected to be electric by 2040, and high cost of raw battery materials is a challenge,” said Mihri Ozkan, a professor of electrical engineering in UCR’s Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. “Using waste from landfill and upcycling plastic bottles could lower the total cost of batteries while making the battery production sustainable on top of eliminating plastic pollution worldwide.”
Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory say they’ve found a breakthrough way to recycle carbon dioxide into energy-rich ethanol fuel. The secret is an electrified catalyst made from copper and carbon, which the researchers say can be powered using low-cost off-peak or renewable energy. What results is a process that’s more than 90 percent effective, which they say is far higher than any similar existing process.
Northern Illinois University professor and participating Argonne researcher Tao Xu says the new catalyst isn’t just a single stop that can produce ethanol—it’s the first step down a possible long list of ways to turn carbon dioxide into other useful chemicals. Despite the obvious plenitude of carbon dioxide, recycling it effectively into new things has been hard because of how stable and chemically stubborn the molecules are.
Imagine plugging in to your brick house.
Red bricks—some of the world’s cheapest and most familiar building materials—can be converted into energy storage units that can be charged to hold electricity, like a battery, according to new research from Washington University in St. Louis.
In Elon we trust the planet earth!
Tesla studies the possibility of becoming an energy supplier in Europe, offering photovoltaic, storage and electric car charging in one package.
Tesla doesn’t just sell cars. Among the various sectors in which it operates, domestic energy is perhaps the one with the widest growth margins. After launching its photovoltaic products, both solar panels, and tiles, and after the famous PowerWall accumulation, Musk’s company is studying the possibility of offering all its assets in a single offer, even becoming an electricity provider in the world.
A widespread power outage left about 130,000 customers in darkness across a large area of Upper Manhattan early Friday, a Con Edison spokesman said.
Three networks in the utility’s transmission system in Manhattan lost their electricity supply at 5:13 a.m., Con Ed spokesman Philip O’Brien told The Post at 6:30 a.m., adding that the power has been restored.
“And we’re back! Here’s the moment electricity returned to upper Manhattan,” @kendisgibson said in a tweet.
Hypersonic weapons are the next frontier of great power competition between the United States, Russia, and China. The Army and Navy want to expedite the development of the missile and hope to field it in 2023.
Their latest missile test was a success.
By Caleb Larson
Continue reading “The Army and Navy’s Hypersonic Missile is a Go” »
When you think of renewable energy, what comes to mind? We’d venture to guess that wind and solar are probably near the top of the list. And yes, wind and solar are great as long as the winds are favorable and the sun is shining. But what about all those short and bleak winter days? Rainy days? Night time?
Unfavorable conditions mean that storage is an important part of any viable solution that uses renewable energy. Either the energy itself has to be stored, or else the means to produce the energy on demand must be stored.
One possible answer has been right under our noses all along — air. Regular old ambient air can be cooled and compressed into a liquid, stored in tanks, and then reheated to its gaseous state to do work.
Circa 2006
Aiming to create a miniature motor capable of 1 million revolutions per minute, electronics researchers at ETH Life in Zurich are half-way to their goal.
The gas turbine-powered device produces force equivalent to 100 watts and is 95 percent fuel efficient, and gets 10 hours of operation out of the tank.
More than 1.4 million homes and businesses across New Jersey lost power as of Tuesday afternoon as powerful winds and heavy rains from Tropical Storm Isaias battered the Garden State.
That’s more than 25% of the utility customers in the state and half of JCP&L’s 1.1 million customers in the dark, according to outage maps provided by the three major utility companies in New Jersey.
