The electric-car maker could benefit from improving profitability on vehicle sales and huge growth in its nascent energy business.
Category: energy – Page 254
Solid Power started to deliver the first generation of its all-solid-state batteries to strategic partners. They are lighter and more powerful than NMC.
Renewable energy is now richer than the Oil industry.
In yet another sign of the pace of the global energy transition – and the massive switch taking place in the investment community – the market value of company that describes itself as the world’s biggest producer of wind and solar power, US utility NextEra, has overtaken that of what used to be the world’s most valuable company, oil major ExxonMobil.
The flip occurred last last week, when NextEra overtook ExxonMobil to become the largest energy company in the US by market value. As Forbes reported, an investment in NextEra a decade ago would have delivered to return of 600 per cent, while an investment in ExxonMobil would have returned minus 25 per cent.
The shift is as significant as the one the world has seen in the auto industry, with electric vehicle maker Tesla overtaking the biggest car companies in the world in the last year, to the point where it is now valued at more than the next five biggest global car makers combined, despite producing just a fraction of the number of cars.
Could this be the energy source of the future?
The secret to the SPARC reactor is that its magnets will be built from new high-temperature superconductors that require much less cooling and can produce far more powerful magnetic fields. That means the reactor can be ten times more compact than ITER while achieving similar performance.
As with any cutting-edge technology, converting principles into practice is no simple matter. But the analysis detailed in the papers suggests that the reactor will achieve its goal of producing more energy than it sucks up. So far, all fusion experiments have required more energy to heat the plasma and sustain it than has been generated by the reaction itself.
The SPARC reactor is designed to achieve a Q factor of at least two, which means it will produce twice as much energy as it uses, but the analysis suggests that figure might actually rise to ten or more. The papers used the same physics and simulations as the ITER design team and other previous fusion experiments.
Airbus’s plan to bring to market a zero-emission passenger aircraft by 2035 means it needs to start plotting a course in terms of technology in 2025. In fact it needs to plot several courses.
It looks like something out of “Star Trek,” and runs on a fuel experts once thought “crazy,” but Airbus hopes that in 15 years we’ll be flying into a greener future aboard this new zero-emission aircraft concept.
Ramping Up
Johnson announced that the U.K. would invest about £160 million ($207 million) that will go toward factories that would develop new turbines as well as floating offshore turbines themselves. In order to power every home in the U.K., those turbines would need to generate about 40 GW of power, Engadget reports. That’s four times the nation’s current wind energy output.
“Your kettle, your washing machine, your cooker, your heating, your plug-in electric vehicle, the whole lot of them will get their juice cleanly and without guilt from the breezes that blow around these islands,” Johnson announced at the U.K. Conservative party conference.
Urine turned into hydrogen fuel
Posted in energy, transportation
Circa 2009
Whizz electrocatalyst frees the hydrogen from ‘liquid gold’
US researchers have developed an efficient way of producing hydrogen from urine — a feat that could not only fuel the cars of the future, but could also help clean up municipal wastewater.
Using hydrogen to power cars has become an increasingly attractive transportation fuel, as the only emission produced is water — but a major stumbling block is the lack of a cheap, renewable source of the fuel. Gerardine Botte of Ohio University may now have found the answer, using an electrolytic approach to produce hydrogen from urine — the most abundant waste on Earth — at a fraction of the cost of producing hydrogen from water.
French company Nawa technologies says it’s already in production on a new electrode design that can radically boost the performance of existing and future battery chemistries, delivering up to 3x the energy density, 10x the power, vastly faster charging and battery lifespans up to five times as long.
Nawa is already known for its work in the ultracapacitor market, and the company has announced that the same high-tech electrodes it uses on those ultracapacitors can be adapted for current-gen lithium-ion batteries, among others, to realize some tremendous, game-changing benefits.
It all comes down to how the active material is held in the electrode, and the route the ions in that material have to take to deliver their charge. Today’s typical activated carbon electrode is made with a mix of powders, additives and binders. Where carbon nanotubes are used, they’re typically stuck on in a jumbled, “tangled spaghetti” fashion. This gives the charge-carrying ions a random, chaotic and frequently blocked path to traverse on their way to the current collector under load.
The Japanese carmaker’s North America division will be partnering with Hino USA, a commercial vehicles manufacturer, to produce the “heavy” Class 8 fuel cell truck specifically for the North American market.
The truck itself will be based on the existing Hino XL Series chassis and powered by Toyota’s fuel cell technology.
Toyota is planning to show off the first demonstration vehicle in the first half of 2021, but we still know little about it. The prototype of a prior initiative called Project Portal 2.0 may provide some clues: revealed in 2018, the prototype was a 670 horsepower semi with 1,325 pound-feet of torque and a towing capacity of 80,000 pounds. Its fuel cells gave it a reported range of 300 miles, CNET reports.
The next decade is going to be a transforming decade as many many technologies (some of which we all like to share in this group) are converging and maturing enough to rearrange our society in almost any aspect we can conceive.
I’m calling to those who are interested in creating and implementing an alternative model for the current social and governance systems, let’s build an open state that we can all support and trust regardless of our age, sex, geographical location, or belief system.
In the next 10 years, key technologies will converge to completely disrupt the five foundational sectors—information, energy, food, transportation, and materials—that underpin our global economy. We need to make sure the disruption benefits everyone.