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Archive for the ‘energy’ category: Page 306

Oct 7, 2017

Surrounded: In every plant—from trees to crops—there exists a substance that makes up its wood or stems, fiber, and cell walls

Posted by in categories: energy, food, sustainability

This substance is a complex natural polymer called lignin, and it is the second largest renewable carbon source on the planet after cellulose.

This natural abundance has drawn high interest from the to chemically convert into biofuels. And if plant life really does hold the building blocks for renewable fuels, it would seem that we are literally surrounded by potential energy sources everywhere green grows.

But untangling the complex chains of these polymers into components, which can be useful for liquid fuel and other applications ranging from pharmaceuticals to plastics, has presented an ongoing challenge to science and industry.

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Oct 3, 2017

Tesla says it’s halfway done building the world’s biggest battery

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, energy, sustainability, transportation

On Friday, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said that the company was halfway done building the battery bank that will become the world’s biggest battery once it’s complete. Musk made the announcement at a party overlooking the project’s construction, ABC News Australia reported.

Tesla is building the 129-MWh battery with French energy company Neoen. The battery will be draw energy from Neoen’s Hornsdale wind farm that’s 142 miles north of Adelaide. The electricity will be delivered to South Australians during peak grid times to reduce the number of blackouts in the area, which are frequent in summer months.

“The system is a big battery, a battery big enough to power 50,000 houses — the biggest in the world,” Neoen global COO Romain Desrousseaux previously told Business Insider.

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Sep 30, 2017

Water evaporation could be a promising source of renewable energy

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

There’s a lot of water to work with.

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Sep 30, 2017

Evaporating Water Could Power Almost 70% of The US Electrical Grid

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

It’s not every day scientists say a new kind of renewable energy could satisfy the majority of our power needs, so when they do, it’s worth leaning in close.

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers have found that energy harvested from the evaporation of water in US lakes and reservoirs could power nearly 70 percent of the nation’s electricity demands, generating a whopping 325 gigawatts of electricity.

Alongside the great strides being made in solar and wind, biophysicist Ozgur Sahin from Columbia University says natural evaporation represents a massive unexplored resource of environmentally clean power generation, just waiting to be tapped.

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Sep 29, 2017

Engineers create wristbands that keep wearers thermally comfortable

Posted by in categories: energy, engineering, transportation, wearables

Cool Wearable! Actually does something useful & could help reduce energy waste.


Sitting in a stifling subway car or walking Boston’s cold winter streets may soon become more bearable, thanks to a “personal thermostat” wristband being released by MIT spinout Embr Labs.

For a design competition in 2013, four MIT engineering students created a smart wristband, called Wristify, that makes its wearer feel warmer or cooler through its contact with the skin on the wrist. After much fanfare, and a lot of research and development, the wristband will hit the shelves early next year.

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Sep 24, 2017

Scientists have created a BACTERIUM that inhales CO2 producing Energy

Posted by in categories: cyborgs, energy, genetics, transhumanism

It’s a bionic leaf that could revolutionize everything we thought we knew about clean energy.

Harvard scientists open the door to an energetic revolution that has allowed them to test successfully a system that converts sunlight into liquid fuel.

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Sep 21, 2017

ARCA’s revolutionary aerospike engine completed and ready for testing

Posted by in categories: energy, space

ARCA Space Corporation has announced its linear aerospike engine is ready to start ground tests as the company moves towards installing the engine in its Demonstrator 3 rocket. Designed to power the world’s first operational Single-Stage-To-Orbit (SSTO) satellite launcher, the engine took only 60 days to complete from when fabrication began.

Over the past 60 years, space launches have become pretty routine. The first stage ignites, the rocket lifts slowly and majestically from the launch pad before picking up speed and vanishing into the blue. Minutes later, the first stage shuts down and separates from the upper stages, which ignite and burn in turn until the payload is delivered into orbit.

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Sep 20, 2017

The Way We Get Power Is About to Change Forever

Posted by in category: energy

Solar and wind power are all about the batteries.


The age of batteries is just getting started. In the latest episode of our animated series, Sooner Than You Think, Bloomberg’s Tom Randall does the math on when solar plus batteries might start wiping fossil fuels off the grid.

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Sep 16, 2017

Energy Dept Spends $33M to Harden Grid Against Network, Kinetic Attack

Posted by in categories: cybercrime/malcode, energy

The grants focus on improving grid resiliency during a cyberattack and speeding recovery.

The Energy Department announced a roughly $33 million investment Tuesday in seven projects aimed at securing the electric grid against cyberattacks, physical attacks and weather disasters.

The projects are designed both to make grid systems more secure against cyberattacks and to improve their ability to withstand a cyberattack, according to a department fact sheet.

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Sep 15, 2017

3D-Printed Wind Turbine Blades Could Bring ‘Sci-Fi’ Level of Performance

Posted by in categories: 3D printing, energy, sustainability

(3Ders.org) The rapid advance of 3D printing technology means that hybrid-material wind turbine blades complete with metal mesh inserts are no longer the stuff of imagination. These energy savers with “sci-fi-level” performance could become reality in as soon as two years. Philip Totaro of Totaro & Associates, “The greatest challenge for wind turbine blade structural and manufacturing engineers is to implement the idealized performance and noise mitigated designs of aerodynamics engineers,” explains Totaro. “Limitations of previous generations of manufacturing technology and the reliance on lower cost materials have limited the type of spar/shear web structures which could be utilized.” But 3D printing could be about to change all that, Totaro says.

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