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Category: energy – Page 68

Learn about the Kapolei Energy Storage plant, the world’s most advanced battery energy storage system.

The KES batteries play a crucial role in reducing the curtailment of renewable energy by 69%, allowing Hawaiian Electric to integrate 10% more new utility-scale renewables than previously projected. Additionally, the project is estimated to save customers money, reducing electric bills by an average of $0.28 per month over a 20-year contract life.

The specifications of the KES plant include 135 MW / 540 MWH of capacity and energy, 50 MW / 25 MWH of additional ‘fast frequency response’ for grid stability, ‘virtual inertia’ to mimic the power-smoothing function of a spinning turbine, and ‘black start’ capabilities for grid recovery during blackouts.

This innovative battery energy storage system replaces the grid capacity of a nearby AES coal power plant, contributing to the state’s clean energy transition. Plus Power, a leader in developing, owning, and operating standalone energy storage, has a growing portfolio of large-scale battery systems across the United States and Canada.

Continue reading “World’s most advanced grid-scale energy storage system lights up in Hawaii” | >

The two-step process also produces hydrogen gas as a by-product, which could also be used as a zero-emission fuel.

“We are looking at active sites and how these sites are bonding with the reaction intermediates,” said Ping Liu of Brookhaven’s Chemistry Division. “By determining the barriers, or transition states, from one step to another, we learn exactly how the catalyst is functioning during the reaction.”

The researchers found that the iron-cobalt alloy works sequentially in the second stage and gets pushed to the side as the nanofiber grows. Using this information, the team could leach the catalysts using acid and reuse them again. If the entire process could be fueled by renewable energy, the process would be a carbon-negative approach to CO2 mitigation.

The research findings were published in the journal Nature Catalysis.

Continue reading “Researchers trap CO2 from air into nanofibers to prevent its release” | >

Humans have dreamed about traveling to other star systems and setting foot on alien worlds for generations. To put it mildly, interstellar exploration is a very daunting task.

As Universe Today explored in a previous post, it would take between 19,000 and 81,000 years for a spacecraft to reach Proxima Centauri using conventional propulsion (or those that are feasible using current technology). On top of that, there are numerous risks when traveling through the interstellar medium (ISM), not all of which are well-understood.

Under the circumstances, gram-scale spacecraft that rely on directed-energy propulsion (AKA lasers) appear to be the only viable option for reaching neighboring stars in this century.

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Icelandic researchers and scientists are on a mission to transform the renewable energy landscape by delving into the heart of a volcano.

They have set their sights on revolutionizing renewable energy by exploring the possibilities of drilling directly into a volcano’s magma chamber. The magma chamber is an underground reservoir where molten rock collects before exploding as lava.

The ambitious Krafla Magma Testbed (KMT) project aims to tap into a magma chamber of Krafla in northern Iceland by 2026.

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A team of Chinese researchers used a novel theory to invent a new type of ultrathin optical crystal with high energy efficiency, laying the foundation for next-generation laser technology.

Prof. Wang Enge from the School of Physics, Peking University, recently told Xinhua that the Twist Boron Nitride (TBN) made by the team, with a micron-level thickness, is the thinnest optical crystal currently known in the world. Compared with traditional crystals of the same thickness, its is raised by 100 to 10,000 times.

Wang, also an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said this achievement is an original innovation by China in the theory of optical crystals and has created a new field of making optical crystals with two-dimensional thin-film materials of light elements.

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In this study, we conducted behavioral experiments and measured survival rates in local caves to minimize the impacts of factors other than light. Although energy-costly eyes were highly reduced or lost in cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders, which spend their entire life cycles in the complete absence of light, our results demonstrated that they could detect light, and light cues may be used to avoid the perilously dry environment outside the cave. The annotation of core PPGs based on transcriptomic data suggests that cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders have retained a nearly complete set of PPGs as in the entrance spiders. The molecular evolutionary analysis showed strong purifying selection on PPGs of cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders. Therefore, our study provides evidence supporting the hypothesis that the phototransduction system of cave-dwelling eyeless Leptonetela spiders may have been under purifying selection rather than being a phylogenetic relic. Our results thus refute the neutral hypothesis.

Leptonetela spiders are small cryptozoic spiders that build sheet webs for capturing prey in twilight or lightless environment, such as leaf litter, rotting logs, rock crevices, and caves (31). Light is suggested to be the primary selective force driving the evolution of eyes of cave animals, thus, eyes are often reduced or lost as cave preadaptation in many litter-dwelling arthropods (36–38). Leptonetela spiders have lost anterior median eyes that are generally involved in identifying and stalking prey in spiders, likely due to their twilight or lightless habitats. In addition, cave-dwelling Leptonetela spiders living in lightless deep caves exhibit various degrees of eye reduction (highly reduced or eyeless) compared to their entrance spider relatives that have six intact eyes. Thus, Leptonetela spiders provided an ideal system for studying the evolution of eyes and visual systems.

This study provides evidence demonstrating negative phototaxis in cave-dwelling spiders, a highly diverse group that plays a critical role in cave ecosystems as top predators (23). Negative phototaxis has frequently been found in other subterranean animals. For example, the cave-dwelling carrion beetle Ptomaphagus hirtus that has highly reduced eyes nonetheless displays strongly negative phototaxis and maintains a reduced but functional phototransduction system, as shown by transcriptomic data (13). However, Langille et al. (14) reported that five of six subterranean water beetles completely lacked phototactic responses, and the authors proposed negative phototaxis as a preadaptation to living in permanent darkness for ancestral cave-dwelling animals. We speculate that drought resistance may play an important role in the retention of PPGs in Leptonetela spiders.

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