Lifeboat Foundation

What if you could power the smart thermostats, speakers and lights in your home with a kitchen countertop? Stones, such as marble and granite, are natural, eco-friendly materials that many people building or renovating houses already use. Now, in a step toward integrating energy storage with these materials, researchers have fabricated microsupercapacitors onto the surface of stone tiles. The devices, reported in ACS Nano, are durable and easily scaled up for customizable 3D power supplies.

It would be convenient if the surfaces in rooms could charge smart home devices or other small electronics without being connected to the electrical grid. And although stone is a widely used material for floors, countertops and decorative backsplashes, it hasn’t been integrated with energy storage devices, such as batteries and capacitors.

But stones, even those that are polished and seem smooth, have microscopic bumps and divots, making it difficult to adhere electrical components to them. Researchers have recently figured out how to place microsupercapacitors, which have fast charging and discharging rates and excellent power supply storage, onto irregular surfaces with lasers. So, Bongchul Kang and colleagues wanted to adapt this approach to build microsupercapacitors on marble.

A startup from Finland called Polar Night Energy has developed an energy storage system based on sand. The idea is to store excess energy generated from clean electricity sources such as Wind, Solar, etc., to be reused days or even months later.

If it works, it will help solve the primary pain point of intermittent clean energy sources by making their final energy output more predictable and, therefore, more reliable.

Continue reading “Powerful Sand Batteries Are Literally Dirt Simple” »

Blue Planet Energy has successfully deployed this first-of-its-kind project to support the residents of Shungnak, a remote community above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. The microgrid was designed to address the numerous challenges of operating in extreme conditions and break the community’s dependence on its expensive and polluting diesel generator power plant.

The resilient microgrid consists of a 225 kW solar array that can offset much of Shungnak’s energy needs. The system is integrated with 12 cabinets of 32 kWh Blue Ion LX battery systems, each storing excess energy for later use. In addition to reducing the village’s carbon footprint, the system also greatly decreases the high fuel and maintenance costs associated with running diesel generators in remote Alaska.

Continue reading “Solar-plus-storage microgrid replaces diesel in remote Alaskan village” »

Paul Woskov of MIT shows a sample of what a gyrotron can do to vaporize solid rock. The technology may soon help to harvest geothermal energy.

Geothermal renewable energy is the forgotten cousin of wind and solar. An old Soviet-era technology, the gyrotron, may soon change that.

Stochastic thermodynamics is an emerging area of physics aimed at better understanding and interpreting thermodynamic concepts away from equilibrium. Over the past few years, findings in these fields have revolutionized the general understanding of different thermodynamic processes operating in finite time.

Adam Frim and Mike DeWeese, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have recently carried out a theoretical study exploring the full space of thermodynamic cycles with a continuously changing bath temperature. Their results, presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, were obtained using geometric methods. Thermodynamic geometry is an approach to understanding the response of thermodynamic systems by means of studying the geometric space of control.

“For instance, for a gas in a piston, one coordinate in this space of control could correspond to the experimentally controlled volume of the gas and another to the temperature,” DeWeese told Phys.org. “If an experimentalist were to turn those knobs, that plots out some trajectory in this thermodynamic space. What thermodynamic geometry does is assign to each curve a ‘thermodynamic length’ corresponding to the minimum possible dissipated energy of a given path.”

^{Credit: VENTRIS/Science Photo Library via Getty Images}

^{By Amal Pushp, Affiliate Physicist at the Resonance Science Foundation}

Quantum mechanics prohibits any quantum system from achieving a temperature that is equal to absolute zero. However, using Laser cooling, which is a highly efficient spectroscopic technique, atomic samples could be cooled to near absolute zero thus bringing them to their lowest achievable quantum energy state. Scientists have been advancing this technique for decades now and an important question that arose recently is whether carbon molecules, which are an integral component of life on earth, could be laser-cooled.

Eurowind Energy is building wind-solar capacity at five onshore energy centers and is also considering hydrogen electrolysis. It says each of the sites will include battery storage to offer grid services.