Risen Energy Co. is planning to build a 45 billion yuan ($7 billion) integrated solar power factory in Inner Mongolia that’ll run on clean energy.
Category: solar power – Page 69
The idea of a human-made device that can process solar energy to make usable fuels has been tantalizing researchers since the 1970s. There being no such thing as a free lunch, it is not so easy to engineer a device that mimics photosynthesis, which Mother Nature perfected a long time ago. Nevertheless, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California appear to have solved an important piece of the “artificial leaf” challenge.
Solar Energy & The Artificial Leaf Of The Future
The concept of the artificial leaf first crossed the CleanTechnica radar in the form of a card-sized photoelectrochemical cell, back in 2011. Instead of converting sunlight into electricity, the cell acts as a catalyst that deploys solar energy to break water into oxygen and hydrogen.
The largest solar project in Kentucky will be built on an abandoned coal mine in Martin County and provide jobs for former coal workers.
Austrian Verbund AG is acquiring the Illora photovoltaic project in southern Spain from BayWa r.e. The solar park, with a planned total capacity of 147.6 MW, is scheduled to go into operation in the first quarter of 2022.
With an efficiency of 20.9%, the tested cell does not yet fully exploit the potential.
Circa 2020
What do you get when you place a thin film of perovskite material used in solar cells on top of a magnetic substrate? More efficient hard drive technology. EPFL physicist László Forró and his team pave the way for the future of data storage.
“The key was to get the technology to work at room temperature,” explains László Forró, EPFL physicist. “We had already known that it was possible to rewrite magnetic spin using light, but you’d have to cool the apparatus to—180 degrees Kelvin.”
Forró, along with his colleagues Bálint Náfrádi and Endre Horváth, succeeded at tuning one ferromagnet at room temperature with visible light, a proof of concept that establishes the foundations of a new generation of hard drives that will be physically smaller, faster, and cheaper, requiring less energy compared to today’s commercial hard drives. The results are published in PNAS.
Sunny way.
A ‘bike highway’ running between Daejon and Sejong in South Korea is a sight —or rather, a concept —, you surely haven’t thought of before: It stretches for 20 miles (32 km), and it not only shields cyclists from the sun but also generates power at the same time.
It’s true that a bicycle lane in the center of a highway is an unusual location for one, especially with three lanes of traffic on either side of it, yet it works. Much like the $3.7 million SolaRoad in the Netherlands, a 230-foot road replaced by solar panels, which powers the highway’s lighting system, this bike highway is a win for green energy. Its lanes produce more than enough electricity to power the lighting of the highway and the electric vehicle charging stations, according to Fast Company.
This all-electric 4×4 off-road concept has a monster battery pack, a brutally angular and military look that borrows heavily from the Cybertruck, and pop-out solar panels for off-grid charging. Oh, and if you need extra range, you can snap two extra wheels and a battery onto the back of it with a self-balancing caboose that makes it a six-wheel-drive.
First things first: Thundertruck is the brainchild of a Los Angeles “creative consultancy,” conceived mainly as a way to keep the team busy during the first wave of COVID lockdowns. “Instead of baking bread or making puzzles,” says the Wolfgang L.A. team, “we decided to make a new state-of-the-art EV truck.”
So while Wolfgang says it “has the ability to support an entire product development program, from research and strategy to initial sketches and first prototypes, all the way to advertising launch campaigns and content creation,” it’s fair to say it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing the Thundertruck out bush-bashing or crushing hillclimbs any day soon.
One of the barriers to generating electricity from wind and solar energy is their intermittent nature. A promising alternative to accommodate the fluctuations in power output during unfavorable environmental conditions are hydrogen storage systems, which use hydrogen produced from water splitting to generate clean electricity. However, these systems suffer from poor efficiency and often need to be large in size to compensate for it. This, in turn, makes for complex thermal management and a lowered energy and power density.
In a study published in Journal of Power Sources, researchers from Tokyo Tech have now proposed an alternative electric energy storage system that utilizes carbon © as an energy source instead of hydrogen. The new system, called a “carbon/air secondary battery (CASB),” consists of a solid-oxide fuel and electrolysis cell (SOFC/ECs) where carbon generated via electrolysis of carbon dioxide (CO2), is oxidized with air to produce energy. The SOFC/ECs can be supplied with compressed liquefied CO2 to make up the energy storage system.
“Similar to a battery, the CASB is charged using the energy generated by the renewable sources to reduce CO2 to C. During the subsequent discharge phase, the C is oxidized to generate energy,” explains Prof. Manabu Ihara from Tokyo Tech.
The idea of a tritium power cell is pretty straightforward: stick enough of the tiny glowing tubes to a photovoltaic panel and your DIY “nuclear battery” will generate energy for the next decade or so. Only problem is that the power produced, measured in a few microwatts, isn’t enough to do much with. But as [Ian Charnas] demonstrates in his latest video, you can eke some real-world use out of such a cell by storing up its power over a long enough period.
As with previous projects we’ve seen, [Ian] builds his cell by sandwiching an array of keychain-sized tritium tubes between two solar panels. Isolated from any outside light, power produced by the panels is the result of the weak green glow given off by the tube’s phosphorus coating as it gets bombarded with electrons. The panels are then used to charge a bank of thin-film solid state batteries, which are notable for their exceptionally low self-discharge rate.
Some quick math told [Ian] that a week of charging should build up enough of a charge to power a knock-off handheld Tetris game for about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, after waiting the prescribed amount of time, he got only a few seconds of runtime out of his hacked together power source.