Lifeboat Foundation

For the past two centuries, humans have relied on fossil fuels for concentrated energy; hundreds of millions of years of photosynthesis packed into a convenient, energy-dense substance. But that supply is finite, and fossil fuel consumption has tremendous negative impact on Earth’s climate.

“The biggest challenge many people don’t realize is that even nature has no solution for the amount of energy we use,” said University of Chicago chemist Wenbin Lin. Not even photosynthesis is that good, he said: “We will have to do better than nature, and that’s scary.”

One possible option scientists are exploring is “artificial photosynthesis”—reworking a plant’s system to make our own kinds of fuels. However, the chemical equipment in a single leaf is incredibly complex, and not so easy to turn to our own purposes.

Vertical axis turbines missed their moment in the 1980s, but they are back, and they are getting bigger. That may come as a surprise. The technology was confined to niche applications and all but written off just a few years ago. Now they are poised for a new growth spurt in the rooftop field, and they are even heading out to sea.

The Long Road To Vertical Axis Wind Turbines

For those of you new to the topic, vertical axis wind turbines are engineered to make curved blades rotate around a central, upright pole. The US Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratory was experimenting with a scaled up design that resembled an egg beater back in the 1980s, as depicted in the photo at the top of this article.

Our start-up on its way to a scale-up is looking for new team members.

Plant-e, founded in 2013, generates electricity with living plants and is the only known company in the world that generates carbon-negative electricity. It doesn’t get any more sustainable than this!

Spark of Nature. It is Plant-e’s mission to provide a high-tech, nature-based solution by generating electricity with living plants.

He’s hoping that his plastic orbs, which rest between 15 and 36 feet below the ocean’s surface and hold about 528 gallons of air, will provide a water-conserving, overall sustainable alternative to on-land agricultural operations, particularly helping dry coastal nations grow more food without having to desalinate more water — a costly and resource-intensive process. The plants require just a small bit of starter water, but from there, they’re self-sustaining. Sunlight heats the submerged spheres, which contain humid air that naturally condenses into freshwater on the walls and drips back into the soil.

“Since the underwater farm needs an external source of water only for the start-up of plants growing,” reads the company’s site, “our system could be useful for those locations far from the bodies of water available.”

Climate change delegates traveling aboard private jets known to release more carbon dioxide emissions have added to the controversy surrounding the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Hundreds of environmental activists stopped private jets from taking off from Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport the day before the conference started last week.

The SisAl Pilot project produces solar-grade silicon from Spanish quartz without using coal and with zero CO₂ emissions. The company behind the project claims that the process is cheaper and more sustainable.

Organic photovoltaics, solar energy devices based on organic semiconductors, have so far achieved very promising results in experimental settings, both in terms of efficiency and stability. However, engineers have not yet devised reliable strategies to fabricate these devices on a large-scale at a reasonable cost.

Researchers at Wuhan University in China have recently identified an approach that could facilitate the rapid fabrication of photoactive layers for organic solar cells, without compromising the cells’ efficiency and stability. Their proposed strategy, introduced in a paper published in Nature Energy, is based on sequential deposition, a method often used to deposit organic semiconductors and perovskite films on substrates.

“To realize the commercialization of organic photovoltaics (OPVs), the golden triangle of power conversion efficiency (PCE), stability, and cost should be considered simultaneously,” Jie Min, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Why does the world’s richest person need more cash?

Days after agreeing to acquire Twitter for his initial offer of $44 billion, Elon Musk sold off Tesla stock worth nearly $4 billion in the days between November 4 and November 8, the Wall Street Journal.

Last year, Musk became the world’s richest person riding on the stock value of his electric car-making company, Tesla. At its peak price of $410 a piece, Musk’s personal worth reached a never-before figure of $340 billion last year. As we turned into the new year, Tesla stock started shedding the rapid gains, and as 2022 draws to a close, it is now down 45 percent, a Bloomberg report said.

In 2021, researchers from Toyota Central R&D Labs developed a large, cost-effective artificial photosynthesis system that produces industrial formate at a solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency (ηSTC) of 10.5%¹. Researchers from the lab say that, to their knowlege, this ηSTC is a first for a one metre squared cell.

Within the next 10 years, the company aims to establish artificial photosynthesis technology for wide-scale production of useful carbon compounds.