Menu

Blog

Archive for the ‘sustainability’ category: Page 231

Apr 15, 2022

New Heat Engine With No Moving Parts Could Fully Decarbonize the Power Grid

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

The design could someday enable a fully decarbonized power grid, researchers say.

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency — a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The heat engine is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot heat source and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius 0, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

Apr 15, 2022

To Escape Elon Musk, Twitter May Need To Sell Itself To … Microsoft?

Posted by in categories: Elon Musk, sustainability, transportation

Twitter could run out of options and need to find a so-called white knight, a friendly buyer that it views as more suitable than the electric-car mogul.

Apr 15, 2022

Molecular thermal energy system can store solar energy for 18 years

Posted by in categories: computing, solar power, sustainability

Developed by a Chinese-Swedish research group, the device is an ultra-thin chip that could be integrated into electronics such as headphones, smartwatches and telephones. It combines a Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage System (MOST) with a micro-fabricated system that includes a thermoelectric generator (TEG) with a low-dimensional material-based microelectromechanical system (MEMS).

Apr 15, 2022

Greece opens the largest double-sided solar farm in Europe

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

The 204-megawatt solar park in the northern Greek town of Kozani was built by Greece’s biggest oil refiner Hellenic Petroleum.

Hellenic Petroleum is one of the largest oil companies in the Balkans but claims to be undergoing a transformation into clean energy. It has installed the largest solar park in Greece and also hints that it may add battery storage too.

Apr 15, 2022

Researchers Set New World Record for Solar Cell Efficiency

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability

A German research team has developed a tandem solar cell that reaches 24 percent efficiency – measured according to the fraction of photons converted into electricity (i.e. electrons). This sets a new world record as the highest efficiency achieved so far with this combination of organic and perovskite-based absorbers. The solar cell was developed by Professor Dr. Thomas Riedl’s group at the University of Wuppertal together with researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry at the University of Cologne and other project partners from the Universities of Potsdam and Tübingen as well as the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin and the Max-Planck-Institut für Eisenforschng in Düsseldorf. The results have been published today (April 13, 2022) in Nature under the title “Perovskite/organic tandem solar cells with indium oxide interconnect.”

Conventional solar cell technologies are predominantly based on the semiconductor silicon and are now considered to be “as good as it gets.” Significant improvements in their efficiency – i.e., more watts of electrical power per watt of solar radiation collected – can hardly be expected. That makes it all the more necessary to develop new solar technologies that can make a decisive contribution to the energy transition. Two such alternative absorber materials have been combined in this work. Here, organic semiconductors were used, which are carbon-based compounds that can conduct electricity under certain conditions. These were paired with a perovskite, based on a lead-halogen compound, with excellent semiconducting properties. Both of these technologies require significantly less material and energy for their production compared to conventional silicon cells, making it possible to make solar cells even more sustainable.

Apr 13, 2022

A new heat engine with no moving parts is as efficient as a steam turbine

Posted by in categories: finance, solar power, sustainability

Engineers at MIT and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have designed a heat engine with no moving parts. Their new demonstrations show that it converts heat to electricity with over 40 percent efficiency—a performance better than that of traditional steam turbines.

The is a thermophotovoltaic (TPV) cell, similar to a solar panel’s photovoltaic cells, that passively captures high-energy photons from a white-hot and converts them into electricity. The team’s design can generate electricity from a heat source of between 1,900 to 2,400 degrees Celsius, or up to about 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit.

The researchers plan to incorporate the TPV cell into a grid-scale thermal battery. The system would absorb from such as the sun and store that energy in heavily insulated banks of hot graphite. When the energy is needed, such as on overcast days, TPV cells would convert the heat into electricity, and dispatch the energy to a power grid.

Apr 13, 2022

These plastic batteries could help store renewable energy on the grid

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

A new type of battery made from electrically conductive polymers—basically plastic—could help make energy storage on the grid cheaper and more durable, enabling a greater use of renewable power.

The batteries, made by Boston-based startup PolyJoule, could offer a less expensive and longer-lasting alternative to lithium-ion batteries for storing electricity from intermittent sources like wind and solar.

Apr 13, 2022

Engineers enlist AI to help scale up advanced solar cell manufacturing

Posted by in categories: robotics/AI, solar power, sustainability

Perovskites are a family of materials that are currently the leading contender to potentially replace today’s silicon-based solar photovoltaics. They hold the promise of panels that are far thinner and lighter, that could be made with ultra-high throughput at room temperature instead of at hundreds of degrees, and that are cheaper and easier to transport and install. But bringing these materials from controlled laboratory experiments into a product that can be manufactured competitively has been a long struggle.

Manufacturing perovskite-based involves optimizing at least a dozen or so variables at once, even within one particular manufacturing approach among many possibilities. But a new system based on a novel approach to could speed up the development of optimized production methods and help make the next generation of solar power a reality.

The system, developed by researchers at MIT and Stanford University over the last few years, makes it possible to integrate data from prior experiments, and information based on personal observations by experienced workers, into the machine learning process. This makes the outcomes more accurate and has already led to the manufacturing of perovskite cells with an energy conversion efficiency of 18.5 percent, a competitive level for today’s market.

Apr 13, 2022

The “World’s First Ever Solid State Swappable EV Battery” Is Here!!

Posted by in categories: quantum physics, sustainability

Covering the topics of Solid State Battery, World First Swappable Solid State Battery, Gogoro, Quantumscape, and more!

Don´t forget to leave your comments below and to support the channel by liking the video and subscribing. Thanks!

Continue reading “The ‘World’s First Ever Solid State Swappable EV Battery’ Is Here!!” »

Apr 13, 2022

A new energy storage system can store solar power for nearly two decades

Posted by in categories: solar power, sustainability