Tesla is rumored to be looking to invest in Nuevo Leon, a Mexican state bordering Texas, as CEO Elon Musk meets with the governor.
Earlier this year, people crossing the border between Texas and Nuevo Leon were surprised to see not just the usual marked lanes for cars and trucks but also one marked “Tesla” – pictured above.
A new way to boost the growth of plants in rooftop farms.
Humans constantly breathe out large amounts of CO2 and when we are inside a building for a period of time, it creates high concentrations of carbon dioxide inside the building. This CO2 is removed through a building’s exhaust system.
Plants take in CO2 as a source of food and when they are exposed to lots of CO2, they will grow bigger than they would have otherwise.
Dr. Sarabeth Buckley.
Interestingly, a team of researchers from Boston University has proposed a system called BIG GRO in which excess CO2 from a building’s exhaust system can be utilized as a fertilizer to grow thriving rooftop gardens.
Bill Gates founded Breakthrough Energy and has recently announced that its first Catalyst project funding will come in the form of a $50 million grant to LanzaJet’s Freedom Pines Fuels sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) plant in Soperton, Georgia.
Breakthrough Energy Catalyst is a unique program that brings together businesses and nonprofits to fund key first-of-its-kind commercial-scale projects that speed up the deployment of essential technologies.
Tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon enable significantly higher efficiencies than silicon solar cells alone. Tandem cells from HZB have already achieved several world records. Most recently, in November 2021, HZB research teams achieved a certified efficiency of 29.8% with a tandem cell made of perovskite and silicon. This was an absolute world record that stood unbeaten at the top for eight months. It was not until the summer of 2022 that a Swiss team at EPFL succeeded in surpassing this value.
Three HZB teams worked closely together for the record-breaking tandem cell. Now they present the details in Nature Nanotechnology. The journal also invited them to write a research briefing, in which they summarize their work and give an outlook on future developments.
Most efforts so far have relied on external heating and cooling systems, but these add a lot of bulk and also tend to use up a considerable amount of energy themselves. The researchers’ innovation, outlined in a recent paper in Nature , was to add an extra component to the batteries: a sheet of nickel foil just a few micrometers thick between the stacked electrodes of each cell.
This ultra-thin sheet is used as a heating element, and when a current is passed through it the cell heats up to 149° Fahrenheit in about a minute. This temperature is maintained through charging, but the cell then quickly cools back to room temperature as soon as the current is switched off.
When they tested their approach, the researchers found that they could charge a 265 watt-hour battery to 70 per cent in 11 minutes. They also showed that heating the battery didn’t seriously affect its lifetime, as it survived 2,000 cycles of charging, which would provide enough energy to drive more than 500,000 miles overall.
A collaboration between the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington State University opens the door to sustainable jet fuel.
An underused natural resource might be just what the airline industry needs to reduce carbon emissions.
U.S. researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT.
Warrior Moms, a national citizen action group, is battling for their children’s right to breathe clean air in polluted cities like Delhi, by engaging in urban mobility, waste management, biomass burning, and biodiversity protection.
The Indian Electric Vehicle market is set to reach a sales volume of 10.8 lakh units by 2025. However, these vehicles are currently at a high price and are not affordable to consumers in low-income categories.
To bridge this gap, a team of seven students at the KL University, Hyderabad have retrofitted an old and discarded bike into an EV.
“We also added futuristic features including wireless charging and cell balancing, which ensures equalised charging,” says Charan Sai (21), a fourth-year student of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, and the lead of the project.
Each has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of efficiency, size, location, installation costs, operating costs, input and output power ratings, longevity and how long it can store the energy for. That’s good, since different solutions will fill different needs – some backing up the power grid during instantaneous demand spikes, others smoothing out the mismatched daily curves between demand and renewable supply, and others still helping to address seasonal supply drops, like when solar drops off through the winter.
Here’s another for the pile, coming out of Finland. Polar Night Energy says it’s just opened its first commercial sand battery at the premises of “new energy” company Vatajankoski, a few hours out of Helsinki.
