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Category: sustainability – Page 265

Tesla Cybertruck production reportedly delayed further to 2023 end

Elon Musk’s final lap is one year long.

Fans of Tesla’s much-awaited Cybertruck may have to wait for yet another year to see their dream pickup at their doorstep. According to a Reuters.

When Elon Musk first showcased the Cybertruck, it immediately caught the eye of many motorheads. With a $100 fee to book the truck, many jumped in the fray to get one. Years have now rolled by, and Tesla has been pushing back production dates.

First scheduled for production in 2021, the rollout timeline was shifted by a year, first to 2022, then another to 2023. While it was earlier expected that the futuristic pickup would go into production early in the year, it now appears that it has been pushed further into the fag end of the year.

Solar energy in Europe will be 10 times cheaper than gas by 2030 — here’s how

Gas will still be a part of the mix but only to address exigencies.

Energy prices In Europe are at an all-time high. While the situation is not expected to last forever, even after gas prices reach some degree of moderation, the cost of generating power using solar photovoltaics will drop so low that it will be 10 times cheaper, a report from an energy research company said.

Europe has always relied on gas-fired power stations for its energy demands. The geopolitical tension over Ukraine has resulted in Russia dropping its gas exports, which have directly impacted the region’s energy cost.

SergiyMolchenko/iStock.

According to a report by Oslo-based Rystad Energy, the spot prices for gas at the Title Transfer Facility (TTF) gas hub in the Netherlands were an average of US$46 per Megawatt-hour (MWh) in 2021. The TTF pricing is a reference point for Western Europe’s gas prices and has risen sharply after the conflict in Ukraine this year. The TTF pricing at the time of the report was US$134 per MWh, a steep increase of 187 percent.

More than 50 Tesla employees are helping Elon Musk handle matters at Twitter

But do they really have the necessary skillset?

The new CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, has authorized 50 employees from his other companies, such as Tesla, SpaceX, and the Boring Company, to help him handle matters at the social media company, according to a report by CNBC

In addition to the employees, Musk has friends and advisors who are looking into the affairs at Twitter, such as the head of his family office Jared Birchall, venture capitalist and founding member of the PayPal team David Sacks, and angel investor Jason Calacanis.

After completing his Twitter acquisition, Musk fired the Board of Directors and the top brass at the social media site. This leaves him as the sole director of the company, taking up the position of the CEO at Twitter, although his Twitter bio describes him as Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator as of now.

Efficiency and stability best practices for solar water splitting to make hydrogen

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are providing researchers with a guide to how to best measure the efficiency of producing hydrogen directly from solar power.

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water-splitting, which relies on sunlight to split water into its component elements—oxygen and hydrogen—stands out as potentially one of the most sustainable routes to clean energy. Measurements of how efficient the PEC process is on an identical system can vary wildly from different laboratories, however, from a lack of standardized methods. The newly developed best-practices guide published in Frontiers in Energy Research is intended to provide confidence in comparing results obtained at different sites and by different groups.

The publication provides a road map for the PEC community as researchers continue to refine the technology. These were verified by both laboratories via round-robin testing using the same testing hardware, PEC photoelectrodes, and measurement procedures. Research into photovoltaics has allowed a certification of cell efficiencies, but PEC water-splitting efficiency measurements do not yet have a widely accepted protocol.

ICON Unveils “House Zero” and Announces 2022 SXSW Activations

How much did Musk pay for Twitter again? With everything the marketing of anything starts with demand. Was there demand for something better than Facebook and Twitter of course. Was there a demand to buy Twitter no. Kanye lost money but he didn’t lose $44 billion, as Musk probably realizes that $5 billion in yearly revenues isn’t guaranteed, especially if people pull a Kanye…so Musk wants to charge.

What is in demand then? Affordable housing is in demand because rents and inflation keep going up. $44 billion buys a lot of land. $25 Billion is $500 million in 50 states. This would have enabled Musk to spend $25 Billion on land alone. That always increase in value.

New 3D-printed Home Pushes the Boundaries of Resilient and Sustainable Architecture and Design; Official SXSW Event Tours of ICON’s “House Zero” Revealed for March 13–14, 2022.

NVIDIA Is Making a Digital Twin of Earth’s Climate. Here’s an Inside Look

https://vimeo.com/502905473

“If I’m a farmer in Australia, and I want to know what the drought situation is going to look like over the next 20 to 30 years and decide what sorts of crops I might want to grow or how I might want to change irrigation technologies that I use for my farm, I want to be able to ask questions like that to this digital twin and get answers,” Kashinath said.

FourCastNet, an open-source project, is the first product of the broader Earth-2 initiative available to researchers. And while there’s no specific date for when the team will launch Earth-2 publicly, Kashinath said it will similarly be open for use by the research community.

Hopefully, as tools like Earth-2 emerge, we can better plan for and adapt to our rapidly changing climate.

Beaming Clean Energy From Space — Caltech’s “Extraordinary and Unprecedented Project”

Technology capable of collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy was once considered science fiction. Now it is moving closer to reality. Through the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), a team of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers is working to deploy a constellation of modular spacecraft that collect sunlight, transform it into electricity, then wirelessly transmit that electricity wherever it is needed. They could even send it to places that currently have no access to reliable power.

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy to the world.”

Atwater, who is also the Howard Hughes Professor of Applied Physics and Materials Science, leads the project jointly with two other researchers: Ali Hajimiri, Bren Professor of Electrical Engineering and co-director of SSPP; and Sergio Pellegrino, Joyce and Kent Kresa Professor of Aerospace and Civil Engineering, co-director of SSPP, and a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL.

China: Lithium batteries may soon power ‘world’s largest fleet’ of submarines

With an estimated 60 to 70 vessels, China allegedly possesses the largest fleet of conventional submarines in the world.

The Chinese Navy could finally use lithium technology to replace the lead-acid batteries that are now used in its fleet of conventional submarines.

Since lithium batteries had a higher risk of catching fire or exploding, the navy was hesitant to replace the submarine fleet’s current batteries with them.

Razihusin/iStock.

Lithium-ion batteries could soon power China’s massive fleet of conventional submarines due to advancements in the nation’s globally dominant electric car industry, according to a study by China’s Navy, reported on Saturday by South China Morning Post (SCMP).

Solar panels: How new materials can make them cheaper and better than ever

Transitioning away from fossil fuels.

The cost of turning sunlight into electricity has fallen more than 90 percent over the last decade. Solar is now the cheapest form of newly built energy generation. Job done? Not quite. Right now, solar works well at cost-competitive prices and can help us cut emissions significantly. But with less than five percent of the world’s electricity delivered by solar, we are just at the start.

The solar panels of 2022 are like the chunky mobile phones of the 1990s. Much more is possible with the same underlying technology.

Australia is likely to play a key role in global progress.

JONGHO SHIN/iStock.

Job done? Not quite. Right now, solar works well at cost-competitive prices and can help us cut emissions significantly. But with less than five percent of the world’s electricity delivered by solar, we are just at the start.

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