A new photodetector design borrows its light-gathering architecture from plants, offering a potential path to more efficient solar cells.
Category: sustainability – Page 273
NREL’s newly patented technology will generate electricity from ocean waves, lab claims
This novel technology can be built in many ways, even like a snake.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has revealed a breakthrough technology with wave energy. The lab claims that with this new technology, electricity can be produced from waves and even from clothes, and cars.
NREL — which specializes in the research and development of renewable energy, energy efficiency, energy systems integration, and sustainable transportation — has already taken out the patent of its unique distributed embedded energy converter technologies (DEEC-Tec).
NREL
The lab claims that with this new technology, electricity can be produced from waves and even from clothes, and cars.
Carbon nanotubes boost efficiency in “nanobionic” bacterial solar cells
Engineers at EPFL have found a way to insert carbon nanotubes into photosynthetic bacteria, which greatly improves their electrical output. They even pass these nanotubes down to their offspring when they divide, through what the team calls “inherited nanobionics.”
Solar cells are the leading source of renewable energy, but their production has a large environmental footprint. As with many things, we can take cues from nature about how to improve our own devices, and in this case photosynthetic bacteria, which get their energy from sunlight, could be used in microbial fuel cells.
In the new study, the EPFL team gave these bacteria a boost by inserting carbon nanotubes – tiny rolled-up sheets of graphene, a material that’s famously conductive. The nanotube-loaded bugs were able to produce up to 15 times more electricity than their non-edited counterparts from the same amount of sunlight.
This Environmentally Friendly Quantum Sensor Runs On Sunlight
Quantum tech is going green.
A new take on highly sensitive magnetic field sensors ditches the power-hungry lasers that previous devices have relied on to make their measurements and replaces them with sunlight. Lasers can gobble 100 watts or so of power — like keeping a bright lightbulb burning. The innovation potentially untethers quantum sensors from that energy need. The result is an environmentally friendly prototype on the forefront of technology, researchers report in an upcoming issue of Physical Review X Energy.
The big twist is in how the device uses sunlight. It doesn’t use solar cells to convert light into electricity. Instead, the sunlight does the job of the laser’s light, says Jiangfeng Du, a physicist at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei.
How Many Miles Before An Electric Car Is Greener Than A Gas Car
Electric vehicles have often been hailed as the future. Major motoring companies are aiming to produce nothing but electric vehicles in the future, and some aspire to hit that target by the end of the decade. Cars that are traditionally seen as so-called gas guzzlers — like pickup trucks, muscle cars, and hummers — all have electric equivalents. Governments, including the one running the United States, are improving infrastructure, offering tax incentives, and enacting policies aimed at getting more electric vehicles on the road. And modern-day industrial icons like Elon Musk, who obviously has a vested interest in the electric car’s success, constantly promote the concept. Musk recently published a tweet that likened internal combustion engines to the steam engine — an archaic method of producing mechanical power.
Geothermal Energy May Be Key to Lithium Battery Technology Sustainability
The rapid development of geothermal energy can contribute not only to reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also to the production of environmentally sustainable lithium for EV batteries.
Jane Marsh describes how a Salton Sea project is producing both geothermal energy and lithium salts suitable for EV batteries.
Rapid adoption of electric vehicles could save money and avoid 24,000 deaths over 20 years
The loss of life would be equivalent to six planes, each carrying 200 passengers, killing everyone on board, every year.
Reducing air pollution from road transport will save thousands of lives and improve the health.
In our published research we evaluated the costs and benefits of a rapid transition. In one scenario, Australia matches the pace of transition of world leaders such as Norway. The modeling estimates this would save around 24,000 lives by 2042. Over time, the resulting greenhouse emission reductions would almost equal Australia’s current total annual emissions from all sources.
We also calculated the total costs and benefits through to 2042. Australia would be about 148 billion Australian dollars better off overall with a rapid transition.