Lifeboat Foundation

The idea of transparent solar windows almost sounds too good to be true, and it is, but not entirely. Researchers have been hammering away at the challenge of harnessing sunlight to generate electricity from see-through windows for years. The prize is acres upon acres of new sites for solar panels on buildings, without losing the energy-saving advantages of daylighting. Just look at any glass building and you can practically feel the blooming of the possibilities. The obstacles are many but it looks like a real breakthrough is finally at hand, so to speak.

Transparent Solar Windows, For Real

See-through solar cells have been bouncing around the CleanTechnica radar since at least 2010, when the possibility of creating a transparent solar window was beginning to emerge alongside thin film solar technology.

Solid-solution organic crystals have been brought into the quest for superior photon upconversion materials, which transform presently wasted long-wavelength light into more useful shorter wavelength light. Scientists from Tokyo Institute of Technology have revisited a materials approach previously deemed lackluster—using a molecule originally developed for organic LEDs—and have achieved outstanding performance and efficiency. Their findings pave the way for many novel photonic technologies, such as better solar cells and photocatalysts for hydrogen and hydrocarbon productions.

Light is a powerful source of energy that can, if leveraged correctly, be used to drive stubborn chemical reactions, generate electricity, and run optoelectronic devices. However, in most applications, not all the wavelengths of light can be used. This is because the energy that each photon carries is inversely proportional to its wavelength, and chemical and physical processes are triggered by light only when the energy provided by individual photons exceeds a certain threshold.

This means that devices like solar cells cannot benefit from all the color contained in sunlight, as it comprises a mixture of photons with both high and low energies. Scientists worldwide are actively exploring materials to realize photon upconversion (PUC), by which photons with lower energies (longer wavelengths) are captured and re-emitted as photons with higher energies (shorter wavelengths). One promising way to realize this is through triplet-triplet annihilation (TTA). This process requires the combination of a sensitizer material and an annihilator material. The sensitizer absorbs low energy photons (long-wavelength light) and transfers its excited energy to the annihilator, which emits higher energy photons (light of shorter wavelength) as a result of TTA.

Facebook has been rife with “Star Trek” Thanksgiving memes for the last week or more which in and of itself is puzzling. “Star Trek” is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about when commemorating the first harvest feast shared by this country’s Pilgrim colonists and local Native Americans.

But it’s reasonable to assert that “Star Trek” and Thanksgiving are at least tangentially linked since the latter is a celebration of home and hearth whereas “Star Trek” is a celebration of humankind’s exploration of the cosmos. Certainly, this time of year represents an ideal time of year to be thankful for home and shelter.

As for “Star Trek”?

Continue reading “‘Star Trek’ Meme Reminds Us To Be Thankful For Earth Itself” »

Deepsea submersible diving could compete with space tourism.

A form of luxury tourism is hitting the deep sea thanks to a small handful of firms providing state-of-the-art private submersibles to high-paying customers.

Continue reading “Could Luxury Submarine Trips Thrive as an Alternative to Space Tourism?” »

Advanced hydrogel used in SmartFarm was also tested for space-based agriculture.

Sushil Reddy is no stranger to long-distance electric bicycles rides, having broken the Guinness World Record back in 2016 with a 7,424 km (4,613 mile) ride across India. Since then he’s set his sights on solar power, performing several more long-distance solar-powered electric bike rides. Now he’s halfway through a 10,460 km (6,500 mile) ride around the US on a custom-built solar-powered electric bike as part of the SunPedal Ride project.

As the SunPedal Ride project explained:

“The SunPedal Ride is an outreach project started by Sushil Reddy in 2016. The idea is to have conversations about clean energy and sustainable mobility via endurance journeys undertaken on zero tail-pipe emission vehicles. Each edition of The SunPedal Ride is a new challenge which is executed by a team and supported by a group of sponsors/partners to spread the message via public interactions. A medium of a zero tail-pipe emissions vehicle is used in each edition of The SunPedal Ride.”

A small team of researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California has found that battery-powered trains could become economical as soon as 2023. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the group argues that improved battery technology and cheap, renewable energy could soon allow battery power to compete with diesel fuel to power trains. Federico Zenith with NTNU, Trondheim, has published a News & Views piece in the same journal issue outlining the reasons for converting trains to battery power and gives an overview of the work done by the team on this new effort.

Trains, as Zenith notes, haul approximately 40 percent of intercity freight in the U.S., and sending things by train is cheaper than using trucks. Most of the freight trains in the U.S. run on diesel fuel, he states, spewing approximately 0.6 percent of total U.S. carbon emissions. In this new effort, the researchers suggest that switching to battery power could prevent these emissions.

Electric trains in the U.S. get their power from overhead lines—a system that is expensive and inefficient. The team suggests that batteries could provide a better option; more specifically, they claim that a single locomotive equipped with a 14-megawatt battery system would be sufficient to replace a train powered by a diesel engine. They further claim that such a locomotive could carry a train approximately 240 kilometers on a single charge. This would consume half the energy of a diesel-powered train. And if the battery is charged using a renewable resource, it would reduce the carbon footprint of an electric train to zero.

Tesla’s Shanghai Gigafactory will see an expansion of its manufacturing capacity as the US company announced new investment of 1.2 billion yuan ($188 million) into the plant.

The facility’s manufacturing area will be increased while including a certain level of environmental protection investment, Tesla disclosed in a new environmental impact assessment report published on Shanghai’s corporate environment information public platform.

According to state-run Global Times website citing information disclosed in the assessment report, Tesla will upgrade the plant’s phase one production lines by investing 1.2 billion yuan ($188 million) in the project, of which 85 million yuan ($13.3 million) will be allocated for environmental protection.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk vended about$1.05 billion in stock on Tuesday evening, according to fiscal forms posted this week. The deals were listed in September to exercise options that were set to expire in 2022.Musk has vended a aggregate of$9.85 billion in Tesla stock this month including the$6.9 billion he vended the week ofNov.10 and another$1.9 billion he vended onNov. 15 andNov. 16. Some of the shares were vended in part to satisfy duty scores related to an exercise of stock options. Musk and his trust still hold further than 169 million shares in the company.

Tesla shares fell15.4 the week endedNov.12 marking the worst week for Tesla stock in 20 months after Musk began dealing shares. Shares of Tesla were over about 1 on Wednesday autumn. Musk ran an informal Twitter bean onNov.6 asking his further than 60 million Twitter followers whether or not he should vend 10 of his Tesla stock. The bean eventually ended with druggies telling Musk to vend.

But Musk had formerly indicated before this time he was likely to vend a huge block of his options in the fourth quarter. During an appearance at the Code Conference in September he said when his stock options expire at Tesla his borderline duty rate would be over 50.