The American Farm Bureau Federation has recognized Chad and Ben Johnson of Nebraska for designing a robot called “Grain Weevil” to lower maintenance and make grain bins safer.
Category: sustainability – Page 300
Energy company Royal Dutch Shell has started operations at the power-to-hydrogen electrolyzer in Zhangjiakou, China, a joint venture between Shell (China) and Zhangjiakou City Transport Construction Investment Holding Group, the Anglo-Dutch company wrote on Friday. The electrolyzer will reportedly provide about half of the total green hydrogen supply for fuel cell vehicles at the Zhangjiakou competition zone during this year’s Winter Olympic Games, set to begin on February 4. Shell looks set to make further investments in China’s hydrogen sector. “We see opportunities across the hydrogen supply chain in China, including its production, storage and shipping. We want to be the trusted partner for our customers from different sectors as we help them decarbonise in China,” commented Wael Sawan, director of Shell’s Integrated Gas, Renewable and Energy Solutions unit. The companies, which took 13 months to complete the project, have plans to scale the power-to-hydrogen electrolyzer up to 60 MW in the next two years. Utilizing onshore wind power, the project will initially supply green hydrogen to fuel a fleet of more than 600 fuel cell vehicles at the Zhangjiakou competition zone during the Winter Olympic Games. After that, the hydrogen will be used for public and commercial transport in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region.
Green Hydrogen Systems, a provider of pressurized alkaline electrolyzers used in on-site hydrogen production based on renewable electricity, has signed a supply agreement with Edinburgh-based Logan Energy to deliver electrolysis equipment for a project in England. The order includes the supply of two electrolyzers with a combined capacity of 0.9 MW for the production of green hydrogen from renewable energy. “Manufactured by Green Hydrogen Systems and operated by Logan Energy, the electrolysers will be deployed in a 40 ft container as a complete green hydrogen plant as part of plans to develop a regional hydrogen economy in Dorset, England,” Green Hydrogen Systems wrote on Tuesday. When fully operational during Q4 of 2022, the ordered electrolyzers will reportedly have the capacity to provide approximately 389 kg green hydrogen per day.
The company sold roughly one million cars in 2021.
The electric vehicle manufacturer announced yesterday that it made $5.5 billion in profits last year after selling nearly one million cars. That’s six times more than it did in 2020. But even those numbers weren’t enough to reassure investors that Tesla’s future success is a sure thing.
Surprisinglyfell sharply after the announcement because it also disclosed that supply chain problems have been forcing Tesla factories to run below capacity for months. Its 2022 outlook was also short on details about when new factories will come online, according to several analysts. Meanwhile, rival EV manufacturers are on the rise as the might of U.S. and global auto manufacturing shifts momentum into sustainable, electric vehicles.
“This is not ‘SpaceX did something bad’—it’s perfectly standard practice to abandon stuff in deep orbit,” writes McDowell. “This is ‘none of the space agencies care about leaving stuff out beyond the Moon’.”
However, with the age of commercial space industry there’s going to be a lot more junk like this. Something needs to be done. “It’s time for the world to get more serious about regulating and cataloging deep space activity,” writes McDowell. ## Why we need to launch rockets and satellites.
There seems to be a swell of doubt around whether the carbon footprints of rocket launches can be justified in this age of rampant climate change. Attaching the term “space junk” and Elon Musk’s name instantly make it a big and negative story.
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Developed in Spain, the Arca system integrates solar panels, power electronics, and energy storage. Arca Lite has a rated power of 490 Wp, and Arca Plus of 980 Wp.
From pv magazine Latam
The Spanish companies Solartia and IED — experts in energy and electronics, respectively — have launched Arca, an autonomous solar power generator described as a robust and low-maintenance system that aims to alleviate energy poverty.
The system integrates solar panels, power electronics, energy storage and prepayment in a compact, robust and simple way, which allows it to be able to supply energy permanently anywhere in the world, according to the manufacturer. The solution is also designed to be installed in any location without qualified personnel.
New biodegradable straws developed in China are as cheap as plastic, stronger than paper, and made from edible materials — but can they make a difference in the global plastic waste problem?
Plastic everywhere: People produce 330 million tons of plastic every year. Less than 9% of it is recycled, and about 12% is incinerated — the rest ends up polluting our natural environment or languishing in landfills.
About half of this plastic is in disposable products — bags, straws, etc. Because these products are disposable, they’re also cheap, so any equally disposable but more sustainable alternatives are going to need to be cheap, too — and similar quality.
All-polymer blend solar cells are expected to play an important role in the transition to clean energy technologies because they can be easily produced in large-scale flexible sheets. However, their performance has lagged behind that of more traditional silicon alternatives, as well as other organic solar cells.
All-polymer blend solar cells are formed by combining two polymer solutions that solidify into a film on an electrode with in the form of interpenetrating networks, a kind of “phase-separation.” The introduction of solvent additives to the polymer solution has been shown to increase the efficiency of all-polymer blend solar cells. However, the exact process underlying this improvement has not been fully understood. Now, in a study recently published in ACS Applied Polymer Materials, researchers from Nara Institute of Science and Technology have investigated the performance enhancement mechanism using photoconductive atomic force microscopy (PC-AFM). Their findings are expected to help accelerate the widespread application of polymer-based solar cells.
“The empirical nature of solvent additive-mediated efficiency enhancement has hindered the optimization of all-polymer blend solar cell performance, so there has been an urgent need for a greater understanding of the process,” explains senior author Hiroaki Benten. “To that end, we used PC-AFM to interrogate the nanoarchitecture that underpins the performance enhancement.”
Danish renewable energy provider, Eurowind Energy, has chosen ampere.cloud as a partner to monitor its PV portfolio after an intensive process of technical due diligence. A conversation:
A team mapping radio waves in the Universe has discovered something unusual that releases a giant burst of energy three times an hour, and it’s unlike anything astronomers have seen before. The team who discovered it think it could be a neutron star or a white dwarf—collapsed cores of stars—wi…
Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined. Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars […].
Electric bicycle sales have been on a skyward trajectory since early in the pandemic, and new numbers show they are selling more units than electric cars and plug-in hybrids combined.
Those figures recently released by the Light Electric Vehicle Association trade group help bolster the case for personal electric vehicles as alternatives to larger cars and trucks.
According to data released by the LEVA, the US saw nearly 790,000 electric bike imports in 2021. That marks a 70% increase from the 463,000 imports in 2020.