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Category: sustainability – Page 624

The three solar micro-grids, with combined capacity of 35 kilowatts, were installed in the communities of Harkapur in Okhaldhunga district, and Kaduwa and Chyasmitar in Khotang District, as per a statement issued today. They will provide a 24-hour reliable electricity supply to around 540 people in 83 households and 25 local businesses.

“Nearly a quarter of Nepal’s population has no access to electricity and rely heavily instead on kerosene in particular. Since most of them live in remote areas, there is little possibility of connecting to the national power grid in the near future,” said Jiwan Acharya, senior energy specialist at the Asian Development Bank (ADB). “The solar micro-grids that we are piloting here provide a clean, cost-effective, local solution involving private sector that will change the lives of these communities and serve as a model for other far-flung villages.”

Electricity costs for households are forecast at $4 to $6 per month. Currently households relying on kerosene for lighting alone, can pay up to $10 a month. And by using solar power rather than fossil fuels, the project will avoid 41 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year.

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Researchers in the US have proposed a new form of wind power: small, artificial, mechanical trees capable of producing energy from their vibrations. Working with the natural breeze, or small movements caused by other factors, the scientists hope that new forms of renewable energy can be developed in the future.

The idea is to create a device that can convert random forces – whether that’s from the footfall of pedestrians on a bridge, or a passing gust of wind – into electricity that can be used to power devices. And the researchers have found that tree-like structures made from electromechanical materials are perfect for the task.

“Buildings sway ever so slightly in the wind, bridges oscillate when we drive on them and car suspensions absorb bumps in the road,” said project leader Ryan Harne from Ohio State University. “In fact, there’s a massive amount of kinetic energy associated with those motions that is otherwise lost. We want to recover and recycle some of that energy.”

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The Roll-Array is easily towable by a standard 4×4 vehicle such as a Land Rover. When connected to the back of the car, the flexible solar panels are pulled out of a spool and create ground cover in a matter of minutes. On their website, Renovagen claims the panels will be able generate up to 100kWp – 10 times more power than other transportable solar panels on the market today.

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Not only is this new technology installed quickly, but the fuel cost savings during transportation is noteworthy. The tightly wound solar spools can be carried by the 4×4 vehicle attached to a small air pallet trailer in tow, which eliminates the need for large diesel generators.

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Government’s other big NextGen Program “Advanced Research Projects Agency-EnergyAdvanced Research Projects Agency-Energy” (ARPA) is funding a personal climate change solution with robots, foot coolers, etc. There is one fact; US Government does love their acronyms.

Why heat or cool a whole building when you could heat or cool individual people instead?

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Two big problems have been vexing environmental scientists for decades: How to store solar energy for later use, and what to do with CO2 that’s been captured and sequestered from coal plants? Scientists from General Electric (GE) could solve both those problems at once by using CO2 as a giant “battery” to hold excess energy. The idea is to use solar power from mirrors to heat salt with a concentrated mirror array like the one at the Ivanpah solar plant in California. Meanwhile, CO2 stored underground from, say, a coal plant is cooled to a solid dry ice state using excess grid power.

When extra electricity is needed at peak times, especially after the sun goes down, the heated salt can be tapped to warm up the solid CO2 to a “supercritical” state between a gas and solid. It’s then funneled into purpose built turbines (from GE, naturally) which can rapidly generate power. The final “sunrotor” design (a prototype is shown below) would be able to generate enough energy to power 100,000 homes, according to GE.

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Q-Dots windows to power homes and other buildings.

Researchers at the Los Alamos National Lab may have found a way to take quantum dots and put them in your ordinary windows to turn them into solar collectors.

Photovoltaic cells may be cheaper and more efficient than ever, but you still need to find a place to put them.

Looking to solve these space constraints, Los Alamos partnered with the University of Milano in Italy to see if they could turn windows into electric generators.

As nanocrystals roughly one-billionth of a meter across, — that is as small as 10 atoms wide — quantum dots can absorb light at one wavelength, convert it and re-emit it at another wavelength.

So the dots would absorb sunlight and convert it to a wavelength best suited for the photovoltaic cells, then be guided to the solar cells installed at its edges to electricity.

The University of Milan is responsible for the new industrial method that embeds the dots in a transparent material.

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VideoDisclaimer: The author of this article, Jason Belzer, is a member of rLoop and serves as the non-profit’s legal counsel. When billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk proposed the Hyperloop — a futuristic transportation system capable of propelling passengers to supersonic speeds — back in 2013, it is unlikely that even he could have imagined that just a few years later his vision would be tantalizing close to reality. Yet ironically, Musk, who has helped build companies like Tesla Motors and SpaceX that are on the leading edge of technological innovation, will not receive the credit if the Hyperloop indeed becomes a reality. Instead, that honor will be bestowed upon on a small group of teams now working feverishly to construct a prototype that will be tested this summer at SpaceX headquarters in California.

Imagine tackling one of the most complex engineering projects in the history of the human race, requiring countless hours of collaboration and experimentation by some of the world’s most talented engineers, and never actually meeting the people you are working with in a physical setting. You might think it’s impossible, or you might be a member of rLoop — the only non student team to reach the final stage of the SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition.

rLoop V6 3AM.259 - Final

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Researchers from the University of Alexandria have developed a cheaper, simpler and potentially cleaner way to turn seawater into drinking water than conventional methods.

This could have a huge impact on rural areas of the Middle East and North Africa, where access to clean water is a pressing issue if social stability and economic development is to improve.

Right now, desalinating seawater is the only viable way to provide water to growing populations, and large desalination plants are now a fact of life in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

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