БЛОГ

Archive for the ‘energy’ category: Page 141

Jul 10, 2022

Powerful Sand Batteries Are Literally Dirt Simple

Posted by in category: energy

A startup from Finland called Polar Night Energy has developed an energy storage system based on sand. The idea is to store excess energy generated from clean electricity sources such as Wind, Solar, etc., to be reused days or even months later.

If it works, it will help solve the primary pain point of intermittent clean energy sources by making their final energy output more predictable and, therefore, more reliable.

Continue reading “Powerful Sand Batteries Are Literally Dirt Simple” »

Jul 10, 2022

Solar-plus-storage microgrid replaces diesel in remote Alaskan village

Posted by in category: energy

Blue Planet Energy has successfully deployed this first-of-its-kind project to support the residents of Shungnak, a remote community above the Arctic Circle in Alaska. The microgrid was designed to address the numerous challenges of operating in extreme conditions and break the community’s dependence on its expensive and polluting diesel generator power plant.

The resilient microgrid consists of a 225 kW solar array that can offset much of Shungnak’s energy needs. The system is integrated with 12 cabinets of 32 kWh Blue Ion LX battery systems, each storing excess energy for later use. In addition to reducing the village’s carbon footprint, the system also greatly decreases the high fuel and maintenance costs associated with running diesel generators in remote Alaska.

Continue reading “Solar-plus-storage microgrid replaces diesel in remote Alaskan village” »

Jul 9, 2022

Why Does Geothermal Get Missed in Conversations About Renewable Energy?

Posted by in categories: energy, sustainability

Paul Woskov of MIT shows a sample of what a gyrotron can do to vaporize solid rock. The technology may soon help to harvest geothermal energy.


Geothermal renewable energy is the forgotten cousin of wind and solar. An old Soviet-era technology, the gyrotron, may soon change that.

Jul 9, 2022

Engineers develop lithium-ion batteries that work well in extreme cold and heat

Posted by in category: energy

Jul 8, 2022

Using thermodynamic geometry to optimize microscopic finite-time heat engines

Posted by in categories: energy, physics, space

Stochastic thermodynamics is an emerging area of physics aimed at better understanding and interpreting thermodynamic concepts away from equilibrium. Over the past few years, findings in these fields have revolutionized the general understanding of different thermodynamic processes operating in finite time.

Adam Frim and Mike DeWeese, two researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have recently carried out a theoretical study exploring the full space of thermodynamic cycles with a continuously changing bath temperature. Their results, presented in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, were obtained using geometric methods. Thermodynamic geometry is an approach to understanding the response of thermodynamic systems by means of studying the geometric space of control.

“For instance, for a gas in a piston, one coordinate in this space of control could correspond to the experimentally controlled volume of the gas and another to the temperature,” DeWeese told Phys.org. “If an experimentalist were to turn those knobs, that plots out some trajectory in this thermodynamic space. What thermodynamic geometry does is assign to each curve a ‘thermodynamic length’ corresponding to the minimum possible dissipated energy of a given path.”

Jul 8, 2022

China allegedly built a hypersonic wind tunnel that’s too powerful for the grid

Posted by in category: energy

Jul 8, 2022

Cooling Down Carbon Molecules Using a Laser

Posted by in categories: energy, quantum physics

Credit: VENTRIS/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

By Amal Pushp, Affiliate Physicist at the Resonance Science Foundation

Quantum mechanics prohibits any quantum system from achieving a temperature that is equal to absolute zero. However, using Laser cooling, which is a highly efficient spectroscopic technique, atomic samples could be cooled to near absolute zero thus bringing them to their lowest achievable quantum energy state. Scientists have been advancing this technique for decades now and an important question that arose recently is whether carbon molecules, which are an integral component of life on earth, could be laser-cooled.

Jul 8, 2022

Hybrid wind-solar complex under development in Denmark

Posted by in category: energy

Eurowind Energy is building wind-solar capacity at five onshore energy centers and is also considering hydrogen electrolysis. It says each of the sites will include battery storage to offer grid services.

Jul 7, 2022

Design work starts on European commercial fusion power station

Posted by in category: energy

The EuroFusion consortium hopes its DEMOnstration Power Plant will take fusion power from the lab to commercial electricity supply by 2054.

Jul 6, 2022

Thermoelectrics: From heat to electricity

Posted by in categories: energy, physics

A lot of heat gets lost during the conversion of energy. Estimates even put it at more than 70%. However, in thermoelectric materials, such as those being studied at the Institute of Solid State Physics at TU Wien, heat can be converted directly into electrical energy. This effect (the Seebeck effect) can be used in numerous applications in industry but also in everyday life.

Recently, Ernst Bauer’s research team made an exciting discovery in a consisting of iron, vanadium and aluminum (Fe2VAl). The researchers recently published their results in Nature Communications.