Dear Reader.
Despite what the mainstream media have been telling you for decades now, the future of consumer and commercial transportation is not electric.
It also won’t be gas-powered…
Continue reading “‘Liquid Electricity’ at a Filling Station Near You?” »
HOUSTON — (Jan. 27 2020) — That banana peel, turned into graphene, can help facilitate a massive reduction of the environmental impact of concrete and other building materials. While you’re at it, toss in those plastic empties. A new process introduced by the Rice University lab of chemist James Tour can turn bulk quantities of just about any carbon source into valuable graphene flakes. The process is quick and cheap; Tour said the “flash graphene” technique can convert a ton of coal, food waste or plastic into graphene for a fraction of the cost used by other bulk graphene-producing methods. “This is a big deal,” Tour said. “The world throws out 30% to 40% of all food, because it goes bad, and plastic waste is of worldwide concern. We’ve already proven that any solid carbon-based matter, including mixed plastic waste and rubber tires, can be turned into graphene.” As reported in Nature, flash graphene is made in 10 milliseconds by heating carbon-containing materials to 3,000 Kelvin (about 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit). The source material can be nearly anything with carbon content. Food waste, plastic waste, petroleum coke, coal, wood clippings and biochar are prime candidates, Tour said. “With the present commercial price of graphene being $67,000 to $200,000 per ton, the prospects for this process look superb,” he said.
Scientists at Rice University are using high-energy pulses of electricity to turn any source of carbon into turbostratic graphene in an instant. The process promises environmental benefits by turning waste into valuable graphene that can then strengthen concrete and other composite materials.
Continue reading “Rice lab turns trash into valuable graphene in a flash” »
This is where floating wind farms come into play. The world’s first floating wind farm, Hywind, opened in 2,017 almost 25 miles off the coast of Aberdeen in Scotland. The wind farm counts six floating wind turbines that are slotted in a buoyant cylinder filled with heavy ballast to make it float vertically. Because they’re only tethered to the seabed with thick mooring lines, they can operate in waters more than 3,000 feet deep.
Hywind is powering around 36,000 British homes, and it has already broken U.K. records for energy output. Wind Catching Systems launched the same year Hywind opened. It claims that one unit could power up between 80,000 and 100,000 European households. In ideal conditions, where the wind is at its strongest, one wind catcher unit could produce up to 400 gigawatt-hours of energy. By comparison, the largest, most powerful wind turbine on the market right now produces up to 80 gigawatt-hours.
The Desert Quartzite Solar+Storage Project is in Riverside County, California, and could enter service in early 2024.
From pv magazine USA
EDF Renewables North America, the US unit of French energy giant EDF, and Clean Power Alliance signed a 15-year power purchase agreement (PPA) for the Desert Quartzite Solar-plus-Storage project.
Continue reading “EDF inks PPA for 300 MW/600 MWh solar-plus-storage project in the US” »
Juno Solar is one of five projects that SB Energy is building this year, with an additional 1.3 GW scheduled to go online over the next seven months.
From pv magazine USA
Continue reading “Juno Solar starts operations with 418 MW of capacity” »
An Australian company by the name of HyperPower Technologies has developed an electric motor that generates a mammoth 1,340 horsepower.
The electric motor, code-named the QFM-360-X, measures about 17 inches in diameter and is designed to be scalable. HyperPower said ten of them could be mounted on a common shaft to deliver 13,400 hp.
To demonstrate the performance, HyperPower teamed up with electric drag racers Top EV Racing and built a Top Fuel-style dragster powered by four of the motors for a combined output of 5,360 hp. Performance estimates for the electric beast include a 0–124 mph time of 0.8 seconds, a 0–330 mph time of 3.7 seconds, and a top speed of 380 mph.
A hair-like protein hidden inside bacteria serves as a sort of on-off switch for nature’s “electric grid,” a global web of bacteria-generated nanowires that permeates all oxygen-less soil and deep ocean beds, Yale researchers report in the journal Nature. “The ground beneath our feet, the entire globe, is electrically wired,” said Nikhil Malvankar, assistant professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry at the Microbial Sciences Institute at Yale’s West Campus and senior author of the paper. “These previously hidden bacterial hairs are the molecular switch controlling the release of nanowires that make up nature’s electrical grid.”
Almost all living things breathe oxygen to get rid of excess electrons when converting nutrients into energy. Without access to oxygen, however, soil bacteria living deep under oceans or buried underground over billions of years have developed a way to respire by “breathing minerals,” like snorkeling, through tiny protein filaments called nanowires.
Continue reading “Hidden bacterial hairs power nature’s ‘electric grid’” »
The two companies have raised an initial US$6.5 million toward what could genuinely be a revolutionary powertrain for electric aircraft; a fully FAA-certified hydrogen system would instantly allow electric aircraft to carry several times more energy on board, vastly boosting flight endurance while also enabling fast refueling instead of slow charging.
HyPoint claims its “turbo air-cooled” fuel cell system” will be able to achieve up to 2,000 watts per kilogram (2.2 lb) of specific power, which is more than triple the power-to-weight ratio of traditional (liquid-cooled) hydrogen fuel cells systems. It will also boast up to 1,500 watt-hours per kilogram of energy density, enabling longer-distance journeys.” For comparison, today’s commercially available lithium battery packs rarely break the 300-Wh/kg mark.
Circa 2020
Carmaker is to begin testing proposal to fit its Dyna vehicles with hydrogen fuel cells[br].
Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a soft and stretchable device that converts movement into electricity and can work in wet environments.
“Mechanical energy—such as the kinetic energy of wind, waves, body movement and vibrations from motors—is abundant,” says Michael Dickey, corresponding author of a paper on the work and Camille & Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State. “We have created a device that can turn this type of mechanical motion into electricity. And one of its remarkable attributes is that it works perfectly well underwater.”
Continue reading “Using liquid metal to turn motion into electricity, even underwater” »
