Lifeboat Foundation

But some policy experts and scientists worry that African nations might become too reliant on other countries to provide training. Others doubt that the initiatives will truly boost African science, as similar projects planned at past forums have yet to produce noticeable benefits.

But critics worry the investment will make African countries too reliant on an outside power.

You’ve probably seen them, perhaps on long roadtrips: wind turbines with enormous, hypnotic rolling blades, harnessing the clean power of wind for conversion into electric energy. What you may not know is that for the explosion in the number of wind turbines in use as we embrace cleaner sources of energy, these wind farms are quite possibly not as productive as they could be.

“We’ve been designing turbines for use by themselves, but we almost never use them by themselves anymore,” said UC Santa Barbara mechanical engineering professor Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz, whose specialty lies in fluid mechanics. Historically, he said, wind turbines were used individually or in small groups, but as the world moves toward greener energy technologies, they are now found in groups of hundreds or thousands.

The problem with these large installations is that each machine, which has been designed to extract as much energy as possible from oncoming wind, may not “play well” with the others, Luzzatto-Fegiz explained. Depending on how the turbines are situated relative to each other and to the prevailing wind, those not directly in the path of the wind could be left to extract energy from significantly depleted airflow.

Continue reading “Mechanical engineers develop ways to improve windfarm productivity” »

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a super-hydrophobic surface that can be used to generate electrical voltage. When salt water flows over this specially patterned surface, it can produce at least 50 millivolts. The proof-of-concept work could lead to the development of new power sources for lab-on-a-chip platforms and other microfluidics devices. It could someday be extended to energy harvesting methods in water desalination plants, researchers said.

A team of researchers led by Prab Bandaru, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, and first author Bei Fan, a graduate student in Bandaru’s research group, published their work in the Oct. 3 issue of Nature Communications.

The main idea behind this work is to create electrical voltage by moving ions over a charged surface. And the faster you can move these ions, the more voltage you can generate, explained Bandaru.

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New catalytic biohybrids can generate fuel from sunlight and might find use in green-energy applications.

For too long, presentations of science for the general public, and education in schools, has suggested that science wields a sort of hegemonic power, as if its terms and methods gradually replace and make redundant all other discourse; the only reason it has not yet completed its conquest is that the world is complicated—but it is only a matter of time…

Helion Energy in close.

In 2017, Nextbigfuture said that the ITER tokamak fusion project would cost $45–60 billion more than the claimed $22 billion construction budget and US Department of Energy (DOE) agrees with a far higher cost estimate. On April 11, 2018, Paul Dabbar, DOE undersecretary for science, provided a $65 billion estimate to the Senate Appropriations subcommittee on energy and water development. The $65 billion covers construction alone and annual operating costs once experimental operations begin in 2025 aren’t included.

The day after Dabbar’s testimony, the European Union Council of Ministers endorsed ITER’s nearly two-year-old baseline estimate, which covers construction from 2007 to full completion in 2035. Including a 10% contingency to account for overruns, ITER’s cost to EU members is €11.7 billion ($14.5 billion). As host, the EU is paying 46% of ITER’s cost, five times the share of each of the other six partners: China, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the US.

The budget they talk about is 20 billion euros. This does not include the cost of the hardware only the bureaucratic management costs and the costs of assembly. The donated hardware is not included. The budget is only to get ITER to 2035.

Continue reading “Said ITER would cost $45+ billion more and DOE agrees” »

The occurrence of geomagnetically induced currents (GICs) poses serious threats to modern technological infrastructure. Large GICs result from sharp variations of the geomagnetic field (dB∕dt) caused by changes of large-scale magnetospheric and ionospheric currents. Intense dB∕dt perturbations are known to occur often in high-latitude regions as a result of storm time substorms. Magnetospheric compressions usually caused by interplanetary shocks increase the magnetopause current leading to dB∕dt perturbations more evident in midlatitude to low-latitude regions, while they increase the equatorial electrojet current leading to dB∕dt perturbations in dayside equatorial regions. We investigate the effects of shock impact angles and speeds on the subsequent dB∕dt perturbations with a database of 547 shocks observed at the L1 point. By adopting the threshold of dB∕dt = 100 nT/min, identified as a risk factor to power systems, we find that dB∕dt generally surpasses this threshold when following impacts of high-speed and nearly frontal shocks in dayside high-latitude locations. The same trend occurs at lower latitudes and for all nightside events but with fewer high-risk events. Particularly, we found nine events in equatorial locations with dB∕dt 100 nT/min. All events were caused by high-speed and nearly frontal shock impacts and were observed by stations located around noon local time. These high-risk perturbations were caused by sudden strong and symmetric magnetospheric compressions, more effectively intensifying the equatorial electrojet current, leading to sharp dB∕dt perturbations. We suggest that these results may provide insights for GIC forecasting aiming at preventing degradation of power systems due to GICs.

NantEnergy says its zinc air battery system can deliver energy for $100 per kilowatt hour. By comparison, lithium ion batteries vary in price, but often range from $300 to $500 per kilowatt hour, according to the Energy Storage Association.

Zinc air batteries will replace lithium ion batteries due to the required 12 pounds of cobalt in car lithium ion batteries. Cobalt supplies is estimated to run out by 2025.

Remote villages in Africa and Asia are receiving electricity using a little-known type of technology: zinc-air batteries.

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