Lifeboat Foundation

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are providing researchers with a guide to how to best measure the efficiency of producing hydrogen directly from solar power.

Photoelectrochemical (PEC) water-splitting, which relies on sunlight to split water into its component elements—oxygen and hydrogen—stands out as potentially one of the most sustainable routes to clean energy. Measurements of how efficient the PEC process is on an identical system can vary wildly from different laboratories, however, from a lack of standardized methods. The newly developed best-practices guide published in Frontiers in Energy Research is intended to provide confidence in comparing results obtained at different sites and by different groups.

The publication provides a road map for the PEC community as researchers continue to refine the technology. These best practices were verified by both laboratories via round-robin testing using the same testing hardware, PEC photoelectrodes, and measurement procedures. Research into photovoltaics has allowed a certification of cell efficiencies, but PEC water-splitting efficiency measurements do not yet have a widely accepted protocol.

How much did Musk pay for Twitter again? With everything the marketing of anything starts with demand. Was there demand for something better than Facebook and Twitter of course. Was there a demand to buy Twitter no. Kanye lost money but he didn’t lose $44 billion, as Musk probably realizes that $5 billion in yearly revenues isn’t guaranteed, especially if people pull a Kanye…so Musk wants to charge.

What is in demand then? Affordable housing is in demand because rents and inflation keep going up. $44 billion buys a lot of land. $25 Billion is $500 million in 50 states. This would have enabled Musk to spend $25 Billion on land alone. That always increase in value.

Continue reading “ICON Unveils ‘House Zero’ and Announces 2022 SXSW Activations” »

How resilient are solar panels in the face of extreme weather events?

Guest contributor Jane Marsh explores the current capability of solar panel technology in the face of increasing extreme climate events.

“If I’m a farmer in Australia, and I want to know what the drought situation is going to look like over the next 20 to 30 years and decide what sorts of crops I might want to grow or how I might want to change irrigation technologies that I use for my farm, I want to be able to ask questions like that to this digital twin and get answers,” Kashinath said.

FourCastNet, an open-source project, is the first product of the broader Earth-2 initiative available to researchers. And while there’s no specific date for when the team will launch Earth-2 publicly, Kashinath said it will similarly be open for use by the research community.

Continue reading “NVIDIA Is Making a Digital Twin of Earth’s Climate. Here’s an Inside Look” »

Technology capable of collecting solar power in space and beaming it to Earth to provide a global supply of clean and affordable energy was once considered science fiction. Now it is moving closer to reality. Through the Space-based Solar Power Project (SSPP), a team of California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers is working to deploy a constellation of modular spacecraft that collect sunlight, transform it into electricity, then wirelessly transmit that electricity wherever it is needed. They could even send it to places that currently have no access to reliable power.

“This is an extraordinary and unprecedented project,” says Harry Atwater, an SSPP researcher and Otis Booth Leadership Chair of Caltech’s Division of Engineering and Applied Science. “It exemplifies the boldness and ambition needed to address one of the most significant challenges of our time, providing clean and affordable energy to the world.”

Continue reading “Beaming Clean Energy From Space — Caltech’s ‘Extraordinary and Unprecedented Project’” »

With an estimated 60 to 70 vessels, China allegedly possesses the largest fleet of conventional submarines in the world.

The Chinese Navy could finally use lithium technology to replace the lead-acid batteries that are now used in its fleet of conventional submarines.

Since lithium batteries had a higher risk of catching fire or exploding, the navy was hesitant to replace the submarine fleet’s current batteries with them.

Continue reading “China: Lithium batteries may soon power ‘world’s largest fleet’ of submarines” »

Transitioning away from fossil fuels.

The cost of turning sunlight into electricity has fallen more than 90 percent over the last decade. Solar is now the cheapest form of newly built energy generation. Job done? Not quite. Right now, solar works well at cost-competitive prices and can help us cut emissions significantly. But with less than five percent of the world’s electricity delivered by solar, we are just at the start.

The solar panels of 2022 are like the chunky mobile phones of the 1990s. Much more is possible with the same underlying technology.

Continue reading “Solar panels: How new materials can make them cheaper and better than ever” »

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have made a serendipitous scientific discovery that could potentially revolutionize the way water is broken down to release hydrogen gas—an element crucial to many industrial processes.

The team, led by Associate Professor Xue Jun Min, Dr. Wang Xiaopeng and Dr. Vincent Lee Wee Siang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE), found that light can trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used extensively in water electrolysis, where water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The result is a more energy-efficient method of obtaining hydrogen.

This breakthrough was achieved in collaboration with Dr. Xi Shibo from the Institute of Sustainability for Chemicals, Energy and Environment under the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR); Dr. Yu Zhigen from the Institute of High Performance Computing under A*STAR; and Dr. Wang Hao from the Department of Mechanical Engineering under the NUS CDE.

Ice buildup on powerlines and electric towers brought the northern US and southern Canada to a standstill during the Great Ice Storm of 1998, leaving many in the cold and dark for days and even weeks. Whether it is on wind turbines, electric towers, drones, or airplane wings, dealing with ice buildup typically depends on techniques that are time consuming, costly and/or use a lot of energy, along with various chemicals. But, by looking to nature, McGill researchers believe that they have found a promising new way of dealing with the problem. Their inspiration came from the wings of Gentoo penguins who swim in the ice-cold waters of the south polar region, with pelts that remain ice-free even when the outer surface temperature is well below freezing.

We initially explored the qualities of the lotus leaf, which is very good at shedding water but proved less effective at shedding ice,” said Anne Kietzig, who has been looking for a solution for close to a decade. She is an associate professor in Chemical Engineering at McGill and the director of the Biomimetic Surface Engineering Laboratory. “It was only when we started investigating the qualities of penguin feathers that we discovered a material found in nature that was able to shed both water and ice.”