Lifeboat Foundation

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have made a technological breakthrough and constructed a perovskite solar cell with the dual benefits of being both highly efficient and highly stable.

The work was done in collaboration with scientists from the University of Toledo, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and the University of California-San Diego.

A unique architectural structure enabled the researchers to record a certified stabilized efficiency of 24% under 1-sun illumination, making it the highest reported of its kind. The highly efficient cell also retained 87% of its original efficiency after 2,400 hours of operation at 55 degrees Celsius.

Scalable technology can work in relative humidity of four percent too.

An international collaboration of researchers has successfully demonstrated the production of green hydrogen directly from the air, a press release said.

Solar and wind installations are picking up steam as the world looks toward greener energy sources. Although energy is generated in an emission-free way in these methods, energy storage requires large batteries, which do not fit into the idea of sustainable living.

A relatively new kind of semiconductor, layered atop a mirror-like structure, can mimic the way that leaves move energy from the sun over relatively long distances before using it to fuel chemical reactions. The approach may one day improve the efficiency of solar cells.

“Energy transport is one of the crucial steps for solar energy harvesting and conversion in solar cells,” said Bin Liu, a postdoctoral researcher in electrical and computer engineering and first author of the study in the journal Optica.

“We created a structure that can support hybrid light-matter mixture states, enabling efficient and exceptionally long-range energy transport.”

No fields, tractors or back-breaking work: This may be how fruits and vegetables are sustainable in the future.

The popularity of electric vehicles (EVs) as an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional gasoline vehicles has been on the rise. This has led to research efforts directed toward developing high-efficiency EV batteries. But, a major inefficiency in EVs results from inaccurate estimations of the battery charge. The charge state of an EV battery is measured based on the current output of the battery. This provides an estimate of the remaining driving range of the vehicles.

Typically, the battery currents in EVs can reach hundreds of amperes. However, commercial sensors that can detect such currents cannot measure small changes in the current at milliampere levels. This leads to an ambiguity of around 10% in the battery charge estimation. What this means is that the driving range of EVs could be extended by 10%. This, in turn, would reduce inefficient battery usage.

Now, a team of researchers from Japan, led by Professor Mutsuko Hatano from Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech), has now come up with a solution. In their study published in Scientific Reports, the team has reported a diamond quantum sensor-based detection technique that can estimate the battery charge within 1% accuracy while measuring high currents typical of EVs.

Housing the world’s rapidly-growing population will require massive urban expansion and lots of concrete and steel, but these materials have a huge carbon footprint. A shift to building cities out of wood could avoid more than 100 billion tons of CO₂ emissions, according to a new study.

Replacing reinforced concrete with timber might sound unwise, but innovations in engineered wood mean it’s now feasible to construct multi-story buildings without traditional materials. So-called “mass timber” is increasingly being used for structural and load-bearing elements in mid-rise developments, which refers to buildings between 4 and 12 stories high.

One of the main selling points of mass timber is that it’s much less carbon-intensive than steel and cement. In theory it’s actually carbon negative, because trees absorb CO₂ in the process of producing wood. But question marks have remained over exactly how much more climate-friendly wood-based construction is, and what impact demand for timber could have on the environment.

Hydrogen has huge potential as a clean fuel: it’s abundant (mainly in compounds like water), it doesn’t produce any damaging emissions, and it can also be used to store energy from solar, wind, and tidal sources.

There are challenges in producing enough of the stuff in a practical and affordable way, however. Splitting hydrogen from water can require complicated technology and also relies on pure freshwater – not something that’s plentifully available everywhere.

Now, scientists have come up with a new prototype device that can harvest water from humid air, before splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen.

Practical nuclear fusion is, famously, always 10 years in the future. Except that the Pentagon recently gave an award to a tiny startup to launch a fusion power system into space in just five.

There is no shortage of organizations, from VC-backedstartups to nation states, trying to realize the dream of cheap, clean, and reliable power from nuclear fusion. But Avalanche Energy Designs, based near a Boeing facility in Seattle, is even more ambitious. It is working on modular “micro fusion packs,” small enough to hold in your hand yet capable of powering everything from electric cars to spaceships.

Last month, the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) announced it had awarded Avalanche an unspecified sum to develop its Orbitron fusion device to generate either heat or electricity, with the aim of powering a high-efficiency propulsion system aboard a prototype satellite in 2027. The contract to Avalanche was one of two awarded by the DIU—the second going to Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear for development of its radioisotope battery.

With gas prices soaring and food costs pinching family budgets, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at WPI is looking at ways to use food waste to make a renewable and more affordable fuel replacement for oil-based diesel. The work, led by Chemical Engineering Professor Michael Timko, is detailed in a new paper in the journal iScience.

“By creating a biodiesel through this method, we’ve shown that we can bring the price of gas down to $1.10 per gallon, and potentially even lower,” said Timko.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that, in 2018 in the United States, about 81% of household food—about 20 tons—ended up in landfills or combustion facilities. Food waste is also a major contributor to climate change: once it’s placed in landfills, it emits methane, a greenhouse gas.