The Resurgence of Liquid Air for Energy Storage. Some engineers are dusting off an old idea for storing energy—using electricity to liquefy air by cooling it down to nearly 200 °C below zero. When power is needed, the liquefied air is allowed to warm up and expand to drive a steam turbine and generator. The concept is being evaluated by a handful of companies that produce liquefied nitrogen as a way to store energy from intermittent renewable energy sources.
Liquefied air might also be used to drive pistons in the engines of low-emission vehicles. One company, Highview Power Storage of London, has raised more than $4.5 million and built a pilot plant in Scotland that will use liquid air to store power from the grid. Highview has teamed up with Messer , the large industrial gas company, to help develop the technology. If all goes well, the U.K. government may fund the development of a larger plant that could establish its commercial viability. Storage for the power grid is becoming more important as use of renewable energy increases. Europe joins race to store energy at the bottom of the ocean. Think you’re spoiling your child? Think again. A CCTV story is making international headlines after a New York City real estate agent revealed that a Chinese mother purchased a $6.5 million apartment for her toddler.
Sotheby’s senior vice president Kevin Brown told China’s CCTV that he showed apartments all over Manhattan to the buyer, who is remaining anonymous: And she said, well, her daughter was going to go to Columbia, or NYU, or maybe Harvard, and so she needed to be in the center of the city and that was why she was picking this one particular apartment. So I said: ‘Oh, how old is your daughter?’ And she said: ‘Well, she’s 2′. And I was just shocked. The woman ended up buying in the luxury Manhattan building One57. . ( MORE: Report: China Buys 25% of the World’s Luxury Goods ) While some may scoff at the over-the-top purchase, the anonymous mother could be a very savvy real estate investor.
In China, the purchase has tongues wagging about where the money could have come from. Video: Calgary researchers tout 'rust power' as a renewable energy solution. 'nanoflowers' for energy storage, solar cells. Researchers from North Carolina State University have created flower-like structures out of germanium sulfide (GeS) -- a semiconductor material -- that have extremely thin petals with an enormous surface area. The GeS flower holds promise for next-generation energy storage devices and solar cells. "Creating these GeS nanoflowers is exciting because it gives us a huge surface area in a small amount of space," says Dr. Linyou Cao, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and co-author of a paper on the research.
"This could significantly increase the capacity of lithium-ion batteries, for instance, since the thinner structure with larger surface area can hold more lithium ions. To create the flower structures, researchers first heat GeS powder in a furnace until it begins to vaporize. GeS is similar to materials such as graphite, which settle into neat layers or sheets. No joke: This is the biggest battery breakthrough ever. A pioneer in battery research who already successfully launched a $350 million company to supply batteries to the likes of GE and Chrysler has done it again — only this time, "it" represents the complete reinvention of battery technology as we know it.
This technology is in the research phase, but if it can be cost-effectively brought to market — and there's every reason to believe that it could be — it could revolutionize the way we store and transport energy, in the process fully replacing fossil fuels and especially oil. The key to this new technology is that the metals that would normally be solids in a conventional battery have been broken into nano-size particles that are suspended in a liquid. The batteries, known as "semi-solid flow cells," store their power in a black gunk that looks like motor oil, which has earned it the nickname "Cambridge Crude. "