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Scientists Develop Liquid Fuel That Can Store The Sun's Energy For Up to 18 Years

No matter how abundant or renewable, solar power has a thorn in its side. There is still no cheap and efficient long-term storage for the energy that it generates. The solar industry has been snagged on this branch for a while, but in the past year alone, a series of four papers has ushered in an intriguing new solution. Scientists in Sweden have developed a specialised fluid, called a solar thermal fuel, that can store energy from the sun for well over a decade. "A solar thermal fuel is like a rechargeable battery, but instead of electricity, you put sunlight in and get heat out, triggered on demand," Jeffrey Grossman, an engineer works with these materials at MIT explained to NBC News. The fluid is actually a molecule in liquid form that scientists from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden have been working on improving for over a year. "And when we come to extract the energy and use it, we get a warmth increase which is greater than we dared hope for." "There is a lot left to do. Related:  Future of EnergyInventions

Researchers Just Overcame a Key Barrier to Fusion Power Fusion Cuisine One promising approach to nuclear power is a type of reactor called a tokamak, which uses powerful magnetic fields to trap super-heated plasma in a bagel-shaped torus. An obstacle to making tokamak reactors viable is that the plasma gets extremely hot, reaching temperatures of up to 100 million degrees Celsius — as hot as the Sun. Sacrificial Wall The new exhaust system, which was developed by scientists at the U.K. Then the cooler plasma will come into contact with a “sacrificial wall” — it wasn’t clear from the Reuters report what it’s made out of — designed to be replaced every few years as the plasma breaks it down. 2025 Vision The researchers hope the new exhaust system will be used at an experimental reactor in France called ITER. “We’re here to commercialize fusion power,” Atomic Energy Authority executive director Ian Chapman told Reuters.

Scientists Have Created A Molecule That Can Store Solar Energy For 18 Years Researchers say they have taken a key step forwards in making a molecule that can store solar energy. Publishing their latest findings in the journal Energy and Environmental Science, the team from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden first showed off their solar-storing molecule last year. Made from carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen, the molecule is transformed into an “energy-rich isomer”, one made of the same atoms but bound in a different way, when it is hit by sunlight. The isomer can then be stored as a liquid, with the energy being used later. Much later. "The energy in this isomer can now be stored for up to 18 years,” Kasper Moth-Poulsen, the team’s leader, said in a statement. The entire system is called Molecular Solar Thermal Energy Storage (MOST). The collector focuses the Sun’s rays to a point through the pipe onto the liquid. They have also been able to stop using a potentially dangerous chemical called toluene, which is flammable, as part of the liquid for the system.

Despite Trump and Rick Perry’s Best Efforts, Another Coal Plant Eats the Dust in Texas Thu, Oct 4, 2018 at 1:33 pm CST Chalk this one up as another loss for the White House. Last month, American Electric Power (AEP) announced that it would close its 650-megawatt power plant in Vernon, a rural community of 11,000 just south of the Texas-Oklahoma line, by September 2020. The closure of the Oklaunion Power Station is the latest in a string of shuttered coal-fired power plants across the state: Since 2011, at least six have been mothballed, scheduled for retirement or closed altogether, casualties of cheap natural gas and a booming renewables sector. While it’s not shocking that another Texas coal plant has succumbed to market headwinds, it is somewhat surprising that Oklaunion was the latest casualty. Not only are coal plants prone to spewing greenhouse gases and smog-producing chemical compounds, many facilities nationwide have grown inefficient and costly to operate as they’ve aged. It wasn’t the first time Perry had tried to prop up coal.

Brilliant iron molecule could provide cheaper solar energy -- ScienceDaily For the first time, researchers have succeeded in creating an iron molecule that can function both as a photocatalyst to produce fuel and in solar cells to produce electricity. The results indicate that the iron molecule could replace the more expensive and rarer metals used today. Some photocatalysts and solar cells are based on a technology that involves molecules containing metals, known as metal complexes. The task of the metal complexes in this context is to absorb solar rays and utilise their energy. "Our results now show that by using advanced molecule design, it is possible to replace the rare metals with iron, which is common in the Earth's crust and therefore cheap," says Chemistry Professor Kenneth Wärnmark of Lund University in Sweden. Together with colleagues, Kenneth Wärnmark has for a long time worked to find alternatives to the expensive metals. The study is now published in the journal Science. "We believed it would take at least ten years," says Kenneth Wärnmark.

Will 1.5 degrees Trigger a Death Spiral for Oil and Gas Companies? – Paul Gilding It has always been clear that fixing climate change would require a massive industrial and technological transformation, with widespread social and economic consequences. The recent the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on 1.5 degrees however deeply challenges dominant assumptions about the speed and scale involved. This has profound implications for many industries and policy makers, but perhaps most dramatically for the future of the multi-trillion-dollar fossil fuel industry, particularly the oil and gas majors (the coal industry now being in terminal decline regardless). For the last few years, I have been examining what to expect in such major economic transformations – from both large incumbents and disruptive new players. The evidence suggests that when business models are overturned, the dominant tendency of large incumbent companies is to fail. For the oil and gas industry that has very clear implications. Timing is a really critical issue.

Transparent Solar Panels Could Turn Any Building Into A Power Generator See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report in the journal Nature Energy. Led by engineering researchers at Michigan State University, the authors argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet U.S. electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels. “Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” said Richard Lunt, the Johansen Crosby Endowed Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at MSU. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics.”

Decentralized Microgridding Can Provide 90% of a Neighborhood's Energy Needs, Study Finds A new report funded by the Dutch government finds that microgrid technologies could make a local “techno-economy” 90 percent self-sufficient, through the decentralised sharing of energy at the local level between multiple households. The new approach could even pave the way for “100 percent self-sufficiency in power, heat, and water, and 50 percent self-sufficiency in food production”, according to the report’s author, energy systems engineer Florijn de Graaf. If optimized properly, microgrids could play a pivotal role in supporting efforts to transition to renewable energy systems and meet climate targets, finds the report published by Netherlands-based energy systems company Metabolic. Under the Paris Agreement, the Dutch government has pledged to drop its carbon dioxide emissions by 80-95 percent by 2050. Reaching that goal will require an extraordinary level of effort by any standard. Currently, he said, the way in which we use these technologies is, in his words, “dumb.”

How Blockchain Could Give Us a Smarter Energy Grid - MIT Technology Review On an electricity grid, electrons generated from the sun, wind, or other renewable sources are indistinguishable from those generated by fossil fuels. To keep track of how much clean energy is produced, governments around the world have created systems based on tradable certificates. Problem is, the way we manage these certificates “sucks,” and it’s holding up investment in renewable power, says Jesse Morris, an energy expert at the Rocky Mountain Institute. A new system based on blockchain, the technology at the heart of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, could fix this, he says. Keeping track of renewable-energy certificates is one of dozens of potential applications of blockchain technology that could solve data management challenges in the electricity sector without disrupting business as usual, according to Morris. He and many others believe that in the long term, the technology could help transform the very architecture of the grid itself.

Ion age: why the future will be battery powered | News Why have batteries become important? In a world increasingly anxious about climate change, the surge in the generation of renewable energy over the past 20 years offers a sliver of hope. But the variable nature of wind and solar power means that storing energy until consumers need it has become the next big challenge. And so, large-scale battery installations are springing up across electricity grids around the world, to make them more flexible. In 2017, more than 1GW of power storage capacity was added around the world – a record, yes, but still a drop in the ocean of global energy demand. How do batteries like this work? Of course, we are not talking about a few AAA batteries here. Electrical energy is converted to chemical energy when you charge a battery, and then the process is reversed when you draw power from it. There are three main constituents of most batteries: two electrodes and some form of chemical medium called the electrolyte, which can be a liquid, gel or solid. What next?

Elon Musk: Tesla's Solar Roofs Will Be Cheaper Than Regular Roofs & Have "Infinity Warranty" In Brief Last night, Elon Musk announced that Tesla's solar roofs would be on sale starting today. At the time, he also stated that more information on the panels was forthcoming. Now, he has unveiled key details about Tesla's "infinity warranty." A Notable Announcement Last night, Elon Musk announced via Twitter that orders would begin today (May 10th, 2017) for his revolutionary solar roof hardware. But another announcement just came in that’s even more revolutionary: The solar roofs will have an infinity warranty. Yes, you read that right. In the above gif, you can see Tesla’s solar roof (on the left) and traditional roofs (on the right). Ultimately, this absurd warranty lends authority to Musk’s previous claims that the solar roofs would be cheaper than traditional roofs, which is notable because cost efficiency is one of the primary hurdles when it comes to renewable energy. A New Age in Energy To that end, Tesla allows you to take a look at your cost vs. savings.

The truth about big oil and climate change - Big oil and the environment IN AMERICA, THE world’s largest economy and its second biggest polluter, climate change is becoming hard to ignore. Extreme weather has grown more frequent. In November wildfires scorched California; last week Chicago was colder than parts of Mars. Scientists are sounding the alarm more urgently and people have noticed—73% of Americans polled by Yale University late last year said that climate change is real. The left of the Democratic Party wants to put a “Green New Deal” at the heart of the election in 2020. As expectations shift, the private sector is showing signs of adapting. Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks. Yet amid the clamour is a single, jarring truth. ExxonMobil shows that the market cannot solve climate change by itself. For much of the 20th century, the five oil majors—Chevron, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Total—had more clout than some small countries. So, too, the boom in ethical investing.

Hot Solar Cells: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2017 - MIT Technology Review Availability: 10 to 15 years by James Temple Solar panels cover a growing number of rooftops, but even decades after they were first developed, the slabs of silicon remain bulky, expensive, and inefficient. Fundamental limitations prevent these conventional photovoltaics from absorbing more than a fraction of the energy in sunlight. This video isn't encoded for your device But a team of MIT scientists has built a different sort of solar energy device that uses inventive engineering and advances in materials science to capture far more of the sun’s energy. Standard silicon solar cells mainly capture the visual light from violet to red. Hot Solar Cells Breakthrough A solar power device that could theoretically double the efficiency of conventional solar cells. The key step in creating the device was the development of something called an absorber-emitter. There are some downsides to the MIT team’s approach, including the relatively high cost of certain components.

The Crunch # 53 The battery's next trick came last month, when the ancient dinosaurs that run the Australian energy market asked power generators to supply them with extra energy to help maintain the grid's frequency. Usually the big gas generators, despite having way more capacity than required, charge prices that are up to ten times higher because they know they've got everyone over a barrel. Unfortunately for them this time the Tesla battery was there, bidding into the market to ensure that the prices stayed reasonable. Rather than jumping up to the usual prices of $14,000/MW, the battery and the adjoining wind farm kept them at around $270/MW. That's the beauty of technological disruption. Critics of battery farms say they can't handle all the chores of a stable grid. This is what large chunks of our 21st century energy systems are going to look like. These figures matter because they're real world prices. That's why it's fun being an energy geek! We've got better technology coming too.

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