#Germany and Canada Are Building Water Splitters to Store Energy Germany which has come to rely heavily on wind
and solar power in recent years is launching more than 20 demonstration projects that involve storing energy by splitting water into hydrogen gas and oxygen.
and distribution infrastructure already used for natural gas and eventually turned back into electricity via combustion or fuel cells.
It can be deployed almost anywhere it can store vast amounts of energy and the hydrogen can be used to replace fossil fuels not only in electricity production but also in industry and transportation
which account for far more carbon emissions. Even so it has long been considered a relatively lousy way to store energy because of its low efficiency about 65 percent of the energy in the original electricity is lost.
But improvements to the technology are reducing costs and the large-scale use of renewable energy is creating new needs for storage making electrolysis a practical option in a growing number of places.
When it opens next year it will have the capacity to produce 650000 kilograms of hydrogen a year the energy equivalent of 650000 gallons of gasoline.
Cheap electricity makes electrolysis far more competitive. Electrolysis remains more expensive than producing hydrogen from natural gas at least in the United states where natural gas is cheap.
But it can compete with storage options such as batteries says Kevin Harrison a senior engineer at the National Renewable energy Laboratory in Golden Colorado.
It s also more versatile than the cheapest way to store energy: pumping water up a hill
Pacemaker batteries are too clunky for tiny devices saddled up to nerves and existing wireless methods such as those used for cochlear implants won t work with devices buried deep in the body.
otherwise need batteries. Wireless systems like the one used in cochlear implants sit permanently on the skin
The setup worked with about 0. 1 percent efficiency meaning that nearly all the energy sent from the conductive material to the pacemaker was wasted.
that analyzing the power consumption of a computer can reveal cryptographic keys. The good news is that analyzing subtle trends in power usage can also reveal
whether a computer is being attacked (see iny Changes in Energy use Could Mean Your Computer Is Under attack. verall,
But several experimental options for energy harvesting or wireless charging might eventually make that possible (see Batteryless Sensor Chip for the Internet of Thingsand obile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery w
#Longer-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices A type of battery that could eventually store twice as much energy as a conventional one could be about to move beyond niche applications to wearable devices phones and even electric cars.
Solid-state batteries as they re called have been available for a while and are used in some wireless sensors
Applied materials one of the world s biggest equipment suppliers for the semiconductor and display industries says it can make these batteries much cheaper.
In solid-state batteries the liquid electrolytes normally used in conventional lithium-ion batteries are replaced with solid ones
which makes it possible to replace conventional electrodes with lithium metal ones that hold far more energy.
Doing away with the liquid electrolyte which is flammable can also improve the safety of batteries
which leads to cost and size savings particularly in electric vehicles by reducing the need for complex cooling systems (see TR10:
Solid-state Batteries. The manufacturing tools shipped so far by Applied materials which perform extremely high-precision deposition of materials over large areas will be used initially for prototyping and demonstrations of solid-state batteries.
Making high-quality electrode and electrolyte materials over large areas has been one of the challenges to making the solid-state batteries economically.#
#The batteries are made by successively depositing electrical contacts electrodes and the solid electrolyte that separates them in much the way that the many layers of a display are deposited.
If the solid electrolyte has gaps it can lead to short circuits. Applied materials says it can overcome this as well as other manufacturing challenges.
The thing that s holding solid-state batteries back is materials processing and the cost says Andy Chu head of product marketing for energy storage solutions at Applied materials. We re addressing these problems.
That will allow you to take this to high volume. Applied materials says customers are using its equipment to make batteries
but it won t disclose who those customers are. The company says however that one of the first commercial applications of its equipment will likely be making batteries for wearable devices such as smart watches where size is a serious limitation.
Solid-state batteries can also easily be made in different shapes because you don t have to worry about containing a liquid electrolyte making them easier to pack inside a watch for example.
Thin solid-state batteries could even be incorporated into a flexible watch band. Applied materials hasn disclosed t how much solid-state batteries made using its technology would cost how much energy they would store
or how quickly they could be recharged. One perennial challenge with solid-state batteries has been that the solid electrolyte
which isn t as conductive as liquid ones tends to limit power output. Applied materials says it is working on ways to improve that conductivity by doping the solid electrolyte
much as you would dope semiconductor materials for chips. The company is also working on ways to deposit the energy-storing materials faster to enable thick layers that store large amounts of energy r
#China s Shale gas Bust China is finding it harder than it expected to unlock a shale gas boom like the one in North america,
calling into question its lofty goals to use natural gas to help clean up its air and control the growth of greenhouse gas emissions.
Citing complicated geology and high production costs, the Chinese government has cut its ambitious 2020 target for shale gas development roughly in half.
In 2013 China became the third biggest user of natural gas behind the United states and Russia, consuming 166 billion cubic meters (bcm).
By 2019, the International Energy Agency expects China annual natural gas consumption to grow 90 percent, to 315 bcm.
Half of that increase is expected to be supplied by domestic gas production, which would come from multiple sources,
#Super-Fast Pixels Could Make Smartphones Brighter and Longer-Lasting Displays account for between 45 and 70 percent of the total energy consumption in portable electronics.
The new designnown as a sequential displayould help LCDS close the energy efficiency gap with another type of display, the OLED.
it has to constantly shuttle information back and forth from the memory store bottleneck that slows things down and wastes energy.
When experts talk about future solar cells they usually bring up exotic materials and physical phenomena. In the short term however a much simpler approach stacking different semiconducting materials that collect different frequencies of light could provide nearly as much of an increase in efficiency as any radical new design.
The startup Semprius based in Durham North carolina says it can produce very efficient stacked solar cells quickly
Conventional solar cells convert less than 25 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity. Semprius has come up with three key innovations:
In its designs Semprius uses tiny individual solar cells each less than a millimeter across. That reduces costs for cooling
but also stacks several different combinations resulting in a solar panel that can capture more energy from sunlight. Semprius has demonstrated cells made of three semiconductor materials stacked on top of a fourth solar cell that would not have been compatible otherwise.
It has made two versions of the device this year one with an efficiency of 43.9 percent
In addition to being fast and precise the approach also makes it possible to reuse the expensive crystalline wafers that multijunction solar cells are grown on.
The U s. Energy Information Administration estimates that new natural-gas power plants will produce electricity at 6. 4 cents per kilowatt-hour r
#Mobile Gadgets That Connect to Wi-fi without a Battery A new breed of mobile wireless device lacks a battery or other energy storage,
Battery-free devices that can communicate could make it much cheaper and easier to widely deploy sensors inside homes to take control of heating and other services.
and battery-free sensors behind couches and cabinets could provide the detailed data needed to make such thermostats more effective. ou could throw these things wherever you want
The battery-free Wi-fi devices are an upgrade to a design the same group demonstrated last yearhose devices could only talk to other devices like themselves (see evices Connect with Borrowed TV Signals and Need No Power Source.
But although enough energy can be collected that way to run low-powered circuits, the power required to actively transmit data is significantly higher.
Their devices send messages by scattering signals from other sourceshey recycle existing radio waves instead of expending energy to generate their own.
Software installed on the phone allows it to read that signal by observing the changing strength of the signal it detects from that same router as the battery-free device soaks some of it up.
The battery-free Wi-fi devices can harvest enough energy to receive and decode Wi-fi signals in the conventional way.
To send data to the battery-free device a conventional Wi-fi device sends a specific burst of packets that lets the receiving device know it should listen for a transmission.
which also lack batteries, are the closest technology in use today, says Chandra. But they can only communicate with specialized reader devices,
a paper he coauthored with researchers at Duke university medical school indicated that the company earbud sensor was able to accurately estimate total energy expenditure
the LG earbuds connect to a wearable clip that holds the battery and Bluetooth device,
and includes a battery and device controls. But a pair of Performtek-using earbuds that Intel showed off this year at the International Consumer electronics Show in Las Vegaseant to be a reference design for manufacturersvoids this kind of bulk by harvesting power from the microphone jack.
without needing an additional battery or adding much cost i
#Adaptive Material Could Cut the Cost of Solar in Half A material with optical properties that change to help it capture more incoming sunlight could cut the cost of solar power in half, according to Glint Photonics,
a startup recently funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E). Glint adaptive material greatly reduces the cost of a tracking system used in some types of solar power.
cheaper solar cells. But this is usually done with lenses or mirrors, which must be moved precisely as the sun advances across the sky to ensure that concentrated sunlight remains focused on the cells.
where a small solar cell is mounted to generate electricity. As the day goes on, the beam of light from the lenses moves and the material adapts,
compared to eight cents per kilowatt-hour for the best conventional solar panels. This month, the company received the first installments of a $2. 2 million grant from ARPA-E. The ARPA-E funding will allow the company to scale up from prototypes just 2. 5 centimeters across to make 30
a program director at ARPA-E, says the main remaining challenge is increasing the amount of sunlight that makes it to the solar cells,
or reflected en route to the solar cells r
#Cheap and Nearly Unbreakable Sapphire Screens Come into View This fall, rumor has it, Apple will start selling iphones with a sapphire screen that is just about impossible to scratch.
so it could also lead to better and cheaper electronics and solar cells. Sapphire, or crystalline aluminum oxide, is made in nature
#Flexible, Printed Batteries for Wearable devices A California startup is developing flexible, rechargeable batteries that can be printed cheaply on commonly used industrial screen printers.
Imprint Energy, of Alameda, California, has been testing its ultrathin zinc-polymer batteries in wrist-worn devices
and hopes to sell them to manufacturers of wearable electronics, medical devices, smart labels, and environmental sensors.
The company approach is meant to make the batteries safe for on-body applications, while their small size and flexibility will allow for product designs that would have been impossible with bulkier lithium-based batteries.
Even in small formats the batteries can deliver enough current for low-power wireless communications sensors, distinguishing them from other types of thin batteries.
The company recently secured $6 million in funding from Phoenix Venture Partners, as well as AME Cloud Ventures, the venture fund of Yahoo cofounder Jerry Yang, to further develop its proprietary chemistry and finance the batteriescommercial launch.
Previous investors have included CIA-backed venture firm In-Q-Tel and Dow chemical. The batteries are based on research that company cofounder Christine Ho began as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley,
where she collaborated with a researcher in Japan to produce microscopic zinc batteries using a 3-D printer.
The batteries that power most laptops and smartphones contain lithium which is highly reactive and has to be protected in ways that add size and bulk.
While zinc is more stable, the water-based electrolytes in conventional zinc batteries cause zinc to form dendrites,
branch-like structures that can grow from one electrode to the other, shorting the battery.
Ho developed a solid polymer electrolyte that avoids this problem, and also provides greater stability,
and greater capacity for recharging. Brooks Kincaid, the company cofounder and president, says the batteries combine the best features of thin-film lithium batteries and printed batteries.
Such thin-film batteries tend to be rechargeable but they contain the reactive element, have limited capacity,
and are expensive to manufacture. Printed batteries are nonrechargeable, but they are cheap to make, typically use zinc,
and offer higher capacity. Working with zinc has afforded the company manufacturing advantages. Because of zinc environmental stability, the company did need not the protective equipment required to make oxygen-sensitive lithium batteries. hen we talk about the things that constrain us in terms of the development of new products, there really two that
I lose the most sleep over these days. One is batteries and one is displays, says Steven Holmes, vice president of the New Devices Group and general manager of the Smart Device Innovation team at Intel.
Despite demand for flexible batteries, Ho says no standard has been developed for measuring their flexibility, frustrating customers who want to compare chemistries.
So the company built its own test rig and began benchmarking its batteries against commercial batteries that claimed to be flexible.
Existing batteries failed catastrophically after fewer than 1, 000 bending cycles, she says, while Imprint batteries remained stable.
Imprint has also been in talks about the use of its batteries in clothes and eird parts of your body like your eye,
Ho says. The company also recently began working on a project funded by the U s. military to make batteries for sensors that would monitor the health status of soldiers.
Other potential applications include powering smart labels with sensors for tracking food and packages n
#Protect Society from Our Inventions, Say Genome-Editing Scientists Scientists working at the cutting-edge of genetics say one possible application of a powerful new technology called genome editing has the potential to cause ecological mayhem and needs
#Thermoelectric Material to Hit Market Later This Year California-based Alphabet Energy plans to begin selling a new type of material that can turn heat into electricity.
Thermoelectric materials can turn a temperature difference into electricity by exploiting the flow of electrons from a warmer area to a cooler one.
But an efficient thermoelectric material has to conduct electricity well without conducting heat well, because otherwise the temperature across the material would soon equalize.
Alphabet Energy solution is tetrahedrite: an abundant, naturally occurring mineral that also happens to be more efficient on average than existing thermoelectric materials.
According to data released by Alphabet Energy tetrahedrite costs about $4 per kilogram, whereas other thermoelectric materials cost between $24 and $146 per kilogram.
or fracking, for oil and natural gas production (see atural Gas Changes the Energy Map. The technology may provide a way to deal with the increasing amounts of contaminated water the fossil fuel industry is generating as it pursues more and more difficult-to-reach deposits.
a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT who heads MIT Center for Clean water and Clean energy, where the technology was developed.
which accounts for about a quarter of the appliance total energy consumption. Initial tests of actual freezer components showed that the material can reduce defrosting energy consumption by 40 percent,
says Aizenberg. She expects that figure to go up as the researchers optimize the system. Freezers may be the first application of the technology,
and stop generating electricity. Ice can take whole wind farms offline and wreak havoc on the grid in places such as Colorado,
where wind power now accounts for a large fraction of the total electricity supply r
#Facebook s Emotional Manipulation Study Is Just the Latest Effort to Prod Users With emotion-triggering effort, Facebook pushes beyond data-driven studies on voting, sharing,
and organ-donation prompts, to make people feel good or bad. Facebook controversial study exploring
#Sharp Demonstrates Ultra-Efficient Solar cells The best solar cells convert less than one-third of the energy in sunlight into electricity
If it can be commercialized it would double the amount of power a solar cell can generate offering a way to make solar power far more economical.
when sunlight strikes a solar cell it produces some very high-energy electrons but within a few trillionths of a second those electrons shed most of their energy as waste heat.
The Sharp team found a way to extract these electrons before they give up that energy thereby increasing the voltage output of their prototype solar cell.
It s far from a practical device it s too thin to absorb much sunlight
and for now it works only with a single wavelength of light but it s the first time that anyone has been able to generate electrical current using these high-energy electrons.
In theory solar cells that exploit this technique could reach efficiencies over 60 percent. The approach is one of several that could someday break open the solar industry
High-efficiency solar cells would lower the cost of installation which today is often more expensive than the cells themselves.
and figuring out how to make them with high precision (see Capturing More Light with a Single Solar cell and Nanocharging Solar).
which create a shortcut for high-energy electrons to move out of the solar cell. Another way to achieve ultra-high efficiencies now is by stacking up different kinds of solar cells (see Exotic Highly Efficient Solar cells May Soon Get Cheaper)
but doing so is very expensive. Meanwhile MIT researchers are studying the transient behavior of electrons in organic materials to find inexpensive ways to make ultra-efficient solar cells.
Each of the alternative approaches is at an early stage. James Dimmock the senior researchers who developed the new device at Sharp says he expects that his technique will initially be used to help boost the efficiency of conventional devices not to create new ones s
#Elon musk Needs a Very Big Factory for His New Solar technology The Tesla founder and private space entrepreneur Elon musk announced yesterday that Solar City,
And with typical bravado, he also said that the company plans to build a huge factory to produce Silevo high-efficiency solar panels,
it will also become a major manufacturer of solar panels, with by far the largest factory in the U s. The acquisition makes sense given that Silevo technology has the potential to reduce the cost of installing solar panels,
Solar City main business. But the decision to build a huge factory in the U s. seems daringspecially given the recent failures of other U s.-based solar manufacturers in the face of competition from Asia.
Silevo produces solar panels that are roughly 15 to 20 percent more efficient than conventional ones.
Silevo isn the only company to produce high-efficiency solar cells. A version made by Panasonic is just as efficient,
and Sunpower makes ones that are significantly more so (see ecord-Breaking Solar cell Points the Way the Cheaper Solar power.
which is building a huge igafactorythat he says will reduce the cost of batteries for electric cars.
The proposed plant would have more lithium-ion battery capacity than all current factories combined (see oes Musk Gigafactory Make sense?
who directs the Energy and Environment Concentration at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, is that at least three other solar companiesirst Solar, Yingli Solar,
Meanwhile, utilities may start wanting to pay solar-panel owners less for the electricity they produce
if building huge factories to produce advanced solar panels can bring down costs, the market for solar panels could still grow exponentially l
#How LEDS Are Set to Revolutionize Hi-tech Greenhouse Farming It won't come as a surprise to discover that consumers all over the developed world are increasingly demanding seasonal vegetables all year round even
So an important question is how to minimize the energy it takes to grow these crops.
And of course LEDS use considerably less electricity wasting little as heat. But the most interesting part of Singh and co s analysis is in the potential of LEDS to change the way that vegetables are grown.
and well into the infrared where much energy is lost as heat. By contrast LEDS can be adjusted to emit light in very specific parts of the spectrum.
and that light frequency also influences the biomass of certain plants as well as their nutritional content.
and co. Exactly how light of various frequencies influences plant growth biomass and nutritional content is understood not well.
This can be done by immersing the oxides in a bath of molten salt and running electricity through the mixture.
Another effort, called Energy ITS, which is backed by the Japanese government and involves several Japanese universities,
or do not properly respond to the hormone in order to move the body main energy sourcelucosento cells.
Across the table, a briefcase-sized wireless energy transmitter sits on another tripod and a plug dangling from it is plugged into the wall.
and TDK recently licensed Witricity for use in electric car batteries. Energous charging method uses a transmitter with lots of small antennas to send radio waves to a receiver connected to the gadget being charged.
and converts their energy to DC power so it can charge the phone. The transmitter and receivers Energous brings to my office can send power to two devices that require less than 10 watts of power at a distance of up to 15 feet;
what you pay today for a case that provides extended battery life, though the transmitter for charging things probably would cost around $300.
If the end result is wasting energy, consumers may be wary of cutting their cords
#Nerve-Stimulating Implant Could Lower Blood pressure An implantable device that reduces blood pressure by stimulating a nerve in the neck could someday be an alternative to drugs for controlling hypertension.
Implanted electrical devices that control bodily functions have been used for many years. Pacemakers for heart patients are known perhaps best
but electrical devices are used also to control Parkinson s disease and experimentally some psychiatric conditions (see Brain Pacemakers
and will help brands ensure that people keep them in mind next time theye looking for coffee or an energy boost.
In the new work, researchers from University college London and the University of Iceland added carbon dioxide to a stream of water being pumped underground at a large geothermal power plant in Iceland,
Lithium-ion batteries are just about everywherehey power almost all smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Yet Elon musk, CEO of Tesla motors, says he intends to build a factory in the United states three years from
now that will more than double the world total lithium-ion battery production. The plan is still in its early stages,
would by 2020 make enough batteries for 500,000 electric cars. It would produce enough batteries annually to store 35 gigawatt hours of electricity, hence the name.
Second, battery companies normally announce factories only after theye funded and a site is selected. And they typically scale up gradually.
Why announce plans to build such an enormous factory specially when electric car sales so far come nowhere close to justifying it?
The project seems more puzzling in light of the hard times at other electric car battery factories in the United states. In 2009,
President Obama announced an ambitious $2. 4 billion grant program intended to launch an electric car battery industry in the United states. That effort,
All of the battery makers involved have struggled (see oo Many Battery factories, Too Few Electric cars, and one, A123 Systems, went bankrupt.
He seems to be betting that a huge factory will significantly reduce the cost of making batteries,
Tesla has a good track record for reducing battery costs (see riving Innovation, and even incremental improvements at conventional factories could reduce costs by 15 percent by 2020,
says Menahem Anderman, president of Advanced Automotive Batteries. But it unclear where the remaining 15 percent might come from.
with batteries built from raw materials rather than assembled, will also help. Usually, the components of batteries are made in many different places.
Electrolytes are made often at a large chemical plant and graphite electrodes at a plant that also makes graphite for tires and other applications.
The electrolytes and electrodes are packaged then into cells at a plant dedicated to cell making,
and the cells are assembled into complete battery packsith cooling systems and electronic controlsn yet another factory.
Musk plans to bring almost all of this under one roof. Raw materials, processed into electrodes, electrolytes,
containers and other parts, go in one end; complete battery packs come out the other. The factory will also be able to take old batteries apart to recycle the materials,
and Musk even plans to use solar and wind to help power the factory. Brett Smith, codirector for manufacturing, engineering,
and technology at the Center for Automotive Research, says having control over every part of the process could indeed help reduce costs.
For example, it can be cheaper to make electrolytes in a large chemical plant that makes other chemicals
Panasonic, Tesla current battery cell supplier, benefits from the know-how of workers in Japan, many of whom have decades of manufacturing experience. anufacturers have tried both approaches.
Battery manufacturing is a complex process involving many steps. If these steps are all dependent on each other,
there would likely be no alternative market for those batteries, making it a risky investment.
One potential market, using batteries for storing electricity power on the grid, is still in early stages of development.)
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