Synopsis: Domenii: Energy:

#Blame the Weather for Last Year s Rise in U s. Carbon dioxide emissions A colder winter was one of the main reasons carbon dioxide emissions from energy use rose in the United states by 2. 5 percent in 2013

, according to new data from the Energy Information Agency. Besides a small rise in the price of natural gas and slightly cheaper coal, the weather played the biggest role in in pushing up emissions,

there were 18 percent more days in 2013 cold enough to cause a spike in demand for energy for heating,

This contributed to an 0. 5 percent increase in the amount of energy used per dollar of GDP,

In addition, the amount of electricity generated using natural gas dropped 10 percent between 2012 and 2013,

More coal and less gas meant a much smaller drop in the U s. energy system arbon intensity?

the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of energy produced. All of this combined to make the carbon intensity of the whole U s. economy,

#Internet-Connected Battery Could Bring Smoke alarms Online A startup has come up with a simple way to make smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors more useful:

a nine-volt battery with built-in Wi-fi. The battery can alert you on your smartphone

or the battery itself is about to die. Roost the Sunnyvale California-based company behind the battery plans to sell the batteries starting next year for $25 to $35.

We were approaching the Internet-of-things space not from a perspective of##How can we build a whizzy new device that does something?

Roost has its sights set on other devices battery-powered and not that are excluded currently from the growing throng of connected gadgets.

Roost s first batteries which are based lithium and meant to last for more than five years contain a Wi-fi chip and sensors for audio detection and voltage monitoring.

Using the app you can give a battery a name (like living room or kids bedroom) and connect it to your home Wi-fi

and then insert it in the battery compartment of the alarm. Right now Roost has a working prototype in a plastic box about the size of an external hard drive;

Blackwell expects a battery-sized version to be ready in the spring. Roost plans to go beyond the nine-volt battery in the future##Blackwell says the company is thinking about AA BATTERIES

since they re commonly used in toys and remote controls. He s also thinking about adding other sensors such as an accelerometer or thermometer to the battery o

#This Method of Robotic Pickup Could Stick The sticky effect seen when you rub a balloon on your hair could be used to help robots pick things up,

including jobs that involve handling delicate materials such as thin semiconductors for new, advanced solar cells. But the technology also offers a cheap way to pick up just about anythingabric, bags of chips, 50-pound boxes of paper, single pieces of paper, mobile phones.

and its stored energy is used then to aid the more tiring motion of pulling the body upward.

Walking though a seemingly simple act is still largely mysterious using energy in a very economical manner that is difficult to re-create in robotics.

and ankle prosthesis that behaves as he puts it more like a motorcycle than a bicycle meaning that it puts energy into the system rather than relying solely on human power.

The Biom T2 uses a battery to power a system of microprocessors sensors springs and actuators;

They also designed it to minimize the battery at the calf to keep it from getting in the way of dance steps.

and by lowering the energy costs of walking reduce joint stress and fatigue. But bringing bionic devices into the clinic is not easy.

or two battery charges a day for instance so Herr and his colleagues are working to make prosthetic devices smaller lighter quieter and more efficient.

But he recently worked with Herr on a far more minimalistic approach focusing solely on providing mechanical power to the ankle to reduce the energy it needs for walking.

and powered by a wearable battery pack is the first exoskeleton that can actually lower the metabolic costs of walking as demonstrated in a study published this May in the Journal of Neuroengineering and Rehabilitation.

Lockheed martin s announcement last week that it had developed secretly a promising design for a compact nuclear fusion reactor has met with excitement but also skepticism over the basic feasibility of its approach.

Nuclear fusion could produce far more energy far more cleanly than the fission reactions at the heart of today s nuclear power plants.

The so-far-insurmountable challenge is to confine hydrogen plasma at conditions under which the hydrogen nuclei fuse together at levels that release a useful amount of energy.

In decades of research nobody has produced yet more energy from fusion reaction experiments than was required to conduct the experiments in the first place.

Most research efforts use a method that tries to contain hot plasma within magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak.

Three research-scale tokamaks operate in the United states: one at MIT another at a lab in Princeton and a third at a Department of energy lab in San diego. The world s largest tokamak is under construction in France at an international facility known as ITER at a projected

Tom Mcguire project lead of the Lockheed effort said in an interview that the company has come up with a compact design called a high beta fusion reactor based on principles of so-called magnetic mirror confinement.

This approach tries to contain plasma by reflecting particles from high-density magnetic fields to low-density ones.

Lockheed said the test reactor is only two meters long by one meter wide far smaller than existing research reactors.

In a smaller reactor you can iterate generations quicker incorporate new knowledge develop faster and make riskier design choices.

If successful the program could produce a reactor that might fit in a tractor-trailer and produce 100 megawatts of power he said.

The small team developing the reactor at the company s skunkworks in Palmdale California has done 200 firings with plasma Mcguire said

However he said of the plasma it looks like it s doing what it s supposed to do.

The company is even talking about how fusion reactors could one day power ships and planes.

Ian Hutchinson a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT and one of the principal investigators at the MIT fusion research reactor says the type of confinement described by Lockheed had long been studied without much success. Hutchinson says he was only

Lockheed joins a number of other companies working on smaller and cheaper types of fusion reactors. These include Tri-Alpha a company based near Irvine California that is testing a linear-shaped reactor;

Helion Energy of Redmond Washington which is developing a system that attempts to use a combination of compression and magnetic confinement of plasma;

and Lawrenceville Plasma physics in Middlesex New jersey which is working on a reactor design that uses what s known as a dense plasma focus.

Another startup General Fusion based in Vancouver British columbia tries to control plasma using pistons to compress a swirling mass of molten lead

and lithium that also acts as a coolant absorbing heat from fusion reactions and circulating it through conventional steam generators to spin turbines (see A New Approach to Fusion

#How a Wiki Is Keeping Direct-to-Consumer Genetics Alive When Meg Deboe decided to tap her Christmas fund to order a $99 consumer DNA test from 23andme last year,

and other stimuli such as light and electricity have been around for decades. You can find them in cars airplanes robots and medical implants.

and Plug ships into electricity grid so they dont idle in port reducing emissions equivalent to 12000 cars per ship.

While these carbon-capture processes have previously been tested in power plants cement plants differ because their emissions include much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide plus more dust and other contaminants.

#An Industrial-Size Generator That Runs on Waste Heat, Using No Fuel Power plants waste huge amounts of energy as heat about 40 to 80 percent of the total in the fuel they burn.

Thermoelectric materials which convert heat into electricity have been around for decades but they have always been too expensive to use outside extreme situations in spacecraft for example.

Matt Scullin the CEO of Alphabet Energy the startup that developed the new device says connecting it to the exhaust pipe of a 1000-kilowatt generator will yield enough electricity to save 52500 liters of diesel fuel a year for a reduction

Alphabet Energy s system is modular meaning it could be scaled up to make use of larger amounts of waste heat.

The company is also developing another thermoelectric material based on silicon nanowires that could convert a higher percentage of the energy in waste heat to electricity.

#Lighting Sheets Would Use Half as much Power as Lightbulbs The next big thing in lighting could be glowing sheets that use half as much energy as an equivalent fluorescent fixture

and Edvard Moser who shared in the prize for their discovery of a separate type of cell grid cells

Some engineers for instance have used the idea of grid cells as inspiration for new algorithms to control robots or autonomous submarines.

Hydrogen gas has a poor energy density by volume compared to petrol. In fact, there is at least 60 percent more hydrogen in a liter of gasoline then there is in a liter of pure liquid hydrogen.

%This is the mass of the entire storage system and not just the mass of the storage material.

and this takes energy. Worse, the materials tend to physically break down as the number of charging cycles increase beyond 100 or so.

Whether that is good enough to meet the Doe 5. 5 wt%criterion for an entire storage system has yet to be seen.

#A Promising Step Toward Round-the-clock Solar power If solar power is to become a primary source of electricity around the world,

wel need cheap ways to store energy from the sun when it isn shining. A paper published in the journal Science this week reports a major step toward such a system.

and efficiently converts the energy in sunlight into hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel

Switzerland, along with colleagues in Korea and Singapore, built a device that uses electricity and catalyst materials to make hydrogen and oxygen from water.

relatively high-voltage solar cells to generate the needed electricity, along with inexpensive new catalyst materials based on nickel and iron for two electrodesne produces hydrogen

The solar cells use an inexpensive and easily manufactured material known as perovskite, which has been generating excitement in the research community

The solar water splitter stores 12.3 percent of the energy in sunlight in the form of hydrogen.

but consider that most solar cells convert only 16 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity,

without the added step of turning that energy into easy-to-store hydrogen. More work is needed before the device can be practical.

For one thing, it only lasts a few hours before the solar cell performance quickly drops off. Researchers aren sure why perovskite materials degrade quickly

or improving the way the solar cells are sealed against the elements. Researchers recently demonstrated a perovskite solar cell that lasted over a month

#The Coming Era Of Self-Assembly Using Microfluidic Devices When it comes to building microscopic devices,

but the big challenge is the amount of energy the devices use. The Harvard prototype is much sleeker than most exoskeletons.

and battery-powered motors move cables to pull up on the heel or on part of the leg near the hip##adding a propelling tug at just the right moment as the wearer steps forward.

and testing people s energy consumption as they use it. He is also hoping for advances in batteries to help lighten the load further.

Whereas a person can walk 3. 5 miles using the energy in a single cookie an electric bike requires a battery weighing 10 times as much to travel the same distance.

Energy storage is still a challenge he says

#Gene-Silencing Drugs Finally Show Promise The disease starts with a feeling of increased clumsiness.

If researchers can figure out how to make the stuff in large quantities it could be used as a structural material for making planes and trucks as well as in battery electrodes.

Oxygen plasma etches out the polymer leaving behind a lattice of hollow ceramic tubes. Greer s lab showed that by changing the thickness of the tube walls it s possible to control how the material fails.

The new materials might be particularly interesting for use in batteries notes Nicholas Fang a mechanical engineer at MIT who is also working on nanostructured ceramics.

and are lightweight a combination that could make for a fast-charging battery that stores a lot of energy in a convenient package.

In fact Greer says she is collaborating with German electronics company Bosch to apply her designs to lithium-air batteries i

like a minuscule light bulb. Manufacturers can already make OLED displays flexible. They first laminate a sheet of plastic to glass and then deposit the materials for the pixels and the electronics on top of both.

This is tricky because different layershe battery the electronics, and the touch componentsend to be stacked, and the innermost layers have to bend more than the outermost ones.

Making a flexible battery is another challenge. While the lithium-polymer batteries used in smartphones today are somewhat flexible

they can survive being bent many times. One option is to make a segmented battery, like a segmented watch band, says Kevin Chen,

general manager for energy storage solutions at Applied materials. His company is developing solid-state batteries, which could easily be cut up into small pieces for flexible devices,

and which also have the potential to store much more energy than conventional lithium-ion batteries (see onger-Lasting Battery Is Being tested for Wearable devices.

Apple outlines a similar battery design in another recent patent application. Steady progress means fully flexible devices could be available in just a few years.

Meanwhile we have flexible displays that are fixed in places in the Apple Watch r

#A Nimble-Wheeled Farm Robot Goes to Work in Minnesota This summer a Minnesota startup began deploying an autonomous robot that rolls between corn plants spraying crop fertilizer.

#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.

because excess wind and solar power creates a glut of power on the grid. Because power needs to be used as soon as it s generated to keep the grid stable prices are dropped sometimes to zero

so buyers can be found. 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

and then letting it back down to drive a turbine. That approach is limited severely by geography

but he says you can put an electrolyzer almost anywhere e

#Revolution In progress: The Networked Economy No question about it: The Networked Economy is the next economic revolution.

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

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