#Why no one can be a'passive consumer'in today's API economy Increasingly, innovative businesses are being built around application programming interfaces (APIS)
The King Adbullah City for Atomic and Renewable energy, the government organization also known as Ka-care that was set up in 2010 to oversee the country's renewable energy strategy,
estimates the country's peak electricity demand will hit 121,000 megawatts in the next two decades.
With demand for electricity and fresh water increasing, Saudi arabia is seeking out other sources of power including solar, geothermal, wind and nuclear.
Ka-care announced at the recent Fourth Saudi Solar energy Forum it plans to add 41 gigawatts of solar capacity--enough to generate a more than 20 percent of the country's power needs--by 2032.
Another 25 GW of capacity would come from concentrated solar plants, which use thousands of mirrors to concentrate the sun onto heating liquid,
The estimated $109 billion plan isn't just about building solar power plants. Instead, the government wants to build a solar industry, according to al-Sulaiman's presentation.
or seek out other established solar panel makers to establish factories there. Photo: Flickr user zigbphotography, CC 2. 0 Related:
U s. fears unsafe nuclear reactors in China Diplomatic cables from Beijing say old designs lack passive cooling and pose a big risk.
Cables sent three years ago from the U s. embassy in Beijing express concern that China aggressive nuclear power expansion leans heavily on the country own PR-1000design
when the tsunami knocked out backup diesel generators and reactors overheated.""As the CPR-1000 increases market share, China is assuring that rather than building a fleet of state-of-the-art reactors,
they will be burdened with technology that by the end of its lifetime will be 100 years old,
"says one cable dated 7 august 2008. hina is vastly increasing the aggregate risk of its nuclear power fleet.
and that 20 of 22 nuclear plants under construction in 2009 used the design. Contrary to the tone of the cables
some nuclear experts believe that China will play a leading role in the future of nuclear power by develoiping
and deploying modern technologies as it constructs as many as 100 nuclear reactors over the next 20 years nearly a quarter of the total of all reactors in the world today.
It is currently building four Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, which deploy passive cooling (the Pstands for dvanced passive.
including molten salt reactors, thorium, fast neutron reactors, pebble bed reactors and fusion. Some of these could be potentially safer and more effective than conventional designs e
Solar power Bike path Opens In Netherlands This Week On November 12, 2014, The netherlands will proudly open up the world first public solar powered road.
Collective-Evolution notes that the solar panels embedded in the concrete bike path are not as efficient as panels installed on homes
the solar panels on the smart highway cover about 75 yards of roadway which is slightly more than you can fit on a roof.
Nanofibril films may be used in photovoltaic cells and also in displays because they have better light-transmission properties than glass,
in an e-mail interview with IEEE Spectrum. hile it is true that electrical resistive heating is almost 100-percent efficient in converting electricity into heat,
In research published in the journal Nano Letters, the MIT team addressed one of the basic elements of steam-generated electricity:
The turning of the turbine produces electricity. In this process, the steam is condensed back into water
so that an overall power plant efficiency could be improved by as much as 2 to 3 percent based on figures from the Electric power Research Institute."
by definition, convert chemical energy into electricity. Once youe sucked them dry, you have to reverse the process to convert electricity into chemical energy,
and for that, you need a source of electricity. It not like it hard to do this,
but it is certainly a minor annoyance that could do with a fix. Researchers at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) in Pune, India, have skipped the annoying step by developing a battery that charges directly from light.
Wee not talking about a battery with a solar panel on it: it a hoto batterywhere the anode itself is made of titanium nitride and ambient light.
#Wind turbines Power Liquid-air Energy storage One startup energy company is looking to reinvent not only wind energy, but also energy storage.
Keuka Energy recently launched a 125-kilowatt prototype vessel that uses its novel floating wind turbine design paired with liquid-air energy storage to create a steady source of electricity.
Unlike traditional wind turbines, which have three blades and a central gearbox, Keuka turbine is a pinwheel of aluminum blades that sits atop a floating V-shape platform containing liquid air.
The Florida-based company claims that its wind turbine design allows for larger turbines that could produce far more electricity.
The world largest single offshore wind turbine is currently about 6 megawatts; Keuka says its full-size turbines could produce at least double that amount.
electricity liquefies air to nearly-200°C and then stores it at low pressure. When the energy is needed,
liquid-air energy storage requires a significant amount of electricity to make the liquid air, limiting its usage by utilities.
The company also says its wind turbine design is more cost effective thanks to elimination of the gear box and the use of lightweight aluminum blades that cost less than 10 percent the price of traditional composite blades.
Bright Energy is developing a system that would use offshore renewable energy to store compressed air in vessels in the ocean.
The cost of the electricity to power these behemoths has played also a role in slowing the speed of supercomputer development. an somebody make a computer that has higher performance?
#Diesel-Powered Fuel cell Produces Clean electricity Although several options to store hydrogen as a fuel for cars have been investigated,
In addition to lowering CO2 EMISSION, the units produce little noise, making them suitable as mobile electricity generators in places, like field hospitals,
and oxygen gives you access to a completely carbon-free energy source for transportation. But so far, the efficiency of the process has been a bit disappointing,
even when using systems called solar fuel cells solar cells immersed in the water it splitting. Now researchers from Eindhoven University of Technology in The netherlands and the Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter (FOM) report in the 17 july issue of Nature Communications that they have improved tenfold the hydrogen producing capacity of a solar fuel cell.
which you can temporarily store your solar energy. In short, for a solar fuels future we cannot ignore gallium phosphide any longer,
While LED-based lighting produces up to about 150 lumens per watt of electricity, lasers could produce more than 400 lumens per watt,
whether they can excite these lasers with electricity instead of with light pulses. They detailed their findings online 27 july in the journal Nature Nanotechnology N
#Solar cells Could Capture Infrared Rays for More Power Nanocrystals and organic materials convert low energy photons into visible light that a solar cell can capture.
Cadmium selenide nanocrystals with one kind of organic coating left produced violet light, while cadmium selenide nanocrystals with another type of organic coating right produced green.
Solar cell efficiencies could increase by 30 percent or more with new hybrid materials that make use of the infrared portion of the solar spectrum,
Visible light accounts for under half of the solar energy that reaches Earth's surface. Nearly all of the rest comes from infrared radiation.
solar infrared rays normally passes right through the photovoltaic materials that make up today's solar cells.
or pconvertedinto a higher energy photon that is readily absorbed by photovoltaic cells, generating electricity from light that would normally be wasted.
The hybrid materials are combinations of inorganic semiconductor nanocrystals, which capture the infrared photons, and organic molecules,
Earlier this year, Hack Reactor launched the online version of its immersive curriculum, Remote Beta, a web-based ALP.
and the President of the United states. Against this backdrop, the market forces are so strong and clear that they have reshaped Codecademy, Hack Reactor,
based on a conservative prediction that only 6 percent of potential energy-saving opportunities identified will be implemented. However, real benefits for businesses are likely to be two
Apple is putting a massive $848 million into solar energy. According to Cook, Apple is putting $848 million into building a 1, 300-acre solar farm in Monterey, Calif,
As part of the deal, Apple will get electricity from the farm at a fixed rate for 25 years.
#Amazon Invests In 150mw Indiana Wind farm To Power Its Data centers Amazon today announced that it is working with the Pattern Energy Group to construct
and operate a 150 megawatt wind farm in Benton County, Indiana. The new wind farm will go online in about a year
and the expectation is that it will supply at least 500,000 megawatt hours of wind power annually.
That enough to power about 46,000 U s. homes, but the mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) that the full name of what was called previously the owler Ridge IV Wind Projectwill only be used to power Amazon AWS data centers.
Amazon is not disclosing the financial details of this project but Pattern Energy notes that this is a 13-year agreement.
As Amazon announced last November, its long-term goal is o achieve 100 percent renewable energy usage for the global AWS infrastructure footprint.
US WEST (Oregon), EU (Frankfurt) and its AWS Govcloud. mazon Web Services Wind farm (Fowler Ridge) will bring a new source of clean energy to the electric grid where we currently operate a large number of datacenters
in today announcement. his power purchase agreement helps to increase the renewable energy used to power our infrastructure in the US
and renewable energy projects for powering our datacenters that we currently have in the works. While Google has made various wind energy investments over the last few years
this is Amazon first (or at least the first one it is publicly talking about) s
#Cheaper Sensors Will Fuel The Age Of Smart Everything For better or worse, we are about the enter the age of smart everything.
Interestingly there is no mention here of using these tiny bits of working muscle muscle that twitches in response to electricity
It works by converting chemical energy into electricity instead of needing to plug it into the power grid.
This means kraftwerk units can be taken all over the world including vast regions of Earth that aren connected to electricity
Instead, it uses tiny pulses of electricity to stimulate the skin at your temple, which then activates the instinctual fight-or-flight response in your brain to indirectly affect emotional response.
and assumed that China would accomplish ambitious near-term goals for expanding nuclear power and renewables,
and wind power cheaply and cleanly has hit the market. It is by far the cheapest of a new generation of large,
long-lived batteries that could make it possible to rely heavily on intermittent, renewable energy sources. Aquion Energy, a company spun out of Carnegie mellon University,
solar, and hydropower, could help hundreds of millions of people who live beyond conventional grids get reliable electricity.
Batteries can store power from solar panels or wind turbines to provide round-the-clock power. Alternatively, diesel generators can be used.
Aquion batteries use sodium ions from saltwater as their electrolyte. Electrical current moves through this brackish liquid from positive electrodes based on manganese oxide to negative ones based on carbon.
The new energy storage technology could be crucial to making renewable energy more viable, especially in remote locations.
By making solar power cheaper than diesel fuel in many places, it could help bring clean power to some of the more than one billion people in the world without reliable electricity (see Billion People in the Dark.
including stabilizing conventional power grids as they come to rely more heavily on renewable energy. The company isn disclosing where its batteries are being usedxcept to say the projects are international a
#Will a Breakthrough Solar technology See the Light of Day? The power unit is a rectangular slab about the size of a movie theater screen.
and an equal number of even smaller solar cells, each the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen.
This contraption is part of one of the most efficient solar power devices ever made. Semprius, a startup based in Durham, North carolina,
claims that the next generation of this power unit will make solar power the cheapest option for utilities installing new power plants.
000 of these devices, utilities would produce electricity at less than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. That is even cheaper than today least expensive option:
and has set records for solar-cell efficiencyeaning the amount of energy in sunlight that is converted into electricity.
This year it demonstrated that it could use a version of its technology to make a novel kind of solar cell that,
some believe, could convert half of the energy in sunlight into electricity, about three times better than conventional solar cells.
Semprius must scale up the production of its solar cells significantly. Right now it can make enough solar units to produce six megawatts of power per year,
That raises a disturbing possibilityight a breakthrough technology that could make solar power truly competitive never see the light of day, not because of any lack of technical merit,
In the heyday of the solar technology bubble, the ill-fated startup Solyndra raised about $1 billion from venture capitalists
low-cost solar power possible. The stamp, developed in Rogers lab, allows Semprius to improve upon a type of solar power called concentrated photovoltaics,
which has been around for decades (see ltra-Efficient Solar. The idea is that you can increase the amount of energy any solar cell gathers by putting lenses over the cell to focus light into it.
Existing versions of this technology might use a lens with an area of about 400 square centimeters and focus it on a one-centimeter solar cell, for a concentration ratio of 400.
Semprius stamp makes it possible to make arrays of solar cells that are far smaller and thinner than the ones that had been used in concentrating photovoltaics.
For the concentrating technology to work the solar cells need to be picked up and arranged in an array
so they can be paired with an array of lensesnd that where the rubber stamp comes in.
and transfer thousands of the tiny solar cells at once without breaking them, completely changing the economics of using small solar cells.
Small cells have many advantages; because they require little material, they can be made of expensive types of semiconductors that are far more efficient than silicon.
and real estate to generate the same amount of power as a typical solar cell. These advantages,
and some clever lens designs, allowed Semprius to break a solar power efficiency record in 2012.
hat we saw is a way to get to very low costs of electricity. The plan had been for Siemens
and Siemens drawing on its expertise in building solar power plants. But 15 months after Siemens invested in Semprius,
Huge investments in conventional silicon solar power, especially in China had lowered costs of production but also flooded the market with cheap solar panels.
Given the supply of cheap solar panels, it became nearly impossible for companies with alternative technologiesuch as thin film solar
or concentrated photovoltaicso compete. Dozens of promising solar startups failed and the projected market for concentrated photovoltaics shrank,
Semprius solar devices are suited best for use in solar power plants. Having the backing of Siemens would have helped convince utilities to take a chance on novel technology.
conventional silicon solar panels still have room to become significantly cheaper and more efficient. New ways of manufacturing silicon wafers, the most expensive part of a solar cell, could cut wafer costs in half
or more (see raying for an Energy Miracle. New solar cell designs are edging up their efficiencies.
Such advances might eventually make solar power cheaper than fossil fuels, even without Semprius technology. But silicon-based solar power is not yet there,
and that the opportunity for Semprius. The U s. Energy Information Administration estimates that new solar power plants will produce power at just under 15 cents per kilowatt-hourar higher than the 6. 5 cents per kilowatt-hour for natural gas power.
Thus, if Semprius is right that it will soon have technology to make solar panels capable of producing electricity at around 5 cents per kilowatt-hour,
its technology could be attractive to those planning new power plants. o invention is required, just good, solid engineering,
Burroughs says. So Semprius continues its search for a new investor to scale up its technology.
and wind power capacity and increased use of cleaner-burning natural gas instead of coal. Compared with 2012,
In addition, the amount of electricity generated using natural gas dropped 10 percent between 2012 and 2013,
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
#A Promising Step Toward Round-the-clock Solar power If solar power is to become a primary source of electricity around the world,
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
but consider that most solar cells convert only 16 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity,
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,
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.
whether electrolysis as the technology is known could address one of the biggest looming challenges for renewable energy its intermittency.
The electrolyzer projects under construction in Germany typically consist of a few buildings each the size of a shipping container that consume excess renewable energy on sunny and windy days by turning it into an electric current that powers the water-splitting reaction.
and distribution infrastructure already used for natural gas and eventually turned back into electricity via combustion or fuel cells.
and the hydrogen can be used to replace fossil fuels not only in electricity production but also in industry and transportation
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Sarah Kurtz a principal scientist at the National Renewable energy Laboratory says costs won t come down until production happens at a large scale.
With economies of scale however such cells could improve the economics of solar power. At a scale of 80 to 100 megawatts a year of manufacturing capacity a cell with 50 percent efficiency would make it possible to reach costs of less than five cents per kilowatt-hour Burroughs says.
The U s. Energy Information Administration estimates that new natural-gas power plants will produce electricity at 6. 4 cents per kilowatt-hour r
#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,
and reducing the need to keep the apparatus pointed directly at the sun. Glint CEO Peter Kozodoy says solar power from its devices could cost four cents per kilowatt-hour,
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
#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.
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