#How To Save The Electrical Gridthe explosion lit up the Manhattan skyline. A sudden boom a one-two punch of yellow light then everything went black.
While Europe is building a massive Supergrid (much of it with DC lines) for it`s solar wind and bio energy transports.
And while Europe and China keep expanding high speed rail to more cities the US is only lowering investments in roads energy rails etc.
In the ideal US grid all fossil fuel and wind/solar facilities would be replaced with 2500 nuke plants one to every 100k population.
By replacing expensive deadly and sickening destructive fossil fuels plant the rate of return on the investment to the nation as a whole in a kind of a FDR New deal would pay back at 40%per annum.
It would put Big Oil/Coal out of business and they own pretty well all politicians and media at all levels.
Our local utility reports that energy saving efforts have been so effective that demand is falling.
http://spectrum. ieee. org/energy/the-smarter-grid/a-perfect-storm-of-planetary-proportionsif you think Ray`s story is super 1 week ago my cousins best friend basically recieved
carrying about 10000 times the energy of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Clearly something catastrophic had occurred in Earth's cosmic neighborhood
and its stable relative carbon-12 the relative levels of carbon-14 in their growth rings give scientists a way of measuring the amount of high-energy particles entering Earth's atmosphere in a given year.
Those rays would have created high-energy particles in our atmosphere which could then go on to form the carbon-14 present in such abundance in the Japanese cedars.
and dumping oil into lakes puddles and streams to keep mosquitoes from breeding. Such practices would be frowned upon today but apparently these methods saved thousands of lives in the early 1900s.
and filled and oil was used freely where draining was impracticable; a good sewer system was installed and connection required;
What s more at his facility in Richmond California Biddle could produce recycled plastic with as little as 10 percent of the energy required to make virgin.
and recycling could reduce global dependence on oil the source material for virgin plastic. It could conceivably influence not only the price of oil but global flows of trade as well.
And it could dramatically reduce the wholesale smothering of communities across Asia and Africa with hazardous e-waste.
He was soon winning grants and loans from the State of California the Environmental protection agency and the Departments of Energy and Commerce.
In 2010 The Economist honored him with one of its awards for energy and the environment (along with Steve jobs and Harald zur Housen a Nobel-winning cancer researcher).
Concrete and steel require enormous amounts of energy to produce and transport generating more than a ton of carbon dioxide per ton of steel or concrete.
which requires additional energy to cut and press into sections s far more environmentally friendly. According to Wood For good an organization that advocates for sustainable wood construction a ton of bricks requires four times the amount of energy to produce as a ton of sawn softwood;
concrete requires five times steel 24 times and aluminum 126 times. Wood also performs better: It is for example five times more insulative than concrete and 350 times more so than steel.
That means less energy is needed to heat and cool a wood building. When CLT is used to build high-rise towers the carbon savings can be enormous.
By the time Wood graduated in 2004 and opened his own lab at Harvard university he had helped pioneer a way to use extremely energy-efficient exotic materials to replicate the motion of a fly s wing;
It weighs 19 grams ighter than some AA batteries ut it carries a camera communications systems and an energy source.
A flapping-wing drone utilizing resonance generates significant improvements in energy efficiency creating optimal lift with minimal effort.
and storage (CCS) will be pivotal in reaching ambitious climate targets according to a new comprehensive study of future energy technologies from IIASA the Potsdam Institute for Climate Change the Stanford Energy Modeling
The study published in a special issue of the journal Climatic Change provides an overview of the results of EMF27 a major research project combining 18 different global energy-economy models from research teams around the world.
In 2010 coal oil and gas supplied more than 80%of the world's total primary energy supply
--and the demand for energy is projected to increase by 2 to 3 times by 2100.
The EMF27 study shows that without policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions fossil fuels will remain the major energy source in 2100 with resulting increases in greenhouse gas emissions.
and nuclear energy because the combination of the two can lead to negative emissions says IIASA researcher Volker Krey lead author of the study published last week.
CCS is a yet-unproven technology that would remove carbon from fossil fuel or bioenergy combustion and store it underground.
Bioenergy is an especially valuable energy resource because unlike solar wind and hydro power it can be converted into liquid and gaseous fuels
which are easily storable and can be used readily by current transportation systems while the other renewable technologies would require electric or hydrogen vehicles and infrastructure in order to power transportation.
and is led by the Stanford Energy Modeling Forum the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research IIASA and other institutes.
A second study by Mccollum and Energy Program leader Keywan Riahi also included in the issue shows that
contrary to some recent claims the fossil fuel consumption that models project out to 2100 is well within the bounds of estimated recoverable reserves and resources.
because we'll run out of available coal oil and gas supplies in the coming decades. However our study which compares long-term scenario results across a large suite of technologically-detailed models shows that fossil resource constraints are unlikely to limit greenhouse gas emissions in this century.
Existing air quality regulations and trends in clean energy technology are expected to reduce the amount of harmful nitrogen oxides (NOX) emitted by coal plants and cars over time.
comparisons of the energy consumption greenhouse gas emissions and total cost of ownership for the medium-duty vehicles.
On average in the United states electric urban delivery trucks use about 30 percent less total energy and emit about 40 percent less greenhouse gases than diesel trucks for about the same total cost taking into account both the purchase price
The relative benefits of the electric vehicles the researchers found depend on vehicle efficiency associated with drive cycle diesel fuel price travel demand electric drive battery replacement
Vehicles operated in states heavily dependent on coal for producing electricity showed higher emissions. In every state in the U s. electric trucks provided some reduction in greenhouse gas emissions with urban routes providing the most advantage.
Wild cards in the study included the future costs of both diesel fuel and electricity and the potential cost of replacing an electric truck's battery pack
while only diesel fuel prices could have a similarly large effect on the future cost-competitiveness of diesel trucks.
and fuel costs the advantages could swing even farther in the direction of electric vehicles.
or duty cycle application fleet operators could enjoy higher returns on investment while saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
systems for both food and fuel. Brown is working on the project through the Energy Biosciences Institute at the U of
I hoping to use the sorghum findings as a launching pad for working with complex genomes of other feedstocks.
The research was done at the Energy Biosciences Institute a collaboration in which bioscience and biological techniques are being applied to help solve the global energy challenge.
The partnership funded from the energy company BP includes researchers from the University of California Berkeley;
the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Story Source:
The world needs to unhook itself from its ever increasing reliance on synthetic nitrogen fertilisers produced from fossil fuels with its high economic costs its pollution of the environment and its high energy costs.
The solar steam sterilization system uses nanomaterials to convert as much as 80 percent of the energy in sunlight into germ-killing heat.
In a previous study last year Halas and colleagues showed that solar steam was so effective at direct conversion of solar energy into heat that it could even produce steam from ice water.
The technology has an overall energy efficiency of 24 percent. Photovoltaic solar panels by comparison typically have an overall energy efficiency of around 15 percent.
When used in the autoclaves in the tests the heat and pressure created by the steam were sufficient to kill not just living microbes but also spores and viruses.
But as a proof of concept the chip shows it should be possible to surpass the limitations of flash memory in packing density energy consumption per bit
The devices have proven to be robust with a high on/off ratio of about 10000 to 1 over the equivalent of 10 years of use low-energy consumption and even the capability for multibit switching
Yakobson a theoretical physicist and his team specialize in analyzing the interplay of energy at the atomic scale.
With ORNL's images in hand they were not only able to calculate the energies of a much more complex set of defects than are found in graphene
The Welch Foundation the National Science Foundation (NSF) the U s army Research Office the U s. Office of Naval Research the Nanoelectronics Research Corporation and the Department of energy supported the work.
Our results will help develop ways to use this new material in atomically thin electronics that will become integral components of a whole new generation of revolutionary products such as flexible solar cells that conform to the body of a car.
This multidisciplinary collaboration by the Energy Frontier Research center at Columbia University with Cornell University's Kavli Institute for Nanoscale Science focused on molybdenum disulfide because of its potential to create anything from highly efficient flexible solar cells to conformable
This material is the newest in a growing family of two-dimensional crystals says Arend van der Zande a research fellow at the Columbia Energy Frontier Research center and one of the paper's three lead authors.
For example we can now imagine sandwiching two different monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides between layers of graphene to make solar cells that are only eight atoms thick--20 thousand times smaller than a human hair!
Say for example we want to make a solar cell. Now we need to have meters of this material not micrometers
which enables us to integrate it into large-scale flexible electronics and solar cells. The crystal synthesis optical measurements electronic measurements and theory were performed all by research groups at Columbia Engineering.
The study was sponsored by the Columbia Energy Frontier Research center with additional support provided by the National Science Foundation through the Cornell Center for Materials Research.
The oils are also for industrial processes such as making soaps cosmetics perfumes paints and biofuels.
Also known as elephant grass miscanthus is one of a new generation of renewable energy crops that can be converted into renewable energy by being burned in biomass power stations.
#Nanostructures improve the efficiency of solar cellsresearchers have been able to improve the efficiency of solar cells by coating the cell surface with extremely small nanoscale structures.
At Aalto University a research team led by Assistant professor Hele Savin is conducting studies on crystalline silicon solar cells
which are the main type of solar cells that are currently on the market. The advantages of silicon include the long-term stability sufficiency low cost and non-toxicity of the element as well as the advanced production technology.
Another benefit of these solar cells is their relatively high efficiency and technological compatibility with the manufacturing technologies currently used by the semiconductor industry Savin explains.
Promising techniques in the test benchthe efficient operation of solar cells may be compromised by impurities in silicon.
In solar cells it is not possible to use as pure a form of silicon as in for example microelectronics
Moreover the solar cell utilises the silicon disk in its entirety whereas transistors for example are located on the surface of the silicon disk
and accordingly impurities cannot be controlled in solar cells by means of the same methods as those used in microelectronics.
One goal of the research led by Savin is to find ways to produce equally efficient solar cells using the less expensive but impure silicon rather than the more expensive purified silica.
Certain promising techniques are currently being tested in production by a leading European solar cell manufacturer. Another new research topic involves the so-called light-induced degradation of silicon solar cells.
Light degradation is a harmful effect that reduces the solar cell efficiency by several percentage units during the first 24 hours of use after
which the situation becomes stabilised. The aim is to gain an understanding about the phenomenon itself and its causes.
#Turning algae into clean energy and fish food; helping Africans to irrigate cropscould algae that feast on wastewater produce clean biofuels and a healthful supply of fish food?
pollution control the limited supply of fossil fuels and production of healthy food. This team dubbed Algafuture is composed of undergraduates and graduate students from the departments of Geography and Environmental Engineering and Chemical and Biomolecular engineering.
and do not require electricity or fuel. Instead they use the kinetic energy of flowing stream water to power the lifting of a fraction of this water to a higher elevation.
Additional resources were contributed by the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life sciences'Biodesign and Bioprocessing Research center the Shell Gamechanger Program and the U s. Department of energy Bioenergy Science Center along with the Division of Chemical sciences
Geosciences and Biosciences Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the Department of energy. Chen was supported partially by the China Scholarship Council.
In addition to biomedical applications the materials also have potential uses in solar cells and as nanosensors and biomedical imaging reagents Warner pointed out.
and land use change and our energy choices (such as biofuels oil sands and shale gas). In this talk we discuss the drivers affecting water sustainability
Now researchers with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) through support from the Energy Biosciences Institute (EBI) have shed literally new light on cellulase catalysis. Using an ultrahigh-precision visible light microscopy
technique called PALM--for Photo-Activated Localization Microscopy--the researchers have found a way to improve the collective catalytic activity of enzyme cocktails that can boost the yields of sugars for making fuels.
Increasing the sugar yields from cellulosic biomass to help bring down biofuel production costs is essential for the widespread commercial adoption of these fuels.
if the United states is to significantly reduce its use of fossil fuels in the coming decades.
Fossil fuels are responsible for the annual release of nearly nine billion metric tons of excess carbon into the atmosphere.
EBI which provided the funding for this research is a collaborative partnership between BP the funding agency UC Berkeley Berkeley Lab and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The above story is provided based on materials by DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.
The pollutants products of fossil fuel combustion are emitted by cars trucks and buses. Pollutants rise up into the atmosphere
#Breakthrough in hydrogen fuel production could revolutionize alternative energy marketa team of Virginia Tech researchers has discovered a way to extract large quantities of hydrogen from any plant a breakthrough that has the potential to bring a low-cost environmentally friendly fuel source
Our new process could help end our dependence on fossil fuels said Y. H. Percival Zhang an associate professor of biological systems engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life sciences and the College of Engineering.
The U s. Department of energy says that hydrogen fuel has the potential to dramatically reduce reliance of fossil fuels
but not affiliated with this project said this discovery has the potential to have a major impact on alternative energy production.
The potential for profit and environmental benefits are why so many automobile oil and energy companies are working on hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as the transportation of the future Zhang said.
Many people believe we will enter the hydrogen economy soon with a market capacity of at least $1 trillion in the United states alone.
The energy stored in xylose splits water molecules yielding high-purity hydrogen that can be utilized directly by proton-exchange membrane fuel cells.
Even more appealing this reaction occurs at low temperatures generating hydrogen energy that is greater than the chemical energy stored in xylose and the polyphosphate.
This results in an energy efficiency of more than 100 percent--a net energy gain. That means that low-temperature waste heat can be used to produce high-quality chemical energy hydrogen for the first time.
Other processes that convert sugar into biofuels such as ethanol and butanol always have energy efficiencies of less than 100 percent resulting in an energy penalty.
We think this discovery is a game-changer in the world of alternative energy. Support for the current research comes from the Department of Biological Systems Engineering at Virginia Tech.
Additional resources were contributed by the Shell Gamechanger Program the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life sciences'Biodesign and Bioprocessing Research center and the U s. Department of energy Bioenergy Science Center along with the Division of Chemical sciences
Geosciences and Biosciences Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the Department of energy. The lead author of the article Julia S. Martin Del Campo who works in Zhang's lab received her Ph d. grant from the Mexican Council of Science and Technology.
#Waste heat may economize CO2 capturein some of the first results from a federally funded initiative to find new ways of capturing carbon dioxide (CO2) from coal-fired power plants Rice university scientists have found that CO2 can be removed more economically using waste heat
because capturing CO2 with conventional technology is an energy-intensive process that can consume as much as one-quarter of the high-pressure steam that plants use to produce electricity.
Hirasaki's team was one of 16 chosen by the Department of energy (DOE) in 2011 to develop innovative techniques for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.
Power plants fired by coal and natural gas account for about half of the CO2 that humans add to the atmosphere each year;
Some steam has insufficient energy to run a turbine. This is often referred to as waste heat
The Department of energy wants us to investigate how our process compares with what's already on the market
The research is supported by the Department of energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Rice university.
efficient solar cellsolar cells are just like leaves capturing the sunlight and turning it into energy.
Georgia Institute of technology and Purdue University researchers have developed efficient solar cells using natural substrates derived from plants such as trees.
Just as importantly by fabricating them on cellulose nanocrystal (CNC) substrates the solar cells can be recycled quickly in water at the end of their lifecycle.
The researchers report that the organic solar cells reach a power conversion efficiency of 2. 7 percent an unprecedented figure for cells on substrates derived from renewable raw materials.
The CNC substrates on which the solar cells are fabricated are optically transparent enabling light to pass through them before being absorbed by a very thin layer of an organic semiconductor.
During the recycling process the solar cells are immersed simply in water at room temperature. Within only minutes the CNC substrate dissolves
and the solar cell can be separated easily into its major components. Georgia Tech College of Engineering Professor Bernard Kippelen led the study
and says his team's project opens the door for a truly recyclable sustainable and renewable solar cell technology.
But organic solar cells must be recyclable. Otherwise we are simply solving one problem less dependence on fossil fuels
while creating another a technology that produces energy from renewable sources but is not disposable at the end of its lifecycle.
To date organic solar cells have been fabricated typically on glass or plastic. Neither is easily recyclable and petroleum-based substrates are not very eco-friendly.
For instance if cells fabricated on glass were to break during manufacturing or installation the useless materials would be difficult to dispose of.
Paper substrates are better for the environment but have shown limited performance because of high surface roughness or porosity.
Our next steps will be to work toward improving the power conversion efficiency over 10 percent levels similar to solar cells fabricated on glass
or petroleum-based substrates said Kippelen. The group plans to achieve this by optimizing the optical properties of the solar cell's electrode.
Purdue School of Materials Engineering associate professor Jeffrey Youngblood collaborated with Kippelen on the research. A provisional patent on the technology has been filed with the U s. Patent office.
Last year the center created the first-ever completely plastic solar cell. This research was funded in part through the Center for Interface Science:
Solar Electric Materials an Energy Frontier Research center funded by the U s. Department of energy Office of Science Office of Basic Energy Sciences under Award Number DE-SC0001084 (Y. Z
and power lines findings that could affect the oil and gas industry as much as farmers and land owners.
we've been fortunate that the wind energy companies have identified these places as potential problems
You have some of those areas that because of petroleum extraction stockyards or other human activity the chickens just won't said use Boal.
#Petroleum use, greenhouse gas emissions of automobiles could drop 80 percent by 2050: U s. reporta new National Research Council report finds that by the year 2050 the U s. may be able to reduce petroleum consumption
and greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent for light-duty vehicles--cars and small trucks--via a combination of more efficient vehicles;
the use of alternative fuels like biofuels electricity and hydrogen; and strong government policies to overcome high costs and influence consumer choices.
To reach the 2050 goals for reducing petroleum use and greenhouse gases vehicles must become dramatically more efficient regardless of how they are powered said Douglas M. Chapin principal of MPR Associates
In addition alternative fuels to petroleum must be readily available cost-effective and produced with low emissions of greenhouse gases.
i e. energy cost savings improved vehicle technologies and reductions in petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions exceed the additional costs of the transition over and above
what the market is willing to do voluntarily. Improving the efficiency of conventional vehicles is up to a point the most economical and easiest-to-implement approach to saving fuel
and lowering emissions the report says. This approach includes reducing work the engine must perform--reducing vehicle weight aerodynamic resistance rolling resistance
The average fuel economy of vehicles on the road would have exceed to 180 mpg which the report says is extremely unlikely with current technologies.
and fuels including: hybrid electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius; plug-in hybrid electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt;
some will rely on fuels that are not readily available or have restricted travel range; and others may require bulky energy storage that will limit their cargo and passenger capacity.
Wide consumer acceptance is essential however and large numbers of alternative vehicles must be purchased long before 2050
and appropriate refueling infrastructure created they have great potential for reducing petroleum consumption. While corn-grain ethanol
This drop in fuel is designed to be a direct replacement for gasoline and could lead to large reductions in both petroleum use
and greenhouse gas emissions; it can also be introduced without major changes in fuel delivery infrastructure or vehicles.
The report finds that sufficient lignocellulosic biomass could be produced by 2050 to meet the goal of an 80 percent reduction in petroleum use
when combined with highly efficient vehicles. Vehicles powered by electricity will not emit any greenhouse gases
Achieving these goals requires that the improved technology focus on reducing fuel use rather than adding greater power
and fuel research and development supported by both government and industry designed to solve the critical challenges in each major candidate technology.
and fuels will require a rigorous policy framework that is more stringent than the proposed fuel economy standards for 2025.
This policy intervention could include high and increasing fuel economy standards R&d support subsidies and public information programs aimed at improving consumers'familiarity with the new fuels and powertrains.
Because of the high level of uncertainty in the pace and scale of technology advances this framework should be modified as technologies develop and as conditions change.
It is essential that policies promoting particular technologies to the public are introduced not before these new fuels
Even though making concrete is less energy intensive than making steel or other building materials we use so much of it that concrete production accounts for between 3 to 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions Riding said.
The researchers collaborated with the University of Texas North carolina State university and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden Colo.
Ceramics are used in a wide variety of technologies including body armor fuel cells spark plugs nuclear rods and superconductors.
The administration has taken a number of steps to meet those goals such as investing billions of dollars in wind solar and other carbon-neutral energy technologies.
Their findings are summarized in a report by Stanford's Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP.
We need to start thinking about how to implement a negative-emissions energy strategy on a global scale.
when more greenhouse gases are sequestered than are released into the atmosphere explained Milne an energy assessment analyst at GCEP.
A typical BECCS system converts woody biomass grass and other vegetation into electricity chemical products or fuels such as ethanol.
The first project was launched in 2009 by the Department of energy at a corn ethanol production facility in Decatur Ill. operated by the Archer daniel midlands Company.
and other industries fueled by coal natural gas and oil. Capturing and sequestering those emissions could play a significant role in curbing global warming.
To make the process carbon negative researchers have proposed a BECCS co-fired power plant that runs on a mixture of fossil fuel (such as coal) and vegetation (wood grass or straw for example.
But according to the GCEP report major technical and economic hurdles must be overcome such as the relative inefficiency of biomass fuels and the high cost of carbon capture and storage (CCS.
We're going to be burning fossil fuels for many years to come said Field who also serves as director of the Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology at Stanford.
BECCS is one of the only proven technologies that uses fossil fuels and actually removes CO2 from the atmosphere.
Biochar is a plant byproduct similar to charcoal that can be made from lumber waste dried corn stalks and other plant residues.
and replacement of gasoline with ethanol the GCEP authors wrote. However questions remain about the long-term effects of ethanol combustion on climate.
or fuels mechanical trees do not generate power and in fact require natural gas to operate. Following the 2012 negative-emissions workshop GCEP issued an international request for proposals to develop net-negative carbon emissions technologies.
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