Belatchew Architects presents the concept STRAWSCRAPER, the first project to come out of the fledgling business Belatchew Labs. STRAWSCRAPER is an extension of the south tower on Södermalm in Stockholm with a new energy-producing shell covered with hairs that can extract wind energy.
Critics of wind power keep coming back to the same old complaint: what happens when there’s no wind? A new design from researchers at MIT could finally offer a solution to this renewable energy conundrum. Engineers have conceived of an offshore wind turbine anchored by hollow concrete spheres that could also turn seawater into electricity. The turbine would allow offshore wind farm managers to store excess energy for a time when there’s no wind.
By borrowing cooling systems used in its supercomputers, IBM Research claims it can dramatically increase the overall efficiency of concentrated photovoltaic solar power from 30 to 80 percent.
Like other concentrated photovoltaic (CPV) collectors, IBM’s system at its Zurich laboratory uses a mirrored parabolic dish to concentrate incoming solar radiation onto PV cells. The dish uses a tracking system to move with the sun, concentrating the collected radiation by a factor of 2,000 onto a sensor containing triple-junction PV cells. During daylight hours, each 1-sq cm PV chip generates on average between 200 and 250 watts of electrical power, harnessing up to 30 percent of the incoming solar energy.
A solar-powered aircraft has this week been plying the skies around Moffett Field in San Francisco, California, as its inventors rehearse for their next ambitious move: a coast-to-coast sunshine-fuelled flight across the US.
A power source for your mobile phone can now be as close as the nearest tap, stream, or even a puddle, with the world’s first water-activated charging device.
That battery life video that had gone viral due to a recent post on UpWorthy (and which we told you about Tuesday) now has an update. We told you that researchers at Ric Kamen’s lab at UCLA had found a way to make a non-toxic, highly efficient energy storage medium out of pure carbon using absurdly simple technology. Today, we can report that the same team may well have found a way to make that process scale up to mass-production levels.
In a presentation that seems ripped from the Atomic Age, Lockheed Skunkworks says it might be a decade away from producing a power plant based on compact fusion reactors. Unlike current nuclear reactors, all of which use fission, nuclear fusion does not easily produce materials that can be used in nuclear weapons. Fusion reactors also offer better containment, easier shutoff, greater energy efficiency, and less radioactive waste than their fissioning cousins. Of course, with something this promising, there has to be a catch.
Corn crop residues are often left on harvested fields to protect soil quality, but they could become an important raw material in cellulosic ethanol production. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) research indicates that soil quality would not decline if post-harvest corn cob residues were removed from fields.
Scientists have identified willow trees that yield five times as much sugar as ordinary varieties, “drastically reducing” the impact of biofuels.
Here’s how to make a powerful solar cell from indium and phosphorus: First, arrange microscopic flecks of gold on a silicon background. Using the gold as seeds, grow precisely arranged wires roughly 1.5 micrometers tall out of chemically tweaked compounds of indium and phosphorus. Keep the nanowires in line by etching them clean with hydrochloric acid and confining their diameter to 180 nanometers. (A nanometer is one billionth of a meter.) Exposed to the sun, a solar cell employing such nanowires can turn nearly 14 percent of the incoming light into electricity—a new record that opens up more possibilities for cheap and effective solar power.
Organic solar cells have remained a bit of a commercial disappointment. There are a number of reasons for this. Some point to the use of the expensive indium-tin-oxide (ITO) in the electrodes. Still others believe the use of fullerenes as electron acceptors has kept organic solar cells from achieving wider commercial adoption.
Ex-iRobot founder Helen Greiner’s new company, CyPhy Works, has been doing something secret involving drones for the last several years, and as of today, we’ve found out what it is: UAVs that can operate for “unlimited” amounts of time. It’s not some sort of fancy fuel cell or wireless power transfer technology; rather, if you look closely at the image above, you’ll see that CyPhy’s UAVs are using a new solution that is actually very old: an unbroken, continuous cable that connects the UAV to its ground station at all times.
Scientists in Bristol have been showing off a new robot that uses an unusual source of power - human poo!
Rice University scientists have unveiled a revolutionary new technology that uses nanoparticles to convert solar energy directly into steam. The new “solar steam” method from Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics is so effective it can even produce steam from icy cold water. Details of the solar steam method were published online today in ACS Nano. The technology’s inventors said they expect it will first be used in sanitation and water-purification applications in the developing world.
Data center Microsoft researcher Sean Parker used to think that a sewage treatment plant would be an inhospitable place for a data center professional. Now when he smells methane at a wastewater plant, he smells free energy.
