Technical advances jump-start electric cars, wind turbines, and solar power.
Great article with the lastest on:
solar concentrators
hybrid batteries.
storing solar power,
improvements in wind power efficiency
and other emerging technologies that are making renewable-power costs competitive with current technologies.
How Dean Kamen’s Magical Water Machine Could Save the World
The inventor of the Segway and more now has an idea worth tens of millions of lives. But no one cares. Tracking Lord Dumpling’s genius on his seceded island of geekery.
Technology Review:
The first prototype cell to use photonic crystals looks promising.
By Prachi Patel-Predd
Researchers at MIT have unveiled a new type of silicon solar cell that could be much more efficient and cost less than currently used solar cells. Materials science and engineering professor Lionel Kimerling and his colleagues presented results of the first device prototype at a recent meeting of the Materials Research Society in Boston.
The design combines a highly effective reflector on the back of a solar cell with an antireflective coating on the front. This helps trap red and near-infrared light, which can be used to make electricity, in the silicon. The research team is licensing similar technology to StarSolar, a startup in Cambridge, MA.
Project Extends Xcel Energy and GridPoint Business Relationship
ARLINGTON, VA – Nov. 18, 2008 – GridPoint, Inc., a leading clean tech company whose smart grid software platform benefits electric utilities, consumers and the environment, announced today that Xcel Energy selected GridPoint’s software platform to control the flow of power between the grid and a NGK Insulators’ sodium-sulfur battery storing wind energy. When fully charged, the one-megawatt battery will hold approximately 7.2 megawatt-hours of electricity, potentially powering 500 homes for over seven hours. This is the first U.S. application of the battery as a direct wind energy storage device.
The GridPoint Platform applies information technology to the electric grid to provide utilities with an intelligent network of distributed energy resources that controls load, stores energy and produces power. It will allow Xcel Energy to explore using real-time grid conditions and energy pricing to determine when the battery charges or discharges. Based on system regulation and pricing signals received by the software platform, the battery’s charging behavior will be adaptively controlled. When the demand for electricity is high, as an example, stored wind energy could be automatically discharged to the grid, supplementing the power flow. When demand is low, the software platform could issue commands for the battery to store the available energy. (more…)
Technology Review: Sun + Water = Fuel
By Kevin Bullis
With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy.
Daniel Nocera describes the challenges of artificial photosynthesis in a talk given before his recent advance.
“I’m going to show you something I haven’t showed anybody yet,” said Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, speaking this May to an auditorium filled with scientists and U.S. government energy officials. He asked the house manager to lower the lights. Then he started a video. “Can you see that?” he asked excitedly, pointing to the bubbles rising from a strip of material immersed in water. “Oxygen is pouring off of this electrode.” Then he added, somewhat cryptically, “This is the future. We’ve got the leaf.”
COMMENT: If your interested in a simple overview of 10 technologies that may be important in the next century. Even if you already know them, is nice see them as an overview.
LiveScience “Top 10 Emerging Environmental Technologies”
Here’s the slideshow…