Posted in energy
We shouldn’t underestimate the powerful attraction of a ‘sustainable blue economy’, which – I firmly believe – will feed and support the lives of our children and those who come after them. Getting it right – whether through aquaculture, offshore energy, green shipping or ecotourism – is vital not just for SDG14, but for the future of the global commons, and for humankind itself. To do this we must move with purposeful steps. Here are five that could be taken immediately.
Curtail subsidies
Let us stop throwing good money after bad, and resolve to prohibit subsidies that support harmful and illegal fishing. A critical opportunity to eliminate them is looming at the 2019 ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation. It must not be missed.
Every now and again you run into an astronomical object where everything about it is mind blowing. And I get to share it with you! Let me introduce you to a binary star that will crush your imagination and make you realize the Universe is way cooler than you knew.
A few million years ago, and 6,000 light years from Earth, two stars were born out of the gas and dust in the galaxy in a cluster with many other stars. These two formed together, so close their mutual and growing gravity bound them together, forcing them to orbit one another. And they grew huge: By the time they switched on and became true stars, they each had more than two dozen times the mass of the Sun.
They were monsters. Huge, hot, and incredibly luminous, each blasting out as much as 100,000 times as much energy as the Sun does. Replace the Sun with one of these beasts and the Earth would evaporate like an ice cube on a scorching hot skillet.
Posted in energy
Fuel cells and batteries provide electricity by generating and coaxing positively charged ions from a positive to a negative terminal which frees negatively charged electrons to power cellphones, cars, satellites, or whatever else they are connected to. A critical part of these devices is the barrier between these terminals, which must be separated for electricity to flow.
Improvements to that barrier, known as an electrolyte, are needed to make energy storage devices thinner, more efficient, safer, and faster to recharge. Commonly used liquid electrolytes are bulky and prone to shorts, and can present a fire or explosion risk if they’re punctured.
Research led by University of Pennsylvania engineers suggests a different way forward: a new and versatile kind of solid polymer electrolyte (SPE) that has twice the proton conductivity of the current state-of-the-art material. Such SPEs are currently found in proton-exchange membrane fuel cells, but the researchers’ new design could also be adapted to work for the lithium-ion or sodium-ion batteries found in consumer electronics.
In the United States, the energy market dynamics are quite different. There is less top-down pressure to deploy renewables in the US, and the main support comes in the form of tax credits on the back end rather than feed-in tariffs or other subsidies on the customer-facing side. These subsidies are applied across the industry and not through a competitive bidding process. As a result, there isn’t as strong a push to get the industry off the incentives that are available.
But one element of the American renewable energy experience is gaining ground in Europe, namely the use of power purchasing agreements (PPAs) with utilities to buy electricity at a fixed price for years at a time.
PPAs are far less common in Europe than in the United States, but some of these new unsubsidized renewable energy projects are counting on them.
A first-of-its-kind copper and graphite combination discovered in basic energy research at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory could have implications for improving the energy efficiency of lithium-ion batteries, which include these components.
“We’re pretty excited by this, because we didn’t expect it,” said Pat Thiel, an Ames Laboratory scientist and Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. “Copper doesn’t seem to interact strongly or favorably with graphitic materials at all, so this was a big surprise. It really challenges us to understand the reasons and mechanisms involved.”
The scientists bombarded graphite in an ultra-high vacuum environment with ions to create surface defects. Copper was then deposited on the ion-bombarded graphite while holding it at elevated temperature, at 600–800 K. The synthetic route created multilayer copper islands that are completely covered by graphene layer(s).
A chance to switch to renewable sources for heating, electricity and fuel, while also providing new opportunities for several industries to produce large numbers of renewable products. This is the verdict of researchers from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, who now, after 10 years of energy research into gasification of biomass, see an array of new technological achievements.
“The potential is huge! Using only the already existing Swedish energy plants, we could produce renewable fuels equivalent to 10 percent of the world’s aviation fuel, if such a conversion were fully implemented,” says Henrik Thunman, Professor of Energy Technology at Chalmers.
How to implement a switch from fossil-fuels to renewables is a tricky issue for many industries. For heavy industries, such as oil refineries, or the paper and pulp industry, it is especially urgent to start moving, because investment cycles are so long. At the same time, it is important to get the investment right because you may be forced to replace boilers or facilities in advance, which means major financial costs. Thanks to long-term strategic efforts, researchers at Sweden´s Chalmers University of Technology have now paved the way for radical changes, which could be applied to new installations, as well as be implemented at thousands of existing plants around the globe.
