8bitfuture:

Tesla co-founder says electric cars have reached tipping point.

Tesla Motors co-founder JB Straubel believes that steady improvements in battery technology over the past few decades have brought the world to a ‘tipping point’, where we will soon see far greater adoption of electric vehicles on the roads.

In a keynote address this week Straubel said that recently energy density in batteries has improved by an average of 7 to 8 percent each year, to the point where EVs can be driven for at least 200 miles on a full charge - a statistic that is only set to improve. Currently 96% of all US transportation uses petroleum.

Straubel said future generations are likely to wonder why so much of the world’s finite supply of petroleum was squandered on relatively short car rides, which he said could relatively easily be replaced with using electric vehicles. In the U.S., he said, about half of petroleum use comes from people who commute 20 to 50 miles per day. While such commuting is easily within the range of EVs from Tesla and others, replacing the petroleum used for longer trips and especially for things like airplane flights is still far beyond current technology’s capabilities.

(Source: eetimes.com)

alexanderpf:

A team of researchers from Boston College and MIT have developed a hybrid flat panel that is capable of producing electricity from the sun’s rays as well as hot water for thermal energy. The team’s new flat panel is eight times more efficient than previously developed solar thermoelectric generators and could make solar thermoelectric technology more cost effective on a wider scale. Solar Thermal energy is expensive and generally employed in large installations — like the one above — with this new flat panel, solar thermal energy could become a much more valuable investment. The team has increased the energy output without adding much to the dollar sign side of the equation. 

 In order to develop the panels the team used nanotechnology to combine spectrally-selective solar absorbers in a vacuum sealed chambers with high-performance thermoelectric materials. “Existing solar-thermal technologies do a good job generating hot water. For the new product, this will produce both hot water and electricity,” said Boston College professor of physics, Zhifeng Ren. “Because of the new ability to generate valuable electricity, the system promises to give users a quicker payback on their investment. This new technology can shorten the payback time by one third.”

The added materials doesn’t make the panel much more expensive than existing solar thermal technology — but increases the energy generation dramatically — which means this could be a big development in clean energy markets.”We have developed a flat panel that is a hybrid capable of generating hot water and electricity in the same system,” said Ren. “The ability to generate electricity by improving existing technology at minimal cost makes this type of power generation self-sustaining from a cost standpoint.”

Read more: New Solar-Thermal Flat Panels Are Eight Times More Efficient than Existing Technology New Solar-Thermal Flat Panels Generate Electricity and Hot Water All at Once – Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

via PhysOrg:edificecomplex

David MacKay FRS: Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

I was recently introduced to a book will be reading and buying here soon. 

It is about sustainable energy.  The writer is from England so it offers a somewhat different point of view about energy than most Americans are used to.  I will let you know more once I have read it.  It is available for downlaod for free in a low and hires pdf.

You can also read it in full online if you do not feel like downloading this.

dmdhashw:

Floating nuclear power plants | RIA Novosti

Desalination and power generation all in one? Where do I sign?

speshal-k:

Lab Creates 3 Layered Solar Panel, Catches Full Solar Spectrum | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World

Solar panels are great, but they’ve got one huge problem. On average, they only catch about 15% of the sun’s rays and scientists are scrambling to find a way to increase that efficiency — using mirrors and even the shaping them like origami. Well, RoseStreet Labs might just have a solution – they’ve created a thin film solar panel that integrates three separate layers of PV cells into one panel. Each layer captures a different part of the sun’s spectrum bringing the total efficiency above 35%.

Decoupled Utility PG&E Invests in Californians’ Solar Roofs With SunRun (and Texans’ Too)

California’s PG&E has just invested $100 million in SunRun, which offers solar power purchase agreements, (in addition to its earlier $61 million investment in Solar City’s solar lease), through its investment arm, Pacific Energy Capital.  Some of the California utility investment will help homeowners in other states, like Texas, get $0 down solar.

PG&E’s profits are “decoupled” from electricity sales, in accordance with California state mandates. As a decoupled utility, it earns more by saving electricity than by selling more. When a utility’s profits depend on its customers buying less energy, not more, the motivation is created to help customers shed electrons, or even better, actually send power to the grid. Then PG&E doesn’t have to build as many new gas-fired electric power plants.

CleanTechnica

U.S. Utility Industry Gets Serious about Solar Energy

The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) represents about 90% of the electricity generated in the U.S., so it was a significant move when this nonprofit research organization entered a partnership with the Solar Technology Acceleration Center in May.  Well, they certainly haven’t let any grass grow under their feet.  This week, EPRI announced that it will install a 187-kilowattphotovoltaic research system on a roof in its headquarters.  The project is scheduled to be completed within two months, and it will be the second largest in EPRI’s home city of Palo Alto, California.

An executive from SolarCity, the solar system installer, says that the company’s goal “is to make solar a more widely used source of U.S. electricity generation.”  The partnership with EPRI will go a long way to fulfilling that goal. Aside from offsetting a little over 10% of the institutes’s power usage, the installation will perform real-time data collection to help assess the impact of weather variations on a solar array, and to assess their effect on the distribution grid.  But wait, there’s more…

CleanTechnica

Steel Workers See Green Jobs in Wind Power

In a partnership that illustrates the powerful currents at work in today’s environmental movement, the United Steel Workers labor union has joined with the American Wind Energy Association and BlueGreen Alliance, an organization that includes other labor unions, the Sierra Club and the National Resources Defense Council, to produce a blueprint for new green jobs in the wind power industry.

In pushing hard for green jobs, this diverse labor-industry-environmental group puts itself squarely on the side of the U.S. military’s push for alternative energy in the interests of a strong national defense.  It also joins a growing number of leading U.S companies calling for national climate legislation and green jobs, in yet another sign that the dominance of fossil fuels is rapidly coming to a close.

CleanTechnica

freshphotons:

ITER (originally the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international tokamak (magnetic confinement fusion) research/engineering project that could help to make the transition from today’s studies of plasma physics to future electricity-producing fusion power plants.

speshal-k:

New Quantum Dot Photovoltaics Could Double Solar Cell Efficiency | Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World