Technut News

From five miles away, the Nevada Solar One power plant seems a mirage, a silver lake amid waves of 110 degree F. desert heat. Driving nearer, the rippling image morphs into a sea of mirrors angled to the sun.

As the first commercial “concentrating solar power” or CSP plant built in 17 years, Nevada Solar One marks the reemergence and updating of a decades-old technology that could play a large new role in US power production, many observers say.

“Concentrating solar is pretty hot right now,” says Mark Mehos, program manager for CSP at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Co. “Costs look pretty good compared to natural gas [power]. Public policy, climate concern, and new technology are driving it, too.”

Spread in military rows across 300 acres of sun-baked earth, Nevada Solar One’s trough-shaped parabolic mirrors are the core of this CSP plant – also called a “solar thermal” plant. The mirrors focus sunlight onto receiver tubes, heating a fluid that, at 735 degrees F., flows through a heat exchanger to a steam generator that supplies 64 megawatts of electricity to 14,000 Las Vegas homes.

Today the United States has 420 megawatts of solar-thermal capacity across three installations – including Nevada Solar One. That’s just a tiny fraction (less than 1 percent) of US grid capacity. But Nevada Solar One could signal the start of a CSP building boom.

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Scientists at the University of Sheffield have shown how bacteria could be used as a future fuel. The research, published in the journal Bioinformatics, could have significant implications for the environment and the way we produce sustainable fuels in the future.

Like all living creatures, bacteria sustain themselves through their metabolism, a huge sequence of chemical reactions that transform nutrients into energy and waste.

Using mathematical computer models, the Sheffield team have mapped the metabolism of a type of bacteria called Nostoc. Nostoc fixes nitrogen and, in doing so, releases hydrogen that can then potentially be used as fuel. Fixing nitrogen is an energy intensive process and it wasn’t entirely clear exactly how the bacterium produces the energy it needs in order to perform. Now the new computer system has been used to map out how this happens.

Until now, scientists have had difficulties identifying bacteria metabolic pathways. The bacterial metabolism is a huge network of chemical reactions, and even the most sophisticated techniques can only measure a small fraction of its activity.

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Independent geneticist J. Craig Venter raced an international consortium of scientists to map the human genome in the 1990s. Now he’s putting the same cutting-edge science to work on today’s energy crisis, engineering a whole new generation of biofuels. In a rare in-depth interview, we talked to Venter recently about his latest project to save the world, as well as historical flubs, today’s presidential candidates and the future of genetics. —Chris Ladd

So how did you get from mapping the human genome to creating biofuels?
We considered the biggest issues facing society that we thought we could impact. What’s happening to the environment and getting weaned off oil and coal are the biggest issues out there.

Is it similar to the genome project? More daunting?
Nobody thought that such a massive project as sequencing the human genome could be undertaken by a single team, like we did. But that challenge is minor compared to trying to replace the 30 billion barrels of oil that we use globally each year, and the 3 billion tons of coal. The scale of that is beyond my imagination.

I think the real challenge won’t necessarily come from biology, because biology is infinitely scalable, but from engineering. [If we can overcome that,] we have the potential to stop using oil and coal hopefully within the next 10 to 20 years, and even start reducing the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.

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Craig Venter is a talented guy. I expect to hear more about him in the future.

A new milestone was reached recently in the race to make fuel from algae a conventional oil alternative: high-octane gasoline that is compatible with any gas-guzzling vehicle. The feat was performed by Sapphire Energy, a company that manufactures “green crude”. Sapphire uses single-cell algae to produce a chemical mixture that contains extractable fuel for cars and other transport vehicles. While the green crude is chemically identical to crude oil, it is completely carbon neutral.

The algal energy doesn’t require the use of agricultural land and water, and it deliver 10 to 100 times more energy per acre than crop-based biofuels. The company hopes that their green crude will ultimately be injected into normal crude pipelines.

Fortunately for consumers, Sapphire isn’t the only company looking into “Oil 2.0“. Silicon Valley company LS9 is working on genetically modifiying single cell organisms to excrete carbon neutral oil. Like Sapphire’s green crude, the LS9 oil will also work in conventional vehicles.

Whether these efforts come to fruition as oil replacements remains to be seen—and it mostly hinges on questions of efficiency. But we should find out soon. Sapphire expects to start producing their green crude within 3 to 5 years.

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No matter how many years I run this blog… I keep being surprised at the technology-enabled possibilities at mankind’s disposal.

In a revolutionary leap that could transform solar power from a marginal, boutique alternative into a mainstream energy source, MIT researchers have overcome a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn’t shine.

Until now, solar power has been a daytime-only energy source, because storing extra solar energy for later use is prohibitively expensive and grossly inefficient. With today’s announcement, MIT researchers have hit upon a simple, inexpensive, highly efficient process for storing solar energy.

Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”

Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera’s lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun’s energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases. Later, the oxygen and hydrogen may be recombined inside a fuel cell, creating carbon-free electricity to power your house or your electric car, day or night.

The key component in Nocera and Kanan’s new process is a new catalyst that produces oxygen gas from water; another catalyst produces valuable hydrogen gas. The new catalyst consists of cobalt metal, phosphate and an electrode, placed in water. When electricity — whether from a photovoltaic cell, a wind turbine or any other source — runs through the electrode, the cobalt and phosphate form a thin film on the electrode, and oxygen gas is produced.

Combined with another catalyst, such as platinum, that can produce hydrogen gas from water, the system can duplicate the water splitting reaction that occurs during photosynthesis.

The new catalyst works at room temperature, in neutral pH water, and it’s easy to set up, Nocera said. “That’s why I know this is going to work. It’s so easy to implement,” he said.

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They sure make it sound revolutionary! I wonder if we’ll hear more of this in the future.

There are so many solar advances being made today, it makes your head spin.

I’d be surprised is none of them would eventually come through for humanity.

Also see this article.

Followups of this article can be found here, and here.

Thanks to blow-hard winds, the United States has just become the world’s largest generator of wind energy.

Germany previously held this distinction, though since the United States has about 26 times more land than Germany, the milestone isn’t a huge surprise. Nonetheless, we weren’t expected to reach this point until late 2009.

“Our wind energy capacity is growing faster than anyplace else,” said Randall Swisher, the executive director of the American Wind Energy Association, the national trade organization for the wind energy industry. “So it’s no longer really alternative energy. This is very mainstream.”

During the first half of 2008, the United States, for the first time, generated more wind energy electricity than Germany, despite the fact that the smaller European country still has more turbines than we do.

Germany has enough turbines to collect about 22,000 to 23,000 megawatts of power, while the United States has a capacity of about 18,000 megawatts, Swisher said.

“The difference is that because the winds are so much stronger here in the U.S. we are actually providing more wind-generated electricity than Germany,” Swisher told LiveScience. “Our turbines are so much more productive that theirs.”

Though we are winning the race in terms of volume of wind energy produced, we are far behind when it comes to the proportion of our total energy we get from wind.

While wind currently supplies about 1.2 percent of the United States’ power, it accounts for about 7 percent of Germany’s total energy consumption. And the even-smaller country of Denmark gets roughly 20 percent of its energy form wind.

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How refreshing to post something about alternative energy that is not solar!

I always thought solar would be the main deliverer of renewable energy. But Mr. T. Boone Pickens seems to think different.

It’s all fine with me. As long as my energy bills are coming down.

‘New solar dish from MIT concentrates sunlight intensely enough to melt steel.’ -

The solar industry is booming. With waves of investment and grants, the solar power industry is for the first time becoming a serious business. New power plants will soon be pumping power out to consumers, while other firms market to sell panels directly to the consumer, providing them with a more direct means of experiencing solar energy.

There are many forms of solar power technology. Today the most dominant is photo-voltaics , which comprise the traditional solar panels that come to mind when one thinks of solar power. However, there are other promising ways of capturing the sun’s energy that are merely less developed.

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Researchers at the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore, led by Chang-yun Jiang, have developed highly bendable “dye-sensitized” solar cells made from zinc oxide nanowire photoelectrodes on plastic substrates. The researchers found that the nanowires are highly resistant to cracking because gaps between the nanowires allow them to efficiently release bending stresses. The devices, which conserve their photovoltaic properties even when they are extremely bent, have a variety of potential application in flexible and portable devices, such as solar-cell mobile phone chargers, clothes, and umbrellas.

The photoanodes in dye-senzitised solar cells (DSCCs) are usually made from a film of titanium dioxide or zinc oxide nanocrystals. The problem is that these thick films are fragile and crack easily when bent. Moreover, nanocrystals work well at high temperatures, which are disastrous for the plastic-film substrates. The scientists solved this problem by creating flexible DSSCs that are based on this substrate, so that their properties are conserved even when bent.

More about the zinc oxide nanowire flexible cells can be found here (translated via Google).

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The Florida Public Service Commission has “unanimously and enthusiastically” approved a plan to build America’s largest commercial solar-power plant in the state. The committee also gave the green light to a further two facilities, due to go on-line in 2009.

Florida Power & Light have selected SunPower to construct the three solar-power plants in the center of the state. The largest, a 75-megawatt plant in Martin County on the East Coast, will be connected to a natural gas plant. Another 25-megawatt plant in DeSoto County will be the largest photovoltaic facility in the country, while a third, 10-megawatt photovoltaic facility is to be housed at the Kennedy Space Center.

Speaking about the project, Howard Wenger, SunPower’s Senior Vice President, Global Business Units said, “These agreements confirm the growing trend in the U.S. to build solar power plants at a scale rivalling those in market-leading countries such as Germany and Spain.”

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Just when it looked like things were getting dark for solar, the tide has taken a turn for the better.

I’m not going to stand by idly while this revolution is taking place. I’m buying alternative energy stocks, damnit!

Another recent energy-related article of interested is the one about Al Gore’s ambitious plan to go 100% carbon neutral in only 10 years.

Enjoy the read.