Turns out that your average plasma TV sucks more electricity from the grid than those fancy new plug-in hybrid cars that are coming on the market. According to officials at the Electric Power Research Institute who were quoted in a recent Associated Press article, big-screen plasma TVs drain about four times as much power as plug-in hybrids.
Why should you care? It means that the U.S. power grid is capable of handling a few million plug-in hybrids without blowing its gigantic, irreplaceable fuse. The logic goes something like this: Consumers have purchased millions of big-screen plasma sets during the past few years. They’ve all plugged them in and probably leave them on for HOURS each day. Plug-in hybrids, on the other hand, will likely be plugged in during off-peak hours, late at night while most people sleep and when the grid isn’t being taxed.
The grid may be able to handle plug-in cars, but we’ll still need to generate more electricity to meet their demands. Hopefully that energy will come from solar and wind rather than coal-fired power plants.
Cover the insides of your boiler with copper nanorods and you’ll increase its steam output by a factor of 30, granting your fire-breathing steam-turbine velocipede the supersonic speeds befitting its polished-brass fittings. Researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute made the discovery by accident, not while tinkering in their anachronistic steampunk workshops, but while conducting routine experiments with nanoparticles. The team sprayed an invisible forest of the miniscule copper rods on the bottom of a vessel. They soon realized that water boiled in the special pot turned to steam much faster than water boiled in a plain old tea kettle.
The trick? If you want steam, you need water and air. Boiling water turns to steam only where it comes into contact with air. In a regular pot, all of the water can be hot enough to boil, but only a fraction of it is in contact with air. The forest of copper nanorods traps air molecules, which means far more water in contact with air. It’s effective: Nanorod-coated pots produce 3,000 percent more bubbles and a ton more steam than run-of-the-mill pots.
At first glance the discovery seems only relevant to steam engine buffs. But most of our electricity generated by steam turbines: coal or natural gas heats water to produce steam that turns turbines that spins generators that produce electricity. The copper nanorods could mean more efficient steam production, which means burning less coal or natural gas. It makes most power sources get cheaper.
Nikhil A. Koratkar, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer:
“If the time taken to boil a given quantity of water is reduced by an order of magnitude, that should translate into significant cost savings”
A new glass developed by engineers at MIT can soak up sunlight and divert it to tiny photovoltaic cells along its edge. The sunlight-collecting glass is so efficient and inexpensive to manufacture that it could make solar power as cheap as coal power, the engineers say.
The glass would replace the lenses and mirrors that typically focus sunlight in photovoltaic systems. It works like this: Each pane is coated with a special dye that sucks up light and then channels it through the glass to small solar cells along the panes’ edges. Researchers have created several tints of the dye, each one capable of capturing a particular wavelength of light. It’s an important development because some wavelengths, or colors, of light produce more energy than others. High-frequency ultraviolet light is supercharged while lazy infrared yields little juice.
The researchers have stacked different panes of the glass, allowing a solar system to absorb several wavelengths of light. Using two panes, they say, nearly doubles the efficiency of the system. The panes are also good at sucking up indirect light, which means they don’t need to be mounted in expensive motorized sun-tracking apparatuses.
Marc Baldo, a lead member of the team, says that the panes could replace windows in homes and would be much more effective on rooftops, hilltops, or anywhere the sun shines. His team is testing several different combinations of the glass and hopes to produce large-scale solar collectors soon.
BMW is equipping 500 Minis with electric drivetrains for use in California. Company officials say they’re using the hip hatchback to test a few different electric powertrains. No word on exactly when the electric Minis will be available to the public, but I guarantee they’ll be a smash hit.
And still, the question hangs in the air like dirigible ready to burst into flames: Where are the Big Three’s electric vehicles? And don’t talk to me about the Chevy Volt, because there’s no way it should take one of the world’s largest car companies this long to develop a feasible electric car.
A team of photochemical cooks at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland have whipped up a batch of inexpensive solar cells that could revolutionize solar energy. The “Dye-sensitized Solar Cells” use dye and an electrolyte solution to harness solar radiation to make electricity. The components are sandwiched together to form a flexible film that’s durable and long lasting.
Professors Michael Grätzel and Brian O’Regan invented the solar cells in 1991, but only recently developed an easy, low-cost way to manufacture them. So how do they work? The cells consist of a porous film of white, nanometer-sized titanium dioxide particles covered in a dark dye. The film is suspended in an electrolyte solution. When sunlight hits the dye, it injects an electron (negative charge) into the titanium particles.
Grätzel and his team have tweaked the manufacturing process, nixing the volatile organic solvents that typically make up the electrolyte solution in favor of a mixture of three salts. The bottom line: Dye-sensitized cells that can be made on the cheap without harsh solvents.
The new salt-based dye-sensitized cells have an efficiency of about 8.2 precent, a little more than half the efficiency of silicon-based photovoltaic cells. No official word on cost, but Grätzel and friends claim that their panels will be considerably cheaper than traditional solar cells. They should also last more than 10 years, says Grätzel.
San Jose powerhouse Nanosolar has improved the efficiency of their printable solar cells, made from nanoparticle ink. The company now claims it can pump out enough solar panels every year to harness 1 gigawatt of power from the sun. Still not enough to power the Flux Capacitor (1.21 GW), but it would put a considerable dent in U.S. power usage. The typical U.S. home consumes about 8,900 kilowatt hours per year.
Craig Venter etched his name into the annals of history by decoding the human genome (his own genome, in fact) in less time than it takes the ebola virus to replicate. Now he has his sights set on oil. In a recent Newsweek interview with Fareed Zakaria, Venter outlines his plans to genetically engineer bacteria that will suck up C02 and spit out ethanol or biodiesel. The bug could solve two of humanity’s biggest problems—global warming and a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. From the interview:
Zakaria: How are you going to create the fuel of the future? Venter: We think multiple fuels of the future are going to come out of biology, by manipulating the genetic code of simple organisms to convert things like sugar or sunlight or carbon dioxide into fuels that people are very familiar with, like diesel fuel and gasoline.
What would a “refinery” that uses microorganisms to create fuel look like?
They’re just large, bacteria-processing fermenters. People are familiar with this: that’s how wine and beer are made. We’re using similar processes, but ones that are designed to produce much more complex molecules than ethanol, and therefore fuels that will be much higher in energy content, and will work well with the existing energy infrastructure.
How close are you to creating an organism that can produce fuels in this way?
We think the first fuels are maybe one to two years away. We’re definitely thinking in terms of years, not decades.
It’s a must-read interview that’ll fill even the most pessimistic doomsday prognosticators with warm fuzzy optimism. Kinda like wine and beer. All hail our genetically modified bacterial overlords!
We spend a lot of time and energy trying to keep light out of our homes. When the sun blazes, we pull the shades, blocking sunlight that would normally turn our dwellings into sweltering greenhouses. Designer Shelia Kennedy believes that instead of deflecting all that energy, we could harness it. She’s invented “solar curtains,” sheets of flexible fabric with imbedded thin-film photovoltaic solar cells.
The designer and her team at KVA Matix have also sketched a house that can theoretically nab up to 16,000 watt-hours of electricity using the curtains. They call it the “Soft House.” The home hasn’t been built yet, but the photovoltaic curtains are in development.
Everybody has one crazy uncle who, through mysterious circumstances, managed to secure the secret schematics for a car that runs on water. Maybe he ordered them from the back of an old Popular Science magazine, or even got them from the inventor himself; a man who is doggedly pursued by oil industry henchmen. Well, those plans have been leaked, to Japan. A Japanese company dubbed Genepax claims it has invented a car that runs on nothing but air and water.
The car uses their mysterious “Water Energy System,” or “WES” for short, to generate electricity from splitting water into its component parts. The deus ex machina seems to be an ingenious Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA) that can do the job with a simple chemical reaction.
Details are still under wraps, but Genepax says that WES doesn’t require any hydrogen reformer, high-pressure hydrogen tank or exotic catalysts. It still requires platinum, but no more than other current hydrogen fuel cells.
The company has wired their WES system into a Reva electric car, made by Takeoka Mini Car Products Co Ltd. The car runs on a supply of water and air, fed to the WES system with a pump. It doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide.
Right now the WES system costs about $18,000 to build, but Genepax hopes to get the price down to around $4,600 through mass production.
Creative Commons. Some Rights Reserved. Photo by naitokz
Another bulletin from the whirring, buzzing, blinking techno-future that is Japan: Japan Post announced last week that it plans to replace its entire fleet of 21,000 mail delivery trucks with electric vehicles during the next eight years. They also plan to install more than 1,000 charging stations at post offices across the island nation. And if that doesn’t get your green bean buzzing, this will: They just might make those charging stations available to the public. The move could spark an electric motoring revolution in Japan and shock other countries into using more EVs.
No word yet on which Japanese automaker will be honored with the ginormous government contract.
