Lifeboat Foundation

Our Next Energy Inc., an electric-car battery startup involving several former leaders of Apple secretive car project, is planning to invest $1.6 billion into a factory in Michigan to make enough battery cells for about 200,000 EVs annually.

The state of Michigan on Wednesday approved a $200 million grant for the project that promises to create 2,112 new jobs once the facility in Van Buren Township, about 10 miles west of the Detroit airport, is fully operational by the end of 2027. The company must create and maintain the jobs or face a clawback of the funds.

The project will take 7–8 years.

An 853-mile-long (1,373 km) undersea electricity cable connecting Egypt with Europe has been touted to help Europe’s impending energy crisis amidst Russia’s war with Ukraine.

Imaginima/iStock.

Continue reading “EU energy crisis: Egypt to deliver 3,000 MW of electricity through an 853-mile-long undersea cable” »

Millions of people could suddenly lose electricity if a ransomware attack just slightly tweaked energy flow onto the U.S. power grid.

No single power utility company has enough resources to protect the entire grid, but maybe all 3,000 of the grid’s utilities could fill in the most crucial security gaps if there were a map showing where to prioritize their security investments.

Purdue University researchers have developed an algorithm to create that map. Using this tool, regulatory authorities or cyber insurance companies could establish a framework that guides the security investments of power utility companies to parts of the grid at greatest risk of causing a blackout if hacked.

Portland General Electric (PGE), a public utility, has partnered with NextEra Energy Resources to create a 350 megawatt (MW) clean energy project that combines wind, solar, and battery storage. Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility, located at the northern edge of Oregon, has the capacity to serve 100,000 homes.

Although great progress is being made with scaling up renewables, intermittency remains a significant issue – since wind does not always blow, and the Sun does not always shine. Falling costs and improvements in technology mean that batteries are increasingly a realistic option for utilities, but we are still a long way from such systems being able to fully handle the demands of national electrical grids.

The newly operational Wheatfield facility is among the most notable advances in battery storage to date in the U.S. It consists of 120 turbines (a mix of 2.3 MW and 2.5 MW machines) generating 300 MW, alongside a 50 MW photovoltaic solar array, for a total of 350 MW. An accompanying battery storage facility is charged using power from the grid and provides 30 MW of continuous power for four hours, i.e. 120 megawatt-hours (MWh). When combined, this is enough to supply nearly 60% of the power generated by the Boardman Coal Plant, which became the last coal-fired plant in Oregon before its demolition a few weeks ago.

Tesla is finally planning to expand the Gigafactory Nevada building after years of being “stuck” at about “30% of its final size.”

Tesla Gigafactory Nevada was the first major step in Tesla’s effort to secure battery cell supply for its ambitious growth.

The automaker partnered with Panasonic to deploy new battery cell production capacity at the facility, and Tesla used those cells to build battery packs for its vehicles and energy storage products.

Desalination plants discharge brine and wastewater, which can also kill nearby aquatic life if the process is not done properly. And generating the large quantity of energy that the plants consume has its own environmental impacts until it can be done carbon-free, which is still years off in most cases.

Unaffordable Water From Costly Plants

Continue reading “There Are Cheaper, More Sustainable Ways Than Desalination to Meet Our Water Needs” »

LAS CRUCES, N.M., May 16, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — In four weeks of continuous live-fire exercises, an industry team led by Raytheon Intelligence & Space, a Raytheon Technologies (NYSE: RTX) business, and Kord, a wholly owned subsidiary of KBR, defeated multiple 60mm mortar rounds with a 50kW-class high energy laser integrated on a Stryker combat vehicle.

The directed energy weapon system — part of the U.S. Army’s Directed Energy Maneuver-Short Range Air Defense, or DE M-SHORAD — acquired, tracked, targeted and defeated multiple mortars and successfully accomplished multiple tests simulating real-world scenarios.

Continuing to put the DE M-SHORAD system to the test, the recent operational assessment at White Sands Missile Range also included defeating several small, medium and large drones.

Continue reading “Raytheon Intelligence & Space and Kord team-up to defeat multiple mortars and large drones with Stryker-mounted high-energy laser” »

Capturing combustion on a large scale is now possible.

The first cross-sectional photos of carbon dioxide in a jet engine exhaust plume were taken by researchers using brand-new near-infrared light imaging technology.

The research was published in Applied Optics’ 28th issue.

Continue reading “Researchers successfully capture the first images of carbon dioxide emissions in aircraft engine” »

Regent has released video of its remarkable Seaglider prototype in flight testing. The first machine to combine the efficiency advantages of ground effect and hydrofoiling in a single design, it promises revolutionary speed and range in coastal areas.

Wing-in-ground effect (WIG) aircraft such as the Soviet-era Ekranoplan have shown promise in the past, but they’re yet to take off, so to speak, as a mainstream form of transport. These low-flying birds ride on a cushion of air between their wings and the surface, which gives them a significant lift and efficiency boost over regular planes flying higher in the air – as long as they stay within their own wingspan of the surface beneath. This extreme altitude restriction means that while ground-effect aircraft could fly over land, it’s too dangerous for regular operations, and they typically stay over water.

Continue reading “Watch the world’s first hydrofoiling ground effect vehicle take off” »