Lifeboat Foundation

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The Hyperloop may still be a decade from becoming a reality, but already people are trying to improve upon the concept. Chinese architecture firm MAD is developing an eco-friendly version of the futuristic transportation system, one that would utilize solar and wind energies to operate.

Earlier this week, MAD announced that it was working with US-based Hyperloop Transportation Technologies on a new sustainable design with the aim of creating “enhanced connectivity between cities and people,” according to CNN. The proposed Hyperloop draws its power from a system of solar panels and wind turbine forests.

Since July, Toyota has been working on a brand-new design. It features special, much higher efficiency solar panels that are mounted on the hood, roof and even hatchback of the car, charging the car’s batteries even when it’s moving.

Panel Van

The new solar system could allow the Prius to cover 50 kilometers, four days a week, on solar alone, Bloomberg reports.

Put together the best solar panels money can buy, super-efficient batteries and decades of car-making know-how and, theoretically, a vehicle might run forever.

That’s the audacious motivation behind a project by Toyota Motor Corp., Sharp Corp. and New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization of Japan, or NEDO, to test a Prius that could revolutionize transportation.

Semiconductors are substances that have a conductivity between that of conductors and insulators. Due to their unique properties of conducting current only in specific conditions, they can be controlled or modified to suit our needs. Nowhere is the application of semiconductors more extensive or important than in electrical and electronic devices, such as diodes, transistors, solar cells, and integrated circuits.

Semiconductors can be made of either organic (carbon-based) or inorganic materials. Recent trends in research show that scientists are opting to develop more organic semiconductors, as they have some clear advantages over inorganic semiconductors. Now, scientists, led by Prof Makoto Tadokoro of the Tokyo University of Science, report on the synthesis of a novel organic substance with potential applications as an n-type semiconductor. This study is published in the journal Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry. According to Prof Makoto Tadokoro, “organic semiconductor devices, unlike hard inorganic semiconductor devices, are very soft and are useful for creating adhesive portable devices that can easily fit on a person.” However, despite the advantages of organic semiconductors, there are very few known stable molecules that bear the physical properties of n-type semiconductors, compared to inorganic n-type semiconductors.

N-heteroheptacenequinone is a well-known potential candidate for n-type semiconductor materials. However, it has some drawbacks: it is unstable in air and UV-visible light, and it is insoluble in organic solvents. These disadvantages obstruct the practical applications of this substance as a semiconductor.

SAN ANTONIO — April 8, 2019 — A team of Southwest Research Institute and General Electric (GE) engineers have designed, built and tested the highest temperature supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) turbine in the world. The turbine was developed with $6.8 million of funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), in addition to $3 million from commercial partners GE Research, Thar Energy, Electric Power Research Institute, Aramco Services Company and Navy Nuclear Laboratory. Additionally, the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E) Full-Spectrum Optimized Conversion and Utilization of Sunlight (FOCUS) program provided financial support and extended the test program to validate advanced thermal seals.

Copyright © 2019 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

US based Phononic’s thermoelectric technology is proving truly disruptive in the usually staid world of cooling technology.

When it comes to cooling technologies it’s fair to say that not a lot has changed in the past 100 years. Today, however, Phononic, a US company based in North Carolina, is using solid-state microchips to reinvent how devices are cooled.

“Over the past 50 years, semiconductors have totally transformed areas as diverse as data, communications, solar power and LED lighting,” says Alex Guichard, senior products marketing manager, Phononic. “Today, we’re using thermoelectric coolers to offer a radical alternative to traditional forms of cooling technology.”

This is Part Three of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet

In Part One and Two of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of potentially available energy and food on the earth, both stemming from the tremendous input of solar energy to the planet. We have very serious energy and food challenges, which cannot be dismissed. But the challenges are not in the form of a hard limit – they’re in the form of a race between innovation and consumption. Victory in this race is certainly not guaranteed. But the most important variable – how quickly we innovate – is one we can affect through our policies. That’s a topic we’ll return to at the end of this series.

A global wave of investment in high-capacity batteries is poised to transform the market for renewable energy in coming years, making it more practical and affordable to store wind and solar power and deploy it when needed.

Government-owned utilities and companies are buying batteries that can be larger than shipping containers. Some like…

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A team of researchers with the KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Mälardalen University and Tsinghua University has found that all of China’s major cities are now in a position to produce electricity from solar power more cheaply than can be had from the grid. In their paper published in the journal Nature Energy, the group describes how they estimated solar energy costs for all the major Chinese cities, and what they found when they compared them to costs associated with the grid.

In recent years, China has put a significant amount of effort into producing and installing solar technology to the extent that they are now the world’s biggest producer of solar cells, and also the world’s biggest installer of solar panels. Last year, installations in the country accounted for half of all installations worldwide. A lot of that growth has been stimulated by government subsidies, but the Chinese government has made it clear that it wants solar to fly on its own—subsidies are slowly being withdrawn. In this new effort, the researchers wanted to know if China was ready to fly on its own, at least in its major cities.

The researchers started by estimating solar energy system prices and electricity production in all of the major Chinese cities. They then compared what they found with prices from the grid. Next, they estimated solar electricity prices at the grid scale, and compared them to electricity generated strictly from coal. The calculations accounted for estimates of the lifetime of solar systems. They report that they found that all 344 of the major cities they studied were currently in a position to generate electricity at lower costs than the grid supply—without subsidies. They also found that 22 percent of those cities could also produce electricity at a lesser cost than possible with coal.