Lifeboat Foundation

California is about to become the only state in the nation mandating that virtually every new home have solar panels by 2020.

Summer. Blue sky. Sunshine. But you don’t notice much of it in the office or in your home, because the blinds block the view so that the heat stays outside. This scenario could soon be a thing of the past: EPFL researchers are working with Empa on a window glass that keeps out the heat in summer and at the same time allows a clear view of the outside world.

Depending on the season, windows must have a different function in order to provide sufficient comfort in offices and apartments. In summer they should keep heat away and prevent glare from the sun. In winter they should distribute the little light optimally in the room. A team led by Andreas Schüler from the Laboratory for Solar Energy and Building Physics at EPFL has recently developed a window that meets all these criteria. In cooperation with Empa researchers led by Patrik Hoffmann from the Laboratory for Advanced Materials Processing in Thun, work is currently underway on their manufacture—which could soon make sun blinds redundant. Seasonal window glass reduces summer overheating and glare in buildings and ensures high solar energy and daylight input in winter. All this without impairing the view outwards through dimming or blinds.

Jing Gong, a Ph.D. student at EPFL, used Empa’s highly complex laser system in Thun to produce a so-called master form with a microstructured surface with the precision laser. Micro mirrors are then evaporated into these micro-grooves and encapsulated in a polymer film. This film can then be easily inserted into a conventional double-glazed window. The arrangement of so-called “Compound Parabolic Concentrator” (CPC) lenses is used to optimally reflect sunlight with low restrictions in visibility. While the first prototypes have been developed in the laboratory, the researchers are already working on up-scaling. In a pilot project in cooperation with BASF Switzerland, the team is working on a manufacturing process that should make it possible to produce the window glass coating consisting of millions of micro mirrors with high precision, quickly and cost-effectively. This poses a major challenge due to the very high optical quality requirements.

There’s no question that solar power is entering the mainstream, but California is about to give it a giant boost. The state’s Energy Commission is expected to approve new energy standards that would require solar panels on the roofs of nearly all new homes, condos and apartment buildings from 2020 onward. There will be exemptions for homes that either can’t fit solar panels or would be blocked by taller buildings or trees, but you’ll otherwise have to go green if your property is brand new.

The plan doesn’t require that a home reach net-zero status (where the solar power completely offsets the energy consumed in a year). However, it does provide “compliance credits” for homebuilders who install storage batteries like Tesla’s Powerwall, letting them build smaller panel arrays knowing that excess energy will be available to use off-hours.

The new standards are poised to hike construction costs by $25,000 to $30,000 (about half of which is directly due to solar), but the self-produced energy is estimated to save owners $50,000 to $60,000 in operating costs over the solar technology’s expected 25-year lifespan.

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While most surveys suggest that the public generally supports wind and solar power, opposition from local communities and residents sometimes blocks or delays specific new projects.

Consider the ill-fated Cape Wind offshore project, which was slated to be powering Cape Cod by now. Although Massachusetts has some of the nation’s strongest renewable energy policies, a group of coastal homeowners in that state objected vociferously soon after Cape Wind Associates, the developer, first proposed building it in 2001. They ultimately filed more than a dozen lawsuits over 14 years, creating hassles and delays that along with opposition from other parties doomed it.

As renewable energy researchers witnessing similar storylines play out across the country, we wanted to see how much local opposition there is to existing wind farms. With funding from the Energy Department and help from our colleagues, we teamed up to undertake the largest scientific study to date on how people who live near U.S. wind farms perceive them.

Stanford researchers have developed a water-based battery that could provide a cheap way to store wind or solar energy generated when the sun is shining and wind is blowing so it can be fed back into the electric grid and be redistributed when demand is high.

The prototype manganese-hydrogen battery, reported today in Nature Energy, stands just three inches tall and generates a mere 20 milliwatt hours of electricity, which is on par with the energy levels of LED flashlights one might hang a key ring.

Despite the prototype’s diminutive output, the researchers are confident they can take this table-top technology up to an industrial-grade system that could charge and recharge up to 10,000 times, creating a grid-scale battery with a useful lifespan well in excess of a decade.

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Researchers have built a new dynamic model showing how hydrogen produced with concentrated solar thermal energy can be made more continuously through a novel seasonal control strategy with ceria (CeO₂) particles buffering the effect of variation in solar radiation.

A paper, “Dynamic Model of a Continuous Hydrogen Production Plant Based on CeO₂ Thermochemical Cycle,” presented at the SolarPACES2017 Annual Conference, proposes using ceria particles not only as the redox reactant in hydrogen production, but also for heat storage and heat transfer media (or medium) to control the temperatures.

Hydrogen can be produced by splitting water (H₂O into H₂ and oxygen) at very high temperatures using concentrated solar thermal (CST) — avoiding today’s use of fossil fuels for hydrogen production. Using mirrors reflecting focused sunlight onto a receiver, CST can generate very high temperatures for thermochemical processes in a solar reactor, up to 2,000°C, and can store solar energy thermally so it can dispatch the energy when needed.

Apparently needs a lot of work before it can actually operate like a eel/snake. But, i’d wrap this up in skin so it could look like a snake/eel. Give it solar power skin so it could recharge its own batteries; maybe try to use that system that was supposed to be able to eat organic matter to convert into power. Then, put a bunch of sensors on it, and HD cameras for eyes, and rig it so it could transmit to satellites. And you have a pretty impressive drone that can operate in any body of water and on land close to water.

An innovative, eel-like robot developed by engineers and marine biologists at the University of California can swim silently in salt water without an electric motor. Instead, the robot uses artificial muscles filled with water to propel itself. The foot-long robot, which is connected to an electronics board that remains on the surface, is also virtually transparent.

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Nuclear power plants typically run either at full capacity or not at all. Yet the plants have the technical ability to adjust to the changing demand for power and thus better accommodate sources of renewable energy such as wind or solar power.

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently explored the benefits of doing just that. If nuclear plants generated power in a more flexible manner, the researchers say, the plants could lower electricity costs for consumers, enable the use of more renewable energy, improve the economics of nuclear energy and help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The team explored technical constraints on flexible operations at nuclear power plants and introduced a new way to model how those challenges affect how power systems operate. “Flexible nuclear power operations are a ‘win-win-win,’ lowering power system operating costs, increasing revenues for nuclear plant owners and significantly reducing curtailment of renewable energy,” wrote the team in an Applied Energy article published online on April 24.

In an advance that makes a more flexible, inexpensive type of solar cell commercially viable, University of Michigan researchers have demonstrated organic solar cells that can achieve 15 percent efficiency.

This level of efficiency is in the range of many solar panels, or photovoltaics, currently on the market.

“Organic photovoltaics can potentially cut way down on the total solar energy system cost, making solar a truly ubiquitous clean energy source,” said Stephen Forrest, the Peter A. Franken Distinguished University Professor of Engineering and Paul Goebel Professor of Engineering, who led the work.

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