Energy Archives - Page 5 of 9

Tree-Power? Scientists Test Battery Made Of Wood

Beth Buczynski for Earthtechling Get ready to throw all of your assumptions about how to make a battery right out the window. Scientists at the University of Maryland are working on a powerful new battery that could help reduce hazardous waste usually associated with power storage. The main ingredient? Wood. A thousand times thinner than a piece of paper, the battery is made of a sliver of wood coated with tin. Researchers say the low cost of these relatively abundant materials would make the new battery ideal for storing huge amounts of energy at once – such as solar energy harvested at a power plant. Image via Nano Letters According to researchers Liangbing Hu, Teng Li and their team, the inspiration for the wood battery came from the trees themselves. “Wood fibers that make up a tree once held mineral-rich water, and so are ideal for storing liquid electrolytes, making them not only the base but an active part of the battery,” said Hu, an assistant professor of m…

$23 Million Energy Storage Research Center Launched In New York State

New York State is making an aggressive push to expand smart grid and renewable energy, and now a public-private project could combine the two through energy storage innovations. New York’s Battery and Energy Storage Technology Consortium (NY-BEST) and Dutch company DNV Kema have announced a $23 million joint investment to build the Battery and Energy Storage Technology (BEST) testing and commercialization center in Rochester, New York. Construction has already begun on the BEST center in an abandoned section of the former Eastman Kodak business park, and when complete, it will boast 17,000 square feet of world-class testing and commercialization facilities designed to accelerate commercial deployment of energy storage technologies. Public-Private Partnership Potential BEST will represent a unique opportunity for the energy storage industry. Testing facilities will be offered from single cells to megawatt-scale systems and services will include project developm…

Charge your Mobile Battery with your own Body Heat

These shorts and sleeping bag charge your mobile devices Smart materials in the Power Shorts use kinetic energy created by the wearer's movements to charge mobile phones Modules attached to the fabric of the Recharge Sleeping Bag capture thermal energy from a sleeper's body to create an electric charge Products have been developed by Vodafone and Southampton University By Victoria Woollaston Festival goers need never run out of phone battery again thanks to a new range of denim shorts and sleeping bags that use body heat and movement to generate electricity. The Power Shorts and Recharge Sleeping Bag can charge a phone's battery by harvesting energy from the human body using kinetic and thermoelectric technology. The wearable phone chargers have been designed by mobile phone company Vodafone with help from the University of Southampton. Vodafone has teamed up with the University of Southampton to create wearable phone chargers for festival goers. Th…

Hydrogen Fuel That’s Green Thanks To Microorganisms Found Living In Salt Flats?

Image Credit: DOE/Argonne National Laboratory The pink color of salt lakes is caused by salt-loving microorganisms, called halobacteria. from CleanTechnica. Bacteriorhodopsin — an intriguing protein found within the membranes of the ancient microorganisms living in the desert salt flats of California and Nevada — may allow for the cheap, efficient production of “environmentally friendly” hydrogen fuel from nothing but sunlight and saltwater, according to new research from the US Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory. By combining bacteriorhodopsin with semiconducting nano-particles, the researchers were able to create a new system that utilizes light to spark a catalytic process that results in hydrogen fuel being produced. The great potential of titanium dioxide nanoparticles, with regard to light-based reactions, has long been known to those in the scientific community, at least as far back as the early 1970s, when researchers learned that,…

The Big Book of Building Energy Data, 2008-2012

Jeff St. John for GreenTechMedia The past four years have seen the flowering of energy efficiency in the commercial and industrial sectors, with new technology, new financial models and old-fashioned bottom-line cost-cutting pressures driving the trend. But what’s the big picture that emerges from this broad shift toward cleaner, greener buildings? Last week, nationwide energy management firm Ecova released a white paper that helps answer some of those questions. Ecova, a subsidiary of Spokane, Wash.-based utility Avista, manages about $20 billion a year in energy bills for Fortune 500 companies and others, with a client base that adds up to about 8 percent of the country’s power demand, making its big data repository a pretty good benchmark for what’s going on in the energy management sector. Here are some highlights from the report, which covers changes between 2008 and 2012, along with charts that help explain where the trend lines are headed. Consider it yet anothe…

Floating Wind Turbine In Maine A Game Changer

Image: The world’s first full-scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, being assembled in the Åmøy Fjord near Stavanger, Norway in 2009, before deployment in the North Sea. Offshore wind turbines could more than quadruple the United States’ wind energy production, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Until now, the United States has lagged behind countries like Denmark and the U.K. in installing offshore wind turbines, despite the vastly larger shorelines. That situation will likely change with the recent installation of a floating wind turbine off of the coast of Maine, the first such device in North America. About the floating wind turbine project The U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maine teamed up to create the first North American floating wind turbine, situated just off the coast of Castine, in south-central Maine. Maine is particularly well-suited for generating wind energy because of the prevailing northeasterly winds that blow almost constant…