Second Huge Solar Plant In California

Solar Panels

BrightSource Energy, the California startup that is building the first large-scale solar thermal power plant to break ground in the United States in 20 years, on Friday filed a license application with California regulators to build a second huge solar complex that features new technology.

The 500-megawatt Hidden Hills Solar Electric Generating System would be built in two 250-megawatt phases on 5.12 square miles of privately owned Mojave Desert land in California’s Inyo County on the Nevada border. The site is 45 miles west of Las Vegas and north of BrightSource Energy’s Ivanpah facility now under construction on the California side of the border.


The project is the first to seek approval from the California Energy Commission since regulators rushed to approve nine large solar thermal power plants last year so their developers could qualify for billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees. The loan guarantee program is set to sunset on Sept. 30 and Hidden Hills will test financiers’ appetite for such projects absent such a subsidy.

BrightSource, which is backed by French energy giant Alstom, Morgan Stanley, Google, Chevron and NRG Energy, filed for a $250 million initial public offering in April and has signed contracts to deliver 2,610 megawatts of electricity to utilities Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison.

The company deploys vast fields of mirrors called heliostats to focus the sun’s rays on a water-filled boiler that sits atop a tower. The resulting steam drives an electricity-generating turbine.

In a sign that solar technology is unlikely to stand still for long in the race to bring more efficient power plants online, BrightSource has increased the height of its “power tower” at the Hidden Hills project to 750 feet from the 459-foot height of those being built at Ivanpah. Each tower at Hidden Hills would be surrounded by a field of 85,000 heliostats.

“The new, higher, 750-foot solar power tower allows the heliostat rows to be placed closer together, with the mirrors at a steeper angle,” the company stated in its license application. “This substantially reduces mirror shading and allows more heliostats to be placed per acre. More megawatts can be generated per acre and the design is more efficient overall.”

BrightSource on Wednesday announced it would incorporate molten salt storage in its power plants to extend their operating hours past sunset. No mention of such a system was made in the Hidden Hills application but its addition would most likely depend on a request from the utility that purchases the complex’s electricity.

The company has set out an ambitious construction schedule, stating that it anticipates ground would be broken by the third quarter of 2012 and Hidden Hills would begin generating electricity in 2015.

In contrast, it took more than three years for state and federal regulators to approve the Ivanpah project, which is being built on land managed by the Interior Department.

BrightSource will largely avoid the feds involvement by building on land leased from a private owner. The company also apparently hopes to sidestep disputes over the impact of its power plants on the imperiled desert tortoise, a controversy that has dogged the Ivanpah project.

According to its license application for Hidden Hills, initial surveys found only two desert tortoises on the project site.

Breakthrough promises $1.50 per gallon synthetic gasoline with no carbon emissions

UK-based Cella Energy has developed a synthetic fuel that could lead to US$1.50 per gallon gasoline. Apart from promising a future transportation fuel with a stable price regardless of oil prices, the fuel is hydrogen based and produces no carbon emissions when burned. The technology is based on complex hydrides, and has been developed over a four year top secret program at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford. Early indications are that the fuel can be used in existing internal combustion engined vehicles without engine modification.

According to Stephen Voller CEO at Cella Energy, the technology was developed using advanced materials science, taking high energy materials and encapsulating them using a nanostructuring technique called coaxial electrospraying.

“We have developed new micro-beads that can be used in an existing gasoline or petrol vehicle to replace oil-based fuels,” said Voller. “Early indications are that the micro-beads can be used in existing vehicles without engine modification.”

“The materials are hydrogen-based, and so when used produce no carbon emissions at the point of use, in a similar way to electric vehicles”, said Voller.

The technology has been developed over a four-year top secret programme at the prestigious Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, UK.

The development team is led by Professor Stephen Bennington in collaboration with scientists from University College London and Oxford University.

Professor Bennington, Chief Scientific Officer at Cella Energy said, “our technology is based on materials called complex hydrides that contain hydrogen. When encapsulated using our unique patented process, they are safer to handle than regular gasoline.”

Plastic2Oil process turns plastic waste into fuel

While a lot of people may be doing their part for the environment by sending their discarded plastic items off for recycling, the fact is that much of the plastic currently in use is non-recyclable. In a not particularly eco-friendly process, some of this plastic is burned to generate electricity, while much of it simply ends up in landfills. Canadian company JBI, however, has developed a process that uses those plastics as a feedstock, and turns them into fuel.

JBI's Plastic2Oil process starts with a variety of unwashed post-commercial and industrial non-recyclable plastics, which are fed through a shredder and a granulator - the system can handle up to 1,800 pounds (816.5 kg) at a time. It is then heated in a process chamber, after which it proceeds into the main reactor. There, a proprietary (read "secret") reusable catalyst is used to crack the plastic's hydrocarbons into shorter hydrocarbon chains, which exit the plastic in a gaseous state. Those gases are captured, compressed and stored.

Gases containing gasoline and diesel can be condensed and separated, the resulting liquid fuel then temporarily stored in tanks. Methane, ethane, butane and propane "off-gas" out of those tanks, and are subsequently compressed and stored themselves. The butane and propane liquefy upon compression, allowing them to be separated, stored and sold, while the others are used to help power the system. Emissions that make it into the atmosphere are said to be less than those that would be produced by a natural gas furnace.

The whole process, for one 1,800-pound load, reportedly takes less than an hour. According to JBI, almost 90 percent of the plastic's hydrocarbon content is captured and converted into fuel. Approximately two percent of the feedstock is left over as waste, which can be removed while the system is operating. It can then be dumped in a landfill, or burned for fuel, as it has a heating value of 10,600 BTU/lb (24,656 kJ/kg).

On June 14th, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued the permits necessary for JBI's Niagara Falls three-processor pilot plant to begin operations. The plant, which has a footprint of 1,000 square feet (93 sq. m.), is capable of processing 22 tons of plastic per day, and operates continuously.

The company now plans on opening up more Plastic2Oil plants, and will concentrate on building a few plants each containing several processors, as opposed to many plants each with one processor - this is said to make the most sense for keeping construction costs down, and for maximizing production capacity. Some of the plants will be managed and owned solely by JBI, while others will be run as joint ventures.

A similar system, that utilizes a fluidized bed reactor for converting non-recyclable plastics into a variety of products, is being developed by the University of Warwickin the UK.

Source: Gizmag

New Alloy Can Convert Heat Directly Into Electricity

A new alloy with unique properties can convert heat directly into electricity, according to researchers at the University of Minnesota. The alloy, a multiferroic composite of nickel, cobalt, manganese and tin, can be either non-magnetic and highly magnetic, depending on its temperature.

Multiferroic materials possess both magnetism and ferroelectricity, or a permanent electric polarization. Materials with both of these properties are very rare; check out this explainer from the National Institute of Standards and Technology if you’re interested in the electron orbital arrangements that cause these phenomena.

In this case, the new alloy — Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 — undergoes a reversible phase transformation, in which one type of solid turns into another type of solid when the temperature changes, according to a news release from the University of Minnesota. Specifically, the alloy goes from being non-magnetic to highly magnetized. The temperature only needs to be raised a small amount for this to happen.

When the warmed alloy is placed near a permanent magnet, like a rare-earth magnet, the alloy’s magnetic force increases suddenly and dramatically. This produces a current in a surrounding coil, according to the researchers, led by aerospace engineering professor Richard James. Watch a piece of the alloy leap over to a permanent magnet in the video clip below.

A process called hysteresis causes some of the heat energy to be lost, but this new alloy has a low hysteresis, the researchers say. Because of this, it could be used to convert waste heat energy into large amounts of electricity.

One obvious use for this material would be in the exhaust pipes of vehicles. Several automakers are already working on heat transfer devices that can convert a car’s hot exhaust into usable electricity; General Motors is using alloys called skutterudites, which are cobalt-arsenide materials doped with rare earths.

Rare earth magnets are already a necessity in many hybrid car batteries, so heat-capture devices made of the new multiferroic compound could be placed near the magnets.

The material could also be used in power plants or even ocean thermal energy generators, the researchers said.

A paper on the alloy was published in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.

Source: Eurekalert

Solar plane's first international flight a success

Solar Impulse during flight tests earlier this year / Image: Solar Impulse

Solar Impulse has successfully completed its first international flight. After spending most of last week on standby waiting for favorable weather conditions, the Swiss solar powered aircraft made the run from Payerne to Brussels on Friday May 13 in a flight that lasted 12 hours 59 minutes. Hats-off to the Solar Impulse team!

Solar Impulse is an astonishing feat of engineering. It has a wingspan of over 200 feet (61 m) yet it weighs only 1600 kg (3,527 lb) and carries almost 12,000 solar cells which supply all of the energy required to keep it aloft.

The plane has actually flown for a longer duration than Friday's 12 hours 59 minute flight, setting a mark of more than 26 hours in an overnight flight last summer. The achievement of its first international flight is as much about the logistics of civil aviation as it is about performance. Solar Impulse is a slow moving aircraft – during the latest flight it flew at around 31 mph (50 km/h) – and this makes for some unique challenges when it comes to flight planning as Solar Impulse Air Traffic Control manager Niklaus Gerber explains on the Solar Impulse Blog:

"HB-SIA is an obstacle for civil and military aviation because it is not very mobile, and rather inflexible. It is slow (31 mph/50 km/h) and does not really show up on radar (you see it as a point that hardly moves). Now, alongside it, there are aircraft that are traveling at between 400 and 900 km/h. So the other aircraft are the ones that have to make adjustments to avoid it. But this scenario is theoretical because we have done everything to avoid it in planning the flight. Usually, the separation distance between aircraft is 300 meters (984 ft) vertically and 8 kilometers (5 miles) when flying at the same height. In the case of Solar Impulse, our margin of safety is much greater. And an aircraft that passes above it needs to be at least 900 meters (2,953 ft) higher, due to the turbulence it creates which descends for about 5 minutes at a rate of 150 meters (492 ft) per minute before dissipating."

Successfully negotiating these constraints in the flight from Switzerland to Belgium is therefore a big milestone in the build up towards the planned round-the-world journey.

A new future for aviation?

The project founded by Bertrand Piccard and André Borschberg (who was at the controls during the first international flight) is not geared towards producing a commercial product but instead aims to demonstrate just how much can be achieved with renewable technology. Even without the round the world trip that the team plans to undertake in 2013, it's arguable that the achievements of the past year which began with the aircraft's maiden flight in April 2010 have already gone a long way to proving the point. We could well be looking back on this period as a "Wright brothers moment" in the history of aviation.

In the flight from Payerne to Brussels, Solar Impulse covered around 390 miles (628 km) using no fuel. A rough calculation tells us that a Boeing 747 would have used around 2,000 gallons (7,570 L) of fuel to make the same trip.* Of course it's not much of a comparison when you consider that a commercial airliner can carry hundreds of people, but one can't help but think that the seeds of a new era are being sewn. Solar Impulse is powered by 4 x 10 horsepower electric engines, the Wright Brothers had 12 horsepower at their disposal when they flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Food for thought.

Watch the majestic landing at Brussels in the Solar Impulse video below:

* A 747-400 that flies 3,500 statute miles (5,630 km) and carries 126,000 pounds (56,700 kg) of fuel will consume an average of five gallons (19 L) per mile (Boeing.com).

Thin-film flexible 'Paperphone' created

Researchers from the Human Media Lab at Canada's Queen's University have created a fully-functioning floppy E-Ink smartphone, which they also refer to as a paper computer. Like its thicker, rigid-bodied counterparts, the Paperphone can do things like making and receiving calls, storing e-books, and playing music. Unlike them, however, it conforms to the shape of its user's pocket or purse, and can even be operated through bending actions.

"This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper," said its creator, Roel Vertegaal, who is also the director of the Human Media Lab. "You interact with it by bending it into a cell phone, flipping the corner to turn pages, or writing on it with a pen."

The device has a 9.5-cm (3.74-inch) thin film flexible E-Ink display, underneath which is a flexible printed circuit incorporating resistive bend sensors. Those sensors allow it to be programmed to recognize different types of bending gestures, which will subsequently result in it doing things such as navigating menus, making calls, selecting songs, or any other function. A built-in Wacom tablet also allows users to draw on its screen – making it even more paper-like.

When not actually being operated, the Paperphone consumes no electricity. Vertegaal's team have also created a similar device, the Snaplet, which can be worn like a wristband. It operates as a watch when in a convex state, becomes a PDA when flat, and can be used as a phone when turned concave.

The technology is the result of a collaboration between Queen's University and Arizona State University, and will be officially presented on May 10th at the CHI 2011 conference in Vancouver.

"This is the future," said Vertegaal. "Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years."

Source: Gizmag

“Optical Battery” to generate solar power without solar cells

It has long been thought that, even though light has electric and magnetic components, the effects of the magnetic field are so weak that they could effectively be ignored. Now researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) have discovered that under the right conditions, a light field can generate magnetic effects that are 100 million times stronger than previously expected. The researchers say the discovery paves the way for the creation of an "optical battery" that could harness power from the sun without the use of solar cells.


Stephen Rand, a professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics and Applied Physics, and his colleagues found that if light focused to an intensity of 10 million watts per square centimeter (W/cm2) is traveling through a material that does not conduct electricity, such as glass, the light field can generate magnetic effects with the strength equivalent to a strong electric effect.

"This could lead to a new kind of solar cell without semiconductors and without absorption to produce charge separation," Rand said. "In solar cells, the light goes into a material, gets absorbed and creates heat. Here, we expect to have a very low heat load. Instead of the light being absorbed, energy is stored in the magnetic moment. Intense magnetization can be induced by intense light and then it is ultimately capable of providing a capacitive power source."

William Fisher, a doctoral student in applied physics at U-M, says that a previously undetected brand of "optical rectification" is what makes this possible. In traditional optical rectification, light's electric field causes a pulling apart of the positive and negative charges in a material, which sets up a voltage similar to that in a battery. This electric effect had previously been detected only in crystalline materials that possessed a certain symmetry, but Rand and Fisher found that light's magnetic field can also create optical rectification in other types of materials, under the right circumstances.

"It turns out that the magnetic field starts curving the electrons into a C-shape and they move forward a little each time," Fisher said. "That C-shape of charge motion generates both an electric dipole and a magnetic dipole. If we can set up many of these in a row in a long fiber, we can make a huge voltage and by extracting that voltage, we can use it as a power source."

Although the light must be focused through a non-conductive material to an intensity of 10 million W/cm2, which is much higher than the roughly 0.136 W/cm2 intensity of sunlight on its own, the researchers are looking for new materials that would work at lower intensities.

"In our most recent paper, we show that incoherent light like sunlight is theoretically almost as effective in producing charge separation as laser light is," Fisher said.

The researchers predict that with improved materials, they could achieve 10 percent efficiency, which is comparable to today's commercial-grade solar cells. They add that, because their technique doesn't require the extensive semiconductor processing required for traditional solar cells, it could also make solar power much cheaper.

"All we would need are lenses to focus the light and a fiber to guide it. Glass works for both. It's already made in bulk, and it doesn't require as much processing. Transparent ceramics might be even better," said Fisher.

Over the summer, the researchers will first work on harnessing power with laser light, and then sunlight.

The researcher's paper is titled, "Optically-induced charge separation and terahertz emission in unbiased dielectrics," and the University of Michigan is pursuing a patent for the technology.

Source: Gizmag

Man-made 'CLOUDS' to shade 2022 World Cup in Qatar

With the World Cup always held in the European off-season in June and July, the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar offers the prospect of players and spectators sweating through the hottest part of the year. Doha sees an average top temperature of 41 degrees Celsius (106°F) in these months with the possibility of top temperatures as high as 50°C (122°F). While shifting the World Cup to the cooler month of January has been mooted and since rejected, a team of engineering scientists from Qatar University (QU) have taken a more high-tech approach to solving the problem – they've reportedly developed a type of artificial "cloud" designed to float above the World Cup venues and provide fans and players with relief from the blazing sun.

The proposed stadiums for the World Cup unveiled a year ago – which included theLusail Iconic Stadium – would all employ cooling technology capable of reducing temperatures inside by up to 20°C (36°F), but concerns remain about training grounds.

The artificial clouds system was invented by a team led by Dr Saul Abdul Ghani, Head of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at QU, who toldGulf News that the "clouds" would be made from a lightweight carbon structure carrying a giant envelope of material containing helium gas. The "cloud" would also feature solar panels on its upper surface to power engines that allow the cloud to be moved via remote control.

The system would initially cost around US$500,000, with prices coming down with commercial scale production. It's unclear whether the clouds will actually be built. With still eleven years till the kick off of the 2022 World Cup, the long term forecast is mainly sunny with a chance of cloud.

Source: Gizmag Via The Daily Mail.

World's First 'Artificial Leaf' Created By MIT Labs

A practical artificial leaf that can turn sunlight and water into energy as efficiently as the real thing has long been a Holy Grail of chemistry, and researchers at MIT may have finally done it. Today at the National Meeting of the American Chemical Society researchers from MIT’s Nocera Lab, led by Dr. Daniel Nocera, claimed that they’ve created an artificial leaf made from stable and--more importantly--inexpensive materials.

The artificial leaf looks nothing like the natural leaf that it mimics, but its inputs and outputs are the same. Made of silicon, electronics, and various catalysts that spur chemical reactions within the device, the artificial leaf uses sunlight to break water into hydrogen and oxygen which can then be used to create electricity in a separate fuel cell. Placed in a gallon of water and left in the sun, these artificial leaves could provide a home in the developing world with basic electricity for a day, Nocera said.

The Nocera Lab’s artificial leaf, it should be noted, isn’t the first working attempt at recreating photosynthesis in artificial materials. But previous attempts have led to artificial leaves full of unstable materials that are expensive and lead to short life spans. Nocera and his team identified a set of inexpensive, common catalysts including nickel and cobalt that get the job done with far less expense. And in the lab their playing-card-sized leaves have worked continuously for 45 straight hours without a drop in output.

Nocera and company will next try to boost both efficiency and lifespan of their photosynthetic material. It’s still a workbench technology at this point, but the leap forward presented here is significant. Scaled and mass produced, something like the Nocera Lab’s leaf could be the key component to shifting toward a hydrogen-based economy. In the nearer term, such technology could at the very least power parts of the globe that are currently off the grid with clean, plentiful, and easy-to-come-by energy.

Source: Popsci via Eurekalert

Scientists use bacteria to create fuel from sunlight and CO2

Shewanella bacteria, which produces ketones that are processed into fuel

Researchers from the University of Minnesota have announced a breakthrough in the quest to create a viable fuel alternative using greenhouse gases. The process uses two types of bacteria to create hydrocarbons from sunlight and carbon dioxide. Those hydrocarbons can in turn be made into fuel, which the scientists are calling "renewable petroleum."

The process starts with Synechococcus, a photosynthetic bacterium that fixes carbon dioxide in sunlight, then converts that CO2 to sugars. Those sugars are then passed on to another bacterium, Shewanella, which consumes them and produces fatty acids. University of Minnesota biochemistry graduate student Janice Frias discovered how to use a protein to transform those acids into ketones, a type of organic compound. Her colleagues in the university's College of Science and Engineering have developed catalytic technology that allows them to convert those ketones into diesel fuel.

"CO2 is the major greenhouse gas mediating global climate change, so removing it from the atmosphere is good for the environment," said Frias' advisor, Prof. Larry Wackett. "It's also free. And we can use the same infrastructure to process and transport this new hydrocarbon fuel that we use for fossil fuels."

The university is in the process of filing patents on the process.

The research is being published in the upcoming issue of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Source: Gizmag

PepsiCo develops first PET plastic bottle made completely from plant-based material

Mountain Dew's green bottles could become even "greener" with an announcement from PepsiCo claiming it has developed the world's first polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottle made entirely from plant-based, fully renewable resources including switch grass, pine bark and corn husks. The bottle not only offers a significantly reduced carbon footprint compared to petroleum-based PET, but is also 100 percent recyclable.

The company says that by combining biological and chemical processes it has come up with a way to create a molecular structure that is identical to petroleum-based PET using plant-based materials, resulting in a bottle that looks and feels identical to current PET bottles. In the future, PepsiCo hopes to expand the renewable resources used to create the bottles to include orange peels, potato peels, oat hulls and other agricultural byproducts from its food business.

"PepsiCo is in a unique position, as one of the world's largest food and beverage businesses, to ultimately source agricultural byproducts from our foods business to manufacture a more environmentally-preferable bottle for our beverages business," said PepsiCo Chairman and CEO, Indra Nooyi.

With the announcement PepsiCo gets some bragging rights over its main competitor. In comparison, Coca-Cola currently produces bottles that use 30 percent plant-based materials although it says it has produced a 100 percent plant-based bottle in the lab that is still undergoing testing. With both companies producing billions of PET bottles between them each year, the switch from petroleum-based to plant-based PET could have significant environmental impacts.

Over 60 percent of the world's petroleum-based PET production is used as polyester for textile applications, while bottle production – usually for soft drinks – accounts for around 30 percent of global PET demand.

The plant-based bottle isn't the first effort by PepsiCo to move towards more environmentally sustainable packaging. Its Frito-Lay division was also responsible for the world's first fully compostable bag made from plant-based polylactic acid for its SunChips snacks in the U.S. and Canada.

PepsiCo says it will pilot production of the new bottle in 2012 and upon the expected successful completion of the pilot intends to move directly into full-scale commercialization.

Source: Gizmag

We’re one step closer to cheap, abundant biofuel

Biofuels are made from carbohydrates and fats in corn and other feedstock. This is a wasteful process because it leaves behind all the protein, a far more abundant substance. As a result, one of the big questions for alternative energy researchers is how we can pull biofuel from protein.

Especially because proteins are also present in industrial waste products from agricultural processing - things like corn husks, for example. Imagine if you could take corn husks and turn them into gas. Well, now we're one step closer.

And it's all because of a re-engineered E. coli bacteria. According to Nature Biotechnology:

James Liao and colleagues overcome this problem by changing metabolic pathways in E. coli. The engineered bacteria are able to efficiently remove nitrogen groups from amino acids — the building blocks of proteins — to produce alcohols, which in turn are converted into biofuels.

Many kinds of algae, like those pictured above, are also packed with proteins that these E. coli can turn into alcohol as well.

Source: io9