Energy

Roof-top solar panels are just one part of the micropower revolution. Presidency Maldives, CC BY-NC By Morgan Saletta, University of Melbourne There is no shortage of shouting and dire warnings about the state of the climate and our need to phase out fossil fuels. But there is a more silent revolution happening too — in micropower. Small-scale electricity generation is slowly replacing big fossil-fuel driven power plants, which are currently the world’s single largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. These micro-electricity producers are relatively small scale, inexpensive, and most…

Well, maybe it's not quite this electrifying, but the  electrochemical cell prototype is pretty cool. Florian F.  (Flowtography)/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND By Tessa Evans, The Conversation Picture a device that can produce electricity using nothing but the ambient heat around it. Thanks to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science today, this scenario is a step closer – a team from MIT has created an electrochemical cell which uses different temperatures to convert heat to electricity. The cell only needs low-grade waste heat – less than 100C – to charge…

Bacteria are everywhere and so efforts to make cleaner energy using them are ongoing. A report today shows how electrons hop across otherwise electrically insulated areas of bacterial proteins, and that the rate of electrical transfer is dependent on the orientation and proximity of these electrically conductive 'stepping stones'. It is hoped that this natural process can be used to create viable 'bio batteries' which could produce energy for portable technology such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops - powered by human or animal waste. So using your tablet on the toilet would then make…

Remember the big, somewhat bulky Mercedes Benz cars of the early 1990s?  State-of-the-art at that time, they left their competitors behind on Germany’s Autobahn. Mercedes is still here today, but the Autobahns are not what they were: Germans fear that two decades of neglect after reunification might have seriously damaged the country’s once superb infrastructure. Similarly, Germany once possessed one of the world’s most well engineered power systems. Yet in 2014 the country urgently needs new power grids – or “stromautobahnen” (electricity highways) –- to keep supply stable in the face…

Without question American CO2 emissions have plummeted, even after being driven into more coal usage due to political concerns about nuclear energy. Cleaner natural gas made the difference but environmental critics say the energy emissions burden simply shifted to developing nations - poor people can't have air conditioning.  Yet a new study in Nature Climate Change shows that environmentalists don't need to be criticizing the world's poor.  Improving household electricity access in India over the last 30 years contributed only marginally to the nation's total carbon emissions…

Natural gas finally fulfilled its environmental promise this century. Long touted by environmentalists for being much cleaner than coal, hydraulic fracturing - fracking - made it economically viable as well. The resulting boom also offset the lingering economic malaise in America for states, like Pennsylvania, that embraced it. Poor people could still afford energy but CO2 emissions went back to early 1990s levels, while coal, which had skyrocketed in use when nuclear energy was banned in America, was suddenly back at 1980s levels. But the rest of the world has not embraced it yet. Europe,…

A new device invented at The Ohio State University is the world's first hybrid solar generator and battery - it solves the problem of finicky solar power generation by having the storage built in. The key is a mesh solar panel, which allows air to enter the battery, and a special process for transferring electrons between the solar panel and the battery electrode. Inside the device, light and oxygen enable different parts of the chemical reactions that charge the battery. Yiying Wu, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State, believes that their device brings down costs by 25…

BedZED in Hackbridge, London. Credit: Tom Chance, CC BY-SA By Melissa C. Lott, University College London The primary goal of home energy efficiency initiatives might be to reduce total energy consumption, but these projects could have a negative impact on public health if we do not take care. Global climate change has been called the biggest global public health threat of the 21st century – and energy efficiency is a key tool in our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emission levels. Efficiency projects allow us to more effectively manage energy consumption growth without sacrificing services…

There is nothing inherently superior about natural gas from hydraulic fracturing - fracking - it has the same emissions as regular natural gas. But it is a lot lower than coal and does not have the political baggage of nuclear energy and that is why environmentalists lobbied for it over the last 40 years. And it has worked. America leads the world in fracking and energy emissions are back at early 1990s levels, just as climate scientists said we needed to be, while coal is back at early 1980s levels. But now environmentalists have tried to claim that natural gas from fracking will…

We live in a battery world - just visit any airport and see people huddled around a wall outlet to witness our battery culture. Yet batteries haven't made any real improvements in decades and that holds back electric cars and solar energy and laptop computers. An old technology may finally have come of age that can help us enter the world of 21st century portable electricity - betavoltaics, a battery technology that generates power from radiation, has bee created using a water-based solution, and it might be the longer-lasting and more efficient nuclear battery we need. Nuclear? Won't anti-…