Energy

"Nobody understands the cloud," shouts a character in a recent comedy about a couple trying to remove a private video from the Internet.  In reality, the cloud is completely understandable, and it's one of few areas in climate where the emissions costs are also. And because it is quantifiable it can benefit from combinatorial optimization. the famous rucksack problem where a traveler has to try and fit everything in without leaving anything behind. Cloud computing involves using remote servers for data storage and processing. It can provide users with more storage space and computing…

A strange thing happened during climate change policy debates: Advances in hydraulic fracturing - fracking - put trillions of dollars' worth of previously unreachable oil and natural gas within humanity's grasp, and using it led to reductions in CO2 in the United States. America disavowed nuclear energy due to anti-science beliefs and lobbying by environmental groups and adopted dirty coal in its place. Ironically, environmental groups caused global warming by getting Democrats to ban nuclear energy and America led the world in emissions through most of the 1990s. In the last decade, though,…

There are numerous methods for maintaining electricity supply when renewables are in the grid. Credit: Johan Douma/Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA By Anthony Vassallo, University of Sydney The recent review of the Australian Renewable Energy Target has once again raised the issue of the “unreliability” of some renewable power sources such as wind and solar power. Their variability, which arises from the weather or daily and seasonal cycles, leads some to conclude that they will only ever be able to supply a minority fraction of Australia’s electricity. But for the most part we have the technology…

Image credit:  FeeBeeDee via flickr http://bit.ly/1tyHJdD. Rights information: http://bit.ly/cGotEb. By: Laurel Hamers, Inside Science (Inside Science) -- Today, ethanol is routinely made from the kernels of corn. Eventually, though, it may be made from the husks. Starches like corn provide quick energy because they readily break down into simple sugars such as glucose. This structure also makes them easy to convert into bioethanol, an alternative to fossil fuels. But there are problems with relying on the same plants to fuel both our bodies and our cars: we only have so much land and…

By Karin Heineman, Inside Science  (Inside Science TV) – From powering homes, to cars to phones, people across the world use vast amounts of energy. And that consumption is only growing. As energy needs increase, scientists are constantly on the hunt for new ways to meet the demand. A group of mechanical engineers may have found a new source: the ocean. “Wave energy has the potential in the U.S. to power 50 million homes," said Marcus Lehmann, a mechanical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. So, Lehmann and his team at UC Berkeley have created a device that can capture…

Solar cells are the future but for now they are resource-intensive, expensive and not very efficient - but the researchers in a new study can help with those first two. To make a solar cell, machines etch nanoscale spikes into a silicon wafer in order to maximize its surface area and the amount of sunlight that can reach it. Metal particles have been used as a catalyst in this process because etching is accelerated near metal particles. At first, gold was the metal of choice but that was never going to work in mass production so scientists found a way to switch to silver particles -…

Conventional photovoltaic technology uses large, heavy, opaque, dark silicon panels while  organic photovoltaic technology enables more translucent and more flexible solar panels in a range of colors to be manufactured. But even silicon solar panels are not viable yet so for something to replace those, it will have to have greater efficiency, longer duration and low production cost - or at least some combination of those. Legacy solar panels have not improved in decades and policy makers are jaded by claims of how much money this will save. The IK4-Ikerlan research center is working…

Researchers have engineered the bacteria E. coli to generate renewable propane, which would open a path to a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels. Propane is an appealing source of cleaner fuel because it has an existing global market. It is already produced as a by-product during natural gas processing and petroleum refining, but both are finite resources. In its current form it makes up the bulk of LPG (liquid petroleum gas), which is used in many applications, from central heating to camping stoves and conventional motor vehicles. In a new study, the team of scientists from Imperial…

A four-year project on coffee wastewater treatment, The Energy from Coffee Wastewater project by UTZ Certified, has found that is possible to generate energy and protect water resources by treating discharges from coffee mills - maybe it will even tackle climate change. The project started in 2010 with the goal of addressing what to do with the wastewater produced in the coffee industry. Tailor-made coffee wastewater treatment systems and solid-waste treatment mechanisms were installed in eight coffee farms in Nicaragua, ten in Honduras and one in Guatemala. The positive impact of the…

Nitrite-oxidizing bacteria are key players in the natural nitrogen cycle on Earth and in biological wastewater treatment plants but scientists have learned something new about how they are powered.  For decades, these specialist bacteria were thought to depend on nitrite as their source of energy researchers have now shown that nitrite-oxidizing bacteria can use hydrogen as an alternative source of energy. The oxidation of hydrogen with oxygen enables their growth independent of nitrite and a lifestyle outside the nitrogen cycle.  Nitrogen, an essential chemical element for life, is…