Energy

Solar panel proponents rave about their solar energy. They tout how low their electricity bills are, that the utility is forced to buy energy from them at the same price they sell it, and that they are helping the planet. The problem is that solar panels are subsidized by poor people who can't afford the installations in order to get a rebate. And those who rent, or who live in apartments. Multi-million dollar Malibu solar installations have their costs passed through to poor families, hundreds of millions of dollars each year in California alone, because no company with employees and…

Australian academics have a filed patent (PCT/AU 2019/051239) on the manufacturing process for a lithium-sulphur battery capable of powering a smartphone for five continuous days. Even better for them, they got $2.5 million in government funding and industry partners to test it. They say their ultra-high capacity Li-S battery has four times better performance and less environmental impact than current lithium-ion products. Improvements are certainly needed. Li-ion batteries were developed decades ago and while technology has zoomed into the future in many areas, in battery storage it has…

When Al Gore was Vice-President in 1994, he forced the U.S. EPA to mandate ethanol in gasoline by breaking the Senate tie in favor of environmentalists who had been pushing ethanol as 'sustainable biofuel' for decades. His vote forced gasoline manufacturers to include it despite science concerns it would drive up food prices and increase pollution. While biofuels were and are a viable field of study, the concern was that dumping money into corporate subsidies was going to hold progress back.(1) In the real world, the environmentalists were just pushing, as I have written previously, their '…

How do solar panels work? – Nathan, age 5, Melbourne, Australia. The Sun produces a lot of energy called solar energy. Australia gets 20,000 times more energy from the Sun each day than we do from oil, gas and coal. This solar energy will continue for as long as the Sun lives, which is another 5 billion years. Solar panels are made of solar cells, which is the part that turns the solar energy in sunlight into electricity. Solar cells make electricity directly from sunlight. It is the most trusted energy technology ever made, which is why it is used on satellites in space and in remote…

A new study has found that the switch from coal to natural gas hasn't just reduced greenhouse gas emissions from energy, it has reduced water usage. That is even factoring in water used during hydraulic fracturing - fracking - and shale gas generation. “For every megawatt of electricity produced using natural gas instead of coal, the amount of water withdrawn from local rivers and groundwater is reduced by 10,500 gallons, the equivalent of a 100-day water supply for a typical American household,” said Andrew Kondash, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at Duke, who led the study. Water…

The prototype of a catalytic reactor, an electrolyzer, uses carbon dioxide as its feedstock and produces high concentrations of formic acid, pure liquid fuel.  In tests, the new electrocatalyst reached an energy conversion efficiency of about 42%. That means nearly half of the electrical energy can be stored in formic acid as liquid fuel. Formic acid produced by traditional carbon dioxide devices needs costly and energy-intensive purification steps. "Formic acid is an energy carrier," says Rice University biomolecular engineer Haotian Wang, Ph.D. "It's a fuel-cell fuel that can generate…

High-volume hydraulic fracturing, colloquially called fracking, injects water, sand and chemicals under high pressure into petroleum-bearing rock formations to recover previously inaccessible oil and natural gas. While it was experimented with since the 1940s, it only became viable in the 1990s and early 2000s and it led to the current shale gas boom that started about 15 years ago.  While environmentalists have tried to manufacture fundraising opportunities about groundwater due to fracking, they don't realize that conventional methods of oil and natural gas production in use since the…

The Powering Past Coal Alliance(1) wants to phase out coal power but are hampered by limited membership who don't have to face economic realities. Finland has different energy sources available than China has. And China is not going to be bullied by Finland, Denmark, or anyone else. In 2014, for example, the US was pleased that China agreed to talk about CO2 - in 2030. Until then, the world's largest polluter declared they were going to do whatever they wanted but America cheered it as a victory because China had never even agreed on a future date to talk prior to that. Yet we were being…

Vitamin D helps keep bones strong and some diseases at bay. During the summer months, people are able to get about 90 percent of their daily vitamin D requirements through exposure to sunlight, but that is not the case during a northeast winter.  The remainder is often obtained through food. Milk, for example, if fortified with vitamin D because children drink it and that keeps them healthy. Chicken eggs also provide vitamin D and since the nutrition fad has swung away from linking eggs to heart attacks it may be possible to give those affordable protein sources a vitamin boost. …

Can all nuclear energy be weaponized? It could, according to US politicians in the 1990s, when President Bill Clinton and Senator John Kerry mortally wounded nuclear energy development, to the cheers of their constituents. It was all based on claims by environmentalists that nuclear energy invariably led to nuclear weapons. This war on science had started long before and it continued well into the 2000s, when two successive anti-nuclear activists, neither with degrees in energy, were put in charge of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The events in between are important context. During the…