Trending - Solar Power and Net Metering

Digital Trends - By Bill Roberson  —   August 2, 2013

Under net metering, utility companies have to in some fashion pay the owners of private solar power installations (or other generators of renewable power, like wind farms they don’t own) for power generated beyond the needs of the solar/wind power facility owner, like that guy down the street that just had the big solar array put on his roof.

An interesting article published recently in the New York Times has me wondering if there isn’t a vast technological and industrial shift taking place in the United States – and maybe beyond – and how tech icon Elon Musk may be at the center of it, unintentionally or otherwise.

In a nutshell, the Times story essentially said that electrical utilities are waking up to the fact that residential solar installations are stealing their business. While they currently generate less than 1 percent of the power in the United States, their proliferation may pose a threat to the very existence of power-generating utilities in the long term.


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Turning over a new (artificial) leaf

We're closer than ever to replicating how plants turn sunlight into energy. It's a big deal.

ScienceNOW - September 29, 2011 by Robert F. Service

Two independent research teams report today in Science that they've taken key strides toward harnessing the energy in sunlight to synthesize chemical fuels. If the new work can be improved, scientists could utilize Earth's most abundant source of renewable energy to power everything from industrial plants to cars and trucks without generating additional greenhouse gases.

Today, humans consume an average of 15 trillion watts of power, 85% of which comes from burning fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas. That massive fossil fuel consumption produces some nasty side effects, including climate change, acidified oceans, and oil spills. These problems are likely to grow far worse in coming years, as worldwide energy use is expected to at least double by 2050.

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An ore you've never heard of could be oil's ultimate replacement

Everyone's heard of wind farms, solar panels, nuclear fusion and fuel cells. One of all of these have been in the news for years, promising to be the source of our future energy. None of them have yet proven to be a feasible replacement for oil. Conspiracy theorists, settle down. There are good reasons why none of these have done the job.

But here's one you probably have never heard of. In fact, it sort of sounds like a substance that might power the Enterprise (besides dilithium crystals). But it's a very serious contender that you'll likely hear a lot more about in the near future: Thorium.

Telegraph.co.uk has a provocative article from August 29:

"If Barack Obama were to marshal America’s vast scientific and strategic resources behind a new Manhattan Project, he might reasonably hope to reinvent the global energy landscape and sketch an end to our dependence on fossil fuels within three to five years.

"We could then stop arguing about wind mills, deepwater drilling, IPCC hockey sticks, or strategic reliance on the Kremlin. History will move on fast.

"Muddling on with the status quo is not a grown-up policy. The International Energy Agency says the world must invest $26 trillion (£16.7 trillion) over the next 20 years to avert an energy shock. The scramble for scarce fuel is already leading to friction between China, India, and the West."

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Be your own power company

PhysOrg.com - 12.16.09

A rooftop solar panel converts sunlight to electricity. In a new study, an expert describes progress toward an efficient and inexpensive method for storing and distributing solar energy in the home. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

New scientific discoveries are moving society toward the era of "personalized solar energy," in which the focus of electricity production shifts from huge central generating stations to individuals in their own homes and communities. That's the topic of a report by an international expert on solar energy published in the ACS' Inorganic Chemistry. It describes a long-awaited, inexpensive method for solar energy storage that could help power homes and plug-in cars in the future while helping keep the environment clean.

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Can you hear it? - The World's Biggest Laser Powers Up

Technology Review - March 26, 2009, by Kevin Bullis

Now complete, the National Ignition Facility could soon create controlled fusion using lasers.

The most energetic laser system in the world, designed to produce nuclear fusion--the same reaction that powers the sun--is up and running. Within two to three years, scientists expect to be creating fusion reactions that release more energy than it takes to produce them. If they're successful, it will be the first time this has been done in a controlled way--in a lab rather than a nuclear bomb, that is--and could eventually lead to fusion power plants.

The National Ignition Facility (NIF), at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), comprises 192 lasers that fire simultaneously at precisely the same point in space: a sphere of fuel two millimeters in diameter. They are designed to deliver 1.8 megajoules of energy in a few billionths of a second. That's enough to compress the fuel to a speck 50 micrometers across and heat it up to three million degrees Celsius. The lasers, which were fired together for the first time last month, have so far produced pulses of 1.1 megajoules.

"Depending on how you count it, it's between 60 and 100 times more energetic than any laser system that's ever been built," says Edward Moses, the principle associate director for NIF and Photon Science at LLNL. Eventually, the fusion reactions produced by each pulse are expected to generate at least 10 times the energy delivered by the lasers, a significant net gain that could be useful for generating power.

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Now you see it - 'Invisibility cloak' directs light away from eye

MSNBC - March 6, 2009, by Eric Bland

This illustration shows the basic design of a new 3D metamaterial, which is lined with gold nanocups that re-direct the flow of light hitting an object. When the light is gathered and aimed away from the viewer's eye, the object appears invisible. Naomi Halas, Rice University

Nanoantenna could eliminate one of the biggest costs for solar panels

Call it what you will — the world's first 3D nanoantenna or an invisibility cloak — but a new metamaterial created by Rice University scientists could hide objects from human sight.

Call it what you will — the world's first 3D nanoantenna or an invisibility cloak — but asight.

By creating perfectly aligned dimples in a material, the scientists channeled specific wavelengths of light from many directions into one uniform direction.

"This falls into the broad class of metamaterials that have useful and unusual properties, like cloaking," said Naomi Halas, Rice University scientist and co-author of a paper describing the material in Nano Letters. "In a broader picture, you could do some very interesting things with this metamaterial."

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This is not a Terminator - TR10: Traveling-Wave Reactor

Technology Review - March/April 2009, by Matt Wald

A new reactor design could make nuclear power safer and cheaper, says John Gilleland.

Wave of the future: Unlike today’s reactors, a traveling-wave reactor requires very little enriched uranium, reducing the risk of weapons proliferation. (Click here for a larger diagram, also on page 3). The reactor uses depleted-uranium fuel packed inside hundreds of hexagonal pillars (shown in black and green). In a “wave” that moves through the core at only a centimeter per year, this fuel is transformed (or bred) into plutonium, which then undergoes fission. The reaction requires a small amount of enriched uranium (not shown) to get started and could run for decades without refueling. The reactor uses liquid sodium as a coolant; core temperatures are extremely hot--about 550 ºC, versus the 330 ºC typical of conventional reactors. Credit: Bryan Christie Design

Enriching the uranium for reactor fuel and opening the reactor periodically to refuel it are among the most cumbersome and expensive steps in running a nuclear plant. And after spent fuel is removed from the reactor, reprocessing it to recover usable materials has the same drawbacks, plus two more: the risks of nuclear-weapons proliferation and environmental pollution.

These problems are mostly accepted as a given, but not by a group of researcher­s at Intellectual Ventures, an invention and investment company in Bellevue, WA. The scientists there have come up with a preliminary design for a reactor that requires only a small amount of enriched fuel--that is, the kind whose atoms can easily be split in a chain reaction. It's called a traveling­-wave reactor. And while government researchers intermittently bring out new reactor designs, the traveling-wave reactor is noteworthy for having come from something that barely exists in the nuclear industry: a privately funded research company.

As it runs, the core in a traveling-­wave reactor gradually converts nonfissile material into the fuel it needs. Nuclear reactors based on such designs "theoretically could run for a couple of hundred years" without refueling, says John G­illeland, manager of nuclear programs at Intellectual Ventures.

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Power to the soldiers - Methane fuel cells the latest in portable power

cnet news - February 22, 2009, by Mark Rutherford
Photo credit: SFC

A German company has introduced a ""wearable" fuel cell that uses direct methanol fuel cell technology, doing away with the weighty mechanical components usually associated with generation of electrical power.

Based on an award-winning unipolar stack technology design, the Jenny 600S delivers 25 watts of power for up to 20 hours at a time, according to the company Smart Fuel Cell (SFC). SFC fuel cells took top honors in the U.S. Department of Defense's Wearable Power Competition last October against stiff competition from a host of big-name competitors. But it's not the only game: companies like UtraCell and Jadoo Power also offer a range of portable fuel cell options to military customers.

The Jenny uses replaceable liquid methanol fuel cartridges and can be worn by soldiers in a vest, where it instantly kicks in from standby mode to automatically recharge batteries when needed. It works silently in both vertical and horizontal positions, according to SFC. It can also be left in a hands-off mode to automatically power up equipment in the field. The company estimates that the unit could reduce the weight of the batteries that soldiers must carry on certain missions by up to 70 percent.

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The future of energy - New Company Looks to Produce Space Based Solar Power Within a Decade

Universe Today - February 18, 2009, by Nancy Atkinson
Photo credit: Mafic Studios

Is space-based solar power (SBSP) a technology whose time has come? The concept and even some of the hardware for harnessing energy from the sun with orbiting solar arrays has been around for some time. But the biggest challenge for making the concept a reality, says entrepreneur Peter Sage of Space Energy, Inc., is that SBSP has never been commercially viable. But that could be changing. Space Energy, Inc. has assembled an impressive team of scientists, engineers and business people, putting together what Sage calls "a rock-solid commercial platform" for their company. And given the current looming issues of growing energy needs and climate change, Space Energy, Inc. could be in the right place at the right time.

"Although it’s a very grandiose vision, it makes total sense," Sage told Universe Today. "This is an inevitable technology; it's going to happen. If we can put solar panels in space where the sun shines 24 hours a day, if we have a safe way of transmitting the energy to Earth and broadcasting it anywhere, that is a serious game changer." If everything falls into place for this company, they could be producing commercially available SBSP within a decade.

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