Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have discovered and demonstrated a new method for overcoming two major hurdles facing solar energy. By developing a new antireflective coating that boosts the amount of sunlight captured by solar panels and allows those panels to absorb the entire solar spectrum from nearly any angle, the research team has moved academia and industry closer to realizing high-efficiency, cost-effective solar power.

“To get maximum efficiency when converting solar power into electricity, you want a solar panel that can absorb nearly every single photon of light, regardless of the sun’s position in the sky,” said Shawn-Yu Lin, professor of physics at Rensselaer and a member of the university’s Future Chips Constellation, who led the research project.  “Our new antireflective coating makes this possible.”

An untreated silicon solar cell only absorbs 67.4 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that nearly one-third of that sunlight is reflected away and thus unharvestable. From an economic and efficiency perspective, this unharvested light is wasted potential and a major barrier hampering the proliferation and widespread adoption of solar power. 

After a silicon surface was treated with Lin’s new nanoengineered reflective coating, however, the material absorbed 96.21 percent of sunlight shone upon it — meaning that only 3.79 percent of the sunlight was reflected and unharvested. This huge gain in absorption was consistent across the entire spectrum of sunlight, from UV to visible light and infrared, and moves solar power a significant step forward toward economic viability. 

Lin’s new coating also successfully tackles the tricky challenge of angles. 

Read more . . .

Image via Wikipedia

THE federal government is giving General Motors, Ford and Chrysler $25 billion in low-interest loans, and the companies are asking for up to $25 billion more. These same companies have spent millions of dollars lobbying against federal fuel-economy standards and are suing to overturn the emissions standards imposed by California and other states. In exchange for the loans, Congress should first insist that the automakers stop fighting these standards. But it should also make sure that better outcomes will result from these billions than just fuel-efficient cars.

The Obama administration should ask the companies, as a condition of financial assistance, to begin shifting from being just automakers to becoming innovative “transportmakers.” As Barack Obama’s new chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, recently said: “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste. It’s an opportunity to do important things you would otherwise avoid.”

As transportmakers, the companies could produce vehicles for high-speed train and bus systems that would improve our travel options, reduce global warming, conserve energy, minimize accidents and generally improve the way we live.

This better way forward has been kicking around Washington for more than 35 years. In a prescient 1972 article in The Atlantic, Stewart Udall, an interior secretary under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, warned of America’s excessive dependence on cars and called for this approach.

At a time when almost no politicians and industry leaders were paying attention to this problem, Mr. Udall made a bleak but accurate prediction. He wrote that “the oil needs of the other industrialized countries are growing faster than ours” and that this “surge of demand will soon begin to send shock waves through the American economy and transportation system.”

Read more . . .

Image via Wikipedia

There is a type of rock with a voracious appetite for carbon dioxide

ONE way of helping to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is to pump the gas into underground caverns or old oil fields. But there is also a rock that is happy to gobble it up, and according to the latest research its appetite for the greenhouse gas is not only massive but could also be increased by a little human intervention.

The rock is peridotite, which is one of the main rocks in the upper mantle, an area that provides a girth below the Earth’s crust. The rock occurs some 20km or more down, although in areas where plate tectonics have forced up some of the mantle, peridotite reaches the surface. This happens in part of the Omani desert which Peter Kelemen and Juerg Matter, both from Columbia University, New York, have studied for years.

Geologists have long known that when peridotite is exposed to the air it can react quickly with carbon dioxide to form carbonates like limestone or marble. Some people have looked at the idea of grinding up peridotite and using it to soak up emissions from power stations, but the process turns out to be expensive, partly because of the costs of transporting all the rock. The transportation would also create emissions. InProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Messrs Kelemen and Matter suggest an alternative: pumping the gas from places where it is produced and into underground strata of peridotite.

The team has shown that the Omani peridotite absorbs tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, far more than anyone had thought. By drilling and fracturing the rock they believe they can start a process to increase the absorption rate by 100,000 times or more. They estimate this would allow the Omani outcrop, which extends down some 5km, alone to absorb some 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which is a substantial part of the annual 30 billion or so tonnes of the gas that humans send into the atmosphere, mostly by burning fossil fuels.

Read more . . .

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

EARLIER this year, with the oil price at record heights, T. Boone Pickens, a celebrated Texas oilman, seemed to confirm the unstoppable growth of the clean-technology industry when he announced plans not only to build the world’s biggest wind farm, but also to spend $58m of his personal fortune promoting the cause of wind power. On October 30th, with oil prices having fallen by more than half, he told a television reporter that the boom he had foreseen in wind would be “put off”, due to the unexpected fall in the price of fossil fuels and the sudden difficulty of borrowing money.

Mr Pickens is not the only clean-tech investor caught out by the credit crunch. New Energy Finance, a research firm, calculates that the amount of project finance devoted to clean-energy projects around the world fell by almost 25% in the third quarter, to $18 billion. The firm expects it to fall further before the end of the year. It also expects firms to raise less money on stockmarkets, due to the financial turmoil. NEX, an index that tracks clean-tech stocks globally, has tumbled even faster than the market as a whole.

Big American utilities are slashing their investments in alternative energy. Florida Power & Light has cut its planned investment in wind power next year by 400 megawatts. Duke Energy of North Carolina has lopped $50m off its budget for solar power. And on October 31st VeraSun Energy, one of America’s biggest ethanol producers, caught out by gyrations in the prices of corn and petrol (gasoline), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. In the European Union the price of carbon permits has fallen from a high of almost €30 in July to around €20, making clean-tech investments less attractive.

But Michael Liebreich, the boss of New Energy Finance, expects total investments in clean energy to fall only slightly in 2008, thanks to a strong performance in the first part of the year. Venture-capital and private-equity investments actually rose slightly in the third quarter. The price of oil aside, he says, the issues that stoked interest in clean tech, including global warming and energy security, are as prominent as ever.

Read more . . .

Image via Wikipedia

Scientists in Italy are reporting that a new process could eliminate key obstacles to expanded use of coal gasification to transform that abundant domestic energy resource into synthetic liquid fuels for cars and trucks. 

In the study, Maria Sudiro and colleagues note that coal is the only conventional energy source with the potential for meeting global energy demands in the near future. World coal reserves, they note, are 25 percent greater than crude oil and the United States alone has enough coal to supply its own energy needs for centuries. However, existing processes for converting coal into much-needed liquid fuels are uneconomical and release too much carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, and other air pollutants.

Read more . . .

Image via Wikipedia

An alternative fusion project has been kicked off in Europe that would seek abundant clean energy using a colossal laser the size of a football stadium.

The laser would tap the energy by squeezing together atoms of hydrogen - a process very similar to the one that powers the Sun.

Europe is already engaged in the Iter fusion venture that aims for the same outcome but via magnetic compression.

The Hiper programme is seen as a necessary complementary route.

“We have two approaches because of the prize that is out there; fusion energy is the holy grail of energy sources,” said Hiper project leader Professor Mike Dunne.

“It offers energy security because the fuel comes from seawater; it offers abundant supply, it’s clean and it’s safe. So the prize is huge and we believe we need as many approaches as possible to make that prize a reality,” he told BBC News.

‘Spark plug’

The technical challenge of making fusion happen, however, is huge; and a viable solution has eluded scientists for 50 years.

The Hiper (High Power Laser Energy Research) study has been instigated by the European Commission and involves the participation of 26 institutions from 10 countries. Keys players are the UK, the Czech Republic and France.

Read more . . .

Image via Wikipedia

PARIS — Standing in the middle of his company’s display stand here at the Paris Motor Show, Gildo Pastor, chief executive of Venturi Automobiles, ran his hands through his thick black hair and let out a sigh.

His day had been crazy, he explained. Traffic had been crazy. Preparations for the show were crazy. In fact, this interview was a little crazy. The auto show’s two official media days began Thursday but Mr. Pastor had agreed to give me an unofficial tour of Venturi’s new vehicles the night before the show opened.

Electric cars are big news at this year’s Paris show, but few manufacturers seem able (or willing) to top Venturi’s wild creations. The company was purchased by Mr. Pastor in 2001. Having already made his fortune in real estate, he decided to completely break with Venturi’s two decades of experience in building luxurious sports cars and take a calculated risk. The first job was to relocate the business to Monaco, making Venturi the only Monegasque car company.

Most important, Mr. Pastor abandoned Venturi’s lineup of midengine sports cars in favor of focusing all efforts on developing new electric vehicles. Ironically, the first result was a fast and glamorous electric sports car, the Fetish.

Mr. Pastor pointed to the latest example, being shown in Paris. The motor now produces 50 more horsepower — for a total of 300 horsepower — and weighs only half as much as the old motor. Unfortunately, the price tag hasn’t received a similar halving. A Fetish costs more than $400,000.

For those on a tighter budget (and who don’t have a yacht moored in Monaco), Venturi also showed a new electric city car, the Eclectic. Its cartoonlike lines are probably a love-it-or-hate-it proposition; personally, I love it. There is seating for three, with the driver in the center and a passenger to either side. Solar panels are built into the roof, and there is an optional wind-turbine that can be plugged into the car to aid recharging. A regular plug and cord comes standard.

Read more . . .

(Credit: Image courtesy of Temple University)

With the high cost of gasoline and diesel fuel impacting costs for automobiles, trucks, buses and the overall economy, a Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent.

According to Rongjia Tao, Chair of Temple’s Physics Department, the small device consists of an electrically charged tube that can be attached to the fuel line of a car’s engine near the fuel injector. With the use of a power supply from the vehicle’s battery, the device creates an electric field that thins fuel, or reduces its viscosity, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. That leads to more efficient and cleaner combustion than a standard fuel injector, he says.

Six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile showed that the device increased highway fuel from 32 miles per gallon to 38 mpg, a 20 percent boost, and a 12-15 percent gain in city driving.

The results of the laboratory and road tests verifying that this simple device can boost gas mileage.

“We expect the device will have wide applications on all types of internal combustion engines, present ones and future ones,” Tao wrote in the study published in Energy & Fuels.

Further improvements in the device could lead to even better mileage, he suggests, and cited engines powered by gasoline, biodiesel, and kerosene as having potential use of the device.

Read more . . .

Image via Wikipedia

The rising interest in vehicles powered by electricity — either part-time, as in hybrids like the Toyota Prius, or in battery-only cars like the Tesla Roadster — has increased the pressure to develop more efficient devices to store the power. Progress has been steady, but huge breakthroughs have not emerged from the research labs.

The baby-step pace is prompting automakers to move cautiously with their production plans. Toyota, which had been expected to use lithium-ion batteries in the next-generation Prius, announced that the car, which goes on sale next spring, will stick with proven nickel-metal hydride chemistry.

Toyota’s engineers were not ready to adopt the compact high-energy, lithium-ion batteries in a mass-production vehicle, opting to run them in test fleets first. Though the company is optimistic about the potential of lithium batteries, challenges in their durability and operating temperature ranges remain.

While General Motors, Mitsubishi and Nissan have announced plans to employ such batteries in the future, and each has a battery manufacturer as a partner, Honda has set off in a different direction. Last March, Honda’s president, Takeo Fukui, told Automotive News that “lithium-ion batteries are still not usable from our perspective.”

Read more . . .

Bacteria found in compost heaps able to convert waste plant fibre into ethanol could eventually provide up 10% of the UK’s transport fuel needs, scientists heard September 9, 2008 at the Society for General Microbiology’s Autumn meeting being held at Trinity College, Dublin.

Researchers from Guildford, UK, have successfully developed a new strain of bacteria that can break down straw and agricultural plant waste, domestic hedge clippings, garden trimmings and cardboard, wood chippings and other municipal rubbish to convert them all into useful renewable fuels for the transport industry.

“The bioethanol produced in our process can be blended with existing gasoline to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions, help tackle global warming, reduce dependence upon foreign oil and help meet national and international targets for renewable energy,” said Paul Milner, Fermentation Development Manager of TMO Renewables Ltd, based in Surrey Research Park, Guildford.

The new strain of bacteria allows ethanol to be produced much more efficiently and cheaply than in traditional yeast-based fermentation, which is based on the beer-brewing process and forms the basis for most current commercial bioethanol production.

Read more . . .