Costs on solar are coming down steeply, and now they're about to get even cheaper. A group of chemists at Ohio State University has invented a solar panel that stores energy without an external battery. The self-contained tuner/capacitor panels are already being licensed to industry.
Above, you can see a scanning electron microscope image of the mesh solar panel, whose molecular structure allows oxygen to enter the device and assist in a chemical reaction that powers its onboard battery.
A recent third-party analysis of the E-Cat, carried out by a coalition of European professors and engineers over the course of the past year, reports that the technology is in fact producing energy well in excess of any known chemical reaction. Andrea Rossi, thank you for being with me today.
Cold fusion reactor verified by third-party researchers, seems to have 1 million times the energy density of gasoline
Andrea Rossi’s E-Cat — the device that purports to use cold fusion to generate massive amounts of cheap, green energy – has been verified by third-party researchers, according to a new 54-page report. The researchers observed a small E-Cat over 32 days, where it produced net energy of 1.5 megawatt-hours, or “far more than can be obtained from any known chemical sources in the small reactor volume.” The researchers were also allowed to analyze the fuel before and after the 32-day run, noting that the isotopes in the spent fuel could only have been obtained by “nuclear reactions” — a conclusion that boggles the researchers: “… It is of course very hard to comprehend how these fusion processes can take place in the fuel compound at low energies.”
This new report [PDF] on the E-Cat was carried out by six (reputable) researchers from Italy and Sweden. While the new E-Cat looks very different from previous iterations, the researchers say that it uses the same “hydrogen-loaded nickel” and additives (most notably lithium) as a fuel. The device’s inventor, Andrea Rossi, claims that the E-Cat uses cold fusion — low-energy nuclear reactions, LENR — to fuse nickel and hydrogen atoms into copper, releasing oodles of energy.
We have reached the tipping point in the transition out of carbon, and the momentum of this historic change is just beginning to gather speed. This is profoundly good news. Click through to see the charts and tables.
Kepler Chevreux, a French investment bank, has produced a fascinating analysis that has dramatic implications for the global oil industry. The investment bank estimates that $100 billion invested in either wind energy or solar energy – and deployed as energy for light and commercial vehicles – will produce significantly more energy than that same $100 billion invested in oil.
The implications, needless to say, are dramatic. It would signal the end of Big Oil, and the demise of an industry that has dominated the global economy and geo-politics, for the last few decades. And the need for it to reshape its business model around renewables, as we discuss here.
This is lovely good news about the transition out of our carbon energy addiction. The report presents what I think is an accurate assessment of the Non-carbon Energy Trend.
In spite of constant government coddling, endless subsidies, and the huge sums available to buy influence, along with ads to protect its dominance, carbon energy is quickly becoming uncompetitive. One can only wonder where we would be now if the attempt Jimmy Carter made to shift away from carbon had not been blocked by Ronald Reagan, whom I believe history will identify with the beginning of the decline of America. In any case, in spite of everything non-carbon will prevail because it is cheaper, and easier, and doesn't cause climate change. There will also be a little discussed effect: an increase in wellness as the diseases caused by carbon decline.
The real monster in the closet is nuclear waste. Nothing proposed actually deals with the problem, and solar and wind will help only marginally. We haven't a clue what to do with waste, and the timebomb is ticking. Tanks leak. Pools degrade. An how does one really calculate the costs? How does one project expenses for something that is deadly for 10s of thousands of years? Finding a solution to nuclear waste within the next 15 years is going to become an urgent issue.
Happily, by then we will have dealt with a large percentage of carbon usage, as the report describes.
How DERs prepare the power sector to evolve into a sharing economy platform
As Thomas Friedman reported in the New York Times, the shared economy is booming, with companies like Uber and Airbnb continuing to disrupt the incumbent taxi service and hotel sectors. The Ubers and Airbnbs of the world tap the huge value of underutilized assets and create millions of dollars of value for users in the process. Shared economy companies unbundle existing assets and enable value exchange out of those assets, with close to zero marginal capital cost since the users themselves own the actual physical assets, whether a car or a home. Could the electricity grid be next to go the way of a sharing economy?
For more than a century, the electric grid has relied almost exclusively on centralized infrastructure, such as large power plants and long-distance transmissions lines. But distributed energy resources (DERs)—and the customers buying, installing, and using them—are changing the economic landscape for the power sector. Energy efficiency, demand response, distributed generation such as rooftop solar, distributed storage such as batteries, smart thermostats, and more are poised to become the front lines of a sharing economy revolution for the grid. Shared economy solutions will help to increase asset utilization rates and improve consumer and overall system economics, just as they have for other sectors.
Here is some excellent news about the Gulf oil spill. A major court decision has seriously placed the blame and responsibility where it belongs. And the court also made it clear what it thinks about BP, Transocean, and Halliburton ethics and behavior.
BP Plc acted with gross negligence in setting off the biggest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, a federal judge ruled, handing down a long-awaited decision that may force the energy company to pay billions of dollars more for the 2010 Gulf of Mexico disaster.
