Energy

Origami Solar Cells from MIT

- Adam Clare

Those ever smart people at MIT are using origami to model solar cells to make them more efficient. The greater the surface area the more sunlight can be absorbed and used, check out these crazy creations:

Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering at MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), was inspired by the way trees spread their leaves to capture sunlight and wondered how efficient a three-dimensional shape covered in solar cells could be, and what its optimal shape would look like. He worked with a second-year DMSE graduate student, Marco Bernardi, to create a computer program that mimics biological evolution, starting with basic shapes and letting them evolve, changing slightly each time and selecting those that perform best to start the next generation. He found that such systems could produce relatively constant power throughout the day without the need for tracking, and produce significantly more power overall for a given area — for example two and a half times as much as a flat array when the height equals the length and width. He is continuing to work on finding the best shapes and teaming up with Professors Vladimir Bulović and David Perreault (EECS) to build a prototype system. The team believes that solar panels based on this concept could be shipped flat and then unfolded at the site to their complex shapes.

From MIT.

BOB Powers Texas Town

- Adam Clare

It’s true everything is bigger in Texas from trucks to people to batteries. A relatively small town in Texas is using a battery the size of a house for energy storage and transmission. It’s hoped that batteries like the Texas one can be used to store energy from more sustainable sources during high production periods for use later (capture solar during the day and store it for night).

BOB, short for “Big-Old Battery,” began charging up this week. The giant sodium sulfur powerhouse, which is literally the size of a house, can store four megawatts of power for up to eight hours. Before BOB came online, a single, 60-year-old transmission line was the only thing connecting Presidio to the grid. The town frequently experienced power outages. BOB serves as a much-needed back-up plan, and it holds enough power to generate electricity for the whole town.

Read more and get some pictures from Inhabitat

C’est What? Vegetable Oil!

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

A restaurant in downtown Toronto has converted their deep fryer into a more efficient model and use the waste oil from the fryer to fuel a car. Neat!

Since installing the new deep fryer in late January, Broughton says his vegetable oil use has been cut in half and the amount of gas to run the fryer has been drastically reduced.

“The fryer is supposed to use 40 per cent less gas, but we’re still assessing exactly how much we’re saving. Just from the lower vegetable oil use, I’m saving $80 a week, about $4,000 a year. My waste used to be about 100, 110 litres a week. Now it’s about 50 litres a week. Angelo now takes pretty much all of our used oil for his car.”

Rigitano says the only problem he has had so far with the car is when he took it to be serviced.

“My mechanic started laughing. He said, ‘I’m getting hungry.’ ”

Fact: According to Natural Resources Canada, North Americans produce 5 to 6 kg per person of trap grease removed from commercial cooking operations each year and another 3 to 5 kg of cleaner used cooking oils. Converting this could produce almost 2.5 billion litres of clean diesel a year, worth about $2 billion.

Read the full article at The Star.

Thanks Kathryn!

Truly Green Beer This St. Patrick’s Day

- Dan Harrison 1 Comment

Many breweries have stepped up their efforts to limit the negative environmental effects of brewing beer. Steam Whistle Pilsner has earned praise from many an environmentalist for their progressive steps toward becoming a green brewery.

The Toronto-based brewery gets its electricity from Bullfrog Power, which uses wind and low-impact hydroelectric sources. Its cooling is by Enwave, which uses cold water from deep in Lake Ontario, and new brewing equipment that captures steam cuts their wastewater by a third. Its trucks run on biofuels and, thanks to improved route planning, they cut the amount of fuel they used last year by more than 7,000 litres – while increasing sales.

Of course, Steam Whistle isn’t the only brewery improving their environmental standards: Brasserie McAuslan in Montreal and Molson Coors have both reduced their water use in recent years.

You can read the whole article at The Globe and Mail.

Powering Tomorrow With Ancient Plant Technology

- Adam Clare 1 Comment

Photosynthesis is how plants convert energy from the ball of fire in the sky into useful plant-growing energy. The USA’s Department of Energy is actually looking into how photosynthesis can be used to power our homes and even turn homes into miniature power stations using the power of nature.

According to Nocera, his new system can work at ambient temperatures and pressures, without corrosion in a simple glass of water, even polluted water. “If you need pure water for energy storage, they’ll drink it,” Nocera said. “Use puddle water instead.” In fact, Nocera has been running his prototype on untreated water from the Charles River in Boston. And it’s cheap, not $12,000 per kilowatt like commercial electrolyzers that do the same thing. “That’s not going to help the energy situation for the U.S. or poor people of the world.”

Using the electricity generated by a photovoltaic array five meters by six meters, Nocera claims he can split enough water in less than four hours “to store enough energy for the average American home” for a day, a little more than 30 kilowatt-hours. “We need to stop making big energy systems one a time to service lots of people. We need to do it the old American way of making one small one and then manufacturing that system to give it to the masses.”

Read more at Scientific American

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