Most recent 40 articles: Newatlas
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90-GWh thermal energy storage facility could heat a city for a year - Newatlas  (Apr 9) |
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Apr 9 · An energy supplier in Finland has announced the upcoming construction of an underground seasonal thermal energy storage facility about the size of two Madison Square Gardens that could meet the heating demands of a medium-sized city for up to a year. Though renewable energy systems play an important part in the supply matrix, the wind doesn't always blow and long days of sunshine are not guaranteed. We've seen a number of energy storage solutions being proposed to deal with the intermittent nature of such setups over the years, including a hibernating battery, rechargeable aluminum, and an industrial-scale sand battery. "The world is undergoing a huge energy transition," ... Read more ... |
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Cheap sodium-sulfur battery boasts 4x the capacity of lithium-ion - Newatlas  (Dec 08, 2022) |
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Dec 08, 2022 · An international team of scientists eyeing next-generation energy storage solutions have demonstrated an eco-friendly and low-cost battery with some exciting potential. The group’s novel sodium-sulfur battery design offers a fourfold increase on energy capacity compared to a typical lithium-ion battery, and shapes as a promising technology for future grid-scale energy storage. The team’s creation falls into a category of batteries known as molten-salt batteries, which have been around in various forms for around 50 years. As the emphasis on renewable energy continues to grow, scientists are bullish on the potential of molten-salt batteries to store it, owing to their relative ... Read more ... |
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Permafrost thaw seems to be draining Arctic lakes at an accelerated rate - Newatlas  (Sep 01, 2022) |
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Sep 01, 2022 · Scientists studying the lake systems of the Arctic lowlands have made a surprising discovery, tapping into satellite data to find that these bodies of water are vanishing much faster than predicted. They suspect the reason for this is new drainage channels formed through thawing permafrost, which are sucking the lakes dry right across the region. The changes taking place in the Arctic are widespread and profound, and new findings continue to shape our understanding of what is still to come. A study published last month found that the region is warming almost four times the global average, much faster than we thought. Another study this week found that melting of the Greenland ... Read more ... |
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Contra-rotating floating turbines promise unprecedented scale and power - Newatlas  (Aug 30, 2022) |
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Aug 30, 2022 · Norway's World Wide Wind has a radically different take on offshore wind power. These floating, vertical-axis wind turbines (VAWTs) feature two sets of blades, tuned to contra-rotate – and they promise more than double the output of today's biggest turbines. Taking wind farms way offshore can certainly help make them less obtrusive, and open up a lot more opportunities – but as the ocean gets deeper, conventional horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWTs) begin making less and less sense. HAWTs need to hold a lot of heavy components – drivetrains, gearboxes, generators and their colossal blades – right up the top of a long pole, so mounting them on floating platforms that don't ... Read more ... |
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First ammonia-powered jet flight in 2023: A roadmap to clean aviation - Newatlas  (May 08, 2022) |
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May 08, 2022 · The entire airline industry needs to wean itself off jet fuel over the next few decades – but it's still buying enormously expensive jet aircraft that are expected to keep bringing home the bacon for more than 20 years. Australian company Aviation H2 hopes to clean up commercial flight by converting existing aircraft to burn green ammonia instead of standard Jet-A jet fuel. To do so, it's planning to have a nine-seat passenger jet in the air and flying on ammonia by the middle of next year. Ammonia, as we've discussed at length, is a promising energy carrier and future fuel with interesting potential for decarbonizing sectors like shipping and rail. The second-most produced ... Read more ... |
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Brilliant Planet plans cheap, gigaton-scale carbon capture using algae - Newatlas  (Apr 26, 2022) |
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Apr 26, 2022 · As humanity fights to keep its only planet from becoming inhospitable, most of the focus will rightly be on decarbonizing everything we practically can. But it won't be enough. Direct air capture will need to be part of the equation, and it'll need to be massively scalable, energy efficient and much, much cheaper than today's technology, so it can become profitable quickly as carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes kick in globally. London startup Brilliant Planet believes it has a carbon capture and sequestration model that ticks all the boxes, promising scalability up to billions of tons per year, near-negligible energy requirements, and costs around one tenth of current ... Read more ... |
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Hydrogen 11 times worse than CO2 for climate, says new report - Newatlas  (Apr 11, 2022) |
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Apr 11, 2022 · Hydrogen will be one of humanity's key weapons in the war against carbon dioxide emissions, but it must be treated with care. New reports show how fugitive hydrogen emissions can indirectly produce warming effects 11 times worse than those of CO2. Hydrogen can be used as a clean energy carrier, and running it through a fuel cell to produce electricity produces nothing but water as a by-product. It carries far more energy for a given weight than lithium batteries, and it's faster to refill a tank than to charge a battery, so hydrogen is viewed as a very promising green option in several hard-to-decarbonize applications where batteries won't cut the mustard – for example, ... Read more ... |
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Fusion tech is set to unlock near-limitless ultra-deep geothermal energy - Newatlas  (Feb 25, 2022) |
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Feb 25, 2022 · Everyone knows the Earth's core is hot, but maybe the scale of it still has the power to surprise. Temperatures in the iron center of the core are estimated to be around 5,200 °C (9,392 °F), generated by heat from radioactive elements decaying combining with heat that still remains from the very formation of the planet – an event of cataclysmic violence when a swirling cloud of gas and dust was crushed into a ball by its own gravity. Where there's access to heat, there's harvestable geothermal energy. And there's so much heat below the Earth's surface, according to Paul Woskov, a senior fusion research engineer at MIT, that tapping just 0.1 percent of it could supply the ... Read more ... |
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High Hopes claims stratospheric breakthrough in direct air CO2 capture - Newatlas  (May 03, 2021) |
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May 03, 2021 · In the race to get humanity toward zero carbon emissions by 2050, the vast majority of efforts will rightly be focused on reducing emissions at their source. But there are areas where this simply won't be possible, and as carbon taxes gradually rise around the globe there will definitely be a... Read more ... |
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Bill Gates's next-gen nuclear plant packs in grid-scale energy storage - Newatlas  (Mar 08, 2021) |
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Mar 08, 2021 · Wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, wave energy ... Renewable sources are a crucial pillar of any plan to decarbonize the world's energy generation industries and eliminate fossil fuel use. But for many reasons – intermittency, location dependency, land requirements, and others – they can't do it alone. To fully remove greenhouse gases from the world's energy sectors, there needs to be a cheap, scalable form of zero-emissions energy that can reliably produce power 24/7/365. All the better if it can rapidly ramp its output up and down to help the power grid cope with load spikes and interruptions in renewable energy supplies. The best candidate to fill this role right now is ... Read more ... |
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Big oil invests in Eavor's "holy grail" pump-free geothermal loops - Newatlas  (Feb 17, 2021) |
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Feb 17, 2021 · BP and Chevron have led a US$40 million investment round for a Canadian startup that claims to have developed a unique way to extract energy from geothermal heat on demand, using an unpowered looping fluid design that's already prototyped in Alberta. Solar and wind are scalable renewable resources, but only produce energy when the sun and wind are up, not when the grid needs it. Hydro can respond well to demand, but it's not really scalable; the geometry of your dam dictates the size of your operation. Regular geothermal needs volcanic levels of heat, which restricts it to certain locations, the same way hydro needs mountain reservoirs. There are lower-temperature, ... Read more ... |
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Why one part of the ocean bucked the trend and cooled last century - Newatlas  (May 07, 2020) |
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May 07, 2020 · For the last century or more, much of Earth's land and ocean surfaces have been steadily warming, which we now understand is a product of climate change. But in parts of the Southern Ocean around Antarctica, sea surfaces cooled considerably since the early 1980s. And now, scientists think they know why. Humans have left a measurable impact on the planet for thousands of years, but we really kicked things up a notch during the Industrial Revolution. Since the 1830s, carbon dioxide emissions have continuously risen, leading to a cascade of other environmental problems. The most prominent is the steady warming of land and sea. Recent months, years and decades are ... Read more ... |
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Microplastics show up in Antarctic sea ice for the first time - Newatlas  (Apr 23, 2020) |
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Apr 23, 2020 · Understanding the extent of our plastic pollution problem is incredibly difficult, largely because the corrosive forces of the ocean break the waste into tiny fragments which are nearly impossible to track. Scientists have again found evidence of these microplastics in the most remote of places, discovering particles lodged in cores of Antarctic sea ice for the first time. Scientists have previously detected plastic pollution in the surface waters of Antarctica and in sediment samples, but as far as the researchers behind the new study know, it has never before been seen in sea ice. These frozen slabs are formed from seawater, and in Antarctica around 80 percent of it melts ... Read more ... |
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