Lifeboat Foundation

Early experiences with the new Tesla Model Y with 4,680 cells and a structural battery pack are showing some impressive potential for faster charging and better energy density.

When Tesla delivered its first made-in-Texas Model Y vehicles, we noted that it was strange that Tesla didn’t reveal any details – like specs and pricing – about the new version of the electric SUV.

Continue reading “Tesla Model Y with new 4680 cells shows impressive potential for faster charging” »

https://youtu.be/u36H4Uo3rPM

Why the Public Perception of Tesla is TOTALLY wrong:

Shared by Michael Michalchik.

Continue reading “Tesla Fact vs. Fiction: Why the Public Perception is Wrong” »

According the company, this innovative system enables the detection of live objects behind walls at a distance of more than 50 meters.

Camero-Tech, a member of the SK Group and an Israeli developer, producer, and marketer of pulse-based UWB micro-power radar ‘Through Wall Imaging’ systems, announced the launching of its groundbreaking XaverTM LR40 (XLR40) system, which detects live objects behind walls at distances of over 50 meters.

Italian company Energy Dome has announced the successful launch of its first CO₂ Battery facility in Sardinia, Italy. The milestone marks the final de-risking of the CO₂ Battery technology as Energy Dome enters the commercial scaling phase, becoming the first commercial long-duration energy storage technology on the market offering a reliable alternative to fossil fuels for dispatchable baseload power globally.

The Energy Dome CO₂ battery uses carbon dioxide to store renewable energy, such as solar and wind energy, over a long period and release it quickly. Energy Dome says the technology can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world at less than half the cost of similar-sized lithium battery storage facilities.

Continue reading “Energy Dome launches world’s first CO2 battery for long-duration energy storage” »

Devices made of readily available oxide and carbon-based materials can produce clean hydrogen from water over weeks — according to new research (Nature Materials, “Long-term solar water and CO₂ splitting with photoelectrochemical BiOI–BiVO 4 tandems”).

The findings, co-led by Dr Virgil Andrei, a Research Fellow at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, with academics at Imperial College London, could help overcome one of the key issues in solar fuel production, where current earth-abundant light-absorbing materials are limited through either their performance or stability.

Multiple BiOI and BiOI-BiVO 4 pixels on a device. (Image: Dr Virgil Andrei)

Italian company Energy Dome has opened the first of its remarkable grid-level energy storage plants. These “CO2 batteries” can store renewable energy over long periods and release it quickly, at less than half the cost of big lithium batteries.

Large-scale energy storage is going to be required on an epic scale all round the world, as green energy begins to take over the world’s power supply. Renewable energy is often generated at times and places where it’s not needed, and a variety of grid-level storage technologies are jockeying for various energy market niches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses.

We took a close look at Energy Dome’s CO₂ battery technology last July, but here’s the guts of it: carbon dioxide expands dramatically when it moves to a gaseous state from a liquid state, which it’ll only settle in under pressures at least five times higher than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure. How much does it expand? Well, at room temperature, 2.5675 litres of liquid CO₂ kept at 56 atmospheres of pressure will expand into 1,000 litres of gaseous CO₂. That’s a factor of nearly 400.

Organic farmers are returning to an unusual tool in the fight against weeds — fire. Called ‘flame weeding’ the process involves either using a small, handheld flamethrower, or installing a pretty hardcore row of flamethrowers onto the front of a tractor and slowly driving through fields of crops singeing the weeds in between the rows.

Flame Engineering, Inc. specializes in developing and selling flame weeding equipment and says the technique is rooted in science. The company’s website explains that the technique is not about blasting the weeds to kingdom come, but rather about focusing on destroying cell structure.

Continue reading “Flame-Throwing Tractor Needs No Chemicals to Get Rid of Weeds” »

One day soon, buildings could become more energy-efficient—and environmentally sustainable—with insulating material developed from wood by researchers in Sweden. The newly-developed material offers as good or even better thermal performance than ordinary plastic-based insulation materials, according to researchers reporting recently in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces.

Yuanyuan Li, an assistant professor at Wallenberg Wood Science Center, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, says that the new insulating material is an aerogel integrated wood which is made without adding additional substances.

Wood cellulose aerogels themselves are nothing new—researchers have been developing advanced types of aerogels and other composites for the last several years in the Wallenberg Wood Science Center at KTH—but Li says the new method represents a breakthrough in controlled creation of insulating nanostructures in the pores of wood.