Lifeboat Foundation

An Italian energy storage company, Energy Dome, has announced the close of its $11M Series A fundraise, with the goal of deploying the first commercially viable CO2 battery in a demonstration project in its native Sardinia, Italy. The proposed 100 megawatt-hours (MWh) CO2 Battery could support the increased use of renewable power in the generation mix and address the growing need for energy storage on electrical grids.

The CO2 Battery’s optimal charge/discharge cycle ranges from 4 to 24 hours, positioning it perfectly for daily and intra-day cycling. The company points out that this is a fast-growing market segment, not well served by existing battery technologies. Significantly, the CO2 Battery can be charged during the daytime when there is a surplus solar generation and dispatched during the subsequent evening and next-morning peaks, when solar generation falls short of demand. The modular, scalable energy storage solution will allow for solar and wind generation to be dispatchable 24 hours per day.

Using low-cost, off-the-shelf components, the company claims that its CO2 battery achieves a 75–80% round-trip efficiency. Unlike lithium-ion batteries, which degrade significantly in performance after roughly a decade of use, the battery maintains its performance during its expected 25-year operational life. This means the cost of the storage will be about half of the cost of storing with similar-sized lithium-ion batteries.

Boy, how the market for Hydrogen and Hydrogen Fuel Cells has changed in the past couple of years! From my Seeking Delphi podcast.

“So I submit to my colleagues here today that hydrogen is not as far away as we think it is.”–Bob Inglis.

In February of 2017, Seeking Delphi™ featured Infinity Fuel Cell and Hydrogen, Inc.™ founder and CEO Bill Smith, in an episode entitled What Ever Happend to Fuel Cells.

Continue reading “#57: Update on Fuel Cells and Hydrogen with William F. Smith” »

The company aims to turn readily available LNG into hydrogen fuel that will meet IMO 2050 emissions targets.

A new method of creating aerogels can produce up to 70 times more hydrogen than other means! This could help enable hydrogen power at greater scales.

For many of us, this is a part of the year when we are acutely aware of time and timekeeping, even more so than usual. Thanks in part to the changing of clocks I talked about in my last post, it gets dark much earlier, and there’s another month or so to go of the days getting shorter and the nights longer (in the northern hemisphere, anyway; if you’re in most of South America, much of Africa, or Australia, enjoy your long summer days…). We’re also coming into the cluster of solstice-related holidays— Hanukkah started last night, and Christmas is fast approaching— so a lot of kids are counting down days, and adults juggling family and social commitments and trying to find time to shop for gifts. The preceding might make this seem like a particularly Western preoccupation. That’s true in a narrow sense— the holidays of the moment are Jewish and Christian, and there’s nothing all that significant happening in, say, the Muslim world for the next couple of months— but in fact basically every human culture we know much about has devoted significant energy to the tracking of time. Full Story:

Prepare to be Baffled.

The misconception is that electrons carry potential energy around a complete conducting loop, transferring their energy to the load. This video was sponsored by Caséta by Lutron.

Continue reading “The Big Misconception About Electricity” »

The extra juice comes from a secret ingredient…corn starch.

Could a simple materials change make electric car batteries able to four times more energy? Scientists in South Korea think so. In a new paper in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters, a research team details using silicon and repurposed corn starch to make better anodes for lithium ion batteries.

This team is based primarily in the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), where they’ve experimented with microemulsifying silicon, carbon, and corn starch into a new microstructured composite material for use as a battery anode. This is done by mixing silicon nanoparticles and corn starch with propylene gas and heating it all to combine.

Continue reading “Corny Lithium-Ion Batteries Could Hold Quadruple the Charge” »

Google’s cybersecurity team warns that this is neither the first nor the last time.

Cryptomining is a very energy-intensive process with analysis by the University of Cambridge showing that Bitcoin consumes more electricity than the entire country of Argentina. Now, Google has released a new report stating that malicious cryptocurrency miners are using hacked Google Cloud accounts for mining purposes.

The report is called “Threat Horizons” and it aims to help organizations keep their cloud environments secure.

Continue reading “Rogue Miners Are Using Google Cloud Servers to Mine Cryptocurrencies” »

Can we use mountains as gigantic batteries for long-term energy storage? Such is the premise of new research published in the journal Energy.

The particular focus of the study by Julian Hunt of IIASA (Austria-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) and his colleagues is how to store energy in locations that have less energy demand and variable weather conditions that affect renewable energy sources. The team looked at places like small islands and remote places that would need less than 20 megawatts of capacity for energy storage and proposed a way to use mountains to accomplish the task.