Lifeboat Foundation

A widespread power outage left about 130,000 customers in darkness across a large area of Upper Manhattan early Friday, a Con Edison spokesman said.

Three networks in the utility’s transmission system in Manhattan lost their electricity supply at 5:13 a.m., Con Ed spokesman Philip O’Brien told The Post at 6:30 a.m., adding that the power has been restored.

“And we’re back! Here’s the moment electricity returned to upper Manhattan,” @kendisgibson said in a tweet.

Hypersonic weapons are the next frontier of great power competition between the United States, Russia, and China. The Army and Navy want to expedite the development of the missile and hope to field it in 2023.

Their latest missile test was a success.

By Caleb Larson

Continue reading “The Army and Navy’s Hypersonic Missile is a Go” »

When you think of renewable energy, what comes to mind? We’d venture to guess that wind and solar are probably near the top of the list. And yes, wind and solar are great as long as the winds are favorable and the sun is shining. But what about all those short and bleak winter days? Rainy days? Night time?

Unfavorable conditions mean that storage is an important part of any viable solution that uses renewable energy. Either the energy itself has to be stored, or else the means to produce the energy on demand must be stored.

One possible answer has been right under our noses all along — air. Regular old ambient air can be cooled and compressed into a liquid, stored in tanks, and then reheated to its gaseous state to do work.

Circa 2006

Aiming to create a miniature motor capable of 1 million revolutions per minute, electronics researchers at ETH Life in Zurich are half-way to their goal.

The gas turbine-powered device produces force equivalent to 100 watts and is 95 percent fuel efficient, and gets 10 hours of operation out of the tank.

More than 1.4 million homes and businesses across New Jersey lost power as of Tuesday afternoon as powerful winds and heavy rains from Tropical Storm Isaias battered the Garden State.

That’s more than 25% of the utility customers in the state and half of JCP&L’s 1.1 million customers in the dark, according to outage maps provided by the three major utility companies in New Jersey.

A recently deployed DARPA CubeSat seeks to demonstrate technology that could improve imaging of distant objects in space and allow powerful space telescopes to fit into small satellites. DARPA’s Deformable Mirror (DeMi) CubeSat deployed from the International Space Station July 13, beginning the technology demonstration of a miniature space telescope with a small deformable mirror called a microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) mirror.

DeMi made first contact about a week following launch, demonstrating the expected power from its solar arrays, as well as correct spacecraft pointing and stable temperatures. The team will focus on payload checkout over the coming days.

Deformable mirrors can adjust the shape of their reflective surfaces to correct for the effects of temperature and mechanical changes on a space telescope, improving image quality. The experiment will measure how well a MEMS deformable mirror performs in space, from the rocket launch through its time in orbit experiencing the thermal and radiation environment.

Washington State University researchers have made a key advance in solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) that could make the highly energy-efficient and low-polluting technology a more viable alternative to gasoline combustion engines for powering cars.

Led by Ph.D. graduate Qusay Bkour and Professor Su Ha in the Gene and Linda Voiland School of Chemical Engineering and Bioengineering, the researchers have developed a unique and inexpensive nanoparticle catalyst that allows the fuel cell to convert logistic liquid fuels such as gasoline to electricity without stalling out during the electrochemical process. The research, featured in the journal, Applied Catalysis B: Environmental, could result in highly efficient gasoline-powered cars that produce low carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

“People are very concerned about energy, the environment, and global warming,” said Bkour. “I’m very excited because we can have a solution to the energy problem that also reduces the emissions that cause global warming.”

A New Zealand-based startup has developed a method of safely and wirelessly transmitting electric power across long distances without the use of copper wire, and is working on implementing it with the country’s second-largest power distributor.

The dream of wireless power transmission is far from new; everyone’s favorite electrical genius Nikola Tesla once proved he could power light bulbs from more than two miles away with a 140-foot Tesla coil in the 1890s – never mind that in doing so he burned out the dynamo at the local powerplant and plunged the entire town of Colorado Springs into blackout.

Tesla’s dream was to place enormous towers all over the world that could transmit power wirelessly to any point on the globe, powering homes, businesses, industries and even giant electric ships on the ocean. Investor J.P. Morgan famously killed the idea with a single question: “where can I put the meter?”

Munich-based residential vanadium redox flow battery start-up VoltStorage has secured another $7 million from investors including the Bayern Kapital subsidiary of the development bank of Bavaria; family investment house Korys; the EU-backed EIT Innoenergy, New Jersey-based venture capital fund and seed investor SOSV and Zurich power company Energie 360.

The firm claims its flow battery system can complete more than 10,000 charge cycles without any effect on capacity and says its electrolyte is a recyclable, non-flammable vanadium solution. VoltStorage’s modular unit reportedly offers a continuous power rating of 1.5 kW and nominal energy of 6.2 kWh. The unit comes with a ten-year warranty.

More than 20 flow battery chemistries, including zinc-bromine, zinc-iron, zinc-cerium and magnesium-vanadium have been studied with vanadium redox the closest to wide commercialization. Vanadium, the dominant cost in the electrolyte, is a metal mined in Russia, China and South Africa although there are reserves in the U.S. and Canada. It is used predominantly as a steel additive. Flow battery manufacturers include Washington-based UET, Montana’s Vizn, California-based Primus, Japan’s Sumitomo, Anglo-Canadian Invinity Energy Systems – formed after the recent merger of California’s Avalon and U.K.-based redT – and Form Energy.