A device for simultaneously converting the sun’s light and heat into electricity

Researchers have demonstrated a new mechanism for converting both sunlight and heat into electricity.

A new type of device that uses both heat and light from the sun should be more efficient than conventional solar cells, which convert only the light into electricity.

The device relies on a physical principle discovered and demonstrated by researchers at Stanford University. In their prototype, the energy in sunlight excites electrons in an electrode, and heat from the sun coaxes the excited electrons to jump across a vacuum into another electrode, generating an electrical current. The device could be designed to send waste heat to a steam engine and convert 50 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity–a huge improvement over conventional solar cells. Read the rest of this entry »

Bloom Reveals New Fuel Cells

Its 100-kilowatt modules have been sold to Google, eBay, and Walmart.

The up-to-now secretive startup Bloom Energy took the wraps off its technology this week, unveiling a fuel-cell system that the company claims can run on a variety of fuels and pay for itself in three to five years via lower energy bills. Read the rest of this entry »

Physicist Discovers How to Teleport Energy

Energy-Entanglement Relation for Quantum Energy Teleportation

Cheaper Solar, Without Better Cells

Costs could drop 30 percent with other improvements.

GE Grabs Gearless Wind Turbines

New direct-drive turbines promise to lower the cost of offshore wind energy.

With a new purchase, GE is betting on an early-stage turbine technology that could make offshore wind farms cheaper to maintain. The acquisition of ScanWind, based in Trondheim, Norway, has also secured GE a foothold in the growing offshore wind energy market.

Instead of gearboxes, ScanWind uses a novel direct-drive generator technology in its 3.5-megawatt turbines. This makes the turbines more reliable, the company says, by cutting downtime and repair costs–an especially important consideration for turbines offshore, where it’s more expensive to send technicians for maintenance. ScanWind has been testing the turbines on the Norwegian coast since 2003. Read the rest of this entry »

Converting Garbage into Fuel

Waste Management, a large waste company, gives technology for gasifying trash a boost.

Waste gasification, a process for converting garbage into fuel and electricity without incinerating it, may be a step closer to large-scale commercialization. Last week, Houston’s Waste Management, a major garbage-collection and -disposal company, announced a joint venture with InEnTec, a startup based in Richland, WA, to commercialize InEnTec’s plasma-gasification technology.

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Self-powered “infofuses” use chemical reactions to transmit coded messages as far as two kilometers

The data encoding these words was carried as pulses of light on its journey from my computer to yours. But, as new research demonstrates, using light to carry encoded alphanumeric messages over long distances doesn’t require computers, optical fiber, or even electricity.

By patterning flammable metallic salts on a nitrocellulose fuse, researchers at Harvard and Tufts University have encoded messages that can be transmitted without the need for a power source. When one fuse burns, the metallic salts along its length emit pulses of infrared and visible light of different colors whose sequence encodes, “LOOK MOM NO ELECTRICITY.” The system, described today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is inspired by chemical information storage in biological cells.

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MIT Chemist’s “Solar Fuel” – A breakthrough technology for clean source of fuel

Sun + Water = Fuel

Tidal-Power System Hits Record Output

Marine Current Turbines’ SeaGen system quadruples the world tidal-turbine power record.

Tidal-power developments by British firms show this renewable power technology achieving impressive scale and continued design innovation. Bristol-based Marine Current Turbines (MCT) revealed last month that its SeaGen dual-turbine system achieved full power operation of 1.2 megawatts. MCT’s power peak is four times the global record for a tidal-stream system set by the company in 2004, according to U.K.-based renewables journal REFocus, and 30 times more than the output from the tidal turbines pumping electricity in New York’s East River.

To see these concepts in action, check out the animation below and Tidal Energy’s.Watch animation >>

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Segway is trying to reinvent urban transportation with Rickshaw!

GM and Segway Develop Rickshaw Prototype

GM and Segway have teamed up to develop a new prototype vehicle as part of their efforts to “reinvent the automobile,” the companies say, but it’s not clear that their new vehicle will do better than the original Segway personal transport. 

Unlike the original self-balancing two-wheeler, the new vehicle will be enclosed and designed to transport two people seated side by side, rather than one person standing up. It will also be equipped with GPS, wireless technology, and sensors, which could eventually allow an onboard computer to take over some driving tasks.

Watch Video >>

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Tiny Machines Convert Sunlight Directly into Work

Small watercraft made of nanostructured materials are propelled by sunlight.

This object, made of a composite of polymer and vertically-aligned carbon nanotubes, turns sunlight directly into work–in this case, movement across a pool of water. The white line traces the little boat’s progress starting from the bottom of the image. Each blue dot represents a 2-second time point. Credit: JACS/ACS

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