4 breakthrough technologies to effectively exploit renewable energy sources
Light, sun, and wind are abundant energy sources that people always desire to conquer to serve life. Let's discover the top 4 breakthrough technologies in April to effectively exploit and store these energy sources in modern life, towards a sustainable future.
3D-printing wind turbines towers
GE Renewable Energy held a ribbon-cutting ceremony to inaugurate a new research and development facility that will conduct research on how to 3D print the concrete base of towers used in wind turbines.
To make a wind turbine tower today, builders bring prefabricated steel tubes to the location on flatbed trucks and weld them together on-site. But as anyone who tried to move a piece of furniture into a New York City walk-up apartment will know, there are limits that can’t be breached. For turbine towers, that limit is about 14 feet in diameter. Make them any larger and they become too wide to fit on many roads. (Wind blades face a similar issue with length. But GE found an ingenious way to split the blades into two pieces and assemble them at the wind farm).
The way is 3D printing, also known as additive manufacturing. By 3D-printing the base of the tower from concrete on location, wind farm builders will be able to make it wider, and strong enough to support a taller and more powerful turbine. The method could also unlock new locations for wind generation, lower transportation costs, and create additional employment opportunities at the wind farms where the technology will be used.
It’s Always Sunny Or Windy In Texas
Image credits: American Electric Power, Pattern Energy.
Civil engineers at Rice University published a study showing that a combination of wind and solar power in Texas could easily replace coal in the state.
“This paper is really about how we can transition away from coal as quickly as possible,” said senior author Daniel Cohan. As he and his team wrote in Renewables: Wind, Water, and Solar: “Simply put, it’s not always windy and not always sunny, but it’s almost always windy or sunny somewhere in Texas.”
The researchers calculated the impacts of proposed renewable projects across Texas and determined that just a third of them could generate enough electricity to displace nearly all coal energy in the state. The key will be connecting the windiest and sunniest parts of the state with high-voltage transmission power lines, to ensure steady supply. Their previous work showed that wind and solar power are generated at complementary times: West Texas winds blow most strongly at night, while in south Texas, sea breezes peak on summer afternoons and solar power peaks at midday, they explained.
The researchers behind an energy system that makes it possible to capture solar energy, store it for up to eighteen years and release it when and where it is needed have now succeeded in getting the system to produce electricity. Eventually, the research could lead to self-charging electronics using stored solar energy on demand. Image credit: Daniel Spacek/Chalmers University of Technology.
Swedish and Chinese scientists built a battery that can store solar energy for years.
Solar energy is the most abundant energy resource, but harvesting and storing vast amounts of it for dark nights and cloudy days is an elusive element of a clean energy transition. The battery promises a “radically new way of generating electricity from solar energy,” said Kasper Moth-Poulsen, a chemical engineering professor at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
In earlier work, Chalmers researchers designed a molecule made of carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen that changes shape when hit with sunlight. The resulting isomer (a molecule with the same components in a different arrangement) holds energy transferred from the photons and can be stored in liquid form for as many as 18 years. The new study hooks the technology to a micrometer-thin thermoelectric generator developed at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. A catalyst reverts the isomer to its original form, releasing its stored energy as heat. The generator then turns the heat into electricity. The generator could be integrated into electronics such as headphones, smartwatches and telephones, said Chalmers researcher Zhihang Wang. “So far, we have only generated small amounts of electricity, but the new results show that the concept really works.”
USC Viterbi researchers have created a new machine learning model to investigate how light polarizes materials like lead titanate into a vortex-shaped polarization pattern that vastly improves the material’s energy-efficient properties. Image credit: USC Viterbi.
Scientists at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering created a machine learning framework to help develop next-generation materials for more efficient electronics.
Stretching, pulling, heating and cooling are common ways of changing a material’s properties. It’s also possible to use light to prompt hidden properties of metals. But because those interactions happen on the atomic scale, they are difficult to model, making it hard to study them and develop applications. The new machine learning model can model the effects of light on materials at unprecedented scale.
The USC Viterbi team used machine learning to perform simulations that predict light’s effect on more than a billion atoms in a material. Earlier computations could simulate only a few hundred atoms. They used this larger, clearer picture to model a previously unknown ability of light to control the polarization of lead titanate, which can be used in sensors and in energy and memory storage. “Without machine learning, it would have been impossible to design this kind of simulation,” said study co-author Ken-ichi Nomura.