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Category: solar power

One emergent company, Virgin Orbit wants to switch from a fuel-burning upper stage to solar energy, a move that could support future human habitats on other planets.

The satellite launch company has made a name for itself with its visually striking rocket launches. Strapped to the wing of a Boeing 747 the LauncherOne rocket doesn’t need the same launch pads and infrastructure as its competitors.

Virgin Orbit has hosted two successful launches to orbit, but it’s not stopping there. CEO Dan Hart tells Inverse that “we’re developing a solar electric upper stage for our rocket right now.”

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The math is pretty basic. How many satellites are going to go up over the next decade? How many solar panels will they need? And how many are being manufactured that fit the bill? Turns out the answers are: a lot, a hell of a lot, and not nearly enough. That’s where Regher Solar aims to make its mark, by bringing the cost of space-quality solar panels down by 90% while making an order of magnitude more of them. It’s not exactly a modest goal, but fortunately the science and market seem to be in favor, giving the company something of a tailwind. The question is finding the right balance between cost and performance while remaining relatively easy to manufacture. Of course, if there was an easy answer there, someone would already be doing that.

Full Story:

Intech Company is the ultimate source of the latest AI news. It checks trusted websites and collects bests pieces of AI information.

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A simple cooling system driven by the capture of passive solar energy could provide low-cost food refrigeration and living space cooling for impoverished communities with no access to the electricity grid. The system, which has no electrical components, exploits the powerful cooling effect that occurs when certain salts are dissolved in water. After each cooling cycle, the system uses solar energy to evaporate the water and regenerate the salt, ready for reuse.

“Hot regions have high levels of solar energy, so it would be very attractive to use that solar energy for cooling,” says Wenbin Wang, a postdoc in Peng Wang’s lab. In many parts of the world, there is a greater need for cooling because of climate change, but not every community can access electricity for air conditioning and refrigeration. “We conceptualized an off-grid solar-energy conversion and storage design for green and inexpensive cooling,” Professor Wang says.

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Vertical Farming has come a long way since the original series was posted 3 years ago, and there have been many developments that are shaping the future of the industry. Whether it’s large scale plant factories, community urban farms, or even new types of farm, the size of vending machines, and even vertical farms at home, the way we grow is changing.

But it’s not just the way we grow, what we grow is also changing. Vertical Farms are adding new crop types like tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries and many other types of fruits and vegetables, and this change has happened sooner than the original series projected.

But to really have a significant impact on the global challenges of climate change, food security and water security, we will have to grow energy intensive crops like wheat and rice in vertical farms.

Are we on track to meet this challenge, or is vertical farming struggling to improve its energy efficiency? Is vertical farming closer to changing the world?

Previous video in series: The Future Of Vertical Farming.
https://youtu.be/ESuzrY2abAw.

Is Solar Power The Future Of Energy?

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Could combining solar panels plus farming be a viable solution to the growing demand for food production and energy demand? Let’s take a closer look at electrifying our crops (not literally electrifying crops) … well, adding solar to our farm land as well as some of the side benefits and challenges it creates.

Watch 28,000 Year Nuclear Waste Battery? Diamond Batteries Explained.

Video script and citations:
https://undecidedmf.com/episodes/solar-panels-plus-farming-agrivoltaics-explained.

Follow-up podcast:
Video version — https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4-aWB84Bupf5hxGqrwYqLA
Audio version — http://bit.ly/stilltbdfm.

Special thanks to BayWa and GroenLeven for some of the video footage and photography.
https://www.baywa-re.com.
https://groenleven.nl/

👋 Support Undecided on Patreon!
https://www.patreon.com/mattferrell.

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While wind turbine and solar power platforms are beginning to take to the sea, another, more established form of power might also avoid hiking real estate costs.

A Copenhagen-based startup just raised funding to the sum of eight figures in Euros to begin construction of a new kind of cheap, flexible, portable, and unyieldingly safe nuclear reactor, according to a press release shared by the company, Seaborg Technologies.

And, crucially, the timeline for global deployment will shatter conventional paradigms in the energy industry.

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For a long time fixed wing VTOL drones were tricky to work with, but with the availability of open source flight control and autopilot software this has changed. To make experimentation even easier, [Stephen Carlson] and other researchers from the RoboWork Lab at the University of Nevada created the MiniHawk, a 3D printed VTOL aircraft for use a test bed for various research projects.

Some of these project include creating a longer wingspan aircraft by combining multiple MiniHawks in mid-flight with magnetic wing-tip mounts, or “migratory behaviors”. The latter is a rather interesting idea, which involves letting the craft land in any suitable location, and recharging using wing mounted solar panels before continuing with the next leg of the mission. With this technique, the MiniHawk could operate on mission almost indefinitely without human intervention. This is a departure from some other solar planes we’ve seen, which attempt to recharge while flying, or even ditch batteries completely, which limits operation to sunny weather conditions.

The design is open source, with all the relevant information and files available on GitHub. This looks like a fun craft even if you don’t plan on doing research with it, and [Stephen] also created an FPV specific canopy cover.

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Honda builds much more than cars and trucks — power equipment, solar cells, industrial robotics, alternative fuel engines and even aircraft are all part of the company’s production capacity. On Thursday, Honda announced that it is working to further expand its manufacturing portfolio to include Avatar-style remote telepresence robots and electric VTOLs for inter-and intracity commutes before turning its ambitions to building a fuel-cell driven power generation system for the lunar surface.

For its eVTOL, Honda plans to leverage not only the lithium battery technology it’s developed for its EV and PHEV vehicles but also a gas turbine hybrid power unit to give the future aircraft enough range to handle regional inter-city flights as well. Honda foresees air taxis as a ubiquitous part of tomorrow’s transportation landscape, seamlessly integrating with both autonomous ground vehicles and traditional airliners (though they could soon be flown by robots as well). Obviously, the program is still very much in the early research phase and will likely remain so until at least the second half of this decade. The company anticipates having prototype units available for testing and certification by the 2030s and a full commercial rollout sometime around 2040.

Honda will have plenty of competition if and when it does get its eVTOLs off the ground. Cadillac showed off its single-seater aircar earlier this year, while Joby (in partnership with NASA) already has full-scale mockups flying. In June, Slovakian transportation startup, Klein Vision, flew from Nitra and to the Bratislava airport in its inaugural inter-city flight — and then drove home after the event. But building a fleet of flying taxis is no easy feat — just ask Bell helicopters — and we’re sure to see more companies drop out of the sector before eVTOLs become commonplace.

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Last year, computer engineers from Northwestern University and Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) introduced the world’s first battery-free Game Boy, which harvests both solar energy and the user’s kinetic energy from button mashing to power an unlimited lifetime of game play.

The same team now introduces a new platform that enables makers, hobbyists and novice programmers to build their own battery-free electronic devices that run with intermittent, harvested energy.

Called BFree, the system includes energy-harvesting hardware (the BFree Shield) and a power-failure-resistant version of Python, one of the most accessible and most used programming languages. All the user needs is a basic understanding of Python in order to quickly and easily turn any do-it-yourself (DIY) into a battery-free version. With this technology, novice programmers can now turn their DIY battery-powered motion sensor, for example, into a solar-powered sensor with an infinite lifetime.

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