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Category: sustainability

US based Phononic’s thermoelectric technology is proving truly disruptive in the usually staid world of cooling technology.

When it comes to cooling technologies it’s fair to say that not a lot has changed in the past 100 years. Today, however, Phononic, a US company based in North Carolina, is using solid-state microchips to reinvent how devices are cooled.

“Over the past 50 years, semiconductors have totally transformed areas as diverse as data, communications, solar power and LED lighting,” says Alex Guichard, senior products marketing manager, Phononic. “Today, we’re using thermoelectric coolers to offer a radical alternative to traditional forms of cooling technology.”

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While solar and wind power are rapidly becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels in areas with lots of sun and wind, they still can’t provide the 24/7 power we’ve become used to. At present, that’s not big a problem because the grid still features plenty of fossil fuel plants that can provide constant baseload or ramp up to meet surges in demand.

But there’s broad agreement that we need to dramatically decarbonize our energy supplies if we’re going to avoid irreversible damage to the climate. That will mean getting rid of the bulk of on-demand, carbon-intensive power plants we currently rely on to manage our grid.

Alternatives include expanding transmission infrastructure to shuttle power from areas where the wind is blowing to areas where it isn’t, or managing demand using financial incentive to get people to use less energy during peak hours. But most promising is pairing renewable energy with energy storage to build up reserves for when the sun stops shining.

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Tesla is launching today a solar rental service – a brand new way to get a solar panel system on your roof for as little as $50 per month without any long-term contract.

SolarCity pioneered new models to sell solar power systems with no upfront cost by leasing them to homeowners and selling them the electricity it generates, like a regular electric utility.

The model created impressive growth, but it required them to pay for the costly systems upfront on most installations, which weighed heavy on their financials.

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The few available range-extended electric car models give drivers added flexibility by using gasoline engines as onboard backup generators.

But using the range extender too often may consume a significant quantity of gasoline, somewhat offsetting the purpose of owning an electric car for some buyers.

Electric-car advocate Tom Moloughney faced that dilemma about two years ago, when he decided to buy one of the first BMW i3 electric cars in the U.S.

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk says that the automaker is working on a new battery pack to come out next year which will last 1 million miles.

When talking about the economics of Tesla’s future fleet of robotaxis at the Tesla Autonomy Event yesterday, Musk emphasized that the vehicles need to be durable in order for the economics to work:

“The cars currently built are all designed for a million miles of operation. The drive unit is design, tested, and validated for 1 million miles of operation.”

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Iron Ox has just opened its first fully automated farm in San Carlos, California. The company claims that their hydroponic system can produce 30 times the yield per acre of land comparing to traditional farms, while using 90% less water.

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This is Growing Underground, it’s an underground farm founded in 2012 by Richard Ballard and Steven Dring.

The farm sits inside a WWII bomb shelter. Eight of these shelters were built across London during the war, and they were each built to house around 8,000 people.

The tunnel system is 6,500m2 and Growing Underground currently only use 1/6th of the space. The farm uses hydroponic systems and LED lighting to simulate a day and night cycle.

The process takes place entirely underground, from the sowing of the seeds to the harvesting and packaging.
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This is Part Three of a five-part series by Ramez Naam, Singularity University Adjunct Faculty, exploring the power of innovation to boost our access to energy, food, water, raw materials, and human population. All are based on his new book, The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet

In Part One and Two of this series I showed that we have access to a huge amount of potentially available energy and food on the earth, both stemming from the tremendous input of solar energy to the planet. We have very serious energy and food challenges, which cannot be dismissed. But the challenges are not in the form of a hard limit – they’re in the form of a race between innovation and consumption. Victory in this race is certainly not guaranteed. But the most important variable – how quickly we innovate – is one we can affect through our policies. That’s a topic we’ll return to at the end of this series.

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A global wave of investment in high-capacity batteries is poised to transform the market for renewable energy in coming years, making it more practical and affordable to store wind and solar power and deploy it when needed.

Government-owned utilities and companies are buying batteries that can be larger than shipping containers. Some like…

To Read the Full Story.

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