Lifeboat Foundation

The world’s electric grids are creaking under the pressure of volatile fossil-fuel prices and the imperative of weaning the world off polluting energy sources. A solution may be at hand, thanks to an innovative battery that’s a cheaper alternative to lithium-ion technology.

SB Energy Corp., a U.S. renewable-energy firm that’s an arm of Japan’s SoftBank Group, is making a record purchase of the batteries manufactured by Energy Storage Systems. The Oregon company says it has new technology that can store renewable energy for longer and help overcome some of the reliability problems that have caused blackouts in California and record-high energy prices in Europe.

The units, which rely on something called “iron-flow chemistry,” will be used in utility-scale solar projects dotted across the U.S., allowing those power plants to provide electricity for hours after the sun sets. SB Energy will buy enough batteries over the next five years to power 50,000 American homes for a day.

Lebanon’s entire electric grid collapsed on Saturday when the country’s two main power stations ran out of fuel.

For months, the country had been providing citizens with a few hours of electricity a day, according to The Washington Post. Then yesterday, Lebanon’s state-owned power stations, Deir Ammar and Zahrani, ran out of diesel fuel leaving the entire country with no electricity. The outage is expected to last days.

To solve the situation, the Lebanese government is attempting to get emergency fuel from the army and other sources until the country receives and distributes a shipment of oil from Iraq.

Circa 2019

Most people don’t give a second thought to the poop they flush away. But perhaps they should, because the energy contained within our repellent remains is impressive.

If you let poop fester—and you probably shouldn’t in polite company—bacterial digestion will produce a methane-rich ‘biogas’ that can be harnessed for energy. You can also dehydrate a deuce to make powdery fuel or combustible bricks with a similar energy content to coal. These schemes may sound outlandish, but wastewater plants all over the developed world take advantage of this salvageable energy to subsidize their operations. One UK-based treatment plant, for example, gets 50 percent of its power using poop.

The researcher warns that there is a new APT hacker group that targets the fuel, electricity, and aviation industries.

Water production from lunar regolith through carbothermal reduction modelling through ground experiments.

PDF | Condensed matter systems act as mini-universes with emergent low-energy properties drastically different from those of the standard model. A case… | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate.

PDF | Condensed matter systems act as mini-universes with emergent low-energy properties drastically different from those of the standard model. A case… | Find, read and cite all the research you need on ResearchGate.

What is this world with a simple idea and lots of engineering? Father-son duo power regular trucks with military jet engines and almost make them fly.

El Salvador has mined 0.00599179 bitcoin, or about $269, with power harnessed from a volcano.

President Nayib Bukele – who has banked his political future on a nationwide bitcoin experiment – tweeted early Friday morning that this is the country’s maiden voyage into volcano-powered bitcoin mining.

On Tuesday, the president posted a flashy 25-second teaser video, which includes shots of a government-branded shipping container full of bitcoin mining rigs, technicians installing and plugging in ASIC miners, as well as sweeping landscape aerials of an energy factory in the thick of a forest, bordering a volcano.

A geomagnetic storm is set to hit the Earth and may affect satellites and electricity grids. The US government’s space weather tracking body has warned the public about the possibility of a geomagnetic storm, which is different from a solar storm. The phenomenon is caused by the solar wind and it will likely spark an aurora.

After the solar storm, here comes the solar wind! Over the past couple of weeks, reports have detailed the devastating impact that solar storms or coronal mass ejections (CMEs) can have on the Internet infrastructure on Earth. Now, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) has issued a Geomagnetic Storm Watch for Sunday, that is, September 26. A geomagnetic storm is set to hit the Earth. The US government’s space weather tracking body has warned the public about the possibility of a of G1 or G2-level geomagnetic storm. Among some of its effects on Earth is that it is expected to light up the skies in the form of an aurora, aka Northern Lights, and perhaps affect infrastructure.

For the uninitiated, a geomagnetic storm is a major disturbance of Earth’s magnetosphere that occurs when there is an exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding Earth. These storms result from variations in the solar wind that produces major changes in the currents, plasmas, and fields in Earth’s magnetosphere. According to SWPC, the largest storms that result from these conditions are associated with solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) where a billion tons or so of plasma from the sun, with its embedded magnetic field, is shot outwards and it get directed at Earth.