Lifeboat Foundation

Coal is a highly polluting and expensive way to generate electricity. This analysis shows that we have economic alternatives to continuing to burn coal for power in the US. Furthermore, analyses such as “The 2035 Report” show that we can fully retire coal, stop building other fossil fuel plants (namely gas), and still reliably meet electricity demand, while providing a host of environmental and societal benefits. There are existing policies that can help policymakers closely examine the cost burden of generation resources used today, procure cheaper and cleaner generation resources going forward, and address current assets on the books. The continuation and intensification of the coal cost crossover demands attention from policymakers and consumers alike.

The costs of most existing US coal-fired power plants are now more expensive than the total costs of wind and solar.

Researchers have demonstrated a record-high laser pulse intensity of over 10²³ W/cm² using the petawatt laser at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS), Institute for Basic Science in the Republic of Korea. It took more than a decade to reach this laser intensity, which is ten times that reported by a team at the University of Michigan in 2004. These ultrahigh intensity light pulses will enable exploration of complex interactions between light and matter in ways not possible before.

The powerful laser can be used to examine phenomena believed to be responsible for high-power cosmic rays, which have energies of more than a quadrillion (1015) electronvolts (eV). Although scientists know that these rays originate from somewhere outside our solar system, how they are made and what is forming them has been a longstanding mystery.

“This high intensity laser will allow us to examine astrophysical phenomena such as electron-photon and photon-photon scattering in the lab,” said Chang Hee Nam, director of CoReLS and professor at Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology. “We can use it to experimentally test and access theoretical ideas, some of which were first proposed almost a century ago.”

LumiLor is an electroluminescent coating system which allows anything coated with it to function as a light. Electroluminescence simply means that an object is capable of emitting light when an electrical current passes through it.

The lifespan of LumiLor is dependent on how much power is applied and the native LumiLor color used. More power equals brighter light but a shorter half life.

Continue reading “LUMILOR — Electric Paint That Lights Up at The Flip of a Switch” »

Excellent! Technology is available to make real change. Support efforts to clean the seas and use renewable energy sources.

Tired of hitting these floating objects during his races and seeing heavenly places turn into landfills, a French ocean adventurer Yvan Bourgnon decided to fight against this global scourge. He and his team have designed Manta, a giant, plastic-eating catamaran powered by renewable energy. The sea vessel literally scoops up plastic garbage and converts it into fuel to help power the boat.

Continue reading “Meet Manta, a sea-cleaning sailboat that feeds on plastic waste” »

Billy Hurley, Digital Editorial Manager.

Metal-air batteries are light, compact power sources with a high energy density, but they have had a major limitation: They corrode.

A new design from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology uses oil to reduce the corrosion and extend the shelf life of single-use metal-air batteries.

California is set to be home to two new compressed-air energy storage facilities – each claiming the crown for the world’s largest non-hydro energy storage system. Developed by Hydrostor, the facilities will have an output of 500 MW and be capable of storing 4 GWh of energy.

As the world shifts towards renewable energy, grid-scale storage is becoming ever more crucial. Getting carbon emissions to net-zero will require a patchwork of technologies to smooth out unpredictable and inconvenient generation curves, with pumped hydro, huge lithium-ion batteries, tanks full of molten salt or silicon, thermal bricks, or heavy blocks stacked up in towers or suspended in mineshafts all in the mix.

Continue reading “World’s largest compressed air grid ‘batteries’ will store up to 10GWh” »

Modifying the surface of power plant pipes to make it easier to prevent the build up of salt.

Behold the salt monsters. These twisted mineral crystals—formed from the buildup of slightly salty water in power plant pipes—come in many shapes and sizes. But the tiny monsters are a big problem: Each year, they cost the world’s power plants at least $100 billion, as workers have to purge the pipes and scrub them from filters.

Continue reading “These strange salt ‘creatures’ could help unclog power plant pipes” »

Seattle-based company Jetoptera says its air-accelerating Fluidic Propulsive System, which works a lot like a Dyson “bladeless” fan, produces thrust for half the fuel of a small turbojet while being the “most silent propulsion system in the skies.”

UCLA materials scientists have developed a class of optical material that controls how heat radiation is directed from an object. Similar to the way overlapping blinds direct the angle of visible light coming through a window, the breakthrough involves utilizing a special class of materials that manipulates how thermal radiation travels through such materials.

Recently published in Science, the advance could be used to improve the efficiency of energy-conversion systems and enable more effective sensing and detection technologies.

“Our goal was to show that we could effectively beam thermal radiation —the heat all objects emanate as electromagnetic waves —over broad wavelengths to the same direction,” said study leader Aaswath Raman, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering. “This advance offers new capabilities for a range of technologies that depend on the ability to control the flows of heat in the form of thermal radiation. This includes imaging and sensing applications that rely on thermal sources or detecting them, as well as energy applications such as solar heating, waste heat recovery and radiative cooling, where restricting the directionality of heat flow can improve performance. ”.