Energy

It’s definitely a good thing that so many dog owners scoop their pooches’ poop, but what happens to that waste after it’s been bagged and discarded isn’t so great... usually it ends up fermenting in a landfill, where it poses a health risk, attracts vermin, and releases harmful methane gas into the atmosphere. Pickling it and turning it into plant fertilizer is one option, but American conceptual artist Matthew Mazzotta would like to see it fed into digesters that use it to produce methane gas, which is then used for fuel. To that end, he has created a sort of demonstration project/art installation called Park Spark, at a dog park in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It features a lamp that lights the park at night, powered by nothing but canine doo-doo. Read More

There’s no arguing that batteries are an essential element of today’s electronics landscape. Without them our mobile devices would be a lot less mobile and we might still be crank starting our cars. The explosion in mobile electronic devices enabled by batteries and miniaturization has a major downside in the form of discarded batteries, the majority of which contain toxic heavy metals. Chemists have now discovered a new way to pass electrons back and forth between two molecules that could see the development of organic batteries that are lightweight and work without the need for toxic heavy metals. Read More

The size and efficiency of current photovoltaic (PV) cells means most people would probably have to cover large areas of their rooftops with such cells to even come close to meeting all their electricity needs. Using carbon nanotubes, MIT chemical engineers have now found a way to concentrate solar energy 100 times more than a regular PV cell. Such nanotubes could form antennas that capture and focus light energy, potentially allowing much smaller and more powerful solar arrays. Read More

One of the problems with harvesting sunlight and converting it into stored energy is that the sun’s rays can be highly destructive to many materials, leading to a gradual degradation of many systems developed to do just that. Once again, researchers have turned to nature for a solution. Plants constantly break down their light-capturing molecules and reassemble them from scratch, so the basic structures that capture the sun’s energy are, in effect, always brand new. By imitating this strategy MIT scientists have created a novel set of self-assembling molecules and used them to create a photovoltaic cell that repairs itself. Read More

For a lot of people, the electricity bill is an unwanted piece of paper printed with angular graphs and big dollar signs, but with the rising cost of power in today's energy-conscious society it's becoming more important to understand exactly what all those lines and numbers mean. Microsoft's Hohm website aims to make sense of the jargon by providing personalized data on consumers' home energy consumption, and offering recommendations on how to save energy and reduce those bills. Read More

Dark energy has been described as the greatest puzzle of our universe. This mysterious force, discovered in 1998, is pushing the universe apart at ever-increasing speeds and astronomers have now devised a new method of measuring it. Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers were able to take advantage of a giant magnifying lens in space – a massive cluster of galaxies – to narrow in on the nature of dark energy. Their calculations, when combined with data from other methods, significantly increase the accuracy of dark energy measurements and may eventually lead to an explanation of what the elusive phenomenon really is. Read More

Supercapacitors, also called electric double layer capacitors (EDLCs) or ultracapacitors, are electrochemical capacitors that have an unusually high energy density when compared to common capacitors. They bridge the gap between batteries, which offer high energy densities but are slow, and “conventional” electrolytic capacitors, which are fast but have low energy densities. An international team of researchers are reporting the development of a mirco-supercapacitor with remarkable properties that has the potential to power mobile electronics, wireless sensor networks, biomedical implants, RFID tags and embedded microsensors, among other devices. Read More

The largest wind farm in the Southern Hemisphere will be built in Australia at Macarthur near Hamilton, 260km west of Melbourne, Victoria. Comprising 140 Vestas V112-3.0 MW wind turbine generators, the 420 MW Macarthur Wind Farm will have the capacity to power more than 220,000 average Victorian homes and abate more than 1.7 million tons of greenhouse gases every year – the equivalent of taking more than 420,000 cars off the road each year. Read More

The amount of power drawn from the electricity grid can vary greatly at different times of the day. It usually peaks in the early evening for a couple of hours after the mass exodus from school and work, while short-lived spikes are also common after major televised sporting events, during commercial breaks and in the morning hours. This can cause headaches for energy companies as they struggle to match supply with demand. But researchers have now found a way to manage these short-lived draws on the electricity grid far that could halve the fuel needed. Read More