Scientists Produce Cheap Hydrogen from Rust and Sunlight

Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have managed to accurately characterize the iron oxide nanostructures to be used in producing hydrogen at the “lowest known possible cost”.

The news could make is possible to achieve the idea that water and some nano-structured iron oxide is all it takes to produce bubbles of solar hydrogen.  Photoelectrochemical cells (PECs) are devices able of splitting water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen in a single operation using only solar radiation.

The French are feeling pretty good.  Michael Grätzel, Director of the Laboratory of Photonics and Interfaces (LPI) at EPFL and inventor of dye-sensitized photoelectrochemical cells said, “As a matter of fact, we’ve already discovered this precious ‘chalice’. Today we have just reached an important milestone on the path that will lead us forward to profitable industrial applications.”

The peer-reviewed paper appeared this week in Nature Materials.  The standout point of the paper is they have managed to accurately characterize the iron oxide nanostructures to be used in a water splitting operation.

Scott C. Warren, first author of the article said, “The whole point of our approach is to use an exceptionally abundant, stable and cheap material: rust.”

The press release isn’t especially complete, but hints a major point of the groups progress may have been Kevin Sivula, one of the collaborators at the LPI laboratory, presenting a prototype electrode based on the same principle last year. Its efficiency was such that gas bubbles emerged as soon as it was under a light stimulus. That lit off realizing the potential of such cheap electrodes was demonstrated.  Still, there is still room for improvement.
 
The researchers were able to precisely characterize the movement of the electrons through the cauliflower-looking nanostructures forming the iron oxide particles, laid on electrodes during the manufacturing process by using transmission electron microscopy (TEM) techniques.

Grätzel explains, “These measures have helped us understand the reason why we get performance differences depending on the electrodes manufacturing process.”

Then comparing several electrodes, whose manufacturing method is now mastered, the scientists were able to identify the “champion” structure. A 10×10 cm prototype has been produced and its effectiveness is in line with expectations. The next step will be the development of the industrial process to large-scale manufacturing. A European funding and the Swiss federal government could provide support for this last part.

The long-term goal is to produce hydrogen in an environmentally friendly and especially, a competitive way. Grätzel said, “Current methods, in which a conventional photovoltaic cell is coupled to an electrolyzer for producing hydrogen, costs €15 per kilo at their cheapest. We’re aiming at a €5 charge per kilo.”

Source: http://actu.epfl.ch/

My dream is to make renewable energy affordable for all: Steven Chu

Steven Chu was awarded the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics jointly with compatriot William D Phillips and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji of France for "developing methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light". Chu is now better known as US President Barack Obama's former energy secretary, a post he resigned from in April to return to Stanford University. An advocate of sustainable development and renewable energy, Chu speaks to Narayani Ganesh on the sidelines of the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings with young researchers, 22 of who are from India. Excerpts:

What kind of solar energy business model would you suggest for India?

Solar energy being too expensive is not something one has to worry about. On a global scale, the Chinese made solar panels are cheaper but the difference is due to import duties pricing, shipping charges, taxes, licensing fee and so on. In a context where international prices are coming down and the technology is getting better and more reliable, you have to be concerned about installation cost and licensing fee. In the US, it also depends on where you are located. For example, the southern parts get more sunshine and in 10 years, you could get solar power generated at 8 cents an hour and that is not expensive.

Won't the utility companies — what we call electricity boards — be up in arms over consumers generating their own electricity on their rooftops?

In order for utility companies to be part of the solution you have to make them part of the business. It means if you have rooftop space at home, you can hire someone to install the panels from the utility company. In the US more and more solar projects are done this way — a company says you don't have to pay for anything; just pay for the electricity. Have a contract for five or ten years at a certain rate (about the same as normal electricity costs) — you don't have to bear the capital costs nor worry about maintenance. If utility companies are part of business, it would be good as they can borrow money at lower rates. It is a new business, a good business where they can make money.

What about storing solar energy?

As the technology gets better, energy storage too is possible, in batteries in your home. It is inexpensive — in 15 years maximum you can have storage inside home where it does not get up to 40 degrees Celsius. Utility companies, if they have to build a building to hold all batteries, will have to bear high costs. All they need is space. Which means they can offer you electricity at lower cost if they have local storage. So the consumer does not have to worry about inflation or equipment but just pay for the electricity. That is the business model I have been talking about to electrical companies this past year. If they know they can make money from solar energy generation on someone's roof, they would be most interested. And with batteries in homes, you would not have to worry about blackouts.

You gave up your post as Obama's energy secretary. Do you think scientists should stay away from politics?

I neither like nor dislike politics. It's just that I needed to get back to my research as a practicing scientist.

Obama has said he is concerned about climate change. But the US has a poor green track record...

He is certainly concerned, but the Congress has to pass the laws. We do need to change agricultural practices, reduce carbon emissions and ocean acidification. We need another green revolution but without the drawbacks of pesticides. High nutrition is important and to achieve that, we could explore safe GM food. My dream is to make renewable more affordable.

Source: http://economictimes.indiatimes.com 

Windiest or Sunniest Sites Not Necessarily Best for Wind and Solar

Setting up wind and solar farms in places where the wind blows mightiest or the sun shines brightest isn’t the wisest move if you’re looking to reap the most social benefits, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found.

They estimate that the environmental, health, and climate benefits of wind turbines and solar panels vary dramatically by location, ranging from US $10 to $100 per megawatt-hour (in 2010 dollars) of renewable energy generated. The results appeared last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Using a calculation that takes into account the type of conventional energy generators that wind and solar displace, the team was able to assess the amount of damage from carbon dioxide and other air pollutants—sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter—that renewables actually prevent.

Sites with the highest renewable energy output don’t necessarily give the greatest social benefit, says Kyle Siler-Evans, a recent engineering and public policy graduate who helped perform the analysis. So while Arizona gets much more sun, a solar panel in Ohio offers 15 times as many health and environmental benefits because it replaces particularly polluting coal power plants in a higher population-density area. In fact, sunny Arizona is probably the worst location for a solar panel if you want to improve air quality and human health, the team found.

By the same reasoning, wind turbines in California are less beneficial because they replace relatively clean natural-gas-fired plants. By contrast, a turbine in less-windy West Virginia prevents 33 times as much health and environmental damage as one in California by reducing air pollutants. However, 30 percent of existing U.S. wind capacity is installed in California and Texas, while less than 5 percent is in Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginia.

The researchers at CMU, in Pittsburgh, looked at the hourly electricity generated by a 3-megawatt wind turbine at 33 000 locations and by a 1-kilowatt solar panel at 900 locations around the country. Separately, they calculated the health, environmental, and climate damage from 1400 fossil fuel plants for each hour from 2009 through 2011. To do this, they combined hourly plant-emissions data with a dollar value assigned to the damage from a metric ton of each pollutant. (For the dollar values, they used numbers that others had already generated. A social cost of $18.14 per metric ton of CO₂ came from an interagency working group report from the U.S. government, while the cost per metric ton from air pollutants came from a model developed by Yale University researchers.)

Finally, by combining the hourly renewable energy generation data with the emissions data, the researchers estimated the damage reduction achieved by replacing conventional generators with wind and solar.

Federal subsidies today provide incentives for builders to install wind and solar farms that produce the greatest amount of energy. Taking into account the location-specific benefits of wind and solar would be a wiser investment of government dollars, says Inês Azevedo, a professor of engineering and public policy at CMU. “Instead of valuing kilowatt-hours, [if] the policy mechanism…looked at metric tons of carbon dioxide avoided and health and environment damages avoided, we’d find that wind is oversubsidized in California and undersubsidized in Pennsylvania,” she says.

“This is a really nice way of rethinking our priorities in terms of where to deploy renewable technologies,” says Steven Davis, professor of earth system science at the University of California, Irvine. Davis adds that the analysis is robust, detailed, and geographically comprehensive, and he hopes that it catches the eye of policymakers.

Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/

World Future Energy Summit (WFES)

On an expanse of desert land in the United Arab Emirates, about 11 miles (7 kilometers) away from the bustling capital city of Abu Dhabi, there is a lonely outcropping of peculiar buildings -- a work in progress.

It’s called Masdar City, and it could represent the future of green living if all goes according to plan. This mini-metropolis -- where cars are prohibited and buildings are designed according to strict energy-efficiency rules -- is intended to generate almost no waste or refuse and be virtually free of air pollution.

Charles Ebinger, the director of the Energy Security Initiative at the Brookings Institution, has been to this experimental village. “You’re whisked to Masdar City on futuristic trains with no conductors, all on magnetic strips,” he said. “All the buildings there are using renewable energy. And they have channeled the airflow so the winds come through the streets in such a way that even in the dead of summer, it creates a cooling effect that obviates the need for a backup source of cooling energy.”

Amazing as it sounds, Masdar City is at risk of becoming a high-profile failure. Only a few hundred researchers and students live in this urban oasis, which was planned to house tens of thousands of people. An ambitious layout, including homes, businesses and recreational areas, has not yet materialized. The project’s initial 2016 completion date has been pushed back by at least 10 years.

This situation is indicative of the UAE’s strange relationship with renewable energy technology. The government is serious about green research and development -- and keen to publicize it. But in fact, this oil-rich gulf state has some major glitches to address before it can take its place as a global leader in green energy.

Meeting of Minds

The UAE makes no bones about its intention to become a hub for green energy enthusiasts around the world. This week, for the sixth year in a row, Abu Dhabi hosted a global summit to attract some of the best thinkers and businesses in the field of renewable energy.

The World Future Energy Summit, or WFES, ran from Tuesday to Thursday; over 30,000 people were in attendance. Keynote speakers included such luminaries as French President Francois Hollande, Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, and Abu Dhabi’s own Crown Prince, Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

The Emirates are a big oil producer, the seventh-largest in the world, according to the International Energy Agency: they pumped upwards of 3 million barrels per day in 2011, more than Iraq. Dimitra Ampela of Reed Exhibitions, which organized the WFES, does not see a paradox there. In fact, she said it’s precisely the Emirates’ history that makes the country well-suited to playing a leading role in renewable energy.

“UAE’s commitment to renewable energy and sustainability traces back to the late president and founder of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, who was adamant about conservation and encouraged the reduction of the UAE’s environmental footprint,” she said.

The summit attendees represented about 150 countries and 514 registered businesses, which set up booths in a massive convention hall and took the opportunity to build new connections.

“The atmosphere is very electric,” said Scott Burger, who traveled to Abu Dhabi to represent GTM Research, a division of the Boston-based Greentech Media, a clean technology research and media organization.

The paradox of building a center for Big Green Energy in one of the capitals of Big Oil was not lost on him; he noted that oil giants like Exxon (NYSE:XOM), Shell (LON:RDSA) and Statoil (NYSE:STO) were out in force at the event.

“There are some interesting dynamics on display. Given the deep relationships that many oil majors have with the Abu Dhabi government, they have some of the most prominent booths at the WFES. This is an interesting juxtaposition against the booths of solar, biomass and wind companies that are also present,” Burger said.

That oil companies would dominate the convention floor should come as no surprise; hydrocarbons were essentially the enabler for this event. Because of oil revenues, the country enjoys a friendly relationship with the West, its status as a major commercial hub, and a GDP-per-capita of about $48,000 -- the 12th highest in the world, just after the United States. Oil fuels the state-sponsored research that has made the UAE a pioneer in green energy.

Negative Energy

The strong dependence on hydrocarbon fuels leaves the UAE in a bind. The country actually has to import natural gas, and demand has outpaced domestic production since 2007. Oil, on the other hand, is plentiful -- but government officials aren’t fooled by the impressive profits. They are scrambling to diversify in order to avoid falling victim to market volatility, fluctuating prices and geopolitical conflicts in other oil-producing states.

And when it comes to renewable energy, the UAE may be impressive in terms of its commitment to research and development -- but in terms of performance, it’s got a long way to go. The tiny state is certainly not leading the way in terms of reducing its carbon footprint.

Carbon dioxide emissions per capita are sky-high at 22.6 metric tons, according to the latest data from the World Bank. That’s higher than any Western country -- but to be fair, much of that output can be blamed on factors somewhat beyond the UAE’s control: its role as a major oil and gas producer, its costly need to desalinate seawater, and its high-traffic international airports in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

That’s why the UAE set a very low bar for itself in terms of renewable energy generation. The government is aiming for 7 percent of domestic power to come from renewable energy by 2030. By comparison, the European Union is shooting for 20 percent by 2020.

In large part, this sluggishness can be blamed on heavy government subsidies for the wrong kind of energy.

“The UAE is in a strange situation because they subsidize oil, gas and electricity so heavily for their domestic citizens that demand is spiraling out of control,” said Ebinger of the Brookings Institute. “There’s no demand to conserve gas and electricity because it’s so cheap, and it’s eating into the oil and gas that the country could export for profit.”

It would make sense to cut the subsidies that effectively cheapen its hydrocarbon output, but here political concerns outweigh economic ones. Recent Arab Spring revolutions in other Middle Eastern countries have spooked public officials in the UAE, a federation of seven monarchies in which average citizens have little say in the policies that govern their daily lives.

Vast wealth, and the fuel subsidies they enable, have so far kept the public complacent.

“[The government is] just so fearful of ending the subsidy in fear of a political backlash,” said Ebinger. “They really are sitting on a time bomb.”

A Way Out

If hydrocarbon subsidies are here to stay, the UAE’ s only way to generate more energy profits at home is to find new ways of generating power. But renewable sources like wind and solar just can’t be scaled up fast enough to meet growing demand, which will only accelerate with rapid population growth.

“You have to distinguish between research and commercialization,” Burger of GTM Research said. “What makes renewable energy technologies so difficult is the price it takes to scale them.”

For the UAE, nuclear energy presents a viable alternative. The government has already ordered four nuclear plants from South Korea, to be installed in Abu Dhabi. One is already under construction and could become operational by 2017, and educational initiatives are underway to train a new generation of students in nuclear reactor operations.

That leaves the market with little incentive to invest in cleaner, safer alternatives like solar, wind and biomass. So the government is footing the bill for research in that arena, crossing its fingers in the hopes that the risk will pay off.

“The market is simply not competitive, and renewable energy is very cost intensive,” said Karim Elgendy, the founder and general coordinator of Carboun, an advocacy organization promoting energy sustainability in the Middle East.

“With energy prices so low in the UAE, you can’t sell renewable energy at a reasonable price to make a profit, and you’re not going to invest in it. So instead of liberating the market and letting electricity prices go wherever they would go, the government takes it on. That’s why the country’s renewable energy initiatives are almost exclusively government-led projects.”

The UAE has the resources to fund these sorts of ventures; it also has the long-term incentive. But without the market on its side, the monarchy is walking a lonely road. 

The Global Stage

If Masdar City and the WFES are any indication, the UAE is certainly eager to put on a good show. Both these ventures are funded by Masdar, a subsidiary of the government-owned Mubadala Development Company. Masdar has never been shy about funding travel and accommodation for renewable energy buffs, public relations professionals and the press. The idea is that these investments will eventually pay off -- and judging by the deals closed at this week’s WFES, the strategy is working. 

Masdar inked a deal with the kingdom of Jordan, laying a framework for future cooperation on renewable energy projects. France also negotiated a stronger partnership with the UAE-owned company, building on years of collaboration on green projects.

Down in the booths, the deal-making was just as fervent. A handful of companies even received prizes for their work in renewable energy, including Ceres, a Boston-based non-governmental organization that works with investors and policymakers in Europe and the United States to advocate for sustainable energy practices.

Ceres received $1.5 million when it won the Zayed Future Energy Prize in the NGO category. Company spokesperson Peyton Fleming said the funds would be used to strengthen its ongoing initiatives.

“Our perspective is that you need both stronger government policies and strong private action from companies and investors,” he said. “Unless companies and investors are investing trillions of dollars in this space in coming years, and until that amount of capital is moved into the clean energy economy, we are still going to be wrestling with rising greenhouse gas emissions.”

That’s a philosophy the UAE can certainly relate to. And despite formidable challenges the government faces in the field of renewable energy generation at home, there’s no denying the progress the small Gulf country has made.

Masdar City, that metropolis in limbo, can now boast a fully operational school and research facility called the Masdar Institute for Science and Technology.

“The UAE has invested a lot in the Masdar Institute for Science and Technology, which has an extensive renewable energy lab and is collaborating with Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” said Elgendy, who has visited the facility.

The green businesses and clean-energy homes may be missing from the scene, but research and development are flourishing.

That’s where the UAE has made the most impact so far, and where it still leads much of the world in terms of committed resources. Polluted air, oil rigs and half-finished projects notwithstanding, the UAE has at least proven its dedication to engineering the technologies that the rest of us may need in the decades to come.

Veterans Memorial Park and Solar LED Street Lights

TOWN OF NIAGARA – The roadways in Veterans Memorial Park, 7000 Lockport Road, are brighter this holiday season, after the installation this month of 25 solar-powered LED streetlights by the New York Power Authority and the Town of Niagara.

The new lights are powered by energy generated by the sun during the day and then transmitted as much-needed light during the night at the previously unlighted park.

Town Supervisor Steven C. Richards said the lighting was paid for with money from the Power Authority’s Renewable Energy Plan, established in 2008 to help create a pathway to commercialization of renewable energy technology as it emerges.

LED streetlights use light-emitting diodes, which have helped to revolutionize many lighting applications and made it possible to build dramatically thinner television sets. LEDs now provide light for remote controls, light-up clocks and watches, tell when appliances are turned on, and are ideal for miniature lighting of holiday displays.

They often come in tiny packages, but they produce a large amount of light.

Their useful lifetime is thousands of hours longer than that of standard incandescent bulbs.

Source: http://www.buffalonews.com