Category: Renewables

Energy Storage and the Future I had the pleasure this past week of attending the ARPA-E Summit in Washington, D.C. The ARPA-E Summit is always for me one of the most interesting programs on the industry calendar. Although the Summit focuses primarily on highlighting new energy technologies, much of its program is devoted to discussing the future of energy and the future of the economy more generally. These discussions are often more interesting than the individual new technologies themselves. This year was no exception. Several speakers and panelists talked about the future of microgrids, distributed generation and distributed storage. Although there was plenty of good news about progress in those technologies and the market opportunities relating to them, the good news was tempered, as usual, by many bemoaning the high price of those new technologies and the need for utilities to move slowly in adopting them. A new insight […]

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From backyard tinkerers to big corporations, inventors have been struggling to find a way to store solar, wind and other renewable energy so it can furnish electricity when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. Now California is offering businesses a big incentive for success—contracts that the utility industry estimates could total as much as $3 billion for successful, large-scale electricity-storage systems. Starting this year, big utilities that do business here must begin adding enough battery systems or other technology so that by 2024 they can store 1,325-megawatts worth of electricity—nearly 70 times the amount that the handful of mostly experimental systems in the state store now. Regulators are also requiring municipal utilities to buy or lease energy-storage equipment. The storage systems California wants don’t exist on such a scale, so the new rules amount to a big bet—paid for by utility customers—that creating demand will […]

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Nearly 1,000 of the world’s preeminent fusion researchers from 45 countries gathered last week in San Diego to discuss the latest advances in fusion energy. The 24th International Atomic Energy Agency Fusion Energy Conference, organized by the IAEA in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Energy and General Atomics, aims to “provide a forum for the discussion of key physics and technology issues as well as innovative concepts of direct relevance to fusion as a source of nuclear energy.”   Those in attendance in San Diego included Nobel Prize-winning physicist Burton Richter; Physicist Steven Cowley, CEO of the United Kingdom’s Atomic Energy Authority; Frances Chen, a plasma physicist and UCLA professor emeritus who wrote the book An Indispensable Truth: How Fusion Power Can Save the Planet; and keynote speaker William Brinkman, director of the Office of Science in the US Department of Energy. […]

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If you want to beat carbon, it’s the only way to do it unless you change the chemical charts." So says Jack Robertson about the prospects for making ammonia the world’s go-to liquid fuel and renewable energy storage medium. Robertson is chairman and CEO of Light Water Inc., an ammonia energy storage startup. The carbon he mentions refers, of course, to the major carbon-based fuels of oil, natural gas and coal that provide more than 80 percent of the world’s energy. The charts he mentions refers to the periodic table of elements , a listing of the basic elements of the universe which are about as likely to change their properties as the proverbial leopard is to change his […]

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Fusion energy experiments at Lawrence Livermore Labs have finally produced more energy than they consumed, a huge step forward in turning fusion into a viable source of energy. The researchers, led by physicist Omar Hurricane, described the achievement as important but said much more work is needed before fusion can become a viable energy source. Hurricane said that the reaction did not produce self-heating nuclear fusion, known as ignition, that would be needed for any fusion power plant. Researchers have faced daunting scientific and engineering challenges in trying to develop nuclear fusion – the process that powers stars including our sun – for use by humankind. “Really for the first time anywhere, we’ve gotten more energy out of this fuel than was put into the fuel. And that’s quite unique. And that’s kind of a major turning point, in a lot of our minds,” Hurricane told reporters. “I think a lot […]

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U.S. scientists replicated the power of the sun, if only for a fleeting moment, creating a miniature star that has rekindled hopes that nuclear fusion could one day offer a source of cheap and boundless energy on Earth. In experiments done at a U.S. Department of Energy laboratory last fall and published in a scientific journal Wednesday, researchers blasted the world’s most powerful laser at a target the size of a small pea. It triggered a fusion reaction that unleashed a vast amount of energy—for a fraction of a second. "For the first time anywhere, we’ve gotten more energy out of the fuel than what was put into the fuel" when using this technique, said Omar Hurricane, physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and lead author of the study in the journal Nature. The research is a long way from achieving what’s known as ignition, where the overall […]

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