New Tech News

• 7/25/2013   CSP Key Players Focus on the Desert
  
  Spain is still the world's leader, but the US currently has the largest CSP in the world and is building 4 more over 250MW in Cali and AZ and have 4GW of additional capacity planned (but only 1 with heat storage!. With only 7.7GW of PV capacity installed total, we may be seeing the new direction that solar is going in the US.
  
  
• 7/9/2013   CarLab Mixes Natural Gas and Gasoline...
  
  CarLab's conversion is ~3x cheaper than a battery and ~25% cleaner than pure gasoline, but storage is under pressure and downright dangerous for a large fast-moving metal object. Boom! Why Prof. Tim Zhao of HK UST told me they were NOT considering gases as a possible replacement for gasoline, only liquid and aiming for fuel cells.
  
  
• 5/30/2013   Elon Musk Has Plans For A New, Magical Form Of Transportation Called The 'Hyperloop'
  
  Win or lose, this is how all billionaires should think all the time. What better way to invest your excessive funds than on technology that will leapfrog mankind into the future? As an American, building the world's most expensive and slowest bullet trains years after every other developed country is about as impressive as building the 4th tallest skyscraper in the world to show how we're not phased by terrorists.
• 4/25/2013   In Two-Way Charging, Electric Cars Begin to Earn Money From the Grid
  
  These cars provide part of the energy storage needed the intermittency of solar or wind energy. Currently, on a cloudy day or when the wind dies down the system reverts to coal or gas, needed to be constantly running as a backup, but with this system it could sneak a few kilowatts from everybody's cars to keep the grid producing. It also incentivizes people to drive less because they earn money when their car is plugged in.
• 5/1/2013   Cross-Country Solar Plane Expedition Set for Takeoff
  
  Bertrand Piccard, hot-air balloonist and enlightened philosopher, has finally completed his solar plane to cross the US and later the world. Watch his TED Talk. Its monocrystalline panels power batteries that can keep it in the air 24 hours a day at about 45mph. The one other application mentioned in the article is to keep drones from having to refuel: killer solar robots from the sky!
• 4/23/2013   19-Year-Old Student Plans to Clean Up the Ocean
  
  After watching a documentary on the pacific garbage patch last year, I was pretty sure that we have absolutely no chance of preventing plastic from continuing to pile up. It's not great to solely rely on tech to dial down our environmental damage, but it's nice to know this kid created a potentially effective cleaning system that could finish the task in 5 years.
• 9/25/2012   1st Geothermal Plant in Vietnam Gets Approved
  
  This sounds great, but Hot Dry Rock geothermal has never been shown to work and I've had a source from the company that passed on this project, Ormat, that says it is dead on arrival. Apparently the problem is that too much of the water injected into these 3-4 km deep wells dissipates into the ground instead of being pumped back out, yielding uneconomical efficiencies.
• 1/29/2013   Has Belgium cracked the problem of storing Wind Power?
  
  Belgium is building a pumped-water electricity storage island to store wind power when the breeze dies down.