It's Good News on Tuesday! We hope everyone had a great Labor Day weekend!
This Tuesday we talk about:
What are anti-solar panels?
Small-Scale Nuclear Power for Commercial Ship Propulsion (Video)
Carbon offsets with bp
Total SE and Macquarie Group 2 GW floating wind farms
Samsung Obtains ABS Design Certification for Natural Gas Liquefaction
Image Credit: Oil Price
Solar panels are great at producing energy in sunny, daytime conditions, but what about at night? The new anti-solar panels don’t use heat from the sun for electricity. Instead, they capture heat radiated by the Earth as the temperature outside cools down at night. A thermoelectric generator then produces electricity through the Seebeck Effect, where the “difference in temperature in two different conductors or semiconductors results in a difference between their voltages, creating an electric potential.”
Currently, a square meter of panels generates 2.2 watts with no external energy source. Instead of absorbing sunlight, the new cells generate power by emitting light - the current goes in the opposite direction. Anti-solar panels could even work around the clock, if they were turned away from the sun. The new anti-solar panels could produce 50 watts per square meter.
Anti-solar is still new, in its very early stages were solar was decades ago. They could even be combined with cooling systems, sending the heat into anti-solar panels to generate electricity instead of venting it to the atmosphere.
Bill Gates is bringing a new initiative to adapt nuclear technology to maritime propulsion. Thermal storage along with a 345MW liquid sodium cooled reactor could be the future.
The new group Gates is supporting is working on reactors that use spent nuclear fuel rods as their main energy source, keeping the cost of fuel low. Thermal storage increase cost effectiveness, allowing energy can be stored, even during a shutdown. Heat-of-fusion storage could provide large scale propulsion.
The 345MW technology as well as a radiation-free fusion thermal power are being researched. Some ocean routes would be suitable for this technology, while for security reasons, others may not. A ship with a 345MW reactor could “sail in a convoy of 4 to 5-ships to which it supplies propulsive electrical power.”
If micro-reactors and thermal storage are of interest, the original article is much more detailed and includes an excellent video.
Image Credit: bp
Microsoft and Google are pledging to go carbon negative, along with many other large companies around the world. Carbon offsets will play a large part in that, but how do we fulfill these new carbon credits?
CORE Carbon is a platform that could provide money for families, trusts, and non-profits for maintaining trees on their land. The app makes it possible to determine how much income they could generate in the carbon market. According to Nacho Gimenez, bp Ventures managing director, “The conservation and protection of forests is vital for combatting climate change. We cannot take forests for granted. This is a real step forward, both for our ambition to help the world get to net zero and to protect the environment for generations to come.”
Image Credit: gCaptain
Total SE and Macquarie Group’s green bank are planning 2 gigawatts in floating wind farms off South Korea. Total’s plans for huge wind parks, much larger than current are helping reduce the cost of curbing emissions as companies reduce their carbon footprint. The first 500-megawatt farm is planned to start construction by the end of 2023.
Total didn’t disclose funding at this point, but it is not the only investment they’ve made recently: “Total has also stepped up spending on renewable energy more broadly, with investments this year in large solar developments in India and Qatar, a giant wind farm in the North Sea, and growth in clean power in Spain and France. The company aims to have stakes in at least 25 gigawatts of renewable generation capacity in 2025, up from more than 5 gigawatts currently.”
Image Credit: The Maritime Executive
“ABS issued a design certification to Samsung Heavy Industries for its Natural Gas Liquefaction Cycle technology. According to Samsung, it is a first for the shipbuilding industry obtaining the Detailed Design Approval from ABS.”
This is a process that cools gas to -160 degrees Celsius or lower to store and transport natural gas in a liquid state. This is done via a refrigerant at room temperature. The design will need to be performed by advanced engineering companies. This new method using methane and nitrogen lowers the cost of liquefaction by as much as 13 percent.
Smile, its Good News Tuesday! :)