This will all change, of course, once AI – Artificial Intelligence – has matured to the point where you don’t have to rely on browsing. But by that time you will be retired, and a robot will be changing your adult diaper.
In the meantime, resign yourself to the fact that mere humans like us must complete the browsing task.
Speaking of which, it is mere humans that produce one of my favorite feeds … the MIT Download (https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/).
I browse each Download, partly for fun, and partly to pick up the odd tidbit of interest. For example, a recent Download featured the following item, excerpts of which appear below.
TIP: Train your favorite librarian to create a custom download specific to your areas of interest. If you don’t have a librarian available for this task, contact us at research@JeanSteinhardtConsulting.com. We can help, because our intelligence is all natural.
///////
MIT scientists are building batteries
out of sulfur to store energy from renewables. In fact, they want to make
them so cheaply that they can be used to store a whole summer of solar power
for use in winter. Our own James Temple has the skinny.
|
MIT’s Yet-Ming Chiang has launched a flow battery startup aimed at making renewable energy competitive with fossil fuels.
by James Temple
October 3, 2017
[Excerpts]
MIT professor Yet-Ming Chiang has launched his latest storage bet, a flow battery startup designed to make renewable energy directly competitive with fossil fuels.
The scale of the company's ambition—and challenge—is telegraphed in the name: Baseload Renewables. The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup's stated mission is to produce batteries that are capable of producing reliable grid power from renewable sources around the clock, and cost at least five times less than where lithium-ion batteries are likely to plateau.
That’s approaching the price point where the idea of “seasonal storage” becomes economically feasible—meaning arrays of these batteries could store enough solar power during times of excess generation through the summer to continue meeting regional demand through the long, cloudy winter, Chiang says.
Baseload is housed at the Engine, MIT's new accelerator, which recently provided the company nearly $2 million in funding.
Baseload isn't providing many technical details at this stage, but the key to its low cost is relying on sulfur. That's because the material is very abundant and energy-dense, Chiang says. Indeed, it's a waste product of oil and gas production that costs as little as 10 cents per kilogram.
"Based on the charge stored per dollar, sulfur was more than a factor of 10 better than the next best thing," says Chiang, a materials science professor who previously cofounded lithium-ion battery startups A123 Systems, 24M, and three other startups.
Better, cheaper, longer-lasting storage technologies are crucial for enabling renewable sources to meet a greater portion of energy demand, and significantly lower greenhouse gas emissions.
For all the hopeful commentary and coverage of wind and solar prices nearing parity with fossil fuels, the truth is it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. Because the sun doesn't always shine and wind doesn't always blow, those sources can't be used as reliably and flexibly as coal or natural gas unless they're backed up by fossil fuel plants, balanced out through demand-response programs or long-distance transmission lines, or paired with some form of abundant storage. The options for the latter are generally limited to cheap pumped hydroelectric storage—which is tightly geographically restricted since it requires a pair of water reservoirs—or batteries and similar technologies that are still too expensive, short-lived, or both.
The lithium-ion batteries that run our smartphones and electric vehicles are increasingly being used in limited ways to balance renewable generation. But many battery experts believe that their high cost and limited life cycles place hard limits on how big a role they can play on the grid.
Flow batteries, on the other hand, can be designed with a very high energy-to-power ratio, which means they can hold a lot of energy, and continue delivering it over long periods, says Michael Aziz, a professor of materials and energy technologies at Harvard University.
source: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/608962/serial-battery-entrepreneurs-new-venture-tackles-clean-energys-biggest-problem/?utm_source=MIT+Technology+Review&utm_campaign=bba04c5941-The_Download&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_997ed6f472-bba04c5941-156366361
///////
No comments:
Post a Comment