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First utility scale battery storage system combines several technologies, working together.

The typical situation now, as Philip Alexander Hiersemenzel of Younicos points out, is that coal or natural gas must fill in, and it must continuously be running in order to do so when needed, so Germany must essentially “import grid stability” and export excess coal power.

That’s where Younicos steps in.

One Younicos battery system with 100 MW** of capacity can replace 1 coal-fired power plant used for spinning reserve. 2 GW of Younicos batteries, providing ~1 hour of backup capacity, could replace all thermal power plants in Germany that are used for frequency regulation, resulting in 60% renewables and taking out about 25 conventional power plants.
The Younicos system uses Samsung lithium-ion batteries, sodium-sulfur batteries, and vanadium redox flow batteries. But the special sauce that Younicos brings to this hybrid battery system is the software. Developed over the course of 8 years, this is no simple software. Philip noted that Younicos has tested dozens of different lithium-ion batteries to choose the best for its needs (we saw a case full of maybe two dozen different lithium-ion batteries they had tested) but that each of them is complicated and getting them to function very well and last long as frequency regulators is a very challenging matter. Philip noted that as different as the various lithium-ion batteries looked, they were that different on the inside. They looked very different.

Younicos has ~50 software engineers on staff as well as numerous chemical engineers and mechanical engineers. In total, it currently employs ~120 people full time.
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/01/younicos/

New Graphene Compound Could “Revolutionise” Clean Tech

The beauty of GraphExeter is the combination of the new and exotic — graphene — with a widely used, commercially available material. Also called iron chloride, ferric chloride is a common industrial material used for copper etching, sewage treatment, and water purification among other things.

The Next Step For Clean Tech, Via Graphene

So, here’s where things get interesting. It’s been two years since the development of GraphExeter was announced, and the folks over at Exeter haven’t been cooling their heels since then.

Apparently the team was not initially aware that GraphExeter was particularly durable, partly because ferric chloride has a tendency to melt at room temperature. Also it dissolves easily in water, which is a problem.

In other words, you can’t use ferric chloride all by itself, because it falls apart when exposed to air and weather.

When the team started putting GraphExeter through some stress tests, they found that graphene provides the stability that ferric chloride lacks. The results showed that their new graphene compound could even beat out indium tin oxide (ITO), which is commonly used as a conductive material in solar cells, LEDs, and other clean tech applications.

Specifically, they found that GraphExeter could hold up under high humidity, to the tune of 100 percent at room temperature, for 25 days.

They also found that it could withstand temperatures of up to 150 degrees Celsius (that’s 302 degrees Fahrenheit for those of you in the US).

In a vacuum, GraphExeter showed even better results, performing at up to 620 degrees Celsius (1,148 degrees Fahrenheit).

The figure below shows the results of subjecting a GraphExeter sample to heat at room temperature and up. The white scale bar corresponds to five nanometers (a nanometer is one billionth of a meter):

graphene cousin GraphExeter
Results of GraphExeter stress test (courtesy of University of Exeter).
Here’s lead researcher Dr. Monica Craciun enthusing over the results:

By demonstrating its stability to being exposed to both high temperatures and humidity, we have shown that it is a practical and realistic alternative to ITO. This is particularly exciting for the solar panel industry, where the ability to withstand all weathers is crucial.

New Used For Graphene-Enhanced Materials

Did we mention that GraphExeter is transparent? We didn’t? We must have skipped that part in the press materials, but we looked up the study online and we finally put two and two together.

ITO (indium tin oxide) is a transparent material, which makes it ideal for solar cells, LEDs, “smart” windows, and display electronics, but it has a couple of limitations, one major one being its brittleness.

If you can find something to sub in for ITO that’s flexible as well as transparent, and can at least equal ITO in efficiency and cost, then you’re talking transformation.

If you’re interested, the results of the study have just been published at Nature, in the journal Scientific Reports, under the title “Unforeseen high temperature and humidity stability of FeCl3 intercalated few layer graphene.”

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/01/08/new-graphene-compound-could-revolutionise-clean-tech/

A visual tour of the world's CO2 emissions

An “affordable” flow battery technology

An “affordable” flow battery technology is currently under development by researchers at Ann Arbor–based Vinazene Inc, in partnership with Grand Valley State University’s Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center and its Chemistry Department.

The new project — which is funded by a DOE Phase II Small Business Innovation Research grant — is based around the use of proprietary, high-capacity organic electrolytes. The use of these organic electrolytes, rather than relatively expensive metals like vanadium, is what will reportedly allow for greater “affordability” — to date, the barrier to wide-scale use of flow battery technologies has been their relatively high costs.vAnother purported advantage of the use of these proprietary organic electrolytes is the ability to specifically tailor the compounds used for higher solubility (amongst other traits). The Vinazene battery will reportedly have a higher energy density than the more well known vanadium-based systems, owing to this higher solubility.

Based on Vinazene’s website, the researchers involved seem pretty bullish on the technology — but then they often do, don’t they? Still, it sounds like there’s potential there. Perhaps something will come of it.

The researchers mention possible uses in remote military. surveillance, and/or telecommunication sites. Other potential uses include those in greenhouse farming and various types of industrial production facilities.
full story here:
http://cleantechnica.com/2014/12/31/affordable-flow-battery-technology-reportedly-developed-vinazene/

Solar power production doubles in US to 12k GW

By Juan Cole | —

Compared to Germany and Spain, the United States is woefully backward in its development of wind, solar and other renewable sources of energy for electricity generation.

But there is some good news on this front, as CleanTech notes. Utility-scale solar power generation in the United States doubled in the past year, from about 6,000 gigawatt hours in 2013 to 12,000 gigawatt hours in 2014. Utility-scale solar is on the verge of passing the symbolic 1% level of US electricity generation. (Statistics don’t count the contribution of roof-top solar, which is the major form of solar energy in the US, so its actual contribution is much greater). Germany, which is not particularly sunny, generates about 7% of its electricity using solar. Spain gets about 5% of its electricity from solar. The US south and southwest and west is so sunny that it is crazy that the country has neglected this source of power. But that neglect is changing, because the price of solar panels has plummeted in the past 5 years.

Wind energy is also growing rapidly in the US. Iowa now gets 27% of its electricity from wind turbines, and South Dakota is also in that range. Some 9 states get at least 12% of their electricity from wind. These states are Colorado, Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Idaho, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma and Oregon. The rapid progress of wind power (a 24-fold increase since 2001) can be seen in this graph:

Screen Shot 2014-12-06 at 1.16.13 AM

Non-hydro renewables are now 6% or so of the US energy mix, while with hydroelectric power renewables come to 13%. The US is producing about 5.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year, some 16 tons per person– the highest per capita in the major OECD countries. Just 50 US power plants account for almost as much CO2 as the whole country of Germany. Even if you count the CO2 produced in manufacturing and installing them, over their lifetimes wind turbines generate almost no carbon dioxide, and their fuel is free. If the US could get to 30 percent wind power by 2030, it could reduce its carbon production to 40% under 2005 levels.

Wind provides 21% of Spain’s electricity. This EU report notes:

There are now 117.3 GW of installed wind energy capacity in the EU: 110.7 GW onshore and 6.6 GW offshore.

11,159 MW of wind power capacity (worth between €13 bn and €18 bn) was installed in the EU-28 during 2013 . . . The EU power sector continues its move away from fuel oil and coal with each technology continuing to decommission more than it installs.

The wind power capacity installed by the end of 2013 would, in a normal wind year, produce 257 TWh of electricity, enough to cover 8% of the EU’s electricity consumption – up from 7% the year before.

Congress has kept the tax credit for wind farms this year, but it doesn’t do that much good, since wind entrepreneurs don’t know if the tax break will still be there in 2016 and so still cannot plan out wind farm construction and be sure what their margin of profit will be. But wind and solar are coming down in cost so fast that people with a need for inexpensive energy will keep installing them, even if via cooperatives.

http://www.juancole.com/2014/12/solar-doubles-energy.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+juancole%2Fymbn+%28Informed+Comment%29

The missing piece of the climate puzzle

In classrooms and everyday conversation, explanations of global warming hinge on the greenhouse gas effect. In short, climate depends on the balance between two different kinds of radiation: The Earth absorbs incoming visible light from the sun, called “shortwave radiation,” and emits infrared light, or “longwave radiation,” into space.

Upsetting that energy balance are rising levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), that increasingly absorb some of the outgoing longwave radiation and trap it in the atmosphere. Energy accumulates in the climate system, and warming occurs. But in a paper out this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT researchers show that this canonical view of global warming is only half the story.

In computer modeling of Earth’s climate under elevating CO2 concentrations, the greenhouse gas effect does indeed lead to global warming. Yet something puzzling happens: While one would expect the longwave radiation that escapes into space to decline with increasing CO2, the amount actually begins to rise. At the same time, the atmosphere absorbs more and more incoming solar radiation; it’s this enhanced shortwave absorption that ultimately sustains global warming.
“The finding was a curiosity, conflicting with the basic understanding of global warming,” says lead author Aaron Donohoe, a former MIT postdoc who is now a research associate at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “It made us think that there must be something really weird going in the models in the years after CO2 was added. We wanted to resolve the paradox that climate models show warming via enhanced shortwave radiation, not decreased longwave radiation.”

Donohoe, along with MIT postdoc Kyle Armour and others at Washington, spent many a late night throwing out guesses as to why climate models generate this illogical finding before realizing that it makes perfect sense — but for reasons no one had clarified and laid down in the literature.

They found the answer by drawing on both computer simulations and a simple energy-balance model. As longwave radiation gets trapped by CO2, the Earth starts to warm, impacting various parts of the climate system. Sea ice and snow cover melt, turning brilliant white reflectors of sunlight into darker spots. The atmosphere grows moister because warmer air can hold more water vapor, which absorbs more shortwave radiation. Both of these feedbacks lessen the amount of shortwave radiation that bounces back into space, and the planet warms rapidly at the surface.

Meanwhile, like any physical body experiencing warming, Earth sheds longwave radiation more effectively, canceling out the longwave-trapping effects of CO2. However, a darker Earth now absorbs more sunlight, tipping the scales to net warming from shortwave radiation.

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/global-warming-increased-solar-radiation-1110#