[…]

an adaptive tile, which when deployed in arrays on roofs, can lower heating bills in winter and cooling bills in summer, without the need for electronics.

“It switches between a heating state and a cooling state, depending on the temperature of the tile,” said Xiao, the lead author of the study. “The target temperature is about 65° F — about 18° C.”

[…]

It wasn’t until Xiao’s idea of using a wax motor that the idea of adaptive roof tiles took its final shape. Based on the change in the volume of wax in response to temperatures it is exposed to, a wax motor creates pressure that moves mechanical parts, translating thermal energy into mechanical energy. Wax motors are commonly found in various appliances such as dishwashers and washing machines, as well in more specialized applications, such as in the aerospace industry.

In the case of the tile, the wax motor, depending on its state, can push or retract pistons that close or open louvers on the tile’s surface. So, in cooler temperatures, while the wax is solid, the louvers are closed and lay flat, exposing a surface that absorbs sunlight and minimizes heat dissipation through radiation.

But as soon as the temperatures reach around 18° C, the wax begins to melt and expand, pushing the louvers open and exposing a surface that reflects sunlight and emits heat.

In addition, during the melting or freezing process, the wax also absorbs or releases a large amount of heat, further stabilizing the temperature of the tile and the building.

“So we have a very predictable switching behavior that works within a very tight band,” Xiao explained. According to the researchers’ paper, testing has demonstrated a reduction in energy consumption for cooling by 3.1x and heating by 2.6x compared with non-switching devices covered with conventional reflective or absorbing coatings. Because of the wax motor, no electronics, batteries or external power sources are required to operate the device, and unlike other similar technologies, it is responsive within a few degrees of its target range.

[…]

Source: This adaptive roof tile can cut both heating and cooling costs | ScienceDaily

The plane-maker on Thursday revealed it has “commissioned shipowner Louis Dreyfus Armateurs to build, own and operate these new, highly efficient vessels that will enter into service from 2026.”

The ships will have conventional engines that run on maritime diesel oil and e-methanol, the latter fuel made with a process that produces less CO₂ than other efforts. Many ships run on heavy fuel oil, the gloopiest, dirtiest, and cheapest of the fuel oils. Airbus has therefore gone out of its way with the choice of diesel and e-methanol.

The ships will also feature half a dozen Flettner rotors, rotating cylinders that produce the Magnus effect – a phenomenon that produces lift thanks to pressure differences on either side of a rotating object. The rotors were invented over a century ago and are generating renewed interest as they reduce ships’ fuel requirements.

Here’s what they’ll look like on Airbus’s boats.

Airbus’s future ocean transports – Click to enlarge

Airbus expects its three vessels to enter service from 2026 and has calculated they will reduce its average annual transatlantic CO₂ emissions from 68,000 to 33,000 tonnes by 2030.[…]

The craft will have capacity to move around seventy 40-foot containers and six single-aisle aircraft sub assembly sets – wings, fuselage, engine pylons, horizontal and vertical tail planes. Airbus’s current ships can only move three or four of those sets.

The ships will most often travel from Saint-Nazaire, France, to an A320 assembly line in Mobile, Alabama. […]

Source: Airbus commissions three wind-powered ships • The Register

Heat pumps are more than twice as efficient as fossil fuel heating systems in cold temperatures, research shows.

Even at temperatures approaching -30C, heat pumps outperform oil and gas heating systems, according to the research from Oxford University and the Regulatory Assistance Project thinktank.

[…]

The research, published in the specialist energy research journal Joule, used data from seven field studies in North America, Asia and Europe. It found that at temperatures below zero, heat pumps were between two and three times more efficient than oil and gas heating systems.

The authors said the findings showed that heat pumps were suitable for almost all homes in Europe, including the UK, and should provide policymakers with the impetus to bring in new measures to roll them out as rapidly as possible.

Dr Jan Rosenow, the director of European programmes at the Regulatory Assistance Project and co-author of the report, said: “There has been a campaign spreading false information about heat pumps [including casting doubt on whether they work in cold weather]. People [in the UK] don’t know much about heat pumps, so it’s very easy to scare them by giving them wrong information.”

The Guardian and the investigative journalism organisation DeSmog recently revealed that lobbyists associated with the gas boiler sector had attempted to delay a key government measure to increase the uptake of heat pumps.

[…]

Source: Heat pumps twice as efficient as fossil fuel systems in cold weather, study finds | Energy | The Guardian

Obtaining useful work from random fluctuations in a system at thermal equilibrium has long been considered impossible. In fact, in the 1960s eminent American physicist Richard Feynman effectively shut down further inquiry after he argued in a series of lectures that Brownian motion, or the thermal motion of atoms, cannot perform useful work.

 

Now, a new study published in Physical Review E titled “Charging capacitors from thermal fluctuations using diodes” has proven that Feynman missed something important.

Three of the paper’s five authors are from the University of Arkansas Department of Physics. According to first author Paul Thibado, their study rigorously proves that thermal fluctuations of freestanding graphene, when connected to a circuit with diodes having nonlinear resistance and storage capacitors, does produce useful work by charging the storage capacitors.

The authors found that when the storage capacitors have an initial charge of zero, the circuit draws power from the thermal environment to charge them.

The team then showed that the system satisfies both the first and second laws of thermodynamics throughout the charging process. They also found that larger storage capacitors yield more stored charge and that a smaller graphene capacitance provides both a higher initial rate of charging and a longer time to discharge. These characteristics are important because they allow time to disconnect the storage capacitors from the energy harvesting circuit before the net charge is lost.

This latest publication builds on two of the group’s previous studies. The first was published in a 2016 Physical Review Letters. In that study, Thibado and his co-authors identified the unique vibrational properties of graphene and its potential for energy harvesting.

The second was published in a 2020 Physical Review E article in which they discuss a circuit using graphene that can supply clean, limitless power for small devices or sensors.

This latest study progresses even further by establishing mathematically the design of a circuit capable of gathering energy from the heat of the earth and storing it in capacitors for later use.

“Theoretically, this was what we set out to prove,” Thibado explained. “There are well-known sources of energy, such as kinetic, solar, ambient radiation, acoustic, and thermal gradients. Now there is also nonlinear thermal power. Usually, people imagine that thermal power requires a temperature gradient. That is, of course, an important source of practical power, but what we found is a new source of power that has never existed before. And this new power does not require two different temperatures because it exists at a single temperature.”

In addition to Thibado, co-authors include Pradeep Kumar, John Neu, Surendra Singh, and Luis Bonilla. Kumar and Singh are also physics professors with the University of Arkansas, Neu with the University of California, Berkeley, and Bonilla with Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

A decade of inquiry

The study represents the solution to a problem Thibado has been studying for well over a decade, when he and Kumar first tracked the dynamic movement of ripples in freestanding graphene at the atomic level. Discovered in 2004, graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of graphite. The duo observed that freestanding graphene has a rippled structure, with each ripple flipping up and down in response to the ambient temperature.

“The thinner something is, the more flexible it is,” Thibado said. “And at only one atom thick, there is nothing more flexible. It’s like a trampoline, constantly moving up and down. If you want to stop it from moving, you have to cool it down to 20 Kelvin.”

His current efforts in the development of this technology are focused on building a device he calls a Graphene Energy Harvester (or GEH). GEH uses a negatively charged sheet of graphene suspended between two metal electrodes.

When the graphene flips up, it induces a positive charge in the top electrode. When it flips down, it positively charges the bottom electrode, creating an alternating current. With diodes wired in opposition, allowing the current to flow both ways, separate paths are provided through the circuit, producing a pulsing DC current that performs work on a load resistor.

Commercial applications

NTS Innovations, a company specializing in nanotechnology, owns the exclusive license to develop GEH into commercial products. Because GEH circuits are so small, mere nanometers in size, they are ideal for mass duplication on silicon chips. When multiple GEH circuits are embedded on a chip in arrays, more power can be produced. They can also operate in many environments, making them particularly attractive for wireless sensors in locations where changing batteries is inconvenient or expensive, such as an underground pipe system or interior aircraft cable ducts.

[…]

“I think people were afraid of the topic a bit because of Feynman. So, everybody just said, ‘I’m not touching that.’ But the question just kept demanding our attention. Honestly, its solution was only found through the perseverance and diverse approaches of our unique team.”

More information: P. M. Thibado et al, Charging capacitors from thermal fluctuations using diodes, Physical Review E (2023). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevE.108.024130

 

Source: Scientists design novel nonlinear circuit to harvest clean power using graphene

[…] Reuters reports that scientists with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility in California repeated a fusion ignition reaction. The lab’s first breakthrough was announced by the U.S. Department of Energy in December. While the previous experiment produced net energy gain, a spokesperson from the lab told the outlet that this second experiment, conducted on July 30, produced an even higher energy yield. While the laboratory called the experiment a success, results from the test are still being analyzed.

[…]

While fusion reactions are a staple in physics, scientists previously had to grapple with the notion that they required more energy in than they produced, making the net energy gain in both reactions a noteworthy result. The Department of Energy revealed in its December announcement that the fusion test conducted by the laboratory at that time required 2 megajoules of energy while it produced 3 megajoules of energy. The previous fusion experiment conducted at the National Ignition Facility used 192 lasers focused on a peppercorn-sized target. Those lasers create temperatures as high as 100 million degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of over 100 billion Earth atmospheres in order to induce a fusion reaction in the target.

[…]

 

Source: Nuclear Fusion Scientists Successfully Recreate Net Energy Gain

Long-time Slashdot reader KindMind shares a report from The Register: Researchers at MIT claim to have found a novel new way to store energy using nothing but cement, a bit of water, and powdered carbon black — a crystalline form of the element. The materials can be cleverly combined to create supercapacitors, which could in turn be used to build power-storing foundations of houses, roadways that could wirelessly charge vehicles, and serve as the foundation of wind turbines and other renewable energy systems — all while holding a surprising amount of energy, the team claims. According to a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 45 cubic meters of the carbon-black-doped cement could have enough capacity to store 10 kilowatt-hours of energy — roughly the amount an average household uses in a day. A block of cement that size would measure about 3.5 meters per side and, depending on the size of the house, the block could theoretically store all the energy an off-grid home using renewables would need.” […]

Just three percent of the mixture has to be carbon black for the hardened cement to act as a supercapacitor, but the researchers found that a 10 percent carbon black mixture appears to be ideal. Beyond that ratio, the cement becomes less stable — not something you want in a building or foundation. The team notes that non-structural use could allow higher concentrations of carbon black, and thus higher energy storage capacity. The team has only built a tiny one-volt test platform using its carbon black mix, but has plans to scale up to supercapacitors the same size as a 12-volt automobile battery — and eventually to the 45 cubic meter block. Along with being used for energy storage, the mix could also be used to provide heat — by applying electricity to the conductive carbon network encased in the cement, MIT noted.
As Science magazine puts it, “Tesla’s Powerwall, a boxy, wall-mounted, lithium-ion battery, can power your home for half a day or so. But what if your home was the battery?”

Source: MIT Boffins Build Battery Alternative Out of Cement, Carbon Black, and Water – Slashdot

Context & Scale

Osmotic energy is a renewable energy with zero emissions and minimal daily variations. However, the membranes for osmotic energy harvesting must have multiple properties that are thought to be impossible to realize to make this technology viable. Here, we show that cartilage-inspired cation-selective composite membrane assembled from aramid nanofibers and boron nitride nanosheets make it possible by a layer-by-layer assembly technology. The osmotic energy can be harvested by both salt concentration gradient and pressure-driven streaming because of the high mechanical and transport characteristics of the membranes. The combination of high strength, toughness, chemical resilience, rapid ion transport, and structural versatility of aramid-boron nitride composites makes it a promising candidate for osmotic energy harvesting under realistic operational conditions and life-cycle requirements.

Summary

Osmotic energy represents a widespread and reliable source of renewable energy with minimal daily variability. The key technological bottleneck for osmotic electricity is that membranes must combine highly efficient ion rectification and high ionic flux with long-term robustness in seawater. Here, we show that nanocomposite membranes with structural organization inspired by soft biological tissues with high mechanical and transport characteristics can address these problems. The layered membranes engineered with molecular-scale precision from aramid nanofibers and BN nanosheets simultaneously display high stiffness and tensile strength even when exposed to repeated pressure drops and salinity gradients. The total generated power density over large areas exceeded 0.6 W m⁻² and was retained for as long as 20 cycles (200 h), demonstrating exceptional robustness. Furthermore, the membranes showed high performance in osmotic energy harvesting in unprecedentedly wide ranges of temperature (0°C–95°C) and pH (2.8–10.8) essential for the economic viability of osmotic energy generators.

[…]

Source: Bio-inspired Nanocomposite Membranes for Osmotic Energy Harvesting: Joule

Australian scientists have discovered an enzyme that converts air into energy. The finding, published today in the journal Nature, reveals that this enzyme uses the low amounts of the hydrogen in the atmosphere to create an electrical current. This finding opens the way to create devices that literally make energy from thin air.

The research team, led by Dr. Rhys Grinter, Ph.D. student Ashleigh Kropp, and Professor Chris Greening from the Monash University Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Melbourne, Australia, produced and analyzed a hydrogen-consuming enzyme from a common soil bacterium.

[…]

In this Nature paper, the researchers extracted the enzyme responsible for using atmospheric hydrogen from a bacterium called Mycobacterium smegmatis. They showed that this enzyme, called Huc, turns hydrogen gas into an electrical current. Dr. Grinter notes, “Huc is extraordinarily efficient. Unlike all other known enzymes and chemical catalysts, it even consumes hydrogen below atmospheric levels—as little as 0.00005% of the air we breathe.”

The researchers used several cutting-edge methods to reveal the molecular blueprint of atmospheric hydrogen oxidation. They used advanced microscopy (cryo-EM) to determine its atomic structure and electrical pathways, pushing boundaries to produce the most resolved enzyme structure reported by this method to date. They also used a technique called electrochemistry to demonstrate the purified enzyme creates electricity at minute hydrogen concentrations.

Laboratory work performed by Kropp shows that it is possible to store purified Huc for long periods. “It is astonishingly stable. It is possible to freeze the enzyme or heat it to 80 degrees celsius, and it retains its power to generate energy,” Kropp said. “This reflects that this enzyme helps bacteria to survive in the most extreme environments. ”

Huc is a “natural battery” that produces a sustained electrical current from air or added hydrogen. While this research is at an early stage, the discovery of Huc has considerable potential to develop small air-powered devices, for example as an alternative to solar-powered devices.

The bacteria that produce enzymes like Huc are common and can be grown in large quantities, meaning we have access to a sustainable source of the enzyme. Dr. Grinter says that a key objective for future work is to scale up Huc production. “Once we produce Huc in sufficient quantities, the sky is quite literally the limit for using it to produce clean energy.”

More information: Chris Greening, Structural basis for bacterial energy extraction from atmospheric hydrogen, Nature (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-023-05781-7. www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05781-7

Source: Newly discovered enzyme that turns air into electricity, providing a new clean source of energy

Mere weeks after achieving experimental airworthiness certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), Universal Hydrogen has successfully taken its 40-passenger regional hydrogen electric plane to the skies. The aircraft took off from Washington state this morning and ascended to an altitude of 3,500 mean sea level (MSL) before safely landing, as you can see in the video below.

Universal Hydrogen Co. is a Southern California-based aviation company founded in 2020 by engineers with the mission of bringing zero-emission hydrogen electric-powered aviation to fruition.

In early February, we covered new milestones achieved using its Dash-300 flying test bed. The aircraft has the capability to eventually transport over 40 passengers using hydrogen fuel cells and electric powertrains and is promised to eventually become the largest of its kind to ever take to the skies.

The runway to today’s latest milestone began with the FAA experimental certification of the Dash-300, giving Universal Hydrogen permission to take off.

Check out the largest hydrogen electric plane to ever fly

Universal Hydrogen is celebrating today following the first successful flight of the hydrogen electric plane this morning, which took off in Grant County, Washington, at 8:41 a.m. PST and flew for 15 minutes.

For this initial flight, one of the airplane’s engines was replaced with Universal Hydrogen’s fuel cell-electric powertrain. The other standard engine remained to ensure the safety of the plane and its pilot, former US Air Force test pilot Alex Kroll. Kroll spoke to the confidence achieved during flight:

During the second circuit over the airport, we were comfortable with the performance of the hydrogen powertrain, so we were able to throttle back the fossil fuel turbine engine to demonstrate cruise principally on hydrogen power. The airplane handled beautifully, and the noise and vibrations from the fuel cell powertrain are significantly lower than from the conventional turbine engine.

[…]

Source: 40-passenger hydrogen electric plane completes maiden flight

Vestas, the world’s largest producer of wind turbines, says it has developed a chemical solution that allows the blades — made with durable epoxy resin — to be broken down and recycled. Bloomberg reports: “This signals a new era for the wind industry,” Vestas said in a statement. If it’s implemented at scale, the technology can be used on both old blades sitting in landfills and those in active wind farms, the company added. It’s a potential solution for what could be a massive sustainability problem for the wind industry. Industry body Wind Europe has previously estimated that about 25,000 metric tons of blades a year will be decommissioned by 2025, rising to 52,000 tons a year by 2030. The group has called on European authorities to ban blades from going into landfills.

Vestas’s process is the result of joint initiative including Denmark’s Aarhus University and US-based Olin Corp. The company now plans to move it from the lab to a pilot project for two years, before rolling it out on a commercial scale. Its cost hasn’t been disclosed.

Source: Wind Turbine Giant Develops Solution To Keep Blades Out of Landfills – Slashdot

Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could eventually provide cheaper green energy production to coastal areas.

“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” said Professor Shizhang Qiao, the team’s co-lead. Seawater typically needs to be purified before electrolysis splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The team says its results, using cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface as the catalyst, had similar performance to a standard process of applying platinum and iridium catalysts to highly purified and deionized water.

Compared to freshwater, seawater is an abundant resource, and the ability to extract hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment could save money.

[…]

Source: Researchers can now pull hydrogen directly from seawater, no filtering required | Engadget

In France, solar just got a huge boost from new legislation approved through the Senate this week that requires all parking lots with spaces for at least 80 vehicles – both existing and new – be covered by solar panels.

The new provisions are part of French president Emmanuel Macron’s large-scale plan to heavily invest in renewables, which aims to multiply by 10 the amount of solar energy produced in the country, and to double the power from land-based wind farms.

Starting July 1, 2023, smaller carparks that have between 80 and 400 spaces will have five years to be in compliance with the new measures. Carparks with more than 400 spaces have a shorter timeline: They will need to comply with the new measures within three years of this date, and at least half of the surface area of the parking lot will need to be covered in solar panels.

According to the government, this plan, which particularly targets large parking areas around commercial centers and train stations, could generate up to 11 gigawatts, which is the equivalent of 10 nuclear reactors, powering millions of homes. Public Sénat writes that stipulations were put into place excluding parking lots for trucks carrying heavy goods or parking areas in historic or protected areas, to avoid “distorting” them, according to an amendment to the bill.

Other measures on the table include building large solar farms on vacant land found alongside highways and railways, as well as on agricultural lands where feasible. Macron has said that any bill passed would need to guarantee money that ensures local communities directly benefit from the energy shift.

France’s national rail service SNCF also plans to install some 190,000 square meters of solar panels in 156 stations throughout the country by 2025 and 1.1 million square meters by 2030, all with the aim to reduce energy consumption by 25%.

The government also plans to build around 50 additional wind farms likes the one offshore Saint-Nazaire by 2050 in France. Measures are in place to reduce delays in building offshore wind farms from 10-12 years down to six years, and large solar farms from six years to three years.

This summer, the French government solidified two zones for offshore wind farms off the coast of the Atlantic following a massive public debate involving 15,000 participants, with environmental protection being the biggest concern.

The first wind farm is planned to be sited off the island of Oléron, more than 35 km off the coast of La Rochelle, with a capacity of around 1,000 MW. The second wind farm will likely be located farther out at sea, with both wind farms together producing enough electricity for 1.6 million people.

Source: In France, all large parking lots now have to be covered by solar panels

To convert heat into electricity, easily accessible materials from harmless raw materials open up new perspectives in the development of safe and inexpensive so-called “thermoelectric materials.”

[…]

The novel synthetic material is composed of copper, manganese, germanium, and sulfur, and it is produced in a rather simple process

[…]

The powders are simply mechanically alloyed by ball-milling to form a precrystallized phase, which is then densified by 600 degrees Celsius. This process can be easily scaled up,

[…]

Thermoelectric materials convert heat to electricity. This is especially useful in industrial processes where waste heat is reused as valuable electric power.

[…]

However, thermoelectric devices used to date make use of expensive and toxic elements such as lead and tellurium, which offer the best conversion efficiency. To find safer alternatives, Emmanuel Guilmeau and his team have turned to derivatives of natural copper-based sulfide minerals. These mineral derivatives are mainly composed of nontoxic and abundant elements, and some of them have thermoelectric properties.

[…]

The team found that replacing a small fraction of the manganese with copper produced complex microstructures with interconnected nanodomains, defects, and coherent interfaces, which affected the material’s transport properties for electrons and heat.

Emmanuel Guilmeau says that the novel material produced is stable up to 400 degrees Celsius, a range well within the waste heat temperature range of most industries. He is convinced that, based on this discovery, cheaper novel and nontoxic thermoelectric materials could be designed to replace more problematic materials.

More information: V. Pavan Kumar et al, Engineering Transport Properties in Interconnected Enargite‐Stannite Type Cu _{2+ x} Mn _{1− x} GeS ₄ Nanocomposites, Angewandte Chemie International Edition (2022). DOI: 10.1002/anie.202210600

Source: Team creates crystals that generate electricity from heat

[…] in Memmott’s new reactor, during and after the nuclear reaction occurs, all the radioactive byproducts are dissolved into molten salt. Nuclear elements can emit heat or radioactivity for hundreds of thousands of years while they slowly cool, which is why nuclear waste is so dangerous (and why in the past, finding a place to dispose of it has been so difficult). However, salt has an extremely high melting temperature — 550°C — and it doesn’t take long for the temperature of these elements in the salt to fall beneath the melting point. Once the salt crystalizes, the radiated heat will be absorbed into the salt (which doesn’t remelt), negating the danger of a nuclear meltdown at a power plant.

Another benefit of the molten salt nuclear reactor design is that it has the potential to eliminate dangerous nuclear waste. The products of the reaction are safely contained within the salt, with no need to store them elsewhere. What’s more, many of these products are valuable, and can be removed from the salt and sold.

[…]

“As we pulled out valuable elements, we found we could also remove oxygen and hydrogen,” Memmott said. “Through this process, we can make the salt fully clean again and reuse it. We can recycle the salt indefinitely.”

[…]

Memmott’s molten salt nuclear reactor is 4 ft x 7ft, and because there is no risk of a meltdown there is no need for a similar large zone surrounding it. This small reactor can produce enough energy to power 1000 American homes. The research team said everything needed to run this reactor is designed to fit onto a 40-foot truck bed; meaning this reactor can make power accessible to even very remote places.

[…]

[…]

Source: BYU profs create new micro nuclear reactor to produce nuclear energy more safely – BYU News

China’s government-owned utility State Power Investment Corporation (SPIC) has launched the world’s first commercial offshore floating solar that’s paired with an offshore wind turbine.

 

SPIC is one of five major electrical utility companies in China, and the world’s largest photovoltaic power generation enterprise. The pilot is located off the coast of Haiyang, a city in Shandong, eastern China.

The project uses Norway-based Ocean Sun‘s patented floating solar power technology.

The two solar floaters (see the photo above) have an installed capacity of 0.5 megawatts peak. They’re connected to a transformer on a SPIC-owned wind turbine and then a subsea cable runs from the wind turbine to the power grid.

If the pilot is successful, the plan is to build a 20 MW floating wind-solar farm in 2023 using Ocean Sun’s technology.

Ocean Sun signed an agreement to license its proprietary floating solar technology for the project in July. This project is fully funded by SPIC, and Ocean Sun’s first “truly offshore installation.”

In July, Børge Bjørneklett, CEO and founder of Ocean Sun, said [translation edited for clarity]:

Shandong Province is projecting 42GW of floating solar installations in the next few years, and Ocean Sun will now be a contender for some of this volume. These waters see challenging annual typhoons, and all involved parties are aware of the risks. Ocean Sun will improve our product with learnings from this exposed site.

A wind-solar hybrid system potentially offers the advantage of improving power output reliability. Solar peaks during the day, and whereas offshore wind turbines typically generate most of their power in the afternoon and evening.

Source: The world’s first offshore floating wind-solar pilot just came online in China

Back in 2013, Techdirt wrote about “the monster lurking inside free trade agreements”. Formally, the monster is known as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), but here on Techdirt we call it “corporate sovereignty“, because that is what it is: a system of secret courts that effectively places companies above a government, by allowing them to sue a nation if the latter takes actions or brings in laws that might adversely affect their profits.

In 2015, we warned that corporate sovereignty would threaten EU plans to protect the environment in the TAFTA/TTIP trade deal between the US and the EU. TAFTA/TTIP never happened, but fossil fuel companies were able to to use other treaties to demand over $18 billion as “compensation” for the potential loss of future profits as the result of increasing government action to tackle climate change.

Chief among those treaties with corporate sovereignty provisions was the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT), which is designed to protect investments in the energy sector. Research by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) shows that the fossil fuel industry accounts for almost 20% of known ISDS cases, making it the most litigious group. Recently there has been a wave of corporate sovereignty cases brought by fossil fuel companies, with most settled in their favor. The average amount awarded was over $600 million, almost five times the amount given in non-fossil fuel cases.

It has become clear that corporate sovereignty represents a serious threat to countries’ plans to tackle the climate crisis. The obvious solution is simply to withdraw from the ECT, but there’s a problem. Article 47 of the treaty states:

The provisions of this Treaty shall continue to apply to Investments made in the Area of a Contracting Party by Investors of other Contracting Parties or in the Area of other Contracting Parties by Investors of that Contracting Party as of the date when that Contracting Party’s withdrawal from the Treaty takes effect for a period of 20 years from such date.

This “sunset clause” means any of the 53 signatories to the ECT can be sued in the secret ISDS courts for 20 years after withdrawing from the treaty. As a result of this, the EU in particular has been pushing for the ECT to be “modernized”, and recently announced an “agreement in principle” to achieve that. However, it still contains a corporate sovereignty tribunal system:

The modernised ECT will allow the Contracting Parties to exclude new fossil fuel related investments from investment protection and to phase out protection for the already existing investments. This phasing out of protection for fossil fuel investments will take place within a shorter timeframe than in the case of a withdrawal from the ECT, for both existing and new investments: existing fossil fuel investments will be phased out after 10 years under modernised rules (instead of 20 years under current rules) and new investment in fossil fuels will be excluded after 9 months.

Countries that later withdraw from the modernized ECT can be sued for 10 years, rather than the current 20 years. Several EU countries have decided that is not good enough, and have announced their intention to withdraw from the treaty immediately, as Politico reports:

Spain, the Netherlands and Poland have all declared their intention to exit the Energy Charter Treaty (ECT). Italy left in 2015. Germany, France and Belgium are examining their options, officials from those countries said.

France has confirmed that it will be pulling out, as has Belgium.  For those countries that leave before the “modernized” ECT comes into force, companies can potentially use the sunset clause to sue them during the full 20 years afterwards. The only solution that addresses the serious threat of corporate sovereignty is to remove the sunset clause completely from the ECT. According to one analysis from the IISD, that’s possible if a group of ECT’s contracting parties agree to the move amongst themselves (“inter se”) as part of a joint withdrawal:

There is a legal basis for a withdrawal from the ECT with an inter se neutralization of the survival clause. In contrast to the continued protection of existing and certain future fossil fuel investments under the EU’s amendment proposal, such a withdrawal would put an immediate end to treaty-based fossil fuel protection and ISDS among all withdrawing states. In the short term, this would significantly reduce ISDS risks, given that 60% of the cases based on the ECT are intra-EU. It would also enable the EU and its member states to comply with the EU’s climate objectives and EU law. If further contracting states were to join, the ISDS risk to strong climate action would be further reduced and could pave the way for a fresh, unencumbered negotiation of a truly modern energy treaty that would support the expedited phase-out from fossil fuels and the transition to renewable energy.

It’s an imperfect solution, but better than the half-hearted “modernized” ECT proposed by the EU. The current mess shows that the issue should have been addressed ten years ago, when the problems of the “lurking monster” of corporate sovereignty first became apparent.

Source: Finally: Countries Start To Rebel Against Corporate Sovereignty, But Ten Years Too Late | Techdirt

A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have made a serendipitous scientific discovery that could potentially revolutionize the way water is broken down to release hydrogen gas—an element crucial to many industrial processes.

The team, led by Associate Professor Xue Jun Min, Dr. Wang Xiaopeng and Dr. Vincent Lee Wee Siang from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the NUS College of Design and Engineering (NUS CDE), found that light can trigger a new mechanism in a catalytic material used extensively in water electrolysis, where water is broken down into hydrogen and oxygen. The result is a more energy-efficient method of obtaining hydrogen.

[…]

“We discovered that the redox center for electro-catalytic reaction is switched between metal and oxygen, triggered by light,” said Assoc. Prof. Xue. “This largely improves the water electrolysis efficiency.”

[…]

an accidental power trip of the ceiling lights in his laboratory almost three years ago allowed them to observe something that the global scientific community has not yet managed to do.

Back then, the ceiling lights in Assoc. Prof. Xue’s research lab were usually turned on for 24 hours. One night in 2019, the lights went off due to a power trip. When the researchers returned the next day, they found that the performance of a nickel oxyhydroxide-based material in the water electrolysis experiment, which had continued in the dark, had fallen drastically.

“This drop in performance, nobody has ever noticed it before, because no one has ever done the experiment in the dark,” said Assoc. Prof. Xue. “Also, the literature says that such a material shouldn’t be sensitive to light; light should not have any effect on its properties.”

[…]

With their findings, the team is now working on designing a new way to improve industrial processes to generate hydrogen. Assoc. Prof. Xue is suggesting making the cells containing water to be transparent, so as to introduce light into the water splitting process.

“This should require less energy in the electrolysis process, and it should be much easier using natural light,” said Assoc. Prof. Xue. “More hydrogen can be produced in a shorter amount of time, with less energy consumed.”

[…]

More information: Xiaopeng Wang et al, Pivotal role of reversible NiO6 geometric conversion in oxygen evolution, Nature (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-05296-7

Source: Revolutionary technique to generate hydrogen more efficiently from water