Future Energy eNews

JUNE 2020 Vol.21

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Hello Tom,

We are going full speed ahead with our next Conference on Future Energy (COFE12) in Albuquerque NM, August 14-15, 2020. As with other events at this time of controlled reopening, we will be supplying plenty of masks, hand santizers, and outdoor socially distant food events each evening. Furthermore, the US Air Force is supporting our conference by sending:

Colonel Eric Felt from the Kirtland AFRL and Director of the Space Solar Power Incremental Demonstration and Research (SSPIDR) to be one of our plenary speakers. His expertise is in the area of Space Solar Power, which the Air Force is developing quite rapidly, especially since the Japanese are already putting up their own space solar panels (10X terrestrial input) to beam power by RF down to the earth by the end of this decade. Hope you can join us in person! Register.today

Story #1 is quite remarkable since it solves two problems at once. Using hydrogel as a thermogalvanic cell, the invention by Wuhan University and UCLA removes heat and converts it to electricity. Such a substance (polyacrylamide framework with ferricyanide ion transfer) could possibly form the basis for some unusual standalone cooling devices to replace the expected billion air conditioner sale boom with worldwide global warming. Cooling a battery by 20°C is pretty sensational. Cooling a person’s wrists and neck could be even more of a winner! When the hydrogel is attached to a heat source, it can achieve efficient evaporative cooling while simultaneously converting a portion of the waste heat into electricity. Moreover, the hydrogel can absorb water from the surrounding air to regenerate its water content later on. This reversibility can be finely designed. Full details of the new thermogalvanic stretchable hydrogel are reported in Nano Letters.

Story #2 is exciting since the scale of solar PV at 2 GW is touted as being the largest so far. India’s Pavagada Solar Park is remarkable in that regard. However, when we read that 2 liters of water is used to clean one panel twice a month, out of thousands, it seems less environmentally sound. In comes the Ecoppia E4 Robot to the rescue! It is a water-free, wheeled robot with rotating brushes that do the trick very efficiently where there tends to be high dust settling from a dry climate. A Related Story presents another team from Hong Kong and Saudi Arabia also using hydrogel but in this case it is aimed at cooling solar panels which become less efficient at high temperatures. The hydrogel stuck to the undersides of the solar panels passively absorbs moisture from the air at night and releases it slowly during the day cooling the panels by 10°C and increasing their output by 15%, which is very significant. For serious researchers, the PDF is online thanks to Kopernio With global PV capacity expected to reach 1500 GW by 2025, the researchers calculate that cooling all these panels using their approach would generate more than 150 GW of additional power.

Story #3 – While IRI reported on piezoelectric crystals being used in roadways to generate electricity almost ten years ago the invention has finally made its way across the ocean. Not only has the California Highway Department been giving a grant for this research  but now a journal article in Applied Energy shows the full extent of this free energy invention. With design analysis and laboratory validation, the generation of over 100 volts and millijoules of energy from every vehicle that passes over it will someday become a standard addition to local highways that serve the nearby community with low cost electricity.

Story #4 is one of the only hopeful carbon capture discoveries that Project Vesta thinks can be scaled up to a trillion tons of carbon dioxide of more. When our climate change article made its way into several journals, including IEEE ISTAS and IJECC,  in various updated versions, the main calculation driving the predicted 6°C warming this century is the present 410 ppm of CO2 in the air, as compared to the 290 ppm that Dr. James Hansen and others regard as the BASELINE for the comfortable 14.5°C humans have enjoyed for centuries (see IRI 2020 Climate Chart  based on Hansen’s Vostok ice core graph). To summarize, 410 – 290 = 120 ppm and each part per million (ppm) equals 7.77 gigatons of CO2. So when we multiply the 7.77 gigatons by the excessive 120 ppm of heat-trapping CO2, it yields a scary 932 gigatons or almost one trillion tons of CO2 that must be removed to restore our comfortable 14.5°C that everyone has enjoyed for centuries. Therefore, Project Vesta could be a Godsend for the earth at an estimated $10 per ton of removed CO2.

Story #5 follows up on the April 2019 Navy story that appeared on the front page of every major newspaper and reported by IRI  as well, concerning the admission of unexplained, fast-moving UFO craft sighted and analyzed by several Navy pilots. Now a more complete report has been released that adds even more details and mystery to the 2013 and 2014 multiple incidents. As a footnote, for those who prefer to see and hear the original story from two of the pilots who chased the UFOs, the History Channel posted the best video short I have every seen on such a topic. It is only 5 minutes long but is captivating and compelling to watch . We may hope that the other military branches will follow suit and then honesty could become the watchword for eye witness accounts by people in uniform.

 Onward and Upward!

Tom Valone, PhD

Editor

A hydrogel can cool off electronics and generate electricity from their waste heat. Scale bar, 2 cm. Courtesy: Adapted from Nano Letters 2020, DOI: 10.1021/acs.nanolett.0c00800