Lifeboat Foundation

“We are very pleased that we can now start with the first activities to stimulate and consolidate cellular agriculture in the Netherlands,” said Ira van Eelen, CEO of KindEart. Tech and a board member of Cellular Agriculture Netherlands. “With this we can guarantee that the Netherlands remains the ideal place for cellular agriculture to thrive. We have a rich history in cellular agriculture and are a global leader in biotechnology, alternative proteins and food innovation. Supported by this visionary leadership that the Dutch government is showing again today, we will expand our team in the coming months and roll out the first activities around public research, scaling up, and education.”

Indeed, the Netherlands has been demonstrating considerable progress in developing cultured meat. In July, for example, Dutch company Meatable revealed its first lab-grown sausages, which are expected to go on sale to consumers by 2025. The addition of €60 million in government funding will make the Netherlands an even more attractive location for companies in the sector.

Currently a niche and miniscule part of the overall food market, cultured meat has potential to become another “exponential” technology – much like the semiconductor industry, solar energy, genome sequencing, and so on. The benefits in terms of animal welfare, climate change, food safety, antibiotic resistance, land and water usage could be substantial.

Tandem solar cells made of perovskite and silicon enable significantly higher efficiencies than silicon solar cells alone. Tandem cells from HZB have already achieved several world records. Most recently, in November 2021, HZB research teams achieved a certified efficiency of 29.8% with a tandem cell made of perovskite and silicon. This was an absolute world record that stood unbeaten at the top for eight months. It was not until the summer of 2022 that a Swiss team at EPFL succeeded in surpassing this value.

Three HZB teams worked closely together for the record-breaking tandem cell. Now they present the details in Nature Nanotechnology. The journal also invited them to write a research briefing, in which they summarize their work and give an outlook on future developments.

Wind and solar power are intermittent, generating power when it’s available rather than when it’s needed, so the green energy transition will require huge amounts of energy storage. This could end up taking many forms, from conventional lithium-based “big battery” installations, to flow batteries, silicon phase-change batteries, molten salt batteries, iron-air batteries, gravity batteries, carbon dioxide expansion batteries, and other more unusual ideas like buoyancy batteries.

Each has its own advantages and disadvantages in terms of efficiency, size, location, installation costs, operating costs, input and output power ratings, longevity and how long it can store the energy for. That’s good, since different solutions will fill different needs – some backing up the power grid during instantaneous demand spikes, others smoothing out the mismatched daily curves between demand and renewable supply, and others still helping to address seasonal supply drops, like when solar drops off through the winter.

Continue reading “World’s first commercial sand battery begins energy storage in Finland” »

From pv magazine Australia

Volt Solar Tile, a Leeson Group subsidiary, says its Australian-designed building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) roof tile has the highest wattage of any solar tile on the global market, with a maximum power output of 115 W and a solar efficiency of up to 19.3%.

Peter Leeson, managing director of Leeson Group and the director of Volt Solar Tile, said the Volt Planum and Lodge mono PERC solar tiles are the first in the world that can generate the same amount of energy as a standard PV panel.

Taking advantage of the huge output of solar energy in places neighboring the Sahara Desert, a massive undersea power cable is coming to Europe from Egypt. Bringing 3,000 megawatts of renewable energy, the GREGY interconnection will run from northern Egypt to Attica, Greece.

The San Diego County Water Authority is planning to use its San Vicente Reservoir to store solar power making clean energy in the region viable, according to an article by NPR published on Friday.

Powering 130,000 homes

Continue reading “Water batteries could soon power 130,000 homes in San Diego at night time” »

As Europe struggles through the energy crisis, some scientists are looking to space.

It’s the stuff of science fiction: Solar panels in space that beam power directly to Earth equipping the planet with clean renewable and affordable energy. Yet, it could soon be reality.

Caltech has just received $100 million in funding for their Space Solar Power Project (SSPP). The project is described by Caltech as: “Collecting solar power in space and transmitting the energy wirelessly to Earth through microwaves enables terrestrial power availability unaffected by weather or time of day. Solar power could be continuously available anywhere on earth.”

face_with_colon_three circa 2021.

Think about where our energy comes from: drilling rigs and smokestacks, windmills and solar panels. Lithium-ion battery packs might even come to mind.

We probably don’t think about the farms that comprise over one-third of Earth’s total land area. But farms can also be an energy source. Barcelona-based battery company Bioo is generating electricity from the organic matter in soil and creating biological batteries that can power agricultural sensors, a growing 1.36 billion dollar global market.

Continue reading “How biological batteries can generate renewable energy from soil” »