Tag Archives: ccs
UW Professor Designs Solar Cells that Store Energy
When people think about solar, they often think about harvesting- how to gather the energy. “But there’s another side of the story that’s sometimes overlooked,” said Hongrui Jiang a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “How do you store it?” Bulky batteries or supercapacitors often accompany solar panels. Jiang wanted something smaller and more self-sustaining [...]
How to Store Solar Power?
Despite the rapid growth of today’s solar industry, a fundamental question remains: what happens when produced solar energy outweighs its demand at any given time? The intermittent nature of solar energy (and wind, for that matter) is such that we have no control over peak production periods. In other words, the sun shines when it wants, [...]
The Possibilities of Graphene Micro Supercapacitors
Imagine plugging in your smartphone for thirty seconds and then continuing the rest of your day with a fully charged phone. Then imagine plugging in your electric vehicle for less time than it takes to fill up a standard gas tank before running a day’s worth of errands on that one charge. Today, researchers at UCLA may [...]
Can LightSail Energy Dominate Energy Storage?
LightSail Energy (LightSail) is a Berkeley, California, company that has developed compressed air energy storage technology which may be used for grid-scale storage. The company’s central innovation is the injection of a mist of water spray into a compressed air system so the spray rapidly absorbs the heat energy of compression and provides the energy [...]
Liquid Air Batteries: The Key To Energy Storage?
One of the obvious drawbacks of wind and solar energy is the simple fact that the wind doesn’t blow all day long and the sun doesn’t shine constantly (it does actually but things get in its way). A reality often referred to by the press as intermittency. A problem exacerbated by the fact that wind [...]
Energy Storage: Future Requirement for Renewable Energy Projects?
Energy storage technology might be moving from a nice-to-have addition to solar and wind installations to a component that’s necessary for project approval, if developments in California are any indication. Solar developer BrightSource Energy and its utility partner Southern California Edison (SCE) may face rejection for two of five proposed power purchase agreements because they are [...]
ESolar Makes Big Bet on Modular Solar Storage Power Towers
NREL’s just-released Renewable Electricity Futures study concluded the most abundant U.S. renewable resource is solar. The U.S. technical potential of utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) was estimated at 80,000 gigawatts. Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) was 37,000 gigawatts. Distributed PV was estimated at 700 gigawatts. The U.S. needs about 1100 gigawatts of electricity production capacity, so the race [...]
It’s All About Energy Storage
A new study from UK-based GlobaData reveals that energy storage innovation will be essential to the advancement of solar power generation. Unfortunately, the study also found that there is little renewable energy storage innovation and few firms focusing on it. “Currently, there are no effective storage systems for megawatt scale solar power plants,” said GlobalData [...]
Siemens Develops Modular Power Storage for Renewable Energy
Siemens is now trying to step into this growing market as well with its latest modular power storage system dubbed the ‘Siestorage’. These lithium-ion power storage systems offered by Siemens start off at 16kWh and you can extend them to a capacity of 2 MWh. The 500 KWh that is being showcased by Siemens can [...]
Energy Storage Market: Ready for Liftoff
As solar and wind technology gain market share in world of energy production, there will be an increasing need for quality energy storage, according to a report from Lux Research. That need will drive growth and innovation in the battery and energy storage realms, said report author Brian Warshay. While solar and winder energy generation [...]
In Focus: Carbon Capture Storage
It’s been said that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is steadily increasing. Being a greenhouse gas, this could spell a lot of trouble for the planet as it could contribute to more global warming. Human activities like burning fossil fuel, deforestation in the name of development, and harmful practices that see the [...]
Clean Energy Solutions via Hybrid Plants and CCS
AbengoaSolar, based in Seville, Spain, has been selected by Xcel Energy, whichis Colorado’s largest electric utility company, to build a parabolictrough concentrating solar power(CSP) pilot plant at its Cameo coal plant near Grand Junction,Colorado. The project is the first to combine an industrial solarinstallation with a conventional electric power plant. Constructionis expected to start in [...]