If true, the rest of the EV scene looks obsolete already. Will other countries find themselves rolling out the red carpet for Chinese cars as their own motor industries struggle to survive?
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China has developed a revolutionary car battery that can charge in just 10 minutes and power a car for hundreds of miles before it needs to be plugged in, reports The Telegraph.
A report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) has hailed “remarkable” developments in chemistry that have allowed China to develop new batteries that pack far more energy than existing technologies.
The IEA highlighted EV batteries capable of travelling 250 miles without a recharge. Newer versions announced since the report was written can manage 600 miles.
Building the solar power ‘farm’ in space would take more than 60 rocket flights, possibly with SpaceX, and a team of robot builders. The power would be directed away from inhabited areas, probably offshore. Whether the finance numbers would add up is anyone’s guess, but it’s claimed to be a lot cheaper than nuclear power for example, with no waste product.
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A company hoping to launch the first solar farm into space has passed a critical milestone with a prototype on Earth, says Sky News.
Oxfordshire-based Space Solar plans to power more than a million homes by the 2030s with mile-wide complex of mirrors and solar panels orbiting 22,000 miles above the planet.
But its super-efficient design for harvesting constant sunlight – called CASSIOPeiA – requires the system to rotate towards the sun, whatever its position, while still sending power to a fixed receiver on the ground.
Press release – the application ‘has been accepted for Government consideration’. Electricity supply is too important to be left mainly to erratic and weather-dependent power sources.
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LONDON, UK – 5 April 2024 – The Nuclear Industry Association has applied for a justification decision for newcleo’s lead-cooled fast reactor, the LFR-AS-200, says newcleo.
Our application makes the case that the benefits of clean, firm, flexible power from the LFR-AS-200 would far outweigh any potential risks, which are in any event rigorously controlled by robust safety features, including passive safety systems, built into the design and incorporated into the operating arrangements, in line with the UK’s regulatory requirements.
The application also demonstrates that the reactor design would support nuclear energy’s contribution to a stable and well-balanced electricity grid, which is essential to reduce consumer bills and maintain economic competitiveness.
Nuclear fusion has been pursued for decades, but is it now ‘time to drop the old joke that fusion is 30 years away, and always will be’ as the author suggests?
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Commercial nuclear fusion has gone from science fiction to science fact in less than a decade, claims The Telegraph.
Even well-informed members of the West’s political class are mostly unaware of the quantum leap in superconductors, lasers, and advanced materials suddenly changing the economics of fusion power.
Britain’s First Light Fusion announced last week that it had broken the world record for pressure at the Sandia National Laboratories in the US, pushing the boundary to 1.85 terapascal, five times the pressure at the core of the Earth.
Delving into the technical section (see below), this puzzling statement appeared:
‘One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of [a named] dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty.’ — Another section is headed ‘Quality assured data’ but surely models with a wide range of uncertainty must include some which are more uncertain, aka inaccurate, than others. What purpose does that serve for policymakers?
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The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas, launched by the Copernicus Climate Change Service on 20 February, is set to be an important new resource for policymakers looking to formulate effective climate policy and for other users needing to visualise and analyse climate change information, says the European Commission.
. . . Let’s get technical
So, how does the Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas work? The gridded monthly dataset used for the Atlas integrates information from several climatic observational, reanalysis and projection datasets. The data is harmonised across the different datasets and catalogues to ensure standard common definitions and units for each of the variables.
One of the main innovations of the dataset is its inclusion of the CORDEX-CORE dataset, which provides regional climate projections covering the land components of the globe by combining two regional climate models and six general circulation models, which were selected to span the widest possible range of uncertainty. Due to its global continental coverage and higher resolution, this is a strategic dataset for the C3S Atlas, making it possible to analyse climate change in even higher resolution, such as for megacities around the world, for example.
Bad luck for solar panel owners and users, and anything relying on photosynthesis. But as such umbrellas would be far too heavy to move even if they could be made, probably nothing to worry about. Just another climate alarm concoction in search of funding.
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A team of climate scientists wants to launch enormous umbrellas into space to reduce the Earth’s exposure to the sun and fight climate change, The New York Times reported Friday (via Climate Change Dispatch).
The underlying idea is that large parasols could be positioned in space such that they marginally reduce the intensity of sunlight the Earth receives and thereby mitigate some global warming, the Times reported.
To block out enough radiation, a single sunshade would need to be approximately the size of Argentina — nearly one million square miles — and would weigh about 2.5 million tons, so scientists are looking to prove the idea could work by first producing a 100-square foot prototype with the help of $10 to $20 million of funding.
Real ‘solutions’ like degrading entire economies and reducing living standards? How many toytown ‘climate innovations’ does it take in order to grasp that such things are always a dead end, and often an expensive one? The tedium of COP meetings repeating the same worn-out themes grinds on and on.
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Machines to magic carbon out of the air, artificial intelligence, indoor vertical farms to grow food for our escape to Mars, and even solar-powered “responsible” yachts: the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai has been festooned with the promise of technological fixes for worsening global heating and ecological breakdown, says Yahoo News.
The UN climate talks have drawn a record number of delegates to a sprawling, freshly built metropolis, which has as its centrepiece an enormous dome that emits sounds and lights up in different colours at night.
The two-week programme is laden with talks, events and demonstrations of the need for humanity to innovate its way out of the climate crisis.
At £12 million per village, what would the national cost of such devices be for all the other villages that might want one? If it ‘shows how the costs of the energy transition can be made more manageable’, we could ask: more manageable than what?
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In a quiet field in eastern England a vast heat pump generates enough warmth to supply houses throughout a historic village, a pilot project is testing ways to spur renewable energy use in a country that is falling behind its net zero targets, says Reuters.
Resembling a large agricultural site, with gleaming silver water vats, the heat pump produces water hot enough to feed existing domestic systems, removing the need for costly home retrofits. A 60-year funding scheme removed upfront costs.
Supporters say the network, the first of its kind in rural Britain, not only shows one way for the UK to catch up with Europe on heat pump adoption, but addresses how it can fund the wider net zero transition when household finances are tight.
When they say ‘shifts’ they’re measuring in milliseconds or even smaller units of time. Physics Today says ‘The new measurements are relevant to understanding the global water cycle and atmospheric circulation and may provide an important constraint on the effect of all those processes together.’
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Researchers at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have succeeded in measuring the Earth’s rotation more exactly than ever before, reports Phys.org.
The ring laser at the Geodetic Observatory Wettzell can now be used to capture data at a quality level unsurpassed anywhere in the world.
The measurements will be used to determine the Earth’s position in space, benefit climate research, and make climate models more reliable.
Care to take a quick step down to the basement and see how fast the Earth has been turning in the last few hours?
The supposed climate/emissions angle is useful to the makers, although the article points out that ‘some experts and activists contend that the world can radically scale back hydrocarbons without using more nuclear power’. Of course not being intermittent and weather dependent is a selling point for electricity generation devices these days, for example in EV charging away from home.
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During a wide-ranging interview with The Epoch Times, the leadership of Nano Nuclear Energy Inc. predicted they would win the race to commercialize a reactor small enough to fit in a shipping container, says ZeroHedge (via OilPrice.com).
“By 2030, we’re pretty convinced we’ll be the first company to sell microreactors,” said Nano Nuclear CEO James Walker, a nuclear physicist who previously led the development of the Rolls-Royce Nuclear Chemical Plant.
Nuclear microreactors are meant to be nimble, mobile sources of heat or up to 20 megawatts of electricity.
Storing electricity, e.g. from renewables, is an ongoing headache with a recurring problem. If things go wrong ‘hazardous materials crews’ may be needed, along with a ‘bulk carbon dioxide tanker’ to cool things down – spot the irony. The company’s aim of ‘Making 24/7 renewables a reality’ is looking a tad optimistic.
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Firefighters have called in expert technicians to help deal with a dangerous heat build-up at a cutting-edge renewable energy storage plant but the incident has been stabilised, reports The New Daily.
MGA Thermal is behind a new form of thermal energy storage that allows retrofitted coal-fired power stations to distribute renewable energy long after it was produced.
But the company had to call in firefighters on Friday morning at its demonstrator plant in the Tomago industrial area, north of Newcastle.
Initial assessments of over-heating machinery led to the evacuation of 15 businesses.
Carbon dioxide in varying concentrations has been around for millions of years. Plants, trees etc. depend on it, and here we are. But climate scientists know best – don’t they? Looks like another trip to cloud cuckoo land here, in pursuit of the absurd climate control illusion.
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A new study lays out the theoretical plan of tethering a giant solar shield to a captured space rock, says Space.com.
Potentially, this contraption could protect Earth from the sun.
To help combat the effects of global warming, scientists are toying with an innovative idea to shield our planet from the sun with a spaceborne “umbrella” of sorts.
Dr Mike McCulloch has been making truly remarkable discoveries about some of the mysteries of the cosmos over the last two decades. He has answers to fundamental questions such as ‘what causes the force that resists the change in speed and direction of any mass?’, ‘why do observations indicate that the inertial force varies with acceleration in the outer reaches of galaxies?’ and ‘how can we tap into the implicated energy fields to generate propellant-less thrust, and potentially generate electrical energy to power our homes, industries and vehicles?’. His published papers cover the first two of these questions, and touch on the third, although there’s plenty more to be teased out of the implications of his Quantised Inertia theory. The third question is the acid test.
Mike believes science has to have practical, applicable results, and for the last few years, he has been successfully generating those at his lab in Plymouth University, funded by DARPA. He has been getting measurable thrust from purely electrical input. Other collaborating labs have similar results. Exciting times indeed.
But like many scientists who threaten the established and accepted theory in their field, his work has been largely ignored because it falsifies mainstream ‘dark matter’ theory, or dismissed because it ‘must be impossible’. Although he has got measurable results, DARPA funding is ending, and he has no more teaching work to return to at Plymouth University. Mike wants, as far as possible, to keep the ongoing developments of QI publicly accessible, by crowdfunding. He needs our help to fund and equip a new lab, and set up a ‘Horizon Institute’, online initially, to enable the collaboration of academics and citizen scientists. Please read his message below, and then I’ll let you know how you can help.
Where do we start with the issues this raises? Availability of the car for use by the owner/driver is an obvious one, fire hazards another. Inadequacy and weather-dependency of the future electricity grid is implied.
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A revolutionary charger for electric car batteries has been designed by Renault, which claims it is 30% more efficient than existing ones and allows energy to be put back into the grid at peak demand times, says Connexion France.
The bi-directional charger will be introduced to the company’s electric vehicles over the next decade, with the new electric R5 probably being the first model to be fitted with it.
So-called climate schemes have a tendency to be horribly expensive, impractical and of debatable benefit. The 25% figure quoted in the article for natural ocean CO2 uptake is likely an underestimate anyway. Is this just another straw for emission-obsessed alarmists to clutch at?
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Enhancing the ocean’s ability to remove CO2 particles from the atmosphere will be crucial in the fight against climate change, according to a new research paper, says Phys.org.
At present, around 25% of all CO2 emitted to the air is absorbed by the oceans. When these molecules enter the water they cause acidification, having a negative impact on marine environments, particularly for shell forming organisms such as crabs and shellfish that rely on fragile eco-systems for survival.
But in a joint research paper published today (Dec. 21) in the journal, Joule, academics from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Hamburg, believe they have found a way to increase the amount of CO2 stored in the ocean without causing additional acidification.
Before getting too excited, note that the energy used was ‘enough to boil six kettles of water’, at vast expense and effort. Still some way to go to ‘save the planet‘, to borrow a time-worn phrase from climate melodrama.
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FUSION FIRST – Scientists have hailed a ‘true breakthrough’ as a fusion reaction has successfully generated more energy than was used to create it, says Imperial College London.
For over seventy years, scientists have been attempting to harness thermonuclear fusion – the power source of stars – to generate energy.
Fusion has the potential to produce vast quantities of clean energy using few resources, requiring only a small amount of fuel and generating limited carbon emissions.
Once a fusion plasma is ‘ignited,’ it will continue to burn for as long as it is held in place.
The makers say: ‘To charge the battery, we take CO2 at near atmospheric temperature and pressure and we compress it. The heat that is generated during compression is stored. When we exchange the thermal energy with the atmosphere, the CO2 gas becomes liquid.
To generate and dispatch electricity, the liquid CO2 is heated up and converted back into a gas that powers a turbine, which generates power. The CO2 gas is always contained and the entire system is sealed. We don’t use any exotic materials.’
— Looks like another net user of power.
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Italian startup Energy Dome, maker of the world’s first CO2 battery, is officially entering the US market, says Electrek.
Energy Dome’s battery uses carbon dioxide to store energy from wind and solar on the grid.
Efficiency gains can be made as ‘energy is lost turning steam back into water’, which doesn’t apply to the CO2. Whether the idea can be scaled up to full electricity grid level isn’t yet known.
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Sandia National Laboratories researchers recently delivered electricity produced by a new power-generating system to the Sandia-Kirtland Air Force Base electrical grid, says Green Car Congress.
The system uses heated supercritical carbon dioxide instead of steam to generate electricity and is based on a closed-loop Brayton cycle.
The Brayton cycle is named after 19th century engineer George Brayton, who developed this method of using hot, pressurized fluid to spin a turbine, much like a jet engine.
Supercritical carbon dioxide is a non-toxic, stable material that is under so much pressure it acts like both a liquid and a gas.
August 10, 2022: If you want to detect an earthquake on Venus–good luck. The planet’s surface is hot enough to melt lead, and the atmospheric pressure is crushing. No ground-based seismometer could possibly survive.
What’s an extraterrestrial seismologist to do? Launch a balloon.
Above: Researchers prepare to launch a Strateole-2 balloon with sensors capable of detecting earthquakes from thousands of kilometers away.
A new paper just published in the Geophysical Research Letters reports the detection of a magnitude 7.3 earthquake by a fleet of balloons floating through the stratosphere above Indonesia’s Flores Sea. Onboard infrasound sensors registered acoustic waves rippling upward from the sea surface below, proving that, here on Earth, balloons can be used as seismometers.
“The same technique should work in the atmosphere of Venus,” says Raphael Garcia, the study’s lead author and a planetary scientist at the Institut Supérieur de l’Aéronatique et de l’Espace of the University…
They admit so-called green energy has a big problem, namely intermittency. Getting rid of reliable electricity generation from power stations creates it, but that’s what the likes of the climate-obsessed BBC constantly advocate. The sand idea may have some uses, but it’s admitted that ‘The efficiency falls dramatically when the sand is used to just return power to the electricity grid’. No, the big problem will remain.
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Finnish researchers have installed the world’s first fully working “sand battery” which can store green power for months at a time, says BBC News.
The developers say this could solve the problem of year-round supply, a major issue for green energy.
Using low-grade sand, the device is charged up with heat made from cheap electricity from solar or wind.
The sand stores the heat at around 500C, which can then warm homes in winter when energy is more expensive.
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