Quote from Daniel_G

If it was in California,

US buildings are among the worst on the planet worse than UK. Further most folks need a 1..1.5 hours car ride to get on job. USA is built upon wasting resources.

Guess why the Swiss inflation rate is lowest now? No petrol/gas/coal current well insulated buildings since 30 years Since > 10 years only heat pumps.

So US energy is irrelevant for the future of the planet, same for USA if they will not kick start with a sound sustainable living style.

We also have 3 large storage lakes that each can replace a 1000MW nuke for some days. Loading is > 90% efficient!

Quote from Wyttenbach

US buildings are among the worst on the planet worse than UK. Further most folks need a 1..1.5 hours car ride to get on job. USA is built upon wasting resources.

Guess why the Swiss inflation rate is lowest now? No petrol/gas/coal current well insulated buildings since 30 years Since > 10 years only heat pumps.

So US energy is irrelevant for the future of the planet, same for USA if they will not kick start with a sound sustainable living style.

We also have 3 large storage lakes that each can replace a 1000MW nuke for some days. Loading is > 90% efficient!

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That's true. Another company I ran was the global leader in chiller energy efficiency and was written about in the book Factor Four by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker and Amory Lovins. This company has been recently rebooted based on AI and machine learning and IoT technology and we continue to push the envelope in efficient buildings. Unfortunately not every country is as efficient as the Swiss. We need to accommodate all. Couldn't agree more about the edge case Switzerland is a model for efficiency.

The American model's history is notable in that the Detroit automakers specifically made a system of suburbs build around urban centers to sell more and more cars back when energy and resources were plentiful. It's hard to unbuild what is already built.

cmblu press conference explaining their technology....

Excitement grows about ‘natural hydrogen’ as huge reserves found in France

Unlike hydrogen produced from natural gas or electrolysis, its natural counterpart requires no water and little energy to extract while taking up very little land.

Here's something that might get you excited

Alef Flying Car Video Reveals How $300,000 Vehicle Actually Works

Alef flying car video reveals how $300,000 vehicle actually works

The aeronautical start-up's Model A was the first to receive FAA approval, but doesn't have any wings—so how will it fly?

www.newsweek.com

On Tuesday, San Mateo, California-based start-up Alef announced that Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) had approved its Model A flying car, making it the first vehicle to receive approval for use in the U.S.

Quote from gerold.s

cmblu press conference explaining their technology....

What technology?

Quote from Fm1

Alef Flying Car Video Reveals How $300,000 Vehicle Actually Works

This is one of these vehicles that converts from a car that can drive on the road to an airplane. I do not understood the need for this. Or the market. Cars are cheap and widely available. If you want to fly from one place to another and then drive, you should rent a car at the destination. The extra cost and complexity of making the flying car road worthy would be far greater than renting a car. Or buying a car and leaving it at the destination airport, if you fly there often.

Quote from JedRothwell

This is one of these vehicles that converts from a car that can drive on the road to an airplane. I do not understood the need for this. Or the market.

Nor me. But then I never got golf, either. Spoils a nice walk.

Phosphorus and sulfur team up to create efficient redox flow batteries.

A new class of molecules with ‘extreme potentials and high stability’ could compete with commercial technologiesA new class of molecules based on just main group elements can store and release energy efficiently in flow batteries, with minimal degradation. Although the work is purely a proof-of-concept, researchers in the field are excited by the possibilities for energy storage. ‘It’s great… extreme potentials and high stability,’ says Gloria De La Garza, a doctoral candidate working on redox flow batteries at the University of Michigan, US, who wasn’t involved in the study.Redox flow batteries are an attractive way to store energy from intermittent sources, such as solar and wind . In a flow battery, electrochemical energy is stored on soluble molecules, housed in spatially separated storage tanks. ‘As the name suggests, flow batteries are dynamic; electrochemical energy is released from a redox event between the [different] species that is controlled in flow,’ explains lead author Máté Bezdek, from ETH Zürich in Switzerland. Flow presents a unique opportunity ‘to independently tune the amount of energy stored and the rate [of] release’, adds Bezdek.

Quote from Daniel_G

Curbina again the burden of intermittency rears its ugly head. In order to be economical the production of liquid fuel is a chemical engineering process. Chemical processes need to work near to capacity a majority of the time.

I do not understand what you mean by this. If, as you say, a chemical process has to run nearly all of the time, then you have to build out the wind turbines to generate enough power to run them all of the time. That is to say, even at the lowest level of wind, there should be enough to keep the chemical factory running at close to 100% of capacity. When the wind exceeds this level, you sell the extra energy in real time and turn down the stand-by natural gas generators.

That is what they do with any source of energy that cannot be modulated, such as a nuclear plant, or a coal plant. Demand always fluctuates, so they need to turn on and off the natural gas generators or hydroelectric generators (which two are the fastest to modulate), or they use short term battery storage. They have been doing that since electricity was invented by Edison. I don't see a problem here.

I can see why solar would not be a good choice for plants that have to run at night to be cost-effective, but wind across a wide enough area, such as whole state of Iowa, should work.

Quote from Alan Smith

Redox flow batteries are an attractive way to store energy from intermittent sources, such as solar and wind . In a flow battery, electrochemical energy is stored on soluble molecules, housed in spatially separated storage tanks.

I read that these flow batteries are compact compared to other storage methods such as pumping water up to reservoirs, or conventional batteries.

Storing energy from intermittent sources is important, but that is not the only reason you need storage. As I said above, demand is also intermittent. A large factory machine may turn on or off. An electric train will slow down coming into the station, and then start up again. It gets hot at 3 p.m. and millions of air conditioners turn on. You always need some sort of buffer.

Quote from Wyttenbach

What technology?

organic solid flow battery with up to 90% efficiency, scaleable, sourcing of components within EU, not flamable and completely recyclable.

Organic SolidFlow Battery Technology | CMBlu Energy AG

The Organic SolidFlow battery is the first green battery technology that’s ready to scale.

www.cmblu.com

Could be a real game changer for stationary applications.

Quote from gerold.s

Could be a real game changer for stationary applications.

It's neither green (all teh metal used) nor the only. There are at least 5 large suppliers that already deliver flow batteries. But as usual marketing counts.

Australia has a lot of good tech.

I think that future storage technologies are the answer to reducing reliance on coal and gas as baseload for the grid.

Quote from JedRothwell

This is one of these vehicles that converts from a car that can drive on the road to an airplane. I do not understood the need for this. Or the market. Cars are cheap and widely available. If you want to fly from one place to another and then drive, you should rent a car at the destination. The extra cost and complexity of making the flying car road worthy would be far greater than renting a car. Or buying a car and leaving it at the destination airport, if you fly there often.

As well as it being a poor car, it is also a poor aircraft. All the deadweight of the roadwheels, and the weight & aerodynamic drag of the additional shrouding (to make it look "car shaped") turns what would be an ordinary octocopter/tilt-body aircraft into a useless flying lump.

Unfortunately, the lure of the "dual purpose" invention, that does neither thing well, is still strong. It will go the same way as all the other "flyng cars" that have been devised (regularly) over the decades.

Nutzung von Sonnenenergie – Diese Solarzellen sammeln Rekorde – mit Schweizer Technologie

Forschende aus der Schweiz mischen vorne mit bei Solarzellen mit Perowskit. Diese sind viel effizienter und günstiger als herkömmliche Siliziumzellen. Und sie…

www.tagesanzeiger.ch

Mixed solar cells quartz - Perowskit are above 33% now, best quartz > 26%.. Swiss version with 31% is easy to scale up. But aging of Perowskit is still a challenge...

De Wolf from the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia set a new world record with 33.7 percent.

Hail damaged solar farm panels must be landfilled.

Baseball-Sized Hail Smashing Into Panels At 150 MPH Destroys Scottsbluff Solar Farm

Baseball-sized hail took out a 5.2-megawatt solar farm in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, on Friday, as part of a giant supercell thunderhead that moved across eastern…

cowboystatedaily.com

Each panel contains about $3 worth of recoverable metals. The transport costs are $12-25 whereas the cost to landfill them is about $1.

So the PV utopia will never exist. Nuclear in one of its forms is the only energy than can power civilization.

Solar/Wind are a dead-end and the sooner we realize this, the better.

Solar panels are starting to die. What will we do with the megatons of toxic trash?

Most solar manufacturers claim their panels will last for about 25 years. That means the solar e-waste glut is coming.

grist.org

Even Grist a pro-renewable non-profit are starting to acknowledge this reality.

We don't abandon houses just because the windows sometimes get broken. We replace the glass.

We don't scrap cars just because the windscreen sometimes gets smashed. We replace the glass.

Current panels are designed to be thrown away, rather than repaired. This is what the manufacturers of new panels want, of course. The core elements of panels have a long life - but we need to have an associated repair and refurbishment industry, to ensure solar PV is sustainable.

It’s all related to economics and the inextricable physics of highly diffuse and intermittent power sources. Your analogy about wind screens is not appropriate. Each panel is more akin to a foam box or paper plate in that simply transporting it to a recycling facility is more costly by a large factor in making a new one.

Have you ever held a modern poly silicate PV cell in your hand? They are very thin and brittle. That is only one dimension of the problem with PV and wind. Slowly people are coming to realize that it’s a dead end path.

Quote from Daniel_G

Solar/Wind are a dead-end and the sooner we realize this, the better.

This is true for dead minded people only. Swiss panels are safe up to 3.5cm diameter hail. Further its all about impact angle.

And of course there are a high risk locations. What are the chance of hail in a typical desert where the largest solar farms reside?

0.0000001% or smaller ?