More and more people are looking toward nanomaterials to help solve issues in the energy infrastructure. Not only could this technology lead to more efficient and cost effective renewable energy sources, but could also help the development of devices that remove pollutants from the air and water. In fact, nanotechnology has such a vast scope that there is potential for it to impact almost all areas of society.

“There is not a field that is not touched,” said nanomaterials expert Francis D’Souza of the University of North Texas. “It is a group of very eminent scientists exploring the possibilities in every single field. You can expect big discoveries and breakthroughs.”

While nanomaterials are infiltrating everything from electronics to biomedical applications, many scientists have shift their primary focus to energy harvesting.

“There are so many new capabilities that can be exploited with nanotechnology, from dramatic improvements to solar conversion efficiency to battery systems with higher storage capacity and faster charging and discharging cycles to miniaturized power management systems, so we can have energy storage that can last for a long time,” said IBM’s Lili Deligianni.

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In an effort to address climate change, President Obama is setting the United States on the path towards a clean energy economy.

Recently, President Obama announced the country’s plan to drive alternative energy innovation and accelerate the transition to clean energy. Growing on the already established ENERGY STAR program, the executive actions focus on implementing clean, efficient, and affordable energy technologies across multiple sectors of the United States.

Highlights

• More funding for energy projects utilizing innovative technology, including an additional $1 billion
• A total of 11 projects across the country will receive $24 million for projects that have the potential to double the amount of energy a solar panel can produce
• Bringing a 485-megawatt photovoltaic facility to produce enough energy to power more than 145,000 homes
• PACE (Property-Assessed Clean Energy) project to make alternative energy more easily accessible for single-families

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The science behind climate change is alarming. Concentrations of greenhouse gases are rising at an alarming rate, land ice is dropping by 258 billion metric tons per year, and every passing year is proving to be the warmest year on record. Even with all of this information, it is difficult for some to grasp the complications climate change is causing due to the fact that an average person’s day-to-day life has remained relatively unharmed.

“You can tell people that all these fossil fuels we’re using and all the CO₂ that’s building up in the air is going to cause terrific problems. It’s only going to be when lower Manhattan is underwater that they’re going to start to respond,” said Allen J. Bard, the unofficial father of modern electrochemistry.

What Does Climate Change Look Like?

In order to make the reality of climate change more tangible, scientists with the Department of Energy are launching their SPRUCE (Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Climatic and Environmental Change) project to naturally demonstrate what the world could look like if there is no action taken on climate change.

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Fuel cells have been receiving a lot of attention in the scientific domain as one of the most promising alternative energy sources. When applying fuel cell technology to both the grid and automobiles, one issue is persistent: cost. Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory (ANNL) have been looking for a way to combat the price issues. Now, a team of researchers led by ECS member Di-Jia Liu have found a potential way to utilize fuel cells without the high cost of development and commercialization.

A New Catalyst

The team’s development revolves around the notion of using naturally abundant materials without sacrificing efficiency. Current, fuel cells work off a platinum catalyst, which is both expensive and scarce. The new catalyst eliminates the need for the precious material, all while demonstrating performance rates comparable to that of a platinum catalyst.

The scientists developed the new catalyst via the synthesis of a highly efficient, nanofibrous non-precious metal catalyst. If this technique proves to be commercially viable, it transition into automotive technology and extend the range of electric vehicles and potentially eliminate the need for charging.

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Earlier this year, we looked at the Israeli start-up company StoreDot’s innovative research in battery technology that could allow a smartphone battery to charge in just 30 seconds.

Now, the same company is taking that same technology and applying it to electric vehicles.

The company is claiming to have tweaked their technology to fully charge an electric car in just five minutes.

According to StoreDot, an array of 7,000 cells could enable electric vehicles to travel up to 300 mile on just a five minute charge.

This from Ecomento:

StoreDot believes it can speed up charging by creating a new variant of the industry-standard lithium-ion chemistry. It uses nanotechnology to make new organic materials that researchers claim have lower resistance than the materials used in current lithium-ion cells. That means electricity can flow through the battery more easily.

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EJ Taylor, ECS Treasurer and Chief Technical Officer at Faraday Technology, recently ran across this article from The Economist discussing an accidental discovery that could yield big results.

Materials scientists Wang Changan of Tsinghua University and Li Ju of MIT may have unintentionally found the answer to developing a battery that can last up to four times longer than the current generation.

Initially, the scientists were simply researching nanoparticles made of aluminum. While these tiny particles are good conductors of electricity, they become less efficient when exposed to air. When air hits these tiny particles, a coating of an oxide film begins to develop, greatly affecting the performance. The research the two scientists were working on was not to create a better battery, but rather to eliminate the oxide that coats the particles.

This from The Economist:

Their method was to soak the particles in a mixture of sulphuric acid and titanium oxysulphate. This replaces the aluminium oxide with titanium oxide, which is more conductive. However, they accidentally left one batch of particles in the acidic mixture for several hours longer than they meant to. As a result, though shells of titanium dioxide did form on them as expected, acid had time to leak through these shells and dissolve away some of the aluminium within. The consequence was nanoparticles that consisted of a titanium dioxide outer layer surrounding a loose kernel of aluminium.

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When we think of renewable energy, our minds typically tend toward solar and wind power. However, there are other promising energy sources that commonly fly under the radar. The Guardian recently highlighted five alternative energy sources that have the potential to see great growth in upcoming years and transform the energy landscape as we know it.

Ocean Power
With ocean waters covering more than 70 percent of our plants surface, it only makes sense to harness the energy it naturally produces. Ocean current and waves could be used to drive electric generators and produce an abundant amount of consistent energy. Typically, ocean energy is broken down into four categories: deep water source cooling, tidal power, wave power, and marine current.

The catch? Salt water causes corrosion, which raises an issue when developing a device to capture this energy. The biggest roadblock engineers are currently facing is how to develop an energy harnessing device that makes ocean power commercially viable. With the right scale of development, this from of energy could be at the forefront of a renewable future.

Biomass
Essentially, biomass transforms living things or the waste they produce into electricity. Currently, biomass accounts for 12 percent of the country’s renewable energy generation. While burning the fuel produces CO2, proponents of this source believe it will significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions due to the growth of plants that produce the energy, which remove the CO2 from the atmosphere.

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Thanks to a team of Australian researchers, we can now get a detailed idea of what is happening on the deep ocean floor. The first digital map of the seafloor has been created to let us know what’s happening under 70 percent of the planet’s surface. Not only does this give us a new understanding of the oceanic environment, it will also help scientists see how the waters are reacting to climate change.

“Our new map brings out the enormous ecological and geological complexity of the seafloor that before we had no idea about,” said Dr. Dietmar Muller, a geophysicist at the University of Sydney in Australia and co-author of a paper.

When analyzing the findings, researchers found that the majority of the deep ocean floor is littered with the remains of phytoplankton. Due to the warming ocean temperatures, these phytoplankton have declined by 40 percent since the 1950s. Due to the difficulty in studying organisms on the ocean floor, the reasons for these happenings have only been theoretical. However, it has caused great concern due to the sea creatures’ essential role in providing vital support to the marine ecosystem. Due to the new research, scientists can now examine the composition of the remains and see how the ocean responded to and will continue responding to climate change.

“In order to understand environmental change in the oceans we need to better understand what is preserved in the geological record in the seabed,” says lead researcher Dr. Adriana Dutkiewicz from the University of Sydney.

PS: Head over to the Digital Library to read more on climate change!

A small-town farm in Plymouth, Indiana is doing its part to save the environment. The farm, and many other dairy farms across the country, are investing in biogas recovery systems that take unwanted cow manure and turn it into usable electricity. And not just a tiny bit of electricity. This system can produce enough power to light 1,000 homes.

The farm is grappling an issue that many small farms deal with: too much cow poop. Farms often times toss excess manure into open water to eliminate the small for surrounding neighbors. Doing this leads to a whole host of environmental consequences and negatively impacts the surrounding ecosystem.

In order to get rid of the bothersome manure without causing environmental damage, the farmers set up an anaerobic digester to speed up composition without smell or emission of greenhouse gases.

It’s not just this one farm that it doing its part to help the environment. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates that last year alone, farmlands eliminated more than three million tons of greenhouse gases via biogas recovery systems. To put it in perspective, that’s like taking 630,000 pollutant causing cars off the road.

The EPA also estimates that if all viable farms were to install biogas recovery systems, they would generate enough electricity to power over a million homes and drastically cut emissions.

However, the roadblock appears when it comes to finding financing for these projects. Though, the federal government remains committed to seeing progress in this sector.

A tiny chip may be the answer to the wide-spread utilization of fuel cells.

A team of researchers from UCLA have developed a nanoelectronic chip that can accurately analyze the chemical reactions that allow fuels cells and batteries to function. The new chip effectively evaluates at the nano level how nanocatalysts convert chemical reactions into electricity.

New Insights About Fuel Cells

Essentially, the chip scales down spectroscopy—doing what a large laboratory would typically do, only more effectively and with the ability to collect new data.

This from UCLA:

Being able to analyze these reactions with increased accuracy, heightened sensitivity and greater cost-effectiveness will vastly improve scientists’ understanding of nanocatalysts, which will enable the development of new environmentally friendly fuel cells that are more efficient, more durable and less expensive to produce. Eventually, those new fuel cells could be used to power vehicles that run on hydrogen, the 10th most abundant element on Earth, and give off water as exhaust.

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