After a short hiatus, Clean Technica’s Celantech Talk podcast has returned. For their first episode back, ECS member and podcast co-host Matthew Klippenstein discusses speed bumps in renewable energy, transforming the grid, and the demise of diesel.

Klippenstein is a 13 year veteran of the fuel cell industry with Ballard Power Systems. He was part of the 2007 group that received ECS’s Industrial Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering Division New Electrochemical Technology Award, which has recognized significant advances in industrial electrochemistry since 1997. Listen to the podcast below.

PS: To learn more about science and some of the key contributors, download the ECS Podcast for free through the iTunes Store, SoundCloud, or our RSS Feed. You can also find us on Stitcher.

Google is going green.

Tech giant Google announced that it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017. This will be a huge shift for the company that, according to the New York Times, consumed as much energy as the city of San Francisco in previous years.

Google states that both its data centers and offices will reach the 100 percent renewable energy mark in 2017, with the majority of power derived from wind and solar. According to a press release by the company, going green makes the most sense economically in addition to Google’s goal of reducing its carbon footprint to zero. With wind energy prices down 60 percent and solar down 80 percent over the past six years, Google’s move to renewables will both make an environmental impact and help the company cut operating expenses.

In part, Google is able to make this transition due to the number of large-scale deals the company has made with renewable energy producers over the past few years. Google has guaranteed to purchase energy from renewable start-ups, which then allows those start-ups to obtain the capital necessary to expand their business.

“We are the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world,” Joe Kava, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, told the New York Times. “It’s good for the economy, good for business and good for our shareholders.”

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ECS Fellow and technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, Charles Hussey, recently added one more item to his list of career accomplishments.

The esteemed scientist and integral member of the University of Mississippi’s chemistry and biochemistry department has been named the new associate dean for research and graduate education at the university’s College of Liberal Arts.

“I am very excited about the chance to serve in this role and anxious to get started,” Hussey said in a release.

Hussey states that since the appointment of Dean Lee Cohen, the university began to shift in a new direction focused on research and graduate education. “I want to be part of helping him move the college forward in these areas,” he said.

With his extensive scientific background and experience serving as a chair of a department, Hussey will be looking to reflect those experiences in his new position. He will also be aiming to evaluate current issues students face pertaining to research engagement, scholarship, and graduate education.

“Once I have a sense of the issues, then we will work with other departments to develop long-range strategies that make use of our available resources to attack these roadblocks,” said Hussey, the 2014 winner of ECS’s Max Bredig Award in Molten Salt and Ionic Liquid Chemistry. “I also see potential for the growth of new graduate programs in the college.”

In addition to his new appointment, Hussey plans to continue his research into electrochemistry and transport properties of ionic liquids and molten salts.

Global energy demands are predicted to reach 46 terawatts by 2100. That number is a far reach from the 18 terawatts of energy currently generated around the world. According to one expert in the field, a major shift in the way we produce and consume energy is necessary in order to meet future demands.

Meng Tao, ECS member and Arizona State University professor, discussed how society could move toward meeting those demands at the PRiME 2016 meeting, where he presented his paper, “Terawatt Solar Photovoltaics: Roadblocks and Our Approaches.”

“We just cannot continue to consume fossil fuels the way we have for the last 200 years,” Tao told ECS. “We have to move from a fossil fuel infrastructure to a renewable infrastructure.”

For Tao, the world’s society cannot set on a path of “business as usual” by producing energy via coal, oil, and natural gas. And while solar energy has experienced a growth rate of nearly 45 percent in the last decade, it still only accounts for less than one percent of all electricity generated.

The shift to solar

Historically, solar technology soars when oil prices are at their highest. This is especially true during the oil embargo of the 1970s. During that time, private and public investments began to shift away from fossil fuels and toward solar and other renewable energies. That trend emerged again in the early 2000s when oil prices skyrocketed to a record-setting $140 per barrel.

“In the 1970s, the motivation to invest in solar and other forms of renewable energy was geopolitical,” Tao says. “Now, that motivation tends to focus more on the environment and sustainability.”

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The San Francisco Section is currently accepting nominations for the following award:

Daniel Cubicciotti Student Award: established in 1994 to assist a deserving student in Northern California in pursuing a career in the physical sciences or engineering. Qualified candidates will be full or part-time graduate or advanced undergraduate student(s) in good standing at a university or college in Northern California.

The award consists of an etched metal plaque and a $2,000 prize which is intended to assist with the educational expenses. In addition to the main award, up to two honorable mentions will be given consisting of a framed certificate and a $500 prize.

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By: Richard E. Peltier, University of Massachusetts Amherst

In an experiment sponsored by Intel, a Portland, Oregon household uses a low-cost sensor to measure air quality and stream real-time data online. Intel Free Press/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

Until recently, measuring air pollution was a task that could be performed only by trained scientists using very sophisticated – and very expensive – equipment. That has changed with the rapid growth of small, inexpensive sensors that can be assembled by almost anyone. But an important question remains: Do these instruments measure what users think they are measuring?

A number of venture capital-backed startup or crowd-funded groups are marketing sensors by configuring a few dollars’ worth of electronics and some intellectual property – mainly software – into aesthetically pleasing packages. The Air Quality Egg, the Tzoa and the Speck sensor are examples of gadgets that are growing in popularity for measuring air pollutants.

These devices make it possible for individuals without specialized training to monitor air quality. As an environmental health researcher, I’m happy to see that people are interested in clean air, especially because air pollution is closely linked with serious health effects. But there are important concerns about how well and how accurately these sensors work.

At their core, these devices rely on inexpensive, and often uncertain, measurement technologies. Someday small sensors costing less than US$100 may replace much more expensive research-grade instruments like those used by government regulators. But that day is likely to be far away.

New territory for a known technology

Pollution sensors that measure air contaminants have been on the market for many years. Passenger cars have sophisticated emission controls that rely on data collected by air sensors inside the vehicles. These inexpensive sensors use well-established chemical and physical methods – typically, electrochemistry or metal oxide resistance – to measure air contaminants in highly polluted conditions, such as inside the exhaust pipe of a passenger vehicle. And this information is used by the vehicle to improve performance.

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Just over ten years ago, the number of electric vehicles on the road could be counted in the hundreds. Now, more than 1.3 million EVs have been deployed across the globe. But even as EVs become a stronger force in the transportation sector, many buyers still cite one major deterrent in going electric: range anxiety.

Range anxiety refers to the fear that during longer trips, the EV battery may run out of energy and leave drivers stranded without a charging station. However, Ford, BMW, and VW are planning to but this fear to rest in Europe where they’re planning to develop a networking of charging stations along major highways.

The car companies believe this implementation of these stations will help enable long-rage travel and facilitate the mass-market adoption of EVs. Because current EVs cannot exceed a 300 mile driving range on single charge, the establishment of ultra-fast charging stations will help take away some of the anxiety drivers feel behind the wheel.

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Image: Powin Energy

Powin Energy, a company focused on creating dynamic energy storage solutions, recently announced their plan to install a 30 kW/40 kW-hour battery system at the University of Washington’s Washington Clean Energy Testbeds. The testbed facility was developed by UW to scale-up, prototype, test, and validate new clean energy solutions. Powin Energy hopes to assist the researchers at the facility in their quest to develop clean energy innovation.

“We’re excited about this installation at the University of Washington because it will give our technology a more rigorous workout than most real-world installations that don’t approach the far ends of usage parameters,” Virgil Beaston, CTO of Powin Energy, said in a statement.

Venkat Subramanian, technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and UW professor, discussed this energy storage opportunity, stating the he and his team could “use the Powin BESS to measure the performance of energy devices and algorithms when integrated into real and simulated system environments.”

Powin’s partnership with UW comes after the company’s development of its newly patented Battery Pack Operating system, which was designed to make its way into the utility-scale storage market. The company has already installed a 2MW/8MW-hour battery system in Irvine, CA.

At its most recent board of directors meeting during PRiME 2016, ECS leadership approved the addition of students who are ECS members as voting members of the Individual Membership Committee and Education Committee. This governance change is many years in the making with the understanding that if the student member voice is most warranted, it is within these two committees. The timing is perfect as ECS student membership is burgeoning with 64 student chapters around the world and more to come. Our student population takes full advantage of our biannual meetings to network, share, and learn so volunteer leadership within our governance structure is an appropriate next step.

About the Committees

The Individual Membership Committee is charged with retaining and recruiting our organization’s membership on a Society, student and institutional level. The Education Committee has the responsibility of providing educational and career development opportunities to that group. The scope of the work of the two committees are broad with the potential for further growth that parallels the growth of our constituency, its needs and external forces such as new technology and shifts in best practices.

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Researchers from the University of California, Riverside recently combined photosynthesis and physics to make a key discovery that could lead to highly efficient solar cells.

Nathan Gabor, a physicist, began exploring photosynthesis when he asked himself a fundamental question in 2010: Why are plants green? This question probed him to combine his physics training with biology.
Over the past six years, Gabor has been rethinking energy conversion in light of these questions. His goal was to make solar cells that more efficiently absorb intermittent energy from the sun and increase past the current 20 percent efficiency. In this, he was inspired by the plants that had evolved over time to do exactly what he hoped solar cells would be able to do.

This from University of California, Riverside:

[The scientists] addressed the problem by designing a new type of quantum heat engine photocell, which helps manipulate the flow of energy in solar cells. The design incorporates a heat engine photocell that absorbs photons from the sun and converts the photon energy into electricity.

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the quantum heat engine photocell could regulate solar power conversion without requiring active feedback or adaptive control mechanisms. In conventional photovoltaic technology, which is used on rooftops and solar farms today, fluctuations in solar power must be suppressed by voltage converters and feedback controllers, which dramatically reduce the overall efficiency.

Read the full article.

At the core of the research, Gabor and his team are looking to connect quantum mechanical structure to the greenest plants.