It’s all about repurposing. At least, that looks to be the case for Japan’s energy grid.

Beth Schademann, ECS’s Publications Specialist, recently came across a Business Insider article detailing Japan’s initiative to turn abandoned golf courses into solar power plants.

Japan’s Kyocera Corporation is taking the unused green space and making clean, renewable solar farms. They’re starting off big with a 23 megawatt solar plant that will produce enough energy to power around 8,100 households.

And they’re not stopping there. After their first project goes live in 2017, the company will go full force into their 92 megawatt solar plant project that is expected to power over 30,000 households.

Japan’s abandoned golf courses are prime real estate for solar farms, and there’s no shortage of potential here.

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ECS will be offering three Short Courses at the 227th ECS Meeting this May in Chicago. Taught by industry experts, the small class size makes for an excellent opportunity for personalized instruction helping both novices and experts advance their technical expertise and knowledge.

Register online today!

Short Course #1
Nanotechnology for Bioenergy: Biofuels to Fuel Cells
Shelley D. Minteer, Instructor

This course is perfect for those with an interest in biofuels and renewable energy. Attendees can expect to learn about the production and use of biofuels, the advances in synthetic biology that have improved biofuel production, advance sin ananotechnology that have improved electrochemical biofuel production, electrochemical uses of biofuel, and more—including fuel cells, enzmatic biofuel cells, and microbial biofuel cells. Read more.

About the Instructor
Dr. Shelley D. Minteer is most well known for her contributions to the use of catalytic cascades for anodic electrocatlaysis. In 2003, Professor Minteer co-founded Akermin, Inc. with her previous graduate student, which has focused on the commercialization of her biofuel cell technology and has moved on to carbon capture technology. Her roles with ECS have included: Chair, Vice-Chair, Secretary-Treasurer, and Member-at-Large of the Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division, as well as being a member of multiple other Society committees. She is currently the technical editor for the Journal of The Electrochemical Society and ECS Electrochemistry Letters.

Tucker aims to develop transportation that is sustainable and fun to use.
Credit: Arizona State University

Hard-work and perseverance have paid off for The Electrochemical Society’s Telpriore “Greg” Tucker. From chemist, to mentor, to entrepreneur—the Arizona State University doctoral graduate aims to make an impact in renewable energy and transportation.

With his new degree in hand, Tucker plans to revisit his business plans for The Southwest Battery Bike Company, which focuses on developing electric bicycles that can provide a more affordable and greener source of transportation.

“I’ve always had an interest in transportation and how to make it more affordable and sustainable for the public,” Tucker says. “Since my degree focuses on batteries for renewable energy purposes, I began to see a lot of applications from my research. Some of the best jobs can spring from your hobby or projects that you enjoy doing.”

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Find openings in your area via the ECS job board.

ECS’s job board keeps you up-to-date with the latest career opportunities in electrochemical and solid-state science. Check out the latest openings that have been added to the board:

Post-Doctoral Research Associate
North Carolina State University – Raleigh, North Carolina
The Postdoctoral Research Associate will focus his/her work on research and development of new lithium-sulfur batteries. The work includes the development of both electrode and electrolyte materials and the integration of these materials into lithium-sulfur batteries. The Postdoctoral Research Associate will be responsible on designing and carrying out experiments, analyzing data, writing reports, and/or help mentoring junior researchers to conduct their research.

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The technology can be applied on top of an existing module or integrated into a new module during assembly, on flat or curved surfaces.
Credit: CSEM

The Swiss company, Center for Electronics and Microtechnology (CSEM), has announced that they have developed the world’s first white solar modules. According to the company, this will allow for a more visually appealing solar module, which will blend into buildings to become virtually invisible.

The current blue-black solar modules are built to maximize sunlight absorption, whereas a white solar module was previously not a color option due to the fact that the color would generally reflect light, rather than absorbing it.

This from CSEM:

CSEM has developed a new technology to make white solar modules, with no visible cells and connections, a reality. It combines a solar cell technology able to convert infrared solar light into electricity and a selective scattering filter, which scatters the whole visible spectrum while transmitting infrared light. Any solar technology based on crystalline silicon can now be used to manufacture white – and colored – modules.

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Find openings in your area via the ECS job board.

ECS’s job board keeps you up-to-date with the latest career opportunities in electrochemical and solid-state science. Check out the latest openings that have been added to the board:

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Battery Manufacturing
Oak Ridge National Laboratory – Oak Ridge, Tennessee
Under general supervision, the postdoctoral research associate will be conducting research specifically in battery manufacturing R&D to lower cost, raise energy density, increase production yield, and address manufacturing bottlenecks. This incumbent will work in close collaboration with other researchers involved with ORNL’s applied energy storage program. This position resides in the Department of Energy (DOE) Battery Manufacturing Facility and the Manufacturing Systems Research Group at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Director at the Helmholtz Institute Erlangen-Nürnberg for Renewable Energy Production (HI ERN)
Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH – Jülich, Germany
We are seeking an internationally respected researcher in the field of electrocatalysis, who is capable of further developing in particular the material and process engineering principles of electrolytic water splitting at the highest scientific level. It is envisaged that research activities will be complementary to and interlinked with work at Jülich‘s Institute of Energy and Climate Research (IEK) with its sub-institutes involved in electrochemical, process engineering, and materials science research, and with research work at the Erlangen cluster of excellence Engineering of Advanced Materials.

Sadoway’s research seeks to establish the scientific underpinnings for technologies that make efficient use of energy and natural resources in an environmentally sound matter.
Credit: MIT

Donald R. Sadoway – a prominent member of The Electrochemical Society and electrochemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge – has led a team of researchers at MIT to improve a proposed liquid battery system that could help make sources of renewable energy more viable and prove to be a competitor for conventional power plants.

This from MIT News:

Sadoway, the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry, says the new formula allows the battery to work at a temperature more than 200 degrees Celsius lower than the previous formulation. In addition to the lower operating temperature, which should simplify the battery’s design and extend its working life, the new formulation will be less expensive to make, he says.

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Pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) is a method of producing renewable energy from two streams of a different salinity.
Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares/MIT

“When the River Meets the Sea” may very well be a John Denver song circa 1979, but it is also an intersection with the potential to generate a significant amount of power. According to a team of mechanical engineers at MIT, when river water collides with sea water, there exists the potential to harness a significant amount of renewable energy.

This from Phys.org:

The researchers evaluated an emerging method of power generation called pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), in which two streams of different salinity are mixed to produce energy. In principle, a PRO system would take in river water and seawater on either side of a semi-permeable membrane. Through osmosis, water from the less-salty stream would cross the membrane to a pre-pressurized saltier side, creating a flow that can be sent through a turbine to recover power.

Read the full article here.

According to calculations by Leonardo Banchik, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, a PRO system could potentially power a coastal wastewater-treatment plant by taking in seawater and combining it with treated wastewater to produce renewable energy.

Although more research needs to be done to see in what applications the PRO system is economically viable, Banchik sees the huge potential of this method.

“Say we’re in a place that could really use desalinated water, like California, which is going through a terrible drought,” Banchik says. “They’re building a desalination plant that would sit right at the sea, which would take in seawater and give Californians water to drink. It would also produce a saltier brine, which you could mix with wastewater to produce power.”

Learn more about new devlopments in osmosis via ECS’s Digital Library.