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World’s first “solar battery” runs on light and air

October 3, 2014 in Battery Energy Storage, Environment, EV News, Greentech, Solar

Researchers at The Ohio State University have invented a solar battery -- a combination solar cell and battery -- which recharges itself using air and light. The design required a solar panel which captured light, but admitted air to the battery. Here, scanning electron microscope images show the solution: nanometer-sized rods of titanium dioxide (larger image) which cover the surface of a piece of titanium gauze (inset). The holes in the gauze are approximately 200 micrometers across, allowing air to enter the battery while the rods gather light. Image courtesy of Yiying Wu (Ohio State University)

Researchers at The Ohio State University have invented a solar battery — a combination solar cell and battery — which recharges itself using air and light. The design required a solar panel which captured light, but admitted air to the battery. Here, scanning electron microscope images show the solution: nanometer-sized rods of titanium dioxide (larger image) which cover the surface of a piece of titanium gauze (inset). The holes in the gauze are approximately 200 micrometers across, allowing air to enter the battery while the rods gather light. Image courtesy of Yiying Wu (Ohio State University)

Batteries Included: A Solar Cell that Stores its Own Power.

By Pam Frost Gorder, Ohio State University

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Is it a solar cell? Or a rechargeable battery?

Actually, the patent-pending device invented at The Ohio State University is both: the world’s first solar battery.

In the October 3, 2014 issue of the journal Nature Communications, the researchers report that they’ve succeeded in combining a battery and a solar cell into one hybrid device.

Key to the innovation is a mesh solar panel, which allows air to enter the battery, and a special process for transferring electrons between the solar panel and the battery electrode. Inside the device, light and oxygen enable different parts of the chemical reactions that charge the battery.

The university will license the solar battery to industry, where Yiying Wu, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State, says it will help tame the costs of renewable energy.

Yiying Wu Photo courtesy of Ohio State University

Yiying Wu
Photo courtesy of Ohio State University

“The state of the art is to use a solar panel to capture the light, and then use a cheap battery to store the energy,” Wu said. “We’ve integrated both functions into one device. Any time you can do that, you reduce cost.”

He and his students believe that their device brings down costs by 25 percent.

The invention also solves a longstanding problem in solar energy efficiency, by eliminating the loss of electricity that normally occurs when electrons have to travel between a solar cell and an external battery. Typically, only 80 percent of electrons emerging from a solar cell make it into a battery.

With this new design, light is converted to electrons inside the battery, so nearly 100 percent of the electrons are saved.

The design takes some cues from a battery previously developed by Wu and doctoral student Xiaodi Ren. They invented a high-efficiency air-powered battery that discharges by chemically reacting potassium with oxygen. The design won the $100,000 clean energy prize from the U.S. Department of Energy in 2014, and the researchers formed a technology spinoff called KAir Energy Systems, LLC to develop it.

“Basically, it’s a breathing battery,” Wu said. “It breathes in air when it discharges, and breathes out when it charges.”

For this new study, the researchers wanted to combine a solar panel with a battery similar to the KAir. The challenge was that solar cells are normally made of solid semiconductor panels, which would block air from entering the battery.

Doctoral student Mingzhe Yu designed a permeable mesh solar panel from titanium gauze, a flexible fabric upon which he grew vertical rods of titanium dioxide like blades of grass. Air passes freely through the gauze while the rods capture sunlight.

Normally, connecting a solar cell to a battery would require the use of four electrodes, the researchers explained. Their hybrid design uses only three.

The mesh solar panel forms the first electrode. Beneath, the researchers placed a thin sheet of porous carbon (the second electrode) and a lithium plate (the third electrode). Between the electrodes, they sandwiched layers of electrolyte to carry electrons back and forth.

Here’s how the solar battery works: during charging, light hits the mesh solar panel and creates electrons. Inside the battery, electrons are involved in the chemical decomposition of lithium peroxide into lithium ions and oxygen. The oxygen is released into the air, and the lithium ions are stored in the battery as lithium metal after capturing the electrons.

When the battery discharges, it chemically consumes oxygen from the air to re-form the lithium peroxide.

An iodide additive in the electrolyte acts as a “shuttle” that carries electrons, and transports them between the battery electrode and the mesh solar panel. The use of the additive represents a distinct approach on improving the battery performance and efficiency, the team said.

The mesh belongs to a class of devices called dye-sensitized solar cells, because the researchers used a red dye to tune the wavelength of light it captures.

In tests, they charged and discharged the battery repeatedly, while doctoral student Lu Ma used X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy to analyze how well the electrode materials survived—an indication of battery life.

First they used a ruthenium compound as the red dye, but since the dye was consumed in the light capture, the battery ran out of dye after eight hours of charging and discharging—too short a lifetime. So they turned to a dark red semiconductor that wouldn’t be consumed: hematite, or iron oxide—more commonly called rust.

Coating the mesh with rust enabled the battery to charge from sunlight while retaining its red color. Based on early tests, Wu and his team think that the solar battery’s lifetime will be comparable to rechargeable batteries already on the market.

The U.S. Department of Energy funds this project, which will continue as the researchers explore ways to enhance the solar battery’s performance with new materials.

This article is an EV News Report repost, credit: Ohio State University.

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Green Charge Networks Signs Lithium-Ion Battery Supply Agreement with Samsung SDI

October 3, 2014 in Battery Energy Storage, Electric Vehicles, Environment, EV charging, EV News, Greentech, Large Energy Storage

Samsung SDI and Green Charge Networks Partner to Provide Intelligent Energy Storage Worldwide

Photo courtesy of Samsung SDI

Photo courtesy of Samsung SDI

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – Clean tech market leaders Green Charge Networks and Samsung SDI today announced the signing of a strategic supply agreement to deliver as much as 25 megawatt-hours (MWh) of lithium-ion batteries over the next two years. The agreement guarantees Green Charge has adequate supply of batteries as it seeks to expand its leading position in the growing market for intelligent energy storage.

Samsung SDI is the leading manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries for stationary energy storage, electric vehicles, as well as consumer electronics. In February 2014, Samsung SDI announced an investment of $600 million to build China’s largest automotive lithium-ion battery manufacturing plant in Shaanxi province. The plant will begin operation in October 2015 with an annual capacity of enabling battery supply for over 40,000 EVs. Samsung SDI formed the strategic alliance with Green Charge as it has emerged as the leading solution in distributed energy storage with a fast growing list of brand name customers.

The GreenStationTM software-driven energy storage systems are installed and operating at commercial businesses, cities, and schools from coast to coast. After more than a year of technical collaboration, Green Charge chose Samsung SDI as its primary source for lithium-ion due to its safety, quality standards, and 10-year warranty. In addition to scale, Samsung SDI has met the highest level of performance and reliability demanded by Green Charge’s customers. By agreeing to purchase as much as 25 MWh of batteries from Samsung, Green Charge assures itself access to safe and reliable lithium-ion batteries to expand its market-leading position. Samsung SDI, in turns, benefits by gaining access to the growing mid-tier U.S. energy storage market.

“Green Charge’s partnership with Samsung affirms our commitment to using the best technology to deliver exceptional results to our customers,” said Vic Shao, CEO at Green Charge Networks. “Our customers count on us to use safe, reliable, and robust battery technology. This partnership solidifies the quality and value of the GreenStation platform.”

“Distributed energy storage will follow the same growth trajectory as distributed solar in the years to come,” said Woo-chan Kim, SVP of Samsung SDI. “We are pleased to partner with Green Charge as it has developed one of the most advanced and software-driven energy storage solutions. This partnership will vastly accelerate deployment in the emerging battery storage market in America and beyond.”

About Samsung SDI

Having entered the secondary Li-ion battery business in 2000, Samsung SDI has developed and grown into a market leader. Li-ion battery manufacturing now serves as one of Samsung SDI’s core businesses as it seeks to restructure its business portfolio from electronic display products to eco-friendly energy solutions, thereby writing another chapter of our industrial history in energy sector. The secondary lithium-ion batteries manufactured by Samsung SDI are rapidly expanding their applications from digital mobile devices such as cell phone and laptop to electric vehicles such as xEV and Energy Storage System (ESS). Our employees are sparing no effort to further develop new and innovative technologies and products and to expand our presence into untapped markets. For more information, visit http://www.samsungsdi.com/main.

About Green Charge Networks, LLC (Green Charge)

Founded in 2009, Green Charge Networks is a leader in intelligent customer-sited energy storage. The company gives commercial and industrial businesses, municipalities, and schools control of rising demand rates on their monthly electric bills. Green Charge’s product complements solar PV, electric vehicle charging, and energy efficiency. The GreenStationTM was developed in partnership with leading utilities and Fortune 500 customers from coast to coast. K Road DG is the lead investor in Green Charge, with $56M investment announced in July 2014. Green Charge is headquartered in Santa Clara, CA with offices in New York City. For more information, visit www.GreenCharge.Net.

This article (10-1-14) is an EV News Report repost, credit: Samsung SDI.

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Crumpled graphene could provide an unconventional energy storage

October 2, 2014 in Environment, EV News, Graphene, Greentech

Two-dimensional carbon “paper” can form stretchable supercapacitors to power flexible electronic devices.

To form the crumpled graphene, a sheet of polymer material is stretched in both dimensions, then graphene paper is bonded to it. When the polymer is released in one direction, the graphene forms pleats, as shown in the bottom images, taken with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Then, when released in the other direction, it forms a chaotic crumpled pattern (top images). The right pair of SEM images shows the material at higher magnification than the left-hand images.  Image courtesy of the researchers (MIT)

To form the crumpled graphene, a sheet of polymer material is stretched in both dimensions, then graphene paper is bonded to it. When the polymer is released in one direction, the graphene forms pleats, as shown in the bottom images, taken with a scanning electron microscope (SEM). Then, when released in the other direction, it forms a chaotic crumpled pattern (top images). The right pair of SEM images shows the material at higher magnification than the left-hand images.
Image courtesy of the researchers (MIT)

By David L. Chandler, MIT      

When someone crumples a sheet of paper, that usually means it’s about to be thrown away. But researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene “paper” — a material formed by bonding together layers of the two-dimensional form of carbon — can actually yield new properties that could be useful for creating extremely stretchable supercapacitors to store energy for flexible electronic devices.

The finding is reported in the journal Scientific Reports by MIT’s Xuanhe Zhao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering, and four other authors. The new, flexible superconductors should be easy and inexpensive to fabricate, the team says.

“Many people are exploring graphene paper: It’s a good candidate for making supercapacitors, because of its large surface area per mass,” Zhao says. Now, he says, the development of flexible electronic devices, such as wearable or implantable biomedical sensors or monitoring devices, will require flexible power-storage systems.

Like batteries, supercapacitors can store electrical energy, but they primarily do so electrostatically, rather than chemically — meaning they can deliver their energy faster than batteries can. Now Zhao and his team have demonstrated that by crumpling a sheet of graphene paper into a chaotic mass of folds, they can make a supercapacitor that can easily be bent, folded, or stretched to as much as 800 percent of its original size. The team has made a simple supercapacitor using this method as a proof of principle.

The material can be crumpled and flattened up to 1,000 times, the team has demonstrated, without a significant loss of performance. “The graphene paper is pretty robust,” Zhao says, “and we can achieve very large deformations over multiple cycles.” Graphene, a structure of pure carbon just one atom thick with its carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal array, is one of the strongest materials known.

To make the crumpled graphene paper, a sheet of the material was placed in a mechanical device that first compressed it in one direction, creating a series of parallel folds or pleats, and then in the other direction, leading to a chaotic, rumpled surface. When stretched, the material’s folds simply smooth themselves out.

Forming a capacitor requires two conductive layers — in this case, two sheets of crumpled graphene paper — with an insulating layer in between, which in this demonstration was made from a hydrogel material. Like the crumpled graphene, the hydrogel is highly deformable and stretchable, so the three layers remain in contact even while being flexed and pulled.

Though this initial demonstration was specifically to make a supercapacitor, the same crumpling technique could be applied to other uses, Zhao says. For example, the crumpled graphene material might be used as one electrode in a flexible battery, or could be used to make a stretchable sensor for specific chemical or biological molecules.

“This work is really exciting and amazing to me,” says Dan Li, a professor of materials engineering at Monash University in Australia who was not involved in this research. He says the team “provides an extremely simple but highly effective concept to make stretchable electrodes for supercapacitors by controlled crumpling of multilayered graphene films.” While other groups have made flexible supercapacitors, he says, “Making supercapacitors stretchable has been a great challenge. This paper provides a very smart way to tackle this challenge, which I believe will bring wearable energy storage devices closer.”

The research team also included Jianfeng Zang at Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Changyang Cao, Yaying Feng, and Jie Liu at Duke University. The work was supported by the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and the National 1000 Talents Program of China.

This article is an EV News Report repost, credit: MIT.

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Energy Department Recognizes 11 Manufacturers for Energy Efficiency Achievements

October 2, 2014 in Climate Change, Environment, EV News, Greentech, Politics, Pollution

Dr. Ernest Moniz Photo courtesy of DOE

Dr. Ernest Moniz
Photo courtesy of DOE

Washington, D.C. – Building on the Administration’s efforts to double energy productivity and help American businesses save money by saving energy, the Energy Department today recognized 11 companies that have met ambitious energy-efficiency goals through the Better Buildings, Better Plants Program. Across the country, manufacturers spend more than $200 billion each year to power their plants. Through the Energy Department’s Better Plants Program, American manufacturers commit to improve their energy intensity by 25 percent over ten years, or an equally ambitious level for their sector.

“Through cost-effective energy efficiency improvements in their factories, American manufacturers are boosting their energy productivity, saving money and protecting the environment by reducing carbon emissions,” said Secretary Ernest Moniz. “As a result, Better Plants Partners have avoided 18.5 million metric tons of carbon emissions to date, which is about the same as the annual emissions from close to five coal-fired power plants. These companies are demonstrating that significant energy savings can be achieved through smart investments that create jobs and strengthen the U.S. manufacturing sector.”

The Department also announced today that over the last four years, Better Plants Partners have improved the energy intensity of their operations – a measure of a facility’s energy use per unit of output – by about 2.4 percent annually, far exceeding projected business-as-usual rates for U.S. manufacturers as a whole. Demonstrating leadership and showcasing initiatives and strategies that have proven successful, 11 Better Plants Partners recently met their goal to improve energy intensity:

  1. BPM, Inc.
  2. Celanese International Corp.
  3. Holcim (US) Inc.
  4. Legrand North America
  5. Lennox International Inc.
  6. Patriot Foundry & Castings
  7. Procter & Gamble
  8. Texas Instruments
  9. ThyssenKrupp Elevator
  10. Toyota
  11. Verso Paper Corp.

More than 140 companies currently participate in the Better Plants Program, representing more than 2,300 manufacturing facilities and close to 11 percent of the total U.S. manufacturing energy footprint. Cumulatively, these companies have saved approximately 320 trillion British Thermal Units of energy – equivalent to saving nearly $1.7 billion in energy costs. Earlier this month, the Department welcomed 23 new manufacturers to the Better Plants Program, representing a range of manufacturing sectors.

The Better Buildings, Better Plants Program is part of President Obama’s broader Better Buildings Initiative to help American commercial and industrial buildings become at least 20 percent more energy efficient over the next 10 years. The Initiative also includes the Better Buildings Challenge through which U.S. companies, universities, school districts, multifamily housing owners, and state and local governments have committed to reducing energy use across their building portfolios by 20 percent or more. The accomplishments announced today are summarized in the Energy Department’s Fall 2014 Better Plants Progress Update, released today and available HERE.

This article is an EV News Report repost, credit: Energy Department.

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Alstom improves the performance of its tidal energy solutions with Oceade™ 18 – 1.4MW

October 2, 2014 in Environment, EV News, Greentech, Ocean / Tidal Energy

Alstom has taken advantage of its experience with the 1 MW turbine to improve the design of its tidal stream turbine. We are now offering the Oceade™ 18 – 1.4 MW, making the turbine even more efficient, cost-effective and easy to maintain.

With a rotor diameter of 18 metres, the Oceade tidal stream turbine has a nominal power of 1.4MW and three variable pitching blades. It is equipped with plug-and-play modules on rails, easily accessible through an inspection hatch at the rear of the nacelle to enable faster assembly and maintenance. This turbine is buoyant, making it easy to tow to and from the operating site. Installation and maintenance costs are therefore lower because there is no need for specialist vessels and divers. It also reduces the timeframe to install or retrieve the turbine. The unit rotates to face the incoming tide at an optimal angle and thus extract the maximum energy potential.

The Oceade is ready to be deployed at the tidal energy farm that will be selected in the call for expressions of interest launched in September 2013 by the French government.

Alstom is currently working on the development of an Oceade™ platform concept to reduce the price of electricity and maximise the use of tidal stream resources according to local conditions (tidal current speed and depth) .

In January 2013, Alstom successfully deployed a 1MW tidal stream turbine at the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC), a test site located off the coast of the Orkney Islands in Scotland. Alstom is currently testing the turbine, which has already reached nominal power of 1MW, demonstrated its autonomous running capability and generated over 500MWh on the Scottish grid, as part of the ReDapt Project (Reliable Data Acquisition Platform for Tidal), which is commissioned and co funded by the ETI (Energy Technologies Institute).

With Oceade 18 – 1.4MW, Alstom has taken a new step forward in the development of marine energy production solutions.

“With this new tidal energy production solution, Alstom has made definite headway. The project is seeking to demonstrate a new design for an efficient, reliable turbine to reduce installation and maintenance costs with a view to commercial production,” declared Jacques Jamart, Alstom Senior Vice-President New Energies.

Alstom is continuing to develop the largest portfolio of solutions in the field of renewable energies. The company offers the most complete range of products and integrated systems to generate electricity from hydraulic, onshore and offshore wind, geothermal, biomass and solar sources.

[1] The call for expressions of interest plans to install experimental farms in two high-potential areas: Raz Blanchard, west of the tip of Cotentin (Manche) and Fromveur Passage, near Ile d’Ouessant (Finistère).

[2] This project has received the support of ADEME (French Environment and Energy Efficiency Agency) in the frame of the “Investissements d’Avenir” programme, and of FEDER (European Fund for Regional and Economic Development).

This article (10-1-14) is an EV News Report repost, credit: Alstom.