Energy conversion

Americans tossed 292.4 million tons of trash into landfills in 2018, or about 5 pounds of garbage per person per day. Once in a landfill, much of that trash undergoes some wild chemistry, often polluting the surrounding area. But amid all the stinking refuse is potentially valuable material, and some environmentalists and engineers see landfills as a resource to be tapped. This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaLandfill mining is the process of uncapping a landfill and sifting through its cells of garbage to reclaim any sort of…

Businesses and homes throughout Texas cranked up their air conditioning this week during the ongoing heat dome, pushing the grid into record-breaking energy usage. This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaData from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the state’s grid operator, showed that power use reached 80,828 megawatts at 6 p.m. central time on Tuesday, Reuters reports. This topped a previous record of 80,148 megawatts that was set last July, according to ERCOT data.The state’s often fragile electric grid has been…

The California Institute of Technology has big news for space-based power. Researchers at the university have reportedly beamed solar power from space to Earth without a single wire—and they say it’s a first.This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaThe experiment is a part of Caltech’s Space Solar Power Project, and the institute announced a successful transmission via press release yesterday. The researchers conducted the power transfer experiment using the Microwave Array for Power-transfer Low-orbit Experiment, or MAPLE, which is…

Washington state building code officials voted Wednesday to delay the first statewide mandate for electric heat pumps in new buildings, dealing a significant blow to restrictions on natural gas.What Is Carbon Capture? With Gizmodo’s Molly Taft | TechmodoThe Washington State Building Code Council voted 8-2 to delay the statewide building codes for 120 days, E&E News reported. The council also approved a motion to begin revising the codes to ensure that they won’t easily be overturned in the future.This came after the…

U.S. manufacturing takes up a lot of energy, but there’s untapped potential in solar power for that sector, new research finds. A study looked at how installing solar panels throughout manufacturing sites could meet a third of that sector’s power needs.This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaResearchers used a survey from the Department of Energy and compared states to understand where rooftop solar could best supply electricity needs for manufacturing. Theyfound that companies that focus on textiles, apparel, and furniture would…

In an energy-efficient future, homes may be heated and cooled by pumping from giant pools of water stored underground. A study published this month in Applied Energy looks at how underground aquifers could help significantly reduce reliance on fossil fuels and help store energy produced by renewables.This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaThe research deals with a technology known as aquifer thermal energy storage, or ATES. Water is a great way to store thermal energy, and the Earth is an efficientinsulator. ATES is simply the…

Some of the world’s largest most influential nations have formed an alliance to create new supply chains for nuclear energy—the same weekend that another country announced it had completely weaned itself off the energy source.This Summer’s Hottest UmbrellaAt the meeting of the G7 this weekend, leaders of nuclear trade associations from the U.S., UK, Canada, Japan, and France announced they will work together to create supply chains for nuclear fuels that do not rely on Russia.When it comes to nuclear fuel, Russia’s supply…

As humanity resets its gaze toward Moon, British aerospace company Rolls-Royce Holdings is continuing its work on developing nuclear power sources for spaceflight and exploration. Today, the company announced funding from the U.K. Space Agency to further research and develop a nuclear reactor that’s meant to power a future base on the Moon.The U.K. Space Agency provided Rolls-Royce Holdings with £2.9 million, which isabout $3.5 million USD, according to a press release from the agency. Rolls-Royce elaborated in its…

Steam rises from the cooling towers at the Vogtle plant.Photo: John Bazemore (AP)It’s official: One of the new towers at the Vogtle power plant has started splitting atoms. The step brings the troubled plant in Georgia, which is years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget, closer to providing an enormous amount of carbon-free power to the grid.Westinghouse, the designer and operator of the two pressurized water reactors, said in a press release Monday that Unit 3 of the Vogtle plant had started the nuclear…

A group of cities in the Western U.S. have voted to move ahead with a new nuclear project that could help revolutionize how clean power is generated in this country—despite sharply rising costs for the project.On Tuesday, a group of 26 cities in Utah, Idaho, New Mexico, and Nevada saidthey wanted to continue with their investment in what could become the U.S.’s first cluster of small modular reactors. NuScale, the company behind the project, told the group in January that costs for the energy generated by the planned…