Green Technology – Latest Developments in Green Tech

Northern Brewer Essential Brew

Popular Mechanics — Mon, 09 Nov 2020 21:21:24 +0000

Bart van Overbeeke/TU Eindhoven

After 300 years in business, a Dutch brewery is heating beer using sustainable iron combustion.
Replacing high heat for furnaces or boilers has been a special challenge for renewables.
Burnt iron is “recharged” for reuse using electrolysis that can come from clean energy sources.

A brewery in the Netherlands is making environmental history by using a cycle of renewable iron as fuel for its furnace.

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Royal Swinkels Family Brewers is working with Eindhoven University of Technology and a technology think tank called Metal Power on the circular economy of iron burning. “The iron acts as a kind of clean battery for combustion processes, charging up via one of a number of means including electrolysis, and discharging in flames and heat,” New Atlas reports.

Here’s how it works: Iron is burned in furnaces, fulfilling a key industry requirement for high heat that isn’t covered by many other renewables. Then, the resulting oxidized rust waste is recycled back into newly re-burnable iron fuel using electrical energy that can be from clean sources. In February, Eindhoven University researcher Niels Dean explained in a statement:

”Iron powder is also easy to transport and can be recycled. If you combust iron powder with hot gases to drive a turbine or an engine, rust powder remains. Using hydrogen produced from electricity surpluses from sustainable sources you turn it into iron powder again. That’s how you extract the oxygen from the rust particles.”

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The researchers also explain why this hasn’t really been explored in the commercial sector before. It’s simple: Fossil fuels were the right combination of plentiful and relatively cheap to dominate the energy market for decades. Even today, Eindhoven University says, iron powder is funneled through a scant handful of suppliers around the world. Production would need to be scaled up for wider energy usage.

Brewery Bavaria in the Netherlands, owned by Royal Swinkels and operated for over 300 years, says it’s the first business in the world to begin using a cyclical iron-burning furnace. “As a family business, we invest in a sustainable and circular economy because we think in terms of generations, not years,” CEO and descendent Peer Swinkels tells New Atlas.

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Beer is heated at different points during the brewing process, sometimes merely hot and sometimes to a full boil. This kind of heat is a challenge for renewable energy or even simply electricity. Home users of electric stoves know the burners must gradually warm up to temperature, which is fine for individual home use, but could constrict the timelines of a brewery that makes 15 million servings of beer a year, for example.

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But the government of the Netherlands has introduced a strict timeline to phase out the use of natural gas by 2022. This has incentivized researchers to find a totally different path—the iron cycle creates heat by burning, yet the burning is cleaner and the results are recyclable. For industries that require high heat, electricity and heat from iron combustion are one version of the future.

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160W Monocrystalline Solar Panel

Popular Mechanics — Fri, 06 Nov 2020 20:19:54 +0000

Elon Musk and Neoen are collaborating on the supersized sequel to Tesla’s existing battery farm in South Australia.
The Hornsdale Power Reserve has been a huge success, and the new battery is multiple times larger.
The renewable future will include a variety of sources to cover all times of day and conditions.

After the undeniable success of Elon Musk’s battery farm, the Tesla head honcho and the government of Victoria, Australia are following it up by building a new, much larger, 300-megawatt battery farm.

➡ You like Elon Musk. So do we. Let’s nerd out over his creations together.

As a refresher, in 2016, South Australia experienced a near total blackout after a crazy storm brought 80,000 lightning strikes and at least two tornadoes to the area. When a politician blamed the blackouts on the push for renewable energy, Musk and Tesla bet they could power the area with the company’s PowerPacks within 100 days—and did it in 60.

In just two years, the Neoen-owned Hornsdale Power Reserve—literally a facility full of PowerPacks that receives and stores energy from nearby wind and solar farms—has worked as advertised, saving South Australia more than $100 million in network costs. By storing power up to its capacity of 100 MW, this “battery” can absorb brief blips in the grid surrounding it, reducing outages for residents and easing the burden on businesses or facilities that lose money, product, and more during those outages.

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Victorian Big Battery Megapack will be built about 40 miles outside Melbourne, and it’s double even the upgraded size of the existing Hornsdale Power Reserve. Like Hornsdale before, the Victorian Big Battery Megapack will become the largest facility of its kind in the world.

The battery farm itself is a storage system. South Australia has a robust infrastructure of renewables like solar energy farms, and both the state and Musk view storage as a key part of making renewables an everyday competitor. That’s because solar is subject to fluctuations that greatly vary its energy output, which makes it difficult to predict as well as price for consumers. The renewable future is likely made of a patchwork of sources that work best in different environments, times of day, and conditions.

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160W Monocrystalline Solar Panel

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DOKIO Monocrystalline Foldable Solar Panel

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Renogy 300 Watt Monocrystalline Solar Panel

If you want to really go all out, you can’t go wrong with Renology’s 10-piece, 300-watt solar panels. They’re capable of withstanding high winds and snow loads, they’re anti-reflective, and extremely versatile. These are ideal for residential or commercial rooftops, but they’re compatible with a ground-mount as well.

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Renogy 100 Watts 12 Volts Monocrystalline Solar Starter Kit

Anyone new to solar panels should start with a good kit, like this one by Renology. You’ll get everything you need in one, including an 100W solar panel, 30A PWM negative ground charge controller, MC4 connectors, a 8Ft 10 AWG tray cable, and mounting Z brackets for an RV or boat. It can fully charge a 50Ah Battery from 50% in 3 hours.

If that sounds fussy or tedious, think about the food your family eats every day. It’s a mix of animals that evolved in different climates, grains from around the world, fruits and vegetables that vary by season, and even preserved and fermented products that are only edible because of how they’re prepared. We can put together a similar “menu” of renewables, and battery farms like Victorian Big Battery Megapack help to make that selection more “shelf stable.”

Neoen is again footing the bill for the Megapack. It’s likely that having increased stability and delivery lets Neoen make a better sales pitch for the renewables it builds for and sells around the world, making this a win-win situation.

When the battery is fully charged, it can provide power back into its intended South Australia grid for about an hour and a half. On a typical peak summer day, the hot and dry state has abundant sunshine and equally high energy needs. South Australia has led the way globally toward an all-renewable grid, including a recent milestone where the grid was powered only by solar for an entire hour.

Strangely, too much solar at once can also be bad for the grid as well as energy prices. Evening out the highs by redistributing them to the lows is something that, Australian officials say, will stabilize the grid and keep uptime high. They’ve also passed a law allowing the local power distributor to “switch off” household solar if the grid is unstable due to excess.

Here in the U.S., we think of peak hours as a bad thing—when residents are encouraged to switch off high-usage appliances and conserve energy to prevent brownouts or even blackouts. But in Australia, the abundance of solar energy means people are encouraged to do their most energy intensive things in the peak of the afternoon. With increased solar storage in the Megapack, perhaps all hours can be dishwasher hours again.

(Why?)

Watch Contractors Hypnotically Build an Entire Wind Turbine Farm

Popular Mechanics — Mon, 21 Sep 2020 17:46:24 +0000

Watch as builders dig, frame, and fill the foundation for a 250-foot wind turbine.
Turbines are growing in popularity all the time, and they’re marvels of engineering.
Three words: sixteen African elephants.

Get ready to see one of the biggest and most common large technical installations of today: a wind turbine farm. First there are countless meters of trenching and cable laying, then the digout of a gigantic pit for the base. It only gets better from there.

➡ You love badass construction projects. So do we. Let’s nerd out over them together.

Let’s watch what happens.

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To start, the team lays a concrete disc that covers the entire base of the foundation. Then, the contractors place an anchor cage in the center and start to lay radiating rebar that extends out in a sunburst shape. Ultimately, the resulting cage assembly looks like a very wide and flat jungle gym. It extends to the edges of the concrete base and its very top lies flush with the surrounding ground level.

A bunch of very patient, talented workers fill the entire cage base with concrete—the video cites between 130 and 240 cubic meters—before they fully cover the rebar and finish the concrete to a smooth surface. Dirt is pushed back in, hiding the structural bulk and leaving just the opening where a turbine will be mounted.

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Next comes the manufacturing and quality testing of the turbine parts. “By the approximate weight of 16 African elephants, blades are vigorously bent for testing,” one caption reads, while blades are tested for flexure in the background. A brittle rotor wouldn’t be practical, the same way airplane wings must be able to tolerate flex and rebound. Special, wild long two-piece trucks called Dolls carry the front and very back of each rotor blade as well as the parts of the turbine’s trunk.

These are all assembled on site. The final turbine, between 212 and 262 feet tall, is piled piece by piece and topped with the spinning motor portion—itself in two pieces the size of a large car. Finally, the rotor blades are hauled up on surreally large cranes and attached.

The turbines are so gigantic that fog appears in the massive distance between the camera and the entire turbine assembly it’s capturing in frame. And while some people argue that wind turbines are an eyesore, this one—a collaboration between ERBI, Peikko Group, LM Wind Power, DOLL Fahrzeugbau, GE Europe and, MidAmerican Energy Company—looks strong and elegant.

(Why?)