The answer is “yes”! Then, a little more “yes” since the team of researchers at MIT associated around the professor Daniel Nocera said they discovered a process of generation and storage of energy never implemented so far!
The major obstacle to the use of “green” energy sources is not the implementation of the energy production system but the ability to store the energy produced most of the time discontinuously (day / night for solar power, wind strength for the wind power, speed for the hydraulic power…). Thus, the “real”discovery of Prof. Nocera is the means to store energy during a short-and long-term in a stable manner: thanks to matter!
The system he describes is composed of generating clean energy already known (such as wind turbines or solar panels), a catalyst of water into oxygen and hydrogen associated with storage tanks and a fuel cell (hydrogen).
By day, solar panels (for example) provide energy to a catalyst to raise the gas separately. The night (or anytime…), a fuel cell pump in these gas reserves and recombine molecules of hydrogen and oxygen with each other, producing sufficient energy to power a home.
The catalyst is a chemical process that allows separating molecules of oxygen atoms of hydrogen plunging two electrodes in a volume of water and then getting an electric current one electrode to another. It is then possible to reap the molecules in gaseous form and stored. The advantages of this manipulation are that it requires no condition of specific temperature or pressure and does only require that water has a neutral pH.
Finally, all components of this system are mastered and used for several decades now. The real innovation lies, rather than in the pure technological breakthrough, but in the process and how to organize the “bricks” known to arrive at a conclusive result, or to achieve more energy transformation to allow storage.
More information here - Credit: Donna Coveney, MIT
A sunny weekend. You are forced to go in a cinema, without conviction, by a fan-of-Disney friend of yours.
However, as soon as the movie starts, you know that finally you did not come for nothing!
In a not-so-distant future, Wall-e is the last robot still running on our planet. For several centuries, the Earth has been abandoned by men, overwhelmed by pollution and especially the growing amount of waste.
But I know what you are wondering: why such a pust in Greennovative?
Well simply because Wall-e is a robot designed to process waste, or rather waste compaction. It’s a very intelligent robot of course, but also a very weel designed one: its energy comes from an integrated solar panel!
Of course, Wall-e would not really come from Disney without a beautiful love story and a predictable happy-ending… but the movie works, and everyone is thinking differently at the end.
A not-to-be-missed movie - and given its theme, it should bring even more readers on Greennovative!
Today, just a short post to present you GreenIT.fr. Launched three months ago, this blog already contains a large number of posts and wants to quickly become the reference of “Green IT” news in France.
You will particularly appreciate their “Tools” category which lists many software directly related to ecology!
Did you heard about “cuil” (pronounced “cool”)? It is a new service in the market of search engines. This new service announced three times more pages indexed than Google (121 billion). Founded by three former employees from Google, we are not surprised that there is so much buzz around its recent announcement!
However, the object of this post is not to describe its features, others do it as well. I am talking about Cuil and its entirely black page because it reminded me a piece of news about the consumption of screens including the white color. It would seem that displaying a black page consumes less energy than displaying a white one!
Blackle and Cuil: same quest?
Some people trusted so much in this idea that they released a “black” version of Google (blackle.com, not edited by Google). As I’m writing these lines, blackle proudly displays 745 kWh saved, but what is it the truth?
Well, no! Despite your disappointed look, I must tell you that displaying a web page in black doesn’t consume less energy, at least not on our LCD (suffering rather the reverse)! Indeed, LCD screens are backlit by a source of constant intensity whether white or black! On the contrary, this belief is therefore true only for CRT screens. And we know that every day less and less people uses CRT screens.
To conclude: black background for Cuil, white one for Google, no difference for the planet… but there is clearly a difference when you look at the results page!
