This morning Dave Borlace of YouTube Just Have a Think fame reached out to ask me about a scheme to capture waste heat from a trash burning electricity plant, put it in thermal storage on barges and tow it 28 kilometers upriver to displace gas burning boilers in a district heating … [continued]
Danfoss, a Danish company, has released a white paper that advocates for capturing and reusing waste heat in homes and businesses.
Globally, data centers are estimated to account for 1 to 2% of electricity usage. The percentage is higher in Europe, where data centers there consumed 104 TWh of electricity in 2020 — about 3% of all the electricity consumed within the EU. Those data centers create a lot of waste … [continued]
Heating and cooling the cabin of electric vehicles needs to be more efficient to avoid loss of range.
Leveraging waste heat is a model for making any energy production more efficient. In the TalkSolar podcast below, I interview Phil Brennan, I his company’s technology fits in with the solar equation and the DOE project that is exploring waste heat and the solar connection. Echogen Power Solutions is taking what was once waste and … [continued]
An entirely new approach to harvesting waste heat — one based on a phenomenon known as the thermogalvanic effect — has been developed by researchers at MIT and Stanford University. The new technique is entirely divorced from the (usually used) thermoelectric effect, which relies on (generally expensive) solid-state materials — … [continued]
by Chadwick Wasilenkoff Sometimes what’s old becomes new again and “cogeneration,” which is over 130 years old, is gathering momentum across the world. “Combined heat and power (CHP), also known as cogeneration, is the simultaneous production of electricity and heat from a single fuel source, such as natural gas, biomass, … [continued]
I got news of this a couple of days ago and decided to pass on covering the story since we basically already covered it 3 weeks ago, when the news was that 99% of new power capacity added in November would come from renewables. That somehow changed to 100% once … [continued]
A new crowdfunding campaign aimed at creating the world’s most efficient semiconductor chip has just been launched on Kickstarter. The MicroPower Chips team has a rather ambitious goal of raising $250,000 within 30 days, but it may indeed be able to do so. Within just 1.5 days, it has already … [continued]
Industry can’t exist without water. Producing anything involves heat. When you’re a manufacturing facility, you’re lucky to be pushing out exhaust heat at less than 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
It costs water to make steel, water to make cement, even water to make solar PV panels and wind turbines. And then it costs water to continue to run things. For example, your average solar parabolic plant sucks up between 760 and 920 gallons for every megawatt hour produced. (Editor’s Note: wind and solar PV use a ton less than other power generation options, though.)
