Tuesday, August 12, 2014

scty01 large-scale energy storage renewable energy industry Morgan Stanley’s US and Europe may seek to avoid utility grid fees by going “off-grid” through a combination of solar power and energy storage

5 Energy Projects Almost Too Ridiculous To Be True

 
Benzinga


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These days, energy is a big concern on a global scale. But some projects seem so far-fetched that they belong in science fiction novels rather than city streets.
Here's a look at a few:
Energy Duck Designed by a British team, the Energy Duck promises to provide Copenhagen with solar and hydropower. The duck would be a tourist attraction that would gather solar energy in Copenhagen Harbor in an effort to help the city’s ambition of becoming carbon-neutral by 2025.
Aside from the design, two things sound particularly ridiculous about this project: As explained by designboom, the yield of the generator would be 75 percent of a fully optimized solar farm on the same site, and the project claims that the duck is designed to serve as much as an entire town.
Thermoelectric energy harvesters These are also called thermoelectric generators. Essentially, they convert temperature differences into electrical energy using the Seebeck effect. While the thermoelectric phenomena have been utilized in heating and cooling applications, its application in electricity generation is negligible at the moment.
However, a recent research by IDTechEx says that the market for these devices could reach almost a billion dollars by 2024. One of the most bizarre parts of the thermoelectric energy-harvesting project is generating electricity from the human body. Scientists have previously said that a resting male can provide anything from 100 to 120 watts of energy, which is theoretically sufficient to power many gadgets.
A team of researchers from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) has developed a “flexible thermoelectric generator” in form of a wristband.
The main breakthrough with this particular wearable is that it is capable of generating about 40 milliwatts of energy without making the wearer feel the burden of carrying a load. And with companies like ABB (NYSE: ABB) and General Electric (NYSE: GE) already involved– with wireless sensors in particular – this industry could well grow as much as forecasted.
Vibration-to-electric energy conversion To think that you can generate electricity by simply marching (dancing, walking, etc.) around is quite ridiculous. But it is possible. Discovery News reported that Club Watt in Rotterdam, Netherlands, already has this technology in place, using floor vibrations from people walking and dancing to power its light show.
Mitsubishi (OTC: MSBHY) is also already involved in electricity generation from vibration. The company’s research is based on using spring to amplify vibrations, which could help maximize the potential of vibration-generated electricity.
Solar highway The idea of replacing asphalt roads with glass-covered roads that have solar panels underneath also sounds too ridiculous to be true. But in the future, it might not be.
Solar Roadways, based out of Sagle, Idaho, is the company behind this initiative. The company has raised more than $2 million so far. The federal government has also supported this project by giving the company $750,000 in 2011. It’s a difficult call, but smart highways could be the future.
Cheap, recharchable batteries
Make a list of the top five problems faced by the renewable energy industry, and you’re likely to have large-scale energy storage in there. Companies like Elon Musk’s Solar City (NASDAQ: SCTY) have invested a lot in this.
However, a recent breakthrough by scientists at the University of Southern California promises to solve this problem completely. These scientists have developed a water-based, organic battery, which uses no metal or toxic material, and is intended for use in power plants.
One of the researchers said the battery lasts for about 5,000 recharge cycles – an equivalence of 15-year lifespan – compared with the 1000 cycles for lithium ion batteries, which cost ten times more to manufacture.
See more from Benzinga

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  • GEORGE 2 hours ago
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    If you entertain enough wacky ideas, eventually you will run across something that actually works. Remember all those stupid attempts to make a flying machine before the Wright Bros.? We are desperately searching for ways to scrape together enough energy to power our insatiably energy hungry world. Since the time that humans were stealing meat from lions and waiting for lightning to start fires for us, we have been searching for more and better ways to access energy. The search will not cease until the human race is extinct.
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  • Jack 3 hours ago
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    1) Energy duck - hard to imagine a giant duck covered in solar panels that would also be a tourist attraction! Maybe in Disneyland?
    2) Thermoelectric energy harvesters - if a human body dissipates 100W of power (sounds a tad high), a typical Thermoelectric converter operating at 5% efficiency could then generate 5W of power but you would have to cover the entire individual with TE converters!
    3) Vibration to energy converters - a waste of effort!
    4) Solar highway - yes could generate a lot of power but how do you deal with the potholes? Not to mention the initial cost and cost of maintenance!
    5) Cheap rechargeable batteries - look to super capacitors instead of chemical batteries with all their inherent limitations.

    My 2 cents...
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  • Squid B 3 hours ago
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    Solar highways are stupid.. Sorry to all you who think I should be embracing some new idea. They cant even keep refectors from being damaged,--I constantly see gouges in the road from something.. and since when do the suns rays beam directly down to a street? Does this mean we have to futher clear millions of trees on either side of a highway anohter 100ft so the sun can get to the road for longer periods?
    How about using the empty meidans tens of thousands of miles on the middle of the interstates and highways... cheaper, already cleared, and you don't have to worry about someone dragging thier muffler across it.
    Leave it to the goverment to give someone money for this garbage.
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  • Joshua 3 hours ago
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    One of those bad ideas is solar roadways, which–thanks to a tweet by George Takei (because actors on science fiction know so much about real science than other celebrities)–received more than $2 million in pledges when its promoters asked for only half that. The pledges kept coming in even after numerous web sites debunked the proposal to turn roads into solar energy collectors. On roads, the panels can’t be oriented, they will be partly obscured by vehicles, skid marks, and oil leaks, and subject to continuous impacts from tires, studs, chains, accidents, and falling cargo. This makes the road option a poorer producer of electricity at a higher cost. You need to turn 12 volt DC into 120 volt AC to power a home. Of course build high voltage transmission lines that run parallel to the entire American roadway. The other good thing about solar roadways is that urban planners hate roads enough that few of them will ever try to adopt this technology. Let’s just hope no more of our tax dollars go to this crazy idea. If you really wanna exploit solar power on roadways. Put solar heating tubes in the parking lots to heat and cool adjacent buildings.
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  • Meab 3 hours ago
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    Solar highway? Difficult call???? HA HA HA.

    Why put the solar cells in the road where trucks will pound them into dust? Why put them where dirt and black tire marks will cover them? Put the solar cells in the medians, on roofs, and in open fields. SLANT THEM SO THEY FACE THE SUN so they can make power. Install them on an angle so that rain can wash dust off.

    Ever see the movie Idiocrasy? Well, the Goverment officials that approved $750,000 to fund solar highways belongs in the movie. So does this idiot author.
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  • Dennis Z 3 hours ago
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    Until energy storage improves in capacity and cost, all the clever methods of generating energy are for naught.
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  • Foolinwitu 1 hour ago
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    How much can I generate masturbating with that watch thing? Seeing how I do this once everyday morning maybe I can charge my cell phone for the day?
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  • Jim 38 minutes ago
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    The solar highway could be the solar canopy over highways and be started right now using existing tech at a fraction of the cost. It would have the added benefit of keeping drivers from having to drive in the rain, snow,hail, glare of the sun.etc It would still be using large areas that govt's controls.
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  • Atilla 3 hours ago
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    Younare sitting on a magnetic sphere that is spinning inside another external magnetic field... that is the definition of a 'generator'. Any way to 'tap' the Sun-Earth rotating magnetic field interaction?
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  • k p 2 hours ago
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    Thermoelectric energy harvesters are from the Matrix, they had all those humans hooked up drawing their energy...
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  • How lucrative could the solar energy storage business be for Tesla? Almost as lucrative as selling cars.
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    That’s according to Morgan Stanley, which this week placed a figure—$2 billion—on how much it thinks Tesla could make in annual revenue from solar energy storage. That’s assuming that its “gigafactory”—a massive lithium-ion battery production facility, which is currently still in the planning stages—is up and running by the end of the decade.
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    To put that number into context, Tesla’s annual revenue last year, when it sold about 22,000 vehicles, was… $2.01 billion. Of course, this can be expected to be much higher by the time the gigafactory is completed, but the comparison still reinforces the idea that Tesla is much more than just simply an automaker. The factory, currently slated for completion in 2020, has reportedly signed up Japanese industrial giant Panasonic as a partner.
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    Earlier this year, Morgan Stanley received some stinging criticism when it released some fairly ebullient research on Tesla (calling it “arguably the most important auto company in the world). That helped lift the electric car maker’s share price just days before it raised $1.6 billion in fresh capital to help fund the gigafactory. The fundraising round was underwritten in part by none other than Morgan Stanley.
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    The central thrust of the bank’s thesis was (as I put it) that Tesla’s most disruptive product might not actually be its cars, but its batteries. Analysts, and not just those from Morgan Stanley, think that once Tesla’s gigafactory is producing to scale, those batteries could be used to power everything from drones to consumer electronics devices.
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    But aside from cars, the most plausible use case remains solar power storage, whereby a house could capture solar energy through a panel installed on its roof—perhaps even one made by Solar City, one of Musk’s other companies—and then store that energy in the basement using Tesla-made batteries.
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    Here’s an excerpt from Morgan Stanley’s latest note:
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    Given the relatively high cost of the power grid, we think that customers in parts of the US and Europe may seek to avoid utility grid fees by going “off-grid” through a combination of solar power and energy storage. We believe there is not sufficient appreciation of the magnitude of energy storage cost reduction that Tesla has already achieved, nor of the further cost reduction magnitude that Tesla might be able to achieve once the company has constructed its “Gigafactory,” targeted for completion later in the decade.
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    Morgan Stanley gets to the $2 billion number by forecasting that Tesla’s batteries could eventually store more than 10 gigawatt hours of energy per year. Which is a lot of power—enough to run the average home for 1,000 years—but still a tiny fraction of overall energy consumption in the US.                    







                    

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