Tech for Good

2021-07-15 07:00:08 Green energy island

Denmark has proven itself a pioneer in wind energy production. It already generates more than 50% of the entire European Union's wind energy. With the green revolution already well underway, the country is making a further step (if not a leap) with the largest construction project in Danish history.

The country will build a $34 billion artificial wind energy island located offshore in the North Sea. Denmark expects the construction of the island to start in 2026 and finish in 2033.

The project will provide 3, and at a later stage, 9 million households with energy almost pollutant-free. 120,000 m2 in size (roughly 20 football fields), the artificial floating landmass will be surrounded by offshore wind turbines. They will be huge, and individually, they can match a 184-meters high Seattle's Space Needle tower. Their initial output will be 3 gigawatts of energy, increasing to 10 gigawatts over time.

The energy will fuel the huge hydrogen production plant located on the island. Once produced that green hydrogen may be used in many different ways beyond just energy for houses. That includes producing ammonia fuel to run ships in an environmentally efficient way and green fuel for aircraft. In the longer term, it will also fuel cars and industrial plants.

Denmark will be pumping its offshore island-produced hydrogen back to land as a liquid in huge undersea pipes. It will then fuel its own homes, industry, and transport. And as 10 gigawatts is far beyond the country's own needs, it will also export the fuel for the financial benefit of the country. The Netherlands and Germany have already said to be interested.

The project is a part of Denmark's strategic environmental plan. In early 2021 the Danish government announced that they are to switch from being the largest European oil producer to completely phasing out fossil fuels by 2050. The country is already refusing further permits to search for oil in its northern territories.

8-minute video about the island
Article on Electrek
More on hydrogen production from wind power in this post

#wind #hydrogen Open / Comment

2021-07-14 07:00:06 ​Solar mobility

A Netherlands-based startup, Squad Mobility, comes with a small solution to the first/last-mile transportation issue. 'Small' in this case is a literal meaning. The company's product is an affordable, low-speed car charged by a solar panel, which is even smaller than the famous Smart. With a footprint of just 2 square meters, three or even four Squad solar cars can fit in just a single parking slot. The vehicle can still seat two people and store a couple of grocery bags.

At all times, a roof which is a solar panel, powers a vehicle. The solar panel can generate 20 km per day. If this is not enough and the juice runs low, the owner can easily swap out the battery, giving Squad an additional 100 km range. That would be enough for so many applications in cities, towns, and even villages worldwide. Private owners may seek to do some elementary grocery shopping. Car-sharing services may get a vehicle with no need to burden an electrical grid or worry about charging logistics.

As Robert Hoevers, CEO of Squad Mobility, puts it, "cities love solar charging, as this is a sustainable energy source. Cities are looking for zero-emission mobility solutions with a small space footprint. We have achieved both. A per capita energy consumption lower than public transport and a space footprint comparable to a bicycle. And all this, while offering the flexibility of personal transport and the comfort of a car."

The price starts at 5750 euro, which is half as much as the cheapest A-segment car. Lease and subscription options at 100 euro per month will also be available.

The vehicle will initially be limited to 45 km/h (28 mph). A more powerful version that can reach 70 km/h (43 mph) will be launched later. And that is not the only improvement Squad Mobility has for its car-sharing clients. The vehicle will already be equipped with smart sensors and cameras monitoring everything from cabin cleanliness to how a car is parked. Fleet operators would be able to remotely control a vehicle that is improperly parked or blocking an exit. The company hopes that once self-driving technology would be more commonplace, they will add that to their product.

Squad Mobility may expect its product to sell like hotcakes. As it has a functionality that is very much in demand for unbelievably low prices.

Source: Cleantechnica
Squad Mobility website accepting pre-orders

#EV #solar #startups Open / Comment

2021-07-13 07:00:13 Queen of waste

In 2018, the global waste recycling market and Australia in particular were shocked by China's recycling ban, restricting the waste imports of all but the highest purity. China's share of imports of paper and plastic waste from Australia at that time was about 30%.

The Australian government has taken a number of short-term measures to bail out the situation, such as sending waste to other Asian countries, temporarily increasing waste storage limits, and financial support for recycling companies facing increased recycling costs. However, it was clear that these measures were temporary and would not solve the long-term issue of increased landfilling within the country.

In December 2020, the country passed a law banning the export of unprocessed waste overseas. This measure should stimulate local waste processing and create local demand to reuse these recovered materials in infrastructure, packaging and products as part of a move towards a circular economy.

Veena Sahajwalla, professor of materials science at the University of New South Wales in Australia, is one of the leaders for these changes . Veena is known in Australia and beyond as the "Waste Queen". Her job and mission are to find hidden opportunities and untapped resources in the rubbish mountains.

Veena has become world-famed for her "green steel" production technology. She was the first to research waste materials to replace coal and coke in a steelmaking. In 2005, she received the Eureka Prize (so called "Oscar in Australian Science") for her technology of using recycled plastic and rubber from old car tires as a fuel for electric arc furnaces in steel production. In 2011, this technology was introduced at the Sydney Steel Works, then at the electric furnace in Melbourne, and then taken overseas. The commercial version of this technology has allowed to replace more than a third of the coal used in steel production with waste products and save millions of tires from being sent to a landfill.

Now Veena is working to market the green ceramics technology. This technology allows manufacturing of ceramic tiles from old fabrics and broken glass. These designer-look tiles can be used for floor and wall cladding, making of countertops and other interior decoration products.

Veena's team has designed and already got a prototype of the micro factory for green ceramics up and running. The micro factory is a series of modules that can take a variety of different waste materials and transform it into a new product. It can be assembled in a small shed. Textiles and glass are loaded into the machine and get converted into a hard green ceramic tiles. A micro factory like these costs between half a million, a million dollars. At the moment, prototyping is funded by Australian university grant.

The main idea of such micro factories is to rethink waste management and pass the initiative for their recycling to the local level, that is, to local communities where this waste is generated and collected.

Veena's further plan is to refine the green steel technology in order to completely eliminate coal from the process and replace it with waste products.

Veena believes Australia can become a zero-waste economy. To get this, it is necessary to involve ordinary people into the process, and not only government and science. People will be able to reimagine themselves as manufacturers, asking for resources and materials that come from waste streams, and inspire each other to do things better.

Video about Veena's work
What green ceramics look like - starting at 19:30
Micro factory operation - starting at 24:00

#recycle Open / Comment

2021-07-12 07:00:12 Table salt for Tesla

Electric vehicles (EVs) are good in many ways. They do not have any emissions, and recent models are often more technically advanced than their gas-powered counterparts. There are, however, factors that constrain the extensive development of this sector. One of these is the production cost and inefficiency of the strategic material for EV batteries, lithium. Tesla looks to have found the cure for this problem.

Their recent patent application has revealed some details on the new 'table salt' lithium extraction process. Elon Musk vaguely described it as using table salt to extract lithium from ore.

The dominant source for lithium mining is lithium brines (LiBs) due to the low cost associated with Li extraction. However, increasing demand for LiBs makes it necessary to explore other lithium sources.

Another method for Li extraction is to extract the Li from clay minerals. Clay minerals are mixed with an aqueous solution of common mineral acids, such as H2SO4 or HCl, and then heated under atmospheric pressure to leach out the lithium in the clay minerals. This method has a lot of disadvantages. It leaches out high concentrations of impurities with lithium; it is less cost-effective and not environmentally friendly.

Tesla summarizes its new method in the patent application abstract:
The extraction process includes mixing a positively charged ion (cation) source with the clay mineral, performing a high-energy mill of the clay mineral, and performing a liquid leach to obtain a lithium-rich leach solution.

So, it is a little more complicated than just adding table salt. However, the cation source described by Tesla in the patent application is indeed NaCl, sodium chloride (aka table salt).

Drew Baglino, SVP of engineering at Tesla, claimed that the new process would result in a fantastic 33% reduction in lithium cost.

Tesla plans to use this new process on its new lithium claim deposit in Nevada of over 10,000 acres. Successful production trials would mean a lower price for batteries and EVs. That could significantly speed up the process of large-scale replacement of carbon-emitting vehicles with EVs.

Source: Electrek

#EV Open / Comment

2021-07-11 07:00:11 It's Sunday, and we are having our "Week in Review":

First garbage truck on hydrogen deploys in Sweden - a refuse truck that does not have any emissions other than water
Hero Arm - an Iron Man styled prosthetics technology that is changing lives across the globe
Decarbonization is 4.5 gigawatts closer - the most ambitious UK floating wind turbine project
Seeing the unseen - building a constellation of hyperspectral earth imaging satellites that can benefit agriculture and almost all other sectors
Plastic made of air - a thermoplastic made of biowaste that stores two times more CO2 than it produces to slow down climate change

Please let me know in the comments if you would like something to be specifically covered on this channel. I'll be glad to write about it if that's relevant

Have a nice weekend

Your Tech for Good

#weeksummary Open / Comment

2021-07-09 07:00:13 ​Plastic made of air

By 2050 we will need to build houses for additional 2 billion people. This will cost us 350 gigatonnes of carbon emissions or 70% of all carbon budget in building materials alone. Traditional building materials. But there is a Berlin-based startup, Made of Air, trying to change this.

Their carbon-negative thermoplastic is developed using biomass - waste from forests and farms in the countryside surrounding Berlin. Made of Air stores 2 tonnes of CO2 for every tonne of plastic - more than it releases into the atmosphere.

The material is created from biochar, a form of charcoal produced by heating biomass to extremely high temperatures in an oxygen-free furnace. This process, called pyrolysis, reduces the biomass to just carbon. Biochar is commonly used as a fertilizer, but it is becoming popular as a tool for removing carbon from the atmosphere and combating climate change.

Made of Air plastic is made from forestry offcuts and agricultural waste, plant material, and wood that is naturally full of carbon. After creating the biochar, the company infuses it with a binding material from sugar cane. The end result is thermoplastic granules that can be used in plastic molding and production.

The company has already shown some cool real-life uses of its material. Made of Air has created a pair of limited-edition carbon-negative eyeglasses for clothing retailer H&M. They have also made a paneling for an Audi dealership building in Munich. It was clad in seven tonnes of Made of Air pressed into hexagonal panels, storing fourteen tonnes of carbon, as the company claims.

According to the startup, there are five main areas where bioplastics can be realistically applied — urban infrastructure, building facades, interiors, transport, and furniture.

Made of Air hopes to see more practical applications of their material. That could help rapid urban growth across the planet play an active part in slowing down climate change.

Article on Cleantechnica
Made of Air website (they are hiring)

#recycle #biomass #architecture #startups Open / Comment

2021-07-08 07:00:06 Seeing the unseen

Today big space tech news is from an Indian company. Based in Bangalore, Pixxel is a space data company building a constellation of hyperspectral earth imaging satellites and the analytical tools to gain insights from that data. Sounds complicated? Read on, and we will try to make it clear.

The company was founded by Kshitij Khandelwal and Awais Ahmed. The duo met at BITS (Birla Institute of Technology and Science). As a finalist of the SpaceX Hyperloop pod competition in 2017, they presented their hyperloop pod prototype to Elon Musk in LA.

After that competition, Kshitij and Ahmed started building AI models that could take in and analyze terabytes of satellite imagery. They wanted to extract actionable insights and patterns to help tackle problems in agriculture. But the existing free-to-use satellite imagery of the earth, in most cases, was years old. That was important because the team could not fix what it could not see.

That was the idea behind founding Pixxel in early 2018. The aim was to build a constellation of microsatellites that would do hyperspectral imaging (HSI). Khandelwal describes HSI as capturing light in multiple narrow wavelengths. This allows tapping into the chemistry of the image. "Instead of telling you whether a piece of the farm is green or not, we can identify what type of crop grows there, the chlorophyll content in the leaves, the moisture in the soil, the stage of growth, and a whole host of other insights,” explains Khandelwal.

Pixxel's technology can benefit most sectors. It could help map and monitor forest cover; measure and reverse deforestation; measure climate risks such as flooding, famine, and wildfire; detect hazardous material and take timely measures; monitor water resources, and so on.

Now the team is looking forward to launching their first ANAND satellite by the end of this year. For that purpose, Pixxel has already raised around $7.3 million from established institutional venture capital firms like Lightspeed India and Blume Ventures.

As you probably guess, the government could also see the vast satellite imaging potential. Monitoring military resources and troop movement as an example. So let us hope this technology will be used primarily for peaceful purposes.

Source: Modern Manufacturing India
Pixxel website (they are hiring)

#space #AI #startups Open / Comment

2021-07-07 08:15:00 Decarbonization is 4.5 gigawatts closer

Rapid global decarbonization is not already looking out of reach, especially with recent developments in the floating wind turbine sector. It has popped out of nowhere just a couple of years ago but has already managed to hook up with the new green hydrogen trend.

Putting a wind turbine on a floating platform is a technologically difficult exercise, but it pays off. The platform may be located in deeper waters farther from shore, where it takes advantage of prime wind speeds and minimizes opposition from coastal communities. And adding green hydrogen generation allows for squeezing the most available juice possible from wind turbines.

Hydrogen is a zero-emission fuel that can be combusted to run turbines or deployed in a fuel cell to generate electricity. At present, though, almost all of the global hydrogen supply comes from natural gas. That's going to change because low-cost renewable energy has improved the economics of hydrogen production, making it financially feasible to "split" hydrogen gas from water with an electrical current.

Since hydrogen acts as a transportable energy storage medium, water-splitting provides a way to salvage excess energy from wind turbines or solar panels. The case for wind turbines is especially strong because winds generally pick up at night when electricity demand goes down.

Into this picture steps a UK venture called Cerulean Winds. Their proposal is billed as the "UK’s largest offshore decarbonization development." It costs £10 billion and includes the construction of at least 200 floating wind turbines with integrated green hydrogen systems in West of Shetland and Central North Sea.

Before we get too excited, one leading aim of the project is to provide clean electricity to existing offshore facilities, namely, offshore oil and gas drilling sites. Cerulean projects that 3 gigawatts in hourly capacity will go to the oil and gas industry. Still, that leaves a capacity of 1.5 gigawatts per hour for green hydrogen production systems to be located onshore.

Cerulean has just submitted a seabed lease request to Marine Scotland, so if anything happens out there in the North Sea it could be a long way off. To speed up the approval process, the company is appealing to the potential for the wind-plus-hydrogen project to create thousands of new green jobs. According to the company’s analysis, over the next five years, the project will help preserve 160,000 oil and gas jobs while adding 200,000 new green jobs.

Source: Cleantechnica

#wind #hydrogen #startups Open / Comment

2021-07-06 07:00:07 ​Hero Arm

Today's topic is prosthetics technology that is changing lives across the globe.

Based in Bristol, UK, Open Bionics is a company that has developed an affordable assistive device called Hero Arm. Hero Arm is a lightweight myoelectric prosthesis for below-elbow amputee adults and children aged 8 and above.

For each of the Hero Arms, Open Bionics makes a 3D scan of the limb; and then uses clever software and design to manufacture the prosthetic using strong material called Nylon 12. The company claims that the Arm socket is comfortable, adjustable, and breathable, making it easy to take on and off while providing the best fit.

The Hero Arm uses myoelectric sensors, which detect underlying muscular contractions generated from specific muscle groups in the arm. These are then amplified and converted into intuitive and proportional bionic hand movements. The device gives the wearer the ability to select from 6 grip options. They are a fist, hook, pinch, and tripod, as well as a manually adjustable thumb and wrist. Haptic vibrations, beepers, buttons, and lights provide intuitive notifications to help control bionic arm movements.

Videos on the company's website show 15-year-old Tilly Lockey performing various day-to-day activities with a myoelectric arm. She pours and drinks water, makes a sandwich, uses a knife and a fork, picks up small objects, and even writes with her Hero Arms.

On top of that, Hero Arm comes with swappable magnetic covers. The wearers may choose from a wide range of styles, including Star Wars BB-8 and R2-D2, Marvel Iron Man, Disney Frozen, and Deus Ex, allowing them to switch up their style and match their mood.

Open Bionics was co-founded by Joel Gibbard and Samantha Payne in 2014. Since then, the company has won several international awards. In January 2019, they raised £4.6 million in Series A funding, which enabled the company to serve multiple markets, including UK, USA, New Zealand, and Europe. The company is on a mission to make bionic prosthetics more accessible across the globe. Open Bionics states that their Hero Arm is less than half the price of the nearest competitor.

Open Bionics website

#medical #robotics Open / Comment

2021-07-05 07:00:15 First garbage truck on hydrogen deploys in Sweden

On June 17th, Sweden's first hydrogen-powered garbage truck came online in Gothenburg. Its power system is based on PowerCell's fuel cell technology. The electrification provided by the hydrogen-electric powertrain means that the refuse truck can complete a full work shift without refueling, just like its diesel or natural gas-powered counterpart.

PowerCell Sweden AB was founded in 2008 as an industrial spinout from the Volvo Group. It has developed fuel cells and fuel cell systems since the mid-1990s and is today world-leading in the field. When the world's first hydrogen-electric flight of a commercial airplane took place in September last year, a fuel cell system from PowerCell was onboard.

The hydrogen-electric refuse truck was deployed by the waste management and recycling company Renova and was built jointly by PowerCell, Renova, Scania, and JOAB. Electricity produced onboard will propel the vehicle and power the loading and compression of the refuse. The heat generated will be used to heat the cab.

A truck powered by fuel cells features the same driveability, range, uptime, and payload capacity as a diesel-powered truck, but it does not have any emissions other than water. The time required to fuel the vehicle will be the same as for the regular diesel-powered refuse truck.

Richard Berkling, CEO of PowerCell Sweden AB, says that one of the many advantages of fuel cells and hydrogen gas is that they have a minimal impact on customer's operational processes. That will be crucial for a broad phase-out of fossil fuels to gain momentum in the future.

Source: FuelCellsWorks

#hydrogen Open / Comment