Humankind has an insatiable appetite for energy that has put the planet in a very precarious position environmentally, but is also one of the main drivers of prosperity and improved living standards. New Atlas keeps you up to date with the latest breakthroughs in the energy sector, from the expanding field of renewable energy production to the exponential rise of battery technology and the slow march towards cold fusion.
A consortium of American and British science institutions is working on a way to use antineutrinos to remotely monitor nuclear reactors. The 3,500-ton WATCHMAN detector will be installed in a mine on the northeast coast of England as part of international nuclear weapon non-proliferation efforts.
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Rather than using hydrogen in its normal gaseous state, a liquid hydrogen carrier called formic acid has been floated, and now a team from EPFL has built a promising prototype of a formic acid-based fuel cell.
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Just a few months after Tesla built the world's biggest battery, another contender is looking to swoop in. Simec Zen Energy and British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta are planning to build an even larger storage battery in the same Australian state.
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To ensure that moving spent radioactive fuel is being carried out with the minimum of risks, Sandia National Laboratories recently completed a nuclear "triathlon" of a simulated cargo of spent fuel rods over 14,500 mi to record the stress and jolts that fuel undergoes in transit.
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As useful as solar energy is, it still has one major Kryptonite: gloomy weather. Now, a team of Chinese engineers has developed a hybrid solar cell that can produce electricity come rain or shine, using the triboelectric effect to harvest energy from the movement of raindrops on its surface.
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Scientists at the German Aerospace Center have tested a solar reactor concept known as CONTISOL, which also contains a thermal energy storage system to allow it to run day or night.
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Energy is all around us – we just need to work out how to tap into it. Now a team from MIT has developed a device called a thermal resonator, which could essentially pull electricity out of thin air by taking advantage of gradual ambient temperature changes over the course of the day.
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Over the last few years, perovskite has proven itself to be a promising material for photovoltaic solar cells, but it’s not without its problems. Now, a team has found a way to helps solve at least one of those issues, removing toxic lead from the device by substituting in titanium.
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Tesla is again partnering with the South Australian government, this time on the world’s largest “virtual power plant.” By installing solar panels and Tesla Powerwall batteries on thousands of houses, the system would allow homes to generate their own electricity and feed excess power to the grid.
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Flexible batteries may not be an entirely new idea, but here's a development with more backbone than most: engineers at Columbia have developed a flexible battery shaped much like a human spine. The battery is claimed to offer superior energy density to similar prototypes.
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