Energy
Humankind's insatiable appetite for energy has put the planet in a very precarious position environmentally, but it also drives 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 nuclear fusion.
Latest News
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Boston's Form Energy says its iron-air batteries store up to 100 hours' worth of energy at a tenth the cost of a lithium battery farm. They could make a huge contribution to long-term storage as the world makes its transition toward renewable energy. -
Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories have come up with a new design that addresses a number of shortcomings with current molten salt batteries, demonstrating one that can be constructed far more cheaply than currently available versions.
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The world produces more than 1.8 billion tons of steel a year, releasing nearly twice that weight in carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It's a huge decarbonization challenge, but steel giant ArcelorMittal is starting on a new green plant in Spain.
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According to local media, the Chinese government intends to finish building a prototype molten salt nuclear reactor in the city of Wuwei before the end of year, with plans to establish a number of larger-scale plants in similar settings thereafter.
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Western Australia could soon be home to the world's biggest green hydrogen project. The Western Green Energy Hub wants to deploy 50 GW of solar and wind generation to produce up to 3.5 million tons of green hydrogen or 20 million tons of ammonia a year.
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Looking to leverage all the motion in the ocean is UK startup Sustainable Marine, whose floating tidal turbine rotors just breezed through a testing regime that simulated 20 years of real-world conditions.
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A research group in the US has taken a significant step forward with a design for a long-lasting lithium metal battery with high capacity, which remained functional for a record-breaking number of charging cycles.
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Well-respected Austrian solar energy company Fronius has broken ground on its first customer green hydrogen hub, giving us a good look at what it'll take to run a fleet of vehicles on green hydrogen produced entirely on-site using solar panels.
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Thermoelectric generators produce an electric current through a temperature gradient. Now, engineers have created a new device that absorbs heat from the Sun on one surface and emits it from another, allowing it to generate electricity day and night.
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Germany's Svevind has announced plans for a colossal green hydrogen project that will place some 45 gigawatts of wind and solar energy generation on the vast steppes of Kazakhstan to produce around three million tonnes of green hydrogen annually.
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This new buoyancy energy storage system harnesses a powerful force familiar to anyone who's tried to hold a beach ball underwater, and it could offer grid-scale energy storage cheaper than batteries – as well as super-cheap hydrogen compression.
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By better understanding the intricacies of how lithium batteries operate, scientists can more easily identify opportunities to improve their performance, and scientists at the University of Cambridge have developed a powerful new tool for the job.
