Working At The New New Energy

The race to develop renewable energy technologies; Mechanical engineers rush to develop energy conversion and storage technologies from renewable sources such as wind, wave, solar, and thermal.

Mary Beth Gallagher, December 18, 2019 (MIT News)

“…[Roughly 80 percent of global energy consumption still comes from burning fossil fuels. As the impact of climate change on the environment becomes increasingly drastic, there is a mounting sense of urgency for researchers and engineers to develop scalable renewable energy solutions…[Wave energy has] other resources beat in two respects. First, unlike solar, waves offer a consistent energy source regardless of time of day. Second, waves provide much greater energy density than wind due to water’s heavier mass…[But unlike] wind and solar, there is no consensus in the field of wave hydrodynamics on how to efficiently capture and convert wave energy…

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…[For solar energy to have a more meaningful impact on the climate crisis,] researchers need to develop solar cell materials that are efficient, scalable, cost-effective, and reliable…To accelerate the discovery and testing of new materials [that meet all four criteria, researchers have] developed a process that uses a combination of machine learning and high-throughput experimentation…[Two perovskite materials were found to] hold promise and will be tested further…[Researchers are also] working on concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) technologies that convert sunlight into heat] to provide electricity…[A new aerogel dramatically cuts costs by enabling] sunlight concentration without focusing optics to harness thermal energy…

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...[Researchers are developing new storage technologies that] improve the energy density of today’s electrochemical batteries by designing new earth-abundant materials] that are more cost-effective and versatile for storing cleanly generated energy. Rather than develop these materials using metals that are extracted through energy-intensive mining, she aims to build batteries using more earth-abundant materials…” click here for more

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