Researchers at Swinburne’s Centre for Micro-Photonics are one step closer to producing commercially viable, chemical-free, long-lasting, safe batteries. Professor Baohua Jia and Dr Han Lin lead a team developing the Bolt Electricity Storage Technology (BEST) battery – a graphene oxide-based supercapacitor offering high performance and low-cost energy storage. The technology could, according to one investor, …
Oil has extended its slump below $50 a barrel as concerns grow that rising U.S. supplies will offset the production curbs by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies including Russia. Output at major American shale fields will reach a record in July, according to the EIA. West Texas Intermediate for July delivery slid …
Solar power, once so costly it only made economic sense in spaceships, is becoming cheap enough that it will push coal and even natural-gas plants out of business faster than previously forecast. That’s the conclusion of a Bloomberg New Energy Finance outlook for how fuel and electricity markets will evolve by 2040. The research group …
Rolls-Royce’s director of technology and engineering, John Molyneux gave more details on Rolls-Royce’s new reactor design and the next steps in its development when speaking to the European Young Nuclear Generation Forum event in Manchester, organised by the European Nuclear Society and the UK Nuclear Institute. Still without a publicized name, Rolls-Royce’s design is a …
1. Unit 4 of the Fuqing nuclear power plant in China’s Fujian province has begun fuel loading. The unit is expected to start up later this year. CNNC’s Fuqing plant will eventually house six Chinese-designed pressurized water reactors, the first four being 1087 MWe CPR-1000 units. Units 1 to 3 entered commercial operation in November …
China plans to spend $360 billion on renewable energy by 2020. China has built the world’s largest floating solar farm with 166,000 panels on a lake created when a nearby mine collapsed. While not an entirely unique idea — similar facilities are working in Japan, the U.K. and Israel — the project’s scale represents a …
Unit 3 of the Takahama nuclear power plant in Japan’s Fukui prefecture was restarted on June 6, 2017, plant owner Kansai Electric Power Company has announced. Takahama 4 – which had also been kept offline since March 2016 by a court injunction – was restarted last month, joining three other reactors in operation. Kansai said …
In 2016, former Energy Secretary Steven Chu criticized the Clean Power Plan. He did not think energy storage can solve the reliability problems of wind and solar quickly enough, he said Friday, which led him to criticize the Environmental Protection Agency for neglecting nuclear power in its Clean Power Plan. “Even though the Clean Power …
President Trump will likely withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. The matter has deeply divided the Trump administration. Ivanka Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson have urged the president to remain in the deal, and White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt have been pushing for a withdrawal. …
Methane hydrates, also called “flammable ice”, hold vast reserves of natural gas. China has for the first time extracted gas from the ice-like methane hydrate from under the South China Sea considered key to future global energy supply. Many countries including the US and Japan are working on how to tap those reserves, but mining …
Brillouin Energy has been working on low energy nuclear reactions aka cold fusion aka Controlled Electron Capture Reaction (CECR) process for many years. Nextbigfuture has covered them for many years. In 2015, Nextbigfuture covered what a 35 page third party analysis of Brillouin energy systems. There has been some work with Brillouin and SRI. I …