Solar Talk

Engineers Tap Algae Cells for Electricity

With the help of photosynthesis plants convert light energy to chemical energy. This chemical energy is stored in the bonds of sugars they use for food. Photosynthesis happens inside a chloroplast. Chloroplasts are considered as the cellular powerhouses that make sugars and impart leaves and algae a green hue dell latitude d520 battery. During photosynthesis water is split into oxygen, protons and electrons. When sunrays fall on the leaves and reach the chloroplast, electrons get excited and attain higher energy level. These excited electrons are caught by proteins. The electrons are passed through a series of proteins. These proteins utilize more of the electrons’ energy to synthesize sugars until the entire electron’s energy is exhausted.

Now researchers at Stanford are inspired by a new idea. They intercepted the electrons just after they had been excited by light and were at their highest energy levels. They put the gold electrodes inside the chloroplasts of algae cells, and tapped the electrons to lenovo thinkpad x61 tablet battery create a tiny electrical current. It may be the beginning of the production of “high efficiency” bioelectricity. This will be a clean and green source of energy but minus carbon dioxide.

Stanford University researchers got their work published in the journal Nano Letters (March, 2010). WonHyoung Ryu is the main author of this work. He says, “We believe we are the first to extract electrons out of living plant cells.” The Stanford research team created an exclusive, ultra-sharp gold nanoelectrode for this project.

They inserted the electrodes inside the algal cell membranes. The cell remains alive throughout the whole process. When cells start the photosynthesis, the electrodes attract electrons and produce tiny electric current. Ryu tells us, “We’re still in the scientific stages of the research. We were dealing with single cells to prove we can harvest the electrons.” The byproducts of such electricity production are protons and oxygen. Ryu says, “This is potentially one of the cleanest energy sources for energy generation. But the question is, is it economically feasible?”

Ryu himself provides the answer. He explained that they were able to extract just one picoampere from each cell. This quantity is so little that they would require a trillion cells photosynthesizing for one hour just to get the same amount of energy in a AA battery.

Another drawback of such an experiment is that the cells die after an hour. It might be the small trickles in the membrane around the electrode could be killing the cells. Or cells may be dying because they’re not storing the energy for their own vital functions necessary to sustain life. To attain commercial viability researchers have to overcome these hurdles.

They should go for a plant with larger chloroplasts for a larger collecting area. For such experiment they will also need a bigger electrode that could tap more electrons. With a longer-surviving plant and superior collecting ability, they could harness more electricity in terms of canon lp-e6 battery power.

Energy Grid Could Make Offshore Wind Power More Reliable

Scientists believe that natural resources can meet the energy needs of the entire human population. Wind energy too has huge potential to generate power for us. Researchers are trying to trap offshore wind power. But there are still many hiccups that are preventing us from utilizing natural resources for our needs. Wind turbines produce intermittent dell inspiron 1521 battery power because the direction and strength of the wind varies. Scientists are trying to generate more or less consistent power from offshore winds.

The researchers are focusing their efforts on more consistent offshore wind power supply. They are of the view that production of energy can be more consistent if project locations can be chosen by observing regional weather patterns. They are also proposing to connect the wind power generators with a shared power line. The fund was provided by the Delaware Sea Grant College Program and CAPES, a Brazilian research council.

Researchers from the University of Delaware and Stony Brook University are trying to generate a steady power supply from offshore winds. They have published their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The members of the research team are UD alumnus Felipe Pimenta, UD research faculty member Dana Veron, and Brian Colle, associate professor in the School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at Stony Brook University. Willett Kempton is the lenovo thinkpad t400s battery UD professor of marine policy in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment and director of its Center for Carbon-free Power Integration. Willett Kempton the lead author of the paper, says, “Making wind-generated electricity more steady will enable wind power to become a much larger fraction of our electric sources.” The research team presented various designs of how offshore wind power projects can reduce the nuisances of local weather on power fluctuations.

The researchers analyzed five years of wind observations from 11 monitoring stations along the U.S. East Coast from Florida to Maine. Based on wind speeds at each location, they estimated electrical power output from a hypothetical five-megawatt offshore turbine. After analyzing the patterns of wind energy among the stations along the coast, the team explored the seasonal effects on power output. Kempton talks about his work, “Our analysis shows that when transmission systems will carry power from renewable sources, such as wind, they should be designed to consider large-scale meteorology, including the prevailing movement of high- and low-pressure systems.”

Scientists are working on this project for the last five years. They have never found the power output of their simulated grid to come to a standstill in this time period. The researchers created their own hypothetical power generation site. They showed power fluctuations too like any wind based powerhouse. But when they simulated a power line connecting grids, they received a steady power supply without extremes. Until now the USA doesn’t have any offshore energy plants. But many are in the pipeline waiting to be implemented off the coasts of many Atlantic states. These proposed projects can take help in the selection of sites. Colle talks about the ideal configuration. “A north-south transmission geometry fits nicely with the storm track that shifts northward or southward along the U.S. East Coast on a weekly or seasonal time scale,” he said. “Because then at any one time a high or low pressure system is likely to be producing wind (and thus canon lp-e5 battery power) somewhere along the coast.”

SunEdison to Build Europe’s Largest Solar Power Plant

SunEdison is a division of MEMC Electronic Materials, Inc. They have bagged a project to develop and construct a photovoltaic solar power plant in Northeastern Italy, near the town of Rovigo. This solar power plant will have a capacity of 72 Megawatt (MW). This will be the largest solar power dell inspiron 11z battery plant in Europe. SunEdison is a North American company. It finances, installs and operates distributed power plants using photovoltaic technologies. In 2009, SunEdison delivered more kilowatt hours (kWh) of energy than any other solar services provider in U.S.A.

Banco Santander will be the partner of SunEdison in this project. It is a retail and commercial bank, based in Spain. It is the largest financial group in Spain and Latin America. Few more companies are expected to join this project as partners. Pancho Perez, General Manager for Europe and MENA region at SunEdison says, “A critical element of our approach is working closely with the right partners including developers, suppliers and contractors. For the Rovigo project, we selected Isolux Corsan, a large-scale infrastructure construction company with a strong track record in utility-scale solar plants.”

The stats say that solar power plant would provide power to 17,150 homes and it would result in reducing 41,000 tons of CO2 in the atmosphere. This amount will be akin to taking off 8,000 cars from the road. The project is expected to be completed by the end of 2010 lenovo thinkpad z60t battery.

Carlos Domenech is the President of SunEdison. He is speaking about his solar projects, “SunEdison is focused on enabling the growth of global solar markets through strong capabilities in project finance, engineering, low-cost procurement and operations and maintenance services.”

SunEdison’s solar power plant would cover an area of as large as 120 soccer fields. Once completed, the plant will be spread over 9.15 million square feet of area.

Renzo Marangon is the government official of the Veneto region. He expresses his views about solar project, “Veneto is taking decisive action to advance the use of clean, renewable energy sources. At the same time, this project is expected to create over 350 local construction jobs and build expertise in advanced energy technologies. We expect Rovigo to serve as a European model for large-scale, alternative-energy projects.”

This solar-power plant will enjoy the distinction of being the largest in Europe. Presently, the largest solar power plant exists in Olmedilla, Spain. Its capacity is is a 60MW. Another solar power plant is in Strasskirchen, Germany. It has the capacity of 50 MW.

MEMC deals in the manufacturing and sale of wafers and associated intermediate products to the semiconductor and solar industries. MEMC has their own R&D and manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Through its SunEdison division, MEMC is also a developer Compaq laptop Battery of solar power projects and North America’s largest solar energy services provider.

Biofuels from Engineered Tobacco Plants?

A biofuel is tricky to define because the usual fossil fuel we use, is in a way biofuel too. But we can safely say that most of the biofuels don’t add up their quota of carbon dioxide to the environment. The biofuels are therefore considered to be “CO2 neutral.” Researchers from the Biotechnology lenovo thinkpad x61 battery Foundation Laboratories at Thomas Jefferson University have developed a new method to increase the quantity of oil in tobacco leaves. So that oil in tobacco leaves can be utilized as biofuels in future. Their paper was published in Plant Biotechnology Journal which is an online journal.

Vyacheslav Andrianov is a Ph.D. and assistant professor of Cancer Biology at Jefferson Medical College of Thomas Jefferson University. According to him tobacco can produce biofuel more efficiently than other agricultural crops. But there is a hitch. When we try to extract oil lenovo ideapad y430 battery, most of it is available in tobacco seeds. Statistics say that tobacco seeds are composed of about 40 percent oil per dry weight. Another snag is tobacco plants don’t produce seeds in copious amounts. It is about 600 kg of seeds per acre. Dr. Andrianov and his colleagues aim to find ways so that the tobacco leaves produce more oil.

A usual tobacco plant leave has 1.7 percent to 4 percent of oil per dry weight. The researchers modified two genes of the plant. They are the diacyglycerol acytransferase (DGAT) gene or the LEAFY COTYLEDON 2 (LEC2) gene. The plants were engineered to over express one of the two genes. The alteration of DGAT gene resulted in about 5.8 percent of oil per dry weight in the leaves. It is around twice the amount of oil produced by and large. When the researcher went for the LEC2 gene modification it yielded around 6.8 percent of oil per dry weight.

According to Dr. Andrianov, “Tobacco is very attractive as a biofuel because the idea is to use plants that aren’t used in food production. We have found ways to genetically engineer the plants so that their leaves express more oil. In some instances, the modified plants produced 20-fold more oil in the leaves.”

Dr. Andrianov opines, “Based on these data, tobacco represents an attractive and promising ‘energy plant’ platform, and could also serve as a model for Compaq laptop Battery the utilization of other high-biomass plants for biofuel production.”