storage

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

ENVIRONMENT, TECHNOLOGY

Moving To 100% Renewable Electricity – These 3 Energy Storage Technologies Can Help Solve The Challenge

TECHNOLOGY Kerry Rippy, National Renewable Energy Laboratory In recent decades the cost of wind and solar power generation has dropped dramatically. This is one reason that the U.S. Department of Energy projects that renewable energy will be the fastest-growing U.S. energy source through 2050. However, it’s still relatively expensive to store energy. And since renewable energy generation isn’t available all the time – it happens when the wind blows or the sun shines – storage is essential. As a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, I work with the federal government and private industry to develop renewable energy storage technologies. In a recent report, researchers at NREL estimated that the potential exists to increase U.S. renewable energy storage capacity by as m...

Clever chemistry turns ordinary bricks into electricity storage devices

The big idea In my synthetic chemistry lab, we have worked out how to convert the red pigment in common bricks into a plastic that conducts electricity, and this process enabled us to turn bricks into electricity storage devices. These brick supercapacitors could be connected to solar panels to store rechargeable energy. Supercapacitors store electric charge, in contrast to batteries, which store chemical energy. Brick’s porous structure is ideal for storing energy because pores give brick more surface area than solid materials have, and the greater the surface area the more electricity a supercapacitor material can hold. Bricks are red because the clay they’re made from contains iron oxide, better known as rust, which is also important in our process. We fill the pores in bricks with an...

Big Data Storage Concerns

The past twenty years have brought an evolution from server-based applications to cloud platforms and technologies. Now, data warehousing and big data analytics are the emerging areas to pay attention too. The increasing need for on-demand services that support storage and computing resources has created a need for the cloud that will continue to grow as improvements are made. The transition is taking data from operational systems and moving it to decision support systems. Knowing the trends in cloud technologies can help create cost-effective ways to address data analytics and warehousing. Investing in Higher-Level Services Higher-level services are the managed services where a specific use case is directly handled by the cloud. When it comes to warehousing, many of the challenges arise f...