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Doesn't really sound sexy, but this is of utmost importance for next generation grids for renewable energy.

I agree on the significance indeed - a small boost also for my favourite Desertec project ... Though their language is a bit too "grandiose": "ABB has successfully designed and developed a hybrid DC breaker after years of research, functional testing and simulation in the R&D laboratories. This breaker is a breakthrough that solves a technical challenge that has been unresolved for over a hundred years and was perhaps one the main influencers in the 'war of currents' outcome. The 'hybrid' breaker combines mechanical and power electronics switching that enables it to interrupt power flows equivalent to the output of a nuclear power station within 5 milliseconds - that's as fast as a honey bee takes per flap of its wing - and more than 30 times faster than the reaction time of an Olympic 100-meter medalist to react to the starter's gun! But its not just about speed. The challenge was to do it 'ultra-fast' with minimal operational losses and this has been achieved by combining advanced ultrafast mechanical actuators with our inhouse semiconductor IGBT valve technologies or power electronics (watch video: Hybrid HVDC Breaker - How does it work). In terms of significance, this breaker is a 'game changer'. It removes a significant stumbling block in the development of HVDC transmission grids where planning can start now. These grids will enable interconnection and load balancing between HVDC power superhighways integrating renewables and transporting bulk power across long distances with minimal losses. DC grids will enable sharing of resources like lines and converter stations that provides reliability and redundancy in a power network in an economically viable manner with minimal losses. ABB's new Hybrid HVDC breaker, in simple terms will enable the transmission system to maintain power flow even if there is a fault on one of the lines. This is a major achievement for the global R&D team in ABB who have worked for years on the challeng

nice indeed! " Triggered by commonly available ambient mechanical energy such as human footfalls, a NG with size smaller than a human palm can generate maximum short-circuit current of 2 mA, delivering instantaneous power output of 1.2 W to external load. The power output corresponds to an area power density of 313 W/m2 and a volume power density of 54 268 W/m3 at an open-circuit voltage of 1200 V. An energy conversion efficiency of 14.9% has been achieved. The power was capable of instantaneously lighting up as many as 600 multicolor commercial LED bulbs. The record high power output for the NG is attributed to optimized structure, proper materials selection and nanoscale surface modification. This work demonstrated the practicability of using NG to harvest large-scale mechanical energy, such as footsteps, rolling wheels, wind power, and ocean waves."

You should be able to put it also in your shoes such that you may be able to power some gadgets. Thinking about it, I have seen many kids already running around with brightly lit sneakers!

Francesco pointed out this research one year ago, we dropped it as noone was really considering it ... but in space a low CPU power consumption is crucial!! Maybe we should look back into this?

I don't remember what is the speed factor, but I guess this might do it! Although, I remember when using an IMU that you cannot have the data above a given rate (e.g. 20Hz even though the ADC samples the sensor at a little faster rate), so somehow it is not just the CPU that must be re-thought. When I say qualification I also imply the "hardened" phase.

I don't know if the (promised) one-order-of-magnitude improvements in power efficiency and performance are enough to justify looking into this. For once, it is not clear to me what embracing this technology would mean from an engineering point of view: does this technology need an entirely new software/hardware stack? If that were the case, in my opinion any potential benefit would be nullified. Also, is it realistic to build an entire self-sufficient chip on this technology? While the precision of floating point computations may be degraded and still be useful, how does all this play with integer arithmetic? Keep in mind that, e.g., in the Linux kernel code floating-point calculations are not even allowed/available... It is probably possible to integrate an "accelerated" low-accuracy floating-point unit together with a traditional CPU, but then again you have more implementation overhead creeping in. Finally, recent processors by Intel (e.g., the Atom) and especially ARM boast really low power-consumption levels, at the same time offering performance-boosting features such as multi-core and vectorization capabilities. Don't such efforts have more potential, if anything because of economical/industrial inertia?

Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said Friday that it has succeeded in transmitting 10 kW of power through 500 m. An announcement that comes just after JAXA scientists reported one more breakthrough in the quest for Space Solar Power Systems (http://phys.org/news/2015-03-japan-space-scientists-wireless-energy.html). One step closer to Power Generation from Space/

from the press release (https://www.mhi-global.com/news/story/1503121879.html) "10 kilowatts (kW) of power was sent from a transmitting unit by microwave. The reception of power was confirmed at a receiver unit located at a distance of 500 meters (m) away by the illumination of LED lights, using part of power transmitted". So 10kW of transmission to light a few efficient LED lights??? In a 2011 report (https://www.mhi-global.com/company/technology/review/pdf/e484/e484017.pdf), MHI estimated this would generate the same electricity output as a 400-megawatt thermal plant - or enough to serve more than 150,000 homes during peak hours. The price? The same as publicly supplied power, according to its calculations. There are no results to boost these claims however. The main work they do now is focused on beam steering control. I guess the real application in mind is more targeted to terrestrial applications, eg wireless highway charging (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120312-wireless-highway-to-charge-cars). With the distances so much shorter, leading to much smaller antenna's and rectenna's this makes much more sense to me to develop.

wireless power transmission made useful ? this application did certainly not come to my mind when Guy Pignolet showed me 12 years ago how his handy would lid up a small diode after our first SPS meeting in Paris ...

Great idea to use either unused/wasted energy. Then again, the signal power (receiver floor) is steadily going down going from 3G to 5G, yet there might be more use of bandwidth to compensate this. It is funny though that you buy a device which could have the function build in it on the back from the start, yet you put a shell around it and then harness wireless power to give it that add-on functionality.

Recently I came across this article in a Japanese newspaper about wireless power transmission applications in the women beauty business. It's probably not as useful as an iPhone cover but apparently there is a market for such things! http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/04/18/business/led-nails-light-up-when-calling/#.U2OcWV7v2X8

of relevance to this discussion: Koomey's Law, a Moore's Law equivalent for computing's energetic efficiency http://www.economist.com/node/21531350 http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/09/13/2148202/whither-moores-law-introducing-koomeys-law

We present the design and experimental implementation of a power harvesting metamaterial. A maximum of 36.8% of the incident power from a 900 MHz signal is experimentally rectified by an array of metamaterial unit cells. We demonstrate that the maximum harvested power occurs for a resistive load close to 70 Ω in both simulation and experiment.

An exhaustive overview of all possible advanced rocket concepts, eg.. "As an example, consider a photon rocket with its launching mass, say, 1000 ton moving with a constant acceleration a =0.1 g=0.98 m/s2. The flux of photons with E γ=0.5 MeV needed to produce this acceleration is ~1027/s, which corresponds to the efflux power of 1014 W and the rate of annihilation events N'a~5×1026 s−1 [47]. This annihilation rate in ambiplasma l -l ann corresponds to the value of current ~108 A and linear density N ~2×1018 m−1 thus any hope for non-relativistic relative velocity of electrons and positrons in ambiplasma is groundless." And also, even if it would work, then one of the major issues is going to be heat dispersal: "For example, if the temperature of radiator is chosen T=1500 K, the emitting area should be not less than 1000 m2 for Pb=1 GW, not less than 1 km2 for Pb=1 TW, and ~100 km2 for Pb=100 TW, assuming ε=0.5 and δ=0.2. Lower temperature would require even larger radiator area to maintain the outer temperature of the engine section stable for a given thermal power of the reactor."

The problem is not achieving a high energy density, that we can already do with nuclear fission, the question however is how to confine or harness this power with relatively high efficiency, low waste heat and at not too crazy specific mass. I see magnetic confinement as a possibility, yet still decades away and also an all-or-nothing method as we cannot easily scale this up from a test experiment to a full-scale system. It might be possible to extract power from such a plasma, but definitely well below breakeven so an additional power supply is needed. The fission fragments circumvent these issues by a more brute force approach, thereby wasting a lot of energy for sure but at the end probably providing more ISP and thrust.

Sure. However, the annihilation based photon rocket concept unifies almost all relevant drawbacks if we speak about solar system scales, making itself obsolete...it is just an academic testcase.

Development of biodegradable batteries to power medical devices that you could inject into the human body, for example to do medical checkup, drug delivery etc

next step taken .... after they won the power beaming challenge ... fantastic team!

200 MW solar power plant in China ... wow, an important step ahead

Yet it does all this with a thermal design power of around 2W - incredibly, less than three per cent that of an everyday Core 2 Duo. Average power consumption is promised to be in the milliwatt range, with idle draw as low as 30mW.

You can use idle computers as extra computing power in a big run, or you can use idle personnel as extra computing power by making them play computer games:

article written a bit as if they had invented rectennas ... they are used since the 60s (Brown powered a small helicopter via 2.45 GHz ... and Kaya-san has showed wireless power transmission via advanced rectenna's at almost every SPS conference since 20 years ...

5.8 GHz wireless power transmission for mainstream gadgets ...

Proximity to the transmitter impacts power delivery as follows: 4W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 0-5 feet 2W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 5-10 feet 1W delivered to 4 devices simultaneously within 10-15 feet How to make a piecewise approximation of one inverse square law for commercial purposes

:-) - which also tells us that these are not measured values but estimations it seems to me ...

Why not power an airplane with an ion thruster?

Apple apparently interested in exactly the type of wireless power transfer we were looking into with Duncan and Xurxo!

"Her goal was to design and synthesise a super capacitor with increased energy density while maintaining power density and long cycle life. She designed, synthesised and characterised a novel core-shell nanorod electrode with hydrogemated TiO2(H-TiO2) core and polyaniline shell. H-TiO2 acts as the double layer electrostatic core. Good conductivity of H-TiO2 combined with the high pseudo capacitance of polyaniline results in significantly higher overall capacitance and energy density while retaining good power density and cycle life. This new electrode was fabricated into a flexible solid-state device to light an LED to test it in a practical application. Khare then evaluated the structural and electrochemical properties of the new electrode. It demonstrated high capacitance of 203.3 mF/cm2 (238.5 F/g) compared to the next best alternative super capacitor in previous research of 80 F/g, due to the design of the core-shell structure. This resulted in excellent energy density of 20.1 Wh/kg, comparable to batteries, while maintaining a high power density of 20540 W/kg. It also demonstrated a much higher cycle life compared to batteries, with a low 32.5% capacitance loss over 10,000 cycles at a high scan rate of 200 mV/s."

After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone's Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone's story, the team will join Google X.

TU/e is participating in the new Cruiser class of the World Solar Challenge. This competition entails building an eco friendly family car (instead of a racer) to prove that solar powered transportation is possible. Actually this car produces more solar power than it needs and has a range of 300+ km.