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John Lemke

Lights out: The dark future of electric power - opinion - 12 May 2014 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/article/mg22229684.300-lights-out-the-dark-future-of-electric-power.html?cmpid=RSS|NSNS|2012-GLOBAL|online-news#.U3CvBXVdXgg

lights electric power future 2014

shared by John Lemke on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • We tend to think of such events as occasional, inconvenient blips. But in fact they are becoming increasingly common, and will only get more frequent and severe. This is because our electricity systems are more fragile than is commonly supposed, and are getting frailer. Unless we act, blackouts will become a regular, extremely disruptive part of everyday life.
  • The vulnerability of such systems is demonstrated by the Italian blackout of 2003. The event began when a falling tree broke a power line in Switzerland; when a second tree took out another Swiss power line, connectors towards Italy tripped and several Italian power plants failed as a result. Virtually the whole country was left without power. It says something when a nation can be brought to a halt by two trees falling outside its borders.
  • We predict that blackouts will occur with greater frequency and greater severity due to trends in both electricity supply and demand. Supply will become increasingly precarious because of the depletion of fossil fuels, neglected infrastructure and the shift toward less reliable renewable energy. Demand, meanwhile, will grow because of rising populations and affluence.
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  • Between 1940 and 2001, average US household electricity use rose 1300 per cent, driven largely by growing demand for air conditioning. And such demand is forecast to grow by 22 per cent in the next two decades.
  • John Lemke on 12 May 14
     
    While not a green energy story, it is relevant.  The reality is that our demand for power is growing quicker than the volume of power we can produce.
John Lemke

Toyota shows off all solid state lithium superionic conductor based prototype battery - 0 views

phys.org/...-state-lithium-superionic.html

2012 indienationnews battery prototype toyota lithium solidstate green green_energy

shared by John Lemke on 26 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • last year the company described a prototype solid state lithium superionic conductor battery in an article in the journal Nature Materials that was based on a three dimensional framework. And just this month the company announced plans to introduce several new lines of hybrid and all electric vehicles over the next three years (after also announcing that the Prius hybrid now accounts for ten percent of all sales). The sticking point has been and remains, the batteries used in such vehicles which can account for up to half their cost to consumers.
  • The new battery, first described last year, uses Li10GeP2S12 in a layered three dimensional framework where cells are sandwiched together to create a stack of seven tiers with each having a voltage of four volts for a total of twenty eight at normal temperatures. The result, they say is a battery with five times the output density of previous varieties. To demonstrate its progress in refining the battery, the prototype was demonstrated recently to a group attending a green technology seminar as a power source for an electric scooter.
John Lemke

Scientists May Have Decoded One of the Secrets to Superconductors | Science | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...the-secrets-to-superconductors

technology 2014 superconductors indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • “In the same way that a laser is a hell of a lot more powerful than a light bulb, room-temperature superconductivity would completely change how you transport electricity and enable new ways of using electricity,” said Louis Taillefer, a professor of physics at the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.
  • ripples of electrons inside the superconductors that are called charge density waves. The fine-grained structure of the waves, reported in two new papers by independent groups of researchers, suggests that they may be driven by the same force as superconductivity. Davis and his colleagues directly visualized the waves in a study posted online in April, corroborating indirect evidence reported in February by a team led by Riccardo Comin, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto.
  • Taken together, the various findings are at last starting to build a comprehensive picture of the physics behind high-temperature superconductivity. “This is the first time I feel like we’re making real progress,” said Andrea Damascelli, a professor of physics at the University of British Columbia who led two recent studies on charge density waves. “A lot of different observations which have been made over decades did not make sense with each other, and now they do.”
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  • The community remained divided until 2012, when two groups using a technique called resonant X-ray scattering managed to detect charge density waves deep inside cuprates, cementing the importance of the waves. As the groups published their findings in Science and Nature Physics, two new collaborations formed, one led by Damascelli and the other by Ali Yazdani of Princeton University, with plans to characterize the waves even more thoroughly. Finishing in a dead heat, the rival groups’ independent studies appeared together in Science in January 2014. They confirmed that charge density waves are a ubiquitous phenomenon in cuprates and that they strenuously oppose superconductivity, prevailing as the temperature rises.
  • y applying Sachdev’s algorithm to a new round of data, Davis and his group mapped out the structure of the charge density waves, showing that the d-wave distribution of electrons was, indeed, their source.
  • The waves’ structure is particularly suggestive, researchers say, because superconducting pairs of electrons also have a d-wave configuration. It’s as if both arrangements of electrons were cast from the same mold. “Until a few months ago my thought was, OK, you have charge density waves, who cares? What’s the relevance to the high-temperature superconductivity?” Damascelli said. “This tells me these phenomena feed off the same interaction.”
  • In short, antiferromagnetism could generate the d-wave patterns of both superconductivity and its rival, charge density waves.
John Lemke

World's Largest Solar Array Set to Crank Out 290 Megawatts of Sunshine Power - Scientif... - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/...90-megawatts-of-sunshine-power

indienationnews 2014 solar green energy power electric future american tech

shared by John Lemke on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • Agua Caliente, the largest photovoltaic solar power facility in the world, was completed last week in Arizona.
  • ive million solar panels that span the equivalent of two Central Parks in the desert between Yuma and Phoenix. It generates 290 megawatts of power—enough electricity to fuel 230,000 homes in neighboring California at peak capacity.
  • The project, which cost a total of $1.8 billion to construct, received a million-dollar loan from the Loan Programs Office. Under its “SunShot” initiative (so-named in the spirit of president John F. Kennedy’s “moon shot” program), the DoE provides guaranteed loans to unproved ventures in solar power in the hopes of promoting innovation and making the technology more cost-effective.* Although Agua Caliente (owned by U.S. energy giant NRG Energy and partner MidAmerican Solar) is now the largest photovoltaic solar facility in the world, it probably will not hold that distinction for long. Other massive solar panel facilities, such as Antelope Valley Solar Ranch One in California’s Mojave Desert, are rapidly springing up across the Southwest.
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  • The energy contained in just one hour of sunlight could power the world for a year, if only it could be harnessed.
John Lemke

Cambridge team breaks superconductor world record | University of Cambridge - 0 views

www.cam.ac.uk/...ks-superconductor-world-record

2014 indienationnews physics science superconductor technology record

shared by John Lemke on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • three tonnes of force inside a golf ball-sized sample of material that is normally as brittle as fine china.
  • Superconductors are materials that carry electrical current with little or no resistance when cooled below a certain temperature. While conventional superconductors need to be cooled close to absolute zero (zero degrees on the Kelvin scale, or –273 °C) before they superconduct, high temperature superconductors do so above the boiling point of liquid nitrogen (–196 °C), which makes them relatively easy to cool and cheaper to operate.
  • Superconductors are currently used in scientific and medical applications, such as MRI scanners, and in the future could be used to protect the national grid and increase energy efficiency, due to the amount of electrical current they can carry without losing energy.
John Lemke

Chinese rover may freeze to death on the moon | The Verge - 0 views

www.theverge.com/...ay-freeze-to-death-on-the-moon

indienationnews tech 2014 moon rover china technology

shared by John Lemke on 27 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Observers say the equipment failure may have disabled the electrical motors needed to close the rover's solar panels, which would have disastrous effects as the rover heads into the two-week "lunar night." If the panels cannot be closed, the rover will almost certainly freeze during the two week span.
John Lemke

Japanese company proposes to build solar power cells on the Moon to provide clean energ... - 0 views

spaceindustrynews.com/...4187

2014 japanese solar power energy earth space Moon indienationnews

shared by John Lemke on 24 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • the 11,000 mile Lunar equator
  • will beam microwave and laser energy to giant energy conversion facilities on Earth. These beams will travel to semiconductors and inverters which will convert that energy to clean electricity to the grid that will power households, businesses and factories.
  • Shimizu’s plan uses Earthly materials, ceramics, water, glass, concrete, oxygen and solar cells. They would not ship water from Earth, they will make user of the Moon’s own resources and reduce the lunar soil using hydrogen shipped from our planet and then extract the water for use in construction.
John Lemke

Active malware operation let attackers sabotage US energy industry | Ars Technica - 0 views

arstechnica.com/...rs-sabotage-us-energy-industry

2014 indienationnews malware energy industry cuberattack hacking security

shared by John Lemke on 30 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Researchers have uncovered a malware campaign that gave attackers the ability to sabotage the operations of energy grid owners, electricity generation firms, petroleum pipelines, and industrial equipment providers.
  • the hacking group managed to install one of two remote access trojans (RATs) on computers belonging to energy companies located in the US and at least six European countries, according to a
  • Called Dragonfly
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  • "This campaign follows in the footsteps of Stuxnet, which was the first known major malware campaign to target ICS systems," the Symantec report stated. "While Stuxnet was narrowly targeted at the Iranian nuclear program and had sabotage as its primary goal, Dragonfly appears to have a much broader focus with espionage and persistent access as its current objective with sabotage as an optional capability if required."
  • been in operation since at least 2011
  • "The Dragonfly group is technically adept and able to think strategically," the Symantec report stated. "Given the size of some of its targets, the group found a 'soft underbelly' by compromising their suppliers, which are invariably smaller, less protected companies."
John Lemke

Stealing Encryption Keys Just by Touching a Laptop - 0 views

thehackernews.com/...g-encryption-keys-just-by.html

2014 encryption laptop indienationnews security news

shared by John Lemke on 27 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • A team of computer security experts at Tel Aviv University (Israel) has come up with a new potentially much simpler method that lets you steal data from computers — Just Touch it — literally.
  • In order to victimize any computer, all you need to do is wear a special digitizer wristband and touch the exposed part of the system. The wristband will measure all the tiny changes in the ground electrical potential that can reveal even stronger encryption keys, such as a 4,096-bit RSA key.
  • in some cases, you don't even have to touch the system directly with your bare hands. You can intercept encryption keys from attached network and video cables as well. Researchers called it a side-channel attack.
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  • The actual attack can be performed quickly. According to the research, "despite the GHz-scale clock rate of the laptops and numerous noise sources, the full attacks require a few seconds of measurements using medium frequency signals (around 2 MHz), or one hour using low frequency signals (up to 40 kHz)."
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