Tag Archives: power

New connection between stacked solar cells can handle energy of 70,000 suns

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Stacked solar cells consist of several solar cells that are stacked on top of one another. Stacked cells are currently the most efficient cells on the market, converting up to 45 percent of the solar energy they absorb into electricity.

via New connection between stacked solar cells can handle energy of 70,000 suns.

This should reduce overall costs for the energy industry because, rather than creating large, expensive , you can use much smaller cells that produce just as much electricity by absorbing intensified from concentrating lenses. And concentrating lenses are relatively inexpensive,

A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap”

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Like any other new entrant into the highly competitive solar-panel market, perovskites will have difficulty taking on silicon solar cells. The costs of silicon solar cells are falling, and some analysts think they could eventually fall as low as 25 cents per watt, which would eliminate most of the cost advantage of perovskites and lessen the incentive for investing in the new technology. The manufacturing process for perovskite solar cells—which can be as simple as spreading a liquid over a surface or can involve vapor deposition, another large-scale manufacturing process—is expected to be easy. But historically, it has taken over a decade to scale up novel solar-cell technologies, and a decade from now silicon solar cells could be too far ahead to catch.

via A Material That Could Make Solar Power “Dirt Cheap” | MIT Technology Review.

Intel’s Haswell Takes A Major Step Forward; Integrates Voltage Regulator

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Haswell incorporates a refined VRM on-die that allows for multiple voltage rails and controls voltage for the CPU, on-die GPU, system I/O, integrated memory controller, as well as several other functions. Intel refers to this as a FIVR (Fully Integrated Voltage Regulator), and it apparently eliminates voltage ripple and is significantly more efficient than your traditional motherboard VRM. Added bonus? It’s 1/50th the size.

via Intel’s Haswell Takes A Major Step Forward; Integrates Voltage Regulator – HotHardware.

Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor

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Now, by plugging an EMI sensor into any wall socket, you can read your house’s EM signature — and if you continue to listen, you can detect changes in the signature. Obvious changes occur when a device is switched on or off, but it also turns out that simply moving your hand close to an LCD monitor also alters your house’s EM signature. It might sound a bit unbelievable, that a single finger moving towards an LCD monitor can be detected by a sensor at the other end of the house, but that’s exactly what the University of Washington researchers have accomplished.

via Turning a standard LCD monitor into touchscreen with a $5 wall-mounted sensor | ExtremeTech.

World’s largest OTEC power plant planned for China

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OTEC uses the natural difference in temperatures between the cool deep water and warm surface water to produce electricity. There are different cycle types of OTEC systems, but the prototype plant is likely to be a closed-cycle system. This sees warm surface seawater pumped through a heat exchanger to vaporize a fluid with a low boiling point, such as ammonia. This expanding vapor is used to drive a turbine to generate electricity with cold seawater then used to condense the vapor so it can be recycled through the system.

via World’s largest OTEC power plant planned for China.

A New Molten-Salt Reactor Could Halve the Cost of Nuclear Power

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The new reactor design, which so far exists only on paper, produces 20 times as much power for its size as Oak Ridge’s technology. That means relatively small, yet powerful, reactors could be built less expensively in factories and shipped by rail instead of being built on site like conventional ones. Transatomic also modified the original molten-salt design to allow it to run on nuclear waste.

via A New Molten-Salt Reactor Could Halve the Cost of Nuclear Power | MIT Technology Review.

In the event of a power outage, a stopper at the bottom of the reactor melts and the fuel and salt flow into a holding tank, where the fuel spreads out enough for the reactions to stop. The salt then cools and solidifies, encapsulating the radioactive materials. “It’s walk-away safe,” says Dewan, the company’s chief science officer. “If you lose electricity, even if there are no operators on site to pull levers, it will coast to a stop.”

How SSD power faults scramble your data

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The 2 SSDs that had no failures? Both were MLC 2012 model years with a mid-range – $1.17/GB – price.

via How SSD power faults scramble your data | ZDNet.

Yikes!

This paper reminds us that SSDs are very new technology whose idiosyncracies are still being engineered around. We’re still 5 years away from the average enterprise SSD being as reliable as the average enterprise hard drive is today.

Power company says Super Bowl blackout was caused by device designed to prevent power outages

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In a follow-up statement, Entergy said that tests conducted by S&C and Entergy on the two relays at the Superdome showed that one worked as expected, the other did not.

via Power company says Super Bowl blackout was caused by device designed to prevent power outages – The Washington Post.

I would hope most devices in the distribution of power are designed to prevent outages.