Plastic has been the staple of our manufacturing industry over the last 60 years. It was made to last … and it did… to the point that it’s now everywhere on the planet, even in our bodies. We’ve been struggling to find a greener alternative to this pollution threat.
Near the end of last year I published a video on solid hydrogen storage and it got a lot of questions, critiques, and push back from some of you. In some cases, rightfully so, and in other cases, not so much. In trying to simplify a pretty complex topic, I
Geothermal energy has the potential to be an always-on power source for countries around the world. However, it hasn’t been the hottest renewable energy option because drilling deep enough into the earth to reach sufficiently high temperatures is difficult and costly. Yet, a startup has recently unearthed a solution
Being cheaper, more energy dense and longer lasting than lithium-ion technology, lithium-sulfur batteries may be the holy grail of power storage. Besides fueling electric vehicles (EVs) adoption, they could turbocharge the integration of renewables into our energy grid. However, a technical fault has been holding back their economic feasibility…until
Many of us still rely on fossil fuels for heating our homes, either by burning something like natural gas for heat or by using it to produce electricity to power space heaters and air conditioners. Typical resistive electric heat is 100% efficient. For every Watt you put in, you get
It’s been almost 4 years since I had solar panels installed on my house, which is located in Massachusetts. In general they’ve been performing pretty close to what was promised, but last year threw us some curveballs that made me a little concerned. I saw a pretty sharp
Quantum computers have been the stuff of science fiction for decades and promised by technology companies for almost as long. Although existing quantum computers can be computed on the fingers of one hand, their potential is absolutely massive. These powerful machines could help us discover more efficient carbon capture materials,
Hydrogen is number one on the periodic table, but it’s still a straggler in the renewable energy race. Like many other renewable technologies, hydrogen has dominated headlines for years now, but inefficiencies in the production and storage of hydrogen hold it back. There’s a lot of pieces to
Machine learning and AI are two buzzwords you hear so often that they’re kind of losing their meaning. If we just focus on machine learning, there’s so much hype around its future potential, that it is easy to forget about what is already happening today. For instance, NVIDIA
The 3R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle has been drilled into our heads as the way forward towards a sustainable future. The plastic industry focused heavily on selling us that recycling was the perfect solution to the plastic waste problem. Yet, plastic recycling has turned out to be ... trash. Literally. In
Batteries are the key to the future of renewable energy. We all know that in order for intermittent renewables like solar and wind to be useful, we need energy storage to make them work over long periods of time. Lithium-ion batteries come to mind, but they’re still too expensive
Because of the intermittency of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, storing large amounts of power is a necessity for the decarbonization of our energy system. However, we still don’t have enough batteries to compensate for renewable energy slumps across the planet. When thinking about the biggest utility-scale