Where will our energy come from in the future? We know that it will be based on a combination of multiple resources and technologies. Fossil fuels, renewables and nuclear power will all contribute to meeting growing demand. An interesting alternative could be to use a mix of all the emerging initiatives. Alternatives offers a selection 15 ideas... and some may surprise you!

Diversifying heating sources

A heat-producing carpet!

Battery-heated floors could soon be a reality. The Czestochowa University in Poland has developed a prototype for a carpet incorporating carbon nanotubes. Its research scientists added the nanotubes to the polymers used in making carpets to create a material with interesting properties: when connected to a source of electricity, it can heat large floor areas with very little energy due to the heat-conducting properties of the carbon nanotubes. These cylinder-shaped crystalline structures, thousands of times finer than a hair, are one of the first industrial products to use nanotechnologies.

Source: http://www.bulletinselectroniques.com

A concrete solution for heat storage

In September 2008, the German aerospace research center DLR and its industrial partner Züblin AG presented a new heat storage system for concentrated solar power plants (CSP). The demonstrator, set up near Stuttgart, stores the heat in concrete. The concrete storage cell can be adapted to any level of power. It is suitable for CSP applications, but also for industrial exhaust heat storage (gas, steam, etc.) and for cogeneration applications. Using a CSP plant in combination with a heat accumulator can extend the turbine’s operating time to include night or low-sunlight hours, thereby increasing the availability of the solar electric power plant. There could be commercial applications for this solution, which the scientists consider to be very cost effective, but no dates have been set.

Source: http://www.bulletins-electroniques.com

Heating with human energy

Swedish property management company Jernhuset hopes to use the body heat of pedestrians in Stockholm’s Central Station to partially heat the building next door. About 250,000 people pass through the train station every day. "Everyone generates heat. Instead of opening the windows and letting the heat escape, we want to capture it in the ventilation system," says one of the managers. This "heat pump" type of system has been around for a long time, but has only recently been applied in this way. According to its promoters, the system should reduce the heating costs of the adjacent building by about 15%.

Source: http://www.lesechos.fr

Hot asphalt, an unsuspected energy reservoir

A team of American scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are trying to harvest the captive heat in road asphalt to create a source of power and hot water. "Unlike traditional solar energy, the road surface stays hot and could continue to produce energy after sundown," is the word from the laboratory. Tests have been done on asphalt slabs with embedded thermocouples to measure temperature and heat penetration, and on copper tubes to assess how much of the heat could be transferred to a water system. The hot water produced by the asphalt could be used "as is" to heat buildings or in industrial processes. It could also be used by a thermoelectric generator to convert heat into electricity, eliminating the need for chemical reactions or for piston / turbine mechanics.

Source: http://www.wpi.edu

Utilizing new materials

Light-giving walls and ceilings

When it gets dark, anyone can turn on a light with an incandescent or compact fluorescent bulb. But in Lyon, research scientists from the building science laboratory at the French national school of public works (ENTPE) are testing very thin light panels with embedded electroluminescent diodes. These systems could be placed in walls and ceilings in the form of light slabs or built-in light strips. According to the ENTPE scientists, "the light will come directly from the building materials and should cut our energy consumption by two-thirds." In the home, the diodes could be used to create a different mood in each room by changing the color of the lighting whenever desired.

Source: www.entpe.fr

Solar power on every surface

Although we sometimes see solar panels on roofs, it’s hard to imagine that every surface of a home is capable of storing the sun’s energy and converting it into electric power. A research scientist at the University of Toronto has successfully incorporated nanoparticles into a plastic that absorbs visible and infrared light. The product is applied in the form of paint or woven directly into curtains. In the future, it could boost the energy efficiency of standard photovoltaic cells and serve in household applications. Japanese company Nihon Telecommunication System Inc is already marketing photovoltaic windows. So far, they generate only enough energy to charge computers and mobile phone batteries, but on a sunny day they can generate as much as 70 W of electricity per square meter of glass. And all you need is a USB cord...

The first light-emitting glass

After several years of research and development, Saazs, a French design company, partnered with Saint-Gobain, has introduced the first "active" light-emitting glass: Planilum. The lighting system consists of four layers of a special glass, a rare gas, and screen-printed phosphors and is only 2 centimeters thick. It provides 50,000 hours of lighting, or 20 years of normal use. No need for a bulb, since the material itself emits the light! "The light isn’t glaring. It's close to body temperature and can be touched. It doesn't need a filter or special protection," we were told at Saazs. Planilum lamps are also 90% recyclable because they are made of glass. Currently, one 100-watt panel can light about 40 m² (430 ft²) of space. In terms of efficiency, that puts it somewhere between a standard incandescent bulb and a neon light. The company hopes to improve the panels' efficiency to the level of neon lighting within three years.

Source: http://www.saazs.com

Phase change materials

Who would think that house or apartment walls could regulate the temperature of a room in any season? It is hoped that phase change materials (PCM) can do just that. These materials change from a liquid to a solid or vice versa based on ambient temperature. PCMs already exist as paraffin, salt hydrates or fatty acids. Laboratory studies are ongoing on these materials, with research scientists measuring how they perform in fire, their lifecycle and their impact on air quality. In the future, walls might even contain not just one, but several materials, each capable of changing phase at a different temperature.

Generating electricity differently

Recovering energy from chicken waste

The Netherlands has started up Europe's first biomass power plant using poultry manure as fuel. To achieve an output of 36.5 MW, the Moerdijk plant will recover 440,000 metric tons (MT) of manure per year from 630 farms. The plant is expected to generate more than 270 million kWh of electricity. The operating principle is simple. The methane from the organic waste is burned to generate electricity and the residues are made into fertilizer. It took the Dutch group Delta ten years to develop the project. Last August, China also inaugurated its first power plant to recycle poultry waste.

A second life for vegetable peelings

Rather than bury our domestic waste, why not use it as an additional source of power? This involves letting the waste rot and recovering the gas it gives off. A metric ton of peelings can generate roughly 200 kilowatts of electricity and 250 kilowatts of heat. To take one example, 200,000 MT of potato peelings can be converted into 40 GWh of electricity. That's 40 million kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the annual demand for electricity of 10,000 Western households! In Belgium, Thenergo, a subsidiary of the Theolia group, is installing two potato-peel methanization facilities, one at Ypres and one at Vleteren. In France, thousands of tons of waste are decomposing and producing biogases at the huge Claye-Souilly dump in the Seine-et-Marne region. Site operator Veolia Propreté is recovering the energy from this waste to generate electricity, with the electric current flowing into French utility EDF's power grid. Veolia wants to go even further and is working on converting the methane into biogas fuel for the company's 50 solid waste collection trucks, along the lines of natural gas vehicles. The facility should start up sometime before mid-2009. It will produce 60 Nm3¹ per hour of biogas fuel from 200 Nm3 per hour of biogas captured from the waste disposal facility. The Lille urban community has launched a similar project to produce fuel for a hundred city buses. Sweden, the Netherlands and Switzerland chose this option a long time ago. According to the French energy conservation agency Ademe, France generated enough electricity from waste incineration in 2006 to supply electricity to a million homes and heat for 600,000 households.

1 - Nm³ is an abbreviation for "standard cubic meter", equivalent to the volume of a cubic meter of gas at normal temperature and pressure conditions (O°C and 1 atmosphere, or 1.013 bar).

Sources:

http://www.veolia-proprete.com/
http://www.veolia-proprete.com/documents/Biomethane_VF_QD.pdf

High-tech nanoelectricity

A Harvard research team has developed electricity-conducting nanowires that are also capable of producing current from solar energy. At 100 nanometers, the photosensitive nanowires are hundreds of times smaller than a hair. They are made from three different types of silicon.
Light generates electrons on the outer surface of the nanowires. The electrons penetrate the wires through micropores. The idea of creating photovoltaic cells at the nanoscopic scale is not new, but this time the materials developed are more efficient: they convert 3.4% of the sunlight into electricity (for comparison, the efficiency of the most commonly used solar cells is about 17%). This source of energy is clean, highly efficient, and renewable. The nanowires could be used to equip miniaturized devices, particularly in the medical field, where they could be used for observations inside the human body. We might even see nanotechnologies applied to clothing! Pairs of textile fibers covered in zinc oxide nanowires could generate electricity from mechanical energy, potentially converting any type of movement into electrical energy. A team at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the United States developed these nanogenerators, which use the flexural properties of zinc oxide nanowires to generate electricity. The fibers can be woven into curtains, tents or any type of cloth. Any movement of the cloth would generate electricity.
According to these scientists, a square meter of fabric made with the special fibers could theoretically generate up to 80 milliwatts – which isn't much, but several layers of the cloth could be assembled to make clothing capable of supplying electronic devices or charging a cell phone as the wearer moves around.

Storing energy to give it a second life

The miracles of compressed air

The Lausanne School of Engineering (EPFL) has developed an energy storage system based on the compressibility of air. Like all gases, air can be compressed to occupy a given volume. When it is forced into a smaller area, its pressure increases, creating energy potential comparable to the raising of water in a hydroelectric dam. While there is nothing new about the concept of compressed air energy storage (CAES), existing machines are so inefficient that the technique has never really been used successfully. Compressing the air creates heat, and evacuating the heat results in a significant loss of energy.
The quantity of energy recovered when the air expands is low in comparison to the energy initially stored. The efficiency is apparently only 20-30%. The new "liquid piston" system developed by start-up company Enairys improves CAES efficiency by 30% or more. Scientists say that its 60-65% energy efficiency opens the door to new industrial applications. Now that the initial prototype has been completed, scientists are targeting an industrial version designed specifically for use in areas that are isolated or with unreliable power supply systems. The automotive industry could also be interested in the invention.

Source: http://infoscience.epfl.ch

Taming solar energy

Until now, all efforts to store solar energy for later use have failed. "If you can only get energy when the sun shines, that's a problem. And in my opinion, that's why photovoltaic cells haven't penetrated the market," says Daniel Nocera, professor of energy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who was quoted on the website www.actualites-news-environnement.com. "If I could provide a storage mechanism, then I could supply energy around the clock, and then we could really talk about solar power," he adds. With his team, Professor Nocera developed a process inspired by plant photosynthesis in which energy from the sun is used to break water down into hydrogen and oxygen. In the process, a fuel cell can be used to recombine the gases and supply power to a house or electric car – sun or no sun. This makes it possible to "convert sunlight into chemical fuel" and "use photovoltaic cells at night". Worth keeping an eye on...

Using energy from the human body

The beacon shoe

Two designers, Chen Feijun and Zhao Bin, came up with an original design for a shoe called "Pioneer". Winner of the 2007 Red Dot Award for Design Concept, the shoe is made not just for walking, but also to light up the road at night! The idea is to have the shoe convert kinetic energy from walking into electricity. The diodes are bright enough to illuminate a surface area of about 1.5 meters in front of the walker. There is also a green light at the back of the shoe. Now it remains to be seen who will want to wear this type of shoe when it becomes a reality.

A "kinetic" battery charger

American company M2E Power announced that it will launch a portable battery charger in the summer of 2009 powered solely by kinetic motion. The charger will capture energy from physical activity like walking, jogging or bicycling to generate enough power for most roaming electronic devices. The same applies to dancing, if that's what you prefer! Last year Orange UK, the British subsidiary of France Télécom, announced it would test the life-sized prototype of a cell phone charger powered by the "kinetic energy of dancing".

Source: http://www.m2epower.com
http://pressoffice.orange.co.uk