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Their advantages extend beyond reducing carbon emissions.

Thirteen US states are now implementing underground thermal energy networks to reduce buildings’ carbon emissions as part of a nationwide push to adopt cleaner energy sources.

Thermal energy networks use pipe loops that connect multiple buildings and provide heating and cooling through water-source heat pumps. Geothermal heat is commonly used in these networks, but it is also possible to bring in waste heat from other buildings through the sewer system.

The latest research on quantum materials and electron curves could revamp our energy-efficient electronics.

As current courses through a battery, its materials erode over time. Mechanical influences such as stress and strain affect this trajectory, although their impacts on battery efficacy and longevity are not fully understood.

A team led by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a framework for designing solid-state batteries, or SSBs, with mechanics in mind. Their paper, published in Science, reviewed how these factors change SSBs during their cycling.

“Our goal is to highlight the importance of mechanics in battery performance,” said Sergiy Kalnaus, a scientist in ORNL’s Multiphysics Modeling and Flows group. “A lot of studies have focused on chemical or electric properties but have neglected to show the underlying mechanics.”

We often wonder where we might find a truly sustainable and abundant source of energy, and the answer might turn out to be in the emptiness all around us.
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The group led by researchers from the Technical University of Denmark employed a technique using an X-ray microscope that could see acoustic waves within mm-sized crystals with subpicosecond precision. This enabled the team to see how mechanical energy thermalizes across timeframes ranging from picoseconds to microseconds by directly visiting the creation, propagation, branching, and energy dissipation of longitudinal and transverse acoustic waves in a diamond.

The world’s first artificial energy island has secured its environmental permit, so it’s now all systems go in Belgium.

Princess Elisabeth Island is a pioneering electricity grid at sea that’s going to connect offshore wind farms to the Belgian mainland and also serve as a hub for future interconnectors with the UK and Denmark.

Belgian electricity transmission system operator Elia is the project’s developer, and obtaining the permit, which Elia applied for in January 2023, is a key milestone. Construction will take over two years, from March 2024 to August 2026.

Scientists may have made a major breakthrough in the quest to produce limitless energy. According to a new study published in the journal American Chemical Society, scientists are looking deeper at a molecule known as azulene, which is a blue-light emitting molecule that seems to flout the fundamental rules of photochemistry.

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Jets that develop along the walls of fluid-based thermal-energy-storage systems induce multiple flows that limit the devices’ ability to store energy.

Converting waste heat from renewable-energy technologies into electricity could reduce the need for fossil-fuel power stations—but only if that energy can be stored efficiently, for example, in a thermal battery. Researchers have partially solved this problem by designing batteries with vacuum insulation panels that reduce thermal leakage to the environment. But the useful energy available to the system can diminish even if environmental heat loss is reduced to zero. Now Christian Cierpka of the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany, and colleagues have explored one such energy drain: mixing of hot and cold regions within a fluid-based energy-storage device [1]. The results could aid in the design of more-efficient thermal-energy-storage systems, potentially making such facilities useful as backups for intermittent renewable-energy sources.

The team studied mixing in a common thermal-energy-storage system in which a hot fluid reservoir sits atop a cold one. Between the reservoirs lies a transition layer with a temperature gradient across its width. The maximum energy output of such a battery depends on the temperature difference between the hot and cold reservoirs. Any drop in this difference will reduce the battery’s recoverable energy.

Renewable energy grids need lots of energy storage – and EVs plugged into charging stations represent a huge, city-wide battery just waiting to help out. The Dutch city of Utrecht is about to pioneer a clever way to kickstart two-way charging.

The idea has been done plenty at the domestic level – where devices like Toyota’s V2H (vehicle-to-home) charging system can turn an electric car into a high-powered backup power supply capable of running your whole home for days at a time.

And people have been talking about it on a broader, city-wide scale since the dawn of the EV revolution; the same high power density batteries that makes EVs so quick to accelerate make them perfect for quickly sending power back into the grid to smooth out demand spikes.