Source: www.nasaspaceflight.com

Throughout the inner solar system in 2016, NASA, ESA, JAXA, Roscosmos, and ISRO built upon their prior year successes and demonstrated a coordinated and cooperative approach toward advancing scientific returns from around Earth’s immediate neighbors. For these agencies, non-Earth orbital exploration yielded surprising and dramatic changes to our views of the Sun, Venus, the Moon, and Mars via arrivals, discoveries, and cooperative investigations.

The Sun – The Transit of Mercury; new insights on solar waves and coronal heating:

The oft forgotten but wholly important element of our solar system has the largest number of operational spacecraft and instruments dedicated to its round-the-clock study, including the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), DSCOVR, PICARD, the Solar Monitoring Observatory, the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, Hinode, the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager, the Advanced Composition Explorer, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), and the Global Geospace Geoscience WIND.

In a relatively quiet solar year, one that satellites and instruments again spent continuously peering at the sun, the year afforded an opportunity for space-based craft to observe and study the transit of Mercury and potentially unlock a solar question that has puzzled scientists for decades.

Occurring roughly 13 times each century, the transit of Mercury is far more common though less celebrated than the transit of Venus. Regardless, Mercury’s transit of the sun is equally valuable in terms of stellar observation.

Historically, the transits of Mercury were used to measure the apparent size of Mercury and help estimate the distance from Earth to the sun.

This year, the transit of Mercury occurred on 19 May and was observed cooperatively by SDO, Hinode (a JAXA led and NASA, ESA, and UK supported mission), and SOHO (a joint operation of NASA and ESA) – for which two of SOHO’s dormant instruments were turned back on: the Extreme Ultraviolet Imaging Telescope and the Michelson Doppler Imager.

During the transit event, SOHO measured the sun’s rotation axis – part of a long line of observations which help scientists better understand how the sun changes over hours, days, years and decades.

Likewise, SDO used the transit to help with instrument alignment, made possible because scientists know with such precision where Mercury should be in relationship to the sun that they can use it as a marker to fine tune exactly how SDO’s instruments should be pointed.

For SDO, the Mercury transit observation campaign was not the only significant return this year, with the craft also providing a new understanding of solar waves and, in connection, a revelation about a long-standing mystery of the sun’s coronal temperature.

For the solar waves, the sun is constantly changing as charged material courses through not only the star itself, but throughout its expansive atmosphere.

Understanding the path this charged material (the solar wave) takes through the sun’s multiple layers, how it heats up the sun’s atmosphere, how it creates a steady flow of solar wind streaming outward in all directions, and how magnetic fields create regions that can explode in giant eruptions is a key element to SDO’s mission.

In a scientific paper announced in October, scientists revealed that SDO, along with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph and Big Bear Solar Observatory, had tracked a particular kind of solar wave as it swept upward from the sun’s surface through its atmosphere.

Scientists have long suspected that the solar waves seen on the sun’s surface, the photosphere, are linked to those seen in the lowest reaches of the sun’s atmosphere, the chromosphere. But never before had scientist been able to track a wave up through the various layers into the sun’s atmosphere.

Until now.

“This research gives us a new viewpoint to look at waves that can contribute to the energy of the [sun’s] atmosphere,” said Junwei Zhao, a solar scientist at Stanford University.

The implications of this study are twofold. First, the technique for watching solar waves gives scientists a new tool to understand the sun’s lower atmosphere, and second, it provides an avenue to potentially answer a long-standing question in solar physics: the coronal heating problem.

For the first implication, “Watching waves move upwards tells us a lot about the properties of the atmosphere above sunspots – like temperature, pressure, and density,” said Ruizhu Chen, a graduate student scientist at Stanford.

“More importantly, we can figure out the magnetic field strength and direction” because the effect of the magnetic field on these waves is so pronounced that instead of traveling straight upwards through the sun, the waves veer off and take a curved path through the atmosphere.

“The magnetic field [acts] like railroad tracks, guiding the waves as they move up through the atmosphere,” said Dean Pesnell, SDO project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

For the second implication, the coronal heating problem, models have always suggested that each layer of the sun should be cooler the further out they are. But the corona is roughly one hundred times hotter than the region directly below it – counter to what the models suggest.

Presently, no one has been able to pinpoint the source of the extra heat in the corona, but solar waves may play a small role.

“When a wave travels upwards, a number of different things can happen,” said Zhao. “Some may reflect back downwards or contribute to heating – but by how much, we don’t yet know”.

Source: www.rewmag.com

Chagrin Falls, Ohio-based manufacturer RES Polyflow has announced it has developed a rapid assessment solution designed to prequalify raw materials for the company’s proprietary plastic to fuel energy recovery technology.

The Remote Universal Feedstock Utilization System, or RUFUS, is a mobile diagnostic tool that uses pyrolysis to convert nonrecycled plastic to a liquid hydrocarbon for on-the-spot analysis that determines the quality of the raw material for conversion to petroleum products. Using RUFUS, nonrecycled plastic is now able to be evaluated against graded raw material specifications that support the financial and operational performance goals of a RES Polyflow plastics-to-fuel facility using this assessment tool. Development of the RUFUS system was funded in part by a market development grant awarded to the company by the Ohio EPA in 2015.

When operated, RUFUS determines the percentage of hydrocarbon value that is recoverable from nonrecycled plastic and then analyzes the liquid to determine if the raw material offered by a supply source is technically and financially viable for conversion at commercial scale rather than discarding as a waste material.

The system can be utilized at the company’s northeast Ohio-based technical center and in the marketplace at the source of the supply. In addition to evaluating supply sources throughout Ohio and the Midwest, the company is building a collaboration with Trine University in Angola, Indiana, and the Northeast Indiana Solid Waste Management District to identify and prequalify localized raw material streams generated across a four-county area.

RES Polyflow says it is in the midst of a capital raise that, when completed, will fully fund the construction and start-up of the first commercial plastics to fuel facility in the United States, located in Ashley, Indiana.

Source: www.theguardian.com

Route in Tourouvre-au-Perche cost €5m to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during two-year test period

France has opened what it claims to be the world’s first solar panel road, in a Normandy village.

A 1km (0.6-mile) route in the small village of Tourouvre-au-Perche covered with 2,800 sq m of electricity-generating panels, was inaugurated on Thursday by the ecology minister, Ségolène Royal.

It cost €5m (£4.2m) to construct and will be used by about 2,000 motorists a day during a two-year test period to establish if it can generate enough energy to power street lighting in the village of 3,400 residents.

In 2014, a solar-powered cycle path opened in Krommenie in the Netherlands and, despite teething problems, has generated 3,000kWh of energy – enough to power an average family home for a year. The cost of building the cycle path, however, could have paid for 520,000kWh.

Before the solar-powered road – called Wattway – was opened on the RD5 road, the panels were tested at four car parks across France. The constructor was Colas, part of giant telecoms group Bouygues, and financed by the state.

Normandy is not known for its surfeit of sunshine: Caen, the region’s political capital, enjoys just 44 days of strong sunshine a year compared with 170 in Marseilles.

Royal has said she would like to see solar panels installed on one in every 1,000km of French highway – France has a total of 1m km of roads – but panels laid on flat surfaces have been found to be less efficient than those installed on sloping areas such as roofs.

Critics say it is not a cost-effective use of public money. Marc Jedliczka, vice-president of Network for Energetic Transition (CLER) told Le Monde: “It’s without doubt a technical advance, but in order to develop renewables there are other priorities than a gadget of which we are more certain that it’s very expensive than the fact it works.”

Jean-Louis Bal, president of renewable energy union SER, said: “We have to look at the cost, the production [of electricity] and its lifespan. For now I don’t have the answers.”

Colas said the panels have been covered with a resin containing fine sheets of silicon, making them tough enough to withstand all traffic, including HGVs. The company says it hopes to reduce the costs of producing the solar panels and has about 100 other projects for solar-panelled roads – half in France and half abroad.

Source: www.renewableenergyworld.com

A brisk, late November morning in Northern Germany provided backdrop to a ceremony held to mark completion of the structural supports of the factory slated to secure Siemens Wind Power’s position as purveyor of next generation wind turbine technologies.

Behind the ceremony, a host of developments from Siemens are coming together to enable the company to cut costs and improve efficiency of its wind power business, which already leads in offshore wind turbine construction.

Scheduled for completion by mid-2017, the Cuxhaven, Germany, wind turbine factory will provide Siemens with a manufacturing hub for its latest and forthcoming generations of large direct drive offshore wind turbine nacelles.

In the nearest timeframe, factory operations will revolve around the direct drive, 7-MW capacity D7 platform. The production facility will undertake serial production of generators, hubs and nacelle back-ends, and final assembly of these components to form complete D7 nacelles.

In time, even larger capacity machines will eventually flow from the factory’s production lines. Siemens’ Carsten-Sünnke Berendsen, who is heading the Cuxhaven project, told Renewable Energy World: “The Cuxhaven plant is our central manufacturing base for all large direct drive nacelles of our offshore wind turbines. The [8-MW] SWT-8.0-154 is an enhanced version of our models SWT-6.0-154 and SWT-7.0-154 and so its nacelle will definitely be assembled in the new factory.”

Motivating the choice of location and hinting at the ultimate, global destinations for products of the factory, Berendsen said: “Siemens always invests where its markets are. Since the UK and Germany are the largest offshore wind markets, it shows our consistence that nacelles are produced in Cuxhaven and the blades where manufactured in Hull, England. Both components will be shipped within and beyond Europe to our projects.”

Covering some 170,000 square meters of land, the factory lies adjacent to Cuxhaven harbor. Positioning is key to the facility’s design — allowing heavy nacelle components to be loaded directly onto sea-going transportation vessels and avoiding costly, more complex ground transportation.

Remarking on what the Cuxhaven plant represents for Siemens Wind’s position within the wind market going forward, Berendsen said: “Its strategic significance can be seen in our new logistic concept: sea transportation and Roll on-Roll off-loading (Ro-Ro) are both key in this concept. We have launched a specialized transport vessel that can be loaded directly from the production [facilities] via a ramp.”

That vessel is Siemens Wind Power’s first customized turbine transport vessel, the 141m long Rotra Vente, and it’s pitched as a key component to facilitate cost-effective transportation of the large direct drive nacelles between Cuxhaven and destination harbors in the North and Baltic Seas.

Berendsen explained: “Due to their weights and dimensions, the current and future turbine generations are not suitable for road transportation anymore. That was one of the reasons why we decided to open a factory at a harbor site. At Cuxhaven, we found the best conditions to fulfil our requirements.”

The Rotra Vente in the harbor of Esbjerg, Denmark. The customized transport vessel allows for nacelles to be rolled on and off the deck, avoiding the need for crane operations. Credit: Siemens.

A sister ship to the Rotra Vente — a transporter for towers and blades — is also under construction. With it, cost-effective logistics will extend to transportation of blades from Siemens’ production facilities in Hull or Aalborg, Denmark, to harbors chosen for delivery.

Construction of Cuxhaven factory seen from the air. Credit: Siemens.

The progressive character of the factory is evident beyond its use of harbor-based transportation. Indeed, state-of-the-art processing methods are planned for within the factory itself.

“The Cuxhaven plant will be a digital factory,” Berendsen said. “We will implement the industry 4.0 approach wherever possible.”

Being constructed on a greenfield site, Berendsen explained, has allowed for freedom in planning out an innovative production flow.

“All processes [including, storage, supply chain and assembly] will be coordinated by modern digital production systems, such as Siemens Production System (SPS), supporting throughput time and cost position,” he said. “A modern industry park concept allows to optimize the supply chain with suppliers located close to the factory.”

Siemens could not comment on a figure relating to cost reduction through the manufacturing and transportation processes of Cuxhaven, however the company have stated: “When our new factories in Hull and Cuxhaven become fully operational, and both Ro-Ro vessels are in service as interconnection of our manufacturing and installation network, we expect savings of 15-20 percent in logistics costs compared to current transport procedures. This is another important contributor reducing the cost of electricity from offshore wind.”

A healthy pipeline of projects for Siemens’ D7 wind turbines is in place already. Berendsen highlighted: “There’s a couple of orders that show the tremendous success of our large direct drive offshore wind turbines — including the 588 MW Beatrice offshore wind project in the UK and 714 MW East Anglia ONE project at the British east coast. Also German Arkona wind power plant in the Baltic Sea and the floating Hywind Scotland project will be equipped with these turbines.”

Nacelles produced at the Cuxhaven factory are destined to join Siemens Wind Power’s offshore fleet. Pictured is a SWT-6.0-154 turbine. Credit: Siemens.

In related news, Siemens recently inaugurated its new rotor blade factory for offshore wind turbines in Hull. The factory, which is located at Alexandra Docks, has completed the first 75-meter-long blades. Shipping to the first offshore wind project, Race Bank, is expected early next year.

Source: www.renewableenergyworld.com

A transformation is happening in global energy markets that’s worth noting as 2016 comes to an end: Solar power, for the first time, is becoming the cheapest form of new electricity.

This has happened in isolated projects in the past: an especially competitive auction in the Middle East, for example, resulting in record-cheap solar costs. But now unsubsidized solar is beginning to outcompete coal and natural gas on a larger scale, and notably, new solar projects in emerging markets are costing less to build than wind projects, according to fresh data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

The chart below shows the average cost of new wind and solar from 58 emerging-market economies, including China, India, and Brazil. While solar was bound to fall below wind eventually, given its steeper price declines, few predicted it would happen this soon.

Source: www.renewableenergyworld.com

Image: Staff from Sandia National Laboratories meet with government representatives in the Southeast Asian island city-state of Singapore. Credit: Jacquelynne Hernández

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Sandia National Laboratories on Dec. 6 said it signed a cooperative research and development agreement with the government of Singapore’s Energy Market Authority (EMA) that will tap into the labs’ expertise in energy storage.

“Sandia will collaboratively develop an energy storage test-bed to better understand the feasibility of deploying energy storage systems [ESS] in Singapore,” Dan Borneo, Sandia team lead on the project, said in a statement.

According to Sandia, EMA is the statutory body in Singapore responsible for ensuring a reliable and secure energy supply, promoting competition in the energy market and developing a dynamic energy sector.

Under the four-year agreement Sandia, with the backing of the DOE Office of Electricity’s Stationary Energy Storage Program managed by Imre Gyuk, will work with Singapore EMA to establish and evaluate up to three ESS test-beds at existing electrical substations with different energy-storage technologies: lithium-ion, flywheels and flow batteries.

Sandia also will evaluate various grid applications, such as frequency/voltage support and renewable integration, and will help EMA develop standards and guidelines for grid integration and fire safety.

As part of the agreement, Sandia said it will assess the economic case for ESS and offer guidance on the policy and regulatory frameworks that EMA needs to introduce energy storage into Singapore’s electricity market.

Sandia will provide periodic reports to Singapore EMA on the performance of its test systems.

Source: phys.org

Astronomers from the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy (IfA), Brazil, and Stanford University may have solved a long-standing solar mystery.
Two decades ago, scientists discovered that the outer five percent of the sun spins more slowly than the rest of its interior. Now, in a new study, to be published in the journal Physical Review Letters, IfA Maui scientists Ian Cunnyngham, Jeff Kuhn, and Isabelle Scholl, together with Marcelo Emilio (Brazil) and Rock Bush (Stanford), describe the physical mechanism responsible for slowing the sun’s outer layers.

Team leader Jeff Kuhn said “The sun won’t stop spinning anytime soon, but we’ve discovered that the same solar radiation that heats the Earth is ‘braking’ the sun because of Einstein’s Special Relativity, causing it to gradually slow down, starting from its surface.”

The sun rotates on its axis at an average rate of about once per month but that rotation isn’t like, for example, the solid Earth or a spinning disk because the rate varies with solar latitude and distance from the center of the sun.

The team used several years of data from the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite to measure a sharp down-turn in the sun’s rotation rate in its very outer 150km. Kuhn said, “This is a gentle torque that is slowing it down, but over the sun’s 5 billion year lifetime it has had a very noticeable influence on its outer 35,000km.” Their paper describes how this photon-braking effect should be at work in most stars.

This change in rotation at the sun’s surface affects the large-scale solar magnetic field and researchers are now trying to understand how the solar magnetism that extends out into the corona and finally into the Earth’s environment will be affected by this braking.

Source: reneweconomy.com.au

Carnegie Wave Energy’s 100 per cent owned subsidiary, Energy Made Clean, is set to develop and demonstrate a commercial-scale solar and battery storage plant in Australia, after entering into a joint venture targeting Australia’s vanadium redox flow (VRF) battery market.

Carnegie said on Tuesday that EMC had signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese company Sumitomo Electric Industries and ASX-listed TNG Limited to assess the potential applications of VRF batteries in Australia through an initial joint demonstration project.

The deal builds on a June 2015 MOU between EMC and emerging strategic metals company TNG, to establish the feasibility of Vanadium Redox batteries. And it comes less than two months after Carnegie took full ownership of the Perth-based EMC, which has established itself as one of the Australia’s foremost micro-grid and battery storage businesses.

Energy Made Clean’s main role in the partnership will be to identify commercial project site opportunities, while also designing and supplying a compatible balance of plant – likely to include solar PV – to integrate with the VRF containerised system being supplied by Sumitomo.

The demonstration will be of commercial size, to best showcase Sumitomo’s technology, the companies said; with each party contributing to their core competencies, and subsequently cooperating on the marketing and sales of VRF batteries.

As we have noted on RE before, vanadium redox flow batteries are tipped to be one of the key playersin the booming global energy storage market, as more and more renewable energy sources are brought onto grids around the world.

The batteries are considered uniquely suited to on- and off-grid energy storage applications due to their scalability and long asset lives, with deep and very high cycling capability.

Australia, as well as being a key market for battery storage uptake, has been noted for its potential to become a top global producer of vanadium – a metal found in a range of mineral deposits.

A number of Australian companies are already active in the local vanadium redox flow battery market, including miner Australian Vanadium – which recently inked a deal with Germany battery maker Gildemeister Energy Storage to sell its CellCube range of VRF batteries – and Brisbane based battery maker Redflow.

Energy Made Clean CEO John Davidson said the signing of the MOU would bring key industry innovators together to help revolutionise the vanadium redox flow battery market in Australia.

“This strategic MoU represents a compelling three-way tie-up of an emerging miner, a manufacturer and an integrator to accelerate the development of a major new energy growth market,” Davidson said.