Sourcing Renewables  -  May 9, 2020

Weekend reads: Shell's clean energy plan; Visualizing America's energy use

It's the weekend! Kick back and catch up with these must-read articles from around the web.

Hydrogen Industry: The Dawning Of The Hydrogen Economy ( Hyundai Motor Investment & Securities) Hydrogen as an energy carrier to create strong synergies with renewables. Hydrogen is produced by electrolyzing gas initially but eventually it will probably be produced by electrolyzing water with surplus renewable energy. The hydrogen produced in this manner is injected into fuel cells to be converted into power or heat energy. Hydrogen will be highlighted as an energy carrier that stores a large amount of energy. This helps overcome the shortcomings of renewable energy and lowers the cost of fuel cell power generation, thereby creating strong synergy between renewable energy, hydrogen, and fuel cells.

Shell Has A Bigger Clean Energy Plan Than You Think (CleanTechnica) Royal Dutch Shell has gotten some pretty good reviews for the laundry list of clean energy items in its new decarbonization plan, but there is one little item that hasn’t gotten much attention, and it could have an impact on all those other oil and gas giants out there. Back in 2018, the company nailed down a partnership with NREL that leverages 40 years of clean tech research and industry connections, and they’ve been busy at work shoveling new clean tech into the market as fast as they can go.

Why The Coronavirus Pandemic Is Creating A Surge In Renewable Energy (Forbes) King’s Cross station in London is usually enveloped in pollution, especially during the evening rush hour. Not yesterday. One of the few silver linings of the coronavirus cloud for city dwellers worldwide has been the improvement in the environment. And as carbon emissions are set to decline by almost 8% this year, demand for renewable energy has surged. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), measures in place in almost every country are driving a major shift towards low carbon sources of electricity including wind, solar PV (in which solar radiation is converted directly into electrical currents), hydropower and nuclear.

Visualizing America’s Energy Use, in One Giant Chart (Visual Capitalist) Have you ever wondered where the country’s energy comes from, and how exactly it gets used? Luckily, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) crunches the numbers every year, outputting an incredible flow diagram that covers the broad spectrum of U.S. energy use. The 2019 version of this comprehensive diagram gives us an in-depth picture of the U.S. energy ecosystem, showing not only where energy originates by fuel source (i.e. wind, oil, natural gas, etc.) but also how it’s ultimately consumed by sector.

Space Force will test solar power transmission during X-37B space plane’s next mystery flight (Geek Wire) When a Boeing-built X-37B space plane is sent into orbit this month for the test program’s sixth flight, it will try out a technology that’s been more than a decade in the making: space-based solar power. An experiment designed by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory will transform solar power into a microwave beam for transmission down to the ground. If such a power-beaming system could be perfected, concentrated microwave energy from space could conceivably be converted to electricity for far-flung military outposts.

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