Tech Scrape

A solar-driven process could yield far more fuel than conventional biomass production. Sundrop Fuels , a startup based in Louisville, CO, says it has developed a cleaner and more efficient way to turn biomass into synthetic fuels by harnessing the intense heat of the sun to vaporize wood and crop waste. Its process can produce twice the amount of gasoline or diesel per ton of biomass compared to conventional biomass gasification systems, the company claims.

A novel fuel-injection system achieves 64 miles per gallon. Transonic Combustion , a startup based in Camarillo, TX, has developed a fuel-injection system it says can improve the efficiency of gasoline engines by more than 50 percent. A test vehicle equipped with the technology gets 64 miles per gallon in highway driving, which is far better than more costly gas-electric hybrids , such as the Prius, which gets 48 miles per gallon on the highway.

1366 Technologies hopes to cut the cost of solar with cheaper manufacturing. A new manufacturing process could cut the cost of making crystalline silicon wafers for solar cells by 80 percent. The process is being developed by Lexington, MA-based 1366 Technologies , which this week showed off the first solar cells made this way. The technology is key to the company’s plan to make solar power cheaper than the electricity generated from coal within 10 years.

Federal funds could help 15 gigawatts of solar projects move forward. A massive $1.37 billion loan guarantee that the U.S. Department of Energy granted to Brightsource Energy last week could help clear the way for over 15 gigawatts of solar projects in California, and could be the key to launching a new solar thermal industry in the United States.

The flexible composite requires far less silicon than today’s solar cells. A new photovoltaic material performs as well as the one found in today’s best solar cells, but promises to be significantly cheaper. The material, created by researchers at Caltech, consists of a flexible array of light-absorbing silicon microwires and light-reflecting metal nanoparticles embedded in a polymer.

Fuel made from waste by-products could lower greenhouse gas emissions. A novel chemical process developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison converts cellulose from agricultural waste into gasoline and jet fuel. It produces fuel by modifying what until now had been considered unwanted by-products (levulinic acid and formic acid) of breaking cellulose down into sugar. The work was described in this week’s issue of the journal Science .

Its 100-kilowatt modules have been sold to Google, eBay, and Walmart. The up-to-now secretive startup Bloom Energy took the wraps off its technology this week, unveiling a fuel-cell system that the company claims can run on a variety of fuels and pay for itself in three to five years via lower energy bills.

The money has helped the solar and wind industries, but hasn’t created many manufacturing jobs. In the year since it was enacted by Congress, the federal stimulus bill has helped the solar and wind markets grow in the United States, but has done relatively little to boost domestic renewable energy manufacturing.

The maker of nuclear power plants is promoting a process to use the waste as fuel. GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy , one of the world’s biggest providers of nuclear reactors , says it has an alternative to burying nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, the proposed waste repository that the Obama administration has said is now “off the table.” Based in Wilmington, NC, GE Hitachi wants to use nuclear waste as a fuel for advanced nuclear power plants, significantly reducing the volume of waste and the length of time that most of the waste needs to be stored.

IBM researchers have built efficient cells using abundant elements. Researchers at IBM have increased the efficiency of a novel type of solar cell made largely from cheap and abundant materials by over 40 percent. According to an article published this week in the journal Advanced Materials , the new efficiency is 9.6 percent, up from the previous record of 6.7 percent for this type of solar cell, and near the level needed for commercial solar panels. The IBM solar cells also have the advantage of being made with an inexpensive ink-based process.