Related Articles

Advancing robust all-weather desalination: a critical review of emerging photothermal evaporators and hybrid systems

All-weather solar-driven desalination systems, integrating photothermal evaporators with hybrid technologies, present a sustainable, cost-effective, and high-efficiency strategy for freshwater production. Despite significant advancements, previous reviews have predominantly focused on daytime evaporation, neglecting the broader scope of all-weather seawater evaporation. This review provides a comprehensive examination of the current status of all-weather seawater evaporators and their hybrid systems. Initially, the review details the system’s composition and operating principles, as well as the design criteria for high-performance evaporators. It then goes over various common photothermal conversion materials for seawater desalination, with a particular emphasis on those materials tailored for all-weather applications. It also offers an in-depth overview to the developed photothermal hybrid systems for all-weather seawater evaporation, including their working principles, the efficiency of evaporation across the day-night cycle, and their practical applications. Lastly, the existing challenges and potential research opportunities are thoroughly discussed.

Decarbonizing urban residential communities with green hydrogen systems

Community green hydrogen systems, typically consisting of rooftop photovoltaic panels paired with hybrid hydrogen-battery storage, offer urban environments with improved access to clean, on-site energy. However, economically viable pathways for deploying hydrogen storage within urban communities remain unclear. Here we develop a bottom-up energy model linking climate, human behavior and community characteristics to assess the impacts of pathways for deploying community green hydrogen systems in North America from 2030 to 2050. We show that for the same community conditions, the cost difference between the best and worst pathways can be as high as 60%. In particular, the household centralized option emerges as the preferred pathway for most communities. Furthermore, enhancing energy storage demands within these deployment pathways can reduce system design costs up to fourfold. To achieve cost-effective urban decarbonization, the study underscores the critical role of selecting the right deployment pathway and prioritizing the integration of increased energy storage in pathway designs.

Diversity of biomass usage pathways to achieve emissions targets in the European energy system

Biomass is a versatile renewable energy source with applications across the energy system, but it is a limited resource and its usage needs prioritization. We use a sector-coupled European energy system model to explore near-optimal solutions for achieving emissions targets. We find that provision of biogenic carbon has higher value than bioenergy provision. Energy system costs increase by 20% if biomass is excluded at a net-negative (−110%) emissions target and by 14% at a net-zero target. Dispatchable bioelectricity covering ~1% of total electricity generation strengthens supply reliability. Otherwise, it is not crucial in which sector biomass is used, if combined with carbon capture to enable negative emissions and feedstock for e-fuel production. A shortage of renewable electricity or hydrogen supply primarily increases the value of using biomass for fuel production. Results are sensitive to upstream emissions of biomass, carbon sequestration capacity and costs of direct air capture.

Direct air capture of CO2 for solar fuel production in flow

Direct air capture is an emerging technology to decrease atmospheric CO2 levels, but it is currently costly and the long-term consequences of CO2 storage are uncertain. An alternative approach is to utilize atmospheric CO2 on-site to produce value-added renewable fuels, but current CO2 utilization technologies predominantly require a concentrated CO2 feed or high temperature. Here we report a gas-phase dual-bed direct air carbon capture and utilization flow reactor that produces syngas (CO + H2) through on-site utilization of air-captured CO2 using light without requiring high temperature or pressure. The reactor consists of a bed of solid silica-amine adsorbent to capture aerobic CO2 and produce CO2-free air; concentrated light is used to release the captured CO2 and convert it to syngas over a bed of a silica/alumina-titania-cobalt bis(terpyridine) molecular–semiconductor photocatalyst. We use the oxidation of depolymerized poly(ethylene terephthalate) plastics as the counter-reaction. We envision this technology to operate in a diurnal fashion where CO2 is captured during night-time and converted to syngas under concentrated sunlight during the day.

Management practices and manufacturing firm responses to a randomized energy audit

Increasing the efficiency of industrial energy use is widely considered important for mitigating climate change. We randomize assignment of an energy audit intervention aimed at improving energy efficiency and reducing energy expenditures of small- and medium-sized metal processing firms in Shandong Province, China, and examine impacts on energy outcomes and interactions with firms’ management practices. We find that the intervention reduced firms’ unit cost of electricity by 8% on average. Firms with more developed structured management practices showed higher rates of recommendation adoption. However, the post-intervention electricity unit cost reduction is larger in firms with less developed practices, primarily driven by a single recommendation that corrected managers’ inaccurate reporting of transformer usage at baseline, lowering their electricity costs. By closing management-associated gaps in awareness of energy expenditures, energy audit programmes may reduce a firm’s unit cost of energy but have an ambiguous impact on energy use and climate change.

Responses

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *