“Many people today view photovoltaics as a panacea for our energy woes, given how dirty most of the alternatives are. But that does not mean we should turn a blind eye to the darker side of this technology. Indeed, we need to consider it very carefully. And just maybe, with a sustained effort by consumers, manufacturers, and researchers, the photovoltaics industry will one day be truly, not just symbolically, green.”

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“The atmosphere is more generous out in the open ocean. There […] wind farms could be packed more tightly, because energy should flow down from above the boundary layer to quickly restore winds depleted by wind turbine rotors. In some regions, such as the North Atlantic, the simulations suggest that large wind farms can extract 6 MW/km2 or more.”

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“More automotive industrial strategies, including real time methods, need to be developed to predict parking time and energy requirement, reduce energy wastage and increase reliability during subfreezing temperatures. Improved techniques to manage water during shutdown and startup; improved temperature uniformity in the stack during heating; and improved heat utilization, cooling, and humidification techniques are needed. It is important also to improve membrane/cell stability under freeze/thaw cycles and membrane conductivity under low humidity conditions.”

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“And just as the price of solar energy has dropped over the past decade—for example, a mid-November auction in Mexico for new generating capacity resulted in prices that approached $20/MWh—so, too, has the price of storage. It has fallen by as much as 80 percent since 2010.”

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“Of course, the colder the surrounding ocean, the better this scheme will work. To get access to chilly seawater even during the summer or in the tropics, you need only put the pods sufficiently deep. For example, at 200 meters’ depth off the east coast of Florida, the water remains below 15 °C all year round.”

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By combining the technology of PMSM motors with salient-pole synchronous machine (SPSM) motors, the resulting motor “is able to produce almost 6 percent more torque and attain 2 percent higher peak efficiency. And in the driving cycle the improvement is even better: It requires 4.4 percent less energy. That means a car that would have gone 100 kilometers on a charge can, with this motor, go 104.4 km.”

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“In post-Fukushima Japan, these nimble storage plants have a new opportunity to shine: managing the more than 10 GW of solar and other renewable energy capacity that has been installed in Japan since the March 2011 meltdowns and the subsequent idling of the country’s nuclear reactors.”

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