Hydrogen power paste, solar powered helicopter on Mars, more! Episode #33

The Clean Power Hour is a weekly clean energy headline review and commentary podcast brought to you by Tim Montague and yours truly – the CommercialSolarGuy – John Fitzgerald Weaver.

First of course, here’s the podcast – Episode 33!

Now, to the news!

Hydrogen-powered drives for e-scooters

…this advance is really something significant. One argument against hydrogen is its density – density which can only be achieved via expensive, heavy, hard to make tanks at high pressure. That’s history.

And compared to batteries, it has ten times the energy storage density. This means that POWERPASTE offers a range comparable to – or even greater than – gasoline. And it also provides a higher range than compressed hydrogen at a pressure of 700 bar.

The Fraunhofer Institute white paper and several reference papers.

Perseverance Rover lands on Mars

“Stop what you’re doing and watch us land on Mars. This is the first time ever we’ve had this perspective. What a beautiful, special, absolutely astounding thing to have this footage. My god.”

NASA’s (solar power) Mars Helicopter – Ingenuity – Reports In

…did some homework in on the helicopter NASA just landed on Mars in the below tweets. The second to last tweet includes a spec page from the manufacturer of the solar cells. 32%+ efficiency.

Xinte Energy To Build 200,000 Tons Polysilicon Fab

…I think this is a factory being moved from the forced labor camp area of China to a different area. If it is new capacity, then we still have a forced labor issue. If this factory’s capacity is moved, how do we verify who is working in these facilities?

Chinese Polysilicon Supplier Xinte Energy Enters Investment Framework Agreement With Baotou City In China To Build High-Purity Polysilicon Fab With 200,000 Annual Production Capacity” – current global capacity 500,000 tons

Solar and Wind Are Reaching for the Last 90% of the U.S. Power Market.

They’ve both grown exponentially over the last 30 years. Now there’s just one more decimal place to go. Anything growing at a compounded rate of nearly 18%, as U.S. wind and solar have done for the past three decades, will double in four years, then double again four years after that, then again four years after that, and so on.

Total – oil major – targeting 100 GW of renewables assets by 2030

Pouyanne told a French business magazine in a recent interview that “for a company like Total to shift 15% of its portfolio to electricity, or nearly 100GW, by 2030, we will have to finance more than $60bn worth of projects over a period of ten years.”

Israeli Solar Energy Storage Site Won the Bid for Compressed Air Energy Storage

Israeli CAES firm Augwind announced that it has obtained an allocated storage volume of 120MWh…power plant comprises of 20MWh of compressed air and 5MW of solar power. Augwind commented that the CAES equipment of Augwind achieves an overall efficiency of 75-81% for systems that start from 5MW…to no deterioration for CAES systems.

Siemens Gamesa Rolls Out Record-Breaking Wind Turbine Blade

By increasing the rotor diameter to 222 metres with 108 metre-long blades, the SG 14-222 DD provides an increase of more than 25% in Annual Energy Production compared to the SG 11.0-200 DD offshore wind turbine, rated at 11 MW with a 200-metre rotor, according to Siemens Gamesa. The blade is one metre longer than the previous record holder, the LM 107.0 P featured on the GE Haliade – X wind turbine.

Texas on the Verge of an Energy Catastrophe: How Microgrids are Helping

“Microgrid company Enchanted Rock has about 200 microgrids in Texas. Of those 200, about 130 have been supplying capacity to aid the grid under the most recent tally. 70 of Enchanted Rock’s customers onsite microgrids keeping electricity flowing to their premises.”

And last but not least, the podcast: