Developments that will allow abandoning traditional energy in favor of alternative

There is a lot of talk about the need to obtain electricity from renewable sources. They are environmentally friendly and unlimited in use.

What prevents alternative energy sources from completely replacing traditional minerals today? This is hindered by a number of economic, technical and political reasons. This article discusses the technical reasons and developments that will help to overcome them.

Alternative energy is most widely represented by solar and wind power plants. They give the world a large part of clean electricity.

There is a common problem for all renewable electric energy sources. It is associated with the need not only to generate electricity, but also to store it. After all, the sun does not shine at night and it is not always windy.

Roughly speaking, there is a need to create huge batteries that will accumulate energy if it is in excess and give it away if it is not enough.

That's about how a car battery works. When the car engine is not started, all electrical appliances in the car are powered by a battery. When we start the car, the battery from the source becomes a consumer of electricity. And the generator becomes the source, the energy of which is enough for charging the battery and for powering the devices. In our case, the generator is the sun or the wind.

But accumulating electricity on an industrial scale was not at all easy. One of the methods used is to convert electricity to water energy. For this, two reservoirs are being built, at different heights.

When there is enough electricity, the pumps pump water from the lower reservoir to the upper. And when there is a shortage, water is discharged into the lower reservoir, passing turbines that are connected to electric generators. The construction of such a structure costs billions of dollars, and the energy loss during its use is very large. Therefore, the challenge facing scientists is to find a new way to store energy.

This problem can be solved in the near future. Chemists have discovered a new property of vanadium, thanks to which a vanadium battery was designed that can operate without loss of capacity up to 20,000 cycles. But most importantly, the size of such batteries is almost unlimited. Prior to this discovery, vanadium was used in the steel industry to harden parts.

An obstacle to the development of solar energy remains the high cost of solar panels. This is due to their complex design, which requires a pn junction, to create a constant electron flow.

After many years of research, scientists from the University of Pennsylvania found a new mixture that emits an electron stream from exposure to sunlight, without pn transition. Spectroscopic studies have proved that the material is able to emit electrons from exposure to visible light. Early known materials showed similar properties, only from ultraviolet radiation.

This development will not only significantly reduce the cost of solar panels, but also increase the conversion rate. Since conventional solar panels convert solar energy with an efficiency of about 20%.

Indirectly, the development of alternative energy will be affected by another important event - the discovery by the Russian scientist Konstantin Novoselov and Andre Geim in 2010 of new material - graphene. It can be used in modern electronics.

All these developments may well improve the methods of obtaining energy from renewable resources to such an extent that the extraction of coal, gas and oil will be inappropriate.

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