Energy Storage

The second day of the hugely successful IDTechEx conferences in Denver started with a focus on photovoltaics, which has the biggest market share in energy harvesting technology today.

At the recent IDTechEx Energy Harvesting and Storage event in Denver, Arveni, a startup based near Grenoble, France, demonstrated a batteryless remote control.

EnOcean Alliance reaches milestone toward becoming an international standard.

This week the IDTechEx events Energy Harvesting & Storage and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) & RTLS took place in Denver, CO, USA. The event was attended by more than 290 attendees, with a brilliantly diverse spread of those through the value chain - from component suppliers to solution providers to many end users from different industries.

Infinite Power Solutions, Inc., a global leader in the development and manufacturing of solid-state, rechargeable, thin-film energy storage devices, formally unveiled its INFINERGY(TM) Micro Power Module products at the Energy Harvesting & Storage USA conference in Denver, Colorado.

Printed electronics and electrics will be a $335 billion business in twenty years, just for devices primarily made by printing with electronic inks. IDTechEx gives a summary of the projections.

Dependence on increasingly troublesome oil supplies and rapid degradation of the environment provide every reason why electric cars, whether hybrid or pure electric, should now be adopted rapidly.

On November 4, Pierre Mars, vice president of applications engineering for CAP-XX Ltd will present a technical paper on design strategies using a supercapacitor to overcome power limitations from energy-harvesting sources.

Scientists have known for some time that an electrical charge could be harvested from the metabolic processes of bacteria living in soil but the effort required to achieve this was time consuming for a very low power output. But a team of Harvard scientists has used the idea to design an inexpensive battery, a microbial fuel cell, which can produce enough current to power LED lights and charge cellphone batteries in rural Africa.

University of Missouri researchers are developing a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient.

A group of researchers at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University have discovered that the distinctive cellulose nanostructure of these algae can serve as an effective coating substrate for use in environmentally friendly batteries.

A new thin-film paper battery that holds great promise for applications in areas where conventional Li-ion batteries are not the perfect choice has been developed at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Plug in hybrid electric cars are now prioritised by most major car manufacturers. Pure electric on- road cars are prioritised by Nissan and a host of vibrant start up companies, they have one thing in common. The cleverest, most expensive part of their planned vehicles is increasingly the traction battery.

ReVolt Technology applies for $30 million in government research grants accelerating development of innovative zinc-air batteries for vehicles and renewable energy storage.

It is interesting that the new ways of using energy harvesting are often seen first in consumer goods where budgets are tight rather in less price sensitive industrial and military applications.