More signs of the "greening" of Australia have simultaneously appeared on opposite sides of the continent.
Near Perth, the state capital of Western Australia, a sea of wheat fields and a petroleum refinery do not appear to a casual observer to be the components of an energy breakthrough.
But they have come together as the country's first wheat-to-ethanol project, accelerating efforts to cut the use of gasoline in Australia by up to half within 20 years by growing bio-fuel substitutes for gasoline on a scale only Brazil, which uses sugar cane rather than grain as the feed stock, has so far achieved.
And what looks like a dazzling cutting-edge breakthrough has been revealed over on the eastern side of the country at Newcastle north of Sydney.
There, resembling a huge work of contemporary art, an arrangement of 200 mirrors surround a slender 24m silver tower supporting a metal and glass ring shaped like a basketball hoop minus the net. Not artwork, though, but a source of fuel which turns water and natural gas into a storable "solar gas," which packs 26 percent more energy than liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) and already powers road transport across the world.
"Think of it as bottled sunshine," said John Wright, director of the Energy Transformed national research group.
"The old bogey of solar power -- what happens when the clouds roll over, or it's night -- is banished by this. We are turning natural gas into a super efficient gas," he said.
In fact the Solar Tower now running at Newcastle is sufficiently efficient to generate, in theory, all of Australia's electrical needs from a 50km2 site located in the continent's remorselessly dry and sunny desert zones.
And it looks deceptively simple. The tower which is the focus of the newly named National Solar Energy Centre scavenges every ray of sunshine by the use of several types of collectors and very complex computerized management systems for which the software proved the major challenge.
Between the compact layout of near vertical mirrors are a set of trough-like solar energy absorbers which create a parallel path by which the concentrated heat drives a closed cycle of hot high pressure fluid through conventional turbines able to feed power into a normal electricity grid.
Wright said the essential design is sufficiently compact to install on a variety of scales in industrial estates, large retail malls, and landfill sites, which are a rich source of methane or natural gas.
"You could for instance, use one of these towers to generate the hydrogen fuel the automotive and trucking industries are looking at to replace gasoline right on the site of a major hydrogen fuel depot -- solving the challenge of transporting it in pressurized, refrigerated tankers or by special pipelines," he said.
The prototype tower produces more than 500KW of energy and can create industrially useful temperatures of more than 1,000oC at the focus points used to turn natural gas into the hydrogen enriched "solar gas."
The Energy Transformed group, which is jointly-funded by the state and private energy industry partners, is cooking up a lot more than large scale applications for capturing solar energy. With the government in Canberra backing "clean coal" as a means of keeping Australia's massive reserves of coal competitive with nuclear power, the research group is already involved in a multi-billion dollar programme to capture the carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by coal burning power plants.
And this despite Australia's enthusiasm for selling its own very large uranium reserves.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The
RAMPAGE: A Palestinian man was left dead after dozens of Israeli settlers searching for a missing 14-year-old boy stormed a village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank US President Joe Biden on Friday said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later” and warned Tehran not to proceed. Asked by reporters about his message to Iran, Biden simply said: “Don’t,” underscoring Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. “We are devoted to the defense of Israel. We will support Israel. We will help defend Israel and Iran will not succeed,” he said. Biden said he would not divulge secure information, but said his expectation was that an attack could come “sooner, rather than later.” Israel braced on Friday for an attack by Iran or its proxies as warnings grew of