bus route in Gumi city (South Korea) since 2013 — the world's first public wireless charging road for electric vehicles. The 24-kilometer route has coils embedded in 5% of the road surface — at bus stops and slow sections — providing enough charge to keep a battery-electric bus running continuously without ever stopping to charge.

 

South Korea is building wireless EV charging roads — where electric vehicles charge automatically as they drive without plugging in.

South Korea's Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — KAIST — invented online electric vehicle technology in 2009: a system that transfers electricity wirelessly from coils embedded in the road surface to a receiver pad underneath a moving vehicle. The technology uses resonant magnetic coupling — the same physics as wireless phone charging but scaled up dramatically for vehicle use.

KAIST's OLEV — Online Electric Vehicle — system has been operating on a public bus route in Gumi city since 2013 — the world's first public wireless charging road for electric vehicles. The 24-kilometer route has coils embedded in 5% of the road surface — at bus stops and slow sections — providing enough charge to keep a battery-electric bus running continuously without ever stopping to charge.

The commercial case is compelling. Wireless charging roads eliminate the need for large battery packs — a vehicle that charges continuously while driving needs only a small buffer battery, dramatically reducing vehicle weight, cost, and the critical mineral requirements that constrain EV scaling. A bus with a 10 kWh buffer battery and wireless road charging can do the work of a bus with a 300 kWh battery pack — at a fraction of the battery cost.

Korea's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport is funding a next-generation wireless charging highway pilot on a 10-kilometer section of the Sejong-Cheongju expressway — the first wireless charging highway for private passenger vehicles.

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology — 2024

#ElectricTransport #SouthKorea #CleanEnergy

American researchers have developed graphene-based solar cells that generate electricity from rain as well as sunlight

 

American researchers have developed graphene-based solar cells that generate electricity from rain as well as sunlight — clean power from precipitation that covers the sky when solar panels need it most.

The concept of generating electricity from raindrops has been attempted through piezoelectric, triboelectric, and electrochemical mechanisms for over a decade without producing a commercially viable device. Graphene — the single-atom-thick carbon structure whose extraordinary electrical properties have made it one of the most studied materials of the 21st century — provides the enabling material whose unique electrochemical properties make rain-electricity generation practically viable for the first time.

When raindrops contact a graphene surface, the dissolved ions in rainwater — ammonium, calcium, sodium, and chloride — adsorb preferentially to the graphene surface, creating a charge double layer at the graphene-water interface whose formation and collapse generates a measurable electrical current. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin's Center for Electrochemistry have fabricated a graphene film over a conventional silicon solar cell, creating a bifunctional device that generates electricity from photovoltaic effect under sunlight and from the electrochemical double-layer effect under rain simultaneously.

Outdoor testing of the dual-mode graphene-silicon solar cells in Austin — a city with significant rainfall during its spring and autumn wet seasons — demonstrated electricity generation during every measurable rain event throughout a 12-month test period, with peak rain-electricity output of 8 milliwatts per square metre during heavy downpours. When integrated over the annual cycle, the graphene layer adds approximately 5% additional electricity generation from rain events compared to the solar-only baseline.

America made a solar panel that works in the rain. The weather is no longer the enemy.

Source: University of Texas at Austin Center for Electrochemistry & US Department of Energy, 2024

#EnergyInnovation #RainSolar #USAEnergy #CleanEnergy

The Kuqa green hydrogen project in Xinjiang — developed by Sinopec — is the world's largest green hydrogen facility currently operating. Twenty thousand solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity that powers 260 MW of electrolyzers producing 20,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually.

 

China is building the world's largest green hydrogen production complex — powered entirely by Gobi Desert wind and solar.

China's approach to green hydrogen follows the same pattern as everything else in its energy transition: identify the optimal resource locations, build at unprecedented scale, and drive down costs through manufacturing volume until the economics are self-sustaining without subsidy.

The Kuqa green hydrogen project in Xinjiang — developed by Sinopec — is the world's largest green hydrogen facility currently operating. Twenty thousand solar panels and wind turbines generate electricity that powers 260 MW of electrolyzers producing 20,000 tonnes of green hydrogen annually. The hydrogen is used at Sinopec's adjacent petrochemical refinery — replacing grey hydrogen currently produced from natural gas, saving over 485,000 tonnes of CO₂ annually.

Kuqa is the demonstration project. Behind it comes a pipeline of industrial-scale green hydrogen facilities that dwarf Kuqa entirely. Inner Mongolia alone — with its extraordinary wind and solar resources and its large existing chemical industrial base — has approved green hydrogen projects with combined electrolyzer capacity exceeding 10 GW.

Chinese electrolyzer manufacturers — Sungrow, PERIC, and Longi Hydrogen — are producing alkaline electrolyzers at costs below $300 per kilowatt — less than half the cost of European competitors. That cost advantage, combined with China's cheap renewable electricity, is producing green hydrogen at prices approaching $2 per kilogram — competitive with fossil-derived hydrogen in many applications.

China is not just building for domestic use. It is developing green hydrogen export infrastructure targeting Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Sinopec — China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation — 2024

#GreenHydrogen #China #CleanEnergy

France is using its nuclear electricity surplus to produce green hydrogen — giving its nuclear fleet a valuable new purpose.

 

France is using its nuclear electricity surplus to produce green hydrogen — giving its nuclear fleet a valuable new purpose.

France's nuclear fleet generates approximately 70% of national electricity — clean, reliable, and at remarkably low marginal cost. But nuclear plants are designed to run at constant output. When electricity demand falls — on mild spring nights, for example — French nuclear plants must either throttle down inefficiently, export cheap electricity to neighbors, or find another use for their output.

Green hydrogen production is that other use. Electrolyzers can absorb surplus nuclear electricity at times of low demand, converting it to hydrogen that can be stored, transported, and used as clean fuel or industrial feedstock. The hydrogen earns revenue from the low-cost electricity that would otherwise be sold at near-zero prices — significantly improving the economics of both nuclear generation and hydrogen production.

EDF — the operator of France's nuclear fleet — has partnered with Air Liquide and McPhy to develop electrolysis installations at nuclear plant sites. The Civaux nuclear plant in Vienne and the Chinon plant in Indre-et-Loire are pilot sites for electrolyzer deployments that will produce hydrogen for industrial users in the surrounding regions.

France's hydrogen strategy targets 6.5 GW of electrolyzer capacity by 2030. Nuclear-powered electrolysis — exploiting the country's unique baseload electricity advantage — is projected to contribute a significant proportion of that capacity at costs below wind or solar-powered alternatives in France's specific electricity market context.

Air Liquide is building hydrogen distribution infrastructure connecting French nuclear plant electrolyzer sites to industrial hydrogen consumers in the Normandy and Loire Valley chemical corridors.

EDF — Électricité de France — 2024

#GreenHydrogen #France #CleanEnergy

The Victorian Big Battery near Geelong — 300 MW / 450 MWh of Tesla Megapack units — became one of the world's largest battery installations when it came online in 2021.

 

Australia is building the world's biggest battery — and it's not even the most ambitious storage project the country has underway.

The Victorian Big Battery near Geelong — 300 MW / 450 MWh of Tesla Megapack units — became one of the world's largest battery installations when it came online in 2021. It was overtaken almost immediately by South Australia's Hornsdale Power Reserve expansion. Then came Western Australia's Kwinana Big Battery. Australia is engaged in a continuous competition with itself to build larger and smarter grid storage systems.

But Snowy 2.0 dwarfs them all. The pumped hydro expansion of Australia's Snowy Mountains scheme is the largest energy storage project in the Southern Hemisphere — 2,000 MW of generation capacity connected to 350,000 MWh of storage in the form of two reservoirs linked by 27 kilometers of underground tunnels bored through the Australian Alps. When complete, it will store enough energy to power Sydney for a week.

Australia's storage buildout is driven by a grid undergoing one of the fastest renewable energy transitions in the world. Coal plants are retiring faster than anywhere else on Earth — 7 GW retired in 2023 alone — and the National Electricity Market needs storage at every timescale: seconds for frequency, hours for daily solar cycling, and days for extended low-generation weather events.

No country is learning faster how to integrate massive renewable generation with massive storage. Australia is running the experiment the entire world needs data from.

Source: Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), 2024

#EnergyStorage #AustraliaRenewables #GridStorage #CleanEnergy #Snowy20 #EnergyTransition #RenewableEnergy #Australia #GreenFuture #SustainableEnergy #PumpedHydro #ClimateAction #EnergyRevolution #NetZero

Japanese scientists have developed a blood test that detects Alzheimer's disease 15 years before symptoms appear — changing everything about how we fight dementia.

 

Japanese scientists have developed a blood test that detects Alzheimer's disease 15 years before symptoms appear — changing everything about how we fight dementia.

Alzheimer's disease affects over 55 million people globally and has no disease-modifying treatment — largely because by the time symptoms appear, decades of neurodegeneration have already occurred. The amyloid plaques and tau tangles that define Alzheimer's pathology begin accumulating 15-20 years before a patient first notices memory problems. Treating the disease at symptom onset is treating it far too late.

Researchers at the National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology in Aichi Prefecture — in collaboration with Shimadzu Corporation — have developed an ultrasensitive blood test that detects amyloid-beta oligomers — the earliest soluble forms of Alzheimer's amyloid — at concentrations of femtomoles per milliliter of blood. Previous blood tests lacked the sensitivity to detect amyloid at these early concentrations reliably.

The test uses an immunoprecipitation mass spectrometry method that concentrates amyloid proteins from a blood sample and measures their exact molecular weights with extraordinary precision. The ratio of specific amyloid-beta variants — Aβ42 to Aβ40 — reflects the earliest stages of amyloid accumulation in the brain years before PET imaging or cerebrospinal fluid analysis can detect it.

Clinical validation studies across Japanese cohorts show the test identifies individuals destined to develop Alzheimer's with over 90% accuracy 15 years before cognitive impairment appears. Those individuals can now enter preventive clinical trials — testing whether interventions at the earliest disease stage can prevent dementia entirely.

National Center for Geriatrics and Gerontology, Japan — 2024

#MedicalInnovations #Japan #CleanEnergy

A single teaspoon of matter can weigh wildly different amounts depending on where it comes from in the universe.

 

A single teaspoon of matter can weigh wildly different amounts depending on where it comes from in the universe.

Here’s how extreme space objects compare:

⸻

Water

• About 5 grams per teaspoon

⸻

Iron

• About 39 grams per teaspoon

⸻

Earth rock

• Around 27 grams per teaspoon

⸻

White Dwarf

• A single teaspoon could weigh 5–15 tonnes

• These stars pack Sun-like mass into an Earth-sized object

⸻

Neutron Star

• One teaspoon could weigh around 10 billion tonnes

• Matter is compressed so tightly that atoms collapse together

⸻

Simple takeaway:

The universe contains objects so dense that just a spoonful of their material would outweigh mountains on Earth

Science World