Today the board has five members:

• Patrick O’Farell (Advisory Board Member)
• Ashley Reyes (CMO and Business Development Manager for LATAM)
• Adrian Melendez (COS since 2019 and HR Director for LATAM)
• Michael LECLERC (Advisory Board Member)
• Thomas Madjour (Advisory Board Member)

Read more about our board members below.

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The technology was created by a team of eBay interns led by Muratcan Cicek, a software engineer and PhD student who uses assistive technology as an aid for his motor impairment disability. In that sense, HeadGaze — and the shopping app Cicek created, called HeadSwipe — could be a very useful piece of technology for people with disabilities who are looking for a more accessible way to use mobile devices.

“In addition to this head gazing experience, we’re exploring an experience that tracks eye movements,” Cicek writes in a blog post about HeadGaze. “The fusion of these gazing experiences open up a broader possibility on defining various hands-free gestures, enabling much more interesting applications.” Given its utility to those with disabilities, eBay has decided to release both HeadGaze and HeadSwipe as an open-source project on GitHub so that other app makers can implement Cicek’s technology into their own products.

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Of course, it’ll have to hit its Kickstarter goal first. Eduardo Umaña, the designer of the FrankOne, explained that he encountered the idea one day when chatting with a Colombian roaster.

“He was making coffee then by using the ‘reverse french press’ method and I thought I could improve on that,” Umaña told me in an email. “Some time after, I got very curious to test what high vacuum brewed coffee would taste like. I did some simple experiments and was very surprised by the rich and sweet flavor. One thing led to another and I ended up designing a new product.”

The FrankOne is closest in operation to the big glass vacuum drippers you might have seen in fancy coffee shops. This interesting and quite old method uses the gas pressure created by the boiling action to force the water upwards through a tube into the grounds, and then as it cools, the brewed coffee is pulled back down through a filter by the changes in air pressure. The siphons you’ve seen are elegant but not exactly convenient.

“They implement a similar principle in a very different way,” Umaña said. His device doesn’t require this dance of hot and cool; you put the cylindrical device, about the size of “a big burger,” on the included carafe and add the ground coffee. Pour in the hot water, put the lid on and wait a bit for the oils and such to extract. Then hit the button on top and let it do its thing.

A pump extracts air from the carafe, drawing the coffee down through the metal filter. In a minute or so the process is done, leaving what Umaña says is the bitter crema up in the grounds. The result is a sweet and clear cup of coffee. Its taste (I haven’t tried) is likely closest to AeroPress, as opposed to drip, due to the active force pushing (pulling, actually) the water through the grounds.

The device will accept various grinds and amounts of coffee, producing a different cup — not a possibility with French press and not advised with pourover or espresso. And it’s definitely a lot smaller than an AeroPress.

It does run on a battery, but with 150 cups per charge, you probably won’t have to worry much about it. And there’s no bait and switch with custom filters or something — you just wash the thing and it’s ready to go again.

Incidentally, I had to double-check with Umaña that no one from Colombia had gone on to create a coffee maker. The industry is so old and so important there that it seemed impossible.

“Unbelievable, right?” he wrote. “It was also very meaningful to me as Colombian to work on the first Colombian designed coffee brewer. Perhaps through this project we can bring some much needed economic development to the country by innovating in coffee; it grows right in our backyard and we can do so much more than we are currently doing!”

Umaña and his company, Frank de Paula (after the second president of Colombia, who started the coffee export business there in the 19th century), are looking for $120,000 to finance the device. At $50 for the early birds it’s likely a steal, at least if you’re a coffee brewing fiend like me — I collect stuff like this. Everyone needs a hobby, right? It’ll cost a bill when it comes out in retail, so if you like the idea, save yourself a couple bucks and support good design with a pledge.

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The wind farm has a capacity of 659 megawatts (MW), enough to power almost 600,000 homes, and overtakes the London Array off England’s east coast which has a capacity of 630 MW.

Walney Extension is made up of 87 turbines built by Siemens Gamesa and MHI Vestas, and covers 145 square kilometers (55 square miles), which is equivalent to around 20,000 football pitches.

The 40 eight-megawatt MHI Vestas turbines being used stand 195 meters (213 yards) tall and are the largest wind turbines in operation globally.

(Graphic: World’s largest wind turbine – reut.rs/2PAmS7w)

Orsted said they have been optimized to generate as much as 8.25 MW each.

Matthew Wright, Orsted UK managing director, told Reuters in an interview Britain’s offshore success was due to a combination of strong wind speeds and shallow waters in the North Sea and Irish Sea as well as continued support from the government.

“For the last 10 years governments of all colors have supported renewable energy and offshore wind in the UK, leading to a thriving industry,” he said.

Britain is the world’s largest offshore wind market, hosting 36 percent of globally installed offshore wind capacity, data from the Global Wind Energy Council showed.

Walney Extension was among the first renewable projects to secure a so-called contract for difference (CFD) subsidy from the British government in 2014.

The contract guarantees it a minimum price for electricity of 150 pounds ($195) per megawatt hour (MWh) for 15 years.

Since this was awarded, the cost of offshore wind has fallen dramatically to a low of 57.50 pounds per MWh in the last auction held in 2017.

Blades for both sets of turbines were made at British factories, in Hull and the Isle of Wight, and Wright said the company was keen to use local facilities.

“Approximately 50 percent of the value of the project over its lifetime will have come from UK sources,” he said.

Walney Extension is a shared-ownership project between Orsted (50 percent) and two Danish pension funds – PFA and PKA (25 percent each)

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However, it’s not just a hotspot for newlyweds or keen surfers either, the popular travel destination has also set its sights on saving the world, via its advances with renewable energy. Back in 2015 it managed to generate 100 per cent of its electricity from renewable energy sources for 299 days, and in 2016, it ran for 271 days on everything but fossil fuels.

Now, it appears that Costa Rica has done it again. The small country has purportedly run for a whopping 300 days solely on a mixture of hydro, geothermal, wind, biomass and solar energy.

Credit: Getty

For a small, developing country, Costa Rica is really putting the world’s powerhouses to shame with its commitment to clean energy.

According to a recent report from the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity, the nation has just bested its 2015 achievement and has run for 300 days solely on renewable energy sources. And with just six weeks of 2017 left to go, it looks like that number is only going to increase.

Executive president of the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity, Carlos Manuel Obregón, explained that they were able to reach this impressive feat through improvements to the grid and upgrading clean energy power plants. And it comes at a good time too; the record goes hand-in-hand with the Costa Rican government’s plan to be carbon neutral by the year 2021, a deadline which was set up over a decade ago.

However, we can’t get too carried away by this news. As Costa Rica is a small country, it’s much easier for it achieve these lofty goals, than say, countries like China and the USA, which are larger in size. And furthermore, it’s aided by its natural resources, namely hydropower and geothermal sources, which many western nations don’t have access to.

It’s also worthwhile to note that Costa Rica was one of the few countries which had the prescience to refrain from investing in fossil fuels in the first place.

Ultimately, while it would a great accomplishment if Costa Rica was to go completely fossil free, on a broader level, the impact would be rather insignificant. For example, the country currently produced 1,2141 times less greenhouse gases than China, making its contribution to fighting global warming relatively paltry.

What Costa Rica does prove, however, is that going coal free isn’t as impossible as other, more developed nations seem to believe. And their example just goes to show that clean energy works as well as the energy derived from fossil fuels.

In any case, they certainly deserve all the praise that they have been recieveing.

Source: http://vt.co

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Testing of what CSIRO called “ultrapure” hydrogen commenced in Pullenvale, Brisbane with the CEO of CSIRO, Larry Marshall taking a ride himself in the fuel cell vehicles supplied by Toyota and Hyundai.

CSIRO says their method allows to store and transport hydrogen more safely and effictively. Ammonia holds about twice as much energy than liquid hydrogen and is easier to ship and distribute.

In order to make it workable, CSIRO developed a novel membrane to extract hydrogen out of ammonia. The principal researcher Michael Dolan explained the process to Renew Economy as follows: “We are effectively undoing the Haber-Bosch process [which has traditionally been used to transform hydrogen into ammonia], starting with hydrogen from a source, where you take nitrogen out of the air and make ammonia, which we think helps transport hydrogen over long distances and long time scales.”

Dolan added that it is a chemical process but one that can be fuelled by renewable electricity so it is considered a low-emissions process to generate hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles.

The project of Australia was supported by BOC that belongs to The Linde Group. They contributed over $100,000 in-kind gas products and equipment as well as technical expertise to the $3.4 million project.

CSIRO is now looking to apply their hydrogen storage solutions in real life.

While the firm claims their solution to be the first of its kind, British researchers had taken a similar approach in 2014. The scientists from the ISIS Neutron Source facility in Oxfordshire managed to extract hydrogen from ammonia with the help of sodium reportedly.

A more recent attempt at an ecological solution to power fuel cell vehicles took place at the TU Eindhoven last year. The team FAST used formic acid also known as ant secretion. It was made from CO2 and hydrogen, both from renewable sources. Hydrozine the students call their invention that could prove revolutionary given that synthetic formic acid is usually made from petrol. FAST hopes to get a first production facility together with Volta Chem.

Source: https://www.electrive.com

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We’re constantly hearing that battery-electric cars are the future, so I was surprised to see that companies like Toyota, Honda and Hyundai are making hydrogen fuel-cell cars. Which technology is better? Could hydrogen still win? – Pete, Kingston

The next-generation Fuel Cell Vehicle from Hyundai.

“It’s not really a competition – they’ll both co-exist and there will also be plug-in hydrogen hybrids,” said Walter Merida, director of the Clean Energy Research Centre at the University of British Columbia. “Battery-electric vehicles [BEVs] are better for an urban environment where you have time to recharge and fuel-cell electric vehicles [FCEVs] are better-suited for long range and heavy duty.”

Last year, there were 9,840 BEVs sold in Canada, up from 5,130 the year before. If you include plug-in hybrids, the number sold in 2017 grows to 18,560.

And how many hydrogen vehicles were sold in Canada last year?

None – although Hyundai leased out about a half-dozen hydrogen Tucsons in British Columbia for $599 a month, which included fuel from Powertech labs in Surrey.

In January, Toyota announced it will be selling the Mirai in Quebec later this year. And Hyundai said it will offer about 25 Nexos for sale.

“It’s chicken or egg,” said Michael Fowler, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Waterloo. “Car manufacturers won’t release cars into the market unless there’s a refuelling station and companies won’t build a refuelling station unless there are cars to fuel.”

Right now, there are no retail hydrogen refuelling stations in Canada. While there are plans under way to add stations in B.C., Ontario and Quebec, we’re still behind Japan, Europe and California.

“In 2007, Ontario had a hydrogen strategy and they were starting to develop hydrogen vehicles and they dropped that in favour of the Green Energy Act and it was a complete disaster,” Fowler said. “The reality is the government of the day listened to the wrong people.”

It’s tough to pinpoint a single reason why governments focused on building charging stations instead of hydrogen stations, Merida said.

“It’s ironic, you know – the fuel cell was invented in Vancouver. Geoffrey Ballard was one of the pioneers of this technology,” Merida said. “And for a while, Canada was a global leader, but eventually government programs were discontinued and that was very disruptive to the sector.”

HYDROGEN FOR THE MASSES?

While we tend to think of BEVs when we think of electric cars, fuel-cell vehicles are electric, too; the hydrogen passes through a fuel cell stack, where it mixes with oxygen from the atmosphere to produce an electric current.

That current powers electric motors to drive the wheels and extra energy goes to a battery pack that’s used to boost acceleration (it’s also charged by regenerative braking).

Except for water that drips out of the hydrogen car, they’re both zero-emission on the road.

But a big advantage for hydrogen is that, if you can find a station, you can pull up to a pump and fill up in five minutes or less – the same way we do now at nearly 12,000 gas stations.

Compare that with fast-charging stations that can charge a battery to 80 per cent in 30 minutes – each station only handles one car at a time. What if you get there and it’s busy – or broken? And right now, there are only 139 of them in Canada.

And at slower, Level 2 stations, cars have to be plugged in for hours to recharge.

In a 2018 KPMG survey of auto executives, 55 per cent said that moves to switch entirely to pure battery-electric vehicles will fail because there won’t be enough charging stations.

“Ontario just invested $20-million in public charging stations and that’s going to service 100 or 200 cars a day,” Fowler said. “If you were to invest that in hydrogen stations, you’d be able to service thousands of cars a day.”

And when you do charge at a station, you might not be using clean power, Fowler said.

“At least in Ontario, in order to charge at a public station during the day, you have to rev up a natural-gas plant somewhere,” Fowler said. “So the only way you’re getting zero emissions is when you can charge at night using excess nuclear, hydro or wind that’s not being used.”

But hydrogen can be made when surplus green energy is stored, Fowler said.

“In Ontario, we have lots of wind in the spring and the fall, when we don’t need the electricity,” he said.

And eventually, you’ll be able to connect your fuel-cell vehicle to the grid and sell the power it produces, Merida said.

“The amount of power generation you have in these moving platforms is quite significant,” Merida said.

There are other strikes against battery-electric, including reduced range by 30 per cent or more in the winter and the need to upgrade infrastructure such as electrical transformers so they can handle more than just a handful of cars on each street charging at night, Fowler said.

In that KPMG survey, executives predicted a nearly equal split between BEVs, FCEVs, hybrids and gasoline engines by 2040.

“Battery-electric vehicles will serve a certain niche – they’ll be small commuter vehicles in certain cities,” Fowler said. “But for the way we use cars today – the family car, the suburban car, buses and probably trucks – it will be the fuel cell.”

Full Article

Source: https://www.theglobeandmail.com

Featured Image credits: https://www.mckinsey.com

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The company is looking to achieve a 500-mile driving range and charging times as low as one minute.

Full Article

Source: http://www.electronicdesign.com

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2018 is also the year that Mexico’s market for clean energy certificates (CECs) comes on line: a key plank in the country’s transformative and highly ambitious law on renewable energy. Published in 2012, the law confirmed Mexico’s intention of increasing the amount of electricity generated from clean energy sources, including nuclear energy, to 35 percent by 2024 and to 50 percent by 2050.

To put that in context, the 2018 target required Mexico to build, in three years, the total wind farm capacity that Canada took 23 years to develop. Meeting even half the 2018 target requires the equivalent of the entire Danish fleet of wind turbines.

Image credit: Eka

To meet its goals, Mexico introduced a system of auctions for energy, capacity and CECs that offer long-term contracts — and consequent stability — for foreign and domestic investors: 15 years in the case of energy and capacity; 20 years for CECs. Notably, the auction system was designed to capture relative values of different generation technologies by both location and production profile. Projects in higher-price areas of the country or that deliver power at peak times can secure higher revenues and more investment through the auctions.

This differentiated auction system is described by the IEA as “one of the most sophisticated procurement mechanisms for renewable energy…” whose reach and scope “represent the most ambitious energy system transformation worldwide in recent years.” Indeed, the IEA considers Mexico’s electricity market reform as “one of the most ambitious, comprehensive and well-developed reforms undertaken in the world since the 1990s.”

Mexico is also notable for the specific generation share allocated to both wind (at 23 percent) and solar power (at 13 percent), although the country is committed to subsidy-free competition between these technologies. Analysts predict that the Mexican market will add around 15 GW of additional solar PV by 2022, easily placing it in the top 10 markets worldwide.

But have the Mexican reforms had any wider impact?  Certainly, the country’s success, its ambitious clean energy targets, fiscal incentives, and legislative stance have placed it among the world leaders in integrating climate change objectives into policy making.

It has inspired other countries in Latin America to adopt similar benchmarks in their own efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Countries like Argentina have followed the Mexican example in establishing its own clean energy requirements and revamping sections of its electricity market structures. Along with Chile, both countries are now featured among the top performers in the Ernst & Young renewable energy country attractiveness index.

The pattern of Mexico renewable auctions has also been replicated elsewhere. On the basis of the two first tenders, held in 2016, the auction system has provided an additional boost to both solar and wind energy, at very competitive international prices. Those competitive prices reflect the substantial resources available to Mexico, as home to some of the best solar irradiation in the world, as well as relatively low utility system costs.

But they also represent technological advances that have dramatically improved conversion efficiency of solar panels, as well as wind-farm capacity factors, around the world. In this Mexico is far from unique. Falling prices for solar and wind power also led to new power deals in Denmark, Egypt, India, and the United Arab Emirates, all of which were priced well below both fossil fuel and nuclear alternatives.

More recently, Mexico’s latest auction saw the world’s lowest average price for solar in a regulated auction. That inevitably means exceptionally tight margins for developers. What’s more, natural gas may push prices lower on the open market, depending on how much domestic natural gas or imported gas from the U.S. is in the system. Mexico has already attracted 44 foreign direct investment (FDI) projects worth $13.5 billion from the U.S., Germany and Spain: whether it will continue to be so attractive to private investors and developers remains to be seen.

Mexican law has certainly provided a template for others, and inspired other nations to follow suit. It has demonstrated how thoughtful legislation and liberalization can stimulate the market, and reduces dependence on established fossil fuels.

On the other hand, Mexico has benefitted from a unique geographic and cultural position: able to tap into generation trades and fuel exchanges with its powerful northern neighbor, while maintaining strong ties to its southern partners and their still growing economies. By bringing its extraordinary renewable resources to the open market, it has made at least some contribution to falling prices overall.

Those resources have also enabled it to move away from more conventional renewables like hydro, that have fallen from popularity in large part due to irregular rainfall and environmental concerns around the development of new dams. Less blessed nations may not necessarily be able to follow suit, and so the extent to which the Mexico model can be duplicated is unclear.

But these distinctions apart, what this overview of Mexico’s recent history shows is that the country represents the global industry in microcosm. Liberalized markets mean risks as well as opportunities. They require informed choices, on which everything from the weather to geopolitics and trade tariffs have an impact. They mean moving away from procurement to trading models when making purchasing decisions.

And just as Mexico has created a market template that could be exported elsewhere, it may be that Mexico in turn imports the lessons and the tools of risk management along with its FDIs.

Full article`

Source: https://www.renewableenergyworld.com

Featured image credits: https://www.pv-magazine.com

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