comparemela.com

And goats on the loose. The beautiful welsh countryside. Home to valleys, lakes, the odd feral goat and. Electric mountain. Hidden inside this mountain is the dinorwig pumped storage power station and it is basically a monster battery. It Stores Energy by pumping water from this lake to a lake at the top of the mountain and then letting it flow back downhill, releasing that energy at times of peak demand. See, when you pop the kettle on during breaks in championship matches of that sport they call football, this bad boy springs into action to supplement our National Grid, delivering power to our homes in under 12 seconds. Its an incredible view. Its one of the fastest responding power stations on the planet and well have a nosy inside the thing later in the programme. Dinorwig offers a semi Renewable Energy solution at a time when our National Resources are being used up. As solar, wind and tidal power alternatives advance, were craving a method of using their generated energy 24 7 despite the weather or time of day and this is where batteries come in. Now, this isnt your stereotypical battery. Admittedly when i say battery you probably think of the ones in these. These are rechargeable lithium ion batteries. We really cant live without these. Lithium ion batteries have truly revolutionised electronics. They power the mobile miracles that we use every day. They have a high density, meaning they can store a lot of electricity relative to their small size, so we can easily carry them around and recharge them hundreds of times. Inside cells are layers of sheets stacked together, a positive cathode, negative anode, with a separator in between filled with a liquid electrolyte. When a cell is discharged, the movement of ions from one side to the other facilitates the flow of electrons, which then generates current to power devices. During charging, this process is reversed. Whoever came up with this must have been a real genius. My name isjohn bannister goodenough and when i was at oxford when we developed the cathodes that enabled the lithium ion battery that you use in your cell telephones and laptop computers, i didnt really think about whether the battery we were developing would be a world famous invention. Ive been very pleased to see how its being developed in the hands of the engineers. It has stood the test of time with electric vehicles today relying on thousands of lithium ion cells for their battery pack modules. The dependence of modern society on fossilfuel energy is not sustainable. And so one of the things we need to do is find storage of electric power generated by alternative energy sources, and also storage batteries that can power an electric vehicle with a Competitive Price and performance. Certainly sounds like doctor goodenoughs invention has proved good enough for 37 years, but lithium ion isnt without its problems and thats led some people to look for alternate battery technologies. And this summer the uk government pledged a £250 million into the research and development of battery tech. At the forefront of this research is Warwick Manufacturing Group at the university of warwick. Lithium ion batteries do have potential hazards and if you mistreat some of the Higher Energy chemistries then yes youll see a battery fire and potentially a rupture and so on so theres tight innate chemistries, called iron phosphate chemistries, which are a safe option for using public transport so on. As a Research Centre and a cell manufacturer you can play tunes with the chemistry to basically decide whether safety is your prime goal or your prime criteria or whether performance and energy is. If you look at your periodic table, all the transition metals you see, generally somewhere in the world there is a scientist trying to make a battery out of those. Calcium batteries, aluminium batteries, lithium sulphur batteries, sodium ion, theres a range of different sodium ion batteries and so on. Theres a whole range of different chemistries being worked on, so although were working on lithium ion at the moment and were persevering with lithium ion, there will be more developments in the future as we move onto different types of chemistries. As the uks leading Automotive Battery r d centre, wmg works at the intersection between Scientific Research and industry with the likes of nissan and Jaguar Land Rover as close collaborators. Heres a module we developed and it represents about a 70 80 improvement on the tesla battery module. That improvement has come about not through changes in the chemistry but changes in the way the module has been constructed. Packing the cells tighter together while maintaining safety, improved cooling systems, etc. At the moment cost and range of new evs and the number of charging points available to us is an issue. Manufacturers like nissan even offer up a replacement diesel or petrol replacement for customers needing to drive longer distances as part of their promise scheme. As well as batteries, wmg is looking at how our charging behaviour can affect battery life too surprising results. Its made a smart algorithm that shows degradation of a car battery can be reduced by up to 10 over a year if energy is transferred back to the grid. Synonymous with evs is tesla, owner of the worlds biggest battery factory. Due to hit peak production in 2020, the gigafactory aims to produce enough batteries to power after million new electric cars every year. Tesla boss elon musks ambitions go further than revolutionising our cars, though, he wants to rewire our homes too. Enter the powerwall, the £6,000 home battery Stores Energy gathered from solar panels during the day and when the sun goes down sustainably powers your pad. Its very straightforward really, not that complicated. From tesla to ikea, there seems to be a growing trend in Companies Creating home batteries to harness solar power. So how exactly does this work . Tech enthusiastic terence has had solar panels for several years. More recently connecting them to a home battery, meaning he can use the power he generates and send excess back to the grid. The battery charged up 1. 4 kilowatt hours, which it then used throughout the day, so that saved about 15 on energy bills. Hes also using it to power his electric vehicle and thanks to the way that feed in tariffs currently work in the uk, hes being paid for the power he generates even when he uses it. But of course its early days for the technology. One of the things were going to see over time is these batteries will become cheaper, smaller and higher capacity. At the moment this battery is two kilowatt hours, which is great, but its not quite enough for everything we want to do with it. Terence is actually taking part in a Community Trial taking place in the rose hill area of oxford. While the usual costs for installation of solar panels and a moixa battery would be £5,000, here the cost of batteries is subsidised and a network has been created meaning power can be economically shared between the 82 homes, a school and a Community Centre that are taking part. My house generates more power than i can use so why not store it and sell it back to the grid . Why not give it to my neighbours when weve got surplus. In this area, where many are living in fuel poverty, the Community Element of the project seems to be appreciated too. And here at this school, theyre also treating it as a learning experience. Here in this year 6 classroom you can see the solar panels out of the window and here is the battery thats harnessing the power. Now, this power is actually being used for the lighting in this room but the whole setup also teaches the kids how this works. Swedish giant ikea are now selling home batteries too using the same premise of harnessing solar power and that providing electricity consumable by the homeowner, claiming the average uk home could up to £560 a year from their electricity bills. Meanwhile British Company powerbolt are working on giving older electric vehicle batteries a second life as home batteries. While after eight to ten years of road use a battery could start to deteriorate, it seems it could still be used in the home where demands are less strenuous, giving it an extra decade of use. After being taken from the vehicles they are checked electorally, graded, reformatted and stacked together to create Energy Storage systems for the home. Of course, as battery costs come down and capability increases, the appeal should too. So whether this idea goes mainstream most likely depends on whether the sun shines over those figures. Welcome to the week in tech. Maintaining the battery theme, it was a week when panic was caused on the London Underground when a mobile battery pack exploded and the station had to be evacuated. And Mark Zuckerberg rejected claims by President Donald Trump that facebook is biased and anti trump. Bill gates admitted that he has ditched his microsoft phone for an android handset. The United Nations has declared robots could destabilise the world and its opened a centre in the hague to monitor developments in the visual intelligence. The skies are about to get busier as autonomous passenger drones move one step closer to reality. In dubai, a test flight took place of a proposed autonomous flying taxi designed by german outfit volocopter, 18 blades power the drone with passengers selecting the destination via touchscreen. Meanwhile, a Company Called passenger drone released video of its self flying drone testing in europe. The human can also take the stick and take control of the 16 electric motors. Amazon has announced a host of new hardware this week including new versions of its digital assistant, the echo. The echo spot features a screen that can make video calls and act as a nursery camera and the echo plus can act as a smart home hub, connecting to an controlling other devices. Finally james dyson, of colourful expensive vacuum fame, has announced plans to launch an electric car. Heres hoping it doesnt suck. Back at dinorwig, im heading deeper underground. The water comes from the lake, which is about 600 metres above us, down this pipe, hits this valve and stops. This is the biggest tap you will ever see, and there are actually six of them all in a row down there. When they need the power, this yellow arm swings up, the valve opens and we get to maximum flow of water through to the turbines through there in about six seconds. When all six are open, thats 92,000 gallons per second. Or, as it says here, 1. 5 million cups of tea. Not sure if thats a earl grey or english breakfast. Do we have flow . We have flow. There it is, turbine number two spinning at about 500rpm and when all six of these turbines are all spinning, this place produces enough electricity to power the whole of wales for 5. 5 hours. Now, dinorwig runs at about 75 efficiency because it pumps its water uphill at night using cheap electricity it buys from the National Grid and charges a premium for the energy it generates during the day. If we were to move completely away from fossil fuel power stations, would that mean that this sort of power station wouldnt be able to run . In reality, if we need to pump that water up the hill we need to buy that electricity from the market somewhere, whether that is a thermal power station, a set of windmills, gas power station, whatever it might be. Why are there not more of these around . I suppose the greatest challenge is finding a suitable place in the uk to build them. Youve seen yourself that youve got to have them in a specific area, its got to have two lakes, the lakes are ideally close together, good vertical separation. Theyre not the kind of things you can easily build on the back of a wagon and wheel them in somewhere. Those lakes need to exist or you need to create them, so it comes with cost. So i think its a limited amount of options in terms of locations for such places. Does get lonely down here . Sometimes. Whilst this is powering our homes, kat hawkins has got some top tips to help power our phones. For a lot of us, we feel we cant live without our smartphones. And so when the battery dies and we dont have access to power, it can be a massive inconvenience. Now, there are things you can do to save your battery dim your brightness, turn of wi fi, gps, and any Background Apps you dont need to use. But there are a number apps out there which claim to save your battery. Do they actually work . Greenify, batter doctor and du battery saver are three of the most popular battery saving android apps. Theyve got millions of five star reviews on google play, suggesting people think they work, so we thought they made a good testing ground. They claim to do a number of things, from dimming your brightness, to hibernating or optimising your apps, or reducing your data being used. So to start off, this team took a brand spanking new Samsung Galaxy j3, and hot wired it. The voltage, the current, and the power. So if we turn the phone on, from idle, we can see that the current to the phone, the power to the phone increases so if we do which is power hungry, like take a photo with the flash on, you see the power spikes massively. Then they tested the phone baseline, with no battery saver app installed, and using a small number of apps over a ten minute period. Then they did the same thing with the battery savers installed, as well as the in built Battery Power saver, which comes installed on the phone. So we can see that the power savers do seem to work. They make a small difference for battery doctor and du battery saver about two or three hours, by the looks of things. And then greenify actually makes a difference of about four hours. When you think this one is doing better . We think that is because it is the way the apps work. So du battery saver and battery doctor, they offer you an option to optimise the performance of your apps, so we suspect they are reducing frequency at which applications access mobile data, making them run less in the background, when you put your phone into idle. But interestingly, the most efficient seems to be the android power saver, the one that comes on the phone when you get it from the factory. But this is currently a limited test of ten minutes, and all conducted on the wi fi. What needs to happen now is a bigger test of hours at a time, using apps that stream videos, play games, or use gps. The team here has not yet determined whether the apps do everything they say they do, but do think you can do many of the features yourself, if youre organise enough. But most want to use their phones hassle free, so the apps help with the underlying management. But there are other things that you should do if you want your battery to have a long life. If you plug your phone and when you go to bed, and its charged after a couple of hours, that time at 100 charge, overnight, will significantly accelerate the degradation of the battery. Even better for your phone batterys life, max says, is to keep your phone charged between 20 and 80 at all times. So remember, thats 20 80. Thank you kat. But wouldnt it be nice to get to that 80 much faster . Cue a very different battery technology, that can be charged really quickly. See, these things can deliver a lot of power very quickly. And so they would be much more useful for something that has to do a lot all at once. Something like this. Instead of the electrochemical charging in normal batteries, this charges by electrostatic means. It is called a super capacitor. No Chemical Reaction means you can charge very quickly. This drill battery, for example, goes from zero to full in 12 seconds. You can zap and go which sounds a pretty good name for a company, if you ask me. We use carbon nano materials, which are extremely fine particles at the nano level, and a large surface area is greeted inside one at the nano level, and a large surface area is created inside one of these pouches, that attracts energy very quickly. The more surface, the more energy you can attract. The downside of Super Capacitors is that they cant store as much as lithium ion, so you wouldnt want one in your phone. They are best suited for things that need quick charging and big short bursts of power, like tools and toys, such as the scooter. Now, the lead acid batteries in a normal electric scooter, like those ones, will give you about half an hours ride time, but theyll take six hours to charge. This battery gives you six minutes of charge, but only takes six minutes to charge. And the next generation will give you 12 minutes of ride time, but still only take six minutes to charge. But with that sort of ride time, its unlikely that your electric car will run on this technology alone. We are aiming to the automotive sector, possibly as a hybrid combination with lithium. So we do the fast charge bit, and the lithium does the Long Distance bit. Itll take the charge at the road side, and we will transfer from zap and go cells to lithium, the power that we are harvesting quickly, during the journey. To that end, zapgo is leading to charge airport pods like those at heathrow. However, my six minutes of ride time are up, so for the moment, i have to leave and zip off by car. Back in texas, the father of the lithium ion battery, dr goodenough, shows no signs of slowing down. Hes working on a new type of battery, with a surprising chemical make up an all glass solid state battery. A lady by the name of helena braga brought to me a glass which was a remarkable material. I think weve come up with a cell which will really do the trick. Together with his colleague, dr braga, goodenough claims the new, non flammable battery will last longer and recharge quicker. Its a very competitive field. And i im am a competitor. So im hoping that the new glass that weve done will enable us to go from liquid electrolyte to a solid electrolyte. It will make things safe as well as cheap. Lengthening the life span of batteries is obviously one of the main aims of researchers worldwide, which could be why a team at Bristol University say theyve developed a new type that could last thousands of years. Theyve created a man made diamond that, when pressed inside a radioactive field, generates a small amount of current. Whilst the radiation it gives off is less than a banana, there are no moving parts involved, and no maintenance required just direct electricity generation. As well as making use of nuclear waste, their invention could theoretically power devices in places that people cant go. But whilst this could be years away, something hoping to charge onto shelves sooner is the prieto battery. The battery has a different architecture to the Standard Lithium ion battery. It has a 3 d spongelike material which is covered with a cathode slurry. Its non toxic, explosion proof, and promises to store more power. My ultimate dream was to make a really outstanding battery that would ideally allow device designers to be be more ambitious, but also solve problems in terms of Renewable Energy, being able to store intermittent types of energy, like solar and wind. There are other concepts out there, too, such as microbialfuel cells, that use anything from saliva to urine materials to drive electricity production. But at the end of the day, the batteries were so passionate about using still rely on finite Raw Materials taken from mother nature, and not enough are considered valuable enough to be recycled. Which is why it wmg is working to extend its car batteries, but also work out a system to give them a happy retirement, too. Until then, i guess the best we can do is try and make sure the fuel that we use does not have a Lasting Impact on our environment. Well, thats it from the dinorwig power station in wales. What a pleasure it has been to visit such an unusual place. Dont forget we live on facebook and twitter. Feel free to get in touch any time that is if you have enough battery. See you. Good morning. The farmers may well have ploughed fields but that hasnt stopped our weather watchers from posting photos of the harvest moon. It has clouded over. Not quite a full moon. 98 . We will see the full moon tonight. The time being, the cloud has arrived and we will see strong winds and rain but the next few hours and then that eases away through the south east corner. It would be a damp old start first thing thursday morning. If you are travelling to work there will be outbreaks of rain and still pretty blustery. Behind it, quite a clearance and some decent spells of sunshine to look forward to. Not a bad start through northern england, Northern Ireland and scotland. Scattering of showers to the north and west but they should be isolated. Into the afternoon, we continue with the risk of a few showers and maybe one or two showers driven along by the north westerly breeze to the north midlands. It should be dry with spells of sunshine. The winds lighter and we will see highs likely at 11 to 17 degrees. 63 in terms of fahrenheit. With the clearer skies by day, it will lead into clear skies by night. For the football, it could turn chilly and that is worth bearing in mind if you are going to watch the international matches. The reason for the chilly feel, High Pressure is set to build from the west. Quieten things down quite nicely but it means a chilly start to our friday morning before more wet and windy weather arrives at the start of the weekend. Friday morning first thing, we could see a touch of light frost and that is certainly worth bearing in mind if you are a gardener or a grower. Despite the chilly start, there will be lovely spells of sunshine coming through. Temperatures will recover. 916. By the end of the day, more cloud into the western scotland and Northern Ireland. A cloudy weekend ahead for many of us. There will be rain around and particularly into the north and west. The best of the bright spells into the east. Saturday looks likely to be the most unsettled day. After a misty, murky start, the showers will be light and by sunday, things will be that little bit quieter and any showers will be chiefly out to the north and west. Highs again ii i7. Enjoy. Welcome to bbc news, broadcasting to viewers in north america and around the globe. My name is mike embley. Our top stories the girlfriend of the las vegas gunman tells the fbi and her lawyer she had no idea what her kind, caring, quiet partner was planning. He never said anything to me or took any action that i was aware of that i understood in any way to be a warning. Police have said its unlikely Stephen Paddock acted alone and it appears he intended to survive. Spains political crisis deepens. Catalonias leader accuses the king of siding with the government and ignoring millions of catalans. And political speech or pantomime . Theresa mays keynote address to the conservative Party Conference suffers a series of bizarre setbacks. Boris, job done there, given her the p45

© 2025 Vimarsana

comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.