I believe that there is a better way of creating electricity. Burning gas and coal to heat fluids to heat water to turn turbines is a stupid way to do this.
Many leaders have promised us that one day they would make the people of the world stand together on world issues. However since leaders have a taste for war, this promise has been empty. So why not show that it's possible, by doing it ourselves?
"It's just an evolution," not an agro-industrial revolution, he says, a natural progression from fields to greenhouses, then from greenhouses to vertical farms.
With his system, a 50 square-metre space (540 square feet) can be transformed into 500 square metres of usable "land". And the plants grow two to three times faster than outdoors, further increasing yields.
In the Urban Crops laboratory, up to 220 mature lettuce plants are produced each day in a 30-square-metre room using just five percent of the water required in traditional agriculture.
The thermal material, comprising of nanoscale layers of hafnium oxide and tungsten, was used to suppress the emission of one part of the spectrum while improving emission in another.
They have been used mainly to manipulate coherent light, as in a laser, but the ability to manipulate infrared thermal radiation at 1,000 C opens up new areas of research,"
Electrons in the semiconductor occupy a region of energy called the valence band while the material is in the dark. But shining light on the material causes the electrons to absorb energy, elevating them into a region of higher energy called the conduction band. As the electrons move to the conduction band, they leave behind "holes" in the valance band. The region between both bands, where no electrons exist, is called the band gap.
"If you have energy below the band gap, that is generally wasted," Jacob said. "So what you want to do for high-efficiency thermal energy conversion is suppress the thermal emission below the band gap and enhance it above the band gap, and this is what we have done. We have used the topological transition in a way that was not done before for thermal enhancement and suppression, enhancing the high-energy part of the emission spectrum and suppressing the low-energy thermal photons. This allows us to emit light only within the energy spectrum above the band gap."
But the production of cement, which when mixed with water forms the binding agent in concrete, is also one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, about 5 percent of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from concrete [production].
An even larger source of carbon dioxide emissions is flue gas emitted from smokestacks at power plants around the world. Carbon emissions from those plants are the largest source of harmful global greenhouse gas in the world.
A team of interdisciplinary researchers at UCLA has been working on a unique solution that may help eliminate these sources of greenhouse gases. Their plan would be to create a closed-loop process: capturing carbon from power plant smokestacks and using it to create a new building material — CO2NCRETE — that would be fabricated using 3D printers. That’s “upcycling.”
Biochar is charcoal used as a soil amendment.
The burning and natural decomposition of biomass and in particular agricultural waste adds large amounts of CO
2 to the atmosphere. Biochar that is stable, fixed, and 'recalcitrant' carbon can store large amounts of greenhouse gases in the ground for centuries, potentially reducing or stalling the growth in atmospheric greenhouse gas levels; at the same time its presence in the earth can improve water quality, increase soil fertility, raise agricultural productivity, and reduce pressure on old-growth forests.[