It is that time of a year again when all the everyone is recapping the past year with the best, worst, least, and most. We’ve thought about a good criterion on which to make a selection of the most important news of the year and decided to leave this decision to our readers. Below, we present to you ten of the most popular energy news articles of 2013.
10. Biofuel or Fertilizer: Why Not Both?
A team of scientists at the Technical University of Denmark, Chemical Engineering Department is researching a way to use agricultural biomass as fertilizer and as a renewable energy source simultaneously. The idea is to process the straw through a thermal gasification facility linked to a coal-fired power plant instead of spreading it directly onto the fields.
9. Piezoelectric Material Plugs Leaks in Transistors, Saves Energy
Tom van Hemert and Ray Hueting of the University of Twente’s MESA+ Institute for Nanotechnology have found a way to “plug” leakage current in transistors by “squeezing” the transistor with a piezoelectric material. This cuts the unnecessary energy losses, potentially increasing the battery life of portable electronic devices.
8. Additive Manufacturing Can Save Aircraft Makers Energy
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) are printing airplane parts to show additive manufacturing’s potential as a technology that should be considered foundational to processes seeking more energy efficiency.
7. World’s Largest Offshore Wind Turbine Installed in Belgium
Alstom, a French multinational power company, completed the installation of its new-generation offshore wind turbine, the 6-MW Haliade 150, off Ostend harbor at the Belwind site in Belgium. This is the world’s largest offshore wind turbine ever installed.
6. Unstable Ceria Can Convert Solar Energy Into Hydrogen
A team of scientists at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) has successfully increased the reactivity of the ceramic material—ceria—a million fold. One possible application is solar concentrators used to convert solar energy into hydrogen.
5. Scientists Use Cyborg Plants to Harvest Solar Energy
Researchers at the University of Georgia are developing a technology that makes it possible to use plants to generate electricity. They developed a way to interrupt photosynthesis and capture the electrons before the plant uses them to make these sugars.
4. Cloud Computing Can Save Enough Energy to Power Los Angeles for a Year
A six-month study led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) with financial support from Google has found that moving common software applications used by 86 million U.S. workers to the cloud could save enough energy annually to power Los Angeles for a year.
3. China to Become World’s Largest Oil Importer This Year
EIA’s August 2013 Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) forecasted that China’s net oil imports will exceed those of the United States by 2014 on an annual basis, making China the world’s largest oil importer.
2. Rooftop PV Panels Can Turn Suburbs into Power Providers, Research Shows
Researchers at the University of Lincoln (UK) think that a city’s suburbs could hold the solution to dwindling fuel supplies by producing enough energy to power residents’ cars and even top up power resources.
1. A Method That Uses Bacteria to Produce Pure Diesel Developed
A group of scientists from the University of Exeter, with support from Shell, has developed a new technique which makes use of bacteria to produce diesel fuel. While this new method still faces a number of problems on its way to commercialization, the diesel, produced by special strains of E. coli bacteria, is almost identical to conventional diesel fuel.