Digital-savvy, eco-conscious drivers targeted at Tokyo Motor Show

  Toyota's three-seater exoskeleton car and an electric vehicle with touch screens that turn it into a "digital space" are among the concept models that will be on display at the Tokyo Motor Show this week.

  The biennial event will also focus on self-driving cars and the latest environmental technology as firms look to tap growing demand for green vehicles, seen as the next evolution in the global automotive industry.

  "This year, autonomous driving will be a big trend, with the Japanese automakers really showing what they are trying to do and trying to show that they can match, if not do better, than what Silicon Valley is up to," said Hans Greimel, Asia editor for the Automotive News.

  The show's 44th edition, which kicks off Wednesday and runs until November 8, will feature 160 exhibitors including global auto giants and parts suppliers from a dozen countries.

 It starts a week after Honda said it would put a commercialised self-driving car on the road by 2020, challenging rivals Toyota and Nissan, which are also betting on the future of vehicles that can drive and, in some case, park themselves.

  Google has been testing self-driving cars in Silicon Valley, as have US-based Tesla and General Motors, while Nissan has vowed to put an experimental automated car on Japan's highways as soon as 2016.

  At the show, Nissan, a leader in electric vehicles (EV), will show off an EV concept car without knobs and buttons, replaced by tablet-style touch screens featuring controls and maps on a white instrument panel.

  Music, videogames and movies can also be played on the screens.

  "The car becomes a digital space when it's parked," said Nissan product planning general manager Hidemi Sasaki.

"You can use it as a gaming room, movie theatre...or you can chat online with your friends."

  Toyota's Kikai vehicle conjures images of the Terminator films with some of a usually hidden underbelly—including fuel tank and hoses—exposed, giving an inside look at the car's machinery.

  The automaker said its concept car shows off "the fundamental appeal of machines: their fine craftsmanship, their beauty, simplicity, and their fascinating motion".

Fuel-cell future

  Toyota and Honda will also exhibit their latest fuel-cell offerings, after Toyota last year started selling the world's first mass market fuel-cell car in Japan.

  Toyota is hoping to sell tens of thousands of the four-door Mirai—which is powered by hydrogen and emits nothing but water vapour from its tailpipe—over the next decade, as it looks to stop producing fossil-fuel based cars altogether by 2050.

  Honda's rival fuel-cell features a cruising range of more than 700 kilometres (430 miles), and generates electricity that could help supply power to a local community in an emergency situation, it said.

  Toyota's FCV Plus similarly functions as a power source for homes and communities as the auto giant aims to turn fuel cell vehicles from "eco-cars into energy-cars", it said.

  The firm's hybrid gasoline-electric offerings, including the Prius, have sold more than eight million units since their launch in 1997.

  But a limited driving range and lack of refuelling stations have hampered development of fuel-cell and all-electric cars, which environmentalists say could play a vital role in cutting greenhouse gas emissions and slowing global warming.

  Again this year, most US-based automakers, which have not attended the Tokyo Motor Show since before the global financial crisis, are staying away, a reflection of their puny presence in the Japanese market.

  Foreign carmakers have long complained that they were effectively shut out of Japan through tariffs and other barriers, although luxury brands tend to enjoy success in the world's number three auto market after China and the United States.

  Among the overseas automakers attending are BMW, Peugeot Citroen, Porsche, Jaguar and crisis-hit Volkswagen, which is embroiled in one of the biggest scandals in the history of the automobile sector.

  The German auto giant has admitted it had fitted 11 million of its vehicles with software designed to cheat official checks.

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Morocco launches solar mega-project at Ouarzazate

  Morocco on Friday officially launched the construction of a 160-megawatt solar power plant near the desert city of Ouarzazate, the first in a series of vast solar projects planned in the country.

  The largest of its kind in the world, according to Mustapha Bakkoury, the head of Morocco's solar energy agency MASEN, the thermo-solar plant will cost 7 billion dirhams (630 million euros) and is slated for completion in 2015, the official MAP news agency reported.

  The ambitious project "reinforces the will... to optimise the exploitation of Morocco's natural resources, to preserve its environment... and sustain its development," Bakkoury said at the ceremony which was attended by King Mohammed VI.

  A consortium led by Saudi developer ACWA Power won the contract to build the plant, near Morocco's desert gateway city, last September.

  The World Bank, the African Development Bank and the European Investment Bank are helping to finance the solar complex.

  It is the first of a two-phase project, due for completion in 2020, that is expected to cover 3,000 hectares and have a generation capacity of 500 megawatts, enough to met the electricity needs of Ouarzazate's 1.5 million residents.

  MASEN's Bakkoury said in March that companies bidding for the second phase of the project had to submit their proposals by mid-April, with the contract to be awarded sometime next year.

  The North African country is aiming to become a world-class renewable energy producer, and is eyeing the chance to export clean electricity to neighbouring Europe.

  Morocco expects to build five new solar plants by the end of the decade with a combined production capacity of 2,000 megawatts and at an estimated cost of nine billion dollars (6.9 billion euros).

  The kingdom has no oil and gas reserves to speak of and is hoping, with the solar projects, along with a string of planned wind farms along its Atlantic coast, to raise renewable energy production to 42 percent of its total power supply mix by 2020.

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Kuwait signs $385 mn solar energy project

  

  Kuwait signed a contract worth 116 million dinars ($385 million) with Spain's TSK Group on Thursday for a 50 megawatt solar energy project as part of its renewable energy drive.

  The oil-rich Gulf state has a multi-billion-dollar plan to meet 15 percent of power demand from renewables by 2030.

  Electricity and Water Minister Ahmad al-Jassar told reporters the target is to produce 4,500 megawatts from solar and wind energy by 2030 when demand is expected to rise to 30,000 megawatts from the current 12,000 megawatts.

  The latest project is due to start production in December 2017, said Salem al-Hajraf, head of energy research at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research.

  Two smaller projects of 10 megawatts each, which were signed earlier, are expected to come onstream in May and July next year, Hajraf said.

  The first three projects have been funded by the government but future ones will be awarded to the private sector as Build-Operate-Transfer schemes, he said.

  Production is expected to reach at least 2,000 megawatts by 2025, Hajraf said, adding that more projects will be offered rapidly afterwards to meet the target.

 The pioneer project will be built on a 100-square-kilometre (39-square-mile) area in Shagaya, a desert zone 100 kilometres (60 miles) west of Kuwait City, near the borders with Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

  When complete, the project will meet the electricity demand of 100,000 homes and save about 12.5 million barrels of oil equivalent per year, Hajraf said.

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New nanoscale solar cells could revolutionize solar industry

  University of Maryland Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Assistant Professor Jeremy Munday and graduate students Yunlu Xu and Tao Gong have designed a new type of nanoscale solar cell that they predict could outperform traditional devices by as much as 40 percent. This new technology could revolutionize the solar industry by allowing for significantly more power generation from a single device by simply making it much smaller.

  Xu, Gong, and Munday had their research on the Shockley-Queisser limit for nanostructured solar cells published in Scientific Reports, an online, open access journal from the publishers of Nature. The journal publishes scientifically valid primary research from all areas of the natural and clinical sciences.

  The Shockley-Queisser limit describes the maximum solar energy conversion efficiency achievable for a particular material and is the standard of comparison for new photovoltaic technologies. For a standard solar cell, this efficiency limit is ~33 percent. However, recently people have wondered if nanoscale solar cells are also bounded by this limit.

  Now Xu, Gong, and Munday have shown that a single-junction nanostructured solar cell has a theoretical maximum efficiency of ~42 percent under typical solar illumination. This exceeds the efficiency of a traditional planar device but does not exceed the Shockley-Queisser limit for a planar device with optical concentration, e.g. a solar cell using a lens to concentrate the light. The researchers found that nanostructured solar cells offer an important avenue to achieving high efficiency photovoltaic devices through a "built-in optical concentration." Even when they consider the effects of light scattering in the atmosphere, nanostructured solar cells can achieve 35.5 percent efficiency with a modest built-in optical concentration of only ~1,000.

  As Munday and his team continue to design and fabricate nanoscale solar cells they find the biggest challenge is nano-fabrication. "You start with a solar cell that works well, and then you perform some extreme treatments to structure it on the nanoscale, all without causing any harming," said Munday. "Luckily, we've found a few materials and processes that look promising and have a team of dedicated students determined to make a big impact in solar energy."

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Smog vacuum cleaner inspires more steps to cleaner cities

  A certain structure in a public place in Rotterdam is described in Inhabitat as a smog-sucking vacuum cleaner. If going places, that cleaner is designed to ease city pollution. Lucy Wang reported Tuesday of a Netherlands-based designer behind the machine. This air purifier is part of his Smog-Free Project, and the project team simply defines it as the world's largest smog vacuum cleaner.

  According to Wang, we are looking at a seven-meter-tall tower —it's a lightweight, modular system —cleaning 30,000 cubic meters of air per hour and creating smog-free bubbles, in public spaces. The tower cleans the air by sucking in smog from the top and the filtered air is released through six-sided vents.

  This smog-sucking vacuum cleaner runs on just 1,400 watts, said Inhabitat, which is no more electricity than a water boiler. The enabler is a low-energy ionization technology, which is patented.

  The man behind this machine is Daan Roosegaarde. There was a recent launch in Rotterdam; the tower is a 7.0 × 3.5 m modular system in a public park. The launch marked its first pilot.

  "The first 7-meter high Smog Free Tower" equipped with environment-friendly and patented technology "is now open for public at Vierhavensstraat 52 in Rotterdam NL," announced the team. The Smog Free Tower uses a similar technology as indoor air purifiers. "The technology is used indoors in hospitals, so it's safe and tested—we just built the largest one for outdoor use," said Roosegaarde.

  What happens to all that dust collected? This gets interesting. The collected carbon particles in the smog dust will be compressed into high-end jewelry. He said, "we create jewelry from the residue of the collected smog. Smog consists of carbon which is compressed into high-end jewelry such as the Smog Free Ring or the Smog Free Cufflinks. Each piece of jewelry contributes to the purifying of 1000 cubic meters of polluted air."

  There is a Kickstarter campaign where, for a pledge of $54 (estimated delivery in December), you get a smog-freecube as a "symbol of the Smog Free Movement." It is a cube filled with compressed smog particles. The idea is that you can "Carry your cube with you as a personal reminder of your efforts to create a world free of smog."

  The first pilot was launched in Rotterdam and the team said possible future locations include Beijing, Mexico City, Paris and Los Angeles.

  Studio Roosegaarde is a "social design lab" with a team of designers and engineers based in the Netherlands and Shanghai.

  While the "smog sucking vacuum cleaner" conjures up an image of an environmental eyesore pictures of the tower clearly indicate it is not an eyesore. Its LEDs make the tower glow at night.

  "In the Netherlands we live nine months shorter because of smog.," said a press announcement from Studio Roosegaarde.

  The campaign statement is also a project vision: "This campaign is to fund the first pilot of the Tower in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The tower will travel around the world, from city to city. From Beijing to Paris. From Los Angeles to Mexico City. The tower lets citizens experience the value of breathing clean air. The Smog Free Tower is the first step in working together to free cities permanently of smog. Together we can fight air pollution."

  The campaign page went on to say that "The Smog Free Cubes are first of all developed to make sure the Smog Free Tower produces no waste. All the smog we collect, is processed into a Smog Free Cube and turned into an exclusive piece of jewelry. The Smog Free Movement stands for a better and cleaner future we can create together. The Smog Free Cubes are the building blocks of that future."

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Celebrating Hawaii ocean thermal energy conversion power plant

  An ocean thermal energy conversion power plant has gone operational; it was celebrated at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority earlier this month. The governor of Hawaii, David Ige, "flipped the switch" to activate the plant.

  This is the first true closed-cycle ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) plant to be connected to a U.S. electrical grid, said Big Island Video News.com.

  A number of reporters for sites such as Renewable Energy Magazine and Popular Science were regarding the new plant as a significant marker in ocean energy efforts. This is a "demo" plant connected to the grid, capable of generating enough electricity to power 120 homes a year. (It's 105 kilowatts, enough to power about 120 homes.)

  Big Island Now said kilowatts of sustainable, continuous electricity will be generated by the-site plant. While 120 homes is not a large number, the plant is considered significant as a test bed to commercialize ocean thermal energy conversion technology and to bolster innovation.

  The process involves power derived from ocean temperature differences, as Mary Beth Griggs in Popular Sciencesaid, "between the warm, shallow seawater lapping up against a beach and the icy depths of the ocean." Griggs said the plant, built by Makai Ocean Engineering and situated at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA), expects to generate enough energy to power 120 homes per year and is the largest plant of its kind in the world.

  The company described OTEC as a process that can produce electricity by using the temperature difference between deep cold ocean water and warm tropical surface waters. "OTEC plants pump large quantities of deep cold seawater and surface seawater to run a power cycle and produce electricity."

  Anna Hirtenstein in Bloomberg reported that the project cost about $5 million to build and said that this is the world's largest plant to date utilizing the evolving renewable source.

  The state of Hawaii hopes to be wholly powered by renewables by 2045, said Bloomberg.

  Hawaii's governor, David Ige, said Dan McCue in Renewable Energy Magazine, predicted that this will pave the way for larger plants serving a wider geographical area.

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