Renewable Energy — Posts

30 posts on "Renewable Energy" by Shlomo Strauss — bilingual writing on technology, science, and business.

• The Century-Old Space Mirror Plan Threatening the Night Sky — A new startup plans to launch space mirrors to provide sunlight at night, sparking severe concerns over light pollution and ecological disruption.
• Beyond Food: How Soybeans Power Jet Engines and Plastics — Beyond agriculture, soybeans possess unique biological properties driving innovations in jet fuel, winter tires, and safer plastics.
• The Technologies Turning Carbon Into a Profitable Industry — New technologies are turning carbon capture from a costly necessity into a profitable industry by using emissions to create resources like concrete.
• Supercritical fluids and the future of geothermal energy — Advanced electromagnetic drilling aims to reach deep supercritical fluids, potentially providing limitless geothermal energy for the AI revolution.
• How Quantum Tunneling Powers the Race for Nuclear Fusion — Driven by quantum tunneling and billions in investments, researchers are racing to achieve net energy gain from commercial nuclear fusion.
• The Challenges and Strategic Value of a Far Side Moon Base — Despite communication and terrain challenges, the Moon's far side offers vital resources like ice and helium-3, sparking a new geopolitical race.
• Fiber-optic cables and AI are finding hidden water leaks underground — A British startup repurposed existing fiber-optic infrastructure and AI models to detect water pipe leaks, saving over 700 million liters of water…
• Musk's AI empire: custom chips, space servers, and a closed-loop — From Dojo 3 supercomputers in orbit to xAI merging with SpaceX, the piece maps how Musk is assembling a self-contained AI pipeline that no competitor…
• How data center water use compares to the beef industry — A breakdown of xAI's Colossus 2 data center water consumption against hamburger production figures challenges the assumption that AI infrastructure is…
• Sugar cane: from white sugar to jet fuel and nano-cellulose — The world's highest-yield crop produces far more than table sugar — its byproducts include bioplastics, sustainable aviation fuel, Lego pieces, and…
• A home Bitcoin miner that heats your shower water — Superheat debuted at CES 2026 a home ASIC device that repurposes Bitcoin mining heat for water heating, spotlighting a broader inefficiency in how we…
• Why Chinese waste-to-energy plants are hungry for Western trash — China built over 1,000 waste-to-energy plants, but moisture-heavy local garbage drops furnace temperatures into the dioxin-forming range — making dry…
• Molten salt and the eutectic point powering next-generation solar — A Chinese concentrating solar plant using 30,000 heliostats and a eutectic molten-salt mixture can store thermal energy for up to six hours, outperforming
• How supersonic jet engines could power AI data centers — Boom is adapting its supersonic jet engine to generate electricity for data centers, potentially eliminating the water-cooling workaround that limits…
• China's underwater data center runs on wind and seawater cooling — China completed the first phase of a subsea data center that uses ocean water for passive cooling and nearby wind turbines as its sole power source.
• Small modular reactors and the case for a new nuclear age — From AI data centers to lunar bases, this post examines how small modular reactors work, why tech giants are betting on them, and what risks remain.
• Sodium batteries: a cheaper, safer alternative to lithium — Sodium-ion batteries offer lower cost, improved safety, and better cold-weather performance than lithium, though their lower energy density currently…
• Ethanol: from sugarcane and yeast to fuel, antiseptics and tax law — A concise look at ethanol — how it is produced from plants, why it is considered a relatively clean fuel, and why industrial grades are deliberately…
• Vertical forests: why green buildings fail and what makes them work — A tale of two green projects — Chengdu's mosquito-plagued ghost towers and Milan's celebrated Bosco Verticale — reveals what separates failure from…
• Hydrogen cars: how they work and what is holding them back — From the electrochemistry of the fuel cell to the challenges of green hydrogen production, a clear look at the technology, its promise, and its current…
• How a fusion reactor could turn mercury into gold — A US startup claims that bombarding mercury-198 with neutrons inside a fusion reactor can produce gold as a byproduct — here is the science and the…
• Bioluminescence: from glowing cave larvae to self-lit street trees — The luciferase-luciferin reaction behind New Zealand's glowing cave worms also points toward engineered luminescent trees as a future alternative to…
• Aluminium is the most recyclable material humans use — From Napoleon's dinner table to modern recycling plants, aluminium's near-perfect recyclability and staggering energy savings make it unlike any other…
• A controlled nuclear blast to reverse decades of carbon emissions — A proposed geoengineering plan would use an 81-gigaton nuclear detonation to pulverize basalt rock, absorbing 30 years' worth of global carbon emissions…
• Daylight pipes: bringing natural sunlight deep inside buildings — Light-pipe systems channel natural sunlight into a building's interior zones, combining energy savings, improved wellbeing, and the ability to grow plants
• A server farm on the moon: bold engineering or a PR stunt? — Lonestar Data Holdings plans to launch the first lunar server farm aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9, though steep costs and technical limits raise doubts about…
• China's space solar panel plan: bold energy vision or engineering — China has announced plans for a kilometer-wide solar array in geostationary orbit that would beam energy to Earth via microwaves, though the engineering…
• Fool's gold and its surprising potential in clean energy — Pyrite, long dismissed as fool's gold, is a natural semiconductor that researchers are investigating for use in solar cells and high-capacity lithium…
• Serbia's lithium protests expose the environmental cost of the EV — As automakers celebrate Rio Tinto's renewed lithium mining license in Serbia, mass protests highlight the ecological destruction that fuels the green…
• Mighty Buildings prints modular homes in 3D and ships them to your — Mighty Buildings uses giant 3D printers to produce modular home components that a four-person crew can assemble in four days, claiming five times the…