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Credit: Journal of Power Sources (2022). DOI: 10.1016/j.jpowsour.2022.231339 Thermally regenerative ammonia batteries can produce electricity on demand from low-grade waste heat. A new process for creating these batteries improves their stability and affordability and may help address the country's growing grid-scale energy storage problem, according to a team led by Penn State researchers. "We can use ammonia as an energy carrier to harness waste heat and recharge some battery chemistries," said Derek Hall, assistant professor of energy engineering. "But previous battery chemistries used metallic zinc or copper electrodes, which had major setbacks in terms of electrode stability. What we did...

January 13, 2010, 4:00 a.m. Earth-Shattering NewsAnother energy “alternative” hits the wall. By William Tucker Geothermal energy, the effort to tap the earth’s “renewable” internal heat, is often touted as the most promising potential source for clean, green energy — only this week, the White House was bragging about its investments in geothermal generation. Team Obama may not have noticed, but geotherm has had a rough few months. First off, Al Gore went on The Tonight Show in November, telling Conan O’Brien and his nighttime audience: People think about geothermal energy — when they think about it at all...

PROVO — Within six months of discovering a massive geothermal field, a small Utah company had erected and fired up a power plant — just one example of the speed with which companies are capitalizing on state mandates for alternative energy.

Google, Paul Allen back geothermal startup By JOHN COOK P-I REPORTER AltaRock Energy believes it can harvest energy by fracturing rocks deep below the Earth's surface, using the heat from those rocks to create electricity. Some deep-pocketed investors -- including Google, Paul Allen's Vulcan Ventures and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers -- are big believers in the concept, too. They are among the investors leading a $26.25 million venture round in AltaRock, money that the 14-month-old company will use to test the concept at an undisclosed site next year. Sausalito, Calif.-based AltaRock, which was founded in Seattle by Susan Petty...

BASEL, Switzerland (AP) When tremors started cracking walls and bathroom tiles in this Swiss city on the Rhine, engineers knew they had a problem. "The glass vases on the shelf rattled, and there was a loud bang," recalled Catherine Wueest, a tea-shop owner. "I thought a truck had crashed into the building." But the magnitude 3.4 tremor on the evening of Dec. 8 was no ordinary act of nature: It had been accidentally triggered by engineers drilling deep into the Earth's crust to tap its inner heat and thus break new ground — literally — in the world's search for...

A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock crust could supply a substantial portion of the electricity the United States will need in the future, probably at competitive prices and with minimal environmental impact. CAMBRIDGE, MASS., USA -- A comprehensive new MIT-led study of the potential for geothermal energy within the United States has found that mining the huge amounts of heat that reside as stored thermal energy in the Earth's hard rock...

BILLINGS, Mont. - A newly discovered surface bulge in Yellowstone National Park may be responsible for some unexpected geothermal activity in recent years, according to a study by U.S. Geological Survey scientists. The bulge, about 25 miles across, rose 5 inches from 1997 to 2003 and may have triggered some thermal unrest at Norris Geyser Basin, including a sudden rise in temperatures, new steam vents and the awakening of Steamboat geyser.The findings are part of a paper set to be published Thursday in the journal Nature.Charles Wicks, one of the USGS scientists who worked on the study, said much of...

Much of Yellowstone National Park is a giant collapsed volcano, or caldera. In an enormous eruption roughly 640,000 years ago, this volcano spit out around 240 cubic miles of rock, dirt, magma and other material. Around 70,000 years ago, its last eruption filled in that gaping hole with flows of lava. Since then the area has enjoyed an uneasy peace, the land alternately rising and falling with the passing decades. New satellite data indicate that this uplift and subsidence is caused by the movement of magma beneath the surface and may explain why the northern edge of the park continues...