A new agricultural technique may have just solved the problem of growing food in some of the world’s most inhospitable places – locations that don’t currently support traditional agriculture.

In addition, the technique can save what are clearly finite resources from extinction, something all of us should clearly favor.

As reported by Natural Blaze, as the world’s population grows, so too does its demand for food. Right now, activist organizations are battling the spread of the genetically modified organisms (GMOs) which have become prevalent in modern agriculture, despite the dangers they pose to our health.

The primary argument for GMO makers like Monsanto and backers in industry and government is that they are necessary because the world is running out of resources, and GMO crops are a better way to boost yields (which is not true, actually). On first hearing it, this argument might sound cogent and believable; after all, it’s “science” and scientists aren’t trying to harm us.

Technology to make agriculture sustainable and environmentally clean

But digging deeper into the impact of GMO crops and the herbicides used to make them most effective, demonstrates well that chemical farming is what’s doing real harm to finite land and soil resources.

So GMOs aren’t a viable, long-term option. Thankfully, however, a new innovation that is efficient and environmentally friendly – as well as productive – has been developed.

A new start-up called Sundrop Farms has developed what can only be called high-tech greenhouses that employ several solutions to grow crops with far less reliance on finite natural resources, even more than conventional greenhouse production. With offices in the UK, Australia and the US, the company is working to educate, enlighten and, most of all, expand.

In order to grow crops, you need land, water and energy – all finite resources. But Sundrop Farms’ technology sort of reinvents the resources.

In 2010, when the company launched its first pilot farm in Port Augusta, South Australia, it was located in the middle of a desert, where it would have been impossible to grow food using traditional agricultural methods. However, by combining seawater and sunlight, Sundrop Farms has managed to change the agricultural dynamic. It is a technology that negates any effects of climate change (real or imagined), land grabs by biotech companies who only want to spread GMOs, droughts, floods and other natural and man-made occurrences.

Using coconut husks, 23,000 mirrors to reflect solar power, and desalinated water on 20-hectares (roughly 49,400 acres), the developers have grown tons of fresh, wholesome, organic food.

As further reported by Natural Blaze, the facility in South Australia uses seawater from the Spencer Gulf, desalinating it and then using it in a massive greenhouse lined with cardboard, thereby eliminating the need to rely on groundwater or rain for growing produce.

Year-round production and tons of food per year – organically

In addition, the facility also grows food hydroponically – which you can also do at home – thereby further reducing the overall need for water and eliminating the need for soil.

Utilizing the mirrors for power to redirect the desert sun, all that is required is sunlight and seawater to grow as much as 17,000 metric tons of food a year.

And none of it is genetically modified.

What’s more, this kind of agricultural operation can produce year-round. During winter months, the greenhouse is fed with 39 megawatts of clean energy that comes directly from the sun. While the $200 million price tag may seem excessive, consider that with the renewable technologies and year-round growing seasons, such operations can quickly pay for themselves.

But the bigger issue is that Sundrop Farms is redefining the way food can be – and should be – grown in a world where the population is only expanding, along with competition for resources.

(Source: naturalnews.com; November 30, 2016; http://tinyurl.com/zeueckr)

One of the worst sources of pollution in New England will be home to clean, renewable energy.

The Mount Tom Power Station in Holyoke, Massachusetts—known as one of the worst polluters in New England—is on its way to a renewable rebirth.

The plant’s owners broke ground on a 5.76-megawatt solar farm in October on the site of the defunct coal-burning power station.

Activists had called for the closure of the plant for years, worried about the health effects burning coal was having on surrounding communities.

“This victory came after more than five decades spent inhaling soot and struggling to breathe and more than five years of organizing to retire and repurpose Mount Tom coal plant,” Claire Miller, lead community organizer for the Toxics Action Center, said in a statement.

More than 17,000 solar panels will be installed on the site, providing power to more than 1,000 homes.

The coal plant, which borders the Connecticut River, has been associated with the region’s perennially poor air quality since opening in 1960. Its owner, Paris-based Engie, decommissioned the plant in 2014 and plans to demolish it next year.

Engie, a $75 billion global energy company, said it shuttered the power plant because of competition from cheaper natural gas rather than as a result of pressure from environmentalists. Still, the company saw an opportunity to repurpose the site as a solar farm.

“For Engie, this project brings the concept of ‘Reduce, Recycle, Reuse’ to life,” Engie North America President Frank Demaille said in a statement. “It’s a unique opportunity to transform this property from a coal plant to a solar farm to serve the local community.”

The owners signed a 20-year agreement to sell the solar-generated electricity to Holyoke Gas & Electric. When the project comes online, the local utility—which provides power to 18,000 homes—will obtain more than 75 percent of its energy from renewable sources.

Now, environmental organizers are hoping Mount Tom will be a model for other communities.

“One of the advantages of a coal-fired power plant site is that it is already connected to the energy grid, so looking into whether a coal site can be used for renewable energy is something I hope every community looks to first,” said Miller.

Images: YouTube

For instance, the coal-fired Brayton power plant in Somerset, Massachusetts, is set to be shuttered next June. Houston-based Dynegy said it is weighing options for the site, including a proposal to convert the plant to a $1.3 billion, 400-megawatt natural gas power plant.

But environmental groups drafted a report outlining how the 234-acre waterfront site could host a 9-megawatt solar farm, a food waste digester, a large-scale battery storage facility, and a port to service offshore wind farms.

“This option would represent a ‘Clean Energy Hub’ scenario in which clean, renewable energy sources are brought together to provide reliable electricity, promote innovative new technologies, and reclaim the waterfront area from polluting large-scale industrial use,” the report stated.

(Source: takepart.com; November 6, 2016; http://tinyurl.com/o4uqgvo)

In many parts of the world, the only way to make germy water safe is by boiling, which consumes precious fuel, or by putting it out in the sun in a plastic bottle so ultraviolet rays will kill the microbes. But because UV rays carry only 4 percent of the sun’s total energy, the UV method takes six to 48 hours, limiting the amount of water people can disinfect this way.

Now researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have created a nanostructured device, about half the size of a postage stamp, that disinfects water much faster than the UV method by also making use of the visible part of the solar spectrum, which contains 50 percent of the sun’s energy.

In experiments reported today in Nature Nanotechnology (“Rapid water disinfection using vertically aligned MoS2 nanofilms and visible light”), sunlight falling on the little device triggered the formation of hydrogen peroxide and other disinfecting chemicals that killed more than 99.999 percent of bacteria in just 20 minutes. When their work was done the killer chemicals quickly dissipated, leaving pure water behind.

“Our device looks like a little rectangle of black glass. We just dropped it into the water and put everything under the sun, and the sun did all the work,” said Chong Liu, lead author of the report. She is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory of Yi Cui, a SLAC/Stanford associate professor and investigator with SIMES, the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences at SLAC.

Nanoflake Walls and Eager Electrons

Under an electron microscope the surface of the device looks like a fingerprint, with many closely spaced lines. Those lines are very thin films – the researchers call them “nanoflakes” – of molybdenum disulfide that are stacked on edge, like the walls of a labyrinth, atop a rectangle of glass.

In ordinary life, molybdenum disulfide is an industrial lubricant. But like many materials, it takes on entirely different properties when made in layers just a few atoms thick. In this case it becomes a photocatalyst: When hit by incoming light, many of its electrons leave their usual places, and both the electrons and the “holes” they leave behind are eager to take part in chemical reactions.

By making their molybdenum disulfide walls in just the right thickness, the scientists got them to absorb the full range of visible sunlight. And by topping each tiny wall with a thin layer of copper, which also acts as a catalyst, they were able to use that sunlight to trigger exactly the reactions they wanted – reactions that produce “reactive oxygen species” like hydrogen peroxide, a commonly used disinfectant, which kill bacteria in the surrounding water.

Molybdenum disulfide is cheap and easy to make – an important consideration when making devices for widespread use in developing countries, Cui said. It also absorbs a much broader range of solar wavelengths than traditional photocatalysts.

Solving Pollution Problems

The method is not a cure-all; for instance, it doesn’t remove chemical pollutants from water. So far it’s been tested on only three strains of bacteria, although there’s no reason to think it would not kill other bacterial strains and other types of microbes, such as viruses. And it’s only been tested on specific concentrations of bacteria mixed with less than an ounce of water in the lab, not on the complex stews of contaminants found in the real world.

Still, “It’s very exciting to see that by just designing a material you can achieve a good performance. It really works,” said Liu, who has gone on to work on a project in Cui’s lab that is developing air filters for combating smog. “Our intention is to solve environmental pollution problems so people can live better.”

(Source:  www.nanowerk.com; Aug 15, 2016; http://tinyurl.com/ho47j9r)

Energy storage is crucial for taking full advantage of solar power, which otherwise suffers interruptions from cloudy skies and nightfall. In the past few years, concentrating solar power plants have begun producing additional electricity at night and during peak demand periods by using stored heat energy to propel a steam turbine.

Current thermal energy storage systems rely on materials that store less energy per kilogram, requiring more material at a greater cost to meet energy storage requirements.

Now, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Argonne National Laboratory have designed an inexpensive thermal energy storage system that will be significantly smaller and perform more than 20 times better than current thermal systems.

With funding from DOE’s SunShot Initiative, the Argonne team is building a pilot-scale prototype of their high-efficiency latent heat thermal energy storage system (LHTES) for testing. The SunShot Initiative is a national collaborative effort to make unsubsidized solar energy cost-competitive with other forms of electricity production by 2020.

Argonne’s thermal energy storage system relies on a “phase-change” material that melts as it stores thermal energy and releases energy as it re-freezes — similar to the charge-discharge cycle in a battery.

Inexpensive salts like rock salt (sodium chloride) can be used as phase-change materials, but their use in existing thermal storage systems is limited because of the poor thermal conductivity of the salts.

However, the Argonne LHTES system drastically improves the conductivity of these salts by integrating them with a high-conductivity graphite foam. This combination reduces the overall amount of material needed to build the system and its cost, while making the thermal energy transfer significantly more efficient and still providing up to 8 to 12 hours of energy storage — a typical night of storage for a concentrating solar power plant.

“Phase-change materials tend to have low conductivity but meet the heat energy storage requirements,” said Dileep Singh, leader of Argonne’s Thermal-Mechanical Technologies group. “High-conductivity graphite foam meets the conductivity requirements, so we thought: why not combine the two?”

The porous graphite foam traps the salts in pores, facilitating rapid melting and freezing. The team demonstrated that this rapid phase change holds up over time. After building and testing an initial prototype about the size of a blender, the team is now scaling up the prototype size by 50 times.

Although still smaller than a full-scale power plant system, the pilot-scale modular system will be tested this fall and could expand on applications, such as providing back-up power on a microgrid or storing waste heat from another energy source. The pilot system will also further improve 3-D thermal modeling used for estimating performance and planning the design of a full-scale system.

“We are looking at developing the full-scale power plant system as a modular system, and the pilot-scale system we are building this year can actually be used as one module within a full-scale system that is made of many modules stacked or organized together,” said Argonne mechanical engineer Wenhua Yu. “Therefore, the performance characteristics we will measure from testing the pilot can directly reflect those of a power plant system.”

The full-scale design is expected to meet the needs of current power plants that operate steam turbines at about 450 to 600 degrees Celsius (850-1100 degrees Fahrenheit) using magnesium chloride as the storage medium. When advanced supercritical carbon dioxide turbines — which are more efficient than steam turbines but operate at a hotter 700 degrees Celsius (1,300 degrees Fahrenheit) — come online, the same design can be used with sodium chloride.

(Source:  sciencedaily.com; September 12, 2016; http://tinyurl.com/jur5h54)