Resource World Magazine

A U G U S T / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 4 www.resourceworld.com 59 the shore of Lake Phoksundo, high in the Himalayas. The equipment was donated and installed by Advantage Products Inc, headquartered in Alberta, Canada, with support from the Werth Family Foundation, and the World Wildlife Fund. With no roads to the village, the components were carried 30 km to the site by porters, where the villagers built a flow channel and a weir to install the turbine and control the water level using rocks and gabions (woven wire baskets). They also built a control building and power distribution system in four days using only local materials. Using the water current from a small river, adjacent to the village, the system generates up to 5 kW of electricity con- tinuously providing 50 watts of power for each of the 40 homes, as well as power for a small army base, and for a monastery. This innovation has the potential to dra- matically improve the standard of living for the villagers. Instead of relying on solar panels and batteries for lighting, which are not adequate in the spring and fall or dur- ing rainy periods, they now have a reliable source of power independent of the season or weather. Many of the homes will now also be able to get satellite TV and be able to keep up to date with news and watch mov- ies. One of the most important things the villagers wanted was to watch the World Cup soccer games and the EnCurrent gen- erator system gave them that opportunity. Downstream, in the community of Amchi, there is interest in providing elec- tricity to the local clinic and to the nearby school in Tapriza. The school in Tapriza uses solar panels and batteries to provide power for lighting and a small computer room, but an EnCurrent generator would provide enough power to also allow them to access the Internet. New Energy is also installing two floating 5-kW EnCurrent systems in Myanmar, where they will pro- vide power for a school. New Energy offers water to wire power generation solutions for remote, stand alone applications, hybrid micro-grid distributed generation systems, and grid connected systems. The company offers 5kW, and 25kW models of the EnCurrent Power Generation System, with 125kW and 250kW models under development. For more information, contact New Energy at info@newenergy.ca. rePlacing Platinum in solar cells Researchers at the University of Malaya have developed a new electrolysis process that synthesizes zinc oxide. They have also developed an inexpensive, efficient replacement for the expensive platinum used in the cells. The scientists involved in the new work have succeeded in creating dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) with an efficiency of 1.12% at a fraction of the cost of typical DSSCs, which use platinum. The new solar cells instead use bismuth tellu- ride (Bi 2 Te 3 ) nanosheet arrays. By using a new electrolysis process, the researchers were able to effectively manip- ulate the spacing between individual nanosheets and control the thermal and electrical conductivity to achieve the high efficiency of 1.12%, which is comparable to platinum devices, but at only at a frac- tion of the cost. creating graPhene in a blender Jonathan Coleman and fellow research- ers at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland, have created graphene using nothing but graphite, water, dishwashing detergent, and a kitchen blender. The one-atom thick honeycombed sheets of carbon have a great number of potential applications in renewable energy technologies, electron- ics, the aerospace industry. A cheap means of manufacturing the material would allow such applications to become notably more economical. The researchers from the Irish-UK team poured graphite powder (like pencil leads) into a kitchen blender, added water and dishwashing liquid, and then mixed the ingredients at high speed. They showed that the shearing force generated by a rap- idly rotating tool in solution was sufficiently intense to separate the layers of graphene that make up graphite flakes without dam- aging their two-dimensional structure. The researchers are now working with the UK-based firm Thomas Swan and Co. Ltd. to scale the process to the industrial level. They hope to build a pilot project that could produce about a kilo of gra- phene a day by the end of the 2014. n The New Energy 5-kilowatt (kW) EnCurrent system in the village of Ringmo in the Dolpa region of Nepal. Photo courtesy New Energy Corporation Inc.

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