Energy Views

Some of my most vivid childhood memories stem from being on Cornish beaches, playing with this stuff. Seaweed. It's hard not to love its unique smell and - with some varieties - popping its bubble-wrap-like air pockets. Increasingly, though, seaweed is also being seen as a potential solution to the climate crisis. How exactly, though? In three ways. Ocean afforestation Seaweed grows much quicker than land-based plants, even those grown with manufactured fertilisers. It can therefore absorb CO2 more quickly. Seaweed doesn't need to expend energy on growing structures to counteract gravity (e.g. a trunk or thick stem) or deep roots for gathering moisture. For this reason, some oceanic species like kelp can grow up to a metre a day . A charity called The Climate Foundation, has designed a patent pending structure for growing kelp on vast scales, at depths of 25m. It includes a wave-driven pump to draw up cooler, nutrient rich water from beneath the 'thermocline ...

A couple of years back, I remember vividly once telling my daughter about what solar panels are. She quickly grasped their crucial limitation and then announced that, "we should have lunar panels too". Well, I said, it would great if you could invent one of those when you go to university.  Well, maybe she could build an effective lunar panel, as researchers at UCLA and Stanford have built in their lab a precursor, which they call a Radiative Cooler . It's an aluminium disk that's exposed to the night sky, and exploits a phenomenon called Radiative Sky Cooling to coax small amounts of electricity from the temperature difference between the surface looking up at the night sky and the air immediately surrounding it. So, I suppose you could say that the device is powered by the total absence of the sun, rather than the presence of moonlight. The effect means that if you were to sit on your roof at night - and I'm not recommending that you do! - you'd fi...