Tag: electricity

Utility Accused of Disproportionately Disconnecting Service in Low-Income Neighborhoods “to preserve the grid”

Columbus civic leaders continued to seek answers Thursday about how AEP decided which neighborhoods to cut power to this week and whether appropriate steps were taken to notify customers in advance of the outages.

The NAACP Columbus chapter again questioned AEP Thursday, calling for additional answers as to how the utility determines areas that will be without service, and whether AEP notified residents, governments and social service agencies prior to the shutdown. The questions followed statements from NAACP leaders Wednesday raising concerns that areas in Columbus affected by the outage included many low-income and minority neighborhoods.

“The NAACP’s concern is that these outages will add to the growing list of health, environmental and crime rates in these communities,” the NAACP said in a statement Thursday.  “We also need to know what this community can expect moving forward in these dog days of summer.”

City of Columbus officials also contacted AEP about the outages and the direct impact on those poorer neighborhoods, city spokeswoman Melanie Crabill said Thursday.

“We asked AEP the same question because we were being asked by residents,” Crabill said. “AEP assured us that they based load shedding on circuit locations, not neighborhoods.”

Ohio Democratic lawmakers from the Columbus area also sought answers from AEP Thursday, writing in a letter that the utility has an obligation to provide customers access to services and to communicate planned outages “to limit the human and financial costs shouldered by families, cities and people with medical needs.”

The letter included a list of questions for AEP and was signed by Democratic state representatives from Franklin County, including Kristin Boggs, Rich Brown, Latyna Humphrey, Dontavius Jarrells, David Leland, Mary Lightbody, Beth Liston, Adam Miller, and Allison Russo.

“We find it troubling that AEP has no issue with customer notifications when bills are due, but when customers are faced with historic heat, limited resources and great needs, there seems to be limited or no communication about planned outages that impact the health, safety and welfare of customers,” the lawmakers wrote.

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MIT Engineers Have Discovered a Completely New Way of Generating Electricity

A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.

MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.

The liquid, an organic solvent, draws electrons out of the particles, generating a current that could be used to drive chemical reactions or to power micro- or nanoscale robots, the researchers say.

“This mechanism is new, and this way of generating energy is completely new,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT. “This technology is intriguing because all you have to do is flow a solvent through a bed of these particles. This allows you to do electrochemistry, but with no wires.”

In a new study describing this phenomenon, the researchers showed that they could use this electric current to drive a reaction known as alcohol oxidation — an organic chemical reaction that is important in the chemical industry.

Strano is the senior author of the paper, which appears today (June 7, 2021) in Nature Communications. The lead authors of the study are MIT graduate student Albert Tianxiang Liu and former MIT researcher Yuichiro Kunai. Other authors include former graduate student Anton Cottrill, postdocs Amir Kaplan and Hyunah Kim, graduate student Ge Zhang, and recent MIT graduates Rafid Mollah and Yannick Eatmon.

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Engineers Develop A Device That ‘Literally Generates Electricity Out of Thin Air’

A new study published in Nature entitled “Power generation from ambient humidity using protein nanowires” has discovered an interesting way to harvest energy from the environment, creating the potential for another clean power generating system that is self-sustaining. According to the authors,

“thin-film devices made from nanometre-scale protein wires harvested from the microbe Geobacter sulfurreducens can generate continuous electric power in the ambient environment. The devices produce a sustained voltage of around 0.5 volts across a 7-micrometre-thick film, with a current density of around 17 microamperes per square centimetre. We find the driving force behind this energy generation to be a self-maintained moisture gradient that forms within the film when the film is exposed to the humidity that is naturally present in air.”

The study also mentions that “connecting several devices linearly scales up the voltage and current to power electronics” and that their results “demonstrate the feasibility of a continuous energy-harvesting strategy that is less restricted by location or environmental conditions than other sustainable approaches.”

So, how is this all possible? Well, more than three decades ago a “sediment organism” was discovered in the Potomac river that could do things nobody had ever observed before in bacteria. The microbe belonged to the Geobactergenus, and over time scientists discovered that it could make bacterial nanowires that conduct electricity.

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