Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. California’s forest health crisis is an emergency of unprecedented scope and scale, with disastrous implications for the state’s environment, economy, energy systems, and human life. Unlike essentially all other technologies and solutions proposed to respond to the crisis, gasification has the potential to process forest waste in a way that extracts value and sequesters a large portion of its carbon. Before the recipient’s development of the pre- commercial Powertainer technology, no one had developed gasification technology that could economically respond to the problem. As a result, there have not yet been any large-scale deployments of distributed, commercial-scale gasification technology. The acceleration of tree mortality and persistent drought conditions make finding solutions to this problem more critical with each passing day.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. To achieve robust zero emissions targets, cities and load-serving entities require advanced energy solutions that enable the cost-effective deployment and integration of distributed and renewable energy resources, and the cost-efficient rehabilitation of homes to a near Zero Net Carbon standard.3 Achieving these outcomes in disadvantaged communities requires a combination of innovative technology, scaled finance, and the inclusive engagement of cities, NGOs, and community residents.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. Future offshore wind development in California will create a risk to seabirds for collision or displacement. Existing seabird models, which describe the density and species composition in the California Current, can be used to identify hot spots for seabird activity, but these models do not delineate the presence of seabirds at different heights above the sea surface. Without incorporating flight height and how flight behavior changes with wind speed, it is difficult to accurately estimate the potential impact to seabirds from offshore wind farms. As different size turbines are being designed for use in an offshore environment, the existing two-dimensional spatial models of seabird populations will be unable to estimate the difference in potential impacts
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. The size of wind turbine towers is constrained by transportation size and weight making conventional towers prohibitively expensive for larger next-generation turbines in California. Overhead traffic signals, road width and weight regulations limit conventional steel tubular towers to sub-optimal diameters of 4.3 meters (14 feet.). As a result, the tallest wind turbine towers installed in California are 100-meter (m) tall with turbine capacity of 3.3-megawatts (MW).
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. Climate change poses an urgent and significant threat to California and the nation. California has taken a leadership position in supporting cutting edge science to understand the nature of the threat and possible actions to mitigate that impact. However, California cannot solve this threat alone and does not have all of the solutions.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. Mechanical steam traps are one of the leading causes for steam loss within a steam system. While methods exist to monitor the performance of the steam traps, this is labor intensive and requires knowledge on how to accurately assess performance. Often steam traps will fail and cause a substantial amount of steam loss, which increases natural gas use and GHG emissions, and causes process and production issues. With natural gas prices being at an all-time low, there is a cost barrier to implementing new energy efficient technologies to reduce natural gas use and GHG emissions.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. California processes over one million tons of grapes per year and produces nearly 100 percent of raisins in the U.S.2 Processing and packaging raisins is an energy intensive process which involves substantial electricity use. Further, an unreliable electric grid and threats from wildfire induced public safety power shutoffs have caused undue strains on food producers.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. Onsite emissions from industrial facilities contribute to about one-quarter of California’s GHG emissions. There is significant scope to reduce these emissions through newer technology or retrofits to older equipment, and California’s cap-and-trade program seeks to make it economically viable to make these adjustments. Despite these inducements, many facilities do not engage in energy efficiency upgrades due to uncertainty of the financial benefits and a preference for short payback periods.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. LIBs are still expensive for most of their applications. Substantial effort to reduce the cost of LIBs has been made over the last few decades to make them widely available. Improvements in QC of LIB production would offer a major cost reduction by decreasing the scrap rate, which is currently about 5-10% during manufacturing. Unfortunately, inadequate flaw detection increases the average cost of LIBs. Currently, the world’s LIB production capacity exceeds 320 GW-h/year. Considering the $156 kW-1-h-1 production cost of LIBs in 2019, reducing the scrap rate to zero would save more than $250M dollars for LIB manufacturers every year. The defects in flawed electrodes that are unknowingly assembled into battery cells can cause premature capacity fading, which results in a lower battery lifetime. They can also cause thermal runaway, which can result in an explosion. Therefore, QC is especially needed for LIBs, as they rely on flammable electrolytes, which can be the source of a hazard. Currently, the only way to determine if a LIB is defective or not is through electrical testing at very late stages of manufacturing, after the battery cell formation, which cannot identify all types of defects. Therefore, early identification of these defects through an efficient in-line quality control tool is crucial for battery manufacturers to save money, time, and material and ensure safety. Existing methods of non-contact QC have serious drawbacks for battery QC application, especially in terms of their measurement speed. The most applicable one among these techniques, infrared thermography, has a limited throughput and cannot support rolling speeds of more than 1 meters/min while nowadays, battery manufacturers use rolling speeds as fast as 100 meters/min for LIB manufacturing. For this reason, LIB manufacturers, such as Tesla, Panasonic and LG-Chem, are in an urgent need to have effective solutions for QC at early stages of production to detect the defective parts and re-use the material before completing the entire production cycle.
Problem/ Solution Statement Problem. The cost of lithium batteries has fallen dramatically in the past decade. For a 4-hour, grid-tied solution, the levelized cost is approaching $0.20/kilowatt-hour (kWh). However, single-use batteries can be 1,000 times more expensive given the need for replacement. Throw-away batteries remain the most expensive source of power in the world today. Consequently, battery devices are extremely low power, typically drawing <1 milliwatt (mW) on average to reduce the burden of replacements or recharging. The poor economics limit the use of battery devices at scale (for instance, large-scale infrastructure monitoring). Alternatively, energy harvesting could support numerous and more powerful devices while generating cost savings over time.
