A white paper from the International Energy Agency details how hydropower can help ease the global addition of wind and solar to the resource mix on power grids. Argonne’s Audun Botterud offered his expertise as a co-author.
Survey results showed that the biofuel industry has made marked efforts to conserve resources, diversify product portfolio, recycle and reuse water and improve productivity.
Strategies for purifying water abound, but they tend to require lots of energy. Scientists at Argonne are exploring materials that can efficiently use sunlight to concentrate heat right at the water’s surface to produce clean steam for capture.
Getting reliable precipitation data from the past has proven difficult, as is predicting regional changes for climate models in the present. A combination of isotope techniques developed by researchers at Argonne and UChicago may help resolve both.