News

AirUCI faculty Jack Brouwer's decade long research into storing energy using hydrogen is attracting new attention.  HIs 2016-2020 campus demonstration project, in conjunction with the Southern California Gas Company, was a success. it made renewable hydrogen from solar power using an electrolyzer, then took that renewable hydrogen, injected it into our natural gas grid, then delivered it through our natural gas grid to a natural gas combined cycle plant to make partially decarbonized electricity from it.
 
The energy industry’s interest in using power-to-gas as a storage vehicle comes as a way of achieving a grid that runs predominantly on intermittent renewables, yet will require large amounts of storage to smooth out supply for when the sun isn’t shining and wind isn’t blowing.  "If you need to store terawatt hours of energy — which is what the grid will need if it’s 100% renewable — it’s going to be way cheaper to store it in the form of hydrogen," Jack said.  Read the article
 

AirUCI faculty Michael Prather was among a group of international researchers who recently completed the most thorough review yet of nitrous oxide from emission to destruction in the planet’s atmosphere.  Their work, published in Nature, documents the details of human-sourced N2O emissions and how they have intensified by 30 percent over the past four decades, the dominant share coming from synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and animal manure used in agriculture.
 
“Nitrous oxide emissions are increasing faster than any scenarios considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – so fast that if left unchecked, they along with carbon dioxide will push the rise in global mean temperature to well above 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels, the nominal goal of the Paris climate agreement,” Michael said.  More details         Read the article in Nature

AirUCI faculty Mike Kleinman is extensively quoted in an Orange County Register article about the efficacy of air filters in areas affected by wildfire smoke.  He explains that forest fires adversely affect air quality for two reasons: The first is due to the generally short-term exposure to microscopic particles that result from the fire, which irritate soft tissue like eyes, throats, and lungs.  The second is the gas phase from the fire which contains carbon monoxide and chemicals that are known to be carcinogens. 
 
Mike says air filters can help if buyers select HEPA filters and avoid those that generate ozone (which are banned in California).  “Probably the best evidence that I’ve seen is for small air filter units that recirculate the air in a given room and remove some of the pollutants,” he says. “You can reduce the level of particulates in a room quite substantially.”  Filters attached to heating and air conditioning systems have also been shown to reduce indoor particle exposure substantially.  Read the article

AirUCI faculty Steve Davis is co-author on a new report in Environmental Research Letters that describes how China's reduction in sulfur dioxide emissions may actually help increase global warming.  That’s because the same sulfur dioxide particles that come from coal burning and cause respiratory problems in humans also reflect sunlight, which cools the planet.  “It’s one of these tradeoffs that people have known about before, but we put some numbers on it,” says Steve. 
Read the story