Grow a Better Catalyst
With Crystalline Platinum
By Henry Fountain

Yang

For a catalyst, appearance is everything. That is, the shape or structure of a catalytic particle can determine how efficient it is at stirring a reaction. Chemists spend a lot of time trying to come up with ways to design a particle to perform in a specific way. Progress toward better particle design is reported by Peidong Yang, with Berkeley Lab's Materials Sciences Division, and colleagues in the journal Nature Materials. They have grown tiny crystals of palladium in specific shapes, using “seeds” of even smaller crystalline cubes of platinum. Full story (scroll to second story).

How Rate Structures
Impact PV Economics

Not all retail electricity rates are created equal for prospective solar photovoltaic (PV) customers, according to a report released July 4 by Berkeley Lab. The report analyzes factors that affect the ability of PV systems to reduce electricity bills using 20 different retail rate structures available to commercial customers in California. "One of the surprising findings that emerged from the analysis is that the value of a commercial PV system in reducing retail electricity bills can vary by a factor of four within California," says co-author Ryan Wiser, with Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division. Full story.

Projects to Create Energy From Renewable Feedstock
By Michael McCoy

Patzek

Chemical and biotechnology companies have announced a flurry of initiatives aimed at creating fuels and other forms of energy from a wide variety of biomass sources. One scientist is deeply skeptical that crops can be grown for their energy content without dire environmental consequences. Berkeley Lab earth scientist Ted Patzek takes issue with the basic proposition that "fresh plants produced in real time used as fuel can replace old plants, whose remnants have accumulated over the last 460 million years." Attempts to do so, Patzek warns, will rapidly bring on global ecosystem exhaustion. But MIT’s John Deutch says that corporate and government excitement over new energy technologies should be embraced. Full story.

High-Tc Superconductors Reveal Another ‘Kink’

There’s another kink in the mystery of high-temperature (Tc) superconductors — literally. Using photoemission studies, a group of researchers — including Berkeley Lab Advanced Light Source scientists Zhihui Pan and Alexei Fedorov — has revealed a new anomaly, or “kink,” in the energy spectrum of high-energy electrons in two different families of cuprate superconductors, further complicating their quest to discover exactly how the materials conduct electricity with zero resistance. Full story.