In advance of Veterans Day, the non-profit solar installer GRID Alternatives has announced a hookup with Wells Fargo to kick off “Troops to Solar,” a three-year program aimed at training more than 1,000 military veterans for jobs in the burgeoning solar industry. The program will also train service men and women who are still on […]
A new solar cell efficiency record has been set by China’s Trina Solar Limited, which announced that its new p-type multi-crystalline silicon solar cell has achieved a solar conversion efficiency of 21.25 percent according to the results of third-party testing. Greater efficiency does not necessarily translate into lower costs, but the manufacturing method is based […]
Energy storage is the key to making concentrating solar power plants an economical, reliable alternative to coal for electricity generation, and the US is determined to lead the field into new levels of efficiency. In the latest development, the Energy Department’s SunShot initiative is behind a new energy storage system based on chemical bonds that […]
We were just talking about the accelerated pace of R&D for perovskite solar cells, and along comes the University of California, Los Angeles, with another contribution to the perovskite pot. Put that in the context of the lawsuits sprouting up against President Obama’s new Clean Power Plan, and you have yet another instance of the […]
Perovskite solar cells have been getting a lot of attention for their potential to reach new heights of efficiency and new lows of cost. In the latest development, our friends over at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory have revealed a critical “bottleneck” in perovskite solar conversion that has huge implications for third-generation, super-efficient, hot-carrier solar […]
We’ve been spilling a lot of ink over perovskite solar cells recently, and here comes Brown University with yet another breakthrough. Along with researchers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Brown team has figured out a way to grow larger perovskite solar cells while keeping the conversion efficiency at a fairly high level. (h/t […]
As the saying goes, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. You can’t generate usable energy without some form of impact, whether it’s fossil fuels or renewables, and the Volkswagen “clean diesel” scandal provides ample evidence that technology solutions for fossil fuels are reaching their limit. In contrast, a new “green” thin-film solar […]
The UK startup Oxford Photovoltaics has just announced a second round of funding for 2015 that brings its haul for the year to $19 million. That enables a big step forward in the company’s R&D plans for solar cells based on perovskite materials — those promising but pesky crystals that could help lower the cost of solar […]