US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz this week announced $30 million of support for 12 more unique, hybrid solar projects through the ARPA-E program. Actually, it’s through a program within that program — the Full-Spectrum Optimized Conversion and Utilization of Sunlight (FOCUS) program, “which is aimed at developing new hybrid solar energy converters and hybrid energy storage systems that […]
Editor’s Note: One of CleanTechnica’s awesome readers has provided us with this exclusive guest post on the “intermittency” of various power sources — renewable and non-renewables. The article “knocks it out of the park,” so to speak.…
The Department of Energy recently announced another $30 million was being made available from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) for “full-spectrum” solar energy technologies that go beyond solar photovoltaics (PV) and concentrated solar power (CSP). ARPA-E has more info: The new program entitled Full-Spectrum Optimized Conversion and Utilization of Sunlight (FOCUS) seeks to develop […]
Market research firm IHS has projected in a new report that installed residential PV storage system capacity could likely hit 2.5 GW by 2017. Naturally, Germany is leading the way in this arena, where a home energy storage subsidy went into place on May 1. In the leading solar PV country, it is increasingly competitive […]
This is a guest post from Mathias Aarre Maehlum, who writes more about solar panels at Energy Informative. Enjoy! By Mathias Aarre Maehlum A team of researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has made significant improvements to the process of generating hydrogen from solar energy and water. They have created a PEC-cell (photoelectrochemical) […]
Herman Trabish of Greentech Media has happened across a pretty interesting find — 97% of new electricity generation capacity in line to be added to the California grid in the second half (2H) of 2012 is from solar power projects. This is according to the California Independent System Operator (the ISO), as published in the 2012 Annual Report on […]
Energy storage may be the next big thing in cleantech, and in the energy sector as a whole. We have never had much energy storage in place across the world. Instead, we have built a tremendous amount of backup capacity. With the variability of wind and solar, their increasingly low costs, and the desire to […]
Energy storage is a hot topic these days. While not a lot of it is needed to create a renewable energy–focused grid, a bit of it certainly is. Still a very nascent industry, research and development is going on at a frantic pace. A lot of researchers and firms are trying to “crack the energy […]
Japan is a densely packed country with challenges supplying all its own electricity. So it certainly could benefit from being able to save more renewable energy that is generated during off hours. Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) agrees, as it is planning to install the world’s largest battery in the prefecture of Hokkaido, where a […]