Have you ever wondered how sunlight can travel 93 million miles from the Sun to the Earth, and still have enough oomph in reserve to burn your light bulbs? That, in a nutshell, is the miracle of solar energy. As for how solar panels work, that’s a little harder to fit in a nutshell but […]
If you check your calendar today, you might be excused if you thought today is April Fool’s Day after reading this story. Almost as hard as the election of Donald Trump is to believe, this report from the lunatic fringe is even more difficult to give credence to. The UFO hunter known as Streetcap1 on […]
A joint NOAA/CIRES research study has found that greenhouse gas emissions from electric power production could be cut by 78% below 1990 levels by 2030. The National Energy with Weather System (NEWS) simulator model was used for the study, which is a tool used to simulate the electrical power sector. The model is used to […]
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 […]
Originally published on The Handleman Post. By Clayton Handleman Not so long ago, Sunpower’s 20+% efficiency modules were seen as high end niche products. Last week SolarCity announced that it had leapfrogged that benchmark with its 22% modules currently rolling off of its 100 MW lines and soon to be rolling off its 1 GW […]
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 […]
Lists are always fun, so here are 12 solar facts to put in your notebook so you can share the important stuff with anyone who’s interested. I have divided this list of facts into four categories that might help you to better keep track of things. Understanding Our Sun Solar History Solar Technology Solar Metrics […]
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 […]
Researchers at the University of Michigan have devised a new solar tracking technology that uses kirigami techniques to track the sun and raise efficiency.