Smartphones are an integral part of our modern lives, but few things are more annoying than realizing you are about to run out of battery. This predicament is especially distressing when you are on the run between meetings, and barely have a minute to eat your lunch, let alone charge your phone.
An Israeli solar power company, Brenmiller Energy, says it has developed a new, more efficient way to store heat from the sun that could give a boost to the thermal solar power industry by enabling plants to run at full capacity night and day.
By next year company founder Avi Brenmiller said he will have a 1.5 megawatt (MW), 15-acre (6-hectare) site in the Negev desert connected to Israel's national grid, and a number of 10 to 20-MW pilots abroad are expected to follow, which will produce electricity at a price which competes with power from fossil-fuelled plants.
At an event hosted in New York this week by Solar City, CEO Lyndon Rive and chairman Elon Musk announced that within five to 10 years every set of solar panels that Solar City installs will come with a battery pack to help deal with the intermittency of solar power—one of the key factors limiting its use. Musk says his company Tesla Motors will supply at least some of those batteries.
Solar City, one of the largest solar panel installers in the United States, announced earlier this year that it intends to build the country’s largest solar panel factory in New York. The company currently installs and leases solar panels, and it already sells small battery packs for backup storage to some of its customers.
A new way to control the growth of crystalline materials called perovskites could lead to commercial solar cells that hit a sweet spot of high performance and low cost. Although individual perovskite cells have achieved promising results in the lab, until now it hasn’t been clear how they might be made in uniform batches.
Certain perovskites can harvest the energy of sunlight very efficiently because they strongly absorb both visible and infrared light. And unlike silicon films, which are made at high temperatures, perovskite films can be made from solution at much lower temperatures. It should be possible to make perovskite solar cells using low-cost, low-energy methods such as printing.
When experts talk about future solar cells, they usually bring up exotic materials and physical phenomena. In the short term, however, a much simpler approach—stacking different semiconducting materials that collect different frequencies of light—could provide nearly as much of an increase in efficiency as any radical new design. And a new manufacturing technique could soon make this approach practical.
The startup Semprius, based in Durham, North Carolina, says it can produce very efficient stacked solar cells quickly and cheaply, opening the door to efficiencies as high as 50 percent. (Conventional solar cells convert less than 25 percent of the energy in sunlight into electricity.)
A material with optical properties that change to help it capture more incoming sunlight could cut the cost of solar power in half, according to Glint Photonics, a startup recently funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E).
Glint’s adaptive material greatly reduces the cost of a tracking system used in some types of solar power. It changes its reflectivity in response to heat from concentrated sunlight in a way that makes it possible capture light coming in at different angles throughout the day.
The solar industry has had a brutal shakeout, making it very difficult for any solar energy startup to introduce next-generation cell technology. But, despite the fierce global price competition—and the flight of many venture investors from solar—there are a few signs that interest in novel solar technology is picking up.
Cutting back on greenhouse gases is only one part of the fight against climate change. The planet will also need to capture and store — or, better yet, capture and re-use — the gases already out there.
Now, new research from Princeton and a New Jersey-based startup has led to the most efficient way yet to convert carbon dioxide into a possible fuel.
Gestamp Solar ha firmado un acuerdo con la sucursal en Tokio de Deustche Bank AG para asegurar el acceso a un préstamo de 11,1 billones de yenes (aproximadamente 80 millones de euros) para la construcción de un proyecto solar a gran escala en Japón.
Gestamp Solar ha firmado un acuerdo con la sucursal en Tokio de Deustche Bank AG para asegurar el acceso a un préstamo de 11,1 billones de yenes (aproximadamente 80 millones de euros) para la construcción de un proyecto solar a gran escala en Japón.
The best solar cells convert less than one-third of the energy in sunlight into electricity, although for decades researchers have calculated that exotic physics could allow them to convert far more. Now researchers at Sharp have built a prototype that demonstrates one of these ideas. If it can be commercialized, it would double the amount of power a solar cell can generate, offering a way to make solar power far more economical.
The researchers figured out a way around a bothersome phenomenon: when sunlight strikes a solar cell, it produces some very high-energy electrons, but within a few trillionths of a second, those electrons shed most of their energy as waste heat.
