Solar Power

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A team of MIT researchers is building cubes or towers that extend solar cells upward in three-dimensional configurations. The results from the structures they’ve tested show power output ranging from double to more than 20 times that of fixed flat panels with the same base area.
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University of California, San Diego electrical engineers are building a forest of tiny nanowire trees in order to cleanly capture solar energy and harvest it for hydrogen fuel generation. Nanowires, which are made from abundant natural materials like silicon and zinc oxide, offer a cheap way to deliver hydrogen fuel on a mass scale.
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Graphene has been touted as the next silicon, but it is too conductive to be used in computer chips. A University of Manchester team led by Nobel laureates Professor Andre Geim and Professor Konstantin Novoselov has literally opened a third dimension in graphene research.
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Sandia National Laboratory researchers have developed a family of liquid salt electrolytes - known as MetILs - that could lead to better batteries and well as devices that can help incorporate large-scale intermittent renewable energy sources, like solar and wind, into the nation’s electric grid.
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Through the DOE's SunShot Incubator program, over $12 million in funding is available to accelerate innovation in solar energy and manufacturing - supporting advancements in hardware, reductions in soft costs, and the development of pilot manufacturing and production projects.
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An online tool developed by MIT researchers called “Impurities to Efficiency” - or I2E - allows companies or researchers exploring alternative manufacturing strategies to plug in descriptions of their planned materials and processing steps. After about one minute of simulation, I2E gives an indication of exactly how efficient the resulting solar cell would be in converting sunlight to electricity.
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Electrically conductive meshes made of metal nanowires promise exceptional electrical throughput, low cost, and easy processing in applications like video displays, LEDs, and thin-film solar cells. However, in processing, these meshes must be heated or pressed to unite the crisscross pattern of nanowires that form the mesh - damaging them in the process.
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An international team of researchers has developed a process that improves the efficiency of generating electric power using molecular structures extracted from plants. The system taps into photosynthetic processes to produce efficient and inexpensive energy.
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Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with Jamie Johnson of Solar Power Electric™, have developed PV Value™ - an electronic form to standardize appraisals of homes and businesses outfitted with photovoltaic (PV) installations.
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Join SEMA and SMTA for presentations and discussions focusing on the reliability testing of PV modules, covering gaps and where future work needs to be done. The conference will highlight various reliability programs being done in the industry with an assessment of current and evolving standards in manufacturing and reliability.
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With military colleagues, a trio of University at Buffalo engineers have shown that embedding charged quantum dots into photovoltaic cells can improve electrical output by enabling the cells to harvest infrared light, and by increasing the lifetime of photoelectrons.
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A new superconducting current limiter based on YBCO strip conductors has been installed at a power plant. At the Boxberg power plant of the Swedish company Vattenfall, the current limiter protects the grid for own consumption that is designed for 12,000 volts and 800 amperes against damage due to short circuits and voltage peaks.
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Renewable Energy World North America - co-located with Solar POWER-GEN - offers access to the latest information, solutions, and technologies driving the future of the clean energy industry. The two events are being held at the Long Beach Convention Center in California.
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There are only a handful of concentrated solar power (CSP) plants in the world. The technology could potentially generate enough renewable energy to power the entire U.S., provided that land and sunlight are in ample supply. Researchers have now come up with a design that reduces the amount of land required to build a CSP plant, while increasing the amount of sunlight its mirrors collect.
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A new geospatial application developed by the DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) allows users to map potential renewable energy resources in the United States. The interactive tool is called RE Atlas, and is free to use and available online.
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An Office of Naval Research (ONR)-funded solar generator has recently entered full production, with several systems already in the field. The Ground Renewable Expeditionary ENergy System (GREENS) is a portable, 300-watt, hybrid battery generator that uses the sun to produce electric currents.
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DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has granted Natcore Technology Inc. a patent license agreement to develop new black silicon products. Natcore and NREL also will enter a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) to develop commercial prototypes based on NREL’s black silicon inventions.
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University of Illinois researchers have developed a method to chemically etch patterned arrays in the semiconductor gallium arsenide - used in solar cells, lasers, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), field effect transistors (FETs), capacitors, and sensors.
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Water splitting in photo-electrochemical cells to yield hydrogen is a promising way to sustainable fuels. A team of Swiss and U.S. scientists have now made major progress in developing highly efficient electrodes – made of an algal protein, thus mimicking a central step in natural photosynthesis.
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Imec, Polyera, and Solvay have achieved a new world-record efficiency of 8.3% for polymer-based single junction organic solar cells in an inverted device stack. These performance results represent a crucial step towards successful commercialization of organic photovoltaic cells.
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Unexpected voltage increases of up to 25 percent in two barely separated nanowires have been observed at Sandia National Laboratories. Designers of next-generation devices using nanowires to deliver electric currents — including batteries and certain solar arrays — may need to make allowances for such surprise boosts.
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The bq25504 from Texas Instruments (Dallas, TX) is an integrated energy harvesting nanopower management solution for ultra low power applications. The boost converter is designed to efficiently acquire and manage the microwatts to miliwatts of power generated from a variety of DC sources like photovoltaic or thermal electric generators.
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Pyrite - or “fool’s gold” - has recently helped researchers at Oregon State University discover related compounds that offer new, cheap, and promising options for solar energy. These new compounds would be benign and could be processed from some of the most abundant elements on Earth.
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As the market for liquid crystal displays and other electronics continues to drive up the price of indium — the material used to make the indium tin oxide (ITO) transparent electrodes in these devices — scientists have been searching for a less costly and more dynamic alternative, particularly for use in future flexible electronics.
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As the sustainable design movement continues to grow rapidly throughout the US, architectural engineers, building product manufacturers, and construction business owners must keep up with stringent environmental regulations amidst a quickly changing landscape of new green materials.
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