Chile on Tuesday inaugurated Latin America’s first-ever thermosolar energy plant, a vast complex dubbed Cerro Dominador in the Atacama desert that gives a boost to the country’s quest for carbon-neutrality by 2050. In an area exceeding 700 hectares, 10,600 mirrors surround a 250-meter-high tower topped with a receiver onto which the Sun’s rays are reflected. […]
Engineers at Penn State published plans Monday for a battery prototype they said is capable of powering flying cars. “I think flying cars have the potential to eliminate a lot of time and increase productivity and open the sky corridors to transportation,” lead author Chao-Yang Wang said in a press release on the […]
A compound used widely in candles offers promise for a much more modern energy challenge – storing massive amounts of energy to be fed into the electric grid as the need arises. Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have shown that low-cost organic compounds hold promise for […]
The energy available from sunlight is 10,000 times more than what is needed to supply the world’s energy demands. Sunlight has two main properties that are useful in the design of renewable energy systems. The first is the amount power falling on a fixed area, like the ground or a person’s roof. This quantity […]
Perovskite solar cells have progressed in recent years with rapid increases in power conversion efficiency (from 3% in 2006 to 25.5% today), making them more competitive with silicon-based photovoltaic cells. However, a number of challenges remain before they can become a competitive commercial technology. Now a team at the NYU Tandon School […]
Inspired by nature, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), along with collaborators from Washington State University, created a novel material capable of capturing light energy. This material provides a highly efficient artificial light-harvesting system with potential applications in photovoltaics and bioimaging. The research provides a foundation for overcoming the difficult challenges […]
