Floating solar farms could help to protect lakes and reservoirs from some of the harms of climate change, a new study suggests. However, given the complex nature of water bodies and differing designs of solar technologies, there could also be detrimental ecosystem impacts of deploying floating solar arrays. Conventional solar […]
Perovskites, a class of materials first reported in the early 19th century, were “re-discovered” in 2009 as a possible candidate for power generation via their use in solar cells. Since then, they have taken the photovoltaic (PV) research community by storm, reaching new record efficiencies at an unprecedented pace. This improvement has […]
Researchers from Chalmers University of Technology have produced a structural battery that performs ten times better than all previous versions. It contains carbon fibre that serves simultaneously as an electrode, conductor, and load-bearing material. Their latest research breakthrough paves the way for essentially ‘massless’ energy storage in vehicles and other technology. The […]
The cost of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used for phones, laptops, and cars has fallen dramatically over the last three decades, and has been a major driver of the rapid growth of those technologies. But attempting to quantify that cost decline has produced ambiguous and conflicting results that have hampered attempts to project the […]
One prospective source of renewable energy is hydrogen gas produced from water with the aid of sunlight. Researchers at Linkoping University, Sweden, have developed a material, nanoporous cubic silicon carbide, that exhibits promising properties to capture solar energy and split water for hydrogen gas production. The study has been published in the journal ACS […]
In 1991, scientists Brian O’Regan and Michael Gratzel at EPFL published a seminal paper describing a new type of solar cell: the dye-sensitized solar cell (DSSC), also known as “Gratzel cell”. Simple and cheap to build while being flexible and versatile, DSSCs are already manufactured on a multi-megawatt scale, cutting a significant […]
