Tag Archives: light
Solar Cell Efficiency and the “Black Hole for Light”
Researchers at Princeton University led by electrical engineer Stephen Chou, have developed what is being called a “nanostructure sandwich” to trap light and improve the efficiency of organic solar cells by 175%. A layer of metal mesh 30 nanometers thick (A nanometer is about one hundred-thousandth the width of human hair) is placed on top [...]
IKEA: 70% Powered by Solar Power
IKEA has plugged in its 31st solar array, a 1-megawatt (MW) installation at its store in Bloomington, Minnesota – it’s the state’s largest rooftop PV array. The new array in Minnesota covers 128,000 square feet of the 336,000-square-foot store and was built with 4,316 panels. The retailer is now using solar at 70% of its 38 US stores. Its [...]
The NOMAD Portable Solar Light
An increasing number of companies has been working to create portable solar products, which are ideal for people living in remote, off-grid areas. One of them is O’SUN, which has created a range of products under the Nomad banner. The company now has joined the Practitioner Network, a global initiative to connect companies that are [...]
Solar Traffic Lights Come to Durban, South Africa
The municipality of eThekwini in Durban, South Africa, has greenlighted a new project of solar powered traffic lights. Funded by the state-owned power utility Eskom and implemented by ZRW Mechanika and Saint Gobain Solar, the project uses CIS solar modules to power lights at four intersections. Each system features 16 panels and each panels has [...]
India’s Power Grid Failure: What Happened?
This is the first part of a two part piece by Raj Prabhu of Mercom Capital addressing the recent blackouts in India. This first part examines technical, regulatory and political dimensions of the problem, and the second part will deal with proposed solutions. The massive grid failure in India last week affected over 600 million [...]
Electricity from Thin Air
Progress in the field of biofuel production is engendering optimism for it could be the most viable solution to our energy woes. Research on biofuel cells aims to create renewable batteries capable of satiating our electricity needs. Presently, biofuel cells use glucose-processing enzymes to produce electricity; however the energy is insignificant when compared to their [...]
The Nokero N220 Solar Bulb
With over twenty percent of the world’s population still living in darkness, which might seem like a staggering statistic to some of us, the potential of alternate clean energy to change lives across the globe is huge. The problem is not so much with the lack of technology but the shortage of initiative. awareness and [...]
The O’Sun Solar Powered LED Lamp
There are many parts of the world where even today electricity is a luxury and grid power just has not reached yet. These people generally tend to rely on burning some sort of fossil fuel at night for lighting and on a day when even that is scarce, darkness will have to do. This is [...]
MIT Scientists Create 230% Efficient LED Bulbs
Not only the traditional incandescent bulbs, but the Fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and even the LED lights discharge some heat as waste. The amount may vary from a zenith to nadir, but energy wastage through heat is still there. A team of MIT researchers, who addressed this issue, has emerged up with an unforeseen power-efficiency mechanism [...]