Tag Archives: materials
World’s Largest CSP Project Started in Morocco
Morocco is embarking on the first of a series of mammoth solar plants that in total will raise renewable energy to 42% of its mix by 2020. The country plans to build five huge solar plants that all come online in 2020, as well as a string of wind farms along the coast. The first solar [...]
12 Misleading Myths About Solar Power
Solar energy is a dynamic and continuous energy source that many believe will one day provide most of our energy needs. Unfortunately, conventional energy industries like big oil have giant backers with deep pockets and have successfully leveraged their money to smear renewable technologies. Their main target seems to be solar. It’s important to know [...]
Solarreviews.com: Helping Consumers Find the Right Solar Installer
The solar energy market grew by 76% last year, according to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. As solar power becomes an increasingly competitive energy source, more Americans are looking for reputable companies that can meet their solar needs. Up until now, however, consumers have not had the ability to easily access ratings [...]
Will Nanocrystals Power Electric Cars?
It is well known that one of the main problems with modern electric cars is the problem of energy storage. New better batteries are required to increase the range of electric cars and make them more attractive commercially. A new nanomaterial for lithium ion batteries developed in the labs of chemists at ETH Zurich and [...]
The Solar Shakeout Continues
The past few years have seen some spectacular flameouts in the solar energy industry, with none so prominent—at least in the U.S.—as Solyndra. Many of these flameouts were startups, but some were bigger players. Now Suntech is in the hot seat. The Chinese manufacturer was one of the world’s biggest PV producers, but it recently [...]
In Focus: Carbon Reduced Concrete
Kansas State University civil engineers are developing the right mix to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint and make it stronger. Their innovative ingredient: biofuel byproducts. “The idea is to use bioethanol production byproducts to produce a material to use in concrete as a partial replacement of cement,” said Feraidon Ataie, doctoral student in civil engineering, Kabul, [...]
Nanowires: Making Quantum Dot Solar Cells Better
While potentially much more efficient, than conventional photovoltaic systems, quantum dot solar cells are still at a pre-commercialization stage. In a new paper, to be published in the journal Advanced Materials, researchers propose to improve quantum dot solar cell design with nanowires. To put it simply, quantum dot is a portion of matter that has [...]
The 10 Hottest Green Investment Industries
There are new innovations and ideas generated each day in the cleantech / green sectors. This article helps to separate the hype from the truly revolutionary breakthroughs. Here is a 2011 article from Research White Paper that reviews ten sectors garnering interest from investors. They asked 100 venture capital investors about what types of sub-sectors they [...]
In Focus: Urban Buildings of 2050
What will a skyscraper built in 2050 look like? How will it function? Rather than being static as they are today, in the future buildings will produce food, energy and resources. They will be “living buildings” whose intelligent systems adjust to the needs of inhabitats, respond automatically to variations in weather, are reconfigured by robots and produce more resources than [...]