The Moon as a collecting point for solar energy for use on Earth and maybe even into the outer solar system.
One man’s decades-long dream of harnessing sunlight from the lunar surface.
Category: solar power – Page 146
Liquid energy storage system gets the “MOST” out of the Sun
Solar power is potentially the greatest single energy source outside of controlled nuclear fusion, but the Sun is literally a fair weather source that relies on daytime and clear skies. To make solar energy a reliable, 24-hour source of energy, a team of scientists at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg is developing a liquid energy storage medium that can not only release energy from the Sun on demand, but is also transportable.
The Chalmers team has been working on variants of its system, called a MOlecular Solar Thermal (MOST), for over six years, with a conceptual demonstration in 2013. It differs from other attempts to store solar energy in things like heated salts and reversing exothermic reactions in that the MOST system stores the energy directly in the bonds of an organic chemical.
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The world’s most efficient and environment-friendly solar cells
In the future, solar cells can become twice as efficient by employing a few smart little nano-tricks.
Researchers are currently developing the environment-friendly solar cells of the future, which will capture twice as much energy as the cells of today. The trick is to combine two different types of solar cells in order to utilize a much greater portion of the sunlight.
“These are going to be the world’s most efficient and environment-friendly solar cells. There are currently solar cells that are certainly just as efficient, but they are both expensive and toxic. Furthermore, the materials in our solar cells are readily available in large quantities on Earth. That is an important point,” says Professor Bengt Svensson of the Department of Physics at the University of Oslo (UiO) and Centre for Materials Science and Nanotechnology (SMN).
These Two Tesla Vets Want to Build the Next ‘Gigafactory’ in Sweden — By Geoffrey Smith | Fortune
“Two Tesla Motors veterans want to build a European counterpart to Elon Musk’s “gigafactory”, in an effort to stake out a dominant position in the fast-evolving supply chain for makers of electric vehicles.”
The boom is here: U.S. solar experiences record-smashing year — By Joe Romm | ThinkProgress
“The industry reports that, for the first time ever, solar was the number one source of new generating capacity, beating out wind and gas.”
Tesla Completes Hawaii Storage Project That Sells Solar at Night — By Mark Chediak | Bloomberg
“Tesla Inc. has completed a solar project in Hawaii that incorporates batteries to sell power in the evening, part of a push by the electric car maker to provide more green power to the grid.”
Researchers remotely control sequence in which 2-D sheets fold into 3D structures
Inspired by origami, North Carolina State University researchers have found a way to remotely control the order in which a two-dimensional (2-D) sheet folds itself into a three-dimensional (3D) structure.
“A longstanding challenge in the field has been finding a way to control the sequence in which a 2-D sheet will fold itself into a 3D object,” says Michael Dickey, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-corresponding author of a paper describing the work. “And as anyone who has done origami — or folded their laundry—can tell you, the order in which you make the folds can be extremely important.”
“The sequence of folding is important in life as well as in technology,” says co-corresponding author Jan Genzer, the S. Frank and Doris Culberson Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NC State. “On small length scales, sequential folding via molecular machinery enables DNA to pack efficiently into chromosomes and assists proteins to adopt a functional conformation. On large length scales, sequential folding via motors helps solar panels in satellites and space shuttles unfold in space. The advance of the current work is to induce materials to fold sequentially using only light.”
MIT spinout Sistine Solar can print any image on photovoltaic cells
Nice.
MIT researchers have done even better. MIT has spunout a company called Sistine Solar that has developed a technology to print any kind of image on a skin that can be applied on solar panels, which change the appearance of the photovoltaic cells from all angles, without compromising on their capacity to generate electricity. Founded by the Sloan School of Management at MIT, Sistine Solar hopes to increase the adoption of clean energy with solar panels that mimic the surroundings or environment.
Image: Sistine Solar
Co-founder of Sistine Solar, Senthil Balasubramanian says, “If you look at the landscape today, less than 1 percent of US households have gone solar, so it s nowhere near mass adoption. We think SolarSkin is going to catch on like wildfire. There is a tremendous desire by homeowners to cut utility bills, and solar is finding reception with them and homeowners care a lot about aesthetics.”