Lifeboat Foundation

The energy generation site will be connected to the grid and power Google’s data centers in Nevada.

Houston-based US startup Fervo Energy has claimed that it has achieved “commercial scale” geothermal energy production from its Project Red demonstration site in northern Nevada. The site recently completed a 30-day well test, a standard for geothermal energy installations, a company press release said.

Geothermal energy is one of the sources of renewable power being explored as the world moves away from fossil fuels. Unlike wind and solar power plants, geothermal energy can be sourced around the clock and on demand to cater to increased energy needs.

The thrusters will play an important role on NASA’s Gateway, the outpost orbiting the Moon.

Engineers from NASA and Aerojet Rocketdyne have begun the multiyear qualification testing of the most powerful solar electric propulsion (SEP) thrusters, which are expected to radically change propulsion in space, a press release from the space agency said.

For decades, space research has relied on chemical propulsion to generate millions of pounds of thrust and has attempted to make bigger and more powerful rockets to take us further in our space voyages. While this is a standard even with the most advanced methane-powered rocket engines, it is not necessarily the most efficient way to move about in space.

A huge solar power station in China is generating clean energy, producing salt from sunlight, and serving as a shrimp-breeding site.

State-owned China Huadian Corporation said the 1-gigawatt (GW) Huadian Tianjin Haijing power station will generate 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year – enough to power around 1.5 million households in China.

Continue reading “This 1 GW solar + salt + shrimp farm is a 3-in-1 power station” »

There’s a new way to harness the power of the sun and it may just revolutionize how we approach solar energy. The development is called quantum dots and it consists of tiny semiconductor particles only a few nanometers in size.

This is according to a report by Fagen Wasanni published on Saturday.

“Quantum dots have unique properties that make them ideal for use in solar cells. Their small size allows them to absorb light from a wide range of wavelengths, including those that traditional solar cells cannot capture. This means that quantum dot-based solar cells can potentially convert more sunlight into electricity, significantly increasing their efficiency,” states the report.

Silicon-based solar cells have a theoretical efficiency limit of around 30 per cent, but adding a perovskite layer enables new designs to harvest more energy.

By Alex Wilkins

“Part of what we’re doing is conceptually simple, reflecting sunlight to a solar panel located in the dark,” said Maxar Chief Robotics Architect and lead for Light Bender Sean Dougherty in a Maxar statement. “Where it gets complex is doing that without humans involved. We’re leveraging investments in autonomy to study how NASA can use robots to assemble and deploy a set of reflectors that keep sunlight focused on a solar panel operating in the shadows. It’s never been done before.”

Light Bender works by hoisting two 33-foot (10-meter) reflectors up a 65-foot (20-meter) telescoping mast. One mirror autonomously tracks the sun and reflects that light to the second mirror, which then reflects those rays towards the intended solar panels.

The Light Bender project is a collaboration between Maxar and NASA’s Langley Research Center, and is scheduled for its first terrestrial demonstration in 2025. The company was awarded the contract in May 2023, under NASA’s Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity Program. For their part, NASA’s team is responsible for Light Bender’s structural design, and Maxar is taking the lead on the robotics — an aptitude for which the company has demonstrated in the past.

In energy policy debates, nuclear energy and renewable energy technologies are sometimes viewed as competitors.

In reality, they could be better, together.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Ben Lindley, an assistant professor of engineering physics and an expert on nuclear reactors, and Mike Wagner, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and a solar energy expert, are studying the feasibility and benefits of such a coupling.

This photographer drove six hours from his home in order to find the perfect position for this event that would take place for less than a minute!

Photovoltaic cells work best when sunlight is incident directly on them. To make the most of sunlight available during the day, scientists have relied on solar tracking to move panels in sync with the Sun as its travels across the sky. However, installing these systems increases the cost of deploying solar panels, which is a significant obstacle to their wide-scale adoption.