Volt Solar Tile, a Leeson Group subsidiary, says its Australian-designed building-integrated photovoltaic (BIPV) roof tile has the highest wattage of any solar tile on the global market, with a maximum power output of 115 W and a solar efficiency of up to 19.3%.
Peter Leeson, managing director of Leeson Group and the director of Volt Solar Tile, said the Volt Planum and Lodge mono PERC solar tiles are the first in the world that can generate the same amount of energy as a standard PV panel.
Taking advantage of the huge output of solar energy in places neighboring the Sahara Desert, a massive undersea power cable is coming to Europe from Egypt. Bringing 3,000 megawatts of renewable energy, the GREGY interconnection will run from northern Egypt to Attica, Greece.
The San Diego County Water Authority is planning to use its San Vicente Reservoir to store solar power making clean energy in the region viable, according to an article by NPR published on Friday.
Powering 130,000 homes
The project will take ten years to be built and will see large underground pipes connect San Vicente’s lake to a new reservoir about 1,100 feet higher. California’s solar power will pump water into that upper reservoir, storing electricity.
It’s the stuff of science fiction: Solar panels in space that beam power directly to Earth equipping the planet with clean renewable and affordable energy. Yet, it could soon be reality.
Caltech has just received $100 million in funding for their Space Solar Power Project (SSPP). The project is described by Caltech as: “Collecting solar power in space and transmitting the energy wirelessly to Earth through microwaves enables terrestrial power availability unaffected by weather or time of day. Solar power could be continuously available anywhere on earth.”
face_with_colon_three circa 2021.
Think about where our energy comes from: drilling rigs and smokestacks, windmills and solar panels. Lithium-ion battery packs might even come to mind.
We probably don’t think about the farms that comprise over one-third of Earth’s total land area. But farms can also be an energy source. Barcelona-based battery company Bioo is generating electricity from the organic matter in soil and creating biological batteries that can power agricultural sensors, a growing 1.36 billion dollar global market.
Bioo’s tech eliminates the need for single-use chemical batteries, which have to be replaced frequently. The company will work with large players such as Bayer Crop Science to pilot its sensor tech on farms, while also experimenting with using bio-batteries to power lighting installations. Eventually, Bioo envisions a future where biology may even help power our largest cities.
The streets in this meticulously planned neighborhood were designed to flood so houses don’t. Native landscaping along roads helps control storm water. Power and internet lines are buried to avoid wind damage. This is all in addition to being built to Florida’s robust building codes.
Some residents, like Grande, installed more solar panels on their roofs and added battery systems as an extra layer of protection from power outages. Many drive electric vehicles, taking full advantage of solar energy in the Sunshine State.
Climate resiliency was built into the fabric of the town with stronger storms in mind.
The tech is called Flettner Rotors.
A multidisciplinary design company called 3deluxe has revealed a new low carbon-emission superyacht concept called FY.01. The company made the superyacht design public on Friday, and it is sure to wow thanks to its eco-credentials, aesthetics, and usage of cutting-edge technology.
Flettner Rotors were developed over 100 years ago and use rotating vertical pipes to transform wind energy into a highly efficient transversal force. The technology relies on an effect referred to as the Magnus force and it has seen a powerful revival over the years due to the availability of new materials that make it more efficient and viable.
Although it is currently predominantly used on utility vessels, more and more companies have begun to substantially increase fuel efficiency on large scale commercial vessels by adding Flettner Rotors.
FY.01 is also silently powered by electricity generated by white solar panels on the roof surfaces of the yacht. However, the Flettner rotors remain its main source of energy. Depending on the wind conditions, the force generated by these systems supersedes that of a sail of equivalent size.
Hydrogen generation using abundant solar energy together with semiconductor photocatalysts holds significant potential to produce clean and sustainable energy carriers.
ETH Zurich researchers have developed a new photocatalyst made from an aerogel that could enable more efficient hydrogen production. The aerogel increases the efficiency of converting light into hydrogen energy, producing up to 70 times more hydrogen than rival methods.
Aerogels are extraordinary materials that have set Guinness World Records more than a dozen times, including the honorary position of becoming one of the world’s lightest solids. Professor Markus Niederberger from the Laboratory for Multifunctional Materials at ETH Zurich has been working with these special materials for some time.
A team of researchers from HSE MIEM joined colleagues from the Institute of Non-Classical Chemistry in Leipzig to develop a theoretical model of a polymeric ionic liquid on a charged conductive electrode. They used approaches from polymer physics and theoretical electrochemistry to demonstrate the difference in the behavior of electrical differential capacitance of polymeric and ordinary ionic liquids for the first time. The results of the study were published in Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics.
Polymerized ionic liquids (PIL) are a relatively new class of materials with increasing applications in various fields, from the development of new electrolytes to the creation of solar cells. Unlike ordinary room temperature ionic liquids (liquid organic salts in which cations and anions move freely), in PILs, cations are usually linked in long polymeric chains, while anions move freely. In recent years, PILs have been used (along with ordinary ionic liquids) as a filling in the production of supercapacitors.
Supercapacitors are devices that store energy in an electric double layer on the surface of an electrode (as in electrodes of platinum, gold and carbon, for example). Compared, for example, to an accumulator, supercapacitors accumulate more energy and do so faster. The amount of energy a supercapacitor is able to accumulate is known as its ‘capacitance’.
