Lifeboat Foundation

Solar power systems with double-sided (bifacial) solar panels—which collect sunlight from two sides instead of one—and single-axis tracking technology that tilts the panels so they can follow the sun are the most cost effective to date, researchers report June 3rd in the journal Joule. They determined that this combination of technologies produces almost 35% more energy, on average, than immobile single-panel photovoltaic systems, while reducing the cost of electricity by an average of 16%.

“The results are stable, even when accounting for changes in the weather conditions and in the costs from the solar panels and the other components of the photovoltaic system, over a fairly wide range,” says first author Carlos Rodríguez-Gallegos, a research fellow at the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore, sponsored by the National University of Singapore. “This means that investing in bifacial and tracking systems should be a safe bet for the foreseeable future.”

Research efforts tend to focus on further boosting energy output from solar power systems by improving solar cell efficiency, but the energy yield per panel can also be increased in other ways. Double-sided solar panels, for example, produce more energy per unit area than their standard counterparts and can function in similar locations, including rooftops. This style of solar panel, as well as tracking technology that allows each panel to capture more light by tilting in line with the sun throughout the day, could significantly improve the energy yield of solar cells even without further advancements in the capabilities of the cells themselves. However, the combined contributions of these recent technologies have not been fully explored.

Although perovskites are a promising alternative to the silicon used to make most of today’s solar cells, new manufacturing processes are needed to make them practical for commercial production. To help fill this gap, researchers have developed a new precision spray-coating method that enables more complex perovskite solar cell designs and could be scaled up for mass production.

Perovskites are promising for next-generation solar cells because they absorb light and convert it to energy with better efficiency and potentially lower production costs than silicon. Perovskites can even be sprayed onto glass to create energy-producing windows.

“Our work demonstrates a process to deposit perovskite layer by layer with controllable thicknesses and rates of deposition for each layer,” said research team leader Pongsakorn Kanjanaboos from the School of Materials Science and Innovation, Faculty of Science, Mahidol University in Thailand. “This new method enables stacked designs for solar cells with better performance and stability.”

A Tesla owner has demonstrated a rather novel way to charge his Model 3. In a recent video, Sean Callaghan of the ItsYeBoi YouTube channel opted to use a series of off-the-shelf solar panel sheets onto a towable trailer to create a mobile charging unit for his all-electric sedan.

Callaghan planned to use only the sun and the solar sheets purchased from e-commerce platform Wish to charge his Model 3. The solar panel sheets would collect energy from the sun and transfer it to a control panel. The control panels were connected to batteries that would hold the energy—the batteries connected to an inverter, which would then charge the Tesla Model 3.

The entire assembly would provide the Model 3 with about 800 watts of energy on a completely sunny day. However, Callaghan shot the video when weather was overcast, so the entire solar panel trailer build only managed to provide around 300 watts throughout the YouTube host’s test.

The thermoelectric generator harnesses the flow of heat between two surfaces — one exposed to the cold sky at night. It could be the nocturnal cousin of solar power, lighting the lives of the 1.7 billion people worldwide living with an unreliable electricity connection.

It is often thought that humans are different from other animals in some fundamental way that makes us unique, or even more advanced than other species. These claims of human superiority are sometimes used to justify the ways we treat other animals, in the home, the lab or the factory farm.

One of the biggest challenges for renewable energy research is energy storage. The goal is to find a material with high energy storage capacity and energy storage material with high storage capacity that can also quickly and efficiently discharge a large amount of energy. In an attempt to overcome this hurdle, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) have proposed a brand-new carbon nanostructure designed to store energy in mechanical form.

Most portable energy storage devices currently rely on storing energy in chemical form such as batteries, however this proposed new structure, made from a bundle of diamond nanothread (DNT) does not suffer from the same limiting properties as batteries, such as temperature sensitivity, or the potential to leak or explode. I have previously written about carbon nanotubes, and their applications in everything from Batman-like artificial muscle, to an analogy of the fictional element Vibranium, but a lot of research around carbon nanotubes is already focused on energy harvesting and energy storage applications.

What makes this energy storage method different is the method by which energy is stored, and also the related increased robustness of the resultant material. Dr Haifei Zhan and his team at the QUT Centre for material science used computer modelling to propose the structure of these ultra-thin one-dimensional carbon threads. The theory is that these threads should be able to store energy when they are twisted or stretched, similar to the way we store energy in wind-up toys. By turning the key, we force the spring inside into a tight coil. Once the key is released, the coil wishes to release the extra tension held within it and begins to unfurl. In doing so it transfers that mechanical energy into the movement of the toy’s wheels.

The British company Swindon Powertrain announced market launch of its new, compact and ready to install ‘Crate’ EV powertrain for various EV projects — conversions or new builds.

Swindon encourages that it’s an ideal option for sports, recreation and light commercial applications as well as classic car conversions.

“Suitable for OEMs, niche vehicle manufacturers, electric car conversion companies as well as the enthusiast home mechanic.”

Discovering and optimizing commercially viable materials for clean energy applications typically takes more than a decade. Self-driving laboratories that iteratively design, execute, and learn from materials science experiments in a fully autonomous loop present an opportunity to accelerate this research process. We report here a modular robotic platform driven by a model-based optimization algorithm capable of autonomously optimizing the optical and electronic properties of thin-film materials by modifying the film composition and processing conditions. We demonstrate the power of this platform by using it to maximize the hole mobility of organic hole transport materials commonly used in perovskite solar cells and consumer electronics. This demonstration highlights the possibilities of using autonomous laboratories to discover organic and inorganic materials relevant to materials sciences and clean energy technologies.

Optimizing the properties of thin films is time intensive because of the large number of compositional, deposition, and processing parameters available (1, 2). These parameters are often correlated and can have a profound effect on the structure and physical properties of the film and any adjacent layers present in a device. There exist few computational tools for predicting the properties of materials with compositional and structural disorder, and thus, the materials discovery process still relies heavily on empirical data. High-throughput experimentation (HTE) is an established method for sampling a large parameter space (4, 5), but it is still nearly impossible to sample the full set of combinatorial parameters available for thin films. Parallelized methodologies are also constrained by the experimental techniques that can be used effectively in practice.

In 2010, a lithium-ion battery pack with 1 kWh of capacity—enough to power an electric car for three or four miles—cost more than $1,000. By 2019, the figure had fallen to $156, according to data compiled by BloombergNEF. That’s a massive drop, and experts expect continued—though perhaps not as rapid—progress in the coming decade. Several forecasters project the average cost of a kilowatt-hour of lithium-ion battery capacity to fall below $100 by the mid-2020s.

That’s the result of a virtuous circle where better, cheaper batteries expand the market, which in turn drives investments that produce further improvements in cost and performance. The trend is hugely significant because cheap batteries will be essential to shifting the world economy away from carbon-intensive energy sources like coal and gasoline.

Batteries and electric motors have emerged as the most promising technology for replacing cars powered by internal combustion engines. The high cost of batteries has historically made electric cars much more expensive than conventional cars. But once battery packs get cheap enough—again, experts estimate around $100 per kWh for non-luxury vehicles—electric cars should actually become cheaper than equivalent gas-powered cars. The cost advantage will be even bigger once you factor in the low cost of charging an electric car, so we can expect falling battery costs to accelerate the adoption of electric vehicles.